The Disdainful Marquis (29 page)

“You do have a propensity for gravitating to hearthsides,” the marquis noted. “I wonder at such a sit-by-the-fire being able to pick herself up to travel the Continent in such high-flying fashion.”

But seeing how weariness had stilled her tongue, he left her and set about building up the fire and held low converse with Jenkins about securing the horses in the half-timbered barn that remained.

After a welcome dinner of cheese and bread that Jenkins had foraged earlier, and after warming herself thoroughly by the fire, Catherine stretched and began to take lively note of their surroundings again.

The marquis sat at ease across from her on a box he had found in the barn, and Jenkins sat cross-legged on the floor, gazing into the fire.

“I suppose,” Catherine said conversationally, “that it won't be too long before we reach Dieppe, will it, Your Lordship?”

“Oh, Catherine,” the marquis answered. “Have done with ‘Your Lordship.' We are not precisely in a drawing room here. I doubt the mice will be offended if all the proprieties are not observed. At any rate,” he went on, pleased to see blush upon her cheek, “It would be nothing wonderful if you did not blurt “Your Lordship” the next time we were in a crowd of Frenchmen, if you persist in calling me that. I should hate to lose my head due to an overnice attention to the correct social forms of address.

“But no, I am sorry for it, but it will be long before we reach Dieppe. It will be never. No, don't startle. I haven't formed the intention of becoming a lifetime resident here. It is only that too many people knew you were bound for Dieppe. Indeed, I think soon half the English in Paris will be bound for Dieppe, and it will be the logical place for Beaumont to pick up your trail. No, we will journey to Le Havre. And we shall not find ourselves berths upon a tourist packet for we will be snugly accommodated on some fishing vessel. Brandy, lace, and smuggled souls are high trade on the coast. And I think that, sly as he is, still M. le Commissaire Beaumont will not look to find one of the duchess's doxies sharing her seat with a haddock.”

Sinjun looked up to see Catherine's face blanch. She looked as though he had slapped her, and he turned in sudden uncomfortable contrition to Jenkins.

“It grows late, old friend. Let's gather in some hay to make this wretched floor pass for a feather bed.”

As they rose to go to the door, Sinjun looked back at Catherine, who was ostensibly studying her fingernails with concentration.

“Forgive me,” he whispered back to her. “I have a rash tongue, and I'm sorry for it.”

Resting upon her pelisse, which lay over the mound of straw Sinjun and Jenkins had provided, Catherine stared into the darkness. Sinjun lay not far from her on the other side of the fireplace, and Jenkins, nearer to the door, breathing heavily.

She was warm and full and the two men in the room gave her a feeling of comfort and security such as she had not known in many weeks, but still she could not sleep. Her conscience twinged. Perhaps it was because she was just where she wished to be, she thought with sudden alarm. The sense of contentment and pleasure in the marquis' company was so overwhelming that, try as she might, she could not imagine a place where she would rather be. And yet she felt that if he but knew her deep contentment, he would be somehow displeased. He would be, she thought further, convinced that she was no better than a light woman. For what decently reared girl would be so pleased in such bizarre, irregular circumstances? She ought to be, she thought sternly, fearful and trembling in distress, not as contented as a sleepy puppy.

“Catherine,” came a low whisper in the dark, “do go to sleep. For we must travel hard in the morning. We go a roundabout route.”

“How did you know I was not sleeping?” she whispered back.

“I could hear you thinking,” Sinjun chuckled. “And I could not hear you snore.”

“I don't snore.” Catherine giggled, thinking again, as she had all evening, that the marquis seemed to have put off his cold, cynical manner as he had put off his immaculate garments. Now he seemed so much younger and more carefree that she had a difficult time remembering the aloof aristocrat she had met a hundred years ago in another life, in London.

“Nonsense,” he replied softly. “Hear old Jenkins sawing away over there? I'll wager between the two of you, I won't have a moment's rest this night.

“Catherine,” he said again, after a pause, “do not worry. We shall see you safely home again. But I wonder—how shall you explain your travels away to your family when you get home? Should I expect your brother-in-law at my doorstep at dawn with a pistol clutched in his hand? For while I consider Jenkins an excellent chaperone, I do not know if William will.”

“Not William,” Catherine smiled; “Arthur. And I assure you, you need not fear. Indeed, he will be grateful to you for seeing me safely from my own muddled affairs.”

“I don't have to make reparation for sullying your good name?” he asked lightly.

There was a moment's silence, and then he heard her reply in a suspiciously low, broken tone. “Indeed, I do not see how anyone could have sullied it more than I.”

Sinjun silently cursed himself for an insensitive clod, and then went on as if he had not heard her, “I must admit that if I knew my sister was traveling with me, that is to say, if I were not myself, and heard that my sister was traveling with me, I should be outraged and fly to her defense.”

Catherine gave a little laugh. “I did not know you had a sister.”

“Well, I was not hatched from an egg,” he protested, in mock affront. “Of course I have a sister, and I had a mother and a father as well, you know.”

“Tell me about them,” Catherine said sleepily.

And so the lofty Marquis of Bessacarr lay back upon his straw pallet in an abandoned French farmhouse on a cold March night and spoke into the darkness of his sister's wild extravagances and her complacent husband, and their brood of unruly children. Encouraged by Catherine's delighted response, and prodded by her questions, he told her in less merry tones about his wastrel father and his invalid mother. By the time the natural progression of his story had led him into deep water and he fell silent, wondering how to tell her of the mistakes he had made in his career, he noticed she did not urge him to continue. Instead, he only heard her muted, even breathing.

He rose and went to her. She lay like a child with one hand under her cheek and the other flung out in sleep. He knelt to cover her more securely with her coat. If she were an actress, he thought almost angrily, seeing the easy peace sleep had brought her, she was the best he had ever met.

“I make no doubt”—Jenkins' amused voice came from the shadows—“that you have put many females to sleep of nights. But I do doubt that you've ever just talked one to sleep before.”

“Go to sleep, you old pretender,” the marquis grumbled as he sank down upon his bed of straw again, “or you'll wake her.”

Chapter XV

Their journey was not half so simple as Catherine had anticipated. The weather was against them. First rain, then cold to freeze it where it lay, then wind and more rain slowed their forward movement. They dared not go by coach, and yet increasing numbers of coaches, private and hired, passed them on the roads. It was as the marquis had predicted: The English—at least some small portion of the more than fifteen thousand who had arrived on French shores since Louis had been put back on the throne—were beginning to go home again.

At every stop either the marquis or Jenkins would engage the inhabitants of the small villages or farming communities in easy conversation. Rumor was everywhere, and while the farrier in one town would insist that they were at war with the pigs of England again, the one in another town would steadfastly maintain that Louis still held sway and the adventurer Bonaparte was still at Elba, safely out of harm's way.

Other incidents impeded them. Catherine's horse, never in the best condition, began to founder as they traveled further toward the coast, and they had to stop and search and bargain till they could trade it for another, younger bit of horseflesh that an avaricious farmer near Vironvey agreed to part with. When Catherine insisted on paying Sinjun for the expense, he grew angry, and their bickering caused Jenkins to comment that he felt as though he were seeing two children home from an outing that had overtired them.

Jenkins, for his part, had insisted on calling Sinjun “lord” and “sir” till Sinjun had cursed him and snarled that Catherine would understand if he dropped the pose and continued to call him “lad” or “friend” or “enemy,” for fiend's sake, so long as he was done with posturing as a correct gentleman. Jenkins had looked wounded and explained that those names were only for Sinjun's ears alone, and not for use in company. And when Sinjun rejoined that Catherine was by no means polite company, she looked so stricken that both the marquis and Jenkins together had to jest and make up foolish verses to old songs till they had jollied her out of her depression.

One day they had to sit and wait out the weather in the shelter of a disused barn. For the rain and wind were so fierce that they knew neither the horses nor they themselves could have traveled far. They had passed the time telling stories, speculating on the fate of those they had known in Paris. When, at noon, Jenkins produced an old, limp deck of cards, they had cheered as though they had been given the rarest treat.

They had traveled together for five cold, unpleasant days. They had slept in abandoned houses and begged night's permission to camp in barns. Their food had been rough, their beds usually straw or their own folded garments, yet Catherine could never remember being happier.

And the cause of her happiness, she had thought on the fifth day, rode alongside her. Though they had been constantly together throughout the journey, and only for a few moments of the day was she ever alone, she grew uneasy when he was not with her. She had stolen glances at his straight back and noted the way the wind tossed his demon-black hair back from his forehead. Each night, like the small children Jenkins had commented on, they had chatted happily in the dark till sleep overtook them. He had been a courteous and charming companion, and every last vestige of the cool autocrat she had envisioned him was gone. And, above all, never once since they had begun their trek had he looked at her with the salacious, burning looks he had used when they met in society. He did indeed, she thought with a mixture of relief and disquiet, treat her as an equal.

He had often made her laugh, there in the night, when they spoke to each other as disembodied voices. And she counted among her life's greatest triumphs those moments when she in turn reduced him to helpless mirth. Sometimes they spoke of their past lives, and though she found nothing in hers that she thought might interest him, still he pressed her to tell him more. So she had recounted her mother's sad story, and told him of Jane's beauty and Arthur's primness, and even, as the hour grew late and Jenkins seemed to snore in earnest, of her own desire to be a free and independent person rather than an obligation for her sister's new family to bear.

Sometimes after that first night she told him of Rose and Violet, and tried to make him see that they were nothing like one would have thought, simply common harlots. She told him of their hopes and fears and attempted to let him see that their lives, apart from their trade, were much as anyone else's. And she felt he did try to understand.

She thought he was far too hard on himself. He did not seem to be able to speak of his past without disparaging it and demeaning himself in jest. He did not appear to be able to speak of the woman he had offered for without congratulating her on her perspicacity in rejecting him. He held himself in low esteem, and she found herself tightening her hands to fists whenever he joked, there in the night, about what an empty, idle fellow he was. For she dared not let him see how very much she wished to disprove what he said. One night, as he was speaking, she almost blurted out, “No, how can you say that? You are a man any woman would give her life to please.” For where would she proceed from there? If he rose and came to her and asked her to prove that, how could she then say, “No, I didn't mean that.”

The only discomfort Catherine had felt beyond the physical on their journey toward home was the discomfort of knowing that if he knew her feelings—worse, if she displayed them—he would think her to be the easy female he had originally thought her.

So she kept herself under restraint. They spoke of books they both had read and liked. They joked about the people they both had met. They giggled in the night like small children afraid to wake their nanny, Jenkins. But they did not touch. And they did not speak about their new friendship. Catherine kept herself on a tight rein. She was so busy keeping her feelings tightly to herself that she never saw the looks he bent upon her, obliquely and often during their journey.

The next day the sky cleared and it was a cool morning—one of those strange mornings in the earliest spring when the air holds only a tantalizing promise of the splendors of the months to come.

“We're allowing ourselves a treat today,” Sinjun said as he rode beside her. “We've come more than halfway and the coast will soon be in sight. I think we deserve a day of rest. We are on the outskirts of Rouen, and since we have heard no bells tolling or cannon fire, I think we can safely assume the throne lies secure still. So we will stop at an inn. Then it will be an easier day's journey to the coast.”