And now she was here, and the feeling of meeting life head-on was thrumming through her veins stronger, pulsing powerfully through her body. It was a nervous kind of energy, like she was going to burst at the seams with a new need to face life rather than sidestepping it, as she had for years. Shaking herself out of her curious unwillingness to act, she stepped forward, stooped and touched the dark stain on the folly threshold. It was not wet, but she had the feeling that it had not long been dry. She looked up and tried to gaze into the interior of the folly, but it was dark. The windows were covered in thick vines, like Sleeping Beauty’s palace in one of her favorite childhood stories.
Her heart beat even faster. She had never been a coward. If there was an animal hurt in her folly, she wanted to know. If it was not too badly hurt, she would take it back for Bill, her head groom, to fix up, as she did when a child. There had always been a cage at the back of the stable holding a vole or a ferret, rabbit or mouse that she had retrieved in the woods. If the animal was suffering though, and too far gone, she would kill it to put it out of its misery. She had courage enough to see nothing suffer, she hoped.
She wished she had brought a lamp. The gloom in the folly was almost impenetrable. She peered in.
“Hallo?” she called, feeling more than a little silly as her voice echoed in the thicket.
There was a sound, and she froze on the doorstep. It was a scraping sound! Oh, how she wished for a light! She strained her eyes into the darkness. Was that darker area something, over near the wall under one of the ivy-covered windows? What could it be?
There was that sound again, a scraping! And a . . . a moan? It was ghostly, the noise oddly echoing in the stone folly. She picked up a branch that lay across the stone entrance and advanced, creeping into the folly, feeling her way with the toe of her riding boot. The moan again! It almost sounded human!
Her mouth was dry and she could not swallow; her hand was shaking so badly the dried leaves on the branch she held made a light whispering sound, like the wind in the trees. She was ready to flee if she saw the slightest movement. Her new bravado did not extend to challenging wild beasts or a wounded poacher, if that was what the moaning should turn out to be.
She sidled into the folly and stood with her back to the cool stone wall, letting her eyes become accustomed to the gloom. The dark patch near the window began to take a shape. It was a man! And he lay sleeping against the wall. Sleeping? Dead? No, not dead. He had moaned.
Who was he? What was he doing on her property? If he was an injured poacher he would need help or he might die, and she would not have a man’s death on her conscience, even if he eventually ended up swinging from the gibbet. Holding the branch up like a club she inched forward, waiting for any movement that would signal that he was feigning his unconscious state.
Forward, stop; forward more, pause again. Across the eight feet or so of the folly’s floor she made her way. Finally, she knelt down beside him, satisfied by his posture and the amount of blood that pooled around the poor man that he was no threat.
Was he still alive, or had she heard his death rattle?
She reached out to touch him, ignoring the auburn curls that fell forward when she bent. He was warm. She put her slim fingers under his scruffy chin and turned his face up to the thin thread of light that had found a path through the ivy. She gazed and took in a breath with a choking gasp.
“Etienne!” she cried, and the sound of her voice echoed into the forest.
Chapter Two
It was him! He was scruffy and bearded, his clothes were filthy and he was pale under the beard, but she would never mistake the only man about whom she had wondered, What would it be like to kiss him?
Etienne, her savior. Etienne, in her folly, badly injured! Etienne, alive! She must get help . . . but no, she could not leave him before she knew the extent of his injuries.
All of these thoughts had only taken a second, and the sound of her scream still echoed as Etienne opened his bleary, bloodshot eyes and pushed himself up against the wall. “Back, vilain, I will not let you take me!” he shouted in a hoarse voice. He staggered as he tried to stand, and pulled a pistol from his waistband. He brandished it, but then his eyes drifted closed and he sank to the cold stone floor again, his pistol still clutched in his outstretched hand.
May had stumbled back when Etienne had risen, but she stooped over him again when he slid to the floor in a slump. “Oh, Etienne,” she murmured, tears welling in her eyes. “I thought you were dead! What have they done to you?” She knelt at his side, reached out and delicately touched his hair, his cheek, his feverish brow.
His eyes opened again, and he gazed up at her. A rich caramel brown with flecks of mahogany and amber, his beautiful eyes were clouded with pain and his cheeks were flushed. But his expression sharpened a little. “It is the little English miss,” he whispered.
She nodded, unable to speak. Just minutes before she had been mourning the loss of her gallant chevalier, and now here he was alive, in her folly! She stared at him, eagerly gazing her fill, overwhelmed by the joy that coursed through her just to know that he lived. But his boat had gone down in the channel. How had he survived? Where had he been for over six months? She had a hundred questions for him, but he was in no condition to answer any of them until he was fed, cleaned up and rested.
His eyes were closing again.
“No! Etienne, you must get up. You must stand so you can walk back to my home with me, back to Lark House. Do you understand me?”
“I cannot,” he moaned.
May sat down on the leaf-covered stone floor and pushed her heavy mane of hair over her shoulder. “Why? Is it because you can’t walk? I have my horse outside. Cassie can carry you.”
A weary chuckle. “No, my little one. I cannot walk, but there is more, much . . . augh.”
He had tried to stand again but his face blanched, and he sank back down. May grabbed his arm, gingerly took his pistol and set it aside on the flagstone floor. One flex of his finger and the pistol could go off! “Stay put, you fool!” She looked him over, and finally found where all the blood had come from. His breeches were soaked on his right side, the side away from her, from some wound on his hip. She reached across him, her hair dragging across his body, and touched, lightly. She heard his quick intake of air. He was badly hurt. “What happened?” she demanded. “Who did this to you?”
He waved one hand in the air. “I ran into a little . . . a little annoyance.”
“A little annoyance? What does that mean?” She shook her head in impatience and said, “Never mind. You must come back to Lark House with me.” She slid her arm under his shoulders, trying to get him to rise and go with her. “I need to fetch the doctor.”
“No doctors, no home. No one must know where I am. Promise me, little one,” he said, clutching her arm, his brown eyes dark with pain and fear, the whites shot with blood-dilated veins. “Promise me you will tell no one where I am. It is worth my life if you do.”
She removed her arm and let him rest once more against the wall. “Does this have to do with the trouble in London? With why you ran away?”
He nodded, his eyes closed again.
May thought furiously. Etienne had been accused of trying to kill Lord Sedgely, whose legal heir he was until Emily bore her husband a son. Although Emily was even now with child, who knew if it would be the heir Lord Sedgely needed? May did not believe Etienne guilty of the heinous crime, but everyone else did. She could not explain the faith she had in him, for it was based solely on a feeling deep within her bones, not a rational basis for judging innocence or guilt.
She could not take Etienne back to Lark House, where Lord Sedgely’s Aunt Dodo was buzzing around doing some of her embroidery or seeing to the preserving. She didn’t think much of her nephew but surely would draw the line at living in the same house with his supposed assassin. And May would never be able to keep Etienne’s presence a secret from the servants. Once they knew, one might as well tell the
whole county. Servants gossiped; it was a fact of life.
She gazed at Etienne’s dark head, the chestnut curls much longer than she remembered, and at his beard. It was a growth of some days, perhaps some weeks. Had he been running the whole time, for six long months? How many sheds and barns and follies had he holed up in? And who was he running from? Was it just to elude capture as the attacker of Lord Sedgely? If that was the case, why did he not go to the Continent? In his native land no one would accost Etienne for his supposed crimes, especially since all of the interested parties believed him dead. Somehow, she thought there was much more behind it. So very many questions, and so very few answers.
He sat with his eyes closed, shivering and moaning. Judging from the amount of blood around him—he lay in a pool of it and his breeches were soaked—he had been what . . . stabbed, shot? very shortly before he found refuge in her folly. How long had he been here? And where were his attackers; how did he elude them?
He might have died, alone and cold, out here in her folly, if she hadn’t come out this morning. She would have found his corpse, or even his skeleton! Was that the feeling she had had this morning, the feeling that everything was going to change?
Even though she had found him alive, he was not out of the proverbial woods yet. He was weak, and his wound could become gangrenous. There was no other alternative but to doctor him herself. She was not entirely without experience. Cassie had been bit once by a badger, and she had let no one else tend the wound but herself. She didn’t suppose it was at all the same, doctoring a horse and doctoring a man, but still . . .
“If I can’t take you to see a doctor, then we will just have to make do. I can go back to the house and bring back supplies—food, wine, blankets, medicine. I can make you comfortable, at least, and then we’ll see what we can do about that wound.”
He nodded wearily, his eyes still closed. “That would be much appreciated, little one.”
Little one! How she hated that appellation. He treated her as if she was five and he was ancient, though he was not much older than she. “How were you wounded?”
“It was with the knife, little one. And this time not the jealous husband, not like in Paris that time I . . . ah, well. That story is not fit for your young ears.”
“Etienne,” she said, through gritted teeth, “I am twenty-three, not ten, and I would appreciate it if you would treat me accordingly.”
He opened his eyes at that, looked her over carefully, and a ghost of a smile flickered through his eyes and touched his lips. “So old?”
Blushing, May realized she was most improperly clad in breeches and her long hair was unbound and floating around her shoulders. She must look like a little hoyden to him. No lady would ever be caught like this! But she tilted her chin up proudly. He was not her keeper. No one was! She was her own woman at last. “Yes, so old. I do not appreciate being called ‘little one’ as if you were my grandfather! How old are you?”
“I? I am twenty-four . . . but no! I have turned twenty-five just a week or so ago. How about that, a quarter century.”
“Ancient,” May said dryly. She stared at him intently, and her heart skipped a beat. Etienne was alive! It was so hard to take in when she had been mourning—yes, that was the right word—mourning his death for six months now.
He opened one eye. “Do you think you might get some of that wine? Soon?” he said, plaintively.
She scrambled to her feet. “I will bring back supplies within the hour,” she said. Worry tugged at her as she stared down at him, so pale and so much in pain. “Will you be all right until then?”
“I have been, so far. I will live on, little one.”
She stepped out of the folly.
“Little one?”
She took a deep breath. He was ill. She would not nag him about that damned pet name until he was better. “Yes?” she asked, ducking her head back into the shadowed confines of the folly.
“My horse, my Théron; he is out there somewhere. If I call him, will you unsaddle him, please? He will stay close by, but I do not like to think of him burdened when he does not need to be.”
Théron; oh, yes, she remembered his magnificent black stallion, seventeen hands tall at least, with sleek, powerful muscles and the stride of a champion. She had admitted when Etienne rescued her that she would not attempt to ride him alone. Would he let her take off his saddle?
She stepped out of the folly. “He’s here,” she called. Théron was with Cassie, and they were nuzzling each other with interest. The stallion snorted and reared, showing off for the pretty dun mare, so much smaller than him. “Men,” May muttered, approaching him cautiously.
Etienne had dragged himself up to window height with a groan of pain. He whistled and Théron became alert.
“My friend,” Etienne said, speaking his native tongue. “You will allow this young lady to take from you your saddle, and then you will stay in this wooded area until we are able to leave, do you hear?”
May understood him, having had a very thorough education in French and Italian, as all young ladies did, but strangely enough the horse seemed to understand too. He snorted and tossed his head, but sidled over to May.
“Does he understand English too, or is he purely a francophone stallion?”
Etienne chuckled. “He understands some English, I believe. He is a very intelligent beast—more brains than the average Englishman.”
“You are a beautiful boy,” she murmured, stroking her hand over his smooth flanks. The coal black of his muscular body was dusty, and she said, “I’ll bring you a treat, my beauty, and I’ll bring my curry comb, too. You deserve to be cared for, as I have a feeling your master would not be alive without your speed.” She undid the buckle of his cinch as the stallion tossed his head again and snorted.
“You will spoil him with such tender words,” came Etienne’s dry voice from the window.
May tossed her hair back and glanced at him over her shoulder as she hoisted the saddle and pulled it off the horse. “Nonsense.”
“He is not used to attractive young ladies murmuring sweet nothings in his ear. He will be impossible to deal with now, all conceit.”
Chuckling, May colored and fell silent. Attractive? Her? Who did he think he was fooling with such gammon? She knew Etienne’s taste in women ran to the opulent, abundant beauty of women like Emily, Marchioness of Sedgely. He liked voluptuous, older women.
She lugged the saddle around to the back windowless wall of the folly and pulled some fallen branches and dead leaves over it. She did not want even a poacher to happen by and see a valuable saddle—and it was a lovely one, with tooled leather and silver fittings—just lying on the ground. She couldn’t leave it there forever or it would be destroyed by the wet, but it would have to do for now.
She circled back around again and met Etienne at the window. His complexion was an alarming gray and she realized she must hurry, her worry for him reanimated. “I will return within the hour, I promise,” she said, touching his filthy hand tentatively. “I hope you will be all right until then.”
“I will survive, little one. I must remember to thank le bon Dieu in my prayers that he sent you to aid me. I am most fortunate to be in your petite maison de la forêt.”
Patting his hand, she turned and headed toward Cassie, who was again nuzzling the handsome stallion. She stuck her boot into the stirrup and swung herself up on her mare. “Stay here,” she said over her shoulder, as Cassie sidled, eager to get going again.
“There is little danger I will go anywhere,” Etienne said wryly.
“I was talking to Théron.”
May started off, finding the path that would lead her another way out of the forest on the Lark House side, opposite from where she had entered the copse.
“Shaving supplies! Bring me a razor,” he cried, scruffing his fingers through his beard.
“I will try to be back within the hour.” And then she disappeared into the forest, like a wood nymph, her glorious mane o
f auburn curls bouncing as she urged Cassie into a canter.
• • •
“Merciful God,” Etienne whispered, sliding back down against the stone wall. “Thank you for sending me a sylvan angel. Please let her be as wise as she is brave, cette petite courageuse, and let her trust no one. Anyone could betray me. I know I am atoning for my sins, but if you please, let me atone living, not dead.”
The pain in his side had receded, and that was worrying. When something hurt, that meant the flesh was still alive. He looked down at his filthy, torn clothes and his blood-soaked breeches and touched his pistol to reassure himself he was still armed. Thank God he had not used it on the little one. His eyesight was bleary and his head pounded as if he were in the middle of a cavalry raid. He had not eaten in three days, nor drunk a drop in two. If the little one had not come along he was going to drag himself to the nearest stream, but now . . . now that would not be necessary. He hoped. If she came back.
She would come back. He could trust her. That morning, so long ago—was it only six months?—when he had taken her back to London after her terrible experience with her mother’s foul lover, he had come to know something of her soul. She was brave. She was resourceful. And there was a sweetness, an innocence about her. But he did not deal in innocents. Not for him the Lady Mays of the world, the sweet virginal girls . . . though as she reminded him most vehemently, she was not a girl. He chuckled, until a spasm of pain wracked his body.
“Eh bien,” he said, to no one in particular. “Pain.” He slipped into unconsciousness and slumped over sideways.
Chapter Three
As always, Lark House looked lovely in the early morning sun. The mellow rosy brick glowed, gilded by the rising golden sun. May approached from the back, where a terrace lined the manse, and rode directly into the enormous stables on the east side, the big double doors open as her head stableman, Bill Connors, and his staff mucked out the stalls and prepared for the day’s work.
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