by Sophia James
Each of them had laughed.
‘Frank Booth is reported to be a member. I will ask him to sponsor us.’
A week later they were given a date, a time and a place, a small break in a case that was baffling. Girls were ruined all the time in London, for reasons of economics, for the want of food, for a roof over the head of a child born out of wedlock. But they were seldom so brutally hurt.
Sandrine. He remembered her ruined hand and the fear in her face when he had first met her.
The rage inside him began to build. Back then Cassandra Northrup had never given him any glimpse of an identity, though with each and every day in her company questions had woven their way into the little that she told him.
The first night had been the worst. She had cried behind him in small sobs, unstoppable over miles of walking in the dark. He had not helped her because he couldn’t. The wound in his side had ached like the devil, fiery-hot and prickling, and by midnight he knew that he would have to rest.
Throwing down the few things he had taken from the cart after abandoning it many miles back, he leaned against a tree, the bark of its trunk firm behind him. Already the whirling circles of giddiness threatened, the ache at his hip sending pins and needles into his chest.
The girl sat on the other side of the small clearing, tucked into a stiff and inconsolable shape.
‘You are safer than you were before. I said I would not hurt you.’ He couldn’t understand her weeping.
‘I killed a man.’
‘He was about to rape you.’ Nat’s heart sank at the implications of her guilt. God, how long had it been since he had felt anything remotely similar? He wished he had been the one to slide a knife into the French miscreant, for he would have gutted him and enjoyed watching him die. Slowly.
Her hands crossed her heart and her lips moved as if reciting a prayer.
Had the bullet wound not hurt as much he might have laughed, might have crossed the space between them and shaken her into sense. But he could only sit and watch and try to mitigate his pain.
‘I am sure that the wrath of God takes intent into account.’
‘Oh, I intended to kill him.’ Honestly said. Given back in a second and no hesitation in it.
‘I was thinking more of your assailant’s purpose. I do not think Monsieur Baudoin would have been gentle with you.’
‘Yet two wrongs do not make a right?’
He closed his eyes and felt the bloom of fatigue, irritation rising at her unreasonableness. ‘If you had not killed him, I would have. One way or another he would have been dead. If it helps, pretend I did it.’
‘Who are you?’ The green in her eyes under moonlight matched the dark of the trees. In the daylight they were bluer, changeable.
‘Nathanael Colbert. A friend.’ Barked out, none of the empathy he knew she wanted held within the word. She remained silent, a small broken shape in the gloom, tucked up against bracken, the holes in the leather soles of her shoes easily seen from this angle. ‘Why the hell were you there in the first place?’
He did not think she would answer as the wind came through into the hollow, its keening sound as plaintive as her voice.
‘They caught us a long time ago.’ He saw her counting on her fingertips as she said it, the frown upon her brow deepening. Months? Years?
‘Us?’
He had seen no other sign of captives.
‘Celeste and I.’
Hell. Another girl. ‘Where is she?’
‘Dead.’ The flat anger in her voice was cold.
‘Recently?’
She nodded, her expression gleamed in sadness. She had old bruises across her cheek and new ones on her hand. In the parting of her hair when her cap had been dislodged he had seen the opaque scar of a wound that could have so easily killed her.
As damaged as he was.
Tonight he did not have the energy to know more of her story and the thin wanness was dispiriting. If they could have a drink things would be better, but the flask he had brought with him was long since empty.
‘Can you hear that stream?’
She nodded.
‘We need water...?’
He left the words as a question. No amount of want in the world could get him standing. He had lost too much blood and he knew it.
‘Do you have the flask?’
‘Here.’
When she took it and left he closed his eyes and tried to find some balance in the silence. He wanted to tend to himself, but he would need water to do that. And fire. He wondered if the young French captive would be able to follow his instructions when she returned.
He also wondered just exactly how those at Nay had gained their information on the identity and movements of a British agent who had long been a part of the fabric of French country life.
* * *
It was quiet in the trees and all the grief of losing Celeste flooded back. Her cousin’s body rounded with child. Her eyes lifeless. The pain of it surged into Cassie’s throat, blocking breath, and she stopped to lean against a tree. The anguish of life and death. What was it the man who sat in the clearing wrapped in bandages had said?
Killing is easy. It’s the living that is difficult.
Perhaps, after all, he was right. Perhaps Celeste had known that, too, and put an end to all that she had loathed, taking the child to a place that was better but leaving her here alone.
Alone in a world where everything looked bleak. Bleaker than bleak even under the light of a small moon, the trickle of water at her feet running into the tattered remains of her boots and wetting her toes. The cold revived a little of her fight, reminded her how in the whole of those eight terrible months she had not given up, had not surrendered. She wished the stream might have been deeper so that she could have simply stripped off and washed away sin. A baptism. A renewal. A place to begin yet again and survive.
The flask in hand reminded her of purpose and she knelt to the water.
Her companion looked sick, the crusted blood beneath his nails reflected in the red upon his clothes, sodden through the layers of bandage. Without proper medicine how could he live? Water would clean the wound, but what could be done for any badness that might follow? The shape of leaves in the moonlight on the other side of the river suddenly caught her attention. Maudeline. Her mother had used this very plant in her concoctions. An astringent, she had said. A cleanser. A natural gift from the hands of a God who placed his medicines where they were most needed.
The small bank was easy to climb and, taking a handful of the plant, she stripped away the woody stems, the minty scent adding certainty to her discovery. She remembered this fresh sweet smell from Alysa’s rooms and was heartened by the fact. The work of finding enough leaves and tucking them into her pocket took all her concentration, purpose giving energy. A small absolution. A task she had done many hundreds of times under the guidance of her mother.
An anchor to the familiar amidst all that was foreign. She needed this stranger in a land she held no measure of and he needed her. An equal support. It had been so long since she had felt any such worthiness.
He was asleep when she returned, though the quiet fall of her feet woke him.
‘I have maudeline for your injury.’ Bringing out the leaves, she began to crush them between her fingers, mixing them to a paste with the water on a smooth rock she had wiped down before using. She saw how he watched her, his grey eyes never leaving the movement of her hands.
She laughed, the sound hoarse and rough after so many months of disuse. ‘No, but Mama was often thought to be.’
Again she saw the dimple in his right cheek, the deep pucker of mirth making her smile.
‘Maudeline? I have not heard of it.’
‘Another name for it is camphor.’
He nodded and came up on to his knees, holding his head in his hands as though a headache had suddenly blossomed.
‘It hurts you?’
‘No.’ Squeezed out through pain.
When he stood she thought he looked unsteady, but she simply watched as he gathered sticks and set to making a fire. The tinder easily caught, the snake of smoke and then flame. Using the bigger pieces of branch he built it up until even from a distance she could feel the radiating warmth.
‘The tree canopy will dissipate the smoke,’ he said after a few moments. ‘The low cloud will take care of the rest.’
* * *
Half an hour later flame shadow caught at his torso as he removed his shirt, the bandages following. His wound showed shattered skin, the tell-tale red lines of inflammation already radiating.
‘Don’t touch.’ Her directive came as she saw he was about to sear the edges of skin together with a glowing stick. ‘It is my belief that dirt kills a man with more certainty than a bullet and I can tell it is infected.’
Crossing to him, she wiped her hands with the spare leaves and poured water across the sap. When she touched him she knew he had the fever. Another complication. A further problem.
‘I have been ill like this before and lived.’ He had seen her frown.
Lots of ‘befores’, she mused, lines of crossed white opaque scars all over his body. The thought made her careful.
‘You are a soldier?’
He only laughed.
Or a criminal, she thought, for what manner of man looked as he did? When he handed over the flask of water, she did not take a drink.
‘I will heat it to clean the wound. It might hurt for it has been left a while. If you had some leather to bite down upon...?’’
He broke into her offered advice. ‘I will cope.’
* * *
Stephen Hawkhurst’s voice made Nathaniel start, the echo around the marbled lobby disconcerting as all the years past rolled back into the present.
‘You look as though you have the problems of the world upon your shoulders, Nat. Still thinking of the Northrup chit, I’d be guessing: fine eyes, a fine figure and a sense of mystery. Her uncle, Reginald Northrup, will be at the Venus Club tonight. Perhaps you can find out more about her from him.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘A few years ago when I was in Paris I heard a rumour about a woman who sounded remarkably like Cassandra Northrup.’
‘What did it say?’
‘That she was kept a prisoner in southern France and that she was not released for quite some time.’
‘I see.’
‘Her rescuer was also mentioned in detail.’ The flint of gold in his friend’s eyes was telling and there was a certain question there.
‘It was you, Nat, wasn’t it? And she was one of theirs?
‘Whose?’
‘The French. One of their agents.’
Anger sliced in a quick rod of pain. ‘No, Cassandra Northrup never held loyalty to any cause save that of her own.’
‘Others here might disagree with you. She is the chairwoman of the charity Daughters of the Poor.’
‘Prostitutes?’
Hawk nodded, leaving Nat to ponder on how the circles of life turned around in strange patterns.
‘She must have been a child then, and scared. God, even now she looks young. And you got home in one piece, after all.’
One piece? How little Stephen truly knew.
Taking his hat and cloak from the doorman, Nat forced away his recollections and walked out into a cold and windy London night.
* * *
They were all there, myriad affluent men gathered in a room that looked much like a law chamber or a place of business. Nat was glad that Stephen stood beside him because he still felt dislocated and detached, thrown by the reappearance of a woman he had thought never to see again.
He recalled Cassandra Northrup’s eyes were exactly the same as they had been, guarded in their turquoise, shuttered by care and secrets. But her hair had changed from the wild curls she had once favoured and she was far more curvaceous.
If her eyes had not given her away her left hand would have, of course, with the half-finger and the deep scar across the rest of her knuckles.
It had been a newer wound back then in the clearing, when she had reached forward and laid one cool palm across his back. He had flinched as she brought the knife she carried upwards to cut away the badness.
The pain had made him sweat, hot incandescence in the cool of night as she simply tipped the heated flask up and covered ragged open flesh.
The camphor helped, as did her hands threading through places on his spine that seemed to transfer the pain. Surprise warred with agony under her adept caresses.
The poultice was sticky and the new bandages she bound the ointment with were from the bottom of her shirt. Cleaner. Softer. He could smell her on them.
He wished that he had the whisky to dull the pain. He wished for a bed that was not on a forest floor, but some place warmer, more comfortable, some place where his heartbeat did not rattle against the cold hard of earth.
‘If you sit, it should help with the drainage.’
He was shivering now, substantially, and went to drape his jacket around himself to find warmth, but she held it away and shook her head.
‘You are burning up. The mind plays tricks when the fever rages and as I cannot shift you to the stream we will have to make do with the cold night air instead. I had hoped it would snow.’
Her accent was Parisian, the inflection of the drawing rooms and the society salons where anything and everything was possible. He wondered why the hell she should have been in Nay, dressed in the clothes of a lad, and when he inadvertently blurted the thought out aloud, he saw her flinch.
‘I think you should sleep, Monsieur Colbert.’
His name. Not quite right. But he needed to be quiet and he needed to think. There was danger here. He wished he could have asked her who she was, what she was, but the camphor was winding its way into the quick pricks of pain and he closed his eyes to block her from him.
* * *
He would be sore in the morning if he lived. The wound or the fever could kill him, but it was the bleeding that she was most concerned about. She had not been able to stop it. Already blood pooled beneath him, more hindrance to a body struggling with survival.
Tipping up the flask, she took the last drops of water.
She was starving. She was exhausted. The embers of the fire still glowed in the dark, but outside the small light the unknown gathered.
Baudoin had not existed alone and she knew that others would follow. Oh, granted, this stranger had hidden their tracks well ever since leaving Nay, his cart discarded quite early in the piece. She had watched him set false lures into other directions, the heavy print of a foot in a stream, a broken twig snagged with the hair from her plait, but she knew it would only be a matter of time before those in France’s underworld would find them.
She held far too many secrets, that was the problem. She had seen some of the documents Baudoin’s
brother had inadvertently left in Celeste’s chamber, documents she knew had been taken from the carriage of a murdered man on the road towards Bayonne. A mistake of lust and an error that would lead to all that had happened next.
Her fault. Everything was her fault and her cousin had not even known it. The same familiar panic engulfed her, made her lean forward to catch breath, trying in the terror to hold on to the reason of why Celeste had done as she did. Cassie still felt the sticky blood across her fingers, the warmth of life giving way to cold.
Softly she began to sing, keeping herself staunch; the ‘Marseillaise’ because it was fast paced and because it was in French.
To arms, citizens,
Form your battalions,
We march, we march...
Celeste was dead. And the Baudoin brothers. How quickly circumstances changed. In a heartbeat. In a breath. She looked across to the stranger, Colbert, and determined that he was still in the land of the living before she shut her eyes.
* * *
The girl was asleep, her hat pulled down across her head and her jacket stretched over the bend of her knees. As Nathaniel looked at her in repose there was a vulnerability apparent that was not evident when she was awake. She was thin, painfully so, and dirty. On a closer inspection he saw on her clothes the handiwork of small, finely taken stitches covering rips and larger holes. Her shirt was buttoned to the throat and the jacket she wore was tightly closed. More than a few sizes too large, it held the look of a military coat without any of the braiding. He knew she still had the knife, but it was not visible anywhere. Too big for the pockets, he imagined it tucked in under her forearm or secreted in one of the boots she wore beneath loose trousers.
A child-woman lost into the vagaries of a war that could not have been kind.
He felt stronger, a surprising discovery this, given his fever, and although the wound tugged when he shifted it did not sting like it had. Still, his vision blurred as he stood from the loss of blood or his own body’s heat, he knew not which.