A Matter of Indiscretion

by Jackie Barbosa

  Sabine released a ragged breath and set the letter aside. Its contents were exactly as Mr. Pearce had represented them. What “evidence” did Uncle Etienne have, and how had he come by it? In the wake of her mother’s death, Sabine had gone through all her personal belongings and papers…or she thought she had. Perhaps she’d missed something, though she could not imagine what or how. Or had the information been in her father’s possessions? That made more sense, since Etienne had inherited the estate and everything else that had been her father’s. But Papa had been gone for more than five years now. Why had it taken Etienne so long to find this “evidence”?

  Irritated with herself, Sabine shook her head. Why worry the point? Did it matter what the evidence was or how her uncle had discovered it when Mr. Pitt himself was apparently more than willing to acknowledge the blood tie between them? He must care about her in some small way. That meant, she thought, he had likely cared about her mother, too. Men didn’t always feel any particular tendré for the women they bedded nor the children they sired, especially if either outcome occurred without the benefit of marriage. She supposed the fact that her uncle thought Mr. Pitt could be blackmailed by the threat of harm to her person was a mark of his good character in and of itself. The fact that the British government had sent someone to keep her from harm was even more telling.

  Looking down, she realized she was twisting the letter from Mr. Pitt between her fingers, wrinkling the paper beyond repair. Why did the idea of reading this letter make her more anxious than reading her uncle’s had? There was no reason to be frightened of its contents, which would surely be designed to convince her of the wisdom of heeding Mr. Pearce’s request that she accompany him to England. Pitt had probably composed a missive that portrayed him and his concern for her in a glowing light, whether it was true or not.

  And that, she thought, was what worried her. She wanted the man who had sired her to be a good man, a kind and a generous one. Papa had been such a man, and she did not want the man whose blood she shared to be less than the one who had raised her. She didn’t want to know if half her blood came from someone she would likely dislike and distrust.

  Someone like her uncle.

  But delaying would not change the contents of the letter. Whether she read it now or an hour hence or six years in the future, the words committed to the paper would remain the same.

  She broke the seal, unfolded the three sheets of paper, and smoothed the edges she had crinkled before she began to read.

  Mon cher Sabine,

  I hope I may presume to address you by your given name, despite the fact that we have never met in person, but under the circumstances, it seems peculiar for me to call you Mlle Rousseau. In due course, I trust we can remedy the former, as I am filled with curiosity and longing to lay eyes upon you. I never expected to have children, and to discover that I have, in fact, been a father for more than twenty-four years comes as both a shock and a pleasure. It is also a great source of shame and regret to me that I never acted in the capacity of a parent, but I cannot blame your mother for the choices she made.

  First and foremost, I want you to know that I loved your mother and, I believe, she loved me in return. Although we were both quite young when we met, her beauty and vivacity utterly captivated me. I intended that we would marry, and I would bring her home to England with me, but her parents would have none of it and, in the end, I suppose she feared she would be unhappy in a foreign country. Perhaps I should have insisted, but I truly believed she refused me of her own free will. When I left, neither of us had the slightest notion that she was carrying a child, and even had she wanted to let me know, she would have found it difficult to contact me.

  I was—and still am—quite mad for politics, as you may have gathered. In fact, I met your mother while licking my wounds after having lost my first campaign for office. I decided France would be a good change of scenery after that defeat and might have given up my quest altogether if things had been different, but when your mother refused my suit, I determined that if I could not have her, I would most certainly have the political career I desired.

  As I write this, I do not know whether you were aware that the man who raised you was not your natural father, and thus I cannot guess how you may be feeling as you read this letter. Perhaps you feel I abandoned you; a fair judgment. Perhaps you wish you had never heard of me. Also fair, for my existence now complicates your life in ways you could never have imagined.

  And so, understanding the animus you may rightly bear toward me, I cannot and will not ask you to leave your home and come to England on my say-so, though it is my dearest wish that you should do so, not for political, but for personal reasons. Instead, I ask you to do so for your own safety. Having known your mother, even so long ago and for such a relatively brief time, I find it hard to imagine you are an admirer of your country’s emperor and his military ambitions. Bonaparte will bring France and all of Europe to ruin, given the chance. I am most especially concerned, however, by your uncle’s allegation that you have been working for me with the resistance in France. I do not know, of course, if you have any ties to the Jacobins or other elements that oppose Bonaparte, but even if you do not, the police will not be kind to you and may not believe your denials. You may escape serious harm at their hands, but you will most certainly be safe on British soil.

  Mr. Pearce is an honorable gentleman of good family who will do everything in his power to deliver you safely to London. The sooner you can depart, the better, for there is little doubt that by now, your uncle has dispatched a second letter to Bonaparte and the gendarme could arrive on your doorstep at any time.

  I know this decision cannot be easy for you, my child, and I wish with all my heart you did not have to make it.

  Your father,

  William Pitt

  Sabine read the entire text three times before refolding the sheets and setting them aside. Her expectations had been correct; Mr. Pitt had portrayed himself in a largely flattering manner. Nothing he claimed was necessarily to be trusted. Who was there to gainsay his claims that he had loved her mother and wished to marry her, but had been thwarted by her parents and her own reservations? No one. How could she gauge the truthfulness of his claim that he wanted her in England more for personal reasons than political ones? Not at all. This was exactly what she would expect a powerful and clever man in his position to do: soften her up with the pretense of caring for her, while all along maneuvering purely for political advantage.

  There was, however, one thing she could not ignore. Mr. Pitt, having been informed of her existence and her uncle’s intention to turn her over to the secret police, could have chosen to do nothing. He could have shrugged and simply refused to be swayed by the threat to her person. After all, he had been unaware of her existence until Etienne’s letter had been intercepted, and he must know she was not working with the British as her uncle claimed. Why should he particularly concern himself about the fate of a daughter he had never met? She suspected many men in his position would not.

  But he had concerned himself. He had sent Mr. Pearce—wet behind the ears, as he might be—to retrieve her. He had taken the time to compose a letter he hoped might persuade her to do something any reasonable person knew would be terribly difficult: leave the only home she had ever known. Those acts, she thought, spoke to his character more than any words he had committed to paper. And those acts made it easier for her to believe that his feelings for her mother, his regret that he had never been a parent to her, and his concern for her on a personal level were genuine.

  She did not want to leave France. She did not want to go to England, where the food was supposed to be bland, the skies persistently gray, and the people insular and rude. Although, to be fair, Mr. Pearce struck her as neither of those things, but then, was he not a quarter French? But most of all, she did not want to leave behind the business she had been building for the past five years.

  Thanks to Papa, she was close—so close—to gaining the
freedom to control her own life. When he’d given her Gaston and Copine and explained that farmers would pay top dollar for solid, dependable draught horses from their bloodline, he had been providing her a way out. He had been old—nearly thirty years her mother’s senior—and well aware of his brother’s dislike of his wife and daughter. He could not have predicted, however, that he would fall ill and die within a few short months of turning over the breeding business to her, or that her mother would follow him to the grave within a matter of a few years, further weakening Sabine’s position in the Rousseau household in such a short period of time. Likely, he had expected to live long enough that, between her own income and her mother’s jointure, they would have sufficient funds to purchase land and a home of their own upon his death. It was hardly his fault things had not worked out that way.

  In point of fact, she could leave the home she had grown up in without a backward glance. With both Maman and Papa gone, there was nothing and no one here she cared about—except, perhaps, Madame Charney and her glorious cooking, she amended. All her good memories of the place and the people she loved would go with her wherever went.

  She could also leave France without a care. Mr. Pitt had been correct to suppose she would not hold the emperor in high esteem. Some of his policies were laudable, to be sure; the Code Napoleon, which had only recently created a single civil code for the entire country in place of the patchwork that had existed before, was certainly a positive step for the country. By the same token, that civil code gave her, as a woman, fewer legal rights than a child, and even though that had been more or less the state of affairs before the code ratified, Sabine could hardly approve of the continuation of such subjugation. And beyond that, as Pitt pointed out, Bonaparte’s military and political aspirations were both dangerous and absurd. Emperor by his own dictate. Pah!

  Yes, England would be strange and intimidating. Her English was all-but non-existent, which was likely to be somewhat embarrassing, but she was given to understand that most well-educated English people spoke French—and the letter Mr. Pitt had written had been composed in perfectly grammatical and serviceable French—so life would probably not be unbearably difficult.

  But the one thing she could not give up was the prospect of gaining her independence. And that meant she could not leave behind the means her papa had provided her for doing so. England might be a foreign country with a foreign language, but farmers everywhere had need of solid, dependable draught animals, and there were none better than Percherons.

  Either Gaston and Copine would be coming with her, or she would take her chances with Napoleon Bonaparte.

  6

  Dinner was agony.

  Oh, the food was fine—excellent, in fact, despite Madame Rousseau’s frequent excuses for the meal’s “simplicity” and “humbleness,” but then, how could she have been expected to organize a more elegant repast when she hadn’t known they would be having company until mid-afternoon? Despite Thomas’s assurance that the rich, flavorful coq au vin, the crisp, sweet haricots verts and the thick, crusty bread were delightful, she repeated her apologies for their inadequacies in such a transparent attempt to induce him to compliment her yet again that he was tempted to pick up his plate and decamp to the kitchen to eat with the household staff.

  But that would be undiplomatic.

  It would be equally undiplomatic to depart the dinner table on the grounds that Etienne Rousseau was an obnoxious blowhard. For the first time since he’d joined the foreign service, Thomas wondered if he was cut out for the job. What if all the people he had to interact with in the course of his duties were as insufferable as Rousseau? He’d always considered himself well suited to tolerating difficult people, but perhaps he’d incorrectly extrapolated from personal experience that difficult people were entertaining people. His grandmother, for example. His brother, Conrad, for another. The Langston twins, as well. All demanding, complicated, difficult people who required a good deal of managing on his part, but never, ever boring. Etienne Rousseau, by contrast, was simply tedious and unlikable. His wife, with her frequent but insincere self-deprecations, was no better.

  The Rousseaus’ adolescent sons, Guillaume and Alexandre, did nothing to improve the atmosphere, either. At fourteen and seventeen, they possessed the sullen dispositions and general lack of interest in adult affairs that were typical of their age group, so Thomas did not hold this against them. What he did object to was the elder boy’s sly attempts to peek down his cousin’s bodice, aided and abetted by his younger brother. Throughout the course of the meal, Guillaume would ask Sabine to pass him something—the bread, the butter, the salt or pepper—and, when she did so, remained seated so that she had to rise up and lean across the broad expanse of the table. As he was seated directly across from her, Guillaume was afforded an excellent view of her bosom. Once all the items were on Guillaume’s side of the table, Alexandre asked for each to be passed to him so they were once again on Sabine’s side, and the entire cycle could begin anew.

  Thomas wondered if Sabine were aware of her cousins’ game and decided she probably was not. To his shame, he suspected he would not have noticed if he were not just the tiniest bit entranced by her breasts himself. It was wrong of him, of course, but at least he knew it was wrong. Guillaume, by contrast, evinced not the slightest regret at his efforts to force his cousin to display herself to him. Even more troubling, to Thomas’s way of thinking, was that the expression on the young man’s face when he looked at Sabine was not appreciative or admiring, but lascivious and acquisitive. Like his father, Guillaume Rousseau clearly felt entitled to have his every desire fulfilled, regardless of what anyone else wanted.

  Guillaume Rousseau, though still a lad, was dangerous. He wasn’t going to be satisfied with looking for much longer, and he wasn’t going to wait for her consent to take things further. Even without the looming threat of Bonaparte’s secret police, Sabine needed to get out of this household, and soon.

  Which brought him to the primary source of his agony: he could not tell from Sabine’s manner whether she had decided to leave with him or not. She gave no indication whatsoever of her state of mind, which was undoubtedly wise given the present company. He’d thought he could wait until after everyone retired for her answer, but now, the uncertainty was driving him mad.

  He didn’t want to kidnap her, damn it. But if she refused to come of her own free will, he would have to. And then he’d be no better than her cousin.

  “So, Monsieur Allard,” Mme Rousseau began, her words a welcome distraction from his own thoughts, “will you be staying with us another night? We can certainly do much better than this for dinner with advance notice.”

  He shook his head as he swallowed the bite he had been chewing. “No, I could not trouble you by imposing upon you a second night. My business with your niece should be completed by tomorrow in any case, so there will be no need.”

  “Tomorrow?” Sabine echoed, the quaver in her voice so faint, Thomas was probably the only person at the table who caught it. And that was because he was looking for something, anything, to suggest she was at least considering coming with him voluntarily. This was the tiniest of crumbs, but he would take it.

  “Yes. Once I have given you the jewelry and you’ve agreed to the terms of the bequest, I’ll be on my way. I cannot see that taking more than an hour in the morning.”

  “In the morning?” Etienne Rousseau interjected. “In that case, let us see to everything after dinner. No time like the present.”

  “Oh, no, Uncle, not tonight,” Sabine responded quickly, casting a quick, worried glance in Thomas’s direction. “I have to see to the horses after dinner, as I always do. After that, I will be far too tired to spend an hour discussing things like jewelry and bequests. Aside from that, I imagine Monsieur Allard is quite exhausted from his travels.”

  “I should check with my driver, as well, to make sure my team will be ready to depart on the morrow,” Thomas added to signal his agreement.

&
nbsp; Sabine gave him a sharp look across the table. He responded with a tilt of his head. Yes, they would be talking sooner than originally planned. Rousseau had given them no choice. They needed to leave tonight.

  “Well, at the very least, allow me to store the jewelry in my strong box,” Rousseau said, his attempt at amiability ruined by the eagerness he couldn’t quite keep out of his tone. “One never knows when one of the servants might succumb to such a temptation, after all. I like to think my staff are honest and would never resort to thievery, but it pays to be wary.”

  Even before Thomas caught the warning look in Sabine’s eyes, he was already shaking his head. He knew very well who would be unable to resist such a temptation, and it wasn’t any of the servants. “I appreciate the offer, but I do not think that will be necessary. I have managed to keep the items safe for over a hundred miles, and I would prefer not to part company with them until I have turned them over to their rightful owner.” My grandmother, he added silently, who will have my head if I return to England without them.

  “I am not sure that is the wisest course of action,” Rousseau advised sternly. “But it is, of course, entirely up to you.”

  Yes, it was, thank God. He wondered which of the servants Rousseau would accuse of the theft after he himself removed the jewelry from the proffered strong box. Probably one of upstairs maids or one of the footmen, any of whom could be easily scapegoated and replaced. “Again, I do thank you, but I will feel better keeping them in my possession.”

  The meal wound down relatively quickly, if uncomfortably, after that. Rousseau attempted to cover his disappointment at Thomas’s refusal of the use of the strong box by evincing interest in the Allard family’s current holdings and status, which may or may not have been feigned. The Allards were exactly the sort of people someone like Rousseau might desire to hitch his wagon to in his quest for wealth and status, although they were, to Thomas’s certain knowledge, divided on the subject of Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise to power. Thomas did his best to cast the entire lot of them as French patriots without specifically indicating which branches of the family were pro- or anti-Bonaparte. In his mind, they were all patriots, anyway; it was just that only some of them were correct.