A Lady Betrayed (Secrets of the Musketeers Book 2)

by Leda Swann

  With a shudder of horror she remembered Brother Jacques and Brother Francis, sent for especially to deal with recalcitrant prisoners. Were they meant for Pierre? He had been taken up for treason and plotting against the King. For sure the King would torture him until he divulged the names of his fellow conspirators.

  She shivered again, huddling herself into her filthy robe. What had she doomed Pierre to? What fate would he have to suffer because of her?

  Miriame’s friend was waiting for them with the covered cart as he had both days previously. His eyes widened when he saw three monks stumbling up to him instead of the usual two.

  They clambered into the cart and the driver set off at a good pace.

  “Off with your robes,” Courtney told her father as they clattered along. “As soon as your escape is discovered, they will be looking for you everywhere.”

  The discarded robes were hastily bundled together and hidden under a pile of straw in the cart. It would not fool anyone but the most casual searcher, but with any luck, it would not have to. They should be well out of the area before anyone noticed that the guards were missing.

  They arrived in a fever of haste at Miriame’s lodging where they had been sleeping ever since their arrival in Paris. Miriame’s landlady was a friend of hers from way back and well used to hiding people from the law. She would be sure to hold her tongue if she noticed anything unusual. Miriame paid her well to turn a blind eye to whatever was going on.

  Once inside, Courtney helped her father to peel off his prison rags and fed them one by one into the fire. Together, she and Miriame lifted him into a tub of water and she scrubbed the months of prison dirt away from every pore of his body.

  His hair was crawling with lice. Courtney shuddered with distaste as she shaved him close to his scalp with a sharp blade, and scraped the beard from his chin. The hair she gathered up carefully from the floor and threw in the fire, insects and all.

  The suit of clothes she had bought for him were too loose on his newly gaunt frame. She pinned the sides of his breeches together as best she could and buttoned up his jacket to hide how loosely his shirt hung on him. Even his stockings hung in folds from his thin calves, but at least he was clean and properly dressed once more.

  Miriame fetched the curled gray wig they had obtained for him and helped him adjust it on his head. He looked at himself in the mirror and shook his head in amazement at his reflection. “I almost look like myself again. You would never know to look at me that I had been a guest of the King for so many months.”

  Courtney and Miriame left him to gloat on his changed appearance and went to wash themselves, scrubbing off all the stink of their false monk’s robes.

  Courtney reappeared in a few moments sparkling clean from head to toe and dressed in a sober green traveling gown and ladies’ laced boots. Miriame strutted out in breeches and riding boots, her dark hair tied at the nape of her neck, a fashionable cavalier from her head to her toes. The pair of them looked, and smelled, nothing at all like the two monks who had broken in to the Bastille a scant half hour ago.

  Still, haste was best. Paris was a dangerous place for all of them but Miriame, and she would be damned just by being found in their company. She shoveled Courtney out the door again as soon as she was dressed to where a carriage was waiting in the street.

  Courtney hugged Miriame tightly to her as they said their farewells. “I owe you my father’s life,” she said. “I shall not forget it. If you should ever need me---”

  “Then be sure that I will come a-knocking on your door as loud as can be,” Miriame interrupted her with a grin. “Now be off with you. The sooner you’re gone, the safer I’ll be.”

  Courtney could hardly argue with that. She scrambled into the carriage, the driver gave a shake of the reins, and they set off down the street at a fast clip.

  “You have just arrived from the country, come to fetch me away to Burgundy,” she explained to her father. “We are traveling to your country home for a visit as my mother is ill and like to die. That explains our haste.”

  Monsieur Ruthgard nodded, accepting instantly the need to get their stories straight if they were stopped. “Why to Burgundy?”

  “I have friends there, Sophie and Ricard Lamotte. They will hide us until we can escape out of the country.”

  “Friends you can trust?”

  “With my life. They were Musketeers with me.”

  “Surely not both of them?” He sounded as if he could not comprehend what she was implying. “The wife along with the husband.”

  “Yes, Sophie as well as her husband. They were both soldiers, as was I.”

  “You were a Musketeer, too?”

  “I was. In the King’s Guard, no less.”

  “And the one who helped you free me?”

  She nodded. “He is Jean-Paul Metin, a street rat turned Musketeer and the best friend to have around you when you are in trouble. He has saved me from more scrapes than this one.”

  Monsieur Ruthgard shook his head at Courtney. “The man who is really a woman in disguise? You have been running with a strange crowd since I have been imprisoned, my love. Where is the young girl I left behind me?”

  Courtney pressed his hand with love. “I have grown up now, papa, and learned how to look after myself. You need never fear leaving me again.”

  Paris was soon left behind them and they rumbled along the country lanes that led to Courtney’s cottage in the country. Suzanne, who had been warned on their way to Paris that their flight was imminent, saw them rumbling up the lane and was outside in a flash with Luc and their bundles. The carriage stopped for just long enough for them both to squeeze on board.

  Courtney gathered Luc to her arms and covered him in kisses. “My darling. How I have missed you.” She turned to her papa, fearing his anger. “Papa, this is my son, your grandson.”

  “You have married while I have been away?”

  “No, papa. I am not wed.”

  Her papa looked sorrowful at her words. “His father?”

  She had known that she would one day have to make a confession of her shame, but knowing it did not make it any easier to perform. “Pierre de Tournay. He betrayed the both of us, papa, me as much as you.”

  Her father reached out and patted the boy on his head. “I am sorry for what you must have suffered in my absence,” he said to Courtney. “I would not have chosen such a path for you, but neither can I condemn you for taking it. I will love the lad dearly for your sake.”

  Courtney felt the constriction around her heart begin to grow less. “I avenged myself on the man who wronged us, papa.”

  Her father looked at her with new understanding. “That is why you would not bring him with us – because of the boy.” He nodded to himself. “That explains much. I had not thought you would have proved so cruel to any man else.”

  She turned her eyes to her father. “You think I did wrong to leave Pierre in the Bastille?”

  He shook his head in sorrow. “Do not ask me, daughter, for I have no answer for you. I can only speak to my conscience, not to yours or to any other man’s. You rescued me from a living hell, and I am more than grateful to you for that. You did what you thought was right and just to the man who had wronged us both. No one can ask more of you than that.”

  Chapter 10

  Pierre did not close his eyes until the door to his dungeon was shut and locked. Even then he kept them open for some minutes, hoping against hope that Courtney would relent, that she would return to him and free him from this living hell.

  The minutes ticked by with excruciating slowness. She did not return. The guard stirred from his position on the floor, moaning through his gag, but still she did not return.

  She was not coming back. She hated him with all the passionate intensity that he loved her. She had abandoned him to his death.

  How foolish and blind he had been not to have seen the truth before. She had ripped the scales from his eyes and left him torn and bleeding, but seeing
clearly at long last.

  He had wronged her too greatly ever to hope for the forgiveness she had once sought from her. He had wounded her so deeply that her girlish love for him had been transformed into a woman’s deep and abiding loathing.

  She had hated him with such a fury that she had taught herself to fight. She had hated him with such a fury that she had become a Musketeer, lived a lie, and lured him to his death in the end.

  His gentle Courtney, his sweet, loving innocent, had been transformed into a woman of ice and steel. He had no right to complain of the changes wrought in her – he had wrought it all himself.

  He had never suspected that William was not a man at all, but his Courtney in disguise. Who would ever have thought that she would have concocted and carried out such a daring plan? Who would have thought that such a tender girl as she had been could be transformed into a Berserker, wild with rage and bloodlust, when a sword was once put into her hand? Who would have thought that the girl he had turned into a woman, who had caressed him as gently as a butterfly and cried out with pleasure under him as he took her virginity, could leave him without a backward glance to die of torture in the Bastille for want of reaching out a hand to save him.

  He doubted that he looked worth saving. What had Courtney thought of her formerly proud soldier now that his face was furry with a sennight’s worth of beard and more, his hair tangled and matted, his clothes soiled with filth from the dungeon – even his own excrement? He could bow his head in shame for being seen in such a state.

  Courtney had not loved him for his outward show, though, and neither would she despise him for his current filth. She was not so shallow or so disloyal as that. She had loved him for the man she had thought he was – loyal and honest and true, a man who would love her and protect her with his life. She despised him now for the man she knew him to be, for the weakness that had led him to betray her rather than risk his position as a Musketeer.

  She was right to hate him. He had no excuse for his betrayal of her. He had known his actions were wrong all along, and had used the paltry excuse of duty and loyalty to his King to excuse them. In his heart he had always known that duty to one’s conscience and to the laws of God were more important by far than loyalty to any man – even to the King one had vowed to serve.

  Death was all he deserved. He knew that. Indeed, he welcomed death, now that he had nothing left to live for, now that Courtney had betrayed him as cruelly as he had betrayed her. He only hoped that she would not live to regret her actions as bitterly as he had regretted his for so many, many months.

  He could not hate her for leaving him to die. He was beyond hating her.

  He knew only that he loved her with a hopeless love and would forever.

  It was lucky for him that ‘forever’ in a situation like his, he acknowledged with a wry smile and a clank of the manacles that kept him chained in his corner, was unlikely to be very long.

  The road to Burgundy for the escaped prisoner and his rescuers was blissfully uneventful. They stayed at roadside inns each night, posing as one family, and no one questioned them. The further away from Paris, the less chance there was of any pursuit. Once they crossed the border into lands held by the Duke of Burgundy, that chance became very slim indeed.

  Courtney did not share in the general jubilation as they neared safety. She could not forget the look on Pierre’s face when she had abandoned him to his fate in the prison.

  He had been there for so few days when she saw him, and already he had looked as if he had been there a month. He had grown a stubbly beard and his face had been lined and gray.

  Her father had been put to the rack when he was in the Bastille, and he had been accused of nothing more than fraud and deception.

  Pierre had been accused of treason against his King – the worst crime of all. The King would not let him live. He could not afford to let him live for the sake of his own safety and the safety of his crown. Pierre would die a traitor’s death – his entrails cut out of him while he was still alive and his body hacked into pieces and scattered on the ground.

  Death was not to be feared, but such torture was. By the time he was executed, even this evil death would be a welcome release for him. She shuddered to imagine how else the evil monks would torture him before they killed him.

  She could not bear to think of his beautiful body broken on the rack, his limbs stretched out until the joints parted company with each other. The cruel rack was only the least of their punishments. They might hang him upside down until he swooned, beat him with red hot irons, cut out his tongue, or pluck out his eyes.

  She had had it in her power to save him from such a fate and she had tossed it aside. In her pride and hurt, she had wanted only revenge for what she had suffered. She had left him in manacles, knowing that she had abandoned him to a life in prison, but she had not fully considered the dreadful fate she had left him to suffer.

  Even her father, his body still broken from the rack that Pierre himself had consigned it to, had asked for his freedom. Her father had not born a grudge. Why should she? She had told herself that justice was all she sought, but she had deluded herself. She had not wanted justice so much as she had craved vengeance.

  By the time they reached the safety of Sophie and Ricard’s manor house in Burgundy and received a warm and friendly welcome from her former comrades in arms, her mind was made up. Her conscience would not let her abandon Pierre to such a fate. She would go back and risk her life one more time to save him. If she succeeded, she would not have the stain of his blood on her hands and on her soul. If she died, she would at least die knowing that she had done her best to save him.

  She settled her father and son down into the chambers Sophie had prepared for them and sank into her own bed with a sense of determination. Her rescue of Pierre was for herself and herself alone to attempt. She would not drag anyone else into danger. If she failed, she would fail alone.

  In the middle of the night she rose from her bed. She was scarcely rested from her journey, but she could not wait a moment longer. Even now, Pierre might be suffering unspeakable torments because she, in her stubbornness, had refused to rescue him when she could have done so.

  She tiptoed into her father’s room. He was sleeping peacefully, his face looking more rested than she had seen it for many a day. The shadow of the prison was starting to lift from his brow, though she doubted it would ever be completely gone. He had suffered too much for that.

  She bent down and kissed him lightly on the brow. “Au revoir, papa,” she whispered into the darkness. “I left Pierre in the Bastille for the harm he had done to you. Forgive me, but I must now rescue him for the harm he has done me. He made me fall in love with him, papa, just as dearly as you loved my mother. I cannot live knowing that he is suffering because of me.”

  Luc was sleeping in his cradle at Suzanne’s side. She stroked his soft cheek with the back of her hand. “I go to rescue your papa, my sweet,” she whispered into his sleeping ear, “so that you may learn to love him as dearly as I loved my papa. Be a good boy for Suzanne while I am gone. God willing, I shall be with you again before long.”

  The stables were well-stocked with fine horses of all kinds. She chose a gentle-looking mare, and hoped that Sophie would not mind her borrowing it. Her need was great and her time too short to waste.

  The moon was high and bright in the night sky by the time she had saddled and bridled her beast and started off on the long road back to Paris – and to Pierre.

  Her plan was still only half formed by the time she reached Paris some days later, after riding hard each day and sleeping restlessly each night in her borrowed bed. Her conscience pained her too much to let her sleep, and her brain was too exhausted to come up with much of a plan.

  She would not be able to use the monk disguise again – that much was clear. The guards at the gate might well let her into the Bastille, but she doubted they would ever let her out again. The guard they had stunned and gagged might well recog
nize her by her assumed voice. Even if he did not, she could well be tossed into a cell while her credentials were checked out - and she had no way of obtaining a recommendation from a real Abbot in a real monastery. No, she would have to think of another plan.

  Disguises on the whole were too dangerous, particularly as she had no backup. There was no point in standing at the front gate with her sword in her hand and trying to fight her way in through the guards and gates. She needed to get in quietly, without attracting any undue attention to herself, and get Pierre out again before anyone noticed that he was gone.

  She could not get in through the gates. She could not get in over the walls. She would have to turn rat and burrow in underneath the very foundation of the prison itself. The guards would hardly expect an attack to come from beneath their very feet, from the sewers.

  She would have to ask Miriame to help her – she could not see another alternative. Miriame had been a street rat from the day she was born – she would know where the entrances to the sewers were and which ones would lead in the direction of the prison. It seemed she would have to call on her friend once more to help her.

  She would not allow Miriame to come with her though. She would not put her friend in danger to save Pierre. Miriame would have cut through his shackles days ago if only Courtney had said the word. Her pride and her desire for vengeance had been too strong for her then, overpowering the love she refused to admit she still felt.

  She would save Pierre, and her conscience would be clear. Even were they to part at the prison gates and never see each other again, she would be satisfied that she had done what was right.

  Miriame wasn’t at all surprised to see Courtney when she banged on the door of the lodgings in the middle of the night. She let her in and threw a heap of blankets on the floor for the exhausted Courtney to crawl into. “You came back for Pierre de Tournay?”

  Courtney nodded, shamefaced, as she tossed off her boots and crawled into the nest of blankets, clothes and all.