Cat bowed her head, dropping her eyes to hands which were still tightly clasped in her lap. She and Alex were little more than a foot apart, yet it was still a chasm. Now was the time to find out if she could make this final, vital concession. “You see,” she said, unable to meet his eyes, “you see, there was something else I had to face. I did not consciously plan it, but when I came away with Auguste, I did to you something quite as terrible as you had done to me.”
When Cat peeped at him from under her lashes, she saw a blaze of hope shining from his amber eyes. “No . . . hear me out,” she added swiftly. “I also realized your own conduct has been so dreadful I need not feel you are making a mismatch. We are both quite improper and shockingly exceptional. We are undoubtedly destined for each other, as who else could stand us?”
Once, in the mountains, Alex had had a knife wound followed by a raging fever. The weakness he felt now was just as bad. He sagged into the bed, his head dropping into his hands. Somehow it had all come right, and he was too bloody weak to move.
Cat came up on her knees, shuffling the short distance between them. She clasped her arms around his chest, fingering the soft folds of the white shirt, knowing she had come home at last. Her head snuggled into the hollow beneath his shoulder. “I am most shockingly in love with you, you know,” she whispered huskily. “Now that we have done such dreadful things to each other, perhaps we shall be able to live out our lives more peacefully than most.”
With fierce joy Alex’s arms tightened around her. “Who wants peace?” he growled.
Still tightly locked together, they tumbled full length onto the bed.
Hours later, Cat was roused from a sleep of emotional satiation as well as physical exhaustion as the rocking of the barge changed from gentle to purposeful. “Alex, wake up!” she whispered to the sleeping figure beside her. “We’re moving!”
Instantly awake, he pulled her tightly against him, once again fitting together the full length of their naked bodies. Calmly, he agreed with her. “Well, of course we are. I told them to cast off before dawn.”
“Cast off?” Cat was aghast. “Where are we going, if I may ask?”
“Down the Seine to Le Havre.”
“Le Havre! On a barge. You are quite mad!”
She felt him chuckle, a deep throaty sound which quite distracted her from her annoyance at his customary high-handedness. “I would have you know it was not the easiest thing in the world to pry this barge loose from the sybaritic gentleman who owns it. I had to appeal to the romance in his soul. I told him my wife and I had never had a wedding trip and I felt his boat would provide the absolute privacy we desired. That, and a great deal of money, did the trick. We have a captain, a cook and two crewmen, so we neither have to steer nor fend for ourselves. We might peek at the cathedral in Rouen, but frankly, queridissima, I’d prefer to spend all our time in bed.”
Cat signified her agreement with this suggestion by snuggling a hand into the crevices of her husband’s inner thigh.
When Alex got his breath back, he added, “Father’s yacht will meet us in Le Havre and take us to England.” He paused, his ebullience momentarily ebbing. “I fear mother has her heart set on a grand wedding at St. George’s. Will you mind? She wishes to invite half the ton and Prinny as well so there will be no doubts this time.”
Oh, Lord, he’d done it again. Her silence unnerved him. Had he offended her? Alex congratulated himself on his choice of transportation. At least his Cat had nowhere to run.
“It is some days journey to Le Havre,” Cat mused, her lips brushing his ear, “and large weddings take a good deal of preparation. I fear we may be married later than I could have wished.”
“If you think I mean for you to play propriety until we’re properly wed . . .” Abruptly, he broke off his sentence, raising his head to stare at his wife whose sparkling eyes were now clearly visible in the rays of early sunlight penetrating the portholes. “Just what did you mean?” he inquired sharply.
“Well . . .” Cat refused to meet his look, fastening her gaze firmly on the patterning in the counterpane. “I should not care to be embarrassed by having to explain to the next Marquess of Harborough why he was nearly the bastard his father only pretended to be.”
Cat waited for the explosion.
“I don’t know whether to kiss you or wring your neck!” Alex roared. “My God, what if I hadn’t followed you? You would have let Beaufort raise my child?”
“I was raising his,” Cat replied with sweet reasonableness. “Besides, it is only very recently I have been sure,” she added, injured innocence radiating from every pore.
Alex sat up in the luxurious bed, hugging his knees, staring blindly at Paris sliding by outside. What a devil of a coil it had been. Damn you, Thomas, I hope you’re satisfied.
“I believe,” said Blas the Bastard to his sometime wife, “that this is where I say, ‘Come on and kiss me, Cat.’“ Well satisfied with his quote, he pronounced, “For our sins I sentence us to a week in bed.” Alex slid beneath the covers, suiting his actions to his words, raising his lips from his wife’s only long enough to murmur, “Maybe two.”
The barge drifted quietly down the Seine. It was, most happily, a long, slow journey to Le Havre.
Epilogue
June 19,1815 - Belgium
It was just past noon. The Trowbridge twins sat slumped on their horses on the ridge of a hill overlooking a shallow valley. Beside them was the elm tree which marked the place where, the day before, the Duke of Wellington had directed the battle which put a final end to Napoleon Bonaparte’s dreams of empire.
Alex raised his spyglass and began to search the field, the sudden magnification of the carnage below causing his stomach to clench in agony. Beside him he heard Tony swear as his glass reflected similar images of horror.
Wisps of smoke still rose over a tangle of dead horses and mules, gun caissons, ammunition carts and all the other detritus of war. Among the debris lay fifty thousand men, the dead and the dying, the wounded too badly injured to crawl away in the dark of the night. But the field was far from lifeless. Grim and determined men of both sides moved among the bodies, searching for those who could be helped. Scattered among them were wives, children, friends. And scavengers—the inevitable underbelly of battle.
“Do you recall the position of the chasseurs?” Alex asked.
“I think they were part of that big cavalry charge toward the west, but with all the smoke I couldn’t really tell. How Wellington could see what was happening, I’ll never know.”
“Then just look for bright green. I doubt any but the chasseurs wear that particular shade.”
The twins guided their horses farther along the ridge of the hill, pausing frequently to search the field below with their spyglasses. “I hope you appreciate the irony,” Tony said, tight-lipped, after their fourth stop to make yet another painstaking perusal of a section of the valley below. “Any one of hundreds of men we know could be down there. And here we are, looking for a bloody Frenchman. For all we know he’s halfway back to Paris.”
“I can do it by myself.”
But Tony didn’t hear his brother’s testy reply. “To the right,” he called out, then once again put his glass to his eye. “Bright green . . . and horses. Looks like the remains of a chasseur regiment to me.”
Alex gave a curt nod. “That’s it then.” He shoved his spyglass back into its case and snapped the lid.
“I doubt we can maneuver the horses down there,” Tony said.
“No, best leave them here,” Alex agreed. They tied their horses to an overturned British gun limber, slung their satchels of food and canteens over their shoulders and started down the hill.
Tony was probably right, Alex admitted to himself as they began their slow descent into the hell below. What was he doing here? A married man. Father of a six-months-old daughter. It had not seemed so reckless when they had first come to Brussels—an amazing number of the ton had done the same. And all because a
man of short stature and quicksilver mind refused to pass quietly into history.
When Lady Elspeth Blanche Trowbridge was three months old, Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from the island of Elba and marched through France, gathering his troops behind him. The cream of Britain’s Peninsular veterans, including Captain William Audley, had been sent to teach the upstart Americans a lesson, and had been led into disaster by generals who thought they could fight the swamps of New Orleans like the plains of Spain. There was no way to get the remnants of Britain’s once proud army home in time to fight the resurrected little Emperor.
So it was men like Gordon Somersby who had sold their commissions and William’s father, General Sir Quinton Audley—on the verge of retirement—who took up the gauntlet and hurried back to Wellington’s side. The Trowbridge twins who never expected, or wanted, to go to war again packed up their wives and the first of the next generation of seven young Trowbridges and headed for Brussels where the Duke of Wellington was hastily assembling an allied army a hundred thousand strong.
Arrayed against Wellington’s few old soldiers and thousands of raw recruits were proud French veterans like Colonel Auguste Beaufort, who were appalled by Fat Louis’s monarchy, and rank upon rank of bitter soldiers like Jacques Pelletier and his cohorts. The odds for an allied victory were not good.
Tony and Alex went back to making maps, scouting possible battlefield sites. And yet, they had been as surprised as everyone else when the French, moving with the legendary speed of old, crossed into Belgium where no one expected them. When the massed armies met in a final climactic battle in a shallow valley not far from Brussels, it seemed impossible the French could lose. Only as the last rays of the setting sun revealed the Prussian army arriving to Wellington’s relief; only as the fading light cast a final benediction over six square miles of dead and wounded, could the Duke of Wellington draw breath and declare the allies victorious.
Napoleon’s empire had been washed away in the blood of Europe’s best and brightest. Wellington, never without a strong sense of history, chose to name his epic victory after a nearby Belgian village, very possibly because it would be easy for his countrymen to pronounce.
He called the battle Waterloo.
At nearly midnight on June 18, 1815, Alex and Tony had ridden into Brussels to the waiting arms of their anxious wives. And now, twelve hours later, they were back on the battlefield. Searching for an enemy.
Unable to pass by the wounded and the dying without giving aid, the twins’ passage down the hill toward the area where the bright green of the chasseurs could be seen was slow. Painstakingly, the twins examined every body clad in the spring green jacket and trousers of Auguste Beaufort’s regiment. A few still lived. None were Auguste Beaufort.
Alex leaned back against an overturned cart. Shading his eyes against the sun, he gave the area a last lingering look. If Beaufort was here, they had missed him. They had given away the last of their food and water to those who still lived. Nowhere else was there any sign of the distinctive uniform of the chasseurs. They would have to return to Brussels and admit they could not find André’s father.
“Monsieur le marquis,” came a whisper. Very close.
“Where are you?” Alex choked out, his throat raw from lingering smoke and the stench of death.
“I fear you are leaning on me,” said Auguste Beaufort.
Swearing softly, Alex dropped to his knees behind the cart on which he had been resting. Only Beaufort’s muddy, blood-smeared head and shoulders were visible. “The leg is broken, I think,” said the colonel, “but the rest are mere scratches, I believe. May I ask what you’re doing here?” he added with his customary sangfroid.
“We did not care to see André become an orphan,” said Alex blandly. “And it may be I felt I owed you a debt. N’importe. What matters is that we get you out of here.”
August 1815—Paris
Nearly two months after the battle of Waterloo a strange cavalcade drew up in front of the Hôtel Beaufort. There were three carriages in all and a phalanx of outriders. At the head of the procession was a carriage with the Marchioness of Harborough, her sister-in-law Lady Amabel Trowbridge, baby Elspeth and her nurse, the redoubtable Rosalía Sanchez. The proud father and his twin rode beside the carriage. In the second coach were Auguste Beaufort, his erstwhile enemy General Sir Quinton Audley, and Dona Blanca Dominguez. In the third carriage, servants and a mountain of luggage.
With no regard for dignity, Emile and Marguerite Beaufort ran down the steps to greet their guests. After personally assisting his son out of the carriage and onto his crutches, the Parisian banker, Emile Beaufort, stepped back to allow his wife to rain tears of joy on her son’s chest. He turned to the two identical and equally distinguished young gentlemen who had just dismounted.
Alex Trowbridge held out his hand. “Monsieur Beaufort, I’m Harborough, and it’s a pleasure to meet you at last.”
“Why, my lord?” the elder Beaufort cried, tears shimmering behind his gray eyes. “First the boy, and now his father. To search for my son when you did not even know if he was there . . . Why would you, an Englishman, do such a thing?”
“I suppose it never occurred to me not to,” Alex said at last, carefully avoiding his brother’s eyes. “I could no more leave the father than I could leave the son.”
Marguerite Beaufort, having finally pried herself loose from her son, was now exclaiming over the baby who was already showing signs of being a perfect miniature of her mother. “Elle est très belle,” bubbled Auguste’s mother, “comme sa maman!” And then she fell into a tearful and voluble speech of appreciation for all that the Trowbridge ladies and Blanca Dominguez had done to nurse her son back to health.
“C’est rien, madame,” Cat insisted. “We had many wounded officers in our house in Brussels. That is one of the reasons it has taken us so long to bring him home. Auguste recovered quickly, I assure you, and will be walking without his crutches in no time at all.”
“Crutches!” exclaimed Marguerite Beaufort with scorn. “What are crutches when you have saved his life? There are no thanks enough for what you have done, my lady.” With great pride and dignity, Madame Beaufort turned and led her distinguished visitors into her home.
Later that night, when the house was quiet at last, the travelers gathered in Auguste Beaufort’s sitting room, all of them well past bone weary but unable to sleep without some personal closure to the strange odyssey which had brought them here. Auguste Beaufort was stretched full-length on the sofa, his bad leg propped up on a fat pillow. Tony and Amabel sat, arms entwined, on a loveseat. Alex occupied a large wingchair, his wife unabashedly curled up on his lap, her head snuggled into his shoulder.
“We are not all here,” said Auguste idly. “Where is Blanca?”
“Where else?” Amabel giggled.
“Ah, I see,” said Auguste, noting the additional absence of General Audley. “This is a good thing, no?”
“A very good thing,” said Cat firmly. “We were in Brussels nearly two months before the battle, and Sir Quinton frequently came to call. He is my father’s first cousin and in some ways remarkably like him. Certainly in his taste for women. There was interest there from the moment they met. I believe Sir Quinton has ideas of retiring to Portugal,” she added with a knowing grin.
“Speaking of Thomas—and as long as we’re matchmaking—” Alex broke off, pausing until he had everyone’s attention.
“Oh-oh,” murmured Tony. Amabel clamped her fingers tightly over his arm.
“I think we should make our children’s lives as miserable as Thomas made ours,” said Alex, keeping his face straight with some effort. “I think we should arrange a marriage contract, then sit back and see what our children do about it when they come of age.”
“Alex!” Cat choked, sitting up abruptly. “You are joking. Tell me you are joking.”
“Absolutely not. As angry as he made me, I think Thomas had the right of it. Sometimes it is too easy to take somethi
ng for granted. If our children are at all like us, they will rebel against anything which has been arranged for them. But, hopefully, in the end they will learn to truly appreciate what was in front of them all the time.”
“It is Elspeth and André you mean, is it not?” Tony inquired sweetly, as if to make his brother’s madness quite, quite clear.
“Those are all the children we have at the moment, brother. Or are you making an announcement?”
Tony’s jaws snapped shut. Amabel blushed.
“What about it, Auguste?” Alex urged. “Are you willing?”
Auguste Beaufort struggled to pull himself up into a sitting position. “You would join your family to mine?” he inquired with considerable surprise.
“My family has a history of foreign brides,” Alex returned blandly.
Beaufort’s mouth quirked into a wry smile. “You are right,” he said to Cat. “Our children will not like it, I think. But we French are a practical people. Who am I to reject an alliance with the daughter of an English marquis? Though, you understand, my egalitarian ideals are sorely offended.”
“As long as it is not a formal contract,” Cat conceded, “then I too will agree.” With a wicked gleam in her eye she added, “But before you say yes, Auguste, you must remember this truly terrifying fact: twins run in the family.”
Amid laughter, they toasted the pledge of Elspeth Blanche Trowbridge to André Emile Beaufort before the twins retired to their respective rooms and demonstrated their own personal pledge of love to their wives. In less than a year both brothers had sons to prove it.
And, to everyone’s astonishment, the young Trowbridges had a new cousin the same age. William Audley, back from his sojourn as a prisoner in America, found himself with a brother young enough to be his son. No one seemed to mind. To Blanca, who named her son Thomas Quinton Audley, there was no other word but miracle.
And far above, Thomas Audley sighed and retired from his vigil. At long last he could rest.
The Sometime Bride Page 44