The Indispensable Wife

by Philippa Lodge

  “Your brother, Henri, helped feed the rumors that I was dying. One evening, an unknown servant appeared at my chamber door, saying she was bringing the tray I had requested. Le Fèvre fed some to a rat and it convulsed and died within minutes. But rumors that I was involved in treason started before any of this.”

  Dominique heard Aurore draw a deep breath and realized she was crying.

  “Don’t cry, mon âme,” he whispered as he squeezed her hand. “They didn’t hurt me, really. I wouldn’t let them. I am the Comte de Bures and would never give up my lands.”

  She yanked her hand away from his.

  “Aurore, please. I left you where I believed you were safe. I have searched for you for the last two months. And now I have found you and, I swear, we will find a way to keep from being exiled and losing the lands.”

  Aurore only sighed.

  “Go to sleep, mon âme,” he said. “Michel and I will work on a plan for us to leave.”

  “No!” Aurore’s voice was muffled by the blanket that formed her tent, but was still loud. Dom glanced around to be sure no one had heard. He waved Michel away when he spotted the younger man coming toward them in the gloom of night.

  “Why not?” Dom scowled at the plain brown tent. “You’ll be safe with me. From now on, I will stand between you and—”

  “No.” The edge of the tent lifted again. “I’m safe here with Michel and Le Petit and Marie-France and all the others. I’ll return to my father. I haven’t been this happy since I was a little girl. I sing every single day. I help cook and clean and care for the children.”

  “Is that what it’s all about? The children? We can find some children you can care for at the château-fort. And someday you’ll give me an heir…”

  “It is not only about that. Maybe it is for you, but for me, I am afraid of Poudrain and Saint-Ange and whoever might be supporting them. Out here, we have few worries.”

  “And you travel from village to village with the fear of plague all around—you’ll either die of the plague or be accused of spreading it. You’ll either be robbed or be accused of robbing someone. And singing in public? Before crowds of filthy lechers like today? You are my wife, a comtesse, the daughter of a baron!”

  Dom clutched at Aurore’s hand. She screamed and tugged away, knocking a pole down.

  Michel was there then, shoving Dom away. “Don’t touch her!”

  Michel pulled up the side of the tent, speaking soothingly to his half-sister as she sobbed. Dom watched in amazement as the young man crawled into the collapsed tent and sat as a lump under the blanket, talking softly as Aurore’s sobs eased.

  Dom began resetting the tent poles as best he could from the outside. Le Petit appeared out of the shadows and helped him in silence before exchanging a few murmured words with Michel. He bowed deeply to Dom and slipped away again, leaving Dom alone in the dark clearing, hands on hips, head bowed. He had never known how to handle Aurore. She had chattered and smiled and laughed when they had married, but he had destroyed her joy. He had destroyed his own joy, too. He had never learned how to love her.

  Eventually, he realized he was the only one awake and it must be his watch. He whispered as much to Michel, who grunted in reply. Dom stood in the shadows, his mind turning over the problem of his recalcitrant wife and whatever it was that he had done to make her scream.

  ****

  Aurore lay on her bed at court, paralyzed with fright. Her linens, which should have been soft, were harsh and scratched her skin until she felt as though she were bleeding all over. The mattress was soft, though, too soft, and she was falling into a giant pit filled with spikes. Nettles surrounded her and tied her arms and legs, and then Yves Saint-Ange put his face right in hers and shouted, “Your husband is dead!” Aurore woke up with a start, her arms flailing to be free.

  “Aurore?” said her husband’s voice from only a few inches away from her ear.

  A ghost! She rolled away from the voice, calling for Michel to protect her, but he wasn’t there. She scrabbled under her thin pillow for her knife. Where was it?

  “Aurore? Are you all right?” said Dom a little louder.

  Tent. Still the dream? Dom had found them the day before. Hadn’t he? “Dom?” she whispered.

  “What’s wrong, Aurore?” Dom’s disembodied voice came from the other side of…the tent?

  “I can’t find Michel,” she whispered. “I think the nettles ate him. Are you dead?”

  There was a long silence and, gradually, Aurore realized she was awake.

  “Michel is talking to Le Petit, mon âme. I’m alive. Are you asleep?”

  Aurore sighed. “I was. I think I am awake now. I can’t tell.”

  The blanket that covered the front of the tent lifted away and a dark silhouette crouched in the doorway. She clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a squeak. The shadow spoke. “Have you been having nightmares this whole time, mon âme?”

  She let out a long breath. “Yes.”

  “May I come in and hold you? Would it help you sleep?” Dom asked, his voice low and husky.

  “No!” Her voice was a little too loud.

  “What’s wrong?” asked a shadow behind Dom. “Has something happened, Dumouton?”

  At the name, Dom froze. “Your wife screamed for her husband, Jean-Paul.”

  Had she? Aurore didn’t know.

  “You were out of sight, so I checked on her.”

  Michel didn’t reply for a long time, but Aurore was sure the two men were sizing each other up. “Come away from there, Dario.” Dom dropped the blanket immediately, and Aurore almost cried out at the return of complete darkness. “My wife is over-imaginative and overwrought.”

  Aurore frowned. Was this what Michel really thought of her? Or was it part of the plan for Michel to act cruel and cold? She lay down and pulled her blanket up. It was scratchy, but it didn’t really flay her alive.

  Soon she heard rustling from Dom’s pallet on the other side of the tent wall. “Dom?” she whispered.

  His hand slid in under the edge of the tent, his skin paler than her blankets. “I’m right here, mon âme,” he whispered.

  She touched his hand tentatively and then stroked his fingers. His hand was warm and hard and certainly not a dream. She squeezed his hand gently and fell asleep at once.

  ****

  Aurore was surprised that their departure wasn’t difficult at all.

  Michel woke her at the end of his watch at around midnight. More precisely, she was already half awake, not being able to sleep properly due to nerves.

  When she crawled from the tent with her small bag, Dom was waiting for her with his saddlebags over his shoulder. He only touched her to steady her as they slipped through a narrow copse of trees to where Le Petit held the horse.

  The difficult part had been flirting with Dominique for the three days that preceded their leaving the troupe. Touching his arm and smiling up at him was not so difficult, but letting him lay his hand on her shoulder or kiss her knuckles made her want to scream.

  Michel had second thoughts, too. He watched her closely, but like a nervous brother trying to decide if he liked her suitor. When he had her practice knife work, using a stick and himself as the practice dummy, he asked her in an undertone if she was truly willing to go with Dom. Instead of slashing at the hand he held his own stick in, her hands dropped to her sides and she turned away, unable to answer. It was her duty. It was time to go back.

  The difficult part now was riding pillion gripping Dominique without leaning into him any more than necessary, going back and forth between safety in touching him and panic at being so close to a man.

  The difficult part was trying to sleep on the hard ground, wrapped in two blankets and Dominique’s arms because it was too cold to sleep alone without even a makeshift tent. She wondered at how he had slept rough like this for two months, and he answered only that he stayed in inns when it rained.

  She was fairly sure she still loved him. She was happy he h
ad finally found her and was going to take her home. But she couldn’t trust him. He had cheated on her twice, after all, and was worse than a brother in the way he chided her for talking too much. He never told her what he was thinking, either, and turned away when he felt any strong emotion.

  And he was a man. Men had hurt her. She knew she was as safe with him as with Michel, but her body couldn’t help but turn cold.

  Meeting up with Michel, le Petit, and Marie-France two days later on the outskirts of Paris had gone smoothly. Michel, though, scowled and disappeared to write a letter to his wife Mathilde.

  Marie-France laughed when telling Aurore of the shock among the women of the troupe. “They would never have believed it of you, of course. They thought you were true to your husband. Of course, you really were. I left them some of the cooking pots, because theirs were so very awful when we first joined them, do you remember?”

  The most difficult part, they discovered, was getting a message to Aurore’s brother Henri.

  After three days of trying to intercept him outside the Finance Ministry offices in the Louvre, le Petit and Marie-France finally cornered him. The maid threw herself on Henri’s mercy, as if she were a petitioner to Colbert, the finance minister. Henri, for his part, did not know her and would have shaken her off if he had not recognized le Petit a few paces away, watching.

  They came back to the inn without a firm answer, and they all spent the day in considerable anxiety that Henri would call down the guard on them.

  As the evening dragged by, Aurore began to lose hope that her brother would come at all. The two of them had fought like cats and dogs when they were children. Even when Henri had learned to never, ever strike a woman, they had argued. Aurore considered herself friendly and loving, even to the point of hiding all her frowns behind a fake smile, but Henri was the only of her brothers who had never spoiled her.

  ****

  When Henri ducked through the low door of the inn, he half expected to be set upon by the Guard. He wasn’t sure if the note had been a trick by his enemies in the ministry to drag him into his brother-in-law’s quagmire. Colbert, the head of the Finance Ministry where Henri was a clerk, had personally tried to discover if, indeed, Dominique was a traitor and if Henri supported him. Who knew how far his enemies would go to bring him down?

  Henri had gone back to his rooms to change into rougher clothes and to bring his valet along to watch his back. Even though Paul-Bénédicte was leaving his employ, Henri was fairly certain his former lover would keep him safe.

  Just around the corner of a narrow, dirty street, Michel leaned against a wall with his arms crossed, seemingly nonchalant, watching the door to a squalid inn. The bastard met Henri’s eyes and nodded. Michel had shown considerably more deference before their father claimed him openly. Since Michel rescued Aurore when no one else from the family had been able to get to her, Henri supposed he had the right to be arrogant. Henri blamed Aurore for the loss of deference. He knocked on the inn door and closed his eyes for just a second for blaming anyone other than his father for Michel’s bastardy. When Petit le Petit, the son of Dominique’s guard master, stuck his head out of the low inn door, Henri waved to Paul-Bénédicte, who trotted across the street to join him.

  Le Petit showed them into a cramped, dingy parlor. Henri’s impression was of a whirlwind of brown as Aurore flung her arms around his neck and pulled his head down to her level to kiss his cheeks.

  “Oh, Henri! My favorite brother! I am so happy to see you.” She smiled up at him, her eyes wet. “How are you? I am so relieved.”

  He responded rather stiltedly, he was sure, as suspicious as ever that she was buttering him up and terribly conscious of her husband watching him. She squeezed his hands and turned to Paul-Bénédicte, whose cheeks she kissed almost as enthusiastically. His valet had always liked her, chastising Henri for rudeness on more than one occasion. His valet fairly glowed under her praise of his healthy looks and spoke gravely about the little news he had from his parents, who were still at the de Bures château, working their little farm, enduring instead of fleeing. Paul-Bénédicte didn’t mention that he was leaving Henri.

  Henri turned to the others who stood beside the rickety, splintery table in the cramped room. Dominique—Comte de Bures, his brother-in-law—approached him. Henri noted the leather sleeveless coat, twenty years out of fashion except among the lower classes. Dom’s face and hands were brown, and yet he had the glow of health and natural aristocracy that Henri had always envied. Perfect Dom’s shoulders drew back the way they did when he was full of bluster.

  When all the greetings were done, Aurore invited them to sit at the table, for all the world like a comtesse and not a bratty little sister. The maid who had given him the note brought in a bottle of wine. There was a bustle as Michel came in and squeezed behind Henri’s chair to join them at the table. Aurore sat next to Henri and touched his arm. He didn’t shrug her off, though he would have when they were children. He looked at her for a long moment, staring for a long time at the scar at her temple and wondering about the odd gypsy headscarf that covered her forehead. He figured she had done the flowery embroidery herself. For all the time she had spent on embroidery, surely she could make something nicer than that.

  She caught his eye. The hope and fear in her face made him gasp. Impulsively, he said, “Whatever I can do to help you, Aurore, I will do.”

  She grasped his forearm. “Do you mean that, Henri?” She looked more vulnerable than he had ever seen her.

  Paul-Bénédicte elbowed him in the ribs, and he glanced around the table at Dominique and Michel’s stern expressions. “Of course. I…” He very nearly apologized for all the times he had teased her when they were little when he was merely jealous of the affection she received. Finally he said, “I have always been serious, haven’t I? Always meant what I said? Well, almost always.”

  “Like the time you told me I was ugly and should wear a feedbag over my head?” She pursed her lips.

  Paul-Bénédicte elbowed him harder and Dominique and Michel’s looks turned to ice.

  “I think you had broken my wagon and stolen my bow and arrow. I was six years old.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe you remember that.”

  She grinned and he finally remembered what was so charming about her. “I was very, very wounded by it, but I didn’t tell Papa, so you owe me.”

  He laughed, surprised. She giggled and leaned against his arm.

  Michel shook his head, while Dominique stared only at Aurore, his heart in his eyes. Henri wondered what had happened to both of them over the last two months. He had very little news from Cédric. The only things he heard were the whispers and jabs of jealous coworkers who hoped to damage Henri’s standing with Colbert in any way they could. Henri had assumed his perpetually lucky sister and brother-in-law would already have been cleared, and decided to keep his head down in case they weren’t.

  Henri suddenly knew he had been very selfish, as if his private problems canceled out his family loyalties.

  Dominique finally pulled his eyes away from Aurore and cleared his throat. Everyone turned to him. They always did. “We need your help, in all simplicity.”

  “Simplicity?” Henri leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. There was no reason to not make Perfect Dom suffer a bit.

  Dom sat up straighter and the others leaned in. “It might not be simple, what needs to be done, but we need help. I don’t have access to my lands, my people, or my money. There is a hold on my accounts at the bank and in my investments. The king has sent men to my county seat in the guise of protecting it, to dig for evidence that I am a traitor. Two bastards control half of my lands. It is by the grace of God and the quick thinking and noble deeds of Michel, le Petit, and others that Aurore is not a hostage. And, quite simply, someone has tried twice to kill me. We need your help.”

  Henri felt a moment of bitter triumph—he could make his brother-in-law beg. And his sister, whom everyone loved. He glanced at Aur
ore, who gazed at her husband with great sadness, her heart in her eyes, too. He had always loved Aurore, really, even when he was angry that he was destined for the church—merci au bon Dieu that he had been able to talk his father out of that fate—and she was destined for a brilliant marriage and a life of luxury.

  And now…well, he was already under suspicion, due to the rumors about his proclivities. He could end up in exile with the others if everything went wrong.

  Paul-Bénédicte tapped him on the shoulder, pulling him out of his reverie. He looked into his valet’s dark brown eyes, feeling their lifelong connection hum through him. Paul-Bénédicte’s eyes narrowed, and he tipped his head slightly toward the others. Henri remembered again that Paul-Bénédicte was leaving him, and the knowledge pierced his broken heart. He looked around the table and sighed. “Oui, oui. Bien sûr. I will do whatever I can for my family. And your dependents.”

  He looked at Paul-Bénédicte. Maybe if Henri helped, he could win back his valet’s love.

  Henri sighed again. “I don’t know anyone with enough influence to help you. Cédric and Papa are still your best bet, though they are at home right now, with the harvest drawing near. Cédric is staying close to his wife and children, just in case.”

  Dominique’s bleak expression went hard. “If too many people leave my lands, there won’t be much of a harvest there at all. My people risk starvation. I spent too long searching for Aurore.”

  Aurore—who had been looking at Paul-Bénédicte with compassion and then at Dominique with a smile as he spoke about his people—looked down, frowning.

  Henri gritted his teeth at his brother-in-law’s gaucherie. Too long searching for Aurore? Would he never learn to speak kindly? “Where will you be? I will send a messenger to Cédric immediately. The king will move to Vincennes in a few days.” He thought for a moment of the headache he had, overseeing the horses for the king’s move.