An awkward silence had settled over the chapel. People looked at one another, at a loss as to how to proceed in these unusual circumstances. As it lengthened, Monsieur Cassard eased his comatose wife into Paul’s arms, where the boy stood beside them. With slow steps, he gained the chapel aisle and faced the wedding guests. He opened his arms as if to embrace them all.
“My friends and family,” he said in a tone of solemn reason, “this affair has not ended as expected. It is a great disturbance to us all. Nevertheless, you were promised a feast and I would not have you disappointed. Let us put aside these troubles and return to the house. One must eat, yes? One must drink and dance to good music, no matter what has happened or how heavy the heart. If we can’t rejoice in a wedding, we can at least celebrate being together.”
It was that simple. The guests dashed back to the house through the pouring rain. A modicum of normality was restored by everyone’s need to dry off and rearrange their toilettes. Good food and drink did the rest. The party was soon under way.
Christien and the other sword masters retreated to the quiet of the upper gallery. There outside his bedchamber, with the rain falling in steady streams from the roof behind them and the noise covering their voices, they put their heads together.
Caid and Gavin drew the long straws for the right to act as his seconds. A message was sent to Dr. Laborde requesting his presence at River’s Edge once more. Meeting places were discussed, keeping in mind the need to avoid disturbing the ladies or attracting official attention. The wooded clearing at the edge of the property was chosen, the one where Christien and Reine had caught sight of what must have been Pingre skulking in the shrubbery.
When there was no more to be decided, the others dispersed to reassure their wives about the coming event and find something to eat. Christien remained where he was, having missed being a husband by a hairsbreadth and hunger being the least of his needs. Moving to the gallery railing, he leaned one shoulder against a post and stood staring out at the rainy night.
Frustration and anger were live coals inside him. The need to find Reine and make her listen while he explained, to make her see the need for what he and Vinot had planned, warred with his loyalty to his mentor and to the Brotherhood.
If only the wedding procession had moved faster, if the priest had spoken more quickly, things might have been different. He would have stood some small chance of being declared Reine’s legal husband. A man who played at being dead while allowing all the legalities attached to that condition to be invoked could not expect to come back to life at will. Yet here Pingre was, claiming his wife and daughter as if he had never given them up.
Such a dramatic public reappearance had not been anticipated. A private confrontation had seemed more likely, even one at swordpoint or the wrong end of a pistol. Of course, that had been tried and Christien had the half-healed gouge in his side to prove it. The spectacle tonight was likely the answer to that failure.
What would happen now? Did Pingre anticipate returning to his old life? Would he dare face public scrutiny and attempt setting up residence at Bonne Esèrance again, demanding his rights as a husband and father?
It all depended on the outcome of the duel. What that might be none could say, least of all Christien.
A prickling moved across the back of his neck. The air seemed to shift to a more silken warmth. Reine. So attuned was Christien to her presence that he turned before she fully materialized out of that dimly lit hallway behind him.
She appeared as pale as the gown she still wore, her wedding gown of light blue with its pink ribbon edging. She had removed the lace veil, revealing her hair piled into a crown of ringlets from which a single, shining curl had escaped to lie alongside her neck.
“Madame Pingre,” he said, his voice abrupt.
She paused a bare instant before she came on again. “Monsieur.”
He had meant to keep some kind of distance between them. It was impossible. Never in this life would he forget how she had looked as she descended the stairs toward him earlier. No bride had ever been more beautiful; nothing had ever so touched his soul as the acceptance in her face as she put her hand in his. Now he stood and watched her come toward him as if gliding on the hems of her skirts, and could hardly bear the thought that this time, this hour, was supposed to have been so different.
They would have stayed at the family gathering long enough to accept due congratulations and reply to the toasts. After an hour or so, Madame Cassard would have come for Reine and taken her upstairs, helped her undress and put her to bed. When all was ready, he would have been summoned. Entering the bedchamber that was theirs to share, he would have closed the door and locked out everyone and everything except the two of them.
How perfect it would have been to hold her close while they made love to the rhythm of the rain, then fell asleep listening to it pound on the roof. He had almost had that, almost, even if he did not deserve it.
“Have you eaten?” she asked as she drew near.
He shook his head. “Later, perhaps.”
“Alonzo has put back a plate for you. It’s on a warming rack before your bedchamber fireplace, waiting on your convenience.”
“I must remember to thank him.” Christien did not make the mistake of thinking Alonzo had arranged the food on his own. He knew to whom he owed the undeserved consideration. “You managed to eat something?”
“I wasn’t hungry. As you say, possibly later.”
If the wedding had taken place, they might have shared a private supper of champagne, small delicacies and each other. Casting around his mind for something to counteract the effect of that thought on his unruly body, he thought of Madame Cassard. She had been half carried from the chapel to the house, reviving only in the coolness of the rain.
“How fares your mother?”
“I’ve just come from her. She’s resting with a cloth dampened with lavender water on her forehead and her tisane nearby. I expect she will be all right in the morning.”
“I’m glad to hear it. She seemed overcome by Pingre’s appearance.”
“Yes, it was a shock,” Reine said shortly. Her gaze touched his face and moved away again before she went on. “But not to you, I think.”
“Not entirely.”
“Nor was I surprised.”
His gaze sharpened on her averted face. “What are you saying?”
“I should have told you earlier,” she said with a small shake of her head. “I’d like to remedy that, now that matters have turned out so differently.”
He wasn’t sure, quite suddenly, that he wanted to hear. There were too many secrets at River’s Edge, few of them completely harmless. He turned toward her, putting his back to the post behind him and crossing his arms over his chest.
She stepped to the railing next to him, putting one hand upon it and placing the other on top as she stared out at the falling rain.
Her nearness did strange things to his equilibrium, he realized with a silent groan. He could catch the tantalizing fragrance of roses, lavender and warm female. It was with extreme effort that he gathered his thoughts again, found sufficient words to convey some kind of meaning.
“What would this thing be that you wanted to tell me? Perhaps how you knew your husband was alive?”
“To say I actually knew would be a bit strong,” she said as a frown crossed her features. “I began to suspect two days ago.”
“How was that?”
She told him, relating how she had heard Chalmette in the night, had gone to Marguerite’s room, then looked out to see an oddly familiar form in the darkness outside the house. She ended with her daughter’s claim that the loup-garou had come to her room but Chalmette had scared him away.
“You think Pingre has been the loup-garou that’s haunted her.” He felt his heart ease into a calmer beat as he spoke. Reine’s knowledge of Pingre’s masquerade as a dead man did not, apparently, extend back to the beginning.
Her eyes caught the lamplight f
rom the hall in a blue flash as she flung him a quick glance. “I’ve tried to make excuses, to allow him some feeling as a father. He may have wanted to see her, so satisfied the need by slipping into her room to watch her sleep.” She clenched her hands into fists and slammed them on the railing. “Yet how could he bear hearing her cry out as if in nightmare at the merest glimpse of him? How could he not understand he was frightening her to the point of illness? What kind of monster believes his fatherly impulses are more important than the welfare of his daughter?”
The questions were unanswerable. Christien let them go. “Chalmette scared him off that time.”
She gave an unhappy nod. “He knows Theodore, of course, but there is little love lost between them. Theodore used to kick him out of his way when we visited here. Chalmette even bit him once, when he and Paul came to blows after Theodore’s teasing got out of hand.”
“Dogs have an instinct about people,” Christien allowed, “particularly when it comes to protecting those they love. But why didn’t you call out to me when you caught sight of Theodore? Or tell me later, if it comes to that?”
“It seemed doubtful you would believe the loup-garou was real. More than that, I had no idea what you might do.”
“Do?” he asked while holding his anger under stringent control. “What would I do except chase down this specter and show him to Marguerite for what he was?”
“It would not have been a particularly salutary lesson for her if what he turned out to be was dead!”
“I wouldn’t do such a thing.”
“Perhaps not, but I could hardly depend on it. You were—you are—a virtual stranger. You are also the Nighthawk, chief among the Brotherhood of swordsmen, a man who takes to task those who prey on women and children and makes them pay in blood for their sins.”
A stranger, she called him. A stranger, though she had lain beside him in his bed, and more, much more. He turned to grip the railing as she was doing, his hold so fierce he could not feel the ends of his fingers. “How do you know that?”
“About your nighttime activity? I followed you. What of it?”
“You did what?” He was stunned, not least because he could not believe he had failed to notice her behind him. Where had his mind been? As if he couldn’t guess.
“I watched you leave in the midnight hour of your first evening here. It became necessary to know if you were going to another woman.”
“To Vinot, I only went to see Vinot.”
“But I wasn’t to know that. I’d had one husband who felt climbing into the beds of other women was his birthright. I had no use for another.”
“You trailed after me on the night I was shot, to make certain I would honor our vows.” The pattern was clear now. She had been out riding, all right, just as Mo, the stable boy, had told him.
“I suppose.”
“Yet you were prepared to speak your vows while fearful you had a living husband lurking about the place.”
She gave him an unhappy look. “To call off the wedding on the evidence of a shadow glimpsed for one moment seemed foolish. Besides, I hoped I was wrong.”
“You hoped…” he began.
She went on as if he had not spoken. “Don’t tell me you hadn’t some idea that Theodore was alive. You proposed our marriage in order to force him into the open, but would have gone through with it without turning a hair if it hadn’t worked.”
“Oh, yes,” he said, his voice hard and his gaze raking her face, which had taken on the high color of anger, “I’d have done that.”
“To see if I would refuse at the end, no doubt, proving that I knew I was not a widow. I’m sorry you were cheated out of that final act. The truth is, no one at River’s Edge guessed Theodore might be alive until it was nearly too late.”
“Forgive me, but that seems hard to credit when Marguerite was terrified of him.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. To her, he was just a phantom, a monster from some ancient superstition.”
“She caught a glimpse of him that night in front of Davis’s theater, I would swear to it. It frightened her, so she ran into the street and almost died. He appeared a monster to her, yes, because of his scars, yet must have looked enough like his portrait to trigger some form of recognition. When I held her as we lay in the street, she said…I thought she was calling me her papa, but she must have been trying to say he had been there.”
Reine pressed her lips together, turning from him. “She did ask about him after that, but I’d told her many times that her papa was in heaven.”
“So she turned him into a loup-garou to explain why he was still here.”
A tear gathered at Reine’s lash line and overflowed, making a wet track down her face. “I failed her. I’m her mother, and I didn’t believe her so did nothing. I should have talked to her more about her nightmares and allowed her to tell me her fears. I should have known what was happening.”
“The blame is not yours,” he said in grim certainty.
He leaned on the railing, staring into the wet night through the streams of silver rain that cascaded from the roof. He had to hold on to something o prevent himself from reaching out to take Reine into his arms to comfort her, to sweep her into the open door of his bedchamber, which was not so far away.
It was impossible. She was a married woman; to touch her would be to commit adultery. In something over twenty-four hours, he would meet her husband with sword in hand. He could be forced to kill him, longed to kill him for reasons that clamored in his head with the force of a hurricane. He wanted to dispatch Theodore Pingre for Sophie, for Marguerite, and most of all for Reine, so she would be free of him.
To kill Theodore could be judged as murder given his skill. It would also be a tactical error. That Pingre had returned from the dead would be a seven-day wonder—add the coming duel and tongues would wag for years. If Reine should marry the man who sent her husband back to his grave, she would be suspected of collusion in the crime and branded as unfit for decent society.
He couldn’t do that to her. Pingre’s resurrection proved conclusively that she was no murderess. She was effectively freed of her status as a social outcast. To return her to it by dispatching her husband, then demanding she marry him as planned, would be self-serving beyond words.
Yet how could he permit Theodore Pingre to claim her?
22
Christien had been different tonight.
It was not to be wondered at given what had occurred, still it troubled Reine. He had behaved with such formality, as if already putting distance between them in preparation for the parting that must surely come. He had called her Madame Pingre in that odious fashion that made it clear he considered her a married lady, therefore open to censure for what had taken place between them in his bedchamber. He had listened to what she had to say, then bowed and left her alone with her doubts and fears and endlessly turning thoughts.
How strange to think of Theodore as being alive. In these past two years, she had grown quite used to the idea that he was gone. Never had she prayed to be a widow, but the role had suited her.
Not that she was so hardened as to wish for his death now, much less suggest to Christien that he arrange it. She would not be human, however, if she didn’t reckon the chances.
No, she didn’t want Theodore to die. She only wanted the situation to be as it had before he returned. That was clearly impossible. No matter what happened, nothing would ever be the same.
She returned to the evening party, if it could be called such a thing; Theodore’s appearance had cast such a pall it seemed more a wake than anything else. Voices were hushed and conversation lagged. That was except for the whispers in corners. The music played by a trio of musicians on violin, French horn and pianoforte had a lugubrious sound and few were inclined to dance. Appetites were meager, though inroads were made on the chilled wine and spirits served over ice. The children, a part of the gathering by country French tradition, were made fractious and noisy by confinement and the
strain that hung in the air, causing parental tempers to fray.
At last, the rain slackened and soon ceased altogether. Guests not staying in the house began to depart. The musicians packed up and climbed into their carriage to return to the city. By midnight the swordsmen and their wives and children were all that remained.
With no incentive to extend the evening, everyone dispersed. The younger children were put to bed in the hall and older boys relegated to the back gallery. One by one, the bedchamber doors closed on their occupying couples and the gleam of lamplight from under the doors vanished. Reine checked on Marguerite, pulling the mosquito baire a little closer around the head of her trundle. Then she turned to look at her mother in the tester bed before searching out a quilt in order to make herself a pallet somewhere.
The bedchamber was quiet, lit only by a candle under a hurricane globe. Her mother was sound asleep behind her mosquito netting, with her braided hair trailing over one shoulder and her hands folded on her chest. All strain was gone from her features, wiped away by sleep and the laudanum with which Reine had laced her tisane. She snored gently.
The door opened behind Reine. Her father paused on the threshold, then came forward. “She looks peaceful, does she not? More so than in some time.”
Reine met his gaze. A moment of communication passed between them before she said, “I was thinking the same thing just now.”
“You will stay with her, perhaps, in case she wakes and needs another of her tisanes? You know just how to make them to please her.”
“You mean sleep here?” She indicated the place next to her mother.
“Yes, yes, certainly, as the bridal chamber is denied you. You must not seek a chair or curl up in a corner somewhere after this disaster of an evening. I confess to being exhausted, and you must be a hundred times more so.”
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