by Nita Abrams
Julien had not known that. It made him feel slightly—very slightly—less dubious about the proposal to entrap the thief.
“Another purpose was to persuade the thief to take no action for a time, to tempt him to shelter himself under your alleged guilt. There, too, we have been successful. So far as we can tell, there have been no further attempts to tamper with the diplomatic correspondence. In effect, shooting you bought us some time to continue our investigation.”
There was a knock at the door, and one of the dragoons came in and held a brief, low-voiced conference with LeSueur. He glanced sideways at Julien as he left.
“Come along,” said the captain, rising from his chair. He led Julien back downstairs. “The rest of the dragoons are going off to relieve the troops from the garrison at Boulton Park. Keep out of sight for a few hours, until we can find a room to hide you in. Colonel White is taking no chances. Should the thief spot you, he might take alarm and flee.” And then, after a look at Julien’s face, he added in an almost sympathetic tone, “Try to get some sleep.”
Enlisted men did not rate bedchambers. Julien went off to the stable and found an empty stall with reasonably clean straw. First he thought he would not lie down at all; he had too much to think about. Then he decided a short rest would do no harm and might even make the solution to his problems clearer. The next thing he knew, a rough hand was shaking him awake.
“You’re wanted upstairs again,” the man said, sounding suspicious.
“Damn,” muttered Julien. He ran his fingers through his hair and got most of the straw out; then he stumbled across the yard to the pump. The water was like ice. Where was that corporal with the hot water and the razor when he needed him? He felt groggy and filthy, and the thought of what would happen the next day was making him sick to his stomach.
Barrett was still in the upper parlor, looking harried and anxious. The others were gone. “Mr. Clermont? This way, if you please.” He led Julien down the hall and up half a flight of stairs to a small, steep-roofed room full of linen presses and drying racks. “I must ask you to remain here, with the door locked, and to open only to those who give my name. Now that the other soldiers are leaving, you should not be seen downstairs or in the inn yard. It is of the utmost importance that no one at Boulton Park hear of your presence.”
Julien nodded, too tired to argue or ask questions.
“In the meantime,” Barrett said, “you might wish to have this.” He held out two sheets of note paper.
A letter, Julien saw as he took them. He did not recognize the writing. Only when he reached the signature and saw the name “Charles” did he understand what it was.
“This is your father’s last letter,” said the older man. “I am sure that you find the thought of our proceedings tomorrow afternoon extremely distasteful. I certainly do. I thought it might help to see that your father was willing to risk his life to maintain the confidentiality of the negotiations your kinsman and I are conducting.”
Julien still found it odd to hear Barrett refer to the earl as his kinsman. Knowing he was half English had not meant much to him until an actual family had suddenly taken the place of the mythical, absent father. He acknowledged to himself that his relationship to Bassington was probably the principal reason he had agreed to assist his former persecutors in their quest.
Sir Charles now produced a familiar red-bound book. “I understand that you are also interested in seeing your father’s diaries. This is the volume which describes his meeting with your mother. You may read it if you choose; some of it is very unpleasant. He did not take it well when your mother left him.”
Startled, Julien drew his hand back from the book. “She left him? I thought it was the other way around.”
“He did intend to marry her, at least according to his own record of events. He met her at an inn; she had run away from school. They were living together, and he was arranging for a Protestant minister to travel across from England to wed them—and to bring funds which he had begged from his uncle—when she went to mass one day at the village church and never returned. She sent him a message that she had sinned and would not demean her blood further by living with a seducer and a heretic.”
That certainly sounded like a Condé, Julien thought bitterly.
“I am not sure how trustworthy his account is,” cautioned Barrett. “Although I will say that in the rest of these diaries—and I have read several years’ worth at this point—he has no compunction about painting himself in the ugliest colors. Indeed, this volume is mild compared to some of the later ones. He made his living trading in gossip, you know, and if none was to hand he would do his best to create it.”
Julien took the book, but did not open it.
“Remember,” said his host as he left, “stay concealed.”
Abstractedly, Julien turned the key and locked the door. He was already absorbed in the letter. It was actually two different documents. The first page was a brief note in French, apparently written by one of Piers’s servants, informing the earl that his cousin had been killed in a duel that morning and that, per his instructions, two boxes of his effects were being shipped immediately to England. It was unsigned, but there was a postscript, which initially made no sense to Julien: “I believe my master would have wished you to know that M. Ivanov was also killed in the engagement.”
The letter itself was in English.
12th February, 1814
My dear George—
No doubt you will be very surprised to receive the two crates of books which accompany this letter. Call it superstition; call it prudence. The consequences, should these diaries fall into the wrong hands, are too grave to contemplate, and I am thus compelled to err on the side of caution. It pains me to think of the waste—this carefully cultivated garden of scandalous blossoms, many of which are still in full flower (so to speak), in the hands of someone too righteous to make proper use of them. But even I have my occasional moments of virtue, and it appears Tuesday morning will be one of them. In brief, Ivanov has begun to suspect the identity of your correspondent, and once he is certain he will sell both of you to Austria without even blinking. Unfortunately, I had nothing in my collection at the moment I could use to silence him. I am therefore compelled to use cruder methods; to whit, ten paces at dawn. Madame Ivanov was most cooperative in providing a pretext for the engagement. I believe she is nearly as anxious to be a widow as I am to make her one. At any rate, although I have little doubt about my marksmanship—I have kept my hand in, as you know—it is never wise to count one’s chickens before they hatch. I have therefore made arrangements to have these sent to you at once if word comes to my household that my villainy has met its just reward. What affair is it of mine? Believe me, I have asked myself that question. I may be fairly certain I will kill Ivanov, but there is always some risk, and I do not like taking risks. Still, while I have never balked at extorting money from individuals, I believe I should draw the line at betraying an entire country, especially one which has been rather hospitable to me. And I most definitely draw the line at allowing an amateur like Ivanov to do so.
I remain, at least until dawn on Tuesday,
Your most affectionate,
Charles
Julien sat down and read it again. Then a third time. The postscript made sense now. His father had silenced the threatening Ivanov—but not without taking a mortal wound in his turn. Barrett was wrong, though. The letter did not make him feel better about cornering the thief. The thief was beginning to look a lot like Julien’s father: an opportunistic man who made money selling other people’s secrets.
He turned to the diary. It was just as Barrett had described it, and not so different from his aunt’s account: the vision of a frightened girl at an inn. The self-interested rescue, intended at first as nothing more than a pleasant diversion with a timid but very pretty village maid. The gradual realization that she was of gentle birth. The decision to wed her—all the more plausible to Julien because his father a
lso described Aline’s unthinking revelations of her as-yet-unnamed family’s wealth. And then the frantic search when she did not return after mass. She had asked him to let the priest marry them, and with an Englishman’s typical horror of popery he had refused, had told her their marriage would not be lawful in England if it were not performed by a proper clergyman.
Julien closed the book. It was all there: the pleas to the fourth earl for help, the eventual discovery of a Mademoiselle DeLis at a convent in Lausanne. His father had tried to see her and had been refused. He had never known of Julien’s existence. No one had; the Condés had concealed him well. The payments were for his mother’s place at the convent, not, as he had supposed, for his own upkeep.
The seduction of his mother made painful reading; the absence of any reference to himself was almost as painful. But what haunted him most, long after he had set the book down on the table, were the pages of self-recrimination his father had written in the days after Aline DeLis had disappeared. Why had he been so self-righteous? Why had he failed to see what would happen when she went to mass, and spoke to the priest? Why hadn’t he married her when he had the chance?
Why, indeed? Julien got up, unlocked the door, and peered out into the dark upper hall. He had his own ghosts to confront tonight. He hadn’t exactly promised Sir Charles to stay in this stuffy little room. Or even in the inn. Or even in the village, for that matter.
30
Even in this enlightened age, females remain unaccountably susceptible to the sight of a military man in uniform.
—Miss Cowell’s Moral Examples for Young Ladies
Boulton Park was being guarded by the dragoons, which would have made it difficult for Julien to get into the house had he not been one of the aforementioned dragoons. As it was, he simply rode past the man on duty at the lodge, stabled his horse with the other mounts, and walked in a purposeful, military fashion over to the man who was stationed on the terrace.
“What now?” said the man in a peevish tone. Julien had supposed he would say something like “Who goes there?” but Julien was in uniform, after all, and had ridden next to the man for several hours on the way down from London.
“It’s Dauncy. You’re to go round the gardens now.” He paced, sentry-like, until his fellow soldier had vanished into the mist beyond the inner hedges, and then he took off his hat and boots and began climbing up the wall of the house.
He knew where Serena’s room was. They had sat down with him and shown him a floor plan of Boulton Park, the fools, and asked him where Simon’s secret passages were, and who he had seen in which rooms at which times. He knew he could get up the wall, as well. It was exactly the same rusticated stone as the new pavilion at Chantilly, which he had climbed when he was six in one of his many attempts to escape his aunt. His feet didn’t fit into the grooves as easily, but he was stronger now and his reach was longer. Her window took less than a minute to open. He was feeling very pleased with himself until he eased himself into the room and discovered that the bed was empty.
Panicking, he lit a candle and looked around. This was her room; this had to be her room. Her shawl hung over the back of a chair, and the fan she had carried at the ball was lying on the table next to the fireplace. He crossed to the door. It was locked from the inside. She was Simon’s cousin, however, so that didn’t necessarily mean anything. He set the candle down on the floor, turned the key, and was about to ease the door open when he heard a slight noise.
Instinct, more than anything else, saved him. Before he could really think he had whirled around just in time to catch the poker aimed at his head. She had swung hard; his palm was stinging. Grabbing the poker with both hands, she tried to tug it free. He jerked it away and clapped his hand over her mouth to prevent the scream she was about to give.
“Will you marry me?” he said into her ear once he had gotten his breath back.
She kicked him. “I’ll report you to your captain,” she said, her voice muffled behind his hand. “My uncle will kill you.”
For the first time it occurred to him what she must have thought, seeing a soldier climbing into her room. The poker hadn’t been aimed at him, but at someone she believed to be a stranger. At least, he hoped that was the explanation.
The candle had gone out. He staggered over to the window, half carrying, half dragging her, until they reached a faint pool of light. “Serena, look at me,” he said.
She looked. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting her reaction to be—relief, astonishment, joy? He got astonishment. Briefly. Then her eyes narrowed.
“You are dead.” It sounded like an accusation.
He didn’t have much time. “Will you marry me?” he said again. “I swore that when I saw you, those would be the first words out of my mouth.” He hefted the poker. “I almost didn’t get it said before you brained me.”
“They shot you.” She wasn’t listening. When she spoke, it was as though she was talking to herself, as though he was not really there. “I saw them. I saw the blood. You are supposed to be dead.”
That was what she had said the last time he had come to her room at night. He looked down at the poker and wondered briefly why he was determined to marry a woman who kept threatening to kill him. “I’m alive. The firing squad was a ruse. But until tomorrow afternoon, I am still officially deceased. You cannot let anyone know you have seen me.” He set the poker down and glanced nervously out the window before turning back to her. “You haven’t answered my question.”
“What question?” she said. She sounded more like herself. Suspicious, edgy.
He said it again, slightly louder. He was starting to feel that this whole expedition had been very ill-advised. Only an idiot would go galloping off in the middle of the night because of a passage in a dead man’s diary. Still, an oath was an oath. “Will you marry me?”
“Will I marry you?” She stepped back, so that her face was in shadow. He saw the white nightgown billow as she sketched a sardonic curtsey. “I am most sensible of the honor you do me, Mr. Clermont, but I must decline your flattering offer.”
He amended ill-advised to disastrous. By now he had expected to be wrenching himself away from a poignant embrace. Another glance out the window. There was still no sign of the real sentry. “Is it my birth?” he said, feeling the old wound tear open, raw as ever.
She laughed bitterly. “Your birth? Say rather your death. Am I to marry a man who is such a fraud that even his execution is a sham? A man who let me watch that—that horror show? Who never attempted in any way to warn me, or to let me know, afterwards, that he was still alive?”
Out of the corner of his eye he saw movement in the garden. “Damn,” he muttered. “I must go. There’s a patrol outside, preventing secret meetings like this one. Serena, I will explain, but not now. I haven’t time. All I can say is that I am sorry.” He grimaced. “I seem to spend a great deal of time apologizing to you, don’t I? Perhaps I was a fool to think that a proposal of marriage would be a welcome change in my conversational repertoire.”
She was silent.
He stepped closer to her, and she did not move away. Heartened, he risked taking her hand. It was shaking. When he drew her back into the moonlight she did not resist. Against his cheek her eyelashes were damp, and when he kissed her he felt her tremble in a way which had nothing to do with fear or anger. Perhaps his cause was not so hopeless after all.
“I cannot stay,” he said, after another, harried glance out the window. “Or I’ll be seen climbing down. Si—someone asked me to remain concealed tonight. I broke out of a locked room to come and speak with you.”
“You did?” He detected a distinct thaw in her tone. She hadn’t moved out of his arms, either.
He thought about proposing again, now that she seemed a bit happier about his reappearance. But he didn’t quite have the nerve. He compromised on another kiss. It was meant to be quick, but the thaw turned out to be more like a heat wave. It occurred to him, dimly, that if he were found here s
he would be forced to marry him. What would be so terrible about that?
It occurred to him that he was thinking like his father.
He unlaced her arms—reluctantly—and when he saw the tears in her eyes he almost changed his mind. Almost, but not quite. “Remember, you haven’t seen me,” he warned as he climbed out the window.
She nodded.
He barely made it back down to the ground and into his boots and hat before the other sentry loomed up out of the darkness. “Morrow says he’s been posted to the garden, not me,” he said. “And that you’re not on duty at all tonight.”
“My mistake,” mumbled Julien. “Must have misheard the orders.”
“Well, get back to the village,” the other man said sourly. “And straighten your hat. It’s on nearly backwards. Captain sees you, he’ll fine you a week’s pay.”
He rode back to the inn, wondering what would happen tomorrow. Would the thief confess? Would Serena hate him all over again for his part in the ugly scene Barrett was engineering? Would he hate himself? He suspected that the answer to all three questions was yes.
He kept his face shadowed as he turned his horse over to an exhausted-looking Jem back at the Burford Arms, but he didn’t even try to get back to his garret unobserved. Instead he went and knocked on the door of the little parlor. He didn’t think any of the conspirators would be asleep yet, and sure enough, he heard movement in response to his knock, and then quick footsteps.
“Who is it?” The colonel’s voice.
“Clermont.”
The door swung open.
“What do you want?” White sounded just as irritable as the sentry from the terrace.
Behind the colonel Julien could see Barrett and Meyer. Neither of them looked surprised or angry. They had not noticed his absence, then. He could pretend he had a question, or wanted permission to check on his horse.