She went to the shelf and plucked out two tomes. ‘Catholic or Anglican?’ As he took the Latin Vulgate he saw one of the nails of her left hand had been pulled right off, the bed streaked in blood.
She had never been easy to read, even as a youngster as they had traversed the countryside around Sussex. At sixteen she had let him kiss her. At seventeen she had brought him into the barn at Langley and lain down on the straw to lift her skirts in invitation. She’d worn nothing underneath, save a lacy blue garter about her thigh. The next day she had left with her father to return to France and he was sent to London with a commission to join the army. She would be twenty-five now while he was twenty-six.
Different paths. He wondered if she had thought of him ever.
She was the daughter of a wealthy man who should have been brought out for a London Season. She had no siblings still alive and her mother had been damaged somehow. He could never see that same weak will in Celeste Fournier and he could not now.
‘Do you speak the Latin?’ His voice was low.
‘Yes.’
The past between them slipped back into its place as he wound the necessities for escape out of nothing.‘Fallaces sunt rerum species.’
‘The appearances of things are deceptive,’ she returned, and he smiled. No doubt her father had taught her, for August had been a scholar of some note. ‘We’ll leave tomorrow, mid-morning. It is the busiest time of the day.’
Gathering all that was needed, he sat on the balcony with his back against the wall, the warmth in the stone from the day gone so he felt the coolness through his shirt. No one could see them. No one overlooked this particular space and the thought crossed his mind that this would be why August Fournier had chosen such a location, hidden as it was from the world. He was glad when Celeste joined him, sitting opposite, her hands clenched around her knees so that every knuckle showed white.
‘I shan’t journey with you further, Major. They know me here and you will have a better chance of escape alone. For me to rescue you from the hawks and then feed you to the wolves would make no sense.’
He brought the cheroot he’d lit to his mouth and inhaled. It was one of her father’s that he’d found in a box on the desk. The red tip of it could be seen in the looming dark so his other hand shielded the glow, just in case.
‘Who are you? Now?’ He said this quietly, because the violence and sexual innuendo in the basement beneath the streets of Paris was still fresh in his mind, and because when he looked at her across the small distance he could not see one single part of the girl he had known all those years before.
She did not answer.
He tried another question, a distinct catch of distance in his tone. ‘You wear a wedding ring. Did you marry?’
‘The world is a hard place to be alone, Major.’
‘Is he a good man?’
‘Once I thought him so.’
‘And now?’
She closed her eyes and rested her head against the stone, a pointed refusal to answer imbued in the action. He changed the subject.
‘What colour is your hair really? I have seen it white and black and red. I remember it as a golden brown.’
Her good hand crept upwards, pulling down her hat.
‘There is much you do not know about me now, Major Shayborne, and the colour of my hair is the very least of it.’
‘Once I understood a lot, Mademoiselle Fournier.’ He stressed themademoiselle. ‘I came the next day to find you and thank you for your generosity in the barn at Langley, but you were gone.’
* * *
Celeste felt shame cross her face. ‘My virginity was hardly a prize.’ There, she had said it, out loud. The words settled into the space between them, a truth many times heavier than the weight he had given such a gift.
But he did not let it go. ‘Sometimes I wondered...’
She turned to face him.
‘Wondered what, Major?’
‘Did you know your father would take you back to France the day after...?’
‘The day after I offered you my body? Yes.’
