She looked at him as she said it in a hard and direct way and he thought how seldom she smiled any more.
‘I can protect you.’ The fever burnt and his thigh throbbed, but he meant what he promised. War had changed her, but it had changed him, too.
‘I have no more need of a man’s guardianship, Major.’
‘No?’ He took the hand without the ring and turned it over. Breathing out, he tried the taste of honesty. ‘It seems to me as though you do.’
The marks of old scars ringed her wrist, surprising and reddened, the newer slash of a knife still weeping into her makeshift bandage.
She pulled away. ‘It is the end of my time here in Paris. In another city I shall be someone else entirely.’
‘Your grandmother still leaves a candle burning in your room at Langley Manor, just in case...’
‘In case I return,’ she snarled. ‘To go to court and play the lady as the marriage lines are drawn about me, the richest beau, the wealthiest suitor. I think, my lord, that it is far too late for that.’
‘You might play the role of a quiet widow just as well.’
‘I doubt that I would be credible, for the many acts of violence here have rendered me somewhat...spoilt for gentle society.’
‘Every soldier who has ever lived faces that battle when they return home.’
‘But I am not a soldier, don’t you see. I am not in it for King and country. Once I might have said it was for my papa’s sake, for family, for justice, for liberty even, but now...I am the dark shadow of war, just as you are its shining light.’
He smiled at such an analogy though he knew he should not have, so intent was she on believing it.
Once, years ago, in the home of a Spanish nobleman he had seen a portrait of a naked Venus lying recumbent on her bed as she gazed at the reflection of herself in a mirror. He remembered the painting vividly because in her face was a conceit he had so very often seen in Celeste’s.
The conceited and arrogant Miss Celeste Fournier. Every young swain within a hundred miles had spoken of her beauty then, yet it was he with whom she had chosen to lie. Unmarried, too, though he had offered her the protection of his name after and she had laughed in his face.
And here she was again, denying his guardianship, with a split lip and a swollen eye, a bandaged bloodied hand and scars easily visible at her wrist. No longer conceited, but distant and wary. A broken daughter of her father’s unwise dreams.
‘Did you ever marry?’ Her words punctured the silence.
‘Yes.’
Her glance fell down and away, the years between them filled with ghosts.
He wished he might have been able to stand up straight and tell her of it, but his head felt strange and his balance was off so he stayed still and closed his eyes. When he opened them again she was gone.
Chapter Three
Shayborne needed medicine and he needed water. The darkness would allow her some protection as she moved through the emptying streets of a city settling in for the night.
He was married.
The lump in her throat was thick and real, yet she knew any hope for what she had once thought between them was long, long gone. Better to accept it and move on. Better to have never asked him in the first place, too.
Madame Caroline Debussy appeared to be home as Celeste crept through the dark gardens in the opulent area of Petit Champs for the lights were on in the drawing room. This was an address she had come to for refuge across the years and, opening a large door, she let herself in to find the older woman sitting by an unlit fire.
‘I have been expecting you, my dear, for there are rumours...’
‘Which are all true.’ Celeste had not the time to skirt around the issues and with Madame Debussy she hadn’t the inclination to either.
‘Guy Bernard is dead?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I am glad for it. He was a bully and a cheat and one day he would have killed you. It is said that Benet is furious and names you as a traitor.’
