“Girls! Girls!” Their father cut his arms through the air. “Stop! We must go now.”
“Papa,” Charmaine whined. “I have not finished packing.”
“Unless you wish to wear that gown to the guillotine, girl, you will shove it in your case and run downstairs now!”
Charmaine stamped one foot on the floor. “You are horrid, Papa.”
“I will be a worse tyrant than Robespierre unless you do as you are told!”
Charmaine fumed.
Papa scoffed, then turned on his heel, taking Vivi’s mother, his mistress, by the elbow toward the hall. “Now listen to me, Madeleine. Do as I say…”
“He’s not coming with us,” Charmaine hissed as she sent a glower of hatred toward the door. “I heard him last night. He’s scampering off to Brussels.”
Diane cursed beneath her breath, a usual sign of her frustration with Charmaine’s intolerance for everyone and everything. “He wants us to split up so it is difficult for the committee mobs to track us. Stop being an imbecile, and finish packing!”
“An imbecile?” Charmaine snorted. “Just wait. You will see how right I am!”
“Mes amis!” Another person ran up the stairs. The three girls turned to see their young male house guest appear on the threshold.
The tall, lean, dashing Tate Cantrell was everything a girl could want in a suitor. He had the clean, sculpted looks of an artist’s finest work. With a square jaw, arched cheekbones, and wide, flaring eyebrows, he was a handsome creature. Even his coloring was superb, all wavy, rich caramel hair and blue-green eyes that shone like Chinese jade in sunlight and mellowed to turquoise in the shadows of evening.
Vivi adored him. Diane did, too. Charmaine had claimed him as her own the first night he appeared at their chateau. Even the maids giggled and preened in his presence. To his credit and his discretion, because he was so very upstanding, he did not flirt with any of the three sisters nor any of the household staff.
“Are you ready?” asked the breathless Tate, leaning one hand to the doorframe. He had arrived at their country home in Neufchateau to visit them last autumn. He had escaped home and his terrible father in England, only to come to France and be caught in a war and a revolution that named him an enemy and blocked him from returning home. Instead, he remained with the family of the Vicomte de Neufchateau in the eastern department and had become, over the months, their friend. To Charmaine, the young Viscount Carrington, with his large blue-green eyes and a wealth of golden-red hair, was the one she intended to seduce and marry.
“Let him carry me away to freedom on his estate,” Charmaine often boasted to Diane and Vivi. “He will love me. And soon.”
Vivi thought that could be true. Charmaine was lithe, elegant, very beautiful, with hair the color of glistening moonlight and eyes of sapphire blue. Plus, she was older than Vivi by two years and possessed that asset most men talked about. Breasts.
“A second more, Tate!” Diane bounced away to open a bureau drawer and pull out her diary. Then she dropped it into her damask reticule and buttoned the finely crocheted flap. “Now I’m ready!”
He marched to the bed and grabbed Charmaine’s and Vivi’s bags, then reached for Diane’s. “I’ll carry those down.”
“You will not!” Diane batted his hand away from hers.
Vivi called to her little dog, Beau, and scooped him up in her arms. With a hand to the dog’s wicker bed, she took the circular stairs beside Tate. “I’m glad you’ve come, Tate. You’ll calm Mama. She’s nervous about leaving Papa to go by himself.”
At the bottom of the stairs, Tate and she glanced at each other and the sight of her mother and father embracing in the small salon.
Tate took Vivi’s arm and pulled her around to him. “I’ll try to calm her. I will go as far with all of you as theBarrière d’Enfer. Another coach arrives for all to change into. None of you will be noticed.”
“But what do you do?”
“Tomorrow I leave Paris by a different route.”
Vivi shook her head. “No! Come with us!”
He flinched. “I cannot. Someone in the Bonnet-Rouge has learned I am related.”
“The scullery maid?” she ventured.
“Perhaps. I have it from a friend that the local police want me. I refuse to be caught.” He smiled.
Terrified for him, Vivi grabbed his arm. She had often chided him that he was more than their great friend and English nobleman—he was a British spy. Tonight it came back to haunt her as a sad jest—and a deadly idea. “How will you go?”
“Best you do not know,ma petite.”
