Prologue
Normandy, France
March 15, 1794
The moon’s cool, bright fullness made the escape attempt more hazardous, but scudding clouds and fitful wind drew a dark veil of safety over the fugitives. The stealthy figures following the cliff side path kept silent even though the crashing waves far below them would have obscured their voices. They moved by touch and instinct as the damp, bitterly cold wind numbed hands and feet.
They were only a headland from their goal when the leader slipped on an unexpectedly icy patch of rock. Cat quick, the smaller figure, anchored to a convenient branch, reached out to secure the other. Pulled back from the brink, the leader wrapped an arm around his companion, gasping his thanks in a voice that still retained a thread of laughter.
“One more for you, Christa. I make it three times you have saved my life tonight, while I have rescued you but once.”
The clouds broke for a moment, silvering the pair with moonlight. Even in the unreliable shadows, the smaller figure was clearly female, though she wore breeches for her dangerous trek. She answered in English as fluent as her companion’s, but her low chuckling voice had a definite French accent.
“Women are always more surefooted than men, Charles. Even when we were children I could out climb you.” She took advantage of the moment’s pause to rest her aching body against her half brother’s lean strength. This nightmare flight across France seemed endless; she had trouble believing safety was within grasp. Concentrating on the hazardous footing blocked her worry about her mother, who was following another path to the rendezvous point. Their party of five had split up to reduce the chance of attracting attention, with her and Charles taking the more dangerous coast path while their longtime servants Jean-Claude and Anne Bohnet accompanied her mother, Marie-Claire.
While Christa knew it was safer to separate, she felt irrational fear at letting her mother out of her sight. During the long months of nursing Marie-Claire after her husband’s death, Christa had come to feel more like the parent herself. Her mother’s fragile strength had been tested to the limit in these last days.
For the thousandth time, Christa blessed the kindly providence that had taken her father’s life before the Committee of Public Safety could send him to the guillotine. His well-known liberal sympathies and friendship with Lafayette had protected them all through the early years of the revolution, but the spiraling madness of the Reign of Terror left no one safe. Friends and relatives she had known all her life had fled or died. Her father’s failing health kept them in France, and his wife and daughter refused to abandon him.
Her father had been Philippe, Comte d’Estelle, with properties across the breadth of France. Under the French rules of succession, Christa was a countess in her own right as well as her father’s sole heir, and she had been one of the most sought-after young ladies in Paris during her one brief social season before the ancien régime collapsed around their ears. Afterward, the d’Estelles lived quietly in Paris while the count worked for the social reforms he had urged for the previous two decades.
Christa privately thought her father’s illness was caused by a broken heart over the tragedy that revolution was bringing to his beloved France. Her half brother, Charles Radleigh, the Earl of Radcliffe, had repeatedly urged them to come to England, but her father refused, determined to use his influence to moderate the explosive political situation. After his death and her mother’s subsequent collapse, Christa waited in an agony of anxiety until Marie-Claire had regained some of her strength.
As soon as her mother was able, Christa hired a shabby cart and started them north from Paris toward Normandy and the small estate where they had often summered. The d’Estelles had been well liked in the area, and she thought a fisherman would take them across the Channel. The noblewomen and their two servants had dressed in the drab clothes of peasants to prevent unwelcome attention from suspicious Guards or hostile sansculottes.
Alarmed by the lack of news, Charles had crossed the Channel to find them. For all his blond English looks, his long visits in France with his mother and her second family enabled him to pass as a Frenchman. He and his young half sister were closer than most full siblings, and he used that bond to deduce what she had done. After weeks of searching, he found them resting in a village fifty miles south of their goal.
Christa had never been so glad to see anyone in her life; she hadn’t really acknowledged her fear and exhaustion until she had someone to share the responsibility. With Charles’s help they made much better speed. He had crossed the Channel with a helpful English fisherman cum smuggler who promised to return once a month for three consecutive months to a remote cove on the night of the full moon. The deserted site chosen was accessible only on the high, twice-monthly spring tides. March was the third month; if they missed this meeting, they would have to find other transport, running the risk of being seized as traitors.
Christa released her brother and put as much raillery into her tone as she could. “And you, great oaf, must move those clumsy feet or we shall be late for our appointment. On with you!”
He squeezed her hand encouragingly. “Almost there, little one. We shall be there in plenty of time.”
Christa’s world narrowed to the rhythm of her footsteps. Place the foot carefully, don’t shift full weight until you’re sure it will be supported. Ignore the twisted ankle and bruises from earlier falls, the hunger from a day and a half’s fasting, the fear of being discovered by Guardsmen or bandits. Left, right. Left, right.
The path slanted down to the shore, and she collided with Charles when he reached the beach level and stopped. He put one arm out warningly, his eyes scanning the shadowed beach for the smugglers’ skiff. They both jumped when a voice sounded from no more than two arms’ lengths away.
“Are ye looking for us, yer lordship?”
Charles’s soft laughter was shaky with relief. “Alan, you blackguard! Are you trying to scare me into an early grave?”
“I ’spect it would take more than me. Would this be her ladyship?” The voice was uneducated but immensely comforting to Christa—the sailor sounded so very English. In these past months she had come to fear the voices of her own countrymen, always worried that someone would choose to denounce the d’Estelles for some imagined crime.
She stepped forward, one hand outstretched. “Is this the so-brave English captain? You have my gratitude, monsieur.”
“Eh, I’m no monsewer, little lady. Just plain Alan Brown the fisherman. And happy the lads and me are able to save some folk from the chopping block.”
A thinning of the clouds showed her his burly shape, with the shadows of two more sailors behind him. She grasped the captain’s hard hand. In the moment of silence that followed, the explosive sound of bullets shattered the night air. All three of them whirled. The shots were close, perhaps no farther than the other side of the sea cliff. A woman screamed, her voice cutting off abruptly as another shot sounded.
“Maman!” Christa cried out and tried to bolt toward the cliff.
Before she could take three steps, Charles seized her and pulled her back. His voice razor sharp with tension, he said tersely, “Alan, take care of Christa! I will see what has happened.”
“Charles! I am going with you!”
“You can do nothing but cause me worry. I am armed. If anything can be done, I will do it. Alan, hold her! Bind her if you must, but don’t let her follow. Promise me you will get her to safety . . . no matter what happens to the rest of us.” He grabbed her in a quick savage hug. “IfMamanand I don’t make it back—remember that you must do enough living for all of us.”
Christa hugged him in fierce response but released him quickly. Though her heart cried to follow, she knew he was right—her presence might only make things worse. One of the silent sailors from the darkness beyond Alan slipped up the path after Charles as a fusillade of new gunshots sounded. Her body shaking uncontrollably, Christa saw the two men dimly silhouetted against the night sky as they silently moved over the bluff. She was possessed by an icy conviction that she would never see her brother and mother again.
