Three days later, Claire stood at one of the small windows in the commissioner’s private suite of chambers, gazing steadfastly at the scene below. Though tears misted her eyes, a smile was pinned resolutely to her lips. Zoë was about to enter the carriage which was to take her to the coast and freedom. Their eyes caught and held. Claire nodded encouragingly, and Zoë, with one last lingering look, obediently climbed inside the coach.
The temptation to call out, to do something to attract Zoë’s attention one last time was almost irresistible. Claire bit down on her lip when the order was called out and men mounted up. As the carriage jostled into motion, with a choked sob she turned back into the room.
It was done. Zoë was on the first lap of a journey that would take her to England. Millot, the commissioner’s clerk, had arranged everything. Claire trusted the young man far more than she trusted Philippe Duhet. And, oh God, she must trust someone. If Millot had lied to her, God knows what might become of little Zoë.
As she idled her way to the small table with the remains of the meal she had shared with her sister moments before, Claire clung desperately to the reasons for her confidence in the commissioner’s clerk. Millot liked her. He liked her a lot. She suspected that he might even think himself half in love with her. He was considerate of her feelings. He had done everything in his power to reassure her, even going so far as to arrange this last meeting with Zoë.
For all her tender years, Zoë was nobody’s fool. She knew! O God, Zoë knew why her elder sister had taken up residence in the commissioner’s headquarters! Not that Zoë had said anything. But the knowledge was there in her sad, dark eyes. It was almost more than Claire could bear. Zoë had always looked up to her. Now, she was a fallen woman, or she soon would be, once Duhet returned from Angers.
If it had been in her power, she would have arranged this last meeting with Zoë at the school—anywhere, in fact, except the commissioner’s headquarters. Millot, she was sure, would have permitted it. But by ill-luck, or design, Duhet had given the precious passports into the hands of another subordinate, one who was completely indifferent to Claire’s feelings. He had his orders. Until the woman was established in Commissioner Duhet’s chambers, he refused to hand over the passports. It was no less than she expected. Millot had tried to argue the point with the other man to no purpose.
Millot was a gentleman. It was obvious that he wished to spare her embarrassment. The removal to the hotel had been accomplished under cover of darkness, when the curfew was on. It was almost as if he wished no one to know the identity of Duhet’s mistress—a forlorn hope. As she’d walked into the hotel’s lobby the night before, a throng of young conscripts had blocked her path. She was recognized, and her name was taken up and bandied about.
“Isn’t that one of the teachers at Madame Lambert’s?”
“The stuck-up one. Claire something-or-other.”
“Michelet,” supplied someone, and laughed suggestively. “If I had known that she was for sale, I’d have tried to meet her price.”
“Forêt, you couldn’t meet the price of the town whore, and what she has, she gives away. This fancy bit of stuff is a rich man’s toy.”
Laughter drowned out the next remark.
Claire’s cheeks burned. Millot’s face twisted with fury. He would have put a stop to the coarse talk if Claire had not prevented it. Laying a restraining hand on his sleeve, she shook her head and quickly began to mount the stairs. What did it matter that she had been recognized? It was only a matter of time before the whole of Rouen knew that she was Duhet’s mistress. But oh, she had hoped that word would not get out until Zoë and Leon were on their way.
The thought of Leon brought her back to the present. He should have been on the coach with Zoë. He, at least, had been forewarned that he was to leave today.
Millot had tried to delay the departure of the coach until Leon arrived. It was impossible. He’d done the next best thing. He had gone in person to fetch her brother. There was no need for alarm, he had told her, for when he found Leon, they would simply ride after the coach and soon catch it up. Claire’s one regret was that the three of them, she, Zoë, and Leon, had not shared one last meal together before they must part.
The word “forever” almost intruded to be quickly banished. One day, she promised herself, they would all be together again. They would sit down at the dinner table with Maman and Papa presiding. Papa would tell his funny stories one after the other, and, as usual, he would ruin the joke by fumbling the ending. And the dining room in their house in Saint-Germain would ring with laughter at Papa’s expense. Afterwards, they would retire to the music room, where Zoë would entertain them at the piano, or Claire would sing one of the old ballads which Papa preferred. Sometimes, Leon would join her and they would sing a duet. Leon had a very fine baritone.
When a tap rattled the door, Claire stiffened, the door rattled again, and Claire went to open it. One of the maids to whom Claire had taken an instant liking, simply because she reminded her of Zoë, shyly proffered a folded note. It was from Millot.
His first words were reassuring. He knew where her brother was to be found. Unfortunately, he went on, to fetch the boy and catch up with the coach would take him longer than he had anticipated. At all events, he expected to return long before nightfall, by which time Commissioner Duhet was expected to arrive from Angers.
Claire lowered her brows. Leon, surely, would not be so foolish as to jeopardize this one chance of leaving France? Where was he? What was he up to? She pressed a hand to her temples. No. She would not believe that he had run off to Paris with some fool notion of helping their parents. He had promised that he had given up that reckless scheme.
But when was Leon not reckless? From the day of his birth, he had been possessed with a spirit of adventure. Their mother had sworn that she never would have had a gray hair in her head had it not been for the antics of her youngest child. And though Maman had spoken in jest, her two daughters had recognized that her words held the substance of truth. Leon would dare the devil just for the fun of it.
It was that same recklessness which had once saved Claire’s life, and she never forgot it. There had been a fire at the inn where they were staying. Claire’s room was in the attics and the stairs were impassable. Leon had somehow managed to get to her window and had coaxed her to safety over the inn’s roof.
Recalling that incident filled her with foreboding. It was entirely possible that Leon had run off with some harebrained scheme of saving their parents. She quickly scanned Millot’s note for a second time, and gradually Millot’s words restored her confidence. He knew where Leon was to be found and expected to return before nightfall.
But when dark descended, and Millot had not returned, Claire’s misgivings came back in full force. At every sound in the street below, she gave a little start of dread. It might be Millot. On the other hand, the sound of horses’ hooves might signal the arrival of Philippe Duhet. She hardly knew what she hoped for.
The hours passed slowly. Eventually, the candles were lit. To pass the time, Claire investigated every nook and cranny in the commissioner’s suite of rooms. In one of the bureaux, she came across a decanter of brandy. To steady her nerves, she imbibed a little. She was on her second glass when the maid, Blanche, entered to inquire whether or not she should draw Mademoiselle’s bath.
Claire must have given her consent, for some time later, the maid called her into the adjoining room. Averting her eyes from the huge tester bed, Claire allowed herself to be led to the steaming wooden tub which was placed strategically before the hearth.
With the maid’s assistance, Claire began to disrobe. For no reason that she could fathom, she began to giggle. Naked, Claire stepped into the tub still clutching the glass of brandy to her breast. She frowned, observing that the glass was almost empty. The maid obligingly fetched the decanter and replenished Mademoiselle’s glass.
Claire sank into the fragrant water with a deep sigh of contentment. Her fears, she decided, were completely unfounded. Leon was, in all probability, safely on his way to England. And as for Philippe Duhet…She smiled. These were uncertain times. Between Angers and Rouen, anything might have happened to the commissioner. In all conscience, she could not wish for something fatal, but there were lesser evils that she had no hesitation in wishing upon him. His horse might have stumbled and thrown him, or he might have sustained an injury from another quarter. Perhaps he was wounded, or he might have broken a leg, or been captured by the rebels, or…Her pleasant thoughts droned on.
It was after midnight before Adam rode into Rouen at the head of a small band of men. Having been well briefed, he knew exactly where the commissioner’s headquarters were to be found. And even if he were foolish enough to mistake the way in the dark, his two companions, Bernay and Granville, who rode on either side of him, were there to keep him right.
When they entered the arch leading to the hotel’s courtyard, Adam snapped out orders and the men quickly dismounted. Stableboys came running to lead the horses away. With a show of supreme confidence, Adam led the way into the back entrance of the timber and wattle building.
Once in the hotel’s cramped foyer, he shouted a name. “Domfrey!” and then, in an undertone to his two companions, “Where the devil is Millot?”
They shrugged with an assumed indifference. Millot’s absence was the one small wrinkle in an enterprise which had gone off like clockwork. They had delayed for two hours at the rendezvous, waiting for their fellow conspirator to show. Millot had never appeared. It was his task to report on anything of significance which had transpired in Rouen in the last little while, anything that might jeopardize their mission.
“Domfrey!”
The word was scarcely out of Adam’s mouth when a door to the left of the narrow staircase opened. “Sir!”
The young captain who stumbled into the hallway adjusting the tunic of his uniform was flushed. A woman’s voice languidly called an endearment from the room he had quit and the captain’s cheeks burned scarlet before he made haste to shut the door at his back. A clear case of dereliction of duty if ever I saw it, Adam was thinking. He felt like laughing. Recalling himself to the role he was playing, he smiled unpleasantly.
“Captain Domfrey,” he said, and gestured to his companions, “these envoys are from Deputy Robespierre. They are to be my aides. See that they and their men are comfortably quartered in the hotel.”
There was a silence and Adam began to wish that he had listened to his friends’ advice. They should have waited for Millot. For all he knew, Robespierre, himself, might have descended on the hotel in the last day or two. Or perhaps John Burke was right. There was more to impersonating a man than showing his face to the world and donning his clothes.
Imperceptibly, Adam’s hand moved to the hilt of his short sword.
The captain cleared his throat. “What news of Sillery, sir?” He was referring to the rebel leader whom the commissioner had promised to bring back in chains from Angers.
Adam’s hand fell to his side. Assuming an attitude compounded of dignity and suppressed rage, through his teeth, he gritted, “Evidently, he is not here.”
“A bad business, a bad business,” commiserated Granville, looking at nobody in particular.
Bernay clucked his tongue and shook his head. “The commissioner was fortunate to escape with his life.”
The captain gasped and looked incredulously from one gentleman to the other.
Adam made a growling sound deep in his throat. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you may assure Deputy Robespierre that it is only a matter of time before we catch up with Sillery, yes, and with those misguided peasants who sprung him from my trap. You may depend upon it, every available man will be set to track down the outlaws.”
The captain wasn’t to know it, but there were several “Sillerys” in the area whose mission it would be to keep the commissioner’s troops busy and out of Rouen. The presence of soldiers in the city had curtailed the work of the escape route. In the last number of weeks, the house-to-house searches had led to a spate of arrests and subsequent executions. For as long as Adam could maintain his disguise, the citizens of Rouen could expect an improvement in living conditions.
“I believe I gave you an order,” said Adam softly, looking directly at the captain.
“Sir.” Domfrey’s heels clicked together. “This way, gentlemen.” He pivoted and had taken no more than three steps, when the commissioner’s voice halted him.
“Captain!”
“Sir?”
“I’d like a word with Millot. See to it.”
“He hasn’t returned, sir.”
“He hasn’t…returned,” repeated Adam noncommittally.
“No, sir. Not since Mademoiselle Michelet sent him on an errand.”
There was a pause. Bernay and Granville chanced a quick look at each other. Adam’s expression was inscrutable.
“Carry on, Captain.”
“Sir!”
Adam delayed until his companions had turned the corner in the long corridor before he began to mount the stairs. Mademoiselle Michelet. The name meant nothing to him Nicholas, you sly dog! he was thinking, and laughed.
The commissioner had his suite of rooms—an office, a parlor, and two bedchambers—one floor up. Millot had drawn a map of the hotel for Adam so that there could be no careless gaffes. Without hesitation, Adam pushed into the room that he knew was Philippe’s private parlor.
He saw at a glance that the candles had been lit for some time. The embers of a fire glowed a welcome in the grate. After removing his cloak, Adam made straight for the bureau where Philippe kept his brandy. He found a fresh bottle and opened it. The thought that he was depriving Philippe of his best cognac put Adam in a more congenial frame of mind.
The first small glass, he bolted. The second, he savored, imbibing slowly, having settled himself in one of the armchairs flanking the hearth.
He had one regret, he decided, and that was that his fellow conspirators had not allowed him to come face-to-face with Philippe. He had anticipated that moment with relish. It was not to be. Everything had happened so quickly.
Philippe, all unsuspecting, had walked into the hut where they were holding “Sillery.” His two faithful bodyguards were dispatched instantly. They had no choice here. Since Remy and Savarin were Philippe’s intimates, Adam could never, for one moment, hope to maintain his role with the likes of those two. Philippe suffered only a bump on the head, but severe enough to render him unconscious.
He was stripped, and Adam had donned his clothes. A moment later, “Sillery,” with a knife to Adam’s throat, exited the hut, and while all eyes were on the rebel leader and his “hostage,” Philippe was safely spirited away out the back door. At this very moment, he was under lock and key in the real Sillery’s stronghold in the Forest of Verte.
Adam cocked his head. For a moment, he imagined that he’d heard a woman’s laughter, low-pitched and melodious. He listened, but there was nothing but the soft hiss of the dying embers in the grate.
He was about to replenish his empty glass when it came again. There could be no mistake, the laughter was definitely feminine, and coming from one of the bedchambers.
Adam set down his glass. Without haste, he rose to his feet. Two strides took him to the door. With the press of one hand, he slowly pushed it open.
The girl in the tub had her profile to him. Like a waterfall of liquid fire, her gold-red hair cascaded over her shoulders and breasts. She was gurgling with laughter.
Adam recognized her at once. In the weeks before he had removed to Angers to await Duhet’s arrival, from an upstairs window in a safe house hard by the cathedral, he’d watched her come and go. Something about the girl had intrigued him.
She was more beautiful than was good for her, a truth she seemed to grasp. She’d done her best to conceal her loveliness beneath a nondescript disguise. Much good it had done her. It had amused him to note that every man and boy over the age of thirteen summers, like himself, trailed her with ravenous eyes. A few of the bolder ones approached her, attempting to get up a flirtation. She repelled every overture with a cool, distancing stare. For the most part, her ploy was successful, but there were always gentlemen who would not take no for an answer. It was then that the girl betrayed her temper. With eyes flashing fire, and head and shoulders thrown back, she flayed them with her tongue. And the men, more fools they, let her get away with it, slinking away with their tails between their legs.
Beneath the haughty facade, the girl was a spitfire, a veritable tigress. To Adam, she was the ultimate challenge to his masculinity, arousing the hunter in him.
He might have forgotten her very existence, if she had not betrayed another side of her character. The boy was evidently her brother, or a close relative, though there was nothing in their resemblance to suggest such a thing. Her manner with the boy, the way she smiled at him, the way she clung to him, and scolded him and laughed with him, touched Adam in a way he would not have believed possible. He looked more closely at the boy. Did he know how fortunate he was to have someone lavish him with such affection? He thought of his own boyhood, and Adam envied him.
The boy said something to the girl and he stalked off in a sulk. Adam felt like going after him to administer a thrashing. The girl was close to tears.
“Ah, tigress, don’t cry! Don’t cry!” He’d said the words out loud.
As if she’d heard him, she felt in her reticule and withdrew a lace-edged handkerchief. She blew her nose, squared her shoulders, and proceeded purposefully on her way.
“Good girl,” he’d said, and smiled, touched by her hard-won control, knowing intuitively that she carried burdens too heavy for one slip of a girl. He’d wished, quite seriously, that he was in a position to shoulder some of those burdens. But he dared not show his face in the streets of Rouen, not until Philippe was safely locked away.
If Adam was intrigued with the girl before, by this time, he was fascinated. Who was she? What was her relationship to the boy? Why did she try to conceal her beauty behind a dowd’s disguise? Such a girl did not belong in a backwater like Rouen. It was inevitable that she must belong to some powerful man. Who was her husband and where was he? And what, if anything, would he, Adam Dillon, do about this shadowy figure should he ever meet him face-to-face? The question was a serious one, and Adam did not care for the farfetched solutions which came to his mind. That he would go after the girl once his hands were free was no longer debatable.
The questions had teemed inside his head. And now he had his answer. It was evident that the woman was the property of his half-brother, Philippe. Millot had never as much as hinted that Philippe had taken a mistress. There were women, yes, but no one of any significance. That this woman would be significant to the man who possessed her, Adam never doubted.
His eyes swept over her beautiful body, and the cynical twist to his mouth became more pronounced. He felt, in some strange way, that she had betrayed him.
Claire was absorbed in hunting for the bar of rose-scented soap which seemed to have developed a mind of its own. It kept slipping away from her hand. Her fingers closed around it, and she held it aloft with a crow of triumph.
“Good evening.”
At the quiet salutation, Claire froze. She closed her eyes, then opened them wide. It was some time before she could regulate her breathing.
As Duhet came further into the room, she was not aware that she counted each soft footfall under her breath. Before he halted, facing her, she had forced herself to a tenuous calm.
Slowly, her head lifted, her eyes fastened on him, absorbing the finely etched features, the well-shaped mouth, the thick pelt of dark hair tied back with a ribbon. But it was the promise in those glittering green eyes which made her shiver. “It’s you,” she breathed hoarsely. “It’s you.”
He was studying her silently. Where his eyes touched, her skin grew cold. Her hands clenched around the rim of the tub. “Oh God, it’s you,” she repeated.
The words scarcely registered on Adam’s brain. He was staring at the woman as if he were seeing a vision. He had known, intimately, many beautiful women, he was thinking. Never, never, had any woman had such a profound effect on him. If it had been only her beauty, only the pull on his senses, he would have discounted it, but this girl’s attraction went deeper than anything he had ever known.
Without conscious thought, he captured her hands and drew her from the bath. The scent of roses filled his nostrils. With any other woman, he would have openly appraised her naked loveliness. Her eyes held his and he could not seem to look away.
“It’s all right,” he soothed, and the words surprised him. Slowly, inexorably, he pulled her into his arms.
His lips found hers and sank into their softness. She did not respond, but she did not resist him either. Adam pulled back and studied her wide-eyed expression. There was feminine wariness in her eyes. Every instinct told him that she was coming to him reluctantly.
He wasn’t a complete scoundrel. Her reluctance should have mattered to him. It didn’t. Something primitive, something savage and totally masculine seemed to have entered his bloodstream. His skin was fever hot, his breathing was difficult. He seemed to have lost his grip on reality. Philippe Duhet was forgotten, as was the elaborate charade that had brought him into Rouen. The only thing that Adam was conscious of was the woman in his arms and the driving compulsion which urged him to prove to her that she belonged to him.
He kissed her again, and this time her lips softened beneath the fierce pressure of his. It was all the encouragement he needed.
“It’s all right,” he repeated, soothing away the panic that flashed in her eyes. He swept her up in his arms and carried her to the bed.