17.

 

They were seated in a shadowed corner, the excited interest in their arrival at last dying down, though they continued long to be the object of admiring glances and knowing winks. The landlord himself, all rubicund affability and, with much bowing to Chagrin, came forward to attend to their wants, advising Nick in a conspiratorial whisper behind his hand of the excellent vintage of a recent supply of champagne to which might be added a dash of brandy of most celebrated bouquet. He then grew rhapsodical over a consignment of oysters freshly arrived that afternoon from the sea with brown bread-and-butter sliced thin as poppy-leaves; to be followed by some more substantial dish such as boiled chicken, duck roasted, boiled leg of mutton and capers, bullock’s heart roasted, venison, beef steaks, chops and oxtails, roasted neck of pork, hashed fowl and beans, duck and eggs and potatoes, roast woodcock, hot rabbit or hare and cold ham and tongue, brawn, potted mackerel and prawns, trout potted and sturgeon.

They had oysters and champagne laced with brandy, followed by young chicken and celery and roast potatoes and fruits. The wine arriving at once, they drank to each other and then mine host. His arm tightly round her waist, Nick and Chagrin raised their glasses to the convivial company of the Rose, which brought forth such a roar of answering toasts the tavern rafters fairly rang and was the signal for a wall-eyed fiddler to strike up a tune, followed by the ballad-singer, a buxom doxy complexioned like a rustic wench and a shy, demure manner with her bawdy verses. Those of her audience with a fancy for it were quickly accompanying her.

So to the music and songs, the ribald roars and buffoonery about them, Nick and Chagrin, she suddenly finding herself most marvellously famished, savoured the oysters and champagne and brandy and other dishes that followed. Chagrin could not resist joining in the general laughter, for it was infectious, though her knowledge of English vernacular saved her from realizing most of the ballad-girl’s innuendo and suggestiveness. Nick, explaining some of the meanings behind the so innocently sung words, sent a blush glowing beneath the mask she still wore.

The moment arrived at last when Nick must stake all on his next throw and, with characteristic nonchalance, he beckoned over a waiter and instructed him to serve a final goblet of brandy for them upstairs. ‘You are very bold,’ she whispered, ‘so sure of yourself.’ For a second he thought he had lost, that she had remembered she was the Comtesse de l’Isle and he but a no-account sharper and thief, and inwardly he reviled the fortune of birth and blood, a barrier between them which might not be surmounted even in the overwhelming transports of passion and yearning of the flesh. But, taking her hand, he found it trembling in his like an imprisoned bird and he knew then the game was his.

‘How else should a gambler play,’ he asked, his voice low and husky, ‘for such high stakes?’ And confident now what her answer would be, he added: ‘The dice, are they loaded too heavy against me?’

The upstairs room Nick had secured, all warm and bright with a blazing fire, needed no candlelight to add further illumination. It was low-ceilinged, with comfortable dark furniture and the four-poster bed wide and the sheets drawn back white and gleaming. The brandy decanter and glasses awaited them, catching the glint of the fire and the flames throwing shadows leaping on the walls. She made as if to take off her mask, but some quirk of humour bade him stop her.

‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Do you appear mysterious and intriguing, the far-off unattainable of my dreams.’ The sweet scrape of the fiddle reached them, as the wall-eyed fiddler came stumbling up the stairs. He remained there in the darkness near their door long after Nick had thrown him several coins, his music in their ears as he tore off her mask.

When she fell asleep at last he lay curiously wakeful, not closing his eyes while slowly the fire died until the room was in darkness. She stirred and gave a moan so that he gazed down at her face, pale and luminous in the darkness, her eyes still closed. He had watched her of a sudden lie quiet in his arms, experiencing a deep compassion and tenderness at exhaustion’s final triumph over the fire ablaze within her which he had set aflame. She stirred again and flung one slim, white arm across him and moaned more loudly.

‘Chagrin, darling... what is wrong?’ But her dark-lashed eyelids were still closed: she was speaking in French in her sleep. He bent over her, listening, trying to catch the meaning of what she was saying. He wondered if she was dreaming of him, but the first name she uttered was not his.

‘Morande, Morande, ne me touchez pas avec les mains sales,’ she whispered, her face twisted with horror. ‘Je suis voyagee de Paris,’ she went on. ‘Je viens de la part de Madame Du Barry. Void mes lettres de créance’ Her voice rose.

‘Non, non, Morande, ne me touchez pas. Lâachez moi done. C’est pour l’honneur de la France qu’il nous faut collaborer, vous et moi. C’est pour ga que je viens vous voir.’ She was speaking in low tones once more. ‘C’est Madame Du Barry qui m’a envoye. C’est a cause d’elle que je suis ici. C’est pour la France que nous aimons: C’est pour venger sa defait.’

Her voice trailed off and Nick’s features were grim and sharp, eyes narrowed. How the heavy thoughts which had tormented him and kept him from sleep beside her crowded in upon him, rushed the defences his mind had thrown up against them and bent them down. Throughout the previous day, since her return to retrieve from the house in Half Moon Alley the document which betrayed her as a secret agent for the Du Barry, he had at the back of his mind pondered his next move.

She moved uneasily and at the sight of her locked in the helplessness of sleep, trapped in her dreams, the conflict which had raged within him during the past hours tore at his inner-most soul with renewed ferocity. That heartrending compassion and love she evoked in him struggled once more with the deadly, unyielding demands of his profession upon the trampled battlefield of his emotions. When the little tragi-comedy had played itself out, when he had made his report to Mr. Fielding, he would have washed his hands of her. She moved again and suddenly her eyes opened and his heart constricted as he saw the fear and bewilderment of her dreams disappear from her gaze.

‘Mon amour,’ and her arms reached up to him. The irony of the web of circumstance in which he was held, that the one woman he desired above all the world should have fallen in love with him, believing him to be a desperate rogue, simultaneously with his discovery she was herself a cheat, no devil in hell could have devised.

‘I fell asleep,’ she was saying. ‘I could not help it.’

‘I know.’

‘And you? You slept also?’

‘I slept too,’ he lied.

‘But you awoke before me.’

He nodded. ‘It was you who woke me,’ he lied again.

‘Je te demande pardon, chéri,’ and her arms twined round him more tightly. He felt them tense briefly as he said in her ear:

‘You were talking in your sleep.’ She lay back amongst the pillows, her eyes wide and shining in the gloom. He saw the change in their expression as he continued deliberately: ‘You spoke in French.’ As he anticipated, the guarded look faded.

‘I must have something on my mind,’ she whispered lightly.

Now was the moment. Tell her now he was aware it was Morande and the Du Barry she had on her mind. Then she would know he knew. Or, he wondered, was it not equally likely that she, unaware of his own secret, might not suspect him of having put two and two together? ‘You spoke of Morande.’ He decided to put this newly-arrived-at possibility to the test. Then after a pause: ‘There was another name also.’

‘Whose?’ He could not mistake the faint quiver of apprehension in her query.

‘Madame Du Barry.’ She did not answer and, affecting a shrug, he went on casually. ‘Though why mix such an oddly assorted pair in your dreams, only you can say...’ Of a sudden she began trembling violently, crying out as heartrendingly as any utterance of her dreams. ‘What is it, beloved?’ Impulsively he held her to him as if she were a child. She was shivering in his arms like one assailed with the ague. He could hear her teeth chattering while he sought to comfort her with his kisses. After some minutes he stood beside the bed.

‘Where are you going? Do not leave me.’ Her voice was so piteous he knelt beside her again. ‘Do not leave me.’

‘Some brandy will warm you.’ He moved quickly across the darkened room and half filled a glass from the decanter.

‘I — I am all right,’ she murmured, and he took the glass from her and she lay in his arms, her trembling subsiding. He began to feel the warmth stealing through her slender, rounded body.

‘It was only a nightmare. It is finished now. It will trouble you never again.’

‘Au contraire. The nightmare is only just beginning.’

‘Morande is dead.’

'll est mort,’ she said, ‘but I am alive. I must go on in his place. Oh, Nick. Suddenly I feel so desperately alone.’

He clasped her more tightly to him. ‘Au contraire,’ deliberately mimicking her to give her assurance. ‘You are not alone. You have me.’ She began talking wildly in French until he quietened her. ‘Tell me what it is you so greatly fear. I will face it with you.’ And a spate of words burst from her so fast in her own tongue and in English he had constantly to interrupt her in order to understand what she was saying. She told him how she had become involved in the scheming of those in France concerned with Britain’s ruin. How, on this last journey to London, she had been entrusted by the Du Barry to take Boehemer’s place. He listened, his brain divided into two, one half all keyed up grasping at the significance of her revelations, the other dragging back at the dread future lying in wait for her. He pretended he had difficulty in understanding the implication of her story, until at last he could not help but realize she was a secret agent for France.

‘Do not despise me,’ she implored him. ‘Love me no less because of what I am.’

He gave not a damn in hell for politics or governments, he answered her; his whole preoccupation was with his private war against society; whatever quarrel France sought with Britain was not his concern. He was no soldier to be slaughtered upon some bloody field battled over for what cause no one, not even the generals and the kings urging their armies forward, could remember. She appeared convinced by the sentiments he expressed. ‘I felt so alone, I had not realized before — before Morande’s death what a dark road I had taken. Listening to Madame Du Barry it seemed a noble, worthwhile cause I was serving.’ As if speaking her thoughts aloud, she said: ‘You are fortunate in owing no one your allegiance.’ His expression grew speculative as she continued. ‘You are an adventurer, a soldier of fortune, wearing your loyalty on your sleeve.’What was she driving at? he conjectured, for there was no doubting the underlying significance of what she was saying. Her eyes were burning into his beseechingly. ‘Fate threw us together again at an hour when of all men you were the one I needed most. Oh, Nick,’ she moaned desperately, ‘you will help me?’

Her words struck him with the same impact, the same revelational force as that lightning flash by whose illumination he had glimpsed her on Blackheath two nights since. Now, instead of the shock of recognition, he was probing for the first time into the workings of her mind in all their subtle cunning. Now his ice-cold brain was informing him she had plotted to lure him on to taking Morande’s place ever since the latter’s death. Had she not just now declared how he must appear in her estimation? An adventurer without allegiance, a desperate rascal who would sell his birthright without compunction, so the price were tempting enough.

A bitter fury possessed him, the realization driving deep, with all the piercing thrust of a dagger, into his vitals. How she had used her feminine guile to secure him for her traitorous cause. With cold-blooded calculation she had played her part, had even sold herself to him; bought, so she believed, with her body his complacent agreement to assume the badge of infamy she held forth. How could he have been so vain, so dazzled by her wiles, to credit that he could ever gain her proud aristocratic heart? Her body, yes, he had possessed that, she had debased herself to that low level out of her twisted sense of patriotism.

They were both impostors, he mused, and then with an inward wry smile: except that he had not required to counterfeit his love for her. Even as these thoughts filled their place in his reckoning, he was automatically responding to the instincts of his profession. ‘The credentials you carried, which introduced you to Morande? In whose possession are they now?’

She regarded him mutely, her glance searching his face, and then she told him what he already knew: of her return to the house in Half Moon Alley to recover what might prove to be damning evidence of her hidden intent. While he was promising himself he would have no difficulty in transferring the precious paper to his own person and that soon, either surreptiously or upon some pretext, to be passed on for the attention of the Blind Beak, she whispered: ‘France will reward you, I vow it, as England never will.’

‘And I am rewarded in cash I will rest content,’ he drawled, with a disinterested shrug. ‘Think you not I would spy for your Du Barry on any other account.’

She stared up into his face and then with languorous grace her slender white arms reached for him. ‘And I?’ she asked him slowly. ‘I too am part of the bargain.’