Chapter 14
Sebastian had always known he was different from the man he called Father. Different from both Hendon and from his two elder brothers.
Sebastian had grown up tall but lean and fine boned, whereas Richard and Cecil shared their father’s large, solid build. Like his brothers, Sebastian had thrown himself into the “manly” pursuits of their class—horses and hunting, guns and swords. But he’d had other interests, too, enthusiasms not shared by his brothers, such as a love of music and poetry, philosophy and art. He’d always assumed he simply took after Sophie. But the origins of his yellow eyes and his uniquely acute hearing and sight remained a nagging mystery.
Because the intensely blue St. Cyr eyes were such a hallmark of the family, Sebastian eventually came to assume as a child that his strange yellow eyes were the main reason Hendon so often found fault with him, the reason the gleaming pride in the Earl’s face could film over and become icy whenever Sebastian surpassed his brothers at some feat. And then one hideous July nearly three years ago now, Sebastian had discovered the truth, and it came perilously close to shattering him.
His sister, Amanda, sneeringly insisted that he was the get of Sophie’s lowborn Cornish groom, and he’d believed her, for she was twelve years his senior and had always known him for her half brother. Then he’d encountered Jamie Knox, that ex-rifleman turned tavern keeper who looked nearly enough like Sebastian to be his twin. The two men shared the same lean, dark looks, the same feral yellow eyes, the same uncannily sharp hearing and sight and quick reflexes.
The son of an unmarried barmaid who had died in his infancy, Knox hailed from the small village of Ayleswick-on-Teme in Shropshire. Before her death, Knox’s mother told her family that her son’s father could be one of three men: an English lord, a Welsh cavalryman, or a handsome young Romani stable hand. Sebastian had assumed the handsome young stable hand must have later found work as the Countess of Hendon’s groom—until he discovered the man had died over a year before Sebastian’s birth. That left only two candidates: the unknown English lord and the equally unknown Welsh cavalry officer.
No one had ever said anything about a French officer of Scottish descent.
Which meant—what? That this exiled Scot had fathered both Sebastian and Knox, but that Knox’s mother had for some reason omitted him from her list of lovers? That despite the resemblance there was no actual connection between Sebastian and Knox? Or had Sophie simply been attracted to Marshal McClellan because he reminded her of that unknown, long-ago English or Welsh lover?
Sebastian stared at the portrait of the French marshal, searching for the ways in which this man did not resemble him and trying to come up with another possibility.
But he could not.
He didn’t know how long he stood there, his gaze on the man in the painting. Then he heard a faint rustle of cloth behind him and jerked around to find Madame Geneviève Dion in the library’s doorway. And he knew from the stricken look in her eyes that his every thought, every emotion, was written on his face for her to read.
She lifted her eyes to the painting. “You’ve never seen him before?” Unspoken were the words You didn’t know how much you resemble him?
“No.” His voice sounded scratchy, hoarse, as if he hadn’t used it in a long time. “I take it that’s Marshal McClellan?”
“Yes. Her ladyship had it painted just last year.” She hesitated a moment, then said, “I came to ask if you would like some tea.”
“Thank you, but no.”
She nodded and withdrew, leaving him alone.
Later, after he’d finished searching the library, they walked together in the gardens. The clouds were still pressing down low and gray, but the cold wind had dropped and the temperature seemed to be rising. Everywhere he looked he could see signs of the coming spring, fresh life bursting from the ground, bare limbs budding with green. By May or June the gardens would be breathtaking.
“She obviously liked roses,” said Sebastian as they turned to walk down an allée bordered by climbing roses trained up tall posts to run along swagged heavy chains.
“They were her passion,” said Geneviève Dion. “She was even experimenting with breeding them—growing them from seed.”
He watched a magpie lift off the peak of one of the dormers in the house’s steeply pitched roof. “Did McClellan give her this hôtel?”
“Mais non. The maréchal’s estate is in Normandy. Dama Cappello bought this house for herself.”
He glanced over at her. “Would you tell me now why she called herself that?”
A faint, sad smile touched the Frenchwoman’s lips. “The name was given to her in jest by someone she once loved—a Venetian poet. Are you familiar with Dama Bianca Cappello?”
He shook his head.
“She was a famous Venetian noblewoman of the sixteenth century, beautiful and headstrong and very wayward. She ran off with a lowborn Florentine when she was just fifteen. It was a disastrous and foolish thing to do, yet somehow she ended up becoming first the mistress of Francesco de’ Medici, then his wife and the mother of his son. Her court intrigues were the scandal of her day.”
“And Sophie adopted the name?”
“As I said, at first it was simply a joke. But she told me she no longer felt that she had the right to call herself Sophia Hendon, and so she became Sophia Cappello.”
He stared across a young fruit orchard to the ruins of an old prerevolutionary church just visible on the far side of the high wall. “How long was she with McClellan?”
“As long as I have known her.”
He looked over at her in surprise. “But you’ve been with her some ten years.”
“Eleven, I believe.”
He was silent for a moment. “I was told several years ago that she was with General Becnel.”
“Becnel?” The Frenchwoman frowned. “Non. Never.”
“The person who told me that must have been mistaken.” Mistaken, thought Sebastian, or simply lying. The information had come from one of the men he’d hired to find his mother. The man had resigned, claiming he was too afraid of Becnel to continue. Sebastian had no doubt the man had been afraid of someone, but obviously it was not of Becnel.
They turned to walk through a walled section of the gardens that reminded Sebastian of a traditional English cottage garden with flowers, herbs, fruits, and vegetables all tumbled together. “I understand McClellan is in Vienna. That he has sworn an oath of allegiance to the Bourbons.”
“Yes.”
“And Sophie? Did she likewise shift her allegiance from emperor to king?”
The chatelaine shrugged. “One does what one must to survive. One throws away one’s white cockade and pins on the tricolor. And then when the tricolor is in turn outlawed, one throws it away and pins on the Bourbon white again.”
“Is it that simple?”
“Simple?” The Frenchwoman’s lips flattened into a straight, hard line. “No. It’s never simple. But in the end, the differences between a king and an emperor are not so great, hmm? Not great enough to die for. Both take money from the poor to buy fine gowns and jewels for their women and to accumulate more horses, carriages, and grand châteaus than anyone has need of. And both send the sons of the poor off to fight and die in their wars.”
Sebastian turned his head to study her tightly held profile, wondering if those cynical sentiments were hers alone or if Sophie had shared them. “From what her coachman tells me, after she left Vienna she went to Elba.”
Madame Dion stared silently straight ahead.
He said, “Did you know?”
She shifted her gaze to where one of the gardeners was double digging a section of a nearby bed. “I suspected it. But did I know for certain? No. Not until this morning when Noël told me.”
“Do you know what she was doing there?”
“No.”
Sebastian wasn’t convinced he should believe her, but all he said was “Can you think of someone in Paris who might know?”
The Frenchwoman blew out a harsh breath and shook her head. “There were those she would have called friend a year ago, but things are different now.”
“You mean since the Restoration?”
She nodded. “The wives of the marshal’s colleagues . . . they’re now afraid to be seen as close to her.”
“Because of Marie-Thérèse?”
Geneviève Dion nodded again. “Madame Cappello never made any secret of the nature of her relationship with the maréchal, and Marie-Thérèse . . . Well, let’s just say she is very rigid in her thinking about such things. And she was already predisposed to despise anyone who served France under Napoléon.”
He watched a lizard scuttle away ahead of them on the path. “And there is no one else?”
“Once I would have said she was close to her ward, Angélique La Hure. The girl’s mother died just a few months after the father was killed in the Peninsula, and her ladyship and the maréchal took Angélique in and raised the girl as their own. But they have become estranged.”
He glanced over at her. “Do you know why?”
“Her ladyship disapproved of the man Angélique wished to marry—Antoine de Longchamps-Montendre. But because she was of age, she married him anyway. They quarreled, and Angélique never forgave her.”
“When was this?”
“That they quarreled? Last summer.” She hesitated a moment, then said, “A woman did come to see madame yesterday, just hours after she’d returned home. But I don’t know who it was; she was veiled.”
“Would the gatekeeper or one of the servants know?”
“I can ask, but I doubt it. Her ladyship was in the forecourt consulting with one of the gardeners when the carriage pulled up. She obviously knew the woman because she told Jacques to open the gates and then walked forward to meet her as she descended from her carriage. They spoke for a few minutes, then the woman left.” Madame Dion paused. “I could be wrong, but the exchange did not seem particularly . . . friendly.”
“And you have no idea who the woman was?”
The chatelaine shook her head. “Whoever she was, she was very richly dressed, and her carriage of the finest quality, with a magnificent team of grays. But the coachman and footmen wore no livery, and there was no crest on the carriage’s panel.”
In other words, a woman who liked to travel incognito.
Sebastian said, “How long after that did Sophie leave for the Île de la Cité?”
“Not long. She asked Noël to bring round the town carriage, and they left.” They’d reached the terrace now, and she turned to face him. “It’s possible this may give you some of the answers you seek,” she said, reaching into the pocket of her coat to withdraw a sealed envelope with Sebastian’s name written across the front in his mother’s elegant hand. “Before she left on her journey, madame asked me to keep it for her. She said that if something should happen to her, I was to find a way to get it to you.”
She held the letter out to him, and after a brief hesitation he took it.
He drew a deep breath of clean country air scented with damp earth and growing green things and that faint, elusive scent from the past that still clung to the letter he now held in his hand. It was a moment before he found his voice.
“She knew what she was doing was dangerous,” he said.
Madame Dion met his gaze, her eyes clouded with grief and worry and something else he could not identify. “Oh, yes. She knew.”