Before the Storm (25 page)

Clementine wiped away her tears. ‘We’ll talk more later but must stop now for Monsieur le Comte d’Evremond is approaching.’ She smiled and stepped forward to greet Antoine’s father, who looked pleased to see her now that she was off the market and no longer constituted a threat to his beloved Mon Clos.

‘My dear Duchesse,’ he murmured, kissing her on both cheeks. ‘How lovely you look this evening. That shade of pale blue suits you to perfection.’ He turned to Sidonie and smiled. ‘And this is..?’

‘This is my former governess and most favourite person in all the world, Mademoiselle Roche,’ Clementine said, putting her arm around the older woman’s narrow waist.
 

The Comte bowed. ‘That is indeed a powerful recommendation,’ he said, smiling again at Sidonie. ‘I remember you very well now, mademoiselle. You were formerly with my Choiseul-Clermont cousins, were you not?’

Sidonie smiled and curtseyed. ‘I was indeed and recall you perfectly, monsieur.’ They looked at each other for a long moment before she half turned away. ‘I am afraid that I must leave you both now as our lovely hostess is making imploring looks at me across the room.’

The Comte looked across to Madame d’Albret and chuckled. ‘Ah, it is that bore Descheaux,’ he remarked. ‘I wonder that he is invited anywhere.’ He took Sidonie’s hand and kissed it. ‘Godspeed, mademoiselle. I hope that we meet again very soon.’

‘I am sure of it,’ Sidonie replied in a low voice.

‘I can see why Mademoiselle Roche is your most favourite person in all the world,’ the Comte remarked to Clementine as they watched Sidonie gracefully cross the room to their beleaguered hostess. ‘She seems to me to be a most remarkable young woman.’

Clementine turned to him enthusiastically. ‘Yes, she is. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her as she was the one to persuade Mama into coming to Paris.’

The Comte bowed slightly. ‘Then we have much to be grateful to her for,’ he replied gallantly.
 

A silence fell between them and Clementine was just about to pluck up the courage to ask about Antoine when she realised that her husband was standing at her elbow. ‘Charles, how long have you been standing there?’ she asked, looking up at him with a smile.

‘Oh, not long,’ he replied. ‘Would you mind if we left soon? Gatherings like this always bore me, I’m afraid. I think I must just be far too stupid to properly appreciate them.’

Clementine hid her disappointment behind a polite smile that would have fooled no one but her husband. ‘Of course we can leave if that is what you wish.’

‘I do wish it,’ he replied. ‘I’m sorry to drag you away so soon.’

‘It is of no matter,’ Clementine replied, already pulling her cashmere shawl closer and looking about for her fan.
 

The Comte, who knew and understood women a lot better than the young Duc did, gave a discreet cough. ‘If Madame la Duchesse would like to stay, I am more than willing to escort her home myself at the end of the evening.’

Clementine turned shining, grateful eyes upon her husband. ‘Oh, do you think...’ she began only for him to interrupt her with: ‘I thank you, Monsieur le Comte, but it is quite unnecessary that you should put yourself out so much on our behalf. Madame la Duchesse would prefer to come home with me.’ He looked down at his wife. ‘Is that not right, my dear?’

She took a deep breath and nodded, with an apologetic look at the Comte. ‘Of course, Charles.’

They were silent as their carriage lumbered through the dark streets back to the Place Louis le Grand. Once, Clementine would have gazed up in awe at the high walls of the Tuileries as they went past but now she deliberately looked away, so exhausted was she by her duties at the palace. Only a few dozen attendants remained to the royal family and the sombre, sad mood at the new court was very different to that at Versailles.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Charles asked his wife with a smile.

Clementine sighed. ‘I was just thinking how strange it is that the Queen has been longing for years for a more private and informal mode of life and now that she has it, she spends all her time longing for Versailles.’ They were rattling through the Place Louis XV now, dominated by a large statue of the old King.

‘They weren’t prisoners at Versailles,’ her husband pointed out.

Clementine looked at him. ‘Weren’t they?’

The Hôtel de Coulanges was swathed in darkness when they pulled up in front of it in the Place Louis le Grand. Once upon a time they would have been welcomed back by tall, stately windows blazing with candlelight but the Duc had decided that such ostentation was a bit unseemly in the current climate, especially as several mansions in Paris had been looted by the mob in the aftermath of the fall of the Bastille the previous July.

Clementine thought about that day as she stepped into the huge entrance hall and handed her black velvet cloak to a waiting footman. She’d been at home in Paris when all of the bells of the city had suddenly started ringing as one, in a deafening
tocsin
that was both a warning and a call to arms and had been disbelieving when the first reports of a huge mob marching on the royal prison of the Bastille had filtered through.

When the news of the Bastille’s fall had been brought to them, Clementine had felt oddly exhilarated and had wanted to go out and celebrate like most of the rest of Paris. Her husband had forbidden it though and so she had stayed indoors and looked sadly down from her splendid windows at the dancing, laughing crowd who partied in the shadow of Louis XIV’s statue in the Place Louis le Grand until the small hours.

They walked in silence to their huge
salon
on the first floor. Charles always insisted upon using it when he was at home but Clementine preferred the smaller sitting room at the back of the house, which was cosier and hung with a set of gorgeous paintings of nymphs and shepherds by Boucher, which had been commissioned by her husband’s mother, who seemed to have been a rather frivolous young woman before succumbing to small pox when her son was just a baby.
 

‘Shall I ring for coffee?’ he asked now, settling himself on a sofa.

Clementine shook her head. ‘No, thank you.’ She remained standing by the door. ‘I think I would like to go to bed soon.’ Seeing Antoine’s father had overset her as usual and she wanted to be alone with her thoughts for a while. He’d been gone for eighteen months now and she had heard nothing from him. She didn’t even know if he knew she was married now.

‘As you wish,’ Charles said diffidently, picking up a book. ‘I knew that we were right to leave when we did.’

His wife took a deep breath. ‘I should have liked to stay,’ she said. ‘I don’t like it when you treat me like a child. I was so embarrassed in front of Monsieur le Comte.’

‘If you don’t want to be treated like a child, then don’t you think you had better start behaving like a wife?’ Charles snapped, looking swiftly up at her before quickly returning his gaze to the book on his lap.

She took a step into the room. ‘What do you mean?’

He still couldn’t bring himself to look at her. ‘You know precisely what I mean,’ he muttered.

Clementine blushed. ‘Oh, that...’ She tried to back away towards the door but to her shock he jumped up from the sofa and got there first, closing it with a bang behind her.

He took her chin in his fingers. ‘Yes, Madame Wife, that.’ He was talking quickly and too loudly now in his haste to get the words out, to say what he had desperately wanted for months to say before awkwardness prevented him again. ‘I have tried to be understanding. I think that I have been a kind and considerate husband and in return I ask for only one thing, which you have consistently denied me.’

Clementine pulled her face away from his grasp. ‘I thought we were waiting,’ she whispered, always conscious of the servants who tiptoed around the echoing mansion.

He shook his head. ‘I have waited for well over a year, Clementine.’

She took a step away from him. ‘I need more time, Charles.’
 

‘I don’t understand.’ Her husband stared at her. ‘Do you no longer wish to be my wife, is that it? Or do you just find me utterly repulsive? You certainly did not seem to find me so when we were first married.’
 

She sighed. ‘No, of course I don’t.’ She reached out to touch his arm but then decided against it. ‘I don’t know why, Charles. I just feel too young for all of this.’ She gestured around the splendid
salon
with its gilt panelling, painted ceiling and portraits of long dead Coulanges lining the walls.
 

‘You should have considered this before you agreed to marry me,’ he replied coldly. ‘You knew exactly what marriage to me would entail so don’t insult my intelligence by feigning maidenly innocence now.’

‘I didn’t really know anything about it,’ she said. ‘You know that I wasn’t born to this, Charles. How could I possibly have known how what it would be like to be married to someone like you?’ She hesitated for a moment before saying the words that had been clamouring inside her for release for months. ‘Our marriage was a mistake. I see that now and I am truly sorry for it.’

He stared at her. ‘Is there someone else?’

Clementine almost laughed but instead sadly shook her head. ‘How can there be, when you watch me so closely?’

Charles tried to take her hand but she snatched it away. ‘I want you to be my wife.’ He looked at her imploringly. ‘I don’t know what else to do. Clementine, tell me what to do.’

She shook her head. ‘It’s too late. I can’t be the wife that you deserve, Charles.’ She turned to go to the door, her legs shaking beneath her. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘No.’ He reached out and took hold of her shoulder, tearing the delicate white silk of her dress. ‘Don’t go.’

She turned towards him, her eyes wide with sudden fear. She’d never seen him like this before. ‘Charles, what are you doing?’ She fought against him as he pulled her to him and clumsily tried to kiss her lips as she desperately averted her face. ‘Don’t do this.’

He was breathing heavily now, half mad with desperate lust as he half pushed, half wrestled her to the floor then knelt in between her legs. ‘Don’t deny me, Clementine.’ He kissed her neck, her exposed bosom, her ears as she cried and struggled beneath him. ‘Please don’t stop me.’

She screamed as he fumbled with her voluminous silk and gauze skirts and would have screamed again but it was muffled as he put his large hand over her mouth. ‘Charles, please...’ she mumbled against his palm as he unfastened his breeches and blindly thrust inside her...

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Clementine though that the gardens of the stately Palais Royal had never looked lovelier as she sat wearily down on a green painted wooden bench. The fashion that autumn was for simple
 
flowing white gowns, designed to evoke the beautiful simplicity of ancient Rome and the modish ladies of Paris made a striking sight as they strolled along beneath the trees.

‘Everything is changing so quickly,’ Eliza said with a sigh as she sat down beside her sister and arranged her white silk and gauze skirts becomingly. ‘Do you remember the huge panniered gowns that Mama used to wear and how envious we were of them? All of that is gone now.’

‘I won’t miss any of it,’ Clementine replied, still watching the other ladies as they walked and chattered together. ‘Those dresses were horribly unflattering and so hot and heavy to wear.’ She looked down at her simple muslin dress with a wide red silk sash around the waist. ‘This is much more pleasant.’ She waved to Venetia as she came over holding her fair haired son Alexandre by the hand and carrying Eliza’s little Georges on her hip. ‘How wonderful Venetia is with the children.’

Eliza gave a tiny shrug. ‘The company of children doesn’t really enthral me,’ she said before giving her sister a sidelong look. ‘They chatter on and on and make the most appalling smells. You’ll see.’

Clementine blushed and looked away. ‘Perhaps.’ She stood up and went to meet Venetia with a smile, taking Georges from her and relishing the soft peachy baby scent of the top of his head. ‘You are a sweetheart, Georgey,’ she whispered to him as the toddler cooed and grabbed at her smiling face.

Venetia laughed and twirled her son around as he laughed and screamed with delight. ‘Practising, Clementine?’ she asked, with a glance at her friend’s slender waist. ‘You certainly have a rather sickly glow about you these days.’

Clementine looked startled. ‘Do I?’ She wasn’t a fool - even the desultory preparation that Mrs Garland had given her before her marriage had been enough for her to know that the game was up when her monthly courses failed to appear and she began to feel queasy and dizzy at odd times of the day. She’d hugged her secret close for weeks now, hardly trusting herself to confide in Sidonie and fearing even to tell her sister and closest friends in case they joked as usual about her marital dealings with her husband.
 

Even the Duc didn’t know. She gave a little shudder as she thought of her husband. He had been politely distant ever since that terrible night in August and she had seen even less of him than usual, which was a relief as she could hardly bear to be in the same room as him. She’d thought about running away back to England but there was no point - her mother would be furious to have her back again and she had nowhere else to go.