Before the Storm (31 page)

Clementine blushed. ‘That was kind of her,’ she murmured, turning away. She hadn’t seen Cécile since her wedding day but had recently heard from Sidonie that to no one’s surprise she was planning to marry a very handsome but most unsuitable young man that her father loudly disapproved of.

An uncomfortable silence fell between them as they stood together in the middle of the hall until finally she turned back to him, unable to remain silent any longer. ‘Three years,’ she said. ‘You’ve been gone for over three years and by the sounds of things, you never intended to come back.’

He stared at her then shook his head slowly. ‘No, I didn’t,’ he admitted with some difficulty before reaching out and taking her hand in his own firm grasp. ‘At first though, I thought about nothing else but returning until...’

She returned his gaze. ‘Until...’ she whispered.

‘Until I realised that there was nothing left in France to draw me back again,’ he said in a low voice.
 

Clementine put her head on one side. ‘And now?’ she asked in a voice so low that he had to strain to hear her. ‘Is there still nothing here for you?’

Chapter Thirty-Four

Clementine stayed up all night in her husband’s library on the ground floor of the house and was dozing on a comfortable sofa beside the fire when the door quietly opened and Charles, grimy, blood splattered and exhausted but very much alive tiptoed into the room. He stood for a moment looking down at his wife then slowly reached out to gently touch a long ringlet of auburn hair that had tumbled over the arm of the sofa.

‘Charles? Is that you?’ She sleepily opened her eyes and looked up at him then sat up in shock as she took in his disheveled state. ‘My God, Charles, what happened?’

He sat down heavily on a chair opposite her and stared at his grazed hands for a moment before answering, clearly choosing his words carefully. ‘The mob got into the palace and slaughtered almost everyone who stood in their path,’ he said. ‘The Queen’s ladies were spared but those who did not manage to escape were rounded up and taken to prison.’

Clementine gasped, remembering them all as she had last seen them, clustered together like frightened flowers, their eyes wide with fear, the smiles slowly draining from their faces as the crowd roared and screamed in the gardens below. ‘How did you get away?’ she asked in a low voice.

‘I ran,’ he said simply, unable to meet her eyes. ‘I ran and hid.’ He ran his fingers nervously through his sandy hair. ‘When the screaming had stopped, I left my hiding place and came straight here.’ He reached across for a carafe of red wine that stood on a table and Clementine immediately got up and poured some into a glass before handing it to him. ‘There were bodies everywhere,’ he muttered in between choking gulps of wine.

‘The Swiss Guards, most of the men who came to the palace to defend the King, all of the palace servants...’

Clementine closed her eyes and held on to the edge of the table. ‘All dead,’ she whispered, remembering the young men who had arrived at the Tuileries the previous day with their swords and shy bravado. ‘
They’ll all be dead by nightfall tomorrow,
’ the other lady in waiting had said and so they were, hacked into pieces by a vengeful mob while defending a King who wasn’t even there any more, who had abandoned them to their fate.

Charles watched her as he finished his wine then clumsily reached for the carafe to pour another glass. ‘You should go back to London,’ he said at last with a weary shrug. ‘I can no longer be sure that you will be safe here.’

His wife stared at him. ‘Back to London?’ she repeated stupidly. ‘You want me to leave?’

He drained the last dregs of wine from his glass and wiped his sleeve across his mouth, too tired to care how this looked. ‘Of course I don’t want you to leave,’ he said. ‘I want you to be safe though.’

‘You don’t think Paris is safe any more?’ she asked quietly. ‘You’ve said all along that this will all blow over and things will go back the way they were before...’

Charles shook his head almost angrily. ‘I don’t believe that any more,’ he said. ‘I think that things will never be the same again and that we are all on a downward slide to some sort of hell.’ He poured himself another glass of wine. ‘Clementine, I know that matters have been difficult between us but please believe me when I say that I never wanted to hurt you and would give my life now to protect you.’

His wife regarded him dubiously then slowly nodded. ‘I know, Charles,’ she whispered, ‘but I don’t want to go back to London.’

He looked confused. ‘But you said...’

She moved away. ‘I know what I said,’ she whispered a little shakily. ‘I meant it at the time but now I see that I was being foolish and that my place is here in Paris.’

‘With me?’ her husband asked timidly, standing up and taking her in his arms.

She hesitated then nodded, pushing the thought of Antoine forcibly from her mind. ‘With you.’ She lifted her face and allowed him to kiss her. Perhaps it would all work out? ‘You are still my husband and we were very fond of each other once,’ she said in a low, shy voice. ‘Perhaps we could be fond of each other again.’

He kissed her forehead and pulled her tighter. ‘I hope so,’ he whispered into her tumbled auburn hair, breathing in her soft scent of lavender and lilies. ‘I have longed for this, Clementine.’

His wife closed her eyes so that he wouldn’t see the expression in them. Her heart was telling her to run away from him and this sham of a marriage they had built up between them as fast as she could, but her head advised caution. She knew that leaving her husband would cause an immense scandal and result in becoming a pariah, ignored and ostracised by all polite society who would consider it their duty to turn their backs on her. Clementine didn’t care what the wider chattering reaches of society thought of her, but the prospect of being cast out by her closest friends and family was too painful to be contemplated. She wasn’t ready for that yet.

She had once tried to tell her sister about Charles forcing her that terrible night so long ago, but Eliza had cut her hesitant stammering off with an impatient flick of her hand. ‘I don’t understand what you are complaining about,’ she’d hissed coldly. ‘Monsieur le Duc has given you a title and true precedence in the world and in return you think nothing of denying him his right to an heir?’

Clementine had been aghast. She knew that such things were not exactly considered unusual and that in agreeing to marry Charles, she had also tacitly pledged to provide him with the all important heir, but even so she had expected more sympathy from her own sister. ‘But he forced me, Eliza,’ she protested.

‘Nonsense,’ Eliza said with real annoyance. ‘How could he force you? It is his right.’

Although she suspected that Sidonie would be a sympathetic ear, Clementine had never mentioned it again to anyone again and had hugged her terrible secret close, praying that time would either erase it from her memory or make it less painful. Now though, as she allowed Charles to hug her and even clumsily kiss the side of her neck as she tried her best not to cry or push him away, it felt as rawly terrible as it had always done.

The next few days were tense and strange as they tried to reconstruct their shattered marriage. Charles treated his wife with careful courtesy and shy affection, while she quietly accepted this and did her best to smile and not move away whenever he touched her.

On the second night, Clementine was woken up in the middle of the night by a timid tapping at her door, which then opened to admit her husband, barefooted and dressed in a long white linen nightshirt covered with an embroidered crimson silk dressing gown into the room. He was carrying a lit candle in his hand and its soft glow cast terrifying shadows into the corners of the room as he looked slowly around then advanced on tiptoe towards the pink taffeta hung Polonaise bed, where Clementine warily watched him while pretending to still be asleep.

Slowly, he reached out to touch her shoulder then gave her a tiny shake. ‘Clementine,’ he whispered, ‘are you awake?’

She considered ignoring him until he went away but then decided that this was going against the spirit of their attempt at reconciliation and so warily sat up, pulling her lace edged nightgown up to cover her breasts as she did so. It was too late though, she had noticed him glance at them and this made her recoil a little against her embroidered pillows.
 

‘May I stay?’ he asked, stammering a little as he put down his ornate silver candlestick on the table beside her, splashing candle wax on the polished inlaid wood. ‘I couldn’t sleep and hoped that you would not mind.’

Clementine stared up at him, not knowing what to say. ‘I was asleep,’ she murmured at last, not wanting him to remain in her room but not wishing to cause offence. ‘I’m sorry, Charles.’

He nodded, accepting this but did not move away from the bed. ‘Perhaps I could just stay and sleep here beside you?’ he suggested. ‘I wouldn’t do anything...’ His voice trailed away as she stared up at him.

She sighed resignedly. ‘I would rather that you didn’t,’ she said, reaching out to take his hand, which felt very hot and sweaty within in her own. ‘I’m so very tired, Charles and need to sleep. Maybe tomorrow instead?’

Her husband looked down at her for a moment without speaking then gently pulled his hand away and picked up his candle again. ‘Of course,’ he murmured, diffidently as he turned away and went slowly to the door. ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you.’

The door closed with a gentle click behind him and she waited a few minutes, listening intently, before silently jumping from her bed and locking it behind him. It was only then that she realised that she was trembling with fear and that her heart was pounding painfully against her rib cage.

Chapter Thirty-Five

The next evening they were due to go to a fashionable restaurant in the Palais Royal for Venetia’s birthday. After recent events in the city, Clementine had expected her friend to cancel the gathering but Venetia had sent a lily scented note around to the Place Louis le Grand earlier in the day insisting that it was still going ahead and pointing out in her florid scrawl that ‘
If we stayed in because of the Mob, we’d never go outside at all
’, which Sidonie, who was visiting when the note arrived, pointed out in her quiet way was very true.

As always, Charles was invited but when Clementine came downstairs dressed in her newest gown of teal blue and white striped silk with a fine muslin
fichu
arranged around her shoulders and teal velvet roses pinned into her curled auburn hair, she found her husband slumped in a chair in front of a lit fire with a glass of wine in one hand and clearly no intention of going anywhere.

‘I’m sorry, my dear,’ he said as she regarded him quizzically from the doorway. ‘Please apologise to Venetia for me.’

Clementine stepped into the room and hesitantly walked towards him. ‘Are you sure that you do not want to come with me?’ she asked with a look of concern. ‘Perhaps going outside and seeing people would make you feel better?’

He gave a mirthless laugh then and finished his wine before immediately replenishing the glass from a carafe that stood on a small table at his elbow. ‘How young you are,’ he said, peering at her over the rim of his glass and ignoring the fact that he wasn’t much older than her. ‘I wish that I still believed that drinking with good company would make me happy again.’

‘It has got to be better for you than drinking alone,’ Clementine responded with a grim smile. ‘Please, Charles, I can’t bear to leave you alone like this.’

‘Then stay,’ he said, waving his glass so that it spilled wine all down his breeches. ‘Stay here with me. I’ll ring for another bottle.’ Only then did he notice the wine trickling down his legs and with a curse he began to clumsily wipe it away with his hand.
 

Clementine shook her head. ‘I’ve already promised Venetia that I will be there,’ she said, moving quickly back to the door. ‘I won’t stay out for long though.’

‘You promise?’ Charles asked, standing up and swaying slightly as she swept from the room with a single frightened backward look over her shoulder. ‘I’ll wait here for you.’

It was already dark when Clementine hurried down the steps of the Hôtel de Coulanges to the carriage that waited at the bottom, which was to take her the short distance to the Palais Royal. There was a time when she would have insisted upon setting out on foot, ignoring the scandalised looks of the servants but times had changed and now she had to admit that she felt safer in the carriage as they rushed over the cobbles of the gloomy city streets. Something was happening again and small crowds were hanging about on the street corners, passing bottles of wine between them and spitting at carriages as they went past.

‘Rich whore!’ a woman screamed at Clementine’s carriage as she went past and she heard a heavy thud of something landing against the door, just beneath the closed window. ‘Keep going!’ she shouted at the driver, sensing that he was slowing down and might stop to see what had hit them. ‘Don’t stop!’

She held her breath until they came to a halt outside the entrance of the Palais Royal and the plain coated postillion sitting at the back of the carriage came round to open the door and help her down. ‘It was just mud, madame,’ he murmured discreetly as she averted her eyes from the carriage door. ‘Don’t trouble yourself over it. I will clean it off while we’re waiting for you.’