On My Lady's Honor (All for one, and one for all) (34 page)

She shivered in the chill of the night air.
 
Suddenly conscious of her state of undress, she crawled back under the warm covers.
 
She must not forget the other battle she had to fight.
 
“Wake me in four hours and I shall do my turn.”

She’d thought that after her scare she would never relax enough to sleep, but she was wrong.
 
Her head had barely touched the pillow when her eyes drifted shut of their own accord, and was fell fast asleep.

She woke again in the darkness before early dawn.
 
She turned over and was about to sink back into sleep again when she remembered Lamotte, still on guard duty.
 
Trust him not to have woken her, she thought with a grumble.
 
He would have woken any male companion to share the watch with him.

She rolled out of bed and threw on her clothes.
 
“Get some sleep,” she instructed Lamotte, whose head was drooping with weariness.
 
“Or you shall be no use at all.”

He took her reproof meekly, lay down on the covers in his clothes and was asleep in no time at all.
 

She undid the shutters and watched the pale dawn break over the horizon, resisting the temptation to watch him as he slept.
 
Guard duty was a good time for thinking.
 

They would have to ride full speed ahead to England now.
 
They could not afford to dally along the way – not with the King sending riders out after them to murder them in their beds.
 
Three more days of hard riding would see them at Calais, from where they could find a boat to take them to England easily enough.
 
The two countries, though always suspicious of each other, were not currently at war, so boats to take them across the Channel would be plentiful enough.

A smuggler’s boat would be the best, if they could find one.
 
That way they could make their way into England quietly, without the King’s spies able to track their movements so easily.

She glanced at Lamotte, lying outstretched on the bed, snoring softly in his sleep.
 
There would be no more nights of sleeping in one bed together, curled up close to keep each other warm.
 
One of them would always have to keep wakeful on watch – at least until they had delivered their message to the King of England and made a safe return to Paris.

Their enforced separation would be a relief in so many ways.
 
She would no longer have to rely on her willpower to keep her away from distraction – the situation they were in would do that for them without her having to try.
 
She still could not face up to her own behavior with any degree of equanimity.
 
Her own wantonness and her capitulation to her own desire had shocked her.
 
She had no time or energy to deal with what that meant to her right now, not while she was in the middle of a mission that could not be delayed.
 
There would be time enough to deal with her feelings when they had reached England and given their message to the King of England.

Still, a little voice whispered in her ear that her husband had not been shocked by her.
 
Indeed, he had encouraged her, and had seemed to enjoy her reaction to his caresses.
 
Maybe this was how married couples were supposed to act - she did not know.

His chest was rising and falling with every breath he took, his eyelids fluttering as if he were having disturbing dreams.
 
She could avoid being close to him for the rest of their journey, but she could not avoid him forever.
 

She watched the sun come up over the horizon, sending its pale yellow fingers out into the sky.
 
Sooner or later their mission would be at an end, they would return to France, and she would have to work out what to do about her husband.

She had vowed to protect the honor of her family and win honor for the name of her brother.
 
One thing at least was clear to her - she could not do that as Lamotte’s wife.

If only, she thought to herself, as she gazed at his sleeping form, if only she had not fallen in love with her husband, deeply and helplessly in love with him, the path she should take at this crossroads in her life would be far more clear.

Calais was bustling with activity when they finally reached it, exhausted with their days of riding and their nights sharing the watch.
 
They were not disturbed in the darkness again, nor were there any signs that they were being followed, save for a prickly feeling in the back of Sophie’s neck every so often that made her feel as though she was being watched.
 
However often she turned her head at odd moments, she did not catch any glimpse of their pursuers, but she could not shake off her uneasy feeling.

The lack of obvious pursuit made her more, not less, edgy.
 
Their pursuers must have some trick up their sleeve.

As they drew close tot he wharf, they dismounted and made their way over the cobbles on foot, leading the horses behind them.
 
They must look like a right pair of disreputable rogues, Sophie thought, as she followed in Lamotte’s footsteps through the town.
 
With hair unwashed and clothes stained with days of travel and so caked with mud they were unrecognizable as uniforms of the King’s soldiers, they looked like a pair of not so prosperous horse-traders.

At one point, a couple of fat merchants even stopped them in the streets and tried to buy one of Lamotte’s steeds, offering him an absurdly paltry sum of money for his fine Arabian mare.
 
They were hoping, no doubt, that the pair of them were foolish as well as poor.
 
Taken by surprise, she merely stared stupidly at them.
 
Lamotte growled at them so fiercely in a thick Patois that they backed off again in a hurry.

The docks were busier than Sophie could have imagined, and the sea, when they finally reached it, was far vaster.
 
She gazed in wonderment at the huge expanse of blueness that stretched out as far as the eye could see.
 
In the horizon, the sea and the sky melted together until she could not see where the one stopped and the other began.
 
Gulls wheeled overhead, calling to each other with raucous voices.
 
The air smelled of salt and fish and tar.

Lamotte tossed the reins over to her.
 
She caught them and held them tight, unwilling to tear her eyes away from the blue green ocean.
 
“Look after the beasts,” he said, as he strode off to find out which ships were sailing on the next tide, and to arrange their passage over to England.

She stayed where he had left her, holding the horses and gazing out at the water.
 
This was the water she had to cross, the water that would take her to England.
 
She shivered at the cold blueness of it, at the white-capped waves that broke against the pier, making the air hazy with showers of finely misted droplets that hung in the sunlight like fog.

She had never imagined what the sea would be like.
 
She knew only the still ponds and marshes of the home in the Camargue, or the river that flowed swiftly through Paris, dank and dirty with the refuse of a thousand city dwellers.
 
They were deserts compared with the sight that was spread out before her eyes.
 
She had not known there was this much water in the world.

For the first time since she had left Paris she was tempted to give up her mission, to turn back before she had completed it.
 
The sea was so alien and strange to her.
 
The thought of crossing it with only a few planks of wood to protect her from the cruelty of the water beneath her feet filled her with a sense of horror.
 
She wanted to go back to Paris, shut her eyes and ears and pretend that she had never heard of honor – or of Henrietta.

She could not do that.
 
However much she feared the water, she was honor bound to complete her mission.
 
Still, she could not help but hope as she stood watching the water, her unease growing by the moment, that Lamotte would not be able to find a captain who could be persuaded, cajoled or bribed to take them over to England.

It seemed an age of water-watching before he returned.
 
She misliked the man he brought back with him – a burly seaman with a long, grizzled black beard and a nasty habit of spitting on the ground each time he said anything.
 
Her dislike of crossing the water intensified and focused on this one man until she could believe quite readily that he was the agent of the Devil, come to doom her to destruction.

Lamotte and the Captain carried on their negotiations, unaware of the hatred from her eyes.

“Two of you to be carried over?”

“Two of us.”

The seaman ran his hands over the legs of Sophie’s precious Seafoam.
 
“She’s a mite skinny.”

She glared at the captain, and then again at Lamotte.
 
She had plenty of pistoles for their passage.
 
What was he doing promising her horse to this man?
 
Seafoam had belonged to Gerard and he had served her well.
 
She would never part with him.
 
“My horse is not for sale.”

Lamotte shook his head.
 
“Not that one - the brown gelding.”

The captain humphed and looked dismissively at the gelding that Sophie led.
 
“I’ll take you both to England for the mare.”

Sophie opened her mouth to protest, but Lamotte forestalled her.
 
“The mare is not for sale,” he said smoothly.
 
“The gelding or nothing.”

With a grunt, the captain slouched over to the gelding, ran his hands over its flanks and peered in his mouth.
 
“He’s too long in the tooth.”

Lamotte crossed his arms over his chest and said nothing.
 

The captain lifted the gelding’s foreleg and inspected the foot.
 
“He’s knock-kneed and he needs re-shoeing.”

Sophie held tight to Seafoam’s reins.
 
There was no way she was letting this man get hold of her precious horse.
 
She would go and find another captain herself who would not demand such an outrageous price for carrying them over the water.

The captain spat once more on the ground for emphasis.
 
“He’s fit for nothing but dog-tucker.
 
He’s not worth passage for two.”

Lamotte shrugged his shoulders.
 
“If you’re not interested…”

“But I suppose I’ll do you a favor, seeing as I’ve got a kind heart,” the captain hastily interjected.
 
“As long as you throw in the saddle with the horse.”

Lamotte spat in his hand and held it out to be shaken.
 
Sophie could see he was well-pleased with the bargain he had struck.
 
“Done.”

“We leave this evening on the turn of the tide,” the captain said, giving a toothless smile.
 
“Don’t be late.
 
My boat and I wait for no man, however much he may offer me to stay or however urgent his business may be.
 
If you’re late, you won’t be coming with me.
 
And I won’t be givin’ back your horse, neither.”

“We have plenty of gold pistoles to pay for our passage,” Sophie hissed in his ear as they walked off to find food and a stable for their remaining horses.
 
“Why did you not just pay him what he asked?”

“Would you have me wave a bag of gold under his nose, whetting his appetite and putting us in danger of being tossed overboard a few miles out to sea so he can safely abscond with the lot?
 
Far better that he think we are poor and have to sell one of our horses for passage.
 
We are more likely to make it to England alive.”

Put that way, it was hard to argue with.

“Besides,” he added, “I do not like to keep the horse of the man you killed so neatly with an arrow in the neck.
 
Inconspicuous as it is, someone may yet recognize it and have us hanged for horse thieves and murderers.”

She rubbed her neck thoughtfully.
 
Put that way, it was even harder to argue with.
 
She had no desire to have her neck stretched on the end of the hangman’s rope.

By the time they had concluded all their business ashore, there was scarce on hour left till the turn of the tide.
 
Sophie wandered along the docks, a feeling of nervous excitement building in the pit of her belly.
 
She was about to leave the shores of France, for the first time in her life, and travel over the wide, blue sea to a new land where they even spoke in a whole new tongue.
 
Once upon a time, not so long ago, a visit to Paris had been the height of her ambition.
 
A visit to London had been so far out her reach that it was utterly unthinkable.
 
Now, thanks to her life as Gerard, to her life as a Musketeer, the unthinkable was about to become a reality.