The Sometime Bride (60 page)

“
That was part of it,” Cat conceded. “I thought if you truly cared enough to follow me to France, there might be hope.”

Alex reached out tentative fingers to stroke her cheek. Gently but firmly, she pushed his hand away. “There is more. You must hear it all.”

Cat clasped her hands tightly in her lap. “In a way my enlightenment began with Wrexham. He was so
relieved
when I refused his offer.”

“
Of
marriage
?” Alex questioned, clearly incredulous.

“
Yes,” Cat confirmed, well beyond being insulted. “I was truly surprised. And then there was Norwell.”

“
Norwell?” Alex echoed. “Your cousin . . . Ailesbury’s heir?”

“
That was when reality overwhelmed me. It was very lowering. I found myself refusing him not only because he was a charming boy with whom I would have been bored in as little as half a day, but because he was far too good for me. Even if I had thought we would suit, I would not have accepted him. I was, you see, not a proper wife for the future Earl of Ailesbury.

“
No!
Tais toi!
” Cat commanded, holding up her hand. “It is true. I have led a most irregular life. Though it is only recently I have understood just how shocking it was.”

“
And Beaufort?” Alex inquired, pressing the advantage of Cat’s burst of contrition.

Idly, Cat traced a design on the counterpane, avoiding his steady regard. “If you had not come to France, I would have married him. With Auguste I felt I had a much better chance for a life of peace and contentment than I had any right to expect. He is an honorable man. I assure you he never touched me. So honorable, in fact, he made it clear that if I reject you, I may still return to him. And still his offer will be marriage. But when you came after me . . . I had to accept you truly wanted me. It could have been injured pride but, no matter how angry you made me, I have never felt you were that small a person.”

Cat bowed her head, dropping her eyes to hands which were still tightly clasped in her lap. She and Alex were little more than a foot apart, yet it was still a chasm. Now was the time to find out if she could make this final, vital concession. “You see,” she said, unable to meet his eyes, “you see, there was something else I had to face. I did not consciously plan it, but when I came away with Auguste, I did to you something quite as terrible as you had done to me.”

When Cat peeped at him from under her lashes, she saw a blaze of hope shining from his amber eyes. “No . . . hear me out,” she added swiftly. “I also realized your own conduct has been so dreadful I need not feel you are making a mismatch. We are both quite improper and shockingly exceptional. We are undoubtedly destined for each other, as who else could stand us?”

Once, in the mountains, Alex had had a knife wound followed by a raging fever. The weakness he felt now was just as bad. He sagged into the bed, his head dropping into his hands. Somehow it had all come right, and he was too bloody weak to move.

Cat came up on her knees, shuffling the short distance between them. She clasped her arms around his chest, fingering the soft folds of the white shirt, knowing she had come home at last. Her head snuggled into the hollow beneath his shoulder. “I am most shockingly in love with you, you know,” she whispered huskily. “Now that we have done such dreadful things to each other, perhaps we shall be able to live out our lives more peacefully than most.”

With fierce joy Alex’s arms tightened around her. “Who wants peace?” he growled.

Still tightly locked together, they tumbled full length onto the bed.

Hours later, Cat was roused from a sleep of emotional satiation as well as physical exhaustion as the rocking of the barge changed from gentle to purposeful. “Alex, wake up!” she whispered to the sleeping figure beside her. “We’re moving!”

Instantly awake, he pulled her tightly against him, once again fitting together the full length of their naked bodies. Calmly, he agreed with her. “Well, of course we are. I told them to cast off before dawn.”

“
Cast off?” Cat was aghast. “Where are we going, if I may ask?”

“
Down the Seine to Le Havre.”

“
Le Havre! On a barge. You are quite mad!”

She felt him chuckle, a deep throaty sound which quite distracted her from her annoyance at his customary high-handedness. “I would have you know it was not the easiest thing in the world to pry this barge loose from the sybaritic gentleman who owns it. I had to appeal to the romance in his soul. I told him my wife and I had never had a wedding trip and I felt his boat would provide the absolute privacy we desired. That, and a great deal of money, did the trick. We have a captain, a cook and two crewmen, so we neither have to steer nor fend for ourselves. We might peek at the cathedral in Rouen, but frankly,
queridissima
, I’d prefer to spend all our time in bed.”

Cat signified her agreement with this suggestion by snuggling a hand into the crevices of her husband’s inner thigh.

When Alex got his breath back, he added, “Father’s yacht will meet us in Le Havre and take us to England.” He paused, his ebullience momentarily ebbing. “I fear mother has her heart set on a grand wedding at St. George’s. Will you mind? She wishes to invite half the
ton
and Prinny as well so there will be no doubts this time.”

Oh, Lord, he’d done it again. Her silence unnerved him. Had he offended her? Alex congratulated himself on his choice of transportation. At least his Cat had nowhere to run.

“
It is some days journey to Le Havre,” Cat mused, her lips brushing his ear, “and large weddings take a good deal of preparation. I fear we may be married later than I could have wished.”

“
If you think I mean for you to play propriety until we’re properly wed . . .” Abruptly, he broke off his sentence, raising his head to stare at his wife whose sparkling eyes were now clearly visible in the rays of early sunlight penetrating the portholes. “Just what
did
you mean?” he inquired sharply.

“
Well . . .” Cat refused to meet his look, fastening her gaze firmly on the patterning in the counterpane. “I should not care to be embarrassed by having to explain to the
next
Marquess of Harborough why he was nearly the bastard his father only pretended to be.”

Cat waited for the explosion.

“
I don’t know whether to kiss you or wring your neck!” Alex roared. “My God, what if I hadn’t followed you? You would have let Beaufort raise my child?”

“
I was raising his,” Cat replied with sweet reasonableness. “Besides, it is only very recently I have been sure,” she added, injured innocence radiating from every pore.

Alex sat up in the luxurious bed, hugging his knees, staring blindly at Paris sliding by outside. What a devil of a coil it had been.
Damn you, Thomas, I hope you’re satisfied.

“
I believe,” said Blas the Bastard to his sometime wife, “that this is where I say, ‘Come on and kiss me, Cat.’“ Well satisfied with his quote, he pronounced, “For our sins I sentence us to a week in bed.” Alex slid beneath the covers, suiting his actions to his words, raising his lips from his wife’s only long enough to murmur, “Maybe two.”

The barge drifted quietly down the Seine. It was, most happily, a long, slow journey to Le Havre.

Epilogue

June 19,1815 - Belgium

It was just past noon. The Trowbridge twins sat slumped on their horses on the ridge of a hill overlooking a shallow valley. Beside them was the elm tree which marked the place where, the day before, the Duke of Wellington had directed the battle which put a final end to Napoleon Bonaparte’s dreams of empire.

Alex raised his spyglass and began to search the field, the sudden magnification of the carnage below causing his stomach to clench in agony. Beside him he heard Tony swear as his glass reflected similar images of horror.

Wisps of smoke still rose over a tangle of dead horses and mules, gun caissons, ammunition carts and all the other detritus of war. Among the debris lay fifty thousand men, the dead and the dying, the wounded too badly injured to crawl away in the dark of the night. But the field was far from lifeless. Grim and determined men of both sides moved among the bodies, searching for those who could be helped. Scattered among them were wives, children, friends. And scavengers—the inevitable underbelly of battle.

“
Do you recall the position of the
chasseurs
?” Alex asked.

“
I think they were part of that big cavalry charge toward the west, but with all the smoke I couldn’t really tell. How Wellington could see what was happening, I’ll never know.”

“
Then just look for bright green. I doubt any but the
chasseurs
wear that particular shade.”

The twins guided their horses farther along the ridge of the hill, pausing frequently to search the field below with their spyglasses. “I hope you appreciate the irony,” Tony said, tight-lipped, after their fourth stop to make yet another painstaking perusal of a section of the valley below. “Any one of hundreds of men we know could be down there. And here we are, looking for a bloody Frenchman. For all we know he’s halfway back to Paris.”

“
I can do it by myself.”

But Tony didn’t hear his brother’s testy reply. “To the right,” he called out, then once again put his glass to his eye. “Bright green . . . and horses. Looks like the remains of a
chasseur
regiment to me.”

Alex gave a curt nod. “That’s it then.” He shoved his spyglass back into its case and snapped the lid.

“
I doubt we can maneuver the horses down there,” Tony said.

“
No, best leave them here,” Alex agreed. They tied their horses to an overturned British gun limber, slung their satchels of food and canteens over their shoulders and started down the hill.

Tony was probably right, Alex admitted to himself as they began their slow descent into the hell below. What was he doing here? A married man. Father of a six-months-old daughter. It had not seemed so reckless when they had first come to Brussels—an amazing number of the
ton
had done the same. And all because a man of short stature and quicksilver mind refused to pass quietly into history.

When Lady Elspeth Blanche Trowbridge was three months old, Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from the island of Elba and marched through France, gathering his troops behind him. The cream of Britain’s Peninsular veterans, including Captain William Audley, had been sent to teach the upstart Americans a lesson, and had been led into disaster by generals who thought they could fight the swamps of New Orleans like the plains of Spain. There was no way to get the remnants of Britain’s once proud army home in time to fight the resurrected little Emperor.

So it was men like Gordon Somersby who had sold their commissions and William’s father, General Sir Quinton Audley—on the verge of retirement—who took up the gauntlet and hurried back to Wellington’s side. The Trowbridge twins who never expected, or wanted, to go to war again packed up their wives and the first of the next generation of seven young Trowbridges and headed for Brussels where the Duke of Wellington was hastily assembling an allied army a hundred thousand strong.

Arrayed against Wellington’s few old soldiers and thousands of raw recruits were proud French veterans like Colonel Auguste Beaufort, who were appalled by Fat Louis’s monarchy, and rank upon rank of bitter soldiers like Jacques Pelletier and his cohorts. The odds for an allied victory were not good.

Tony and Alex went back to making maps, scouting possible battlefield sites. And yet, they had been as surprised as everyone else when the French, moving with the legendary speed of old, crossed into Belgium where no one expected them. When the massed armies met in a final climactic battle in a shallow valley not far from Brussels, it seemed impossible the French could lose. Only as the last rays of the setting sun revealed the Prussian army arriving to Wellington’s relief; only as the fading light cast a final benediction over six square miles of dead and wounded, could the Duke of Wellington draw breath and declare the allies victorious.

Napoleon’s empire had been washed away in the blood of Europe’s best and brightest. Wellington, never without a strong sense of history, chose to name his epic victory after a nearby Belgian village, very possibly because it would be easy for his countrymen to pronounce.

He called the battle
Waterloo
.

At nearly midnight on June 18, 1815, Alex and Tony had ridden into Brussels to the waiting arms of their anxious wives. And now, twelve hours later, they were back on the battlefield. Searching for an enemy.

Unable to pass by the wounded and the dying without giving aid, the twins’ passage down the hill toward the area where the bright green of the
chasseurs
could be seen was slow. Painstakingly, the twins examined every body clad in the spring green jacket and trousers of Auguste Beaufort’s regiment. A few still lived. None were Auguste Beaufort.

Alex leaned back against an overturned cart. Shading his eyes against the sun, he gave the area a last lingering look. If Beaufort was here, they had missed him. They had given away the last of their food and water to those who still lived. Nowhere else was there any sign of the distinctive uniform of the
chasseurs
. They would have to return to Brussels and admit they could not find André’s father.