Triumph in Arms (20 page)

What would happen now? Did Pingre anticipate returning to his old life? Would he dare face public
scrutiny and attempt setting up residence at Bonne Esèrance again, demanding his rights as a husband and father?

It all depended on the outcome of the duel. What that might be none could say, least of all Christien.

A prickling moved across the back of his neck. The air seemed to shift to a more silken warmth. Reine. So attuned was Christien to her presence that he turned before she fully materialized out of that dimly lit hallway behind him.

She appeared as pale as the gown she still wore, her wedding gown of light blue with its pink ribbon edging. She had removed the lace veil, revealing her hair piled into a crown of ringlets from which a single, shining curl had escaped to lie alongside her neck.

“Madame Pingre,” he said, his voice abrupt.

She paused a bare instant before she came on again.
“Monsieur.”

He had meant to keep some kind of distance between them. It was impossible. Never in this life would he forget how she had looked as she descended the stairs toward him earlier. No bride had ever been more beautiful; nothing had ever so touched his soul as the acceptance in her face as she put her hand in his. Now he stood and watched her come toward him as if gliding on the hems of her skirts, and could hardly bear the thought that this time, this hour, was supposed to have been so different.

They would have stayed at the family gathering long enough to accept due congratulations and reply to the toasts. After an hour or so, Madame Cassard
would have come for Reine and taken her upstairs, helped her undress and put her to bed. When all was ready, he would have been summoned. Entering the bedchamber that was theirs to share, he would have closed the door and locked out everyone and everything except the two of them.

How perfect it would have been to hold her close while they made love to the rhythm of the rain, then fell asleep listening to it pound on the roof. He had almost had that, almost, even if he did not deserve it.

“Have you eaten?” she asked as she drew near.

He shook his head. “Later, perhaps.”

“Alonzo has put back a plate for you. It’s on a warming rack before your bedchamber fireplace, waiting on your convenience.”

“I must remember to thank him.” Christien did not make the mistake of thinking Alonzo had arranged the food on his own. He knew to whom he owed the undeserved consideration. “You managed to eat something?”

“I wasn’t hungry. As you say, possibly later.”

If the wedding had taken place, they might have shared a private supper of champagne, small delicacies and each other. Casting around his mind for something to counteract the effect of that thought on his unruly body, he thought of Madame Cassard. She had been half carried from the chapel to the house, reviving only in the coolness of the rain.

“How fares your mother?”

“I’ve just come from her. She’s resting with a cloth dampened with lavender water on her forehead
and her tisane nearby. I expect she will be all right in the morning.”

“I’m glad to hear it. She seemed overcome by Pingre’s appearance.”

“Yes, it was a shock,” Reine said shortly. Her gaze touched his face and moved away again before she went on. “But not to you, I think.”

“Not entirely.”

“Nor was I surprised.”

His gaze sharpened on her averted face. “What are you saying?”

“I should have told you earlier,” she said with a small shake of her head. “I’d like to remedy that, now that matters have turned out so differently.”

He wasn’t sure, quite suddenly, that he wanted to hear. There were too many secrets at River’s Edge, few of them completely harmless. He turned toward her, putting his back to the post behind him and crossing his arms over his chest.

She stepped to the railing next to him, putting one hand upon it and placing the other on top as she stared out at the falling rain.

Her nearness did strange things to his equilibrium, he realized with a silent groan. He could catch the tantalizing fragrance of roses, lavender and warm female. It was with extreme effort that he gathered his thoughts again, found sufficient words to convey some kind of meaning.

“What would this thing be that you wanted to tell me? Perhaps how you knew your husband was alive?”

“To say I actually knew would be a bit strong,” she
said as a frown crossed her features. “I began to suspect two days ago.”

“How was that?”

She told him, relating how she had heard Chalmette in the night, had gone to Marguerite’s room, then looked out to see an oddly familiar form in the darkness outside the house. She ended with her daughter’s claim that the
loup-garou
had come to her room but Chalmette had scared him away.

“You think Pingre has been the
loup-garou
that’s haunted her.” He felt his heart ease into a calmer beat as he spoke. Reine’s knowledge of Pingre’s masquerade as a dead man did not, apparently, extend back to the beginning.

Her eyes caught the lamplight from the hall in a blue flash as she flung him a quick glance. “I’ve tried to make excuses, to allow him some feeling as a father. He may have wanted to see her, so satisfied the need by slipping into her room to watch her sleep.” She clenched her hands into fists and slammed them on the railing. “Yet how could he bear hearing her cry out as if in nightmare at the merest glimpse of him? How could he not understand he was frightening her to the point of illness? What kind of monster believes his fatherly impulses are more important than the welfare of his daughter?”

The questions were unanswerable. Christien let them go. “Chalmette scared him off that time.”

She gave an unhappy nod. “He knows Theodore, of course, but there is little love lost between them. Theodore used to kick him out of his way when we
visited here. Chalmette even bit him once, when he and Paul came to blows after Theodore’s teasing got out of hand.”

“Dogs have an instinct about people,” Christien allowed, “particularly when it comes to protecting those they love. But why didn’t you call out to me when you caught sight of Theodore? Or tell me later, if it comes to that?”

“It seemed doubtful you would believe the
loup-garou
was real. More than that, I had no idea what you might do.”

“Do?” he asked while holding his anger under stringent control. “What would I do except chase down this specter and show him to Marguerite for what he was?”

“It would not have been a particularly salutary lesson for her if what he turned out to be was dead!”

“I wouldn’t do such a thing.”

“Perhaps not, but I could hardly depend on it. You were—you are—a virtual stranger. You are also the Nighthawk, chief among the Brotherhood of swordsmen, a man who takes to task those who prey on women and children and makes them pay in blood for their sins.”

A stranger, she called him. A stranger, though she had lain beside him in his bed, and more, much more. He turned to grip the railing as she was doing, his hold so fierce he could not feel the ends of his fingers. “How do you know that?”

“About your nighttime activity? I followed you. What of it?”

“You did what?” He was stunned, not least because
he could not believe he had failed to notice her behind him. Where had his mind been? As if he couldn’t guess.

“I watched you leave in the midnight hour of your first evening here. It became necessary to know if you were going to another woman.”

“To Vinot, I only went to see Vinot.”

“But I wasn’t to know that. I’d had one husband who felt climbing into the beds of other women was his birthright. I had no use for another.”

“You trailed after me on the night I was shot, to make certain I would honor our vows.” The pattern was clear now. She had been out riding, all right, just as Mo, the stable boy, had told him.

“I suppose.”

“Yet you were prepared to speak your vows while fearful you had a living husband lurking about the place.”

She gave him an unhappy look. “To call off the wedding on the evidence of a shadow glimpsed for one moment seemed foolish. Besides, I hoped I was wrong.”

“You hoped…” he began.

She went on as if he had not spoken. “Don’t tell me you hadn’t some idea that Theodore was alive. You proposed our marriage in order to force him into the open, but would have gone through with it without turning a hair if it hadn’t worked.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, his voice hard and his gaze raking her face, which had taken on the high color of anger, “I’d have done that.”

“To see if I would refuse at the end, no doubt,
proving that I knew I was not a widow. I’m sorry you were cheated out of that final act. The truth is, no one at River’s Edge guessed Theodore might be alive until it was nearly too late.”

“Forgive me, but that seems hard to credit when Marguerite was terrified of him.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. To her, he was just a phantom, a monster from some ancient superstition.”

“She caught a glimpse of him that night in front of Davis’s theater, I would swear to it. It frightened her, so she ran into the street and almost died. He appeared a monster to her, yes, because of his scars, yet must have looked enough like his portrait to trigger some form of recognition. When I held her as we lay in the street, she said…I thought she was calling me her papa, but she must have been trying to say he had been there.”

Reine pressed her lips together, turning from him. “She did ask about him after that, but I’d told her many times that her papa was in heaven.”

“So she turned him into a
loup-garou
to explain why he was still here.”

A tear gathered at Reine’s lash line and overflowed, making a wet track down her face. “I failed her. I’m her mother, and I didn’t believe her so did nothing. I should have talked to her more about her nightmares and allowed her to tell me her fears. I should have known what was happening.”

“The blame is not yours,” he said in grim certainty.

He leaned on the railing, staring into the wet night through the streams of silver rain that cascaded from
the roof. He had to hold on to something to prevent himself from reaching out to take Reine into his arms to comfort her, to sweep her into the open door of his bedchamber, which was not so far away.

It was impossible. She was a married woman; to touch her would be to commit adultery. In something over twenty-four hours, he would meet her husband with sword in hand. He could be forced to kill him, longed to kill him for reasons that clamored in his head with the force of a hurricane. He wanted to dispatch Theodore Pingre for Sophie, for Marguerite, and most of all for Reine, so she would be free of him.

To kill Theodore could be judged as murder given his skill. It would also be a tactical error. That Pingre had returned from the dead would be a seven-day wonder—add the coming duel and tongues would wag for years. If Reine should marry the man who sent her husband back to his grave, she would be suspected of collusion in the crime and branded as unfit for decent society.

He couldn’t do that to her. Pingre’s resurrection proved conclusively that she was no murderess. She was effectively freed of her status as a social outcast. To return her to it by dispatching her husband, then demanding she marry him as planned, would be self-serving beyond words.

Yet how could he permit Theodore Pingre to claim her?

C
hristien had been different tonight.

It was not to be wondered at given what had occurred, still it troubled Reine. He had behaved with such formality, as if already putting distance between them in preparation for the parting that must surely come. He had called her Madame Pingre in that odious fashion that made it clear he considered her a married lady, therefore open to censure for what had taken place between them in his bedchamber. He had listened to what she had to say, then bowed and left her alone with her doubts and fears and endlessly turning thoughts.

How strange to think of Theodore as being alive. In these past two years, she had grown quite used to the idea that he was gone. Never had she prayed to be a widow, but the role had suited her.

Not that she was so hardened as to wish for his death now, much less suggest to Christien that he arrange it. She would not be human, however, if she didn’t reckon the chances.

No, she didn’t want Theodore to die. She only
wanted the situation to be as it had before he returned. That was clearly impossible. No matter what happened, nothing would ever be the same.

She returned to the evening party, if it could be called such a thing; Theodore’s appearance had cast such a pall it seemed more a wake than anything else. Voices were hushed and conversation lagged. That was except for the whispers in corners. The music played by a trio of musicians on violin, French horn and pianoforte had a lugubrious sound and few were inclined to dance. Appetites were meager, though inroads were made on the chilled wine and spirits served over ice. The children, a part of the gathering by country French tradition, were made fractious and noisy by confinement and the strain that hung in the air, causing parental tempers to fray.

At last, the rain slackened and soon ceased altogether. Guests not staying in the house began to depart. The musicians packed up and climbed into their carriage to return to the city. By midnight the swordsmen and their wives and children were all that remained.

With no incentive to extend the evening, everyone dispersed. The younger children were put to bed in the hall and older boys relegated to the back gallery. One by one, the bedchamber doors closed on their occupying couples and the gleam of lamplight from under the doors vanished. Reine checked on Marguerite, pulling the mosquito
baire
a little closer around the head of her trundle. Then she turned to look at her mother in the tester bed before searching out a quilt in order to make herself a pallet somewhere.

The bedchamber was quiet, lit only by a candle under a hurricane globe. Her mother was sound asleep behind her mosquito netting, with her braided hair trailing over one shoulder and her hands folded on her chest. All strain was gone from her features, wiped away by sleep and the laudanum with which Reine had laced her tisane. She snored gently.

The door opened behind Reine. Her father paused on the threshold, then came forward. “She looks peaceful, does she not? More so than in some time.”

Reine met his gaze. A moment of communication passed between them before she said, “I was thinking the same thing just now.”

“You will stay with her, perhaps, in case she wakes and needs another of her tisanes? You know just how to make them to please her.”

“You mean sleep here?” She indicated the place next to her mother.

“Yes, yes, certainly, as the bridal chamber is denied you. You must not seek a chair or curl up in a corner somewhere after this disaster of an evening. I confess to being exhausted, and you must be a hundred times more so.”

Now that he had mentioned it, she was weary beyond all bearing, almost to the point of being unable to think. She gave a small nod. “Where will you sleep?”

“I will be quite comfortable on the gallery with Paul and Nathaniel. Vinot is there also, you know, as he must stay for this business of a dawn meeting.”

“Are you sure?” she asked doubtfully.

“Most certainly. Though night air is said to be poisonous, I can’t think it true. We always slept outside in hot weather when I was a boy. I’ll quite enjoy the change.”

She went to him and gave him a hug, pressing a kiss to his cheek. “You’re an old humbug, and I won’t take your bed, but I am grateful for the offer all the same.”

“Please,
chère.
I would be much easier in my mind with you there beside your mother.”

It required further protests and more assurances, but exhaustion won in the end. Her father changed in the dressing room, covering his nightshirt with a foulard dressing gown. Taking an extra pillow and giving her a cheery good-night, he let himself out into the hall. Reine undressed, slipped one of her mother’s nightgowns over her head, blew out the lamp and crawled under the
baire.

Sleep that had threatened to drop her in her tracks only a few moments before deserted her now. She was insufferably hot. Her borrowed nightgown was too tight in the neck, so it strangled her every time she turned over. She seethed with unsettled longing, was haunted by images of what should have been taking place in these midnight hours. She pictured Christien alone in his bedchamber. To ease from her bed and go to his would mean running the gauntlet of children’s cots and pallets that lined the hallway, but might be managed. He would not turn her away; she was almost sure of it.

It was pride more than the consciousness of sinful intentions that kept her in place. He had thought her
capable of living a lie, of concealing the truth about Theodore’s disappearance. He had never expected to marry her, but meant only to lure her husband from his hiding place with the fiction. He had foisted himself upon her, upon them all, without regard for how any of them might be hurt by it. He had desired her, made love to her, taught her to anticipate married bliss, but had no permanent place for her in his affections or his life. If she went to his bed now, it must be as a supplicant, a female so lost to her own worth, so at the mercy of her desires, that nothing else mattered.

She couldn’t do it, though her heart stung with the salt of her unshed tears.

No, she couldn’t.

Could she?

She stared into the darkness while her mind turned in endless circles to reach, finally, the inescapable negative answer. And when she had accepted it, taken it deep inside her, sleep came down like a hammer blow.

Bright sunlight poured in gold streams around the shutter edges when she woke. Its heat was already stifling, made harder to bear by the steamlike rise of moisture left from the rain. Reine’s mother was awake and surprised to find Reine beside her, though she apparently approved the arrangement.

As she complained of thirst, Reine slid from the bed and poured water for her from the bedside carafe. She thought of getting dressed, but all she had to wear was her wedding gown. She borrowed a dressing gown from her mother to use until she was certain Christien
was awake and Alonzo could remove her clothing from where it had been transferred to the armoire in his room. Until then, she was trapped here. Her father would have to act as host to their guests until she could join him.

So much that must be put back the way it was before. Everything. Almost everything.

“Ring for café au lait, will you,
chère?”
her mother asked. “I believe I could relish a roll, as well. I do hope one or two are left from last night.”

“I’m sure they are,” Reine said, summoning a smile as she moved to do as she was bid, turning the bell crank set into the fireplace mantel. “It’s good you’re feeling better.”

“I do seem to be,” her mother answered. Then her lips flattened. “Theodore did come back, yes? Or did I dream it?”

Reine turned sober, as well. “He was there, at the chapel.”

“But changed, so changed. Oh, Reine…”

“Don’t think about it.”

“The wedding didn’t take place, did it? I mean…”

“I know what you mean. No, it didn’t.”

“All praise to
le bon Dieu
that you were spared that much. Oh, but the talk! How people will smack their lips over such a rich morsel. It’s not to be borne!”

“If not this, then it would be something else,” she replied in clipped tones. “They must always have something to enliven their dull lives.”

“But all of us are touched by it, as I’m sure you must agree. The question is what will happen next.”

“After the duel, you mean?”

“Duel? What duel is this?”

The words were edged with alarm. It was clear her mother remembered next to nothing of the events at the chapel. Choosing her words with care, Reine told her what had transpired.

“Alors,”
her mother said in fading tones. “Do you think…Is there a chance Theodore may not survive?”

Reine could not tell whether dread or anticipation was uppermost in her mother’s voice. “One always exists in these things.”

“I was only thinking of you, you know. Well, and of how awkward it would be to have him here again, to sit at the table with him, know he is sleeping just down the hall and…and all the rest. He is quite…quite hideous,
chère.”

All the rest.

That phrase covered so much, including Theodore coming to her bed with his rage and bitterness, his maimed face and his body made corpulent by inactivity and indulgence.

“As you say,” Reine answered in spite of the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. “He may have other plans. It has been his choice to stay away all this time.”

“But why? I don’t understand.”

“Morbid fear of Monsieur Vinot, it appears. Now that he has seen him and discovered how frail he has become, he is less impressed by his past reputation. But of course, it’s Christien who will meet Theodore.”

“How can he? He is not fully recovered from his
injury,” her mother said in querulous tones. She paused. “Perhaps they will kill each other.”

“Maman!”

“Dreadful for me to say, yes, but it would make everything much more comfortable.”

She didn’t mean it, Reine thought. Surely she did not. “By no means,” she said at her most prosaic as she opened the door to Alonzo, who had arrived with their morning coffee on a breakfast tray. “We should all of us miss Christien,
ma chère maman
—Paul, Marguerite, Papa and, yes, even you.” Taking the tray, she gave instructions concerning her wardrobe, then turned back into the room. “Now,” she said with a smile for her mother, “would you care for butter on your breakfast roll?”

It was past midmorning when Reine finally left her parents’ bedchamber. The cots and pallets in the upper hallway were empty, of course; she had heard the children playing for two hours and more, seen them running here and there from the bedchamber window that she had thrown open to the brief morning coolness. Blindman’s bluff and hide-and-seek seemed to be their principal choices for entertainment, though she had also seen them partaking of a breakfast of melon slices.

Marguerite had apparently dressed herself, or perhaps Lisette O’Neill or Juliette Pasquale had seen to it. Thinking it might be best if she had a look at the results, just in case, Reine moved out onto the upper gallery. From that vantage point, she framed her mouth with her hands for carrying quality as she leaned over the railing and called her daughter.

Marguerite did not appear.

Reine was not altogether surprised, given her high excitement over having playmates. She called her name again, letting the last note keen through the great oaks and out across the nearer cane fields.

Still no Marguerite.

Young Sean O’Neill came running from the rear of the house.
“Mon cher,”
she called down to him when he was close enough to hear, “have you seen Marguerite?”

“No,
madame!”
He turned his earnest, choir boy’s face up to her. “Not in a long time.”

He was gone again the moment the words left his mouth. From where he had disappeared behind the house came high-pitched children’s laughter. Listening closely, Reine could make out the voices of several of the children. Her daughter’s voice was not one of them.

Concern touched her, but she dismissed it. Sean was playing with the other boys, most likely, while Marguerite would be somewhere with the girls. Or she might have visited one of the swordsmen’s wives who had a baby, hanging over the cradle watching the little one nap, or else in a dressing room where it was being bathed. She could be in the kitchen, with her grandfather, or even with Christien. There was no need to panic.

Turning swiftly, Reine moved back into the house and through its width to the rear gallery. From that vantage point, she could see an expanse of yard where most of the other children played, as well as the track
that led to the barns and other outbuildings. She counted the various offspring of their guests, but could not locate Marguerite’s bright head.

Down the stairs she went in a billow of skirts, almost running as she moved out the front door and around to the side gallery. Her father and a half-dozen other men lounged there. They must have received the seconds sent by Theodore already, for they seemed to be discussing the terms of the duel. She had no time for that now, no attention for anyone except Christien.

“Marguerite,” she said with a catch in her voice as she met his dark eyes. “Do you know where she is?”

He came to his feet in a single smooth movement, a frown of concern descending over his features. “I thought she must be with you.”

“No, and I don’t see her with the others.” She glanced past him to her father and the other swordsmen, who had risen to their feet. “Has anyone seen her this morning?”

“Don’t upset yourself,” her father said, moving to put a hand on her arm. “She has to be here someplace.”

That soothing platitude grated on her nerves. She wondered in a flash of insight if her mother ever felt this way when he spoke so to her. “Help me look, then,” she said in a resolute tone. “If you’ll make sure she isn’t hiding out for the sake of some game, I’ll check the kitchen.”

Christien said not a word. He merely looked at the other swordsmen with a lifted brow. That brief gesture sent them fanning out under the trees in every direction.
Stepping from the gallery, then, he jogged off in the direction of the stables.