Judith Ivory (29 page)

Adrien slept most of the day. Then, just before dinner, just before they were about to wake him, they were all roused from the peaceful lull that had settled into the house. Adrien was the first to hear it: The sound of people traveling toward them across the snow.

He came tearing out of his room, shoving his arms into his coat, muttering curses. “A wagon and riders. Did they take a wagon when they left?”

“No.”

The travelers were recognized almost at once. It was, despite the addition of a wagon, the others returning. There was also something—someone—they were bringing back whom they hadn’t taken with them.

“Lillings!” Adrien called out into the crisp evening air. He had stepped out onto the porch. His voice, his stance were both angry.
“Qu’est-ce que tu fous ici?”

Christina watched from the window.

Thomas didn’t answer the crudely phrased question. But cheers had gone up from the other men as they recognized Adrien. They would have descended
on him, but Thomas quelled them; inaudible words. He sent the others, with a gesture, toward the barn. A vague tension managed to insinuate itself across the hundred yards of snow.

Thomas descended from his horse and handed it over to Sam Rolfeman. He walked toward the house alone.

Adrien stood, hands in his pockets, hunkered down in his coat, his breath visible under the porch light. Christina watched as he and Thomas spoke across the expanse of snow. They had lowered their voices. But she could see Adrien’s breath clouding the air; cold, forceful little puffs of anger. Then, the argument came inside.

“Because I was bloody well sent here,” Thomas said as he entered. “Claybourne grabbed me yesterday afternoon. Scared the crap out of me—he had some brute with him about eight feet tall. I honestly thought, for a time, I was going to be sent over as a corpse, as a present to you.”

Thomas stopped, confronted by the sight of Christina. He stared at her. “Hallo, Christina,” he said finally. His eyes stayed on her face for a few moments, then dropped to her belly. “Christ,” he muttered, then looked away.

Adrien was taking his coat off in the hallway. “Christina, can you find something to do? I want to talk to Thomas alone.”

She didn’t move.

Thomas sagged into a far chair. “You’re the one that has something else to do,” he told Adrien. “Out in the barn, in the wagon. We have the Frenchwoman. The mystery
émigré
who needed our help last summer? You are going to be fascinated by her story.” He paused. “Incidentally, she is the one who turned you in two days ago—”

Adrien crunched through the snow toward the barn. He nodded at the rest of the men; they were returning to the house.

“We’ve trussed her up for you; she wants to speak to you alone,” Sam murmured.

Adrien looked over his shoulder at them. He was vaguely irritated that this was becoming his duty and his alone. Then, another feeling stirred a little inside him; a feeling of a very different hue. Scarlet red. Perhaps it wasn’t so bad that he was going out here alone. He could remember the scarf, its strange attraction. Adrien admitted to himself, as he got closer to the barn, that he had a certain lurid curiosity—a curiosity he especially wouldn’t have wanted Christina to notice—for what tangible form the scarf might take. He laughed to himself. What a peculiar, perverted sensation to know that an enemy, a female enemy, would be tied up in the barn.

Adrien let himself in, then spent a few wasted seconds trying to set the latch. He got it hooked at last, but he could see that a stiff wind would knock the loose bar out of its catch again. He turned. Around one stall he could see a rumpled skirt peeking out. A pair of hands, limp, graceful, were lashed to the post above. The woman couldn’t see him. But she knew he was there. She called out. A frightened French voice.

“Qui est-ce?”

He came around the edge of the partition. Expecting anything but what he found.

He was speechless for some seconds. All he could think was that he wanted to turn around and run. “Madeleine?” he whispered.

He had seen her the day she was born. But the day he had first
seen
her, really seen her, was actually about eighteen years ago, when she was fourteen and he was seventeen.

His grandfather, uncle, and cousin Madeleine had come from Paris to meet his boat. It was a cold reunion. Adrien had been sent down from yet a third school in England. In disgrace again. His English relatives had given up—and begged for help. His French relatives had complied. He was greeted at the dock in Le Havre with no less leery a welcome than if they’d been shipped an axe murderer.

His grandfather thrust him into the carriage by taking his arm and pushing him in headfirst. One wrong look, one foul word, he was warned…“You are to behave yourself.” And the young Adrien proved he could. All the way to Paris.

He looked out the window, offering no communication. It was assumed he was uncomfortable with French. So his Uncle Geoffrey lectured in a mangled version of the language he called English.

It was here, in a dim carriage, that Adrien got his first look, in sly glimpses, of the cousin he had not seen in six years.

Madeleine sat far back in one corner, her eyes fixed on him; as if indeed he might carry an axe in the folds of his cloak. Then slowly, as they joggled toward Paris, she relaxed. By the city’s edge, she was throwing odd, conspiratorial little smiles at him, punctuating her father’s litany of injunctions and ultimatums with non sequitur looks that Adrien found wholly unbelievable. Try as he might, he found himself unable to ignore her.

It was not that his cousin was beautiful. Even at fourteen, she was promising to be a bit thick through the hips. It was more that she had a kind of singular appeal. Like the long braids that came over her shoulders, she could be—as she was for the most part that day in the carriage—demure and childish. But there was something else lurking; Adrien noticed, that very first day, that the braids didn’t lie very flat over her chest.

He watched her with curiosity that first week. She had long fingers that fluttered and poked. They seemed perpetually into everything. Into Cook’s mixing bowls. Wrapping around her own pigtails, sticking them into her mouth. And, as animated as her hands were, her eyes were the opposite. Solid, dead serious. They pinned you and stared without a waver. They missed nothing.

Especially when Adrien entered a room. Then another change would come over the girl. At the sight of her older cousin, she would put on a womanliness, the earnest way some girls can put on their mother’s clothes. It had to do with her expression. A way to her walk, her laugh. And, like a child dressing up, she usually got it horribly wrong, very overdone. But even at fourteen, there was every indication that a kind of brazen flirtatiousness would one day suit her quite well.

Yet she never made an overture. And Adrien wasn’t about to. He had seen, despite the sly looks, that she was eager to please her elders. He remembered she had been a first-class tattle when they were both little. He also remembered vaguely he had never much liked her then.

So the safest thing was to avoid her.

When Adrien wasn’t at school—they’d put him at the university there—he was restricted to the house. For something to do, he’d begun to help in the back garden. The gardener and his son were pegging down the roses
à l’anglaise.
Adrien was awarded some authority simply by virtue of the fact that he had seen such gardens.

This garden became more and more the place Adrien preferred to be. It was a very unaristocratic preference. But it was accepted by staff and relatives alike, with a shake of the head and the oblique explanation that he was, after all, English.

Adrien himself labeled it botany rather than gar
dening and threw himself into it. Half the time he was supposed to be studying at the university library he was actually there foraging for books on botany. He became far more absorbed in French soil than French people. Though it was in the garden that his involvement with the French cousin began.

He was sitting on the ground, bent over a flat stone on which he was cutting flowers open very methodically.

“You don’t look like a blight.”

His eyes jerked up. His cousin Madeleine was not ten feet away, staring at him. Instantly, he was looking for his uncle, Grand-père, someone. He had been there four and a half weeks, and he and his cousin had never once been alone. She had never even spoken to him directly.

He blinked. “Pardon?”

“A blight. On the family. My father says you are. But you don’t look like one. I think you look…” she hesitated the longest time. Then found the word, “sweet.”

“Sweet,” he repeated.

“Are you really so wild as they say?”

“Oh, much wilder.” He put down the razor he’d been using to dissect the flowers and gave her his complete attention.

“How much?” she asked. Rather bravely, she narrowed her safe distance. The axe murderer in easy reach of a razor. It surprised him she would come near him at all.

Her skirts brushed the edge of his elbow. Perfume swam over him. He looked up. Her young face had been dusted and rouged with face paint. It was not awkwardly applied. Yet, despite its owner’s attempt to make it so, it was not a womanly countenance. Adrien’s eyes dropped to her mouth, its unnatural color. Her father would have been furious: In fact, her red lips were an almost sure announcement that neither her
father nor their grandfather was anywhere around.

Adrien stared at her, this strange-pretty, overly sophisticated cousin. She looked and smelled like a forsaken child-cum-whore. Some poor creature forced into compromising circumstances.

“What are you doing, Madeleine? Your father’s going to kill you if he sees your face like that.”

She gave a half-confused, half-peeved little pout, but didn’t back down an inch. She cocked her head. “Papa’s gone to see his banker. Pepe”—their grandfather—“went with him. Mlle. Durand”—her governess—“has a headache and is lying down—”

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

“I’m not.”

“What—” He frowned.

“I’m not here,” she said shyly. “I’m up in my room studying.” Her smile lit for a moment. Then she looked away.

He considered her, then stood and dusted his hands. Again he found her staring at him.

“Where did you learn your French?” she asked.

“Here. Then in school.”

“Papa says you have never been in school long enough to learn anything.”

He made a dry face. Then one of mild, surprised discomfiture. His unruly masculine nature was creating a snugness at the front of his breeches. Could he possibly be attracted to this…this child? No. But that damned part of him had a mind of its own. God knew it came alive at unpredictable moments—it could be roused over nothing more erotic than a tub of warm water.

“Well,” he said, turning and deftly shielding the front of himself. He stooped and began to carefully scrape and fold up his project; his scattered flower-genitalia. “I think you’d better go wash your face.”

He heard a little catch of breath. “You’re not very friendly, I can tell you that much.”

He was trying too hard to think only of gathering his specimens, his tools, of gathering his thoughts; neither of them knowing he was mounting the assault. “I think your father would want you to be more careful in picking your friends.”

She bent beside him. Her perfume rose up and around him, this time with an insidious allure. He stood up. She too. Very close now. She was much shorter than he. She handed him a forgotten tool. A trowel.

He took her wrist instead.

No amount of painted-on sophistication could hide the little shock that ran over her face. As if she had never imagined her little game could go further than just the moment before.

He took her other wrist. The trowel dropped. He kissed her. Their mouths touched hesitantly. He could feel—in a tension down her arms, in the way she seemed poised to flee at any second—that she was genuinely frightened by this boldness. He waited to see if this might outweigh a curiosity he could also sense in her.

But she allowed the touching of lips.

“Close your eyes, Madeleine.”

“Why?”

“It’s how it’s done.”

“Are you instructing me to any purpose?”

“I’m going to kiss you again. If you sin, you may as well do it right.”

“Is it a sin?”

“It will be when I’m finished.”

She backed at that. Yet the wrists were still in surrender.

“I shall scream if you do more than kiss me,” she said with a sudden sureness, “but I have decided that a kiss is not a sin, no matter what my father says. You may do it again.”

License. He pulled her up against him and touched her mouth again with his own. He kissed her for some minutes in a full, heart-pounding embrace.

“Here,” he murmured. “Put your arms here.” He drew them up around his neck. “And don’t hold your mouth so tight.”

“I can’t help it,” she whispered. “This frightens me.”

“It will be all right. Just relax and open your mouth a little.”

“Open my mouth?” Her eyes widened. “Why? That sounds dreadful—”

He shushed her and kissed her again.

The truth was, despite how much his elders bemoaned and complained, this “difficult and wicked” young man’s experience had never included either an open garden or a curious young girl. In fact, at seventeen Adrien had lain with exactly two women—and on both occasions the situation had been somewhat reversed. Brisk, well-orchestrated encounters manipulated by women considerably his senior.

So there was a certain amount of fumbling on his part. Fidgeting on hers. In the crush of one embrace, he pushed his tongue into her mouth. For a few seconds, there was an ethereal warmth, a surrender. Then squirming. She broke away, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand as if he had played some absurd practical joke.

Cowed, he asked a little crossly, “Don’t you like this at all? You’re not very good at it.”

She frowned. Her eyes showed a hint of glassing over. “Well, I don’t know if I like it. It makes me feel funny. And my stomach—here—” She started to lower her hand to show him the location of this funny feeling.