Judith Ivory (33 page)

“Come on. Let’s get these off you.” She began to pull at his shirt. “Have you been in the water all this time?”

“No. God, no.” He lifted his arms. “I managed to get hold of the anchor rope—someone extended it for me. We have a friend on board, I think. Anyway, I climbed up the rope and stayed in the anchor-hold until they came there to look. I hung outside on the anchor itself while they searched that area.”

“Ah—” His pants gave, as they came over his knees, nearly toppling Christina. “Here.” She shoved him over, piling blankets on him, then crawling under them with him. She nestled against him to lend him her heat. “The captain,” she said.

“What?”

“The friend. He pulled me back into the crowd. Then saw that I was taken here. He seems to know you.”

Adrien shrugged. “I’ve never met him.” He shivered again. “God, that water was cold—by the way, thank you for your lovely scream. It was helpful. Though I did intend to shove the girl into the guardsmen and take to the water anyway.”

“That girl. Oh, Adrien, what you did to her—”

“They’ll let her go, once they realize they have the wrong one.” There was a pause. “You realize whom they would have if they didn’t have her?”

“They would have eventually let me go as well.”

He laughed at this. “Perhaps. I could have thrown you in the water, too. By the way, can you swim?”

“No.”

“Lucky I didn’t then.” He laughed again, refusing to take this too seriously.

She sat up to look at him. Color was coming back to the surface of his skin. But he still felt chilly, clammy. His body did not have the normal temperature. Yet she could tell he was going to be all right. She shook her head at him. “You have been too lucky, too often, Adrien. You have come to count on it. And, you can’t, you know.”

“I don’t.” His look became more sober. “I don’t seem to have much luck with you, for instance.”

She looked away, shifting her gaze to the gash down his face. “Here. Let me get something for that.”

He took hold of her arm. “How can I convince you I want you? That I want to live with you, love you, be your husband?”

This was not a conversation she wanted. She had avoided it for four days and hoped to continue to do so for another month. She was not up to a mounted assault of Adrien’s reasoning and coaxing and logical conciliations. She jerked away. “Not by foolish acts of bravado, certainly. Not by getting yourself half-killed.”

She ripped a length of muslin from one of her chemises, tearing it with frustration and fear and anger. Then, none too gently, she pressed it to his face. He flinched, but his face quickly resumed a faint, crooked smile. He continued to stare at her, unabashed. Then he took her ministering hand and kissed the palm.

She took her hand, her eyes away. “And not by being charming with me either, Adrien Hunt—”

The door of the cabin opened. The captain of the ship entered his own quarters, barely glancing at them. He went to a chest, foraged, and produced a pipe.

“You’re the English earl, aren’t you?” he said matter-of-factly as he turned to pack the pipe. “The one that London’s making such a to-do over.” He smiled up a second, then puffed as he held a piece of kindling to the bowl of his pipe.

Adrien drew up on an elbow. “Do I know you?”

“Nah. But there’s nary a soul what don’t wish ’e knowed you. Right proud o’ what you been doing—keeping Madame Guillotine from kissing a whole lot of French necks.”

Adrien couldn’t respond. It seemed he knew how to deal with a bad reputation. But notoriety for good deeds—public praise—was going to put him a little off-center.

The captain continued. “Ain’t been no one so popular since Saint George after the dragon. A real hero, you are.” He smacked his lips, blew smoke. “And me a little, now. I figured, soon as those Frenchies came after you, who I had on my ship. It’s me what put down the anchor a ways. Figured a fella as smart as you could swim and find it.”

“Well…I’m grateful….”

The captain waved his hand. “Nah. S’pleasure.” He laughed. “I’ll be having stories now awhile o’er my ale.” He gave the chest on the floor a kick as he walked toward the door. “And if I was you, I’d put me on some
decent clothes. You’re apt to get quite a welcome on the English side. Man a the hour, all that….”

They had come up onto the deck to watch the coast come into view. It was still distant. But England lay on the horizon.

Adrien, dressed warmly if a little snuggly in the captain’s clothes, was once more leaning on his elbows, looking out over the ship’s wood rail. His hair blew. His skin was flushed a healthier color against a gentler wind. His cheek, seen to by a doctor on board, was held from bleeding by a line of fine stitches. The muscle twitched there periodically, partly from the ordeal of having it sewn, but partly also, Christina thought, because it was a painful wound. Still, he was coming home in better condition—and under better circumstances—than they had had any right to expect.

“You will do all right. You always do all right,” she told him.

He furrowed his brow but made no answer. He had been lost, the last half hour, in the sort of silence Christina had come to dread. It inevitably meant warfare. On his ground. The verbal, the logical.

She glanced at him.

He looked formidably handsome, vaguely sinister. The slice down his cheek, she could see already, was going to work to his advantage. It brought one’s eye down the line of his bone, the chiseled cheek, to his broad jaw. It underscored his dark, perfect features, then gave a macabre, mysterious flourish.

The wind blew his hair back from his face. His hair shone, fluttering in the late afternoon sun. Like a flag—a black pirate’s flag that waved with bold good health, irrevocable, innate good looks.

Then he sighed, a huge breath; a surrender. “Christina, every time I try to imagine a future without you,
my mind goes blank.” After a moment more, “I don’t think I have a future without you.”

The harbor was gliding up quickly. Like the future itself. Yet Christina, too, found herself not able to see it. Not able to imagine…She touched his hand.

The touch held in it the possibility of a reprieve. And Adrien knew it for such. He smiled up at her a moment, just a fleeting thing on his face. Then his face frowned; it paled sheet-white. He shoved her violently away. Christina spun, landing on the slippery deck hard; shocked, hurt, confused.

She heard explosions, three of them. She looked up only to see three red blotches appear along Adrien’s body as he was thrown backward against the rigging of the ship. Odd; she remembered the scarf in that instant. It was as if he wore one now; at his head, his chest, his groin.

It dawned on her. Christina screamed. Noise, more screams from the ship, from the dock, right beside them, made a riotous counterpoint to her own heartbeat suddenly clamoring in her chest. She began toward Adrien. Toward where he hung, stunned, by one hand from the ropes of the mast.

On the dock, Christina was horrified to see, three men were standing high on a parapet, with long-barreled guns. Repriming their barrels!

Her progress seemed incredibly slow. She was a foot from him, when the gunmen unloaded their second volley. Three more red stains burst on Adrien’s body. His arm, the side of his neck, his belly. His belly!

Someone was screaming so loud and continuously that all her confusion blurred into that sound in her ears. As she reached Adrien’s body—now slumped on the deck—she realized the screaming was coming from her own throat. And that Adrien didn’t hear it. His body looked lifeless. Eyes closed, he didn’t react at
all when she slipped in the sea water and blood and fell right on top of him.

She ran her hands over him, her palms turning red, the front of her dress, her cloak covered in his blood. Yet she kept touching him, assessing him. The wound at his head just grazed his temple. The same at his neck, a near miss. His shoulder had caught a ball, but he could live through that. And the chest wound was high, several inches from his heart or lungs; not a fatal shot.

Not fatal, not fatal, she kept saying to herself. The blood at his groin was coming from a wound high on the inside of his thigh. A ball was lodged in the muscle. Then his belly. She stared at this. Then forced herself to open his coat.

“Dear God,” she murmured. The ball had entered his coat neatly. There had been just a bubble, a little jewel of blood. But underneath—“Dear God,” she murmured again. A bright red stain was spreading across into his shirt. Blood was all over his pants. He had been hit squarely in the bowels.

Christina gagged. Her own belly tightened in a heartrending, sympathetic spasm.

“Adrien!” she screamed. As if she could wake him. “Adrien!”

Someone took hold of her shoulders. She was being pulled from him. She fought this, tried to cling. But Adrien was being lifted away from her. Onto a stretcher.

“Adrien!” she cried out again. His breathing was so shallow. It seemed there one moment, then undetectable the next. Her eyes were fixed to his chest.

“Easy mistress,” someone was saying to her. “We’ll get him to a surgeon. Move. You can’t do him any good lying on top of him.”

Her stomach wrenched again. Hard and painful. She looked down. Her huge belly was soaked scarlet. “God!” she cried out loudly. A blur of tears had be
gun to make her blind as well as bloody and helpless.

On the dock, the gunmen had disappeared. An enclosed wagon had been pulled up to the ship to receive the injured man.

“Who?” Christina asked in confusion. “What happened?” Her mind was blank. He had been there. He loved her. He was dying at her feet. Then being taken away.

“French marksmen is the best anyone can make of it, mum.”

“No.” Christina’s mind could make no sense of it. “They thought they had him dead back in France. And why would they send gunmen ahead? When they could have simply shot him from the docks in Le Havre? Why? Why?” But she was sobbing so badly no one seemed to understand her.

She lurched along, struggling to stay with the litter that carried Adrien’s still body. Then she was denied the right to climb inside the wagon; denied the right by a stern presence already there. A small old man—dark, steady eyes that seemed to burn from the shadows of the enclosure. Recognition gripped her. And panic.

“I’ll see to him, Lady Hunt,” said Edward Claybourne. “You go home. I’ll send word.”

“No!” She tried to enter the wagon, but two men behind her stopped her. Then another pain in her belly took her breath away. The men had to hold her to keep her from doubling over onto the ground.

The wagon started to pull away. Only half-recovered, Christina began to run after it. “Adrien!” she screamed. “No! No!”

She ran fifty yards, breathless, when her eyes widened. The next spasm sent her to her knees. She grabbed herself around the middle.

“Oh, my God—” It was real. The baby was coming.

Sobbing and feeling wretchedly helpless, she pleaded
to anyone, to everyone, “Go after them! They’re taking him!”

Someone mumbled for her to be calm, that her alarm was out of proportion. They were taking him to a good surgeon.

“They’re going to kill him!” she insisted.

But gentle hands were picking her up. “Christina, it’s all right.” It was Thomas.

Another contraction made her dig her fingers into his neck and shoulders. She let out a guttural exclamation, shocked by the force of the spasm. “The baby’s coming,” she got out in a whisper.

By the time the pain subsided this time, she was in the carriage. Grand-père was waiting there.

“Don’t let them take him away,” she murmured to every face she saw, to anyone who would listen. Yet even she knew she was becoming incoherent. “They shot him. They shot him over and over…over and over….”

“It’s all right, Christina,” Thomas was saying. “Everything is being done that can be. They’ve taken him to St. Catherine’s Hospital. They’ll save him.” Philippe de la Fontaine’s wizened, gentle hands reached for her. She leaned into his arms, collapsing, sobbing. To Adrien’s grandfather, Thomas said, “It’s the baby. I could feel her whole body contracting in my arms as I carried her.”

“I saw an inn at the top of this street,” Philippe suggested. “We’ll take her there and send for a midwife.”

“A doctor,” Christina protested weakly. “Adrien wants a doctor.”

“All right, a doctor.”

“And Thomas—” Christina gripped his forearm as hard as she could. She focused her eyes on him. “You go to the hospital. See that he gets there. Stay with him. Then come tell me how he—aiy!”

Another contraction interrupted. How could anything be so strong?

“All right.” Thomas gently smoothed his hand over her belly. A strange emotion played for a moment over his face. “I’ll go to him. If that’s what you want.” Then to Philippe, “You take care of her. I’ll come as soon as I know something.”

Thomas closed the door, and the carriage lumbered off, up the steep cobbled street that sloped away from the sea.

“You’re doing fine,” the doctor told her cheerfully.

Christina fell back. The all-encompassing pressure retreated once more to just a dull ache low in her back. She sank—damp, rumpled—into a mound of humid covers, twisted sheets. She felt limp, not fine.

Her waters had broken. The baby had descended. And the opening in her body, like a magic door, was materializing. These facts had been murmured to her over the hours, along with other encouraging words. Yet, to Christina, everything that happened in the tiny room at the inn seemed to be happening in some distant reality. As if she had indeed slipped through some strange doorway into another dimension. Where was Adrien? she asked periodically. How was he? Where was Thomas? Yet, no one told her anything. She was given no information that really mattered to her.

She stared up at the canopy, waiting for the next pain.

Over the last six hours she had memorized her little corner of this room. It was dim, gray, colorless. She
lay in the shadows—the main window was blocked by a large screen that had been erected for the sake of her modesty: Friends and relatives had gathered on the other side of the partition. Her father. Evangeline and Charles. Adrien’s grandfather. Sam. Others. Several people she didn’t even know. Two members of Parliament. As well as—she realized only vaguely how rude she had been, not fully able to comprehend—the Prince of Wales and his cousin the Princess Anne. Christina knew that the general feeling in the little inn was one of honored excitement. Pleasure. Joy. Nobility was being born. In the presence of royalty. Yet on her side of the screen, she could have screamed at them all. It was Adrien’s child…. Where was Adrien?

The doctor came around the screen again, and Christina quickly rose up on an elbow. “Mr. Lillings has to have returned by n—ah! Ah!” A new swell of pain cut her off. It demanded all her attention.

Christina grasped her belly, crying out. The force, the incredible pressure still amazed her. All she could do was race for her breath. And look for the other side of the contraction.

“You’re doing very well, Lady Hunt,” the doctor reaffirmed as he unceremoniously lifted the sheet that covered her legs.

She didn’t care what he did to her. She counted to herself. At sixty-seven seconds, the last contraction had peaked; she had been able to see the end of it.

She tried not to rush the count now: sixty-eight, sixty-nine, seventy…seventy-three, seventy-four, seventy-five…. She gasped another breath. Where was it? God, they were getting long. She clutched the covers.

“Easy, my dear lady. Gentle. Ah, yes. I think we shall see a crown very soon—”

Christina was oddly disinterested in this news. She
drew a deep breath as the pain leveled off and forced herself to submit quietly to the medical hands. Is this really what Adrien had wanted? Another man to move so freely there?

“Mr. Lillings,” she gasped out. “He has to have returned by now.”

“My dear countess, I can’t let a gentleman in—”

“He’s here?”

“He’s downstairs.”

“I want to see him.”

“Now, now—” He patted her knee solicitously.

She rose up on her elbows and directed an emphatic stare at him between her legs. “I want to see him now. Get him up here.”

Standing at the foot of her bed, Thomas looked tired and haggard. His coat revealed traces of unsympathetic elements; mist or light rain. His face, the pallor, revealed that this was the least of his worries. He was a man who had been through an ordeal. Christina’s heart dropped. In the dim light he looked a hundred years old. And this could only mean one thing—

“He’s very bad off,” she said.

Thomas looked down at his wet hat, wiped at its brim. When he spoke, his words were hardly audible.

“He took a ball in the abdomen. Another through a lung. And one directly through his brain. He was hit other places, but any of these three would have killed him. He never even regained consciousness, Christina.”

She raised herself up, almost sitting. “You’re wrong,” she said flatly. “The chest wound was high, near his shoulder. His head was hardly grazed.”

Thomas only shook his head. “I stayed,” he said. “I saw the body, Christina—”

“So did I. Only the wound in his belly was serious.”

He shrugged. “Whatever. The end result is the same. I’m sorry.”

“No.”

His eyes lifted to her. They held impatience; an accumulation of small annoyances, unspoken grievances. “Christina,” he said. “I know you were in love with him. But love can’t make someone alive when they’re not.” There was both cruelty and pain in the way he pronounced the words: “He’s dead,” he said emphatically.

“Thomas, I saw—”

“So did I. So did Claybourne. And so did Sam, if you don’t trust us. Anyone could have seen him who wanted to. There was no question—”

“I want to! Ah, wait—” She put a hand on her abdomen. Another contraction.

She drew her breath up and away from it, wishing she could withdraw her body and continue this conversation. But the pressure rose, gripped, compressed her around the middle. She bit her lip.

“Thomas—” She held her hand out.

His face panicked as he took her hand. “Doctor!” he called. Thomas came around the bed, trying to support her. The doctor hurried in.

Christina raised herself up farther, pushing back on Thomas, gripping, pushing back against the bed. And pushing down with the muscles of her abdomen.

“Don’t push!” the doctor said sharply.

And Christina was left bewildered, her body telling her to do one thing, the doctor demanding she do another.

He was frowning over the sheet. “It’s not the crown,” he murmured. “It’s the buttocks. The baby didn’t turn in the womb.” He was rolling his sleeves up farther, then extracting instruments from his bag. His attitude had changed to one of intense concentration; worry.

She watched him, tight-lipped, anxious, as he came
around to her. Something cold, a doctor’s instrument, touched her. There was a mild burning.

“Now. Push,” the doctor said.

And it was like being set free. She bore down, the contraction working with her. All the pain seemed magically transformed into supernatural energy. It was going to be all right. The doctor, the surgeon Adrien had wanted there, knew how to cope with upside-down births, upside-down lives….

She thought of Adrien. She longed for him to be there. To hold on to. To squeeze and push against. To hold her and touch her.

But there was only Thomas.

“Ah—Oh, God—” She gasped three quick breaths and pushed again. Then a slight smile appeared on her face; the light of achievement, of discovery. Breech or not, she could feel the child coming into the world. She puffed and panted, laughed and cried. Then a tiny mew of noise, soft sounds she had never heard before—And a healthy male child was held up for her to see.

“Adrien!” she cried out.

The sight of the child so affected her. The long proportions. The full head of black hair. The fair little eyes.

Behind her, Thomas put her weight down gently. He kissed the top of her head. Then she heard him go over to the basin in the corner and be violently sick.

Three days later found Christina still in bed. But it was a different bed. And under very different conditions.

Against the advice of everyone, she had transported herself and her infant son into London. There, from Adrien’s huge mahogany bed, in his house on Hanover Square, she dealt with his agents, bankers, and lawyers. She was trying to hold his estate together, yet prevent it from going into probate.

“Good day, Lady Hunt.” A solicitor nodded to her as
he left the bedchamber. His footsteps could be heard to echo on the landing, then down the stairs.

Thomas, standing by one of the French windows, turned. “You’re being so foolish, Christina. And not just from a legal point of view. Adrien’s not coming back. To build yourself up, counting on—”

Quieter footsteps entered. The nursemaid. “He’s awake again, madam. Shall I bring him?”

“Yes.” Christina turned her attention back to Thomas. “I’m not building anything up. I’m merely doing what I must. The estate is not going through the courts until a few questions are answered to my satisfaction. And now—” she pushed a pile of papers from her lap, “that you have expressed it, I will thank you to keep your wishful opinion to yourself.”

“Wishful?” he chafed.

“This reminds me, dear Thomas, of when your brother went away to school. And you told me he had gone away for good, so I had to play with you—”

“Goddamn it, I saw the body—”

“With the face blown off.”

“He was hit in the face.”

“He wasn’t.” A little quieter, “How
did
Claybourne know he was coming in that morning and on what boat?”

This threw him. Thomas stuttered a reply. “I—I don’t know what you’re talking—”

“You do, I’m afraid. Everyone else might believe it was French assassins, but I don’t. Those marksmen were Edward Claybourne’s. I don’t have a doubt in the world that is true.”

Thomas turned to look out the window again.

“Did you?” Christina asked gently. “Did you tell Claybourne?”

There was a long pause before he answered. His voice was flat and distant. “I never thought he would kill him, Christina. You must believe that.”

“Why?” she said. “You were friends.
We
were friends.”

“Are,” he corrected. “I did it so you could get free of him. I thought Claybourne would arrest him, hold him. Then you could be off. That is what you wanted, isn’t it? Back in France when I last saw you there?” He sat in the chair by the window and bent his head into his hand. “God,” he said. “How did this ever get so complicated?”

The nursemaid arrived with the baby. Little Xavier, pronounced as the French—as Adrien—would say it:
Zav-yay.
Christina’s little savior. She smiled as she took the bundle.

Thomas frowned, then came forward. Again, he was standing at the foot of her bed. He reached to lean on the canopy frame overhead. “Do you want me to pack up and get out?” he asked. He had spent the night in the house.

“No.” She threw a small blanket over her shoulder for modesty, then drew the baby to her breast. Much to everyone’s horror, she was nursing her infant herself. “I have made some terrible mistakes myself. Out of stupidity and jealousy. I’m not going to make things so easy on you as to simply cast you out. Instead, I thought I’d offer you a way to redeem yourself.”

“How?”

“Help me.”

“Do what?”

“Find him.”

He made a skeptical laugh. “You’re as insane as he was.”

She gave him a dry look. “Will you or not?”

He let out a huge sigh. “Of course.”

“Good.” She looked down. There, beside her, among a host of other papers, was a death certificate. Adrien Philippe Charles Xavier Hunt, aged thirty-five. “Now, it seems to me, if Adrien is not dead, two things have
to be true. One: That is not his body in the casket in the Hunt tomb at St. Mary’s. And, two: Some doctor somewhere has to have treated a man with a very bad stomach wound—”