Leopard in Exile (13 page)
Sarah knew.
"
There
you are, Your Grace!"
At the sound of the familiar voice, Sarah halted. Knoyle bustled up to her, the abigail's brown eyes going
wide as she took in Sarah's disheveled state.
"And without your shoes, Your Grace?" she cried piteously. "And you in such delicate health!" She flung
the shawl she carried about Sarah's shoulders in the same way a fowler would fling his net, and with
much the same intention. Knoyle defended Sarah as fiercely as an only chick—and was convinced
despite all evidence that Sarah's constitution was a fragile one.
To keep the peace, Sarah allowed herself to be cossetted with hot tea and a hot bath, letting the strange
experience on the bank of Moonmere fade away from the surface of her mind. The warm water soothed
the scratches left by the brambles that had reduced her gown to a sorry rag, but Sarah drew the line at
being bundled off to bed.
"I am quite recovered," Sarah said firmly, pulling on a warm day-dress in blue and white flannel. "And I
have not yet finished my letter to the Dowager Duchess. I promised faithfully to send Her Grace a full
account of the Royal wedding. Nearly a week has passed and I have not done so. I must begin before
the light is gone—for I hate writing by candlelight!"
In fact, Sarah hated doing anything by candlelight—the larger the house, the gloomier it was once the sun
had set. In the spring she had attended a lecture at the Royal Society that had suggested that one day
streets and homes would be illuminated by burning gas, but Sarah had found the harsh blue-white glare
and loud hissing of the lamp that was demonstrated at the lecture to be worse than candlelight. A terrible
prospect, if all homes were lit so!
It required more firmness than she would have liked, but at last she made her escape from Knoyle and
scurried downstairs to her private parlor.
When she had taken possession of her double's house, Sarah had removed the heavy ornate furniture
that the other Sarah had favored from the room, and had the thick velvet curtains taken down. Now light
blazed into a spacious high-ceilinged room with eggshell-yellow walls and floor to ceiling windows
looking out upon the vistas to the west and south. It held no more furniture than a Chinoiserie writing
desk with its delicate gilded chair, and a long recaumier
8
covered in brown velvet poised invitingly before
the fireplace.
Sarah gained her refuge and closed the door firmly behind her, turning the lock for good measure. The
room was filled with the blaze of afternoon sun, and Sarah took a deep breath, forcing herself to relax.
Sometimes the thousand restrictions the nobility was hemmed in with chafed her so! She was no petted
aristocrat, but an American who had been born free of crowns and thrones…
But if this is a cage, it is a pretty one. And I am loved
, Sarah reminded herself. She would survive the
estrangement from her birthplace—after all, those who had settled her homeland had left homes behind
to do so, and had made new homes in a strange and alien land. She could do no less.
Sarah seated herself at her desk, frowning slightly at the packet of folded and colored papers dropped
there beside her unfinished letter to Grandanne—letters from the Duchess of Wessex's vast
correspondence, for Sarah enjoyed writing letters nearly as much as she liked to receive them.
The servants would have brought the post, of course. She sorted through the missives, hoping for some
word of her husband, but only two were franked as the nobility of England had the right to do, and
neither was in his hand. She put them aside, intending to deal with them later, and turned to the others.
Three bore no stamp. Two were invitations from local families to some festivity or other. One was not.
Its covering was of rough stained paper, of the sort one might find at a coaching inn, and it had been
bound in thin twine before it was sealed with thick yellow candle-wax. But despite its rude contrivance,
the handwriting was patrician and even.
Sarah picked up her pen-knife and cut the cords. The pages inside were of the same poor-quality paper
and ink, but the lines were written boldly and not crossed, as if the writer did not dare chance that her
message be unclear. The pages crackled as Sarah carefully unfolded them. The letter was dated two
months ago, and—
From Baltimore! Someone writes to me from home!
" 'Dearest Sarah—' " the letter began.
I wish I were home
. The shamefaced realization that neither love nor duty were enough to suppress the
unworthy pangs of homesickness made Lady Meriel smile wistfully before returning to her letter. If only
that were her only problem! The tiny attic room was the meanest in a lodging that was very far from the
best to be found, but its landlady asked no questions of a young schoolmaster and his wife, and Louis
had felt that the two of them would be safer here than in a more respectable establishment.
For almost two years she and her husband had traveled carefully to this destination—from France, to
England, to Ireland, to Portugal to throw pursuers off their trail, to Huy Braseal in the New World, and
thence, by slow stages, their money by this time almost gone, north to Baltimore, where they had gone to
ground.
and her hair break loose from its smooth coif to riot in tendrils about her forehead and neck. The
oppressive humidity made the paper soft and moist, difficult to write upon. Despite the greyness of the
day, Meriel had opened both the windows her little lodging possessed, and the damp air brought her the
smell of the sea, hoping it would remind her of home, but even the sea was not the same as it was at
home in Cornwall. Here the smell was softer, greener, tinged with woodsmoke and river.
Meriel gazed ruefully around herself. She had been raised as befit one sprung from a line of kings, and if
she had been a pawn most of her life, she had been a pampered one. Before she had eloped with Louis,
she had never suspected the existence of such a rude chamber as she now inhabited, much less that she
would be living in it The ceiling of the tiny room slanted sharply downward—even Meriel, no giantess,
could not stand upright at the window, but must sit crouched over a shabby table, its surface rough with
knots and adze-marks. The only light came from the two narrow windows, wide rather than tall, whose
panes were of oiled parchment and not honest glass. Though her exile had taught her caution, Meriel
wished she dared to be reckless, for prudence left her reduced to circumstances in which she would not
have kept her own servants at home.
And I may become a servant myself—or worse—for who knows if this letter will reach Sarah? She
is my only hope, but it is not much of a hope when all is said and done.
The air in the room was heavy and close, and the open windows seemed only to admit heat, not dispel it.
Meriel would rather have waited to discharge this task until night had brought with it some vestige of
coolness, but she did not wish to spend any of her remaining budget of coin upon candles, and the charge
to convey this letter all the way to England would take more than half the money that remained—all she
had in the world. Soon she would be forced to earn her keep by the work of her hands—she, the
daughter of a belted Earl, raised to be no more than an ornament to a titled husband!
But I
am
more than that
—
Louis had taught me that. And Sarah will not desert me. She swore she
would always stand my friend
—
she and the Duke both, and I am so afraid of what the villains
who have my Louis now may do to him
.…
No! I will not despair! The Holy Mother will aid me if I am friendless on Earth. I know She will.
Meriel's family, like the royalty of France, followed the Old Religion, and Maryland's population was
predominantly Catholic. Since the grimly Protestant years of Charles HI, those of the Old Religion who
had chafed under the restrictions England placed upon their faith since Cromwell's day had found a new
homeland here in which to practice their religion without constraint. If her trouble were not so terribly
political, Meriel would have gone to the parish priest for help days before. But she dared not. Anyone
here might be her friend—or enemy—for the best of reasons.
" 'Dearest Sarah—' " Meriel wrote, and stopped. It was hard to know what help to ask for, when she
did not know herself the full extent of the blow that had fallen upon her, only that it made her heart ache.
She and Louis had arrived in Baltimore by ship a week before. Funds were waiting here for them through
the good offices of His Grace the Duke of Wessex, enough to settle them respectably anywhere in New
Albion, for land in the New World was to be had nearly for the asking, and few here, so far away from
the courts of Europe, were likely to guess their terrible secret.
But some will guess, for His Grace was never the only one who knew my Louis' secret! If only
Louis had listened to me
—
we should have gone to Coronado
—
it is so far away that no one there
would care who either of us was. I begged him
—
Tears gathered in her eyes and Meriel quickly turned away from the table lest she blot the paper. After a
moment she composed herself and turned back to her task. She must choose her words carefully, for
Louis had told her that he had long suspected they were watched and followed, and her letters might be
intercepted.
And he was right to fear, for he was stalked by the wolves that harry our every step. OK my poor
husband, captive in the hands of those who will seek to use him for the unlucky accident of his
birth!
Tears welled up afresh in Meriel's eyes. Three days ago Louis had gone to Nussman's, the Baltimore
banking house where their money lay waiting for them. It was the most dangerous part of their entire
journey, since to claim the money Louis must reveal himself under a name known perhaps to too many.
They had delayed it for as long as they could, but at last Louis had gone.
And he had not returned.
Sarah
—
Sarah, help me! He is a pawn in the dreams of madmen
—
do those who hold him mean to
make him their puppet-king, or is it Bonaparte, yearning to destroy the last of the true bloodline
once and for all
?
Fifteen years before, Louis-Charles of France had been a child of seven, in Revolutionary custody with
his mother and sister, but he had been Louis XVII from the moment the blade fell upon his father's neck,
and as such, a valuable pawn to both Royalists and Revolutionaries. But somehow the pawn had
vanished from the chessboard, to grow secretly to manhood in the house of the Abbe de Condé. Chance
had tangled his life with Meriel's, and happenstance had grown into love. Raised as a commoner, Louis
had formed no wish to assume a role for which he was not trained, to rule over a people who did not
love him. So when fate had offered him the chance to escape that burden and marry the woman he loved,
he had seized it eagerly.
We were fools to think they would leave us in peace
! Meriel thought bitterly. Louis was too valuable
as a symbol—to the Royalists, to the Emperor, even to the English. Whosoever held the last rightful king
of France held a sword at the throat of Napoleon's Empire.
With new determination, she dipped her quill in the inkwell and set pen to paper once more.
'
Dearest Sarah, I write to beg your help for my husband and myself. He has vanished—I know not
where
—
and I am alone and friendless in a foreign land, in fear of my own life
.…'
Meriel awoke at first light. She had worked far into the night upon her letter to Sarah, reduced to finishing
it by the light of the inferior tallow candles with which the landlord had grudgingly provided her. Once she
had tied the thick packet shut and waxed all the knots with the stub of a precious saved beeswax taper,
she had been unable to sleep, and had knelt on the uneven floor for hours with her rosary, begging the
Blessed Virgin to keep Louis safe and bring him back to her—or failing that, to bring Meriel to him to
share whatever fate God had ordained for him. At last, exhaustion had driven her to her bed, where she
had fallen asleep in her underclothes, the jet beads of the rosary twined around her fingers.
When sleep deserted her at dawn's first light, Meriel rose and dressed carefully, brushing out her long
black hair and rebraiding it into a tight coronet that would disappear beneath her scuttle-brim bonnet Hie
bonnet was an old-fashioned style, of printed calico over plaited straw, but the deep brim and the veil
pinned to it concealed her face from casual inspection. It was important to appear respectable, when the
appearance of respectability was the only thing you had left.
When she was ready, Meriel examined herself as best she could in her hand-mirror. She wore a plain
traveling dress of indigo-dyed cotton
de Nîmes
, and over that a grosgrain pelisse in a darker blue,
trimmed in scarlet satin lace. Her tan gloves, a carefully-hoarded luxury, had cost more than the rest of