Louisa Rawlings (45 page)

“I don’t remember,” she moaned. “Three, four. So many. Vile men. Ugly and dirty.”

“But you were just a child. How old were you?”

She stared at him, her eyes blank and uncomprehending. “Monsieur?”

She was still in the past. “How old
are
you?” he corrected himself.

“Thirteen, monsieur.”

Sweet Jesus. “My poor Topaze.” He put his hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t!” She cringed away from him. “Let me go!” She wrapped her arms around her belly and bent over. “Oh, Maman, it hurts so much. Maman?” She looked about her in a wild frenzy. “Maman?” she whispered. Her still soiled hands caught her eye. “Oh, Maman!” A horrified scream. “So much blood! My sweet Maman…” She buried her face in her arms and began to sob.

Pain upon pain. “They killed her?” He found his voice trembling.

She lifted her head and nodded. “And Monsieur le Vicomte. Those terrible men. They…tore out his bowels. Oh, God.” She squeezed her eyes shut.

“Monsieur le Vicomte?” he asked gently. “Who is he?”

She looked up and blinked, then smiled at him through her tears, the horror forgotten for a moment. “Don’t you know?” Her voice had become the voice of a child, sweet and innocent. “He’s going to marry Maman. He’ll be my father.” She stuck out a belligerent chin. “Maman doesn’t care what his family says. She’s an actress, not a whore.”

“Is he very rich, your mother’s vicomte?”

“Yes.”

“Does he have a big château?”

“Oh, yes, monsieur. Very beautiful. We’ve been living in it all the winter and spring.”

“And…is there a harpsichord?”

She giggled, a little girl’s laugh. “Monsieur le Vicomte hired a tutor to teach me to play it! Maman says I’m the most fortunate girl in all of France!”

“And who is Madame Benoîte?”

He cursed himself the moment he’d asked the question. It seemed to remind her again of the horror. Shaking in fear, she knelt down and began to rub her hands against the grass. Again and again, in a frenzied gesture. “Madame Benoîte. Yes. She’ll take me in.” She looked up at Lucien. Her face was drained, weary. He saw the lost and frightened child she must have been. “Monsieur, do you know the inn where Madame Rachel Benoîte is staying?” Again the little girl’s voice. “She’s my mother’s friend, you know. I’m so tired, monsieur.”

“Poor little Topaze,” he choked. He knelt beside her, fearful of touching her, lest a man’s touch bring back the terror of her memories.

“When I get to Madame Benoîte, I’ll sleep. So tired.” She wiped her hands on the grass again, then reached out and put her fingers in his. Her eyes held a desperate plea. “Can I sleep now, monsieur?”

He hesitated, then gathered her into his arms. She didn’t resist. “Yes. Yes, little one. Sleep.”

She sighed, rested her head on his chest, and closed her eyes.

He pressed her against his breast. Her hair held the fragrance of sunshine. He found himself trembling at the cruel past she’d remembered.

Savagely raped, her mother butchered, a happy childhood suddenly shattered. He looked at poor Léonard, lying cold and still. He thought of Hubert and his deadly plans, of the inhuman creatures who had raped this dear child—all the evil in the world of which he’d become a part.

It was evil that she couldn’t accept, this sweet creature. So foreign to her nature—she’d simply wiped it from her memory. She’d refused to allow it to sully her pure, good heart.

And here was he, Lucien le Bâtard, with his petty hatreds that had driven him to a foul life, while he wallowed in self-pity and cursed the world. He’d been unwilling to see the goodness in anyone, had allowed himself to be blind to
her
goodness. He’d used her. His selfish desire for revenge had brought her to this: she’d nearly lost her life because of him. He’d been too blind to see beyond his own pain, his own grief. No wonder she’d thought him a monster capable of murder. He was still Lucien the pirate, an outcast of his own making.

He saw himself clear. She’d called him a heartless beast, because he couldn’t forgive his father. It was true. He
was
a beast. A savage. What could he give her? A wounded heart? He remembered how she’d laughed with Martin. She deserved a man like Martin. A man who didn’t carry his burdens, his grievances, like a millstone around his neck. Let her marry Denis de Rocher. Be a marquise. She deserved nothing but the best that life had to give.

He thought of his father. He felt an emptiness now, where his hatred had been. There was nothing to sustain him any longer. He knew it had been so, what the girl had tried to tell him. That his father had been weak, deserving of his pity, not his hatred. But he’d refused to see it, even turned on the girl when she tried to make him see it. Without his hatred, how could he justify the evil of his years on the high seas?

Lucien le Bâtard, filled with hatred, could do as he chose, and excuse it all in the name of revenge. But Lucien Renaudot had been born a gentleman; he had no one but himself to condemn for turning to a life of crime and piracy.

The girl moaned in her sleep. He held her more tightly and rocked back and forth. They had both suffered. But she’d rejected evil through forgetfulness; he’d embraced it, and become no better than his tormentors. And then he’d cursed God for allowing it to happen.

He began to weep, the scalding tears burning his eyes. He wept for all the wasted years, the ugly years, the years of cruelty and despair. But most of all he wept for his shame. His body shook with violent sobs. At last he lifted his gaze to the blue of God’s sweet heaven. He clutched the girl’s dear form to his heart.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned!” he cried aloud—a plea from the depths of his tortured soul.

Topaze stirred in her bed. She felt rested. At peace. It hadn’t been a dream. It didn’t seem like a dream. Her life appeared to her as fragments, glittering splinters that were slowly coming back together. One crystalline memory as clear as another. And each in its proper order. It was as though everything had always been there, but hidden behind a thick cloud. Muddled, confused, lost. Now Maman’s death was as clear as Léonard dying before her eyes, and Grismoulins and the vicomte’s château similar, but recognizably different as she thought of them. The smile of her real father, the gentleness of Monsieur Givet. All the memories. They were falling into place, like chapters in a book; characters in a novel. It gave her a strange sense of being a spectator at her own life.

She opened her eyes and sat up.

She heard a gasp. “Oh, my dear child! You’re awake.”

“Fleur?” Topaze smiled at Adelaïde, sitting in a chair just outside the bed alcove. “How long have I been asleep?”

“Since Lucien brought you here two days ago. My poor dear. Such a terrible time, with Hubert. And poor Léonard. We thought you were suffering from a brain fever. You couldn’t be roused. Monsieur Bonnefous wanted to send for a doctor today. I watched you all the while. It broke my heart to hear you groan in your sleep, and cry out.” She patted Topaze’s hand. “I began to think you were reliving your whole life in your dreams.”

Topaze smiled gently. “Perhaps I was. But I’m here in the present now. Did
you
close your eyes at all, Little Cabbage?”

“How could I, when I worried so?”

She sighed. “And now you’re a widow. With more griefs.”

“Don’t weep for me, my dear. Alas, I don’t regret Hubert’s death. We lived an empty life for many, many years. I
do
grieve for Léonard, however. I should have been a better stepmother to him. But I couldn’t forget he was Hubert’s son. How cruel we can be to one another.”

“Will you go to bed now, Fleur, and rest? Please.”

Adelaïde rose from her chair and smothered a yawn. “I am tired. But oh so grateful for your life. Shall I send your maids to attend you, and bring your breakfast?”

“Yes, if you will.”

She noticed that the maids had put black ribbons on their caps, out of respect for the dead master. As they helped her to dress, she was glad to discover that her twisted ankle no longer troubled her. And the bump on her head, from the blow of the mill arm, had subsided and was scarcely sore to the touch. When she was dressed in morning
déshabillé
, she had her breakfast set on a small table near the window, to catch the gentle breezes. It still felt a little queer, to integrate all the people she was, and had been, into the young woman who sat at her window and smiled at the sunny day. She felt free, unencumbered. Strangely newborn.
I’m a little of all of them
, she thought. Topaze Moreau, Topaze Benoîte, Topaze Givet. Even Véronique, whose life she’d lived so comfortably for the past few months.

“Mademoiselle.” One of the maids bobbed at her. “Are you receiving this morning?”

She really didn’t feel like visitors. She’d mourned for Léonard on the hill, in Lucien’s arms; but she wasn’t ready to laugh yet. “Who wants to see me?”

“Monsieur Renaudot asked to be informed the moment you awoke.”

“Lucien?” Her heart leaped in her breast. “Of course I’ll see Lucien.” She waited impatiently until he was ushered into her boudoir. Surely her eyes were newborn as well: He had never looked more handsome to her. The rich golden tone of his skin that made his eyes seem like blue crystals, the rakish devil’s smile, the fineness of his high cheekbones, the sensuous lips. She felt giddy with love and happiness. The dark past was behind her, she stood on the brink of the glorious morrow. She held out her arms to him. “Lucien.”

He avoided her embrace, merely catching at her hands and bringing them to his lips. “Cousin Véronique. You’re up and about, I see. No pain in your ankle?”

“Not at all.” She felt the joy die in her heart at his aloof manner.

“Good. And after your restoration of memory…not too many frightening nightmares, I trust?”

“No. Even though I’ve just recalled all of it, it seems far away, long ago. The memories are fresh. The pain, mercifully, is not.”

“I’m glad.” He pointed to her breakfast tray. “May I help myself to some chocolate?”

“Of course.” She frowned at him. “Lucien…”

He interrupted her with a laugh. “By Lucifer, but you gave me a shock the other day. All that shrieking. It’s a wonder the rest of my hair didn’t go gray.”

She bit her lip. “I’m glad you find it amusing.”

He shrugged. “I find most of life amusing.” He poured himself a cup of chocolate. “I must confess to curiosity as to parts of your story. Do you mind talking about it?”

“I thought
I
was the prying chit,” she said.

“So you are. But won’t you grant me a few questions, to make up in part for all the times you tormented me?”

“You’re a damnable villain,” she said softly.

“Of course.” He smiled. A distant smile. “But satisfy the curiosity of a villain. Madame Moreau, I take it, was your mother?”

“Yes.”

“With blond hair. Like Adelaïde’s.”

“Not quite the same, but close enough so that it became confused in my hazy memory. Incidentally, I
did
have a father, and a quite legitimate birth. He was an actor in the same company with my mother. He died of the plague. He’d gone on ahead to a pestilential town to arrange an engagement.”

“And the vicomte? Tall, of course, which is why you kept thinking you recalled Hubert or Simon.”

“Yes. He was very kind, I remember, Monsieur le Vicomte. Sarlat was the family name, I think. From Gascony. We stayed with him for more than half a year.”

“And his family was against a marriage, I think you said.”

“Yes. The wickedness of actresses, and all the rest of it. His mother, the dowager vicomtesse, who lived in the château with him, could scarcely bring herself to be civil to Maman and me. Madame Benoîte had known Maman for years. She left the company to visit us there. I think she was hoping to persuade Maman that any attempt to go through with a marriage would bring the wrath of the family down upon our heads. She didn’t stay at the château.
Two
actresses under the same roof would have given the old woman apoplexy. Madame Benoîte was in the nearby town, at an inn. Thanks be to God for that. I don’t know what would have happened to me.”

“And the day of the…attack?”

She took a deep breath. “We’d gone for a ride that afternoon. The three of us, in Monsieur le Vicomte’s carriage. We were set upon by brigands. A savage band. They pulled us out of the coach and killed monsieur and his coachman at once. I didn’t see at first what had happened to Maman. They dragged us off in separate directions. I can still hear her screaming. And the sound of my
own
voice.” She swallowed her gorge and looked down at the floor. “If you don’t mind, I’d prefer not to tell the next part.”

“I understand.”

“After they were…finished with me, they went away. Isn’t it odd, what children think? I remember the blood and filth on my skirts. It was a new gown. I thought that Maman would be angry with me. I saw the vicomte and his coachman. Both dead, their clothing stripped from them, their bodies horribly mutilated. It didn’t seem real. It was like those paintings of Hell that you sometimes see, with ravaged creatures. Then I saw Maman. Her skirts were up. I covered her. I thought she was asleep, and went to shake her.” She stared at her hands. “She’d hit her head on a rock.”