Royal 02 - Royal Passion (30 page)

It was true, there was not. Every moment of delay increased their chances of discovery. Exclaiming in a most unladylike manner under her breath, Mara tucked up her skirts and began to climb up the ladder of bodies. Sheer annoyance gave her strength and will enough to reach the shoulders of those on the top row. Then she slowly stood erect. Roderic reached down to her. She hesitated only a moment, then lifted her arms.

Her wrists were grasped in hard hands as merciless in their strength as steel bracelets. She was hoisted upward. An arm went around her waist, holding her until she gained purchase. For a brief moment she was aware of a hard thigh under her and the sharp nudge of the scabbard of the sword Roderic wore, then she was half swung, half pushed over the wall's edge. Before she could protest, before she could guess what he intended, he let her down the length of his arms, holding her dangling for the fraction of a second it took her to stretch downward toward the ground. Then he dropped her.

She landed in an undignified heap. An instant later she rolled, scrambling, to one side as Roderic leaped down beside her. She opened her mouth to make a sharp complaint about his method of scaling walls, then shut it abruptly as a call rang out.

"Who goes there?"

Roderic's only answer was the scrape of his sword blade as he drew it out with one hand, while with the other he swung Mara behind him. The chateau guard, shouting for help and dragging out his own sword, backed away. The prince closed with the man in a few swift strides. Their blades clanged with a shower of sparks as they came together. The encounter was violent, but quickly over. The guard gave a strangled gasp as his sword was sprung from his hand to land quivering and upright in a dung heap. Roderic used the hilt of his own to strike a hard blow to the man's chin. The guard dropped and lay unmoving.

Without pausing, Roderic stepped over the fallen man and ran toward the great iron gates of the château. With a single slash of his sword, he cut the rope that held the counterweight. The weight dropped, and slowly the gates swung open. The cadre, with a ringing yell that echoed from the stone walls, poured through.

They were just in time, for a door opened from somewhere, throwing yellow-orange light into what appeared to be an entrance court. Men, hastily donning their clothes, clattered out. They saw the cadre and stopped, raising their pistols. The flaring explosions of gunpowder blossomed in the gray dawn like short-lived flowers. The cadre flung themselves aside, drawing their own weapons. The concussions of the exchange of shots roared in the enclosed space, sending pigeons whirling up from their roosts in the dovecote off to one side, rising into the shifting pearl-gray sky. Swords were drawn. The dawn light glinted silver along the blades as they tapped and scraped. Men grunted with effort. Oaths rang out. Feet shuffled and stamped back and forth on the uneven cobbles of the courtyard.

The number of guards was small. Within moments, it was over. The men were trussed up and forced to lie on the ground. There was one, a scarred, tough-looking veteran bleeding from a head wound so that he was half-blinded, who appeared to have an air of authority. Roderic turned his attention to this man, dragging him to a sitting position as he knelt over him.

"Where is your master, de Landes?"

"Who wants to know?” the man growled.

Roderic placed his hand on his sword hilt. “The man who will dispatch you to paradise unheralded should you fail to answer—in your next breath."

Mara waited with every muscle tensed, not only for the answer that would tell them whether de Landes had harmed her grandmother, but because she feared she was about to see a man die. If she who knew the prince had no trouble believing the quiet-voiced threat, it was not surprising that the chateau's captain of the guard began to perspire in great, beaded drops.

"Your pardon, Monsieur. We—we haven't seen him in weeks."

"You have with you an elderly woman. Where is she?"

"You speak of Madame Helene? Where else should she be but in bed?"

"She is ill?” Mara asked, her voice strained.

The man looked from her to Roderic, his face puzzled. “She is asleep, so far as I know."

Roderic hauled the man to his feet. “Lead the way."

"You won't harm her?"

At that simple question, the tension that held the cadre ebbed. They looked at one another, and wry smiles etched their faces. It was Juliana who stepped forward from among them then. “Imbecile,” she said without rancor, “take us to her."

With thudding boots and clanking swords, they entered the door of the chateau, kicking aside old and warped saddles, tack, and pieces of uniforms as they crossed a large hall. A spiral stair of white limestone curved upward. They mounted it in procession, with Roderic beside the prisoner and Mara following them and the others close behind. Two floors up, they left the stair to cross another hall hung with deer antlers and furnished with ancient settles holding cushions that were threadbare where they were not moth-eaten. There was a door set in the wall beside the great, soaring fireplace of carved white limestone. The captain of the guard stopped in front of it.

Roderic glanced at the man's face, then lifted his hand to knock. The sound was quiet in the lofty room. There was no answer. He knocked again.

"If this was a lie—” Estes began.

"It's no lie. Let me,” the captain said, and set up a thunderous banging on the door.

The result was the same. Nothing.

"Stand aside,” Roderic said.

"It isn't locked,” the captain said.

Roderic stared at him in disbelief before putting out a hand and trying the handle. It gave readily. He stepped back then, nodding to Mara to indicate that she should enter first.

Mara swallowed. Her hand trembled as she placed it on the door handle. Perhaps her grandmother was too weak to rise, to call out. Perhaps her heart had failed her during the long wait for rescue, and she now lay dead in this great drafty stone mausoleum. There was only one way to find the answer.

The door swung open with ponderous slowness. The room was dim, lit only by the faint daylight falling through uncurtained windows. A huge bed beneath a
baldaquin
of embroidered satin that was gray with dust and age could be seen. A painted armoire of the type once called a marriage chest sat against one wall, and there was a settle drawn up near the fireplace. These were the only pieces of furniture. There was, however, a trunk and a pristine white nightgown, convent made, with a high neck and long sleeves that Mara recognized as belonging to her grandmother. The nightgown was thrown over the settle as if the elderly woman might have dressed in haste in front of the small fire that burned under the cavernous mantel.

At Mara's call, the others crowded into the room behind her.

The captain licked his lips as he looked from one grim face of the cadre to the other. “She—she must have stepped outside. She rises early, does the Madame."

They trooped outside once more, leaving the building by a rear door that gave on to a narrow back passageway. This was the passage between the kitchens and the servants’ quarters, and led toward the stables and a few other outbuildings, including the privy. They searched the kitchens where a slattern in a greasy apron was just brewing a pot of coffee. The privy was discreetly canvassed. The captain had begun to stammer when Mara, staring at what appeared to be a chicken house, gave a glad cry.

Grandmère Helene came walking toward them. The hood of her cloak was thrown back so that her white hair shone in the light of the rising sun. The hem of her cloak and her gown dragged where they were wet with dew. In her hand she carried a basket piled high with eggs, while behind her like a tame dog walked a white milk goat with a pair of kids gamboling around her. She lifted her hand in a wave, her lined face creasing in a smile of welcome.

"Good morning,” she called, her voice gaily lilting as she came near. “You are all in time for a breakfast omelette."

As a good Creole housewife, food was one thing Grandmère Helene knew. Though it had been years since she had prepared a meal with her own hands, she had always supervised her own kitchen personally, and the recipes that appeared on her table were her own, copied out in her elegant, flowing script. She had charmed her guards not only by her gracious manners, but by the quality of the meals she had prepared for them, using the wholesome country items that lay near at hand. The goats and the chickens belonged to the caretakers of the chateau, a family of peasants descended from a servant of the aristocratic family who had built the place. They had been encamped in the great house since the revolution. Owners came and went with the many changes of government, but they remained.

The captain of the guard was the elder son of the caretakers, the others were distant cousins. Grandmère was not happy about the injuries they had sustained defending the chateau. They had been good to her, like her own family. She required that they be given medical attention and released for breakfast.

It was kind of Roderic to ride to her rescue, she said; he must not think her ungrateful. He was very like his father, so impetuous, so amazingly able, so handsome. Seeing him brought back such memories. And how thoughtful it had been of him to bring dear Mara; she had worried so about her granddaughter and could now be easy in her mind. He must call her Grandmère, if he pleased. Would he care for a little wild onion and perhaps a bit of goat cheese in his omelette?

Roderic was charmed. He sat in the kitchen talking to the elderly woman as she moved about doing the tasks of cooking. They spoke of his father and the time he had spent in Louisiana, of the things he had done there, and also of Angeline, his mother, who had been well-known to Helene. By degrees he led the conversation to Mara and her father, and listened, absorbed, to everything the older woman had to say about how they lived and where.

Mara, helping her grandmother when she could, was intensely aware of the growing rapport between the other two. It affected her strangely, for she thought she discerned the glimmering of a purpose on both sides. She was not certain what it was in either case, but feared that she was the cause.

The day wore on. The prince seemed to be in no hurry to leave the bucolic retreat they had found. The cadre gathered in the antler-hung hall and built up an enormous roaring fire, using several tree trunks, in the fireplace. They knocked the dust from the settle cushions and stretched out to rest after their long hours of hard riding. Warm, filled with good food, they soon slept. Even Demon put his head on his paws, sighed, and closed his eyes. He opened them lazily as Juliana's Pekingese, Sophie, came to curl up against his side, then shut them again.

Mara could not seem to relax enough to rest. She had the feeling that it would be best for them to quit the place as soon as possible. De Landes might appear at any moment. What he could do with Roderic and his men in possession, she did not know; still, she had no wish to find out.

She walked to a pair of tall windows that opened out onto a balcony at the front of the chateau. The windows overlooked one of those distant prospects so admired by French landscape architects. Between an alley of trees stretched a long sweep of ground extending unbroken to a building perhaps a half mile away. Doubtless the vista had once been carpeted with greensward. Now it was made up of plowed fields lying fallow for the winter, though the act of plowing had kept the view open instead of becoming overgrown. On either side the garden had closed in, becoming a tangle of underbrush and dead trees that were the roosts of owls and small falcons. As she watched, a falcon rose from the woods and circled the sky, shrieking its fierce pleasure to the wind.

The falcon was free, and she was not.

"Pensive and forlorn, do you require solace, or would it be an insult?"

Roderic's voice was beguiling. It grated on her nerves, setting up a fluttering in her stomach. Or perhaps that disturbance was caused by his nearness as he moved to stand close beside her with his arm braced on the window frame.

"You have rescued my grandmother, for which I must thank you. I require nothing more."

"I have outstripped my usefulness then? What a blow to my esteem."

"I doubt it will be damaged."

"Do you?” he said, the words suddenly hard and clipped. “I am only a man, Mara, with a man's weaknesses and needs. I have never pretended otherwise."

"You are a prince and expect everyone to bow to your will!"

"To deny my birth would be the act of a fool, but for every privilege that goes with it there is an obligation, for every source of power a danger. And princes are still men."

He pushed away from her. Before she could turn, before she could answer, he was gone.

With the dawn of another day, they were on the road to Paris. The ladies rode in the traveling carriage with the cadre strung out around them. Estes brought up the rear, for he was carrying in a bag on his saddle a goat cheese made by Grandmère Helene that she refused to leave behind. The cheese, in the process of ripening, was extremely aromatic. Demon, wise dog, refused to ride in his basket on his master's saddle, but begged a place inside the carriage with the ladies and Sophie.

Roderic was attentive to Grandmère's comfort, handing her down from the carriage and back into it when they halted, tucking the lap robe around her, using a gentle and hilarious raillery to raise her spirits when they began to flag with fatigue. Once or twice he swung from his saddle into the vehicle to ride with the ladies, entertaining them with a seemingly effortless stream of comments and gossip on the places they passed, most of which was slanderous and so delicately improper that Grandmère Helene was delightfully scandalized. The result of his efforts was that by the time they reached the city the elderly woman had accepted his invitation to stay with him at Ruthenia House. Her granddaughter would stay with her, of course.

It was so cleverly done that there was never a time when Mara could, with grace, have declined. She might have shouted out a refusal and started a brawling, screaming quarrel there in front of everyone, but the only reason for her objection she might give that her grandmother would accept was so personal that she could not bring herself to do it. She would not stay, however. On this she was determined. As soon as she could see her grandmother alone, she would explain exactly what had happened and that would be the end of it.