So in Love (2 page)
Authors: Karen Ranney
June 1792
Edinburgh, Scotland
D
ouglas MacRae had no idea, when he prepared for the evening, that in one moment ten years would be swept away and he would feel as lost and distraught as a young man. He had no intimation and no foreboding, when leaving his house a few hours earlier, that he might see
her
.
He stared at the woman standing in the doorway, limned by the light. An icy coldness encapsulated him, as well as a sensation of being instantly catapulted into some otherworldly place.
She was supposed to be dead.
Attired in a dark blue dress with only a hint of white at the collar and cuffs to soften the severe hue, she stood immobile, her face expressionless, holding on to the hand of a little boy. The child, his hair curling in brown ringlets, wore a suit of clothes identical to his father’s down to the lace at his neck and wrists.
Douglas had two immediate thoughts—that Hartley’s wife was a ghost from his past, and that she wasn’t, evidently, still bedridden as the man had said.
The little boy rubbed at his eyes and the woman spoke to him in hushed tones. A gentle smile changed her face, lit her eyes, and softened her lips.
Suddenly it was two years ago and he was standing in the captain’s cabin of his brother’s ship, a scrap of a handwritten notice in his hand. Hamish had brought the news from France and he’d read it three times before making sense of the words.
“The Comte du Marchand is dead,” he said aloud, the words not having the weight he expected. “And Vallans is destroyed.”
“What about his daughter?” his brother had asked.
“It doesn’t say.” He’d laid the notice down on the table in his brother’s cabin, stunned and disagreeably affected by the realization that Jeanne du Marchand must be dead as well. But it seemed that she wasn’t, was she?
“Bid your father goodnight,” she said tenderly to the little boy. At the sound of her voice, Douglas was immediately reminded of Paris, a shadowed garden, and the sound of summer.
The child looked timorously at the man seated next to Douglas.
“Goodnight, Papa,” he said, not relinquishing Jeanne’s hand. The child didn’t move from his stance by the door. Nor did his host bid him come closer.
“Goodnight, Davis,” Hartley said, smiling absently at his son. He managed a longer look at Jeanne.
Her auburn hair was held at the back of her head in a serviceable bun. Over it she wore an arrangement of lace and dark blue ribbon. But it was her face Douglas studied as she stood with eyes downcast, her gaze fixed on the floor.
A lovely face, one he’d kissed enough times to know the
texture of her skin, to measure the distance from the corner of her full lips across her high cheekbones to fluttering eyelashes. He’d traced the line of each winged brow with his fingertips. He’d seen a Roman coin once and the perfection of the profile had reminded him of her.
Thick spectacles now shielded her soft gray eyes, a shade that reminded him of fog and storms, and smoke from a peak fire. A voice from his memory, a laughing teasing taunt, whispered in his ear.
“I fear that I’m vain, Douglas. I could see you better if I wore them, but they are so ugly.”
“Nothing you could do,” he’d said, “could ever make you less beautiful in my eyes, Jeanne.” His own voice had been laden with lust and youthful exuberance. But he had been in love, so desperately in love that he didn’t see her as less than perfect.
She’d linked her arms around his neck and kissed him sweetly, gently.
“Then I shall always think myself beautiful, my dearest Douglas. Even if I must squint at you.”
Now Jeanne’s gaze traveled over him disinterestedly. Abruptly, her eyes widened as she seemed to still, her faint smile freezing in place, one hand splayed at her side.
The least she could do was appear afraid.
But perhaps she no longer had the ability to glean his thoughts as she once had. If so, she would have run from the room or begged for his forgiveness.
He would never give it.
His host flicked a finger in the child’s direction and instantly the woman turned and gently pulled the boy through the doorway. Neither of them looked back, but Douglas could not stop staring in Jeanne’s direction even as the door closed.
“I see you’re struck dumb at the sight of my governess,”
Robert Hartley said, grinning. “I, too, feel the same when looking at Jeanne. If you discount that ugly eyewear, she’s a fine morsel. Did you see those breasts?”
Douglas’s hand reached out to grasp the etched crystal tumbler he was being offered, and he noted with detachment that it sparkled in the gleam of the branch of candles only a few feet from him. Warmth was curiously absent from the room, the chill so pervasive that he wondered why he’d not noticed it earlier.
Governess?
Slowly, Douglas turned his head and looked at his host. With some difficulty he managed a small smile. “Your governess is, indeed, a lovely woman.”
Hartley grinned. “She’ll be more than that in a few days. My wife is still abed from our youngest child’s birth and a man has needs.”
“And is your governess amenable to your suggestions?” How odd that Douglas’s voice didn’t reveal the tumult of his thoughts. Instead, it sounded steady and he appeared only barely interested in the topic at hand.
“What choice does she have? She’s only a governess, after all. They may carry themselves as high and mighty, but in the end she’ll do what’s necessary to keep her position.”
Douglas placed the glass carefully on the brass coaster beside him.
The room in which he sat was comfortable without the touches of grandiosity marking the remainder of Hartley’s home. Bookcases lined the walls and the hundreds of gilt-edged books were arranged by thickness rather than topic, leading Douglas to wonder if Hartley was one of those men who furnished his library by the case, judging his reading material by weight more than content.
Some men prided themselves on being learned without any attempt at learning.
The evening had been one filled with business. Robert
Hartley was not a friend but a customer, one who wanted to engage in the importation of French textiles. Up until a few moments earlier it had been a tolerable evening.
“You should have seen her a few months ago. Scrawny little thing she was, but she’s filled out nicely.”
“Did you hire her yourself?” he asked and forced himself to sit back against the chair, feigning a nonchalance that he didn’t feel. Instead, each of his senses was alert, his hearing attuned to the answer.
Hartley studied his glass, looking entirely too self-congratulatory. “It was my wife who brought her into the household. Evidently the girl’s aunt was a friend of my wife’s mother. A pity Jeanne chose to be a governess. She might have been a very sought-after courtesan with that bosom of hers.”
The anger Douglas felt was a surprise, but then, he hadn’t expected Jeanne to be resurrected from his past, a ghost given form. How strange that, of all the places in the world, all the cities and towns, all the houses, taverns, hovels, and huts, she would be here, in Robert Hartley’s home on this one night.
He glanced toward the door, wondering at the fact that his blood was just now beginning to warm. His heart still beat in a staccato fashion, and his grip on the arm of the chair was a bit too fierce.
His host, however, seemed to have seen nothing untoward in his behavior, for which he was grateful. Douglas didn’t want to explain to anyone that the sight of that one particular woman had enraged him so fully that his hands shook with the emotion.
“I understand you’ve been to France many times,” Hartley said, pouring himself another glass of whiskey.
“I have,” Douglas answered. “But my brother and his wife are the most traveled.”
Hamish and Mary had decided to engage in a rescue ef
fort in the last few years, crossing the Channel innumerable times to ferry those fleeing France to safety. He had no intention of divulging their activities to Hartley or the fact that while the English were intent upon removing Huguenots from Nova Scotia, Hamish and Mary were just as determined to populate his native country with French émigrés.
“It’s a terrible thing what’s happening there,” Hartley said.
Strange, but the other man didn’t sound all that concerned. But then, Douglas had felt the same until accompanying his brother on one of those trips to Calais. His compassion had been born the moment he’d seen the despair in the eyes of those who’d escaped France, and heard their stories.
“I suppose that any revolution has its share of brutality,” Douglas said, sipping from his whiskey. “The French feel disenfranchised, which only encourages a certain radicalism.”
“They’re hard on their nobles, though,” Hartley said, grinning. He leaned back in his chair and held his glass up to the light to admire the dark caramel color of the whiskey.
“And their king and queen,” Douglas contributed, speaking of the fact that Louis XVI and his wife had been arrested the year before. France was swallowing its aristocracy, cleansing itself of nobility one person at a time.
Was that what had happened to Jeanne? Had she escaped France because she was no longer accorded the privileges of her rank? With some difficulty, Douglas focused his mind on his host and the business at hand. Until he left Robert Hartley’s home, he would concentrate on being a genial guest.
Revenge could wait until later.
J
eanne couldn’t breathe. There was a cold spot next to her heart and a pounding in her chest. She felt as if the past were a heavy stone, much like the punishment she’d received at the Convent of Sacré-Coeur. There, she’d been made to stand in the center of her cell, a series of progressively heavier rocks hung from a chain around her neck.
“Will you confess, Jeanne Catherine Alexis du Marchand?” Sister Marie-Thérèse demanded.
“I do,” she’d whispered, the punishment for silence so much greater than any admission of her sins.
“You fornicated?”
A terrible word for the love she and Douglas MacRae had shared. But what would that stern-faced nun know of physical joy, of laughter in the sunlight?
“I did.”
“You lusted?”
God forgive her, but she had. And did, in her nightly dreams of him. But then she woke. “I did.”
“You bore a bastard?”
She placed her hands on her flat belly, feeling the eternal
emptiness there. “Yes,” she said, keeping her head bowed.
The heavy stones were gone now, but the memory of them still pulled at her shoulders, not unlike the burdens of guilt, regret, and grief.
What was Douglas doing in Edinburgh?
Seated, he had still seemed tall, his shoulders square, his build neither slender nor overly muscled. His gaze, from eyes a deep and fathomless blue, was direct without revealing anything of the man. The groove of dimple in his cheek, however, proved that he sometimes smiled.
But not at her.
The child, Davis, was talking. Jeanne forced a weak smile to her lips, knowing that she had to answer him. Perhaps this was just a dream, and her charge was only a participant in it. But the wall was hard against her back and she could smell the perfume of the flowers in the hall and feel Davis’s small hand cupped in hers.
Please, God.
The prayer was the first time in years that she had actually implored the Almighty. She’d had enough of God in the convent. He hadn’t saved her from Sister Marie-Thérèse.
Make him be a ghost.
But it was all too obvious that Douglas was real, and seated not twenty feet from her.
God must have been listening after all, because she somehow found the strength to continue down the hall and then up the stairs to the third floor.
“You don’t look at all well, miss,” Davis said, as she stopped on the landing, trying to quell her sudden nausea. The little boy looked up at her, eyes narrowed. Davis was a great worrier, his thin little face almost always drawn and pinched.
“Of course I am, Davis,” she said, wishing that her heart would slow its staccato beating and her breath would come easier.
“I don’t think you are, miss.”
“Nonsense,” she said. But she was grateful not to see any of the many maids or footmen who patrolled the hallways of the Hartley home. They would glance at her pale face and not hesitate to report her appearance to Robert Hartley.
There was nothing at all wrong with her. A fully fleshed ghost had appeared from her past, that was all.
Determinedly, she mounted the last of the steps and began to walk with lengthening strides away from the narrow back stairs and toward the nursery.
“Are you certain you’re not going to be sick?”
Jeanne searched for the words that would keep the young boy from asking too many questions, none of which she could answer. She had enough to do to breathe, to put one foot in front of the other, and to continue on in the present when the past summoned her with such fervency.
She could feel the tentacles of it stretching out and entwining around her, tugging at her to remember, to recall. A touch of his hand, his breath upon her neck, the feel of his body against hers. Forbidden memories the convent had attempted to expunge all those years. Despite the many beatings, despite the mornings in which she was doused with buckets of cold water and left to stand in the chilled air, she had never told them everything.
Nor had she ever truly forgotten.
At this moment, however, she wished they had been successful, and all those occasions spread flat upon the flagstone floor of the chapel had stripped him from her mind. A memory could hurt, and that knowledge surprised her. In the convent, recollections of Douglas had kept her warm at night, kept her whole when the sisters would have splintered her soul.
Even the anger she felt at his abandonment did not ache as much as this pain.
Blessedly, she finally reached the nursery, opening the door and releasing Davis’s hand. He turned and surveyed Jeanne with too much knowledge in his young eyes.
“You
are
going to be sick, aren’t you? It was the fish at dinner, wasn’t it? It always makes Mama ill. That’s why Cook never prepares it for her anymore. I told you that if you made me eat it I’d get sick as well.”
“You will not get sick, Davis,” she said calmly. “Neither will I. I’m simply feeling a little fatigued.”
“We didn’t say goodnight to Mama,” Davis said, his tone too much like a whine. On any other night she would have corrected him, but not now. Tonight all she wanted to do was put him to bed and retreat to her room.
“Your mother is sleeping and I didn’t wish to disturb her.” Let God make something of that lie.
Davis looked as if he didn’t believe her, but Jeanne didn’t care at the moment.
She helped Davis ready himself for bed and listened to his prayers with little attention. Ever since her years in the convent, she no longer prayed. Instead, she held herself tight, hands clasped in front of her, head slightly bent, an attitude of penitence or worship. Her thoughts were not on God but on Douglas.
Tucking Davis into bed, she smoothed her hand over the boy’s forehead as she did every night. And, every night, Davis withdrew from her touch, not given to overt gestures of affection.
She bent and pinched off the flame of the candle beside the child’s bed.
“Goodnight, Davis,” she said, then stood and walked to the door.
“Goodnight, miss.”
One quick glance at him and she closed the door, walking down the hall to her own chamber, a tiny room with a
sloping ceiling, furnished simply with a single cot, armoire, and bureau. The young woman she’d been, the rich and spoiled aristocrat, would have been dismayed both at the small space and the scarred furniture, but the woman she was now viewed it simply as hers and accepted it as adequate for her needs. She’d done with less at the convent, and even less on the journey from France.
Walking to the window, she opened it, feeling the warm night air enter the room. There were some who said it was poisonous, and from the scent of the damp and pungent Edinburgh breeze, she could almost believe it. But a gust from the north, smelling of trees and flowers, brushed against her cheek and hinted at far-off wild places.
Removing her spectacles, she closed her eyes and vowed not to cry. Even though he’d been close enough to touch, even though he had never said a word to her, even though he treated her like a stranger, she would not cry.
A tear dampened her cheek. Mirthlessly, she chuckled at herself. Very well, she might weep for the young girl she’d been, so desperately in love that she would have challenged any of her father’s edicts, and had.
She replaced her spectacle and opened her eyes, she glanced at her reflection in the night-darkened window, wondering if Douglas had recognized her at all. She had changed from the girl he’d known. Or perhaps those alterations weren’t visible on the surface. Her eyes were the same color, an odd sort of gray that had always embarrassed her. Her hair was brown, with a tinge of red to it, much as it had been as a girl. While it was true her face appeared thinner and her cheekbones higher, it was no doubt due more to the deprivations of the past months than to the passage of time.
The spoiled and rebellious young girl had become a survivor, but such changes didn’t show on the surface.
Her fingers toyed with the rectangular gold pendant that
was one of a few scant remnants of her past. An ugly piece of jewelry, it had belonged to her mother and was, for that reason, treasured.
Douglas had looked so prosperous sitting in Robert Hartley’s library. There was a look on his face, watchful more than stern, that would caution even the most flirtatious woman from approaching him. Whereas her last memories of him had been as a smiling young man, this stranger was formidable and commanding.
Turning from the window, Jeanne performed her nightly routine of pushing the bureau in front of the door, a barricade against Hartley’s nocturnal visits. A month ago he’d knocked on the door, whispering an entreaty. A week ago he’d tested the door, only to discover the furniture blocking his way. So far he’d allowed it to stand, probably because he didn’t want his attempts at seduction to be overheard.
Her employer was watching her like a bird of prey. Sometimes when she came upstairs, he would stand at the landing, refusing to move as she passed. She’d feel his hand glide over the material covering her bottom, but because Davis was with her she hadn’t chastised him in front of the boy. Several times when she entered the schoolroom he was there, leaving only after he’d made a show of questioning his son on his newfound knowledge, and complimenting her overmuch when little Davis repeated his daily lessons by rote.
Something would have to be done about him, and soon. Her nightly precautions wouldn’t keep him at bay forever.
If she’d had another trade, another method of making her way in the world, she would never have chosen to be a governess. But she had few attributes other than her education. People, especially the Scots, simply didn’t care that she was the daughter of a French Count, that her father had once been so wealthy that he’d loaned the king money, that
Vallans had boasted over three hundred rooms and countless works of art.
Nor would they care, if they had known, that she had escaped from a convent, leaving France with little more than the clothes on her back.
It certainly hadn’t mattered to Robert Hartley that she was destitute when she’d come looking for a job, that it had been three days since she’d last had a substantial meal. The two questions he’d asked prior to employing her had been simple and easily answered: Did she have any references, and was she willing to work for a certain sum? No to the first question, regrettably. Her years with the nuns would not help. From the convent she’d made her way to Scotland to be with her aunt, only to learn that her only living relative had died a year earlier. Her uncle by marriage had no interest in opening his home to a half-French émigré whatever the relationship. As to the latter question, she would gladly take whatever Hartley wished to pay.
Jeanne was well aware that she was working for a smaller wage than Hartley would have paid a Scotswoman. But she had learned a very valuable lesson in the last ten years. Life could be distilled to its basic elements. As long as she was warm, dry, and had a little food, she was content. Anything more was superfluous.
Slowly, she removed her clothing, hanging each garment inside the small armoire. She was careful with her three dresses, a legacy from a fellow émigré who had been grateful for Jeanne’s tending of her sick child.
Her fingers smoothed the fine embroidery stitches adorning the top of the collar of one garment. As a child, she’d been punished for her stitches. Every time she’d taken needle to fabric, the result had been a disaster. One of her more inventive—and kind—governesses had only smiled and said that the tiny little spots of blood adorning her needlework appeared like small flowers. Only later,
and quite accidentally, the same governess determined that she couldn’t see well enough to sew.
But Mademoiselle Danielle had disappeared just like a succession of governesses, none of whom could adhere to her father’s severe requirements that she be educated like a Jesuit while being as charming as a courtesan. The jeweler summoned by her governess had likewise been banished by her father, the glasses Jeanne needed to see properly to be taken out only when there were no visitors to their home and no chance of anyone seeing her wearing them.
Heaven forbid that the daughter of the Comte du Marchand have any flaws.
Donning her nightgown, she removed her glasses once more and washed her face and hands. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she prepared for sleep. Her ritual was one she’d begun at the Convent of Sacré-Coeur. There, the nuns had expected obedience, some outward manifestation of her inner faith. They could not know, of course, that she had none left. But she’d pretended, just in case curious eyes were looking at her through the grille set in the middle of the thick oak door. Now she folded her hands in front of her, her lips resting at her fingertips. Then she breathed her prayer in an inaudible whisper.
Please, let me die tonight. Let my heart cease beating, and my breath still. Please, do not let me see the dawn.
Tonight, however, the imploration did not come as quickly or as easily as a day ago.
She knew that there would come a time when she would be called upon to face the consequences of her actions. There would be no mercy for her, no explanation that she could possibly make, nothing that she could say that would expiate her guilt. But she’d not expected that day to be this one or the judgment to be from the one man she’d always loved.
If she were a more courageous woman, she’d march
down the stairs at this moment and ask permission to address Douglas in private. She would tell him of those months when she waited for him and he never came, and how cowardly she became. She would confess, more completely than she ever had to a single soul, how much she regretted what happened next.
Not even God could ever truly forgive her. But it might be a relief to have it over, to simply say the words to Douglas.
I am guilty of murder.