Scars of Betrayal

The nod she gave him was almost imperceptible. ‘Indeed, that was a part of the story, but now I need a favour, Lord Lindsay. I need the right to go on with my life without having to look behind at the chaos, waiting for it to catch up.’

‘And nothing else?’

‘Nothing.’

Her voice was measured. No extra emotion. No telltale sign of weakness or feeling. She had sacrificed the lives of others for his and she knew there was no honour in any of it. It was not thanks she had come for. Neither was it a penance. Celeste was probably more of a part of it than anyone, for Sandrine had always been like a mother lioness over any perceived tarnishing of her cousin’s memory and she might have been fearful about the recount of his knowledge of her.

The complex layers of guilt and shame mixed in strangely with integrity. She had not needed to come. He hadn’t further want for the ring and no explanation could absolve murder.

‘You whored in exchange for my life?’

She shook away the words. ‘You know nothing, Colbert.’

‘Lindsay,’ he corrected her with a cold and hard fury.

‘If I had not traded the information, you would have been dead.’

‘And instead...?’

‘You lived.’

Her eyes flickered to the scar that ran across his jaw on the right side.

‘Death might have been kinder.’

She raised her fist at that, the hand of ruined and knotted skin. ‘You think I did not wish that, too, many times after I left you, the blood of those I’d named wrapped about the heart of my guilt? But there is no book written on the rules of war, my lord, and I was a young girl trying to exist in a world that had forsaken me. Anton Baudoin had taken the documents from a man he had murdered a few days before you came to Nay. I had no idea as to who those mentioned within it were.’

Silence filled the space between them for the time it took the clock in the corner to chime out the hour of two. It was why he had come to find the Baudoins in the first place, pointed in the direction by intelligence garnered after the agent’s murder. Then she spoke again.

‘You think I should have trusted you enough to make a run for it at Perpignan and believed that the impossible might be probable there with a hundred enemies at our heels and many more behind? You believed in that option of faith?’

‘Yes.’ Simple. Heartfelt.

Her unexpected smile was a sad one. ‘On reflection you may have been correct because what happened afterwards took away all my right of choice.’ There was a new note in her words now. Resignation and acceptance mixed with an undercurrent of shame.

‘Merde.’ The French word echoed through the dark like a gunshot. One moment a history just guessed at and the next known exactly.

‘But I have made a new life here, a good life, a life that helps those whom all others have forgotten.’

‘The Daughters of the Poor?’

She nodded, but in the depths of her eyes he saw the truth of what they had each found out about the other shimmering. Unspoken. The lump in his throat hitched in memory and it rested in the spaces after midnight, the weight of such knowledge making him turn away, pain lapping at all they could never say.

‘I help ruined girls like me.’

He hated that pretence was no longer possible.

‘Get out.’ Usually he was more urbane and polished, but with her he had never been quite himself.

‘Not until you agree to what I have asked.’

He did not speak because he did not trust in what he might say, but when he nodded she was gone, the whisper of the velvet curtains as they fell against the sash and a faint eddy of wind. Placing his head against the wall, he closed his eyes and cursed.

No one can get back what is lost.

That is what she had whispered then, that last time, as she had untwined his shaking fingers from around her wrist and gone with the French spymaster, her laughter on the air as rough hands wormed into the young promise of girlhood.

The sacking shield had come down as her footsteps receded, the twine it was held in place with tight at his throat. He remembered the sharp blade of a knife pressed into his ribs just below his heart.

‘Sandrine, the whore.’ Someone had drawled the words behind him as he had been pushed into midair and then he could remember nothing.

* * *

Cassandra was shaking so much she could barely untie her trousers and unbuckle her boots. Two good men had died because of her disclosure and Nathaniel Lindsay hated her now as easily as she had loved him, then. A young girl of shattered dreams and endless guilt. The hero in Nathanael Colbert had beckoned like a flame and she had been burnt to a cinder.

She was so utterly aware of Lindsay; that was the problem. Even now, safe in her room, the thrum of her want for him made her body vibrate. She forced stillness and crossed to the mirror above the hearth, its rim of gold leaf scratched by age. The woman who stared back was not the one she felt inside. This woman still held on to promise and hope, her eyes dancing with passion, heated skin sending rose into pale cheeks.

He had no reason to assent to all that she asked, no obligation to the betrayal and deceit lingering beyond the limits of honour. And yet he had assented.

She thrust her hand instinctively against one breast and squeezed it hard. No joy in this, no pleasure. No reward of the flesh, but the broken promises of men.

Turning away, she swallowed, the anger of her life forming strength. It was all she had, all she could hold on to. Once, other oaths had held her spellbound in the safety of Celeste’s bedroom in Perpignan, and under the light of a candle that threw the flame of curiosity on to two young faces.

‘Papa said that we can all go to Barages. It has been so long since we have been anywhere, Sandrine, and taking in the waters would be something we can all enjoy.’

‘Will David come, too?’

‘If you are going he is bound to want to for I have seen the way my father’s godson looks at you. But be warned, although he is eighteen he is also far too boring.’

Cassie blushed, hating the red that often rose in her cheeks at the mention of anything personal. She had arrived in France four months earlier, travelling from London by boat into Marseilles in the company of her mother’s brother and her cousin, and the warmth of the south had seeped into her bones like a tonic.

‘I want to meet someone who will take my breath away. A rich man, a good-looking man, a dangerous man.’ Celeste’s voice held that thread of wishfulness that Cassandra had often heard her use. ‘I am so very tired of the milksop sons of my father’s friends.’

‘But what of Jules Durand?’ Her cousin’s latest swain had been at the door most days, professing his love and his intentions, a strange mix of shyness and gall.

‘He is not...manly enough. He tells me too much before I want him to. He kissed my hand yesterday and all I could think of was to pull away from the wet limpness of his lips.’

All of a sudden the conversation had gone to places Cassandra did not understand, the edge of virtue tarnished by a feeling that seemed...bruised. Celeste had grown up in the year since she had seen her, the lines of her body curvy and fuller. Tonight under the bedcovers some other feeling lingered, something wrong and false.

Her cousin’s blue eyes flashed. ‘Do you never wish for a man’s hands upon your body, finding the places that feel only magic? Do you not want to know the wonderment that all the great books talk of?’