On My Lady's Honor (All for one, and one for all) (15 page)

No wonder her face had gone was white as milk when he had torn her shirt.
 
He’d intended it only as a lesson for the lad to hold his tongue when he was in no fit state to fight.
 
It was better that he learn that lesson in a hurry from one who wished him no harm, or he would not live long.

He’d caught a glimpse of some strange undergarment the lad was wearing, and then his pupil had surprised him by leaping to his feet with more agility than he would have thought possible, given his sorry state.

From the moment his friend had returned from the Camargue he had been Gerard and yet not Gerard.
 
Those blue eyes that were so like Gerard’s had looked right through him without a shred of recognition or warmth.
 
He had recognized the face of his friend, but that familiar face had hidden the soul of a stranger.

No wonder he had been so confused, wondering how his friend could be the same on the outside but different in every other way from the man he had once known.
 
The explanation had been so obvious he had never seen it hiding under his nose all the time.
 
Gerard had never returned.

Instead God had sent him Gerard’s sister, so like her brother in face and feature.
 
He would marry her as he had promised and look after her as well as he could.
 
He owed his friend that much.
 
Foolish, impulsive, beautiful girl that she was, she would need a lot of protection.

He gathered her closer to him, thankful for her safety.
 
He would never let her be in such danger again.
 
Now he knew who she was, he protect her with every last drop of blood in his body.

He could not take her back to her lodgings as he had first intended and leave her there to the scant cheer of her landlady.
 
He knew the Widow Poussin from old.
 
She was a grasping, cheerless old woman, concerned only with feeding her avarice and adding to the pile of coins she had stacked up under the mattress of her bed.
 

His own lodgings were close by.
 
He could take her there and keep an eye on her until she was better again.
 
Once she was well, he would find out both the reason for her masquerade and the fate of his friend.

Soldier that he was, he felt his eyes fill with tears as he though of his friend.
 
He had little hope that Gerard had survived.
 
If he were alive, his sister would not be alone, in Paris, living an unnatural life as a common soldier.

He could not imagine the desperation she must have felt to have driven her to such extremes.
 
Once again he cursed his own foolishness that had so nearly gotten him killed by a peasant with a pitchfork.
 
He had made the ultimate error then in underestimating his enemy.
 
He vowed he would never do so again.

She opened her eyes as he carried her over the threshold.
 
“Where are we?”

“At my lodgings.”

She groaned, sounding as if she were about to breathe her last.
 
“I thought you were going to take me back to the Rue de Fosset.”

He climbed the last of the stairs and pushed open the door to his apartment on the second floor.
 
“The devil take me if I was going to carry you that far, you great lump of lard,” he said, as he put her down gently on an ottoman.
 
In truth, she was such a light weight that he had barely noticed carrying her.
 
“This is quite far enough.”
 

She looked like she was going to protest.
 
“Besides, you reek of stale wine,” he added.
 
“It almost made me sick to the stomach to carry you.”

She looked at her stained shirt in embarrassment.
 
“Lend me a shirt to go home in, will you?” she said with forced cheer.
 
“I’ll bring it back to you on the morrow.”

He shook his head.
 
“No shirt of mine is going on your back until you’ve had a bath.”

The look on her face was almost comical in its dismay.
 
If he hadn’t already known she was a woman, he would have guessed at it simply by her horror of taking a bath in his company.
 
“N…no bath,” she said.
 
“I shall catch cold.”

He could not resist teasing her.
 
After all, he still owed her for that annoying scratch on his arm.
 
How humiliating, to have been wounded by a mere girl!
 
“Don’t worry, I’ll have the water well heated.”

“I’m perfectly clean,” she said.
 
“I wouldn’t want to bother your landlady for hot water when it isn’t necessary.
 
All I need is a clean shirt and I’ll smell as fresh as a daisy.”

He looked tellingly at her soiled breeches and stained jacket.
 
Her entire outfit looked as if she had been carousing in it all night.
 
“You will?”

She looked down at her battered clothes and sighed.
 
“I had a rough night last night.
 
I’ll bathe in my own lodgings.”

He sighed.
 
What kind of a virago was this strange fiancée of his?
 
“More brawling?”

She held out her hands.
 
They were cut and torn, and covered in weeping blisters.
 
“No more brawling - I never fight without good reason.
 
I was escaping the effects of the first one.
 
I never knew I could climb a stone wall in less time than it takes you to snap your fingers.”

He took her hands in his and stroked them, probing gently to see how deep the sores went.
 
She winced at the touch of his fingers.
 
“They look bad.
 
They need to be tended to.”

“They are little enough.”
 
She gave a wry smile.
 
“My feet are worse.”

Despite her protests, he unlaced one of her boots and pulled it down her thigh and over her ankle.
 
It made his guts churn to see how the stocking on her foot was covered in crusted blood.
 
“Have you been walking in them all morning?”

She nodded.

Was his pretty Amazon slow-witted as well as quick-tempered?
 
“Did you not have the sense to tend to them last night?”

“I did not make it home last night,” she admitted, her face going pink around the edges.
 
“I was drinking with two of my fellows deep into the night, until I fell asleep on the floor with my boots on.
 
I had no time to change my stockings and no clean linen to change into.”

A pang of fury shot through his heart that Sophie, the girl to whom he should be married by now, had spent the night with a couple of his own comrades.
 
“Who did you spend the night with?” he growled, barely able to disguise his anger.

She put her nose into the air and gave him a haughty stare.
 
“That is no concern of yours.”

She was wrong.
 
It was definitely a concern of his.

He had promised Gerard that he would take care of his sister if anything were to happen to him.
 
He had thought that Sophie’s death had absolved him of his promise.
 
Now that he knew better, nothing on earth would keep him from her side.
 
He would even marry her as he had promised, beautiful, brawling Amazon that she was.
 
He owed his dead friend that much.
 
“A simple question deserves a simple answer.”

The haughty look had not left her face.
 
“Is there a law against sleeping on your comrade’s floor?”

He glared at her, wishing he could shake some sense into her pretty head.
 
“Don’t be absurd.”

“Then why do you care?”

What kind of a foolish question was that?
 
She knew full well that he was her betrothed husband – even if she didn’t yet realize that he knew it, too.
 
“You should not be sleeping on the floors of strange men.”

“They are not strange.
 
They are Musketeers – the same as you and I.”

He shook his head at her answer.
 
He still could not get over the fact that she had successfully disguised herself among the regiment for so long.
 
How could he have missed the signs that were so obvious now that he knew the truth?
 
How could he have missed the feminine tilt of her chin, or the haughty way she had of looking down at him, as if he were a maggot under her heel?
 
How had he so easily managed to dismiss her sudden incompetence with a sword, when his efforts with Gerard the year before had turned the lad into a passably good swordsman?
 
Suddenly, she made sense to him, where before he had seen only confusion and contradiction.

She was a woman.
 
There was no point in arguing with her any longer.
 
If she was like every other woman he knew, she would talk the head off a donkey before he would ever convince her that he had a right to care for her.
 

He stuck his head out of the door and shouted for the landlady.
 
She appeared in a bustle of warmth, smelling like the good roast beef she turned out daily for his evening meal.
 
“I need a tub and some hot water up here right away.
 
A comrade of mine has been in the wars and needs attending to.”

She smiled at him.
 
“Certainly, Monsieur le Comte.
 
Would you be wanting anything else?”

“Some bandages, too, if you would be so kind.”

“Right away, Monsieur le Comte.”
 
She bustled away again with a busy air.

Sophie was glaring at him with a look that would freeze the ocean over, her arms crossed over her chest.
 
“I will not get into that bath.”

He would not argue – he would demand.
 
“Yes, you will.
 
You’re filthy.”

Her dagger was in her hand, threatening him with its shining blade.
 
“I will not get into that bath.
 
You cannot make me.”

Did she think she would frighten him with that little pinprick of a knife?
 
He sat down opposite her and looked her straight in the eyes.
 
How could he tell her kindly that he knew her secret?
 
“Believe me, I know why you do not want to bathe.”

Sophie looked back at him with defiance writ large over her face.
 
“I doubt that very much,” she muttered, so low that he barely caught the words.
 
“I will catch my death of cold,” she said aloud.

He could not imagine her catching her death of anything, unless it was at the point of an enemy’s sword.
 
“You’re a good deal stronger than that, if I’m not mistaken.”

She dropped the dagger in her lap, gave an artificial cough and looked up at him with a face full of misery.
 
“The plague weakened me.”

He would have laughed at her had he not known how unpleasant one’s very first hangover felt.
 
“Did it also turn you from a man into a woman?”

All the blood rushed from her face and her whole body was trembling.
 
Even her voice shook with shock and disbelief when she spoke again.
 
“What did you call me?”

He felt sorry for her distress.
 
She had guarded her secret so well that he hardly had the heart to tell her that her disguise had been penetrated.
 
“I called you what you are.”

She picked up her dagger again and held it in a wavering hand.
 
“I will kill you for that insult.”

He did not move.
 
He doubted she could see straight to kill anything that morning.
 
She was probably still seeing two of him.
 
“Come, Sophie.
 
The time for playacting has past.
 
I know what you are.
 
I know who you are.”

All the fight went out of her on the sudden and she collapsed on to the ottoman as if she had lost all the strength in her legs.
 
“What did you call me?”