Before the Storm (27 page)

‘Was she really?’ Phoebe looked across at plump, pretty little Madame de Saint-Amaranthe speculatively.
 

Venetia shrugged and threw some money onto the table. ‘Who knows?’

Clementine idly listened to this conversation before drifting away to wander around the smoky, incense scented room. Gambling had never really attracted her, the clattering sound of gaming chips as they were pushed across a table did not thrill her as it did Venetia and her sister and her few attempts to join in had resulted in such hideous losses that she had given up in despair.

‘The trick is to keep going,’ Venetia had told her more than once. ‘Sooner or later your luck will change.’

‘Later rather sooner in your case,’ Clementine had once replied with a laugh, earning herself a gentle slap from her friend’s lacquered fan.

Suddenly overwhelmed by the heat in the candlelit stuffy room and rather unnerved by the hushed intensity of the gamers as they held their breath at every turn of the cards or roll of the dice, Clementine hastened from the room, thinking she might go and sit for a while in one of the little sitting rooms that she had been told lay across the landing.

The obliging footmen from earlier had vanished and she hesitated before turning the handle of one of four closed doors, not entirely sure what she would find on the other side but hoping for some privacy and rest. A mirror hanging on the wall opposite the door reflected her own pale, scared face and gave her the initial impression that the sitting room was empty.
 

Too late did she realise that the small pink silk sofa in the corner of the room was occupied by a couple, who hastily sprang apart as she stepped inside. ‘I am so sorry,’ Clementine mumbled, instinctively backing away before she realised that the shocked faces turned towards her were those of Sidonie and Antoine’s father, the Comte. ‘My God.’

‘Clementine!’ Sidonie was the first to regain composure and called after her as she whirled blindly from the room. ‘Come back!’

Clementine took a deep breath and turned to face her former governess, while averting her eyes from the Comte, who stood in the doorway behind her. ‘It is none of my concern,’ she said before the other woman had a chance to speak. ‘There is no need to discuss this, is there?’

‘My dear...’ Sidonie reached out to her then let her hand drop. ‘I wish with all my heart that you had not seen the Comte and I together.’ She sighed. ‘I hate to think that I have disappointed you.’

Clementine shook her head. ‘You haven’t disappointed me,’ she replied, forcing her lips to form a smile. ‘Really, you haven’t.’ She looked past Sidonie to the Comte, who looked pale and thoughtful. ‘I am sorry.’

An awkward silence fell which was abruptly broken when the door to the main salon opened and Phoebe, looking harassed and red cheeked hurried out. ‘Oh there you are, Clementine!’ she said thankfully, taking the other girl’s arm. ‘We have to leave at once. Jules has turned up, half out of his wits with wine and God knows what else. He’s just shouted at Venetia and demanded that she breaks with Eugène and returns to him.’ She smiled wanly at Sidonie. ‘You know how Jules can be,’ she said with a tiny shrug.

‘I’m afraid that I do,’ Sidonie murmured and the two women exchanged a look. Phoebe was no fool and, alone of the girls, had eventually come to realise that there was an intimate bond between the pretty little governess and the dissolute young Comte. ‘Would you like me to speak to him?’ she offered in a quiet voice.

Phoebe hesitated then shook her head. ‘It isn’t fair to ask you to expose yourself in such a way,’ she said. ‘He’s so drunk, you have no idea what he might say. Poor Venetia is in a state.’

Just then the door opened and Venetia came out, her cheeks deathly pale beneath her vermilion rouge and her eyes red rimmed and filled with unshed tears. ‘We are leaving,’ she said simply to Clementine as she and Eliza swept quickly down the stairs, their gauze, velvet and silk cloaks ballooning behind them. ‘I refuse to spend another second in the same building as that man!’ she called up to them, wiping her tears away with the back of her hand.
 

Sidonie reached out and took Clementine’s arm as she went down the stairs after her friends. ‘Please don’t be angry with me,’ she whispered. ‘I can explain.’

‘There’s no need to explain,’ Clementine replied before gently but firmly pulling away.

Chapter Thirty

When the footman came to Clementine’s private sitting room the next morning to announce that Mademoiselle Roche was waiting downstairs, her first instinct was to order him to tell Sidonie that she was out. ‘Does she know that I am here?’ she asked.

The footman, well trained after decades working for the Coulanges family and with a special fondness for
La Petite Anglaise
as they called her in the servant’s quarters, shook his head. ‘I said nothing, madame.’

Clementine sighed then gave a shrug. ‘Bring her up to me,’ she ordered after a moment’s reflection. She had barely slept the night before as her mind was full of Sidonie, the Comte, Antoine, Jules and Venetia. In the end she had shouted in her sleep and woken up both herself and her husband in his room next door.

‘Are you having a nightmare?’ he had asked sleepily from the doorway as she quickly pulled the covers up over herself. ‘I heard you shout.’

‘It’s nothing, Charles,’ she had replied in a low voice, wishing she had the courage to ask him to leave her room. This was the first time he had set foot in there since the incident in the salon, and it was clear from his nervous stance that he felt uneasy. ‘Go back to bed.’

He’d hesitated for a moment on the threshold and turned back to her as if he wanted to say something, but then a moment later he was gone, closing the door softly behind him. Clementine rolled over and did her best to go back to sleep, but it was too late and so after a despairing look at the porcelain clock on a table beside the bed, she rang for her maid.

She went to the mirror as she waited for Sidonie to come upstairs, glad that she was still young enough for a sleepless night to have very little effect on her complexion. She knew that she could usually appear before Sidonie looking her very worst but not today.

‘Thank you for seeing me, Clementine.’ Sidonie had entered the room quietly behind her former pupil and was standing uncertainly beside the pale yellow silk sofa. ‘I half expected you to refuse to see me.’

Clementine inclined her head. ‘I almost refused,’ she admitted.

‘That is understandable,’ Sidonie said with a nod. ‘What I have done is unforgivable. You must be so shocked by what you saw.’

Clementine took a deep breath. ‘I am not shocked,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Everyone always assumes that I am shocked by everything, but the peculiar thing is that I never am.’ She sighed. ‘What you do with the Comte is your own affair, Sidonie.’

‘But it has upset you?’ Sidonie said in a low voice.
 

Clementine sank down onto the sofa. ‘The Comte is Antoine’s father,’ she said in a low voice without meeting the older woman’s eyes. ‘Seeing you together was a shock.’

‘Antoine?’ Sidonie stared at her former pupil, searching for a glimpse of the gawky, uncertain Clementine Garland that she had first met in Bath just three years before in the elegantly dressed, tall young woman who stood before her with diamond and pearl earrings hanging from her ears and a small fortune in pearls around her neck. ‘I see.’

A silence fell between them. ‘I think about him all the time,’ Clementine whispered so quietly that Sidonie had to bend to hear her. ‘Even on my wedding day. Antoine was all I thought about and I wished with all my heart that I was marrying him instead.’

Sidonie sat down on the sofa beside the girl. ‘I had no idea,’ she said. ‘Oh, Clementine...’

‘He’s never coming back, is he?’
 

Sidonie patted Clementine’s knee. ‘I don’t know, dear heart. No one knows.’ The Comte rarely spoke about his son and she had got the impression that he did not care to be asked about him either.
 

The door abruptly opened and Charles strode into the room, an unusually firm expression on his pockmarked face. ‘Mademoiselle Roche,’ he said with a cold bow towards Sidonie. ‘I am sure you will forgive me if I cut short your interview with my wife.’ He turned to Clementine and held out his hand as she stared at him in nervous astonishment. ‘Have you forgotten, my dear, that we are expected at the Tuileries this morning?’

Clementine ignored his outstretched hand and shook her head. ‘I think that I must have done,’ she said, flushing crimson. ‘You have not mentioned it before now.’

Her husband was relentless. ‘I am sure that I did, Clementine.’ He turned to Sidonie. ‘If you will excuse us, mademoiselle?’

Sidonie bowed her head in acquiescence, unable to meet Clementine’s embarrassed gaze. ‘Of course, Monsieur le Duc,’ she said in a low voice that vibrated with suppressed hurt. ‘I will leave immediately.’

‘Don’t go, Sidonie,’ Clementine implored, jumping to her feet as her former governess sadly turned to leave. She turned to Charles but he averted his gaze and very deliberately put his back to them both.

‘I must go,’ Sidonie said gently. ‘I’m sorry, Clementine.’

‘Why should you go?’ Clementine demanded. ‘Sidonie, don’t listen to him!’

Charles turned then and looked stonily at his wife. ‘Stop making a scene, Clementine!’ he ordered, taking her arm and pulling her forcibly away from Sidonie who left with one last regretful look over her shoulder. ‘Remember who you are.’
 

She glared at him. ‘I am Clementine Garland,’ she whispered. ‘Clementine Garland.’

‘You are the Duchesse de Coulanges,’ Charles said from between gritted teeth, ‘and my wife, madame and that is why I will thank you not to consort in private with a woman of depraved morals who is said to be the mistress of the Comte d’Evremond.’

‘You mean Sidonie? How disgusting you make her sound. She’s not Messalina.’
 

He shrugged. ‘She has made her choice and must live with the consequences.’

‘Is that what you really think?’ She pulled her arm out of his grasp. ‘I made my choice too and now I wish that I wasn’t your wife!’ she shouted before she could stop herself, not caring that the sitting room door was open and everyone in the house could probably hear her. ‘How could I have been so stupid as to think that you could possibly make me happy?’
 

Without warning, he drew back his hand and slapped her across the face. ‘You push me too far, madame,’ he said, his cheeks flushed with anger. ‘Everyone advised me not to marry you but I ignored them, so blinded by love that I chose to turn a blind eye to your family and low descent. I was wrong to do so, madame, as you are clearly utterly unsuited
 
for the title that I have bestowed upon you.’

‘I didn’t think that you cared about things like that,’ Clementine said, holding her sore cheek and remembering the boyish young man that she had met at the lovely Château de Coulanges. ‘I wouldn’t have agreed to marry you if I had known how things would be.’

‘People change, madame,’ he said, still using a formal tone to control his anger. ‘You are not the girl that I thought I had had the good fortune to marry.’

She stared at him. ‘I have not changed,’ she said in a low voice. ‘You have done your best to control and mould me but I have not changed. I am still the same girl.’
 

Her husband shrugged. ‘Whatever you believe, the fact remains that you are soon to become mother of my child who will be, God willing, a future Duc de Coulanges.’ He turned
 
away and strode to the window, which overlooked a small paved courtyard filled with tubs of roses and lavender. ‘Once the child is born, we will speak again about what to do.’

‘I can’t wait until then,’ Clementine said desperately. ‘I can’t stand to spend another minute here, pretending to be your wife, pretending that there is nothing wrong between us.’
 

He inclined his head but kept his back turned towards her, making it clear that he had no intention of saying anything more and so sobbing she lifted her heavy lilac silk skirts and ran from the room.

‘Clementine! Wait!’ She heard her husband shout as she fled across the hall towards the staircase. ‘Come back! Clementine, please!’

‘I can’t bear it, Charles! I can’t!’ She ran down the stairs, determined to get away from the Duc as he chased after her. ‘You can’t make me stay.’ She had almost reached the first landing when her high heel caught in the hem of her skirt and after tottering for one heart stopping, sickening, panicked moment she tumbled down the rest of the stairs into darkness.

PART FOUR

Chapter Thirty-One

Paris, August 1792

Citizeness Delorme sat up in bed and shook back her long dark hair, feeling very pleased with how life had turned out and the husband she had chosen for herself. He lay fast asleep at her side, his handsome face pressed into a fine linen pillow while one pale muscular arm was slung lightly across her body.

‘Phoebe...’ he murmured in his sleep, momentarily tightening his grip.

She bent down towards him, her dusky hair brushing against his shoulders. ‘Hush, my love,’ she whispered. ‘Sleep now.’ Bright sunlight peeped between the
tricolor
fringed blue taffeta of their bedroom curtains and with a sigh she padded across the room and pulled them closed. With one last smile at Lucien’s sleeping form, she pulled on a frothy pink gauze dressing gown that lay discarded on the floor, where it had lain ever since her husband had ripped it from her shoulders before picking her up and carrying her to the bed, then walked through a pair of double doors, artfully painted with the Revolutionary slogan
Liberté ou la Mort
and symbols like jaunty red Phrygrian caps and golden sheaves of corn into a large
tricolor
wallpapered
salon
that overlooked the Rue Saint-Honoré.