Judith Ivory (22 page)

A buxom woman of about thirty, dark-complected, attractive in an overworked, unkempt way, had come up with a tray of mugs. Another burst of laughter made her call out her answer.

“You go upstairs if you want your sainthood recalled for the night.” She slapped a hand away that tried to fondle a breast. Unfazed, she chatted and greeted the men in a friendly manner over the noise of the room.

“Eh,
mon poulet.
” Colette ran a momentarily free finger under Adrien’s chin. “Nice to see you. I haven’t seen more than your empty breakfast plate in a month.” Her dark eyes sparkled meaningfully as she set a cup down. “And I never see you like before.”

“Like before? Balls!” Le Saint harrumphed in disgust. “What’s this ‘like before’?”

Colette cast a frowning glance at the giant, then jerked her eyes back to the last mug of coffee as she set it down. “Like before!” she asserted. “When your eyes
turn that blue”—she gave a quick nod of her head—“we talk about ‘like before,’ too.” She turned to clear the table next to the group.

Adrien had dropped his eyes to his mug, stealing a surreptitious look at Le Saint. The other man was scowling at him. Adrien grew uncomfortable. He re-experienced an old, groundless—and surely guilt-founded, he thought—anxiety: that, one day, after seeing him through all kinds of chicanery, his looks would be his nemesis; the petard by which he would be hoisted, so to speak. He gave a wan smile.

Then Colette called him back. “I don’t suppose you’d be smiling at the remembrances of me?”

The smile turned sheepish. “No.”

Colette stopped to eye him as she wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. “How’s that bit of a woman you’re married with? She throw you out yet?”

His skin prickled at the word “married.” He managed to grin over his mug. “No, not yet,” he said, then shrugged. “Someday, maybe, but she suffers through me now.”

“Some suffering,” Colette commented as she tossed her tail-end and swished toward the kitchen.

Le Saint, recovered, grinned at the swinging skirt and got up. “Sassy bitch,” he said with great appreciation of a woman worthy of such praise. He followed her into the kitchen.

Adrien was left with Charles Sloane and two of the Old Man’s infiltrators. He had nothing to say to the “Cabrels,” as they were called by the others privately, and nothing to say to Charles in their hearing.

He sipped the coffee. Cheap rum had been added. The combination offended his palate, then his belly. But it warmed. By sheer fire in his insides, if no way else.

Adrien glanced up at the two “Cabrels” again. Their presence nettled him. It was at odds with rational thinking that the English minister would have the time or the
inclination to pursue the Madman’s rescue operation so doggedly.

He grimaced into his coffee cup, then poured the liquid down his throat. For every
petit feu
in the café, Le Saint had said, Adrien had a complaint. It was true. For every
petit feu
there was a
petit chagrin
that glared out at him.

The Old Man.

The French.

Thomas: Adrien had asked him to stay in England; he was handling that side of it—taking the French aristos across the channel and setting them down safely and quietly in England. Yet, Thomas had accepted his new responsibilities with perfunctory coolness. He seemed to view them as some sort of a slight. In a way, perhaps, they were. Adrien had finally admitted to himself he was no longer comfortable with Thomas near Christina; it had become too apparent that Thomas was in love with her.

Then there were the “Cabrels,” like the two eyeing him now. He winked collusion at them; they grinned conspiracy back, then looked away. What asses, he thought.

The original Cabrel had been left behind in a locked cell to be “captured” by the French. Word had it, he was still questioned from time to time. Of course, he knew next to nothing.

Adrien reviewed that night last August for the hundredth time in his mind. He’d been so preoccupied with Christina that he’d hardly remembered Cabrel until hours later, after he had calmed Christina down.

Christina. He’d been dumbfounded to watch her keel over like that at the inn. It was so unlike her. Then she’d been miserably ill crossing the Channel. He’d finally reasoned that he must have frightened her badly. He had meant to, of course, to insure her cooperation. But fear wasn’t the word for what she had manifested for a
few blissfully quiet hours. She had been petrified. He laughed to himself, still a little mystified as to how he’d managed to put her in such an extreme state. Occasionally, he wished he had that understanding to draw on.

An hour into France, though, she had evidently decided he was still the same man she had known so intimately in England. Once they’d crossed and settled down at a hostelry, her fear had dropped away with her seasickness. He’d heard her recovery from downstairs. She’d impaled the man he’d left with her, on a stickpin Adrien had thought he had left behind; stuck the pin right up to its diamond hilt into the man’s shoulder. Much mutual railing and yelling had proceeded between the two, notifying everyone below that an Englishwoman was irate over something upstairs.

Cabrel had been with the group at the time. Adrien had made a special effort to blend into the twenty or so men who were all there for the next day’s activities—and had continued to do so until they had successfully “lost” Cabrel into the hands of the enemy.

As he reviewed the details, he again assured himself that the only thing that would have set him apart from the rest is that he traveled with a crazy shrew.

His crazy shrew, he thought fondly. The one
petit feu
that glowed pleasantly in his life. He was looking forward to seeing her, talking to her tonight.

“Colette—” Adrien caught her by the hips as she came by. She stood in his arm a moment, a speculative smile making her weary features pretty. “Bring me a big wedge of cheese to take home,” he requested. He reached to his belt for money as he released her.

“Just cheese?” She flipped a stray piece of hair from her face, then with her free hand—her other held two empty mugs by their handles—she reached up under his bulky sweater and wool shirt.

He stayed her hand with one of his while he dug with
his other to produce a wad of assignats from the purse at his belt.

She shoved at him good-naturedly with the hand that he held, then saw the money.

“No worthless paper,” Colette said firmly under her breath as she grabbed up Le Saint’s abandoned mug. “Hard money. And you don’t report me this time! Those searches are a pain in my backside.”

Adrien chuckled and reached down into the leather pouch again.

The proprietor of Le Café des Petits Feux Blancs hoarded. Paris suffered, and Colette, certainly in the company of a great many other loyal citizens, profited. Food was short, but Colette always had some—for a price. And, periodically, “La Chasse” denounced her to the committee for it.

“How much?” Adrien asked.

She gave him an allover wistful look, then shrugged. “Nothing. For you, nothing tonight.”

“Then I most assuredly must report you. Trying to bribe a public official. Shame.” Adrien was an official part of the local committee. He grinned in mischief.

She put her hands on her waist, the mugs clinking together on her hips. “Deux francs,” she exhaled, “Why? Why do you denounce me for such a small offense when there are others—”

He dropped two coins into one of the mugs at her hip.

“Because,
cocotte,
” he explained, “I have to report
someone.
The section’s revolutionary committee has its quota. We’re expected to fill the register with enemies of the Republic—you wouldn’t want me to look as though I wasn’t doing my job, would you? Besides”—he smiled at her—“the national agent who comes to check on us is provided with certain…amenities here. He’s not going to let them close you down or lock you up. Even if the
guardsmen do one day find your store, the worst you will get is a verbal chastisement.” He shrugged and grinned broadly. “The duty of a civic-minded committeeman, Colette.”

Colette dropped her eyes away from his smile to the table. She made herself busy dabbing at a spill with the corner of her apron. “You have a strange sense of duty, La Chasse,” she said, “And friendship. Someday we will be out of cheese when you ask.”

“What? And leave me at the mercy of Christina’s cooking? Now that would be cruelty beyond the crime.”

Colette laughed. “Would that her bed were as English as her food.” She bumped him with her hip, then was off.

Adrien sat back down and was confronted with the prying, shady faces of the Old Man’s twosome.

Good God. He would have to talk to Christina about Claybourne’s continued interest and see what she thought.

He enjoyed knowing what she thought on most subjects. Her views were perceptive and entertaining. He frequently profited by her fresh approach to a problem gone stale. Then, of course, her underlying contrariness always made her willing to oppose him, to play devil’s advocate.

He reflected on her contrariness for some moments. Last August and September he had not been so happy, or so understanding of it: Tempers had flared so easily, so frequently—and usually made for such blistering confrontations—that he’d been condemned to never really hear what she said. The situation had been impossible, quite nearly intolerable: Christina screaming, sometimes crying; Adrian shouting her down and shutting her up with his own volume and will. Weeks had gone by like this; weeks into months.

Then, one day, she had answered something he’d
said—he couldn’t even remember what—with a kind of stunning quiet. He’d yet to have figured it out. But, for some unaccountable reason, things had changed. A new reticence became more and more a part of her, more and more a part of the way she dealt with him; and, in it, he had begun to sense a new strength: He had bullied her into quiet, but not into conquered. In these silences, in her humble replies, he saw an ocean of determined and irrepressible “You don’t make all the rules.”

This adaption of hers he found intriguing, baffling, and more than a little unnerving. At times, he felt caught in his own game, but had forgotten the rules or mislaid his strategy. With the play still being too fascinating to leave alone. He would struggle in her killing little silences, trying to fathom the unspoken complexity that underlay a look, a pause. He unwound little pieces of her, but never the whole. A frustrating occupation, trying to know or predict this woman, but surprisingly absorbing.

There was only one bit of obstinacy that persisted with a lively, and thoroughly maddening, endurance. Ever since August and the fateful inn conversation, when it came to sexual matters, she put up a fuss. He was not to touch her. It didn’t matter that a cease-fire had been declared, an amity established, that they’d come to prefer each other’s company, or that they drew together with an extraordinary physical attraction. He was simply not to become intimate with her body.

His response, when confronted with this, was not profound, but it was direct: “Like hell, I won’t.”

Over the months, he’d become a little more gracious. It had become obvious that her protests were purely token—though, in an obscure way, this galled him more than if they hadn’t been.

“Don’t.

“Let go.

“Leave me alone.”

He hated the words, but his vanity could shake them off when she surrendered against him, her body stating strong emphatic retractions.

What he couldn’t shake was another feeling, a feeling remotely related to indignation. He supposed he hadn’t much claim to it, being Christine’s abductor, a man not married to her and with the patently dishonorable intention to remain so. But as best as he could explain it in his own mind, whenever he knew he was going to have to hold her damn hands and pin her to the bed, if he wanted to make love to her, he felt as if
he
were being ravaged. What should have been ideal between them was flawed abominably by her protests. And, fair or not, he could have kicked her from France to Poland for fouling this private oasis with hypocritical statements like, “I don’t want you to touch me.”

Still, he’d yet to feel so put upon he couldn’t grit his teeth and allow her her due.

“Adrien, you have no right.”

He would laugh. “
Droit de prise.
It’s worked for pirates for centuries.”

“No.”

“Mmm. Yes. But you’re entitled to complain. Part of the rules.” He would sigh. “Though I do wish you’d not.”

“The reluctant rapist.”

“It’s not rape, and you know it.” He never knew truly what to say though, how to counter; when, as sure as he’d not have her secure, she’d be up and off the bed, gone.

On more than one night he’d lost her that way and was just too tired, too surprised and unhappy to pursue her. On those nights, he would lie there alone, next to the warm sag in the mattress where she’d been, and he would want to weep, want to simply give way like a
child. But she would inevitably be back; she couldn’t go very far. And many nights, if his self-esteem could hold out long enough, if he could force her, coax her far enough past her line of resistance, he would win a degree of what he wanted: “Oh damn you,” she’d finally say, or some variation on that theme, followed by complete and delicious capitulation.

He fiddled with his mug on the table, allowing his mind to wander. His fingers traced the curved handle, but his mind traced the naked curve of a woman’s body. Diffuse daydreams of venery began pervading all thoughts of Christina Pinn, her continence just so much clothing on the floor.

Adrien laughed aloud at the images at the bottom of his mug.

“Now that’s a dirty laugh if I ever heard one. Here’s your cheese. And a man left these for you a couple of days ago.”

Adrien looked up at Colette, then down at the things on the table. A quarter-wheel of cheese. Two books—he’d been waiting for the one book. And a cigar.

“What’s this?” He picked up the cigar. A moment’s longing crossed his face.

“A present. From me. For old times. Stay and smoke it. I’ll sit. I have a few minutes.”