Prisoner of the Flames (Leisure Historical Romance) (12 page)

“A shoulder wound. He will recover.”

“He has a natural talent for slight of hand I think,” the magistrate observed. He breathed a heaving sigh of relief. “You have no inkling of my happiness at this news, sir, but he must be warned. I had half of Paris on my doorstep before dawn seeking him. Where is he? I will go to him at once.”

The healer shook his head. “I believe it is best that you do not know his whereabouts,” he responded. “He does not wish to involve you. If you do not know where he is, you cannot unwittingly lead the military to him. He is already warned, and he plans to leave France now, while it is still supposed that he died in that raid, before they tally the dead and find him not among them. It is best.”

“But if he is wounded…”

“I will tend him, and the girl, Violette. She is with him now.”

“The flower urchin?”

Nostradamus nodded.

“God’s precious blood! But…
how?”

“She had taken refuge among the Huguenots. When Louis de Brach and his troops raided the settlement, the Scot saved her from the other villagers’ fate. He was bringing her here for sanctuary, when he saw the cardinal and Coligny’s troops at your door. He will not hear of returning and entangling you in his misfortune. He sends you his eternal gratitude and unerring affection, and bids me speak his farewells.”

“But the girl…surely she needs looking after now?”

“That is true. She can peddle her wares no more in Paris, Michel. The gendarmes seek her. They would repay her for their suffering over the Scot’s imprisonment—especially now that he will be sought for treason.”

“He is suspected of killing Louis de Brach.”

“As well he did,” said Nostradamus, “and left his Scottish dagger in him.”

“Mon
Dieu!
So that is how they came to their conclusion. They did not share it with me. Only that he was under suspicion.”

“He did so in defense of Violette ‘s honor,” the healer explained. “Now they are linked, and it is no longer safe for her here. I needn’t tell you that men, women, even children are lost in the Bastille these days for far less than she has done, or cruelly used by men. Surely, you, a magistrate, know that far better than I.”

“Well,
what
, then?”

Nostradamus hesitated. “I travel south to home soon,” he said with raised voice, shuffling closer to the door as he spoke. Until then, he’d spoken in hushed tones, his keen ears alerted to any sound from the passageway beyond. Thus far, he had heard nothing, and now when he spoke, he did so to the door itself. “I shall see her safely to my château in Salon,” he continued. “There, I will arrange for her care. She will be safe. Have no fear.”

He turned back toward the magistrate, who was watching him with knit brows, clearly nonplussed by the attitude he’d taken beside the door. Nostradamus warned him from commenting on it with a quick wag of his head, and a crooked finger laid across his lips.

“Is there a message you would have me deliver to him?” he went on, his voice having gone up still another notch in volume. “I will be returning to him at sundown.”

“Tell him Godspeed for me if you will,” the magistrate said, still frowning, and clearly bewildered, though his voice did not betray it. “Tell him I will miss him greatly…and that my prayers go with him.”

The healer nodded, grasping the door handle, and smiled to himself at the hasty patter of small feet receding along
the passageway outside. “I will give him your message,” he said. “But first, a bit of advice before I go…?”

“Doctor?”

“Leave Paris at once. Go home, Michel. Your business here is…concluded.”

“But—”

“Go
home
, Michel.”

“Why?” the magistrate queried, gravel-voiced.

“It is not to question. There is much yet for you to do. Go home…and live to do it.”

“Doctor Nostradamus, despite all that you say, I am still concerned for Robert. Might I see him…just a brief interview?”

The old healer smiled. “No,” he said flatly. “Heed my words, and go
quickly
for, if you stay, all that he has suffered—and is about to suffer—will be for naught. Michel…
go home.”

Robert slept for a time under the influence of the old physician’s mysterious cordial, while Violette sat beside him, bathing his face. It was the soft touch of her hand on his brow feeling for fever, and the cool solution being stroked on his skin that woke him. He arrested the tiny hand ministering to him and pulled it away.

“Don’t!” he snapped, wincing from the stabbing pain in his shoulder the sudden motion caused.

A muffled cry escaped her lips with the rough handling, and she shrank away from him, all but upsetting the basin beside her.

“Forgive me,” he murmured, breathing a ragged sigh as he focused eyes still glazed with sleep upon the fright in her pale face. “It is just that…I do not like to be touched. Don’t be afraid. I didn’t mean to frighten you.” After what he’d just saved her from the arms of Louis de Brach, he
wasn’t about to tell her that her touch aroused him. “Why aren’t you asleep? We do not know what we face here next. You were supposed to rest as well.”

“You cried out! I…I feared fever. My aunt…before she died, cried out just as you did, and a fever raged, and took her. We were so very poor. There was no medicine—naught save water to bathe her brow. It wasn’t enough…”

“I am not going to die, child. I have sustained many greater wounds than this, and only once before did I succumb to fever.” He reached and gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. “I shall mend admirably for having such a good and conscientious nurse to tend me.”

“Where will you go once you have mended?”

“Home to Scotland,” Robert told her. He popped a bitter laugh. “I never should have left there. I never should have come. Doctor Nostradamus cannot help me. And so, you see, all of this is for naught—a fool’s errand, just as my uncle warned. I regret only that you have become embroiled in my folly.”

“You came all this way in hopes that Doctor Nostradamus could heal you?”

“Yes, child.”

“But…why?”

“Why?”
he erupted. “My God, you
know
why. You heard the gendarmes when they removed my helm and saw my face.”

“But…you are beautiful!”

“Lass, you
are
blind,” he said.

“Oh, no,” she contradicted. “My hands are my eyes, my lord, and they see quite well. I bathed your face a good many times while you slept. Your jaw is firm and squarely set, and your chin wears a fine, deep cleft. Your lips are strong, and your cheeks are like that of a marble statue I once touched in the great cathedral. Your nose is arrow-straight. It is the proud nose of a Celt, from what I have
heard told—bent ever so slightly below the bridge. Your brow is broad, and flat, the eyes deeply set beneath the ledge of it. They are marvelous eyes. They are the most marvelous of all.”

“Oh, child, you dream.”

“No,” she insisted. Grasping his hand, she raised it to his face. “Here…see for yourself.” He tried to pull away, for he detested the feel of it, but she held his hand securely. “Trace the bones, my lord,” she instructed. “Feel deeply…feel what lies beneath the scars. Pay them no mind. They only mar the skin on one side, and go no deeper. The other side was not touched by the flames. The bones themselves have not been harmed. Their structure is sound. Feel both sides now…see? You are beautiful! I can see you just as God made you.”

Reluctantly, he did as she bade him, marveling at her enthusiasm, studying the gentle smile that had turned up the corners of her bowed lips.

“Beautiful,” he ground out through clenched teeth, “only to you, child, in your blindness. If those magnificent eyes of yours were in this instant given sight, you would shrink and turn from me in horror and disgust just like all the others.”

“Perhaps,” she conceded, giving it honest thought, “but that is why at times such as this, I am almost…grateful that I am blind. The sighted all too often do not make use of their gift. They do not notice the thrush or the dove that hide right under their noses. They have no ear trained to detect them, you see. They do not know that moving water laughs and sings, or that the grasses dance and murmur. They view you and others like you by the standard of beauty, which their vain eye sets for them. My lord,
they
are the blind ones. Sometimes, I cannot help but pity them. Does that sound mad?”

“Mad?” he echoed. “No, child—no, indeed it does not. Doctor Nostradamus painted you well. He said you saw with
your spirit far better than anyone with sight. He suggested that I cultivate the art.”

“He is a very dear man. He often stops to buy flowers from my cart.”

“He is a very wise man.”

“Have you tried?” she asked him.

“Tried what?”

“…To see with your spirit.”

“I have labored at it,” he admitted, “but I doubt I have the talent for it.”

“But you tried,” she rejoiced, smiling broadly. “You will succeed at it then. The trying is the hardest part. If you will do that, the rest will come. God lets no honest labor go without reward.”

“Tell me,” he mused, warmed by her joy, “in regard to my ‘marvelous’ eyes, can you tell me their color, my fine little sorceress?”

“Truth to tell, I do not understand color, my lord,” she said, clouding. “I have tried and tried, but I do not know it. Oh, I know that the sky is blue, the apple red, the grass green, but for me to say to you, ‘the sky is blue,’ means nothing. I have not ever seen the sky. The grass is green, but I have never seen the grass to carry the picture of it in my mind. There is no one to explain it, and that is my greatest sorrow. My world is gray, sir. That, they tell me, is the color I see, and the only one I know…”

Moved by her speech, tears welled in his eyes then, and a lump constricted in his throat. How well he knew the emptiness of not being whole. How well he understood her despair. All at once, he longed to reach out and take her in his arms for the sole sake of giving comfort, but he did not—dared not. The little sorceress had bewitched him. When he spoke, he could not erase the tremor from his voice.

“Do you feel the vastness of the sky above, when you walk in the meadow? Do you sense the air…the openness?”

“Oh, yes, it is wonderful, and free. I cannot touch the boundaries of it. I think it has none.”

“My eyes are like the sky in color.”

“Ahhh,” she breathed, “and mine?” she begged, wriggling excitedly. “Tell me of mine.”

“Have you ever stroked a fawn or a doe in the forest?”

“Oh, yes!”

“Your eyes are a golden brown, like its coat.”

“And my hair?”

“The same.”

“And yours?”

He puzzled for a moment. “Almost the same…but…different. I’m sure you have felt the warmth of the sun as it rises?”

“Yes.”

“It blazes brightly before dying…like fire,” he said uneasily, not wanting the word to bring her unpleasant memories, as it did him. But he could think of no other comparison.

“Fire is warm…I cannot imagine its color.”

“Have you never turned your face toward the sky at sunset?”

“I have,” she said.

“The sun blazes before it dies. Does the gray you ordinarily see not change its hue a bit when you face the setting sun?”

“Yes…
yes
, it does!” she cried excitedly. “Oh, it
does
…!”

“Some of that warmth you see as the sun sets lights my hair.”

“It must be beautiful,” she murmured. She held her peace then for so long a time he thought their conversation was over before she finally straightened her posture and said, “Will you tell me truly…am I…fair?” The words scarcely out, she scowled, her quick hands flitting over her hair and clothing. “Oh, I do not mean now—not like this! I mean…well, you know what I mean.”

“Oh, lass, has no one ever told you you are beautiful, then?” Astonished, he laughed.

She shook her head. “Never a lord.”

Again, he laughed. There was poignancy in it. “You are exquisite,” he told her. “I have never looked upon one so fair.”

“It is so difficult to tell,” she returned. “Oh, I can feel my features—my hair, my body, and they appear seemly, but I do not know what ‘fair’ is to a man, unless one tells me.”

Robert stared, studying her excitement over the discoveries, convinced that ugliness could not exist in her presence—in the innocent aura of her spirit. How had he kindled such things as these to life in that gray void of a mind that stored no images? He did not know, but somehow it had happened. Somehow her view seemed clearer, and for a fleeting space of time she had actually convinced him that
he
was beautiful. His eyes had never before been compared to the sky, nor his hair to a deer, or the setting sun. Most wondrous of all, he’d made the comparisons himself. Contemplating that, and scarcely able to believe it, he’d forgotten his pain, and failed to hear the patter of hasty feet milling about overhead, until Violette’s quick intake of breath jolted him back to a more familiar breed of awareness—that of a warrior.

Together, they held their breath, blind and sighted eyes trained upon the movable slab in the ceiling as it opened above the crudely hewn stone stairs. And when the grating sound it made ceased and a shaft of daylight wearing dust motes streamed down around them, Robert drew his sword and labored to his feet, shoving her out of the way behind him.

At sight of the ermine trim on Nostradamus’s best robe of Lyons velvet, the Scot’s posture collapsed, and he relaxed his grip on the sword, reassuring Violette. One look into the grim-faced healer’s eyes, however, sent fingers of a cold chill crawling along his spine.

“Doctor Nostradamus!” he breathed. “Is something wrong? You were not to return until dusk.”

“It is just past noon,” he replied, shuffling toward them out of breath. He lowered a large sack he’d been toting with a grunt. “It is no longer safe for you here. I’m afraid there must be a change in the plan,” he said. “You must go at once. I have delivered your message to Montaigne, and that, my young friend, is your undoing if you do not escape within the hour.”

“But how?” Robert demanded. “I will not believe that he has betrayed me.”