Triumph in Arms (15 page)

“But to go on for years…”

“It’s far easier to assume the feelings of a woman matter not a whit. Or when their failure cannot be ignored, to mend their
amour-propre
at someone else’s expense.”

She had the feeling he was not speaking of her
alone. There was no time to question it, however. Running footsteps could be heard outside in the hall. Abruptly, the door sprang open.

Christien was already moving with swift purpose, whipping the top sheet from under them and wafting it over their nakedness. It settled in a drifting cloud of linen that half covered Reine’s head. She had only the briefest glimpse of her daughter running into the room with a gingerbread man held in either hand and Chalmette gamboling behind her, tongue lolling and a grin on his furry face.

“
Maman!
”

Marguerite’s cry was one of surprise as she came to a halt. She went on at once, her voice high-pitched with curiosity, loud enough to be heard all the way to the outskirts of New Orleans itself.

“What are you playing with Monsieur Christien? Why are you hiding in his bed?”

R
eine’s brother was at the table as Christien walked into the dining room. It was the first time he’d seen Paul since Reine had been discovered in his bed three days ago. The boy looked up and his expression turned surly. Dark color surged into his face. He rose from his chair.

“Don’t leave on my account,” Christien said in an even tone. “I’ll go elsewhere. That’s after an apology in any form you like for compromising your sister.”

“I should call you out.” Paul leaned his fists on the tabletop as he faced him across it.

“I beg you won’t. It’s enough to have everyone in the house disgusted with me without adding Reine to the list. She might well call off the wedding if I nicked her favorite brother.”

“Could turn out you’d be the one nicked.”

“So it might,” he agreed. “Then you could explain to Reine.”

The pugnacious look on the boy’s face faded a degree. “You’d best not have any idea of skipping out on the wedding.”

“The last thing on my mind, I assure you.” God knew that was the truth, Christien thought. He would be a fool to abandon Reine, so exquisitely responsive to his least touch, so matched to his body in size, shape and impulses that he ached from just thinking of it. The trouble was, the choice could easily be taken out of his hands.

Paul looked away. After a moment, he resumed his seat. “I expected better of you,” he said, the words a low mutter. “You were supposed to protect her.”

It was a cut below the chest padding. Christien drew a quick breath against the sting, even as he studied the boy’s tight features. He had disappointed Paul. It had been inevitable from the start; still he regretted it.

More than that, the charge leveled against him was just. He had failed Reine. His thought had been to see how far she would go in the game they played, if game it was indeed. He had failed to consider his own parched need of her. As a result, he had taken advantage of her with guile, deceit and such incredible joy that it made him weak-kneed to contemplate it. His punishment, as it seemed now, was the terror that she might discover just what he had done and all his reasons that had so little to do with simple pleasure.

He had almost confessed, there in those perfect moments before Marguerite arrived. He wished now that he had taken the chance. It would have been better than this fear that she would hear it from someone else.

Yet the worst of it was that he would take her again in an instant if given half a chance. There had been
none since that evening; Marguerite’s discovery of them, more or less in flagrante delicto, ended all chance of it. Reine had retreated, avoiding his bedchamber as she might Bluebeard’s chamber. Left with only the services of Alonzo, he had endured for a time. This morning, however, he had abandoned the hope she might return, and his invalid’s pose with it.

“These things happen,” he said finally, the words sober as he moved to the sideboard where dishes under silver covers awaited his choice. “It isn’t as if your sister is some green girl seduced by visions of romance.”

Paul shifted in his chair. “You’re saying she cooperated.”

“Nothing of the kind,” Christien replied over his shoulder as he shuddered away from the smells of ham and bacon, opting only for a cup of black coffee. “In fact, I’m saying no more than absolutely necessary about what is a private matter,” he continued in hard precision as he turned toward the table, cup in hand. “Any explanation to you or Reine’s father will be to prevent the kind of stiff-rump posturing that may convince everyone within a hundred miles that the incident was worse than the whispers about it. In a few days we’ll be man and wife, our vows blessed by the priest, the church and all who hear them. Let it be enough.”

Paul looked away. His lips firmed for an instant before he spoke in gruff capitulation. “I suppose I must if Reine is satisfied.”

Christien did not answer as his mind suddenly veered to hot, bright images of Reine’s face at the moment of
her fulfillment. A trickle of perspiration ran down the back of his neck that had nothing to do with the morning heat. It seemed a good idea to redirect the conversation before he embarrassed himself.

Reaching for the sugar bowl, adding a large lump to his cup, he spoke with a show of random interest. “About Reine’s first husband. I believe someone said you identified the body.”

“So I did.” The boy frowned as he toyed with a piece of roll.

“Why was that? I mean to say, you were young for the responsibility at…what? Fifteen? Reine could not be expected to perform so unpleasant a task, of course, but what of Pingre’s close male relatives? Surely there was someone more suitable?”

“I was there, was the main thing,” Paul said without lifting his gaze from the roll he was crumbling. “Besides that, his old man was dead and he had no brothers. Madame Pingre, his mother, was prostrate over his disappearance. There might have been a cousin or two, but the body was in no shape to wait for them to arrive. I’d been fishing and sort of on the lookout for a floater, if you know what I mean.”

“You found him, then?” The question was sharper than Christien intended, but he let it stand.

Paul gave a quick shake of his head. “A couple of fishermen in a pirogue did that. They brought him to the landing where I was wetting a line. King saw what was going on and came down pretty quick. He was the first to say it was Theodore.”

“The overseer? Hardly the same as a blood relative.”

“You’d be wrong there. Some say he was old Monsieur Pingre’s, Theodore’s grandfather’s, by-blow, so an uncle to Theodore. The old man was something of a satyr right up to the day he died. King’s papa was overseer here back when the place belonged to
Maman’s
father, you know, and not long married. His wife was pretty and a bit flighty in a backwoods style, or so they say. It’s not that far from one place to another if you ride through the woods.”

“So that’s why he was so sure he could do as he pleased without being dismissed.” Revealing the past scandal of his parentage might be the threat Kingsley had intended to use as leverage. The weakness of it, on top of the threat of Christien’s reprisal, was likely why they’d heard nothing more from him. Well, that and the shooting. The overseer was Christien’s best candidate for the ambuscade.

“King grew up next door to Theodore and so did I,” Paul said with a twitch of one shoulder. “Didn’t seem necessary anybody else should have to see…what was left of him. Anyway, the sooner he was put in the ground, the better.”

“You were positive it was your brother-in-law, then?”

“I swore to it, didn’t I?”

Christien had asked the question because something in the boy’s manner rang an alarm bell in his mind. It clanged even louder now, particularly given the greenish pallor of his face. Picking up his coffee, he took a sip before he spoke again. “Must have been a horrible sight. Not many can stomach that kind of thing.”

Paul waved a piece of roll at him. “Could we talk about something else? I’m trying to eat.”

“Sorry. I suspect I’d have had trouble taking more than a quick glance.”

“All right, I didn’t look too close,” the boy exclaimed, tossing the roll back on his plate with such force it tumbled out onto the tablecloth. “Does that make you happy? It was a man’s body and it was found in an eddy just down the river. King said it was Theodore, too. That was good enough.”

“It sounds to me,” Christien said in a deliberately mild tone, “that you aren’t so sure, after all.”

“Don’t be daft.” Paul flung back in his chair with a scowl on his face. “Theodore was the only man missing around here and he hasn’t shown up since. If it wasn’t him, who else could it be?”

“You would know that better than I.”

“Nobody, that’s who. More than that, I don’t like what you’re getting at.”

“And that would be?”

Paul faced him, his eyes blazing in his face, which had gone pale. “That somebody else was killed and shoved in the river to be found, that Theodore might still be alive. He’s dead and gone, I’m telling you, has been dead and gone these two years and more. It was best for Reine to know it, to be sure so she could put on her widow’s weeds and get done with all the folderol of mourning him. It was best that she stay here at River’s Edge where she belonged and forget the idiot she married. So I said what I did, and I’m not sorry. I’ll never be sorry.”

Christien had his answer, for what good it did him. A humorless smile came and went across his face as he considered the cost of it. Looking up to meet his future brother-in-law’s hot gaze then, he spoke with utter simplicity. “Nor will I,” he said. “Nor will I.”

Paul stared at him a long moment, then pushed to his feet. Dropping his napkin on the table, he stalked from the dining room.

Christien toyed with his coffee cup in brooding silence. He drank the lukewarm brew, then pushed the cup and saucer away from him. After a moment, he sighed, rose to his feet and went in search of Reine.

She was not to be found in the house. Her bedchamber was empty, the door standing open while a pair of upstairs maids straightened the bed. The nursery was likewise empty. Madame Cassard, breakfasting in bed on café au lait and warm rolls, allowed her maid to inform him through a crack in the door that she had not seen her daughter that morning.

Monsieur Cassard, located on the lower gallery, had a neighbor with him whom he introduced as Monsieur Lavalier. His attitude was cordial in deference to his guest, but his gaze was less than approving. He seemed reluctant to be of assistance in locating Reine, but finally allowed that she had been seen heading in the direction of the stables.

Christien, taking his leave as soon as possible, turned his footsteps toward the plantation outbuildings. He was not happy with the thought of Reine anywhere near the stables. At least she was unlikely to be alone. Privacy was a rare commodity at River’s
Edge, as he had discovered to his sorrow. Beyond that, the overseer was no longer around, nor was there reason to believe he might behave with anything less than respect if his path crossed Reine’s. Christien couldn’t be easy, nonetheless, and wouldn’t be until he saw her.

She wasn’t in the stable. The boy who was mucking out the stalls said he had saddled her mare a short time before, and also a pony for the small
mam’zelle.
The two of them had ridden off in the direction of the old Pingre place.

Christien, probing the bandaging at his waist with careful fingers, ordered his black stallion saddled. Mounting required clenched teeth and a leg up from the stable boy, but he made it. Gathering the reins, he sat for a moment, staring down at the young man who had stepped back out of the way.

“What is your name?” he asked, his gaze considering.

“Morris,
m’sieur,
” the boy answered. “Though I’m called Mo.”

“Was it you, by chance, who brought the stallion back to the stable on the night I was shot?”

He ducked his head in assent. “
Madame,
she came riding in like hell’s hounds was after her. She says Alonzo and three more should come with her to carry you to the house, and I must take your horse.”

“Riding?” Christien asked in puzzlement.

“
Mais oui.
A formidable rider, is our young
madame.
She fears nothing.”

“No.” Christien did not doubt it, yet she had not
mentioned riding out on the night he was shot. It was a detail that required attention. “I’m grateful for your care,” he said, fishing a coin from his waistcoat pocket and passing it down to the boy. “Did you, perhaps, find a sword case behind the saddle?”

“Sword case? No,
m’sieur.
Nothing like that. It is lost?”

“Misplaced,” he said easily. “No one has come across such a case along the river road?”

“I don’t know. You want I should look?”

It was not likely a sword case lying in the ditch would go unnoticed. On the other hand, whoever found it could have it hidden away in hope of turning a coin on it. “I am fond of that set of rapiers. I might see my way to offering a reward if they should turn up.”

“
C’est vrai?
I will look well, very well.”

It was the best he could hope for, Christien thought. Giving the boy a salute, he rode from the dim stable into the hot morning sunlight.

The track he had been directed to follow led past the outbuildings and line of cabins that housed the hands, between the chapel and the overseer’s cottage and on toward the sugar mill. From there it meandered through a grove of pecan trees, then alongside a drainage ditch that separated fields of corn and cow peas, coming out finally at a vast ocean of waving cane. Passing through the head-high stalks, it emerged in a field where cows grazed along with several head of mules and oxen and a few goats. More cane lay on either side, long walls of green. Straight ahead, however, the track became a woodland path running under
great trees hung with vines and briars and with fern and spiked fans of palmetto at their feet.

There was no sign of Reine and Marguerite.

Christien was beginning to think he had come on a fool’s errand when he heard a shrill cry and the deep bark of a dog. The hair rose on the back of his neck as he recognized both.

He kicked the black into a run, jumping him over a fallen log, ducking under a low limb and a dangling mass of wild grape vines. Through the trees ahead he glimpsed a clearing beneath the shade of a huge, old oak, saw the shapes of a horse and pony, caught a flash of color, heard Chalmette’s deep woofs blending with Marguerite’s cries. He slowed, pulled up the black.

It was the scene of an al fresco meal that lay before him, with a quilt in rainbow colors spread on the ground and a basket sitting on one corner. Reine was there in the middle of a patch of trodden grass. She had a blindfold over her eyes and her arms outstretched, turning this way and that while Marguerite danced around her, shouting and laughing, and Chalmette leaped about to join the fun. Now and then she made a swooping grab for her tormentors so the skirt of her riding habit of sturdy, rich blue cloth swirled around her, flapping down from where it was thrown over her arm. Chalmette barked and ran. Marguerite squealed and twisted her small body away, avoiding capture by a hairsbreadth.