Scars of Betrayal

She had felt it, too—he could tell she had as she snatched her hand away and buried it into the heavy grey of the blanket. Her face was turned from his so deliberately that the corded muscle in her throat stood out with tension, a pulse beating with rhythm that belied calmness.

* * *

Nathanael Colbert was as beautiful as he was powerful and even with the fever flushing his cheeks and tearing into the strength of him he still offered her protection. Outside, the night clothed the land in silence and inside his warmth radiated towards her, the barrier of wool insubstantial.

If she had been braver, she might have reached over and removed it, so that their skin could touch again as it had done before, close and real, offering safety and something else entirely.

Urgency. Craving. A yearning that she had no experience of, but that was there in her flesh and bones, the call of something ancient and destined, an undeniable and inescapable knownness.

Shocking. Wonderful. She did not wish him to see the remnants of all she thought so she turned away, pleased when he did not demand her attention or reach out again.

An impasse in a cold and wind-filled night, the mountains of the Pyrenees filling a darkened sky and a fire measuring out the passing moments in warmth.

One and then two. Enough to regain composure and push away the thoughts of what might have been between them should they have given it a chance. An ache wormed its way across her throat and heart before settling lower. Loss could be a physical hurt, she would think much later, but right now it was a wondrous and startling surprise.

Chancing a look at him, she saw he lay back against the pillows, the sheet pulled away from the dark nakedness of his skin, muscle sculptured under the flame light. Still sick, she realised, by the sheen of sweat across his brow and the high colour in his cheeks. She wondered how the wound at his side had fared from such exertion, but did not dare to ask him, given the state of her racing heart.

‘I will protect you, Sandrine. Do not worry.’

The words were quietly said.

‘From everyone?’

His lips turned up, the dimple in his right cheek deepening.

‘Yes.’

She did not wipe away the tear that traced down her face, but waited to feel the cold run of its passage, the blot of moisture darkening the yellowed counterpane as it fell. As his breathing evened out she knew he was asleep, his body needing the balm of rest. Turning with as little noise as possible, she watched him, his breathing shallow and fast and his dark eyelashes surprisingly long.

The past few days rushed up at her, the chaos and the hope. Baudoin and his brother had been bandits whose livelihood was made by taking the riches from aristocrats travelling the roads towards the north and west, but Guy Lebansart was a different story altogether. He boasted about working for the French Government, though Sandrine knew enough about the houses and land that he had accrued to know that more lucrative pickings had taken his fancy.

Lebansart blackmailed people and he hurt anyone who got in his way—even Anton Baudoin had been scared of him. He had been due to arrive at the compound with a good deal of gold in exchange for information found on a man Baudoin’s men had killed on the highway. But Nathaniel Colbert had arrived first.

A coincidence.

Sandrine thought not.

Glancing again at the stranger, she frowned. What were his secrets? Closing her eyes, she fervently prayed that Lebansart and those who worked for him would never catch up with them.

Chapter Three

Cassandra smoothed down the wool of her pantaloons and pulled up the generous collar of her jacket. It was cold in the London wind and it had already begun to spit.

Damn, she cursed, for the sound of the rain would dull her hearing and she knew that dawn wasn’t far off.

Lord Nathaniel Lindsay had returned to his town house a quarter of an hour ago, and by his gait as he descended from the carriage she knew he had been drinking.

Perfect.

The thick line of trees in the garden surprised her. She would not have imagined him to sanction such a shelter, for intruders could easily use the screen to hide behind. Making her way through the green-tinged darkness, she sidled along the undergrowth until she came to the windows.

The first sash was rock solid. The next one moved. Unsheathing her knife, she pressed it into the crack and shifted the lock. One second and it was rendered useless, clicking into access. With an intake of breath she lifted the wood, and when she perceived no threat she raised it farther.

Waiting, she listened to the sounds of the room. A single last fall of wood in the grate as the warm air greeted her, a clock in the corner marking out the hour.

She was over the barrier in a whisper, turning to the chamber and waiting as her eyes accustomed themselves.

* * *

‘Shut the window and join me.’

He knew she would come for he had seen a shadow that was not normally there against the stone wall on the opposite side of the street. This window had always been loose, a trick of wet wood or poor craftsmanship, he knew not which.

To give her credit she barely acknowledged the shock. A slight hesitation, one less certain step. He wondered if she held a knife in her hand and thought perhaps he should have bothered to arm himself. But he would not have harmed her. He knew that without a doubt.

‘Lord Nathaniel Lindsay, the heir to the title of St Auburn?’ Her voice was tight, tinged with more than a hint of question.

‘At your service, Mademoiselle Mercier. And now you are all grown up.’

‘A fact that you hate?’

He laughed at that because her surprising honesty had always appealed to him, though the sound held little humour. ‘I survived, but others did not. The names I presume you gave to Lebansart made it easy for him to mark them off as English agents. Didier and Gilbert Desrosiers were like lambs to the slaughter. Good men. Men who had never wronged you in any way. Men with allegiances to England and who had only ever wanted to serve this country.’

The blood seemed to disappear from her face. One moment her cheeks were rosy from the outside cold and in the next second they were as pale as snow.

‘You were a spy, too? My God, that explains why you were there in France and in Nay in particular.’

‘They call them intelligence officers now.’

‘You were a spy for the English army?’

‘The British Service.’

‘Not just the army then, but the quiet and hidden corridors of a clandestine and covert agency. Are you still?’

He did not answer.

‘I will take that as a yes, then.’ The blood had returned to her face, and she did not waver as she went on. ‘I didn’t come to offer excuses for what I did at Perpignan, my lord, nor for exoneration.’

‘Then why did you come?’

‘To give you this.’

She took a ring from her pocket and he recognised it immediately. His mother’s, the emerald as green as it had been all those years before.

‘I took it and I should not have. For all the other things that I was, I was never a thief.’

‘God.’ Thief of hearts, he thought. Thief of lives. Thief of the futures of two good Englishmen caught in the crossfire of politics.

‘Celeste died for nothing. At least those agents of England that you speak of perished for a cause they believed in. A righteous cause. A cause to take them into Heaven and be pardoned by our Lord for it.’

‘You came tonight to tell me this?’ His voice shook with bitterness.

‘No. I came to say that nothing is as black and as white as it seems, and the documents I saw were there for others to see as well.’

‘Yet you memorised them and gave the information back to the one person you should not have.’

‘Guy Lebansart was only one man who might have wanted them dead. France was seething with those who would harm anyone with loyalties to England. Perhaps they held your name, too?’

‘I doubt I was on any index of names.’

‘Then you doubt wrong,’ she said and turned to the window. ‘From the moment you rescued me there was danger.’

And then he understood. ‘So you traded our freedom for intelligence? Hell.’ So many questions and so few answers. Yet something was not quite right. And then the penny dropped.

‘I was the one you bargained for?’

The nod she gave him was almost imperceptible. ‘Indeed, that was a part of the story, but now I need a favour, Lord Lindsay. I need the right to go on with my life without having to look behind at the chaos, waiting for it to catch up.’

‘And nothing else?’

‘Nothing.’

Her voice was measured. No extra emotion. No telltale sign of weakness or feeling. She had sacrificed the lives of others for his and she knew there was no honour in any of it. It was not thanks she had come for. Neither was it a penance. Celeste was probably more of a part of it than anyone, for Sandrine had always been like a mother lioness over any perceived tarnishing of her cousin’s memory and she might have been fearful about the recount of his knowledge of her.

The complex layers of guilt and shame mixed in strangely with integrity. She had not needed to come. He hadn’t further want for the ring and no explanation could absolve murder.

‘You whored in exchange for my life?’

She shook away the words. ‘You know nothing, Colbert.’

‘Lindsay,’ he corrected her with a cold and hard fury.

‘If I had not traded the information, you would have been dead.’

‘And instead...?’

‘You lived.’

Her eyes flickered to the scar that ran across his jaw on the right side.

‘Death might have been kinder.’

She raised her fist at that, the hand of ruined and knotted skin. ‘You think I did not wish that, too, many times after I left you, the blood of those I’d named wrapped about the heart of my guilt? But there is no book written on the rules of war, my lord, and I was a young girl trying to exist in a world that had forsaken me. Anton Baudoin had taken the documents from a man he had murdered a few days before you came to Nay. I had no idea as to who those mentioned within it were.’

Silence filled the space between them for the time it took the clock in the corner to chime out the hour of two. It was why he had come to find the Baudoins in the first place, pointed in the direction by intelligence garnered after the agent’s murder. Then she spoke again.

‘You think I should have trusted you enough to make a run for it at Perpignan and believed that the impossible might be probable there with a hundred enemies at our heels and many more behind? You believed in that option of faith?’

‘Yes.’ Simple. Heartfelt.

Her unexpected smile was a sad one. ‘On reflection you may have been correct because what happened afterwards took away all my right of choice.’ There was a new note in her words now. Resignation and acceptance mixed with an undercurrent of shame.

‘Merde.’ The French word echoed through the dark like a gunshot. One moment a history just guessed at and the next known exactly.

‘But I have made a new life here, a good life, a life that helps those whom all others have forgotten.’

‘The Daughters of the Poor?’

She nodded, but in the depths of her eyes he saw the truth of what they had each found out about the other shimmering. Unspoken. The lump in his throat hitched in memory and it rested in the spaces after midnight, the weight of such knowledge making him turn away, pain lapping at all they could never say.

‘I help ruined girls like me.’

He hated that pretence was no longer possible.

‘Get out.’ Usually he was more urbane and polished, but with her he had never been quite himself.

‘Not until you agree to what I have asked.’

He did not speak because he did not trust in what he might say, but when he nodded she was gone, the whisper of the velvet curtains as they fell against the sash and a faint eddy of wind. Placing his head against the wall, he closed his eyes and cursed.

No one can get back what is lost.

That is what she had whispered then, that last time, as she had untwined his shaking fingers from around her wrist and gone with the French spymaster, her laughter on the air as rough hands wormed into the young promise of girlhood.

The sacking shield had come down as her footsteps receded, the twine it was held in place with tight at his throat. He remembered the sharp blade of a knife pressed into his ribs just below his heart.

‘Sandrine, the whore.’ Someone had drawled the words behind him as he had been pushed into midair and then he could remember nothing.

* * *

Cassandra was shaking so much she could barely untie her trousers and unbuckle her boots. Two good men had died because of her disclosure and Nathaniel Lindsay hated her now as easily as she had loved him, then. A young girl of shattered dreams and endless guilt. The hero in Nathanael Colbert had beckoned like a flame and she had been burnt to a cinder.

She was so utterly aware of Lindsay; that was the problem. Even now, safe in her room, the thrum of her want for him made her body vibrate. She forced stillness and crossed to the mirror above the hearth, its rim of gold leaf scratched by age. The woman who stared back was not the one she felt inside. This woman still held on to promise and hope, her eyes dancing with passion, heated skin sending rose into pale cheeks.

He had no reason to assent to all that she asked, no obligation to the betrayal and deceit lingering beyond the limits of honour. And yet he had assented.

She thrust her hand instinctively against one breast and squeezed it hard. No joy in this, no pleasure. No reward of the flesh, but the broken promises of men.

Turning away, she swallowed, the anger of her life forming strength. It was all she had, all she could hold on to. Once, other oaths had held her spellbound in the safety of Celeste’s bedroom in Perpignan, and under the light of a candle that threw the flame of curiosity on to two young faces.

‘Papa said that we can all go to Barages. It has been so long since we have been anywhere, Sandrine, and taking in the waters would be something we can all enjoy.’

‘Will David come, too?’

‘If you are going he is bound to want to for I have seen the way my father’s godson looks at you. But be warned, although he is eighteen he is also far too boring.’

Cassie blushed, hating the red that often rose in her cheeks at the mention of anything personal. She had arrived in France four months earlier, travelling from London by boat into Marseilles in the company of her mother’s brother and her cousin, and the warmth of the south had seeped into her bones like a tonic.

‘I want to meet someone who will take my breath away. A rich man, a good-looking man, a dangerous man.’ Celeste’s voice held that thread of wishfulness that Cassandra had often heard her use. ‘I am so very tired of the milksop sons of my father’s friends.’

‘But what of Jules Durand?’ Her cousin’s latest swain had been at the door most days, professing his love and his intentions, a strange mix of shyness and gall.

‘He is not...manly enough. He tells me too much before I want him to. He kissed my hand yesterday and all I could think of was to pull away from the wet limpness of his lips.’

All of a sudden the conversation had gone to places Cassandra did not understand, the edge of virtue tarnished by a feeling that seemed...bruised. Celeste had grown up in the year since she had seen her, the lines of her body curvy and fuller. Tonight under the bedcovers some other feeling lingered, something wrong and false.

Her cousin’s blue eyes flashed. ‘Do you never wish for a man’s hands upon your body, finding the places that feel only magic? Do you not want to know the wonderment that all the great books talk of?’

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