“No, some servant girl from Kentland. She met the boy delivering milk at the edge of the village, and—”
Phillipe scrambled up, clutched Fox’s arm. “Did the boy tell you the name of the servant wench, by chance?”
“I believe it was—yes, Betsy. That’s it, Betsy.”
“And what did you say to the boy?”
“Exactly what we agreed. That you’d left the inn. He didn’t care one way or another. He’d already been paid, and he was all in a rush to get back to his milk pails—here! You’re not going?”
“Yes, I must.”
Phillipe turned to speak to Marie, saw she’d fallen asleep. As he started for the stable door, Fox cautioned him:
“By your own words, you could be walking into their trap.”
“I realize. I’ll be careful. When my mother wakes up, tell her I’ll be back in good time—”
“Go through the trees along the shore, then,” Fox shouted after him. “For God’s sake stay off the towpath!”
The words faded as Phillipe ran through the gray morning, toward the Medway and the one person he hoped would be waiting there.
CHAPTER IX
Flight
i
HE KNEW THE LOCATION of the grove well enough, having met Alicia there once before. Taking Mr. Fox’s advice, he avoided the towpath, running instead among the trees on the riverbank below.
He jumped little inlets where the Medway had cut into the lush banks, moving so fast that his chest began to hurt. At the same time, he kept an eye on the towpath in case a cart should appear—or pursuers dispatched from the estate, perhaps.
The supple willow branches lashed his cheeks as he rushed along. He saw the grove ahead. Nearby, the towpath curved away from the river, toward the green hillock from whose far side he’d first glimpsed his father’s estate.
The willows in the grove grew close together. But in the gray-and-green of the stormy summer day, he thought he detected a black horse moving behind the screen of overhanging branches. That reassured him a little, though he remained wary of surprise attack.
He leaped a last channel, pushing at the living, green-leafed curtain—
“Alicia?”
“Here.”
He plunged into the dim heart of the grove. Rain began to pelt again. The towering willows offered protection.
He came on her suddenly, waiting beside her splendid black stallion. She wore the same familiar riding costume. But her tawny hair was disarrayed, the ribbon at the nape of her neck half undone. Her cheeks were flushed. And one was marked with a nasty blue-black bruise.
She saw him notice it immediately, smiled in a forlorn way.
“A small remembrance from my intended. It’s of no importance. Phillipe, I can stay only a few moments. This time I literally had to creep out of the house like a thief—after sending Betsy ahead. I only managed it because all the attention’s on the bishop and”—sudden fear on her face—“plans for you.” Tearful, she looked into his eyes. “Oh, Phillipe—what possessed you to attack Francis?”
“The pious bastard tried to trick us. On Lady Jane’s orders, I imagine. He tried to burn my father’s letter.”
“The coach brought him back to Kentland in a perfect rage. Face all bloodied—and his language! Foul enough to make a fishmonger blush. You’ve got to leave Tonbridge, and quickly. That’s why I had to see you. Warn you.”
Bitterness twisted his mouth. “Salving your conscience for telling Roger about me?”
She turned pale. “How did you know?”
“He told me the night he attacked me.”
“I don’t imagine you’ll soon forgive me—”
“No.”
“It did happen by accident. At dinner. I drank too much claret—”
“A habit of yours, it seems,” he said, harsh. Then he regretted it. He could understand a little about why she had to dull her senses so often.
For her part, Alicia was quick to answer him:
“He provoked me in the extreme, Phillipe! It was right after he returned from London. He began boasting of an orange girl he’d dallied with. He met her one night at the theater—”
“So you, in turn, had to cut him down with an account of your own amusements? I really wonder if you weren’t planning to do that from the start.”
She nodded, as if tired. “Perhaps I was. Perhaps—even despite my promise to you. Well—” She fingered the blotched bruise. “I got my reward. Roger saw to it—in private.”
“And you’re going to marry a monster like that?”
“Yes,” she answered, a whisper. “There are —disagreeable parts to any bargain.”
“Christ in heaven! That’s not a bargain. That’s sentencing yourself to—”
“Don’t, Phillipe. It was settled long ago. Long before Quarry Hill—”
She touched his cheek. Her hand was warm. And capable of arousing memories, emotions, that quelled some of his anger.
“But what we shared was far more than amusement, my darling. Don’t you know that by now? If it wasn’t so, would I risk coming to tell you that Roger’s up, and readying his plans to dispose of you? His hand’s all wrapped in batting, like a mitten. My God, I’ve never seen him so angry—like a madman. This very minute, he’s organizing some of the household men. To send them after you and your mother. At the very least they’ll attack you and take the letter. At worst, they may kill you. I tell you he’s completely out of his head!—you destroyed his hand, even Bleeker admits that. I—”
She hesitated, turning away. Never before had he seen so much as a trace of shame on her face. Now he saw it.
“—I know I’m partly responsible for what happened. Because I drank too much—and refused to bear his bragging.”
Phillipe still wondered whether her regret was wholly honest. There was no pleasure in Alicia’s blue eyes. Yet he could vividly imagine its presence when she’d flung the truth of her liaison at her intended husband.
He cared for her. Deeply. But he knew, with a sadness, that his original impression of her was still, in part, valid. There was a whore in her.
True, the whore was elegant and soft-eyed. But underneath, calculating. And with the quick temper of her kind.
He rubbed the shiny flank of the restless black horse. The animal turned its head to nip. Phillipe stroked the stallion’s muzzle to calm him, saying:
“That’s done with. Obviously I’d better be concerned about the present. My mother and I plan to leave Tonbridge in the morning, by the London coach.”
“You don’t dare delay that long! Believe me! Get out of the village. Hide in the fields. Along the river on the other side of Tonbridge—anywhere—but hide.”
He shook his head in disgust. “They’re ready to kill me—when they should be making preparations to bury my father? What a despicable lot they are.”
“You’ve pushed them too far. As to preparations for the burial—”
A peculiar stiffness seemed to freeze her features. She turned away again, gazing down between the overhanging leaves at the Medway dappled with raindrop rings.
“—those can wait awhile,” she finished. “Until the more important business is accomplished.”
He puzzled about the change in her expression a moment ago. He’d learned to recognize when she was concealing something. But his emotions made him forget that. Almost against his will, he slipped his hands around her waist and up her back. He pulled her close to savor her warmth; the sweet breath he’d known so intimately.
Very softly, he said, “I wish you could come away with me, Alicia.”
“In spite of the grief I’ve caused, telling Roger?”
“God help me—yes.”
The blue eyes brimmed with tears. She bent her head into his shoulder. He stroked her tawny hair while she cried.
“I—I wish I could too. But I’ve told you I’m not strong enough for that. I’m what I was born and taught to be. The Alicia who drinks too heavily, and spills out secrets that should stay hidden. I
will be Roger’s wife next year.”
He sounded bitter again: “I realize I have far less to offer. No inheritance except on a piece of parchment they mean to destroy. No pack of servants to call up to do murder at my bidding—”
“Please!”
She wrenched away, in agony.
“You knew what I was from the beginning, Phillipe. Do you realize how much I’ve thought about leaving everything to be with you? How close I am even now? So close it terrifies me! That’s what you’ve done. That’s how you’ve shaken and changed me.”
“But not enough.” Rage passing again, he drew her close. “Not enough.”
His own eyes had grown blurred with tears. He fought them back as he lifted her chin, gazed at her a long moment before kissing her. Alicia clung to him with all her strength, bending his head into an almost painful embrace.
He didn’t want to shatter the suspended moment. All the realities—the danger from Roger Amberly; the soft rustling of the willow leaves in the rain; his mother waiting back in the village—had faded to the background.
But one by one, those realities claimed his mind. He broke the embrace gently.
“I loved you, Alicia. Nothing that happens can ever change the truth of that.”
“Loved, Master Frenchman?” Once more she tried to smile through the weeping. This time, she almost brought it off. Her shoulders lifted, though the jauntiness was still false and forced. “Can’t we keep it in the present tense? Do you think a woman—even a woman like me—can ever forget the first man she really cared about? Or gave herself to? I love you and I always will. I swear I’ll feel you close even when I’m with another man, for all the rest of my life. If I’ve never spoken the truth before, I swear by Almighty God I’m speaking it now. Be thankful we had the summer. Now go—before I decide to come with you.”
Whirling, she dashed to her horse and mounted, pulling the rein so fiercely the black whinnied against the bite of the bit. She ducked under the branches and drove the stallion up the slope through the willows to the towpath, and out of sight.
Phillipe touched his face. Wet. With tears. And rain. The shower was driving hard enough to penetrate the trees—
As he walked out of the grove, he marked down one more score against the Amberlys of the world. They offered what he could not. The property and position that, in the end, had lost him a woman with whom he might have spent the rest of his life, knowing her weaknesses but loving her uncontrollably in spite of them.
ii
Less than an hour after Phillipe Charboneau crept back into the village of Tonbridge, he and his mother had left it for the last time.
Walking through clover meadows still damp with the morning showers, their plan was to strike north-westward, toward the hamlet of Ide Hill. At Phillipe’s belt hung a tied kerchief with five shillings and some bread inside; the landlord’s way of helping their journey.
Mr. Fox had apologized for the smallness of the gift, then issued warnings about the dangers to which they must be alert. Highwaymen on the public roads. Fees to be paid at the turnpike tollhouses if they went that way—or dodged, if they didn’t. Suspicious country folk who might recognize them as foreigners and, very likely, fugitives of some kind.
Mr. Fox had advised that they might filch apples from orchards and find creeks with sweet, drinkable water, but they would be wise to avoid towns of any size until a week’s walking, give or take a day or two, brought them near the city of London. Because of the necessity to travel swiftly and lightly, living off the land, the trunk was left behind at Wolfe’s Triumph. Phillipe carried Gil’s wrapped sword, Marie the small leather casket. They took nothing else.
By the time they neared Quarry Hill, Marie already looked weary. Despite the anguished memories the hill held, Phillipe decided to wait there until dark before pushing on, both for Marie’s sake and to give them the cover of night.
The showers had cleared. A peaceful blue late afternoon sky replaced the earlier gray. Crickets began to harp noisily in the fields.
“We must go faster till we reach the hill,” he urged, aware of their high visibility in an empty pastoral landscape. Marie countered with a question about the identity of the woman who had sent for him.
Phillipe kept his face expressionless. “I didn’t realize Mr. Fox had told you—”
“Certainly. Who was she?”
He answered with an elaborate lie. It was a kitchen wench from Kentland. She knew one of Mr. Fox’s serving girls. Phillipe had met her when she’d come to the inn to visit. Embellishing the falsehood, he added that he’d even passed some hours strolling with the young lady out in the country during the summer.
Being a kindly girl, he finished, this morning she’d arranged to warn him of Roger’s planned action, at some personal risk.
Face wan, eyes remote as they trudged through the fields, Marie Charboneau accepted the explanation without question. But she said in a hollow voice:
“There was another girl. A beautiful girl—with the young man, the first day we went to Kentland. Remember?”
He kept his face impassive, scanning the horizon in the lowering fight. A speck moved on a distant road snaking across the top of the hill. Only a farmer’s cart, he realized a moment later, relieved.
Marie went on with her toneless reverie:
“She was the kind I wanted you to marry. Rich and beautiful and of good station. I had such hopes of a good marriage.”
To try to cheer her, he smiled. “I’ll make a match like that yet. My claim still stands.” He tapped the casket which she crooked in her arm protectively.
They reached Quarry Hill as sunset came on. Settled on the damp ground well back among the trees, Phillipe broke the coarse, crumbly bread Mr. Fox had given them. He handed the larger half to Marie. She was shivering. She’d brought only a plain woolen cloak to wear over her already muddied clothing. He could hear her teeth chatter when she tried to bite the bread.
He sat beside her, pulled her head close in against his shoulder, to let the warmth of his body reach her if it would. And suddenly, he felt the strange reversal of their roles, a reversal that had come about without his realizing it.
She was the child now, and he the adult, her strength.
He helped steady her hand as she brought the bread to her mouth. She chewed it slowly, like an old woman.
In the distance he heard the sound of horses, traveling fast.
He left her and slipped to the edge of the trees.
Below, in the red light of the August evening, half a dozen men rode in the direction of Tonbridge. He recognized their liveries. The sunset flashed on the belled muzzle of a blunderbuss carried by the leading rider. As he watched them pass, his stomach began to ache.
When the horsemen disappeared, he crept back into the woods to find Marie dozing. He touched her forehead. Warm.
He sat awake most of the night, feeling like a speck—nothing—beneath the twinkling summer stars.
Yet if he were nothing, why did he feel so much fear?
And so much hate?
Book Two
The House of Sholto and Sons
CHAPTER I
Swords at St. Paul’s
i
THE GREAT CITY OF London stank and chimed and glittered.
And as he first observed it with feverish eyes in the mellow light of early September, Phillipe Charboneau thought he’d never viewed anything half so marvelous and awesome.
They had approached through the southern sections, coming at last into the tumult of Southwark. Phillipe’s fair command of English gained them the information that to reach the Old City, they must cross the Thames River. As they were doing now, near sunset, by the Westminster Bridge.
All around, crowds jostled; iron-tired coaches rumbled; and the great river below, alive with barges plied by shouting watermen, mingled its tang with the more pungent aromas of those passing to and fro on the bridge.
Marie walked listlessly. Her eyes were half-closed. Phillipe carri
ed both the casket and the wrapped sword. Their money was long gone, spent carefully for tart cider or sugared buns, at small, poor inns they’d felt free to visit only after dark.
But now the long, exhausting journey on foot seemed to fade behind the panorama spreading in front of Phillipe’s astonished eyes.
London. A sprawl, a hurlyburly of wood and brick buildings of all conceivable styles, shapes and heights, bordering the river upstream and down for what appeared to be two or three miles. Splendid church domes shone dull gold in the autumn light, despite the pall of smoke accumulating from thousands of rooftop chimney pots. One dome in particular, eastward around the curve of the Thames, glowed with special magnificence.
Phillipe stopped a pair of boys. Both carried short brushes fully as black as their cheeks and ragged clothing. He inquired about the imposing dome in the distance.
“Country lout, not to know Master Wren’s greatest church!” jeered one of the boys, giving a wink to his companion. “St. Paul’s! ’Ware you don’t get sold a piece of the river!”
The sweeps were hidden suddenly behind a sedan chair whose liveried carriers jostled Phillipe and his mother out of the way. Inside the chair, a wigged gentleman fondled the brocaded breasts of a woman who laughed and slapped his wrist lightly with a sequinned domino on a stick.
“Mama—” Phillipe was forced to speak loudly because of the incessant din. Church bells predominated, clanging and chiming from all quarters of the stained sunset sky. “We’ll have to sleep where we can again tonight. There’s a great church yonder. If we make for it, perhaps we can find shelter.”
Marie’s lips barely moved, the only sign she’d heard him.
Soon they reached the end of the bridge. Phillipe discovered that negotiating their way to the landmark dome had all at once become impossible. They were plunged into streets that took abrupt turnings. Buildings hid the skyline. Creaking wrought-metal shop signs effectively shut out the little remaining daylight.
The cobbled streets were perilously narrow, too. A drainage channel ran down the center of most of them. After a few minutes on such thoroughfares, Phillipe began to make sense of the patterns of foot traffic.