The Remorse of Others

[igenlode]

The Remorse of Others

It was a fine winter’s day; as fine as Gaston de Trélan had thought it might be, when the first red dawn had showed above the walls of the Temple prison on his final journey out to the chateau of Mirabel. Only he lay there now silent and still, and the sun would never warm him again.

It had been very quick; very efficient. The single sharp volley was over in moments. All the same, even before the assembled troops had dispersed, echoes of another kind from the firing squad had begun to run through Paris amid gathering unrest at the news. There were sullen murmurs on street corners against what had been done, and the means by which it had been accomplished... but no whisper of them had reached to the little spinney on the outskirts of the city where a young man had just dismounted, nor come as yet to trouble the ears of that rather disconsolate young gentleman.

A squirrel, busy stripping the first buds from the branches high above, chattered sharply, and the hired mare threw up her head. Roland soothed her with word and touch, and stooped to run a hand cautiously down her foreleg, ashamed of his own lack of attention. He had already ridden out further than he had meant to do when he had set off before breakfast this morning, too restless to remain any longer shut up indoors, and now it was starting to look as if he would be returning far later than he had intended. The very last thing he wanted was to create further cause for worry, now of all times.

The young man felt again with inexperienced fingers along the mare’s off-fore, and the animal flinched in response. She was undoubtedly going lame, and fool that he was, he had not noticed it. Back in their shared lodging on the rue de Seine, Madame de Trélan would presently be wondering where he had got to; would perhaps begin to picture him taking a toss from the saddle and lying groaning in the street, or worse, having been himself flung into prison after some foolhardy rescue attempt...

It was true that he had found it all but unbearable to have to sit idle while Gaston de Trélan, whom he revered and worshipped in almost equal measure, lay captive and in imminent danger. But the prisoner in the Temple had contrived to send word to his wife that he did not want young Roland implicated in any way in the ongoing plans to organise an escape, and Valentine de Trélan had been correspondingly adamant on the subject. Surely she must know that Roland himself would never for one minute, no matter how much he longed to take part, jeopardise those schemes by some precipitate act of his own?

Tonight— tonight was the appointed time at last when the escape was to go into action, and if by the mere act of holding his breath Roland could have hastened it on, then he would undoubtedly have attempted the feat. By tomorrow morning, ‘Monsieur de Kersaint’, who had been such a thorn in the side of the Republican government (and the old beloved guerilla name came more naturally to Roland himself even now than the title of ‘Duc de Trélan’, let alone the ‘Father’ on which he scarcely dared venture) would be out of Paris and on his way out of France altogether, beyond the reach of Bonaparte, the First Consul, and anything he could do. Only first there was the whole business of forged papers, and false uniforms for the escort, and men to wear them... and when you were twenty years old and forbidden to act, the prospect of yet more hours spent caged inside the house was very hard to bear.

And so he had gone out this morning before breakfast, with the full blessing of Madame de Trélan and the promise that he would be back presently, and hired a horse to ride out beyond the city limits, since there was nothing useful he could do and he could not bear to sit still any longer. The mare had a dusty coat and indifferent paces, but she was willing enough, and when he pressed her to a canter, Roland found that between the thud of her hoofs on the ground and the wind in his face, for a while he could be oblivious of all else.

By the time he had reined her in, conscious of a pleasantly returning appetite, the mare was blowing hard, and Roland had become belatedly aware of an unevenness in her gait. Crestfallen, he had dismounted at once; but there was nothing to be done, and breakfast all at once began to seem very far away.

The mare turned her head to nose against his shoulder, and Roland straightened up to pat her on the neck, mentally cursing himself meanwhile. He had drawn off his gloves in order to feel along her foreleg, and the Duc de Trélan’s signet ring was an unfamiliar weight upon his finger, the great green stone dull in the winter sun.

The memory of that last interview —of his father’s embrace— was still very raw. The ring had been meant as a loan, not a gift, Roland told himself fiercely, and there would be no ‘just in case’. Why, this very night its true owner was to slip free from those grim prison walls, and he, Roland, would be the first to insist upon restoring the signet to that hand on which it belonged...

Only there had been another trust enjoined upon him as well as the ring: that he should guard and care for Madame de Trélan as he would the long-dead mother of whom he had no real memory. The task had been no hardship, for Valentine de Trélan, whom he loved and admired, meant more to him already than the frail lady who had sinned so greatly, and died before he, the child of that sin, was old enough to remember. It was hard for Roland, even now that the first bewilderment of knowledge had ebbed, to feel that bond of blood with his adored leader to be one of shame, however much the latter might seek to take the blame of it upon himself — still less when it was Valentine de Trélan, to whom Roland’s very existence should surely be an affront, who out of love for him and her husband both had revealed to him at the last the secret of his birth. She had been so good to him, and he did not understand why... unless because she had never had children of her own, and it seemed he looked like his father, a little?

For the sake of his modesty, it was as well perhaps that it had not occurred to him that his own sweet-tempered charm and ingenuous looks might have served him equally well in the Duchesse’s favour. But he was all too conscious that, in addition to the affection that he bore her, she had been left in some sense to his care, and at this moment must be waiting for his return, in that same fever of confinement and helpless inaction from which he had been able for so brief a time to escape— with such ill-advised results.

The mare was lame, all right. There could be no question of galloping back in time for breakfast, as he had promised, and, far worse, he had undertaken to accompany Madame de Trélan afterwards when she went out. She would be expecting him imminently, perhaps with her hat and gloves already upon the table...

In later days, when stark black knowledge had overlaid that chilly morning, Roland would look back almost with stupefaction at how trivial such concerns had been. But with the memory of that pledge to his father —a sacred pledge— still fresh upon his lips, he was miserably aware in this moment only that he had vowed to serve her, and failed through his own impulsive nature on the very first day.

It was, in consequence, a very chastened Roland who arrived back breathless upon the doorstep some considerable time after he had been expected. He had run a good part of the way through the streets, having abandoned his limping mount —amid some less-than-pleasant skirmishes with its owner— at the hostelry at which he had hired it.

If he had been in less haste, the news might have reached him before his arrival, for Paris was in a ferment over the case of the Duc de Trélan. As it was, he came bursting into the little parlour with explanations and apologies already tumbling from his lips, half-expecting to find Madame de Trélan already dressed in cloak and gloves and patiently awaiting his arrival.

“Madame! Madame, I—”

Only the Duchesse Valentine was not there. It was the Comte de Brencourt who was seated staring into the fire, and who looked up, as Roland entered, with a face whose harsh lines bore the marks almost of bewilderment. He seemed to Roland, who was conscious of an odd shrinking feeling, to have the air of a man half-stunned by a great wave that has broken over him. Moreover, since the Comte had been engaged almost ceaselessly over the past few days in working towards the escape plans, and the latter were to take effect this very evening, if he was sitting here idle then something was all too clearly wrong.

Roland swallowed. “The plan, then.... The plan has failed?”

“I was... to wait for you.” Even de Brencourt’s voice was harsher than usual, as if he spoke with an effort. He gave no sign of having heard Roland’s words. “She has gone... to Mirabel. You will find her there — with him. It was I who had to tell her...”

To Mirabel — deserted Mirabel of the treasure? She had lived there once in hiding... but there was no treasure left, and no danger now for the Duchesse de Trélan, and Roland did not understand why today, of all days, she should have taken it into her head to travel out to the chateau once more. And the Comte had spoken its name almost with horror.

“Had to tell her—” He caught at those last ominous words with the sense that he stood on the edge of a reeling abyss. “To tell her.... what?”

“In God’s name, boy”—for a moment, driven beyond endurance, the other man might have been back in Brittany in the old days, with Roland an erring aide-de-camp—“have you still not heard?”

But since it was all too clear from Roland’s face that he had not, it was from the Comte de Brencourt of all people — de Brencourt, who had served with Monsieur de Kersaint, as he had then been called, in Brittany, who had left that service under the most extraordinary of circumstances, of which Roland and his fellow aides-de-camp knew little and suspected much, who had once, as they had divined with the half-scorn of youth for such histories amongst its elders, nursed an overwhelming passion for Valentine de Trélan— from de Brencourt, who had made his return under equally staggering circumstances only a few days before, in a vain attempt to forestall another betrayal, and who for Valentine’s sake had spent almost every waking hour since in efforts to avert its consequences before his old rival could pay the price— it was from the Comte de Brencourt, grey in the face with weariness and from successive tides of emotion, that the young man learned at last that the Duc de Trélan had been taken to Mirabel and there executed, on a charge some nine years old, at a little after sunrise that morning.

The same sun that had woken him, Roland, so insistently —at that same moment, perhaps— and drawn him out for that ride which now seemed so utterly frivolous; that same sun whose setting, this evening, was to have seen the prisoner conjured free from the shadow of that fate which had come too soon! Only nothing they could do, no plan, no escape, could make any difference now...

“I don’t believe it,” Roland said at last, blindly. De Brencourt was standing over him, looking down with an expression he had never seen before on that bitter dark face which might almost have been concern. “I don’t— I can’t believe it.”

“Nor could I,” the Comte said quietly. “Indeed I still cannot. But it is true — would to God it were not!”

That last was torn out of him on a sobbing breath, but Roland did not perceive it. He was fighting too hard to keep his own composure. If Valentine had been here he would have buried his tears in her arms, but he could not do so in front of this man whom he was not at all sure he did not hate... only de Brencourt had suffered also, one could see that...

He was aware, vaguely, that de Brencourt had been saying something. He had not heard a word of it.

“If you were told... to wait for me,” Roland began haltingly, following a train of thought of his own, “it was not... not, then, monsieur, merely to give me that news which... which it seems is so rife already on the streets of Paris that you believed I must have had it before I could come.”

“No.” The Comte likewise seemed to find some difficulty in speaking. “No, it was not.”

But since he gave no sign of being about to continue, but, on the contrary, appeared to be prey to memories that had overwhelmed his capacity of reply altogether, Roland was obliged to blurt out his own unvoiced hope.

“Did she— did she leave me some private message, before she went to Mirabel?”

No need to ask now why she had gone; not though he knew who —what— lay there awaiting her. Not with the words “shot at dawn” still echoing horribly in his ears, and the vision presented to him by an all-too-vivid imagination of just what the bullets of a firing-party could do... There swam before him the face of ‘Monsieur de Kersaint’ as they had first known him, clear-cut, grave, and a little amused by the self-evident hero-worship of Roland and the others, and then again that beloved profile as he had seen it last, only yesterday, when his father had kissed him and set that ring upon his finger, and this time a sob did break from him. And she— what must she be enduring at this moment?

He was scarcely aware that he had buried his face in both hands, as if to shut out that haunting image, or that a halting touch had been laid on his shoulder.

“Whatever she may think of me... now,” the Comte managed at last, very low, “I am not the man by whom Valentine de Trélan would send any such message. It is more almost than I dare believe that—”

He cut himself off; tried again.

“Madame de Trélan left you no message, Roland. Only that she desired you to come, and”—his voice roughened and caught—“and me also.”

Roland did not — quite — voice his own astonishment that Madame de Trélan should wish, or even permit, the presence of de Brencourt. But he could not entirely hide his flinch from the prospect of such a companion. The hand on his shoulder stiffened and fell away as he looked up sharply.

“Go with you to see... him?”

He had not intended the cruelty of that, or the look upon the other man’s face. But the Comte de Brencourt had not precisely been popular, in their days together in Finistère. Had not perhaps known, or else had not cared to know, how to make himself beloved like Monsieur de Kersaint... All the same, however embittered he had been, whatever accusations had been flung at him— as Roland, a bewildered witness to that last inexplicable parting, could attest— he had worn himself to the bone since they had come to Paris, and before, in an effort to save his former leader. And now with all those hopes in such utter, aching ruin, there was nothing left for any of them.

“You could, perhaps, hire another horse,” de Brencourt said coldly, and the cutting reminder was no more than Roland knew he had deserved.

“Forgive me, monsieur,” he blurted at once, shamefaced. “I did not mean—”

Only it was just what he had meant, and they both knew it. To make that last journey to his father’s violated body with de Brencourt, of all men.... But over these past nightmare days, at least, the Comte had merited better of him. He flushed.

“Of course we’ll go. Whenever you wish. What I said was foolish... and unpardonable.”

He held out a hand on impulse, but the Comte did not take it.

“Do you suppose,” de Brencourt got out after a moment, “that I have not felt the same? That I have not waited here alone by the ticking clock, and shrunk from the very travesty of my presence at Mirabel by him, now? When I wished to see him only in hell, and would have given my soul to keep him there?”

And the raw agony of his face and voice might as well have come from the infernal regions. Roland, aghast, fell back a pace, and de Brencourt’s mouth twisted.

“So he did not tell you, then, after all... She knew. And the little Abbé, the Duc’s foster brother— did he tell you that? I did not guess— the Abbé knew all along. ‘It is dangerous to play with the remorse of others...’ And then this morning, to learn that he was dead— and then, dear God, to have to tell her... I have been half out of my mind—”

Roland, who had been told nothing and was himself half-bewildered with grief, could understand only that by a careless word he had somehow unleashed the deluge upon them both. Battered and appalled by that outpouring, he reached out again to catch at the other man’s sleeve, with no very clear idea save that for the Comte’s own sake he must somehow be stopped. “Monsieur, I beg you—”

But de Brencourt had mastered himself, by what effort Roland could not guess.

“I gave my word once,” he said harshly, “to serve Valentine de Trélan as a brother in any way that I could, and as God is my witness, if she had come away as I begged, I meant to keep it... I cannot bring her comfort now. No man alive can do that. But whatever she asks of me, I will undertake, and she bade me bring you to Mirabel — and repaid me with a word that means more than I had any right to ask: friend.”

Before Roland’s feet there had opened up an unsuspected adult abyss to which there was no adequate response. “I’m sorry...”

“So am I,” retorted the Comte in an indescribable tone. He turned away. “And most bitterly sorry that it should come at this cost. If I could think—”

‘Friend’ was not territory upon which Roland felt he could venture. “I made a promise of my own yesterday,” he began, “that if—”

But that ‘if’ had become terrible reality, and it caught in his throat so that he could not get it out.

“That I was to take care of her,” he went on rather wildly, “as if she were... were my mother. So I suppose then, monsieur, that would make you—”

“An honorary uncle?” The Comte swung round with something that might have been a suffocated laugh. “And to his—”

He cut himself off. “Dear God, how de Kersaint would be amused... And yet we have been a forlorn little family in these last days, have we not? She holds you in affection, and I... I will stand by her side in any way that I can.”

“As will I,” Roland insisted, hearing the folly at once in his own bravado. He flinched, awaiting the older man’s cutting retort. It did not come.

“Then I suppose... we have very little choice in the matter,” de Brencourt said gently enough. “I will come with you to Mirabel— if I may. But if you had rather—”

“Oh. monsieur, forget what I said!” Roland went to him on impulse, remembering that awkward hand upon his shoulder as he wept; embraced the Comte a little clumsily, and felt de Brencourt’s stiff astonishment yield a little in response. “We have all been out of our wits with grief, you said it yourself. I shall go out and find a carriage”—he had some confused idea of proving that he, too, could be of practical use—“and we will go to him at once.”

Struck to the heart all over again by the knowledge of what they would find, he faltered despite himself. He’d fought under Gaston de Trélan in Finistère and seen what remained of men and horses in the aftermath of a battle; he had last seen his dearest friends left at death’s door in a final, futile attempt to save their beloved leader, and they would all of them have counted that sacrifice well spent, if by it they could have averted... what had come to pass. He was not afraid. Only— the Duc de Trélan had been riddled with bullets in cold blood, and there was something horrible in that deliberate wreckage of a man he loved.

The Comte de Brencourt freed himself from the young man’s slackening grasp, and held him at arm’s length for a moment. His face softened a little.

“There is nothing... unseemly, where he lies,” he said quietly, his thoughts having all too clearly followed Roland’s own. “I was assured of that by one who saw it done. They have covered him and laid him out with honour, and his face was untouched. You need not fear—”

Flushing, Roland began a movement intended to repudiate that idea, but the Comte held his gaze with a tiny shake of the head. “Nothing unfit for her eyes — or yours.”

And there was a small, shameful relief in that, though he would not admit it. One should be prepared to endure anything and face the worst —even as he had been— and yet there were things to which Roland knew in his heart he did not want to bear witness.

And de Brencourt, he realised with a jolt, de Brencourt had not himself set eyes on Gaston de Trélan since that final, disastrous meeting that had led so inexorably to those gun-shots at Mirabel. Only neither man would ever be able to hold out the hand of forgiveness now. The utter irrevocability of what had happened swept over him in a fresh tidal wave.

Valentine de Trélan would be alone there in that great sepulchre of a house, and he who lay at her feet would not wake in answer to her call or hear any word she spoke ever again. The sun would rise tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and wars might be lost and won, and none of it could change a thing. He was gone, and he would still be gone.

“We will all need... friends, monsieur,” Roland said a little hoarsely, and held out his own hand. The Comte accepted it without hesitation, then froze with a catch in his breath, staring down. Between them, where Roland bore it in their joined clasp, there lay the signet ring of the last Duc de Trélan. Last spring, when hopes were high, they had both of them seen it gleam in the candlelight on the finger of ‘Monsieur de Kersaint’... on that night when Roland had first heard the name of Mirabel.

De Brencourt bent his head suddenly and raised the ring to his lips, with the air of a sacrament; then, before the young man, taken utterly aback, could recover from this confusion, he released him with his usual brusque air.

“If we are going, we had better leave,” he observed drily, and Roland, relieved beyond measure by this resumption of normality, took up his gloves and hat at once.

“Gladly — monsieur my honorary uncle!”

This sally drew precisely the expression of distaste that Roland had expected; but one corner of de Brencourt’s mouth had twitched a little, in what might have been a smile. It was not much comfort, but it was something. And perhaps, Roland thought, the Comte had been right, and his father after all would have found the whole situation amusing. At any rate it was a little like being back in Brittany...

It took him longer than he had anticipated to find a carriage that would take them out to Mirabel, and throughout the journey the Comte de Brencourt was even more taciturn than was his wont. His gaze dwelt rather fixedly upon the face of his young companion, but Roland had the impression that de Brencourt was not seeing him at all. For his own part he was haunted throughout the journey by the remembered glimmer of a smile; only it was not the one that had tugged briefly at the other man’s harsh features. It was the old half-teasing look of affection that he had treasured so much in Brittany when he had contrived to win it from Monsieur de Kersaint.

~o~

The great hall at Mirabel was silent and very dim, but there were candles burning where the dead man lay, as if he had returned at last in state to his former inheritance. If Madame de Trélan had been weeping, then there were no traces of it to be seen by that kindly light; she was quite composed now, her head borne high, as she came towards them in that vast empty place. For a moment Roland had the feeling that he was in a church —the massive candlesticks had surely come from a chapel somewhere— but if so, it was a church pillared in green marble and shabby gilt, with a floor of scarred and uneven parquet. There had been no reverence among those who scrawled slogans on the walls, or defaced the carved stone there.

Valentine de Trélan was as pale as if the bullets had struck home in her breast also, but the candlelight burnished the silver in her faded hair into a bright coronet. The Comte de Brencourt went to her at once, bending as low to kiss her hand as if she had been the martyred Queen. Madame de Trélan reached out to touch his arm and they spoke together for a moment.

Roland, who hung back, did not hear what was said, or seek to do so; but the hand of the Duchesse was adamant upon de Brencourt’s sleeve, and they had both turned towards that pool of candlelight and the makeshift bier. De Brencourt broke away and drew one hand briefly across his eyes, but his face, when he straightened, was less taut with strain than it had been.

And then Madame de Trélan held out both her hands to Roland, and he came forward at once, and was for a while no longer very certain of anything at all, save that her arms were around him and he was shaken by sobs... and she too perhaps... But when he raised his head at last she was smiling at him with resolute calm.

“Come,” she said simply, and he let himself be steered across that final space to look down for the last time upon the Duc de Trélan as he had seen him so often, lying wrapped in his cloak asleep upon campaign; only it was no cloak that covered him now, but a worn strip of tapestry, woven with tarnished bullion. And he was not asleep, but mortally pale, and the ghost of a smile that touched his lips would never fade.

“He has won,” Valentine de Trélan said very quietly at his side. “You see, I... know, Roland. About the pardon he refused, and why. Did he ask you not to tell me? Yes, for you are a man now, but I— I too can be proud of his choice, and strong. He will win more against Bonaparte by this victory than by any skirmish fought in Brittany, and we must be— glad.” And beneath her breath: “Oh Gaston, Gaston...”

Gaston de Trélan had been the last Royalist leader in arms in the West; had been taken prisoner in breach of a signed safe-conduct, condemned on a spurious charge, and paraded in front of his own despoiled chateau to be shot, and if his friends had succeeded in smuggling him away before that sentence could be carried out, it would have been a blow to Bonaparte’s self-esteem, it was true. But the First Consul had wanted the last Duc de Trélan to beg for pardon. Had been minded to grant it, with one eye on the weathercock of public opinion, if only his opponent would humble himself to plead for his life and thereby lose the respect of the dogged peasants he had once led.

That offer had been rejected, by way of the fire, in Roland’s own presence yesterday. Gaston de Trélan had had no intention of making the First Consul’s life easier, least of all at the cost of his own honour. Bonaparte would have to back down, or go ahead with an execution achieved by means that were already arousing an outcry. The volley of bullets, if it came, would paint with infamy the name of the man who had ordered it, and precisely because Bonaparte sought to turn aside, his opponent would willingly walk that path.

Roland had pinned his hopes on plans of escape. But the war in the West was over, and nothing more could be done by strength of arms. His father had sought to force the enemy’s hand, and the outcome of that final battle of wills was echoing even now in rising unrest on the streets of Paris as nothing else could have done. For a defeated enemy to escape into exile abroad might have been a minor embarrassment at best; to be seen to put him to death in breach of the rules of war was something that would be far harder to brush off, and the Duc de Trélan, who had valued life and those he loved as much as any other man, had known that.

If only they could have contrived it in time, he would not have refused the escape. Roland clung to that, remembering his father’s embrace. But he knew also that the leader he had worshipped had understood that one more life was little enough to pay, to revive a cause that perhaps was not yet lost.

His face was very calm, and it still wore that fleeting smile. The Comte de Brencourt was kneeling now beyond the candlesticks at the dead man’s feet, head bowed in the shadow as if in prayer or homage. Roland knelt down likewise and tried to find words to pray. There were fleurs-de-lys, he saw, on that faded strip of tapestry, flickering oddly with the candle flames as if the motionless breast on which they lay might still move... and somehow the familiar phrases would not come. He fumbled after them like rosary beads, but when his lips moved, it was on the broken litany “mon père, mon père, mon père” — the “Father” over which he had faltered only yesterday, and which flowed now seemingly without surcease, and to no avail.

De Brencourt, beside him, gave no sign that he had heard. But one hand reached out across the space between them to press the young man’s own, and Roland clung to it. As if from a great distance he saw Madame de Trélan stoop to kiss her husband’s still form one last time. He must be strong for her sake... only it seemed she was the strongest of them all. He glanced across at de Brencourt; looked away quickly from the raw emotion glimpsed on that shuttered face.

And then the Duchesse had turned and was coming towards them, and Roland freed himself hastily, flushing, and began to scramble to his feet. “Madame...”

“Oh, Roland.” She smiled a little sadly at him and laid one cool hand against his cheek where it was still damp. But her gaze had gone on beyond, to where the Comte de Brencourt had also risen, with rather less alacrity, to acknowledge her. He bowed, somewhat stiffly. “Madame.”

“Mon ami...” A tiny hint of reproach that said clearly, both to Roland and to him at whom it was aimed, that ‘friend’ was not a word to be turned aside. “He will be buried in the old chapel. We have permission, and it can be made fitting. Will you help me see it done?”

It was said with the little unconscious air of command that Roland remembered so well, and the gesture that accompanied it summoned the Comte to offer her his arm as if unaware of what he did. Valentine de Trélan tucked her hand into the crook of his proffered sleeve with almost the same maternal touch she had bestowed upon Roland, and said something softly to which the Comte bent his head in assent.

“I... know, Madame.”

“Then we will speak no more of it... Will you help me— for his sake?”

“Valentine—”

“You would rather have lain here in his place. I know that. So would Roland.” Somehow, out of all that she had endured in the last week —despair, hope, heartbreak— she had come to this hard-won calm. Now for the first time her voice shook a little. “So would I. But it is done, and we have to go on. And forgiveness is for the living.”

A spasm passed over de Brencourt’s face, and for an instant Roland thought he would pull away. But she had him fast.

“I am yours, Madame.” The words were conventional formula, but in that harsh voice they were more akin to a plea— or a prayer.

“And I am his.” A catch in her breath. “Was his... no, for that pride they cannot take from me. That crown at least I shall carry to my grave.”

“No, Madame,” de Brencourt said very quietly. “No man can or will encroach upon that.”

His eyes met those of Roland above her gallantly-carried head, in what the young man realised with a jolt was an assurance for him alone.

Outside the windows with their broken shutters, the low winter sun shone through the long colonnade of the château front, and there was a pathway of light where the great door still stood ajar. Roland knelt for a final time to cross himself and whisper a promise of his own to those ears that could no longer hear —but surely somehow his father would know?— and turned to follow the others towards the threshold into the day beyond. The Duchesse was leaning a little upon the strength of her escort, but more, Roland thought, for de Brencourt’s sake than her own. At any rate there was a resolute set to the older man’s shoulders that had been absent since the old days with Monsieur de Kersaint...

Memories welled up, and he glanced back again, despite himself swallowing hard. But the candles burned steadily on, and the slight figure of the Duchesse was unwavering against the brightness up ahead; and he had friends still living, and a duty of care to which he had given his word. Even if, as it seemed, it was to be shared with the man who would least have expected it.

They were all of them stuck with one another, he thought a little ruefully. Yet oddly enough he found he did not mind.

---

Note to self (because I know from past experience that in ten years' time I shall have forgotten the subtext I was intending to imply!): the dialogue exchanges between Valentine and de Brencourt that Roland does not hear relate to Valentine passing on Gaston's explanation of why he would have *had* to attend the arranged surrender even if he had been certain that his opponents intended to breach the safe-conduct, because failure to do so would have been taken as a refusal to surrender and brought down reprisals upon those he was trying to protect... to which her canon reaction is "I will point out that aspect to the Comte—for he has suffered, Gaston". However, she doesn't have the opportunity or indeed any thought to spare of doing so when next she and de Brencourt meet, so in this story, after her long vigil at Mirabel, when in a calmer state of mind she does as she had said she would in an attempt to ease his mind also. The other message she has to convey to him would be the one entrusted to her in Gaston's final letter (the existence of which Roland is as yet unaware): I ask de Brencourt's pardon once more for what I said to him at La Vergne when he tried to warn me.