Ashes (Ch2)

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Chapter 2 — Rapprochement

His Lordship the Earl of Carnforth —or rather, the Countess his spouse— had spared no expense to lay on an entertainment on a truly grand scale. Lady Blaymere’s social evenings, by comparison, had been little more than a supper party with cultural pretensions. Following young Roland de Céligny through room after room ablaze with light and costly hangings, where the quivering flame of hundreds of candles was cast back by mirrors and by crystal lustres overhead, and servants in livery moved deftly amidst the throng, Artus de Brencourt could almost have imagined himself transported to some princely court, or back in a dream of the France of his youth.

Only those days had vanished as thoroughly as the youth that had fled —barren and wasted, all of it— or the laughter of the little Queen at Versailles. Quite how empty that dream had become he knew better now than anyone here. England, secure behind the wooden walls of her ships, no longer cared for the fate of Royalist France save as a remnant with nowhere else to go, an all but useless ally that could be spurned at will, for she would always come crawling back. A new society had flocked to fill the salons of Paris these days, as febrile and brittle and perhaps no more corrupt than that which had preceded it, and a new monarch held the reins of power in all but name.

All around in the brightly lit rooms the English upper classes, flush with embroidered Indian silks and Jamaican sugar, spared not a thought for the shabby business of politics across the Channel. But more complacent yet were those emigrés present tonight: ladies such as the stout, gouty Vicomtesse de Nantillac, taking snuff in the assurance that someone, somewhere, would some day restore her to her rights. Men in well-cut coats or obsolete uniforms, nodding their heads wisely over cavalry charges long past or scheming for the favour of one or another party among the Princes. Monsieur le Duc de Pontferrand, prosperous and sleek as a well-fed cat; he had married an English wife with wealth even greater than his own, and no doubt supposed that one had only to drop a few thousand livres here and there to unseat Bonaparte. They paid lip-service, all of them, to a world that was gone, but the Comte de Brencourt was of the bitter opinion that if truth be told, they were very comfortable where they were.

He followed in young de Céligny’s wake as the boy threaded his way through a crowd that made way for him, as it always would, with smiles for a handsome face and ready charm. Artus de Brencourt, who had never, even twenty-five years earlier, been in possession of either, observed the process with a certain detachment.

De Céligny had matured a good deal in the passing of the last two years, but he was fresh-faced and ingenuous as ever. Those same years —years of suspicion, betrayal, and disappointment— had left de Brencourt himself greyed almost beyond recognition, and bitten deeply into features that had been harsh enough before; if the flecked glass of his shaving-mirror had left him any remaining delusions on that score, the young man’s all too candid reaction at their re-encounter would have shattered them once and for all. De Céligny’s expression had always been an open book.

(But that was not quite true, memory forced him to admit. In those last days they had spent together, after the disaster of the Duc’s arrest and the death sentence that had followed, Roland had become guarded almost to the point of withdrawal, and one could see the traces of it in him still. It would not be the least of the ironies of that unendurable, achingly unforgettable week if it had after all achieved what the Duc de Trélan had never managed to do, and induced the Duc’s adoring young followers to grow up.)

The young man had spent more time than anyone else with the Duchesse Valentine in those final days, both of them fretting at enforced inactivity with the escape still so uncertain. Might, perhaps, speak of her unprompted, if one could turn the conversation in that direction...

The thought was like an aching tooth, to be constantly probed. But it was an ache of long years’ standing, with each familiar twinge a reassurance, and de Céligny, for all his new-found interest in reminiscence, seemed in no great hurry to begin. Indeed, he appeared to be nursing an odd air of suppressed excitement, along with a sparkle in his eyes that had not been there the last time they met... and since the Comte could scarcely imagine that joy to have been prompted by the prospect of their coming conversation, he could only conclude that the young man had derived some other source of satisfaction in the course of his stay in London into which de Brencourt did not propose to enquire.

From what de Céligny had said, it was to be a short stay only. Perhaps that accounted for the enthusiasm. Artus de Brencourt, whose name and activities were only too well known to Fouché’s secret police, could see no prospect laid out for his own future save an endless barren exile on English shores, and the idea of London had long since lost any charm it had still possessed.

For the moment he still had the entrée among those, like Lady Blaymere, who regarded his situation with a mixture of pity and prurient curiosity. But that would not last... and then he would be left alone to savour the final dregs of that bitter cup he had poured for himself so long ago.

He could not go back. Home, such as it had been, was gone, along with the rest of that world of which he had been a part, with the memories of it tainted also. But there were some memories that could not be forgotten, even though stained with madness, shame and dishonour— even though the past two years, futile as they had proved, had been undertaken as much in a spirit of self-imposed expiation as anything else.

She was happy... and this time by his doing rather than in his despite. He had done her that service, after all, as once foretold by the Abbé Chassin; from whom, as it happened, he had had his scanty news of her.

They had encountered one another by chance, some fifteen months back, when their paths crossed amid the undercover work in which they were both at that time engaged. Although he had a strong suspicion that their meeting had not been truly by chance on the Abbé’s part; the little peasant-priest —who was, so far as he knew, still unsuspected, and who made for a far more effective agent than the Comte de Brencourt ever could, or would— had always been uncomfortably well-informed, and his shrewd eyes saw altogether too much.

Artus de Brencourt had not wanted the Abbé’s sympathy, nor his approval for the course the Comte had chosen, any more than he had ever sought absolution for what he had done. But the little priest had seen fit to seek him out, to ask no questions, and to let fall a few precious drops of information without betraying in the least that he was aware how much they meant.

He had undertaken also, on parting, to make no mention of that interview to any of their old acquaintance; the Comte’s pride had not allowed him to be any more specific in the request, but he had no doubt that the Abbé still possessed channels of communication of some sort with de Trélan. But it was not at de Trélan’s instigation that the Abbé had come...

They had never, in any sense, been friends. One did not —all other considerations aside— befriend a little low-born provincial cleric, who held no official position in the uprising save that of spiritual advisor, even and indeed especially if one’s commanding officer gave every indication of trusting his discretion and judgement equally with one’s own. But strange times made for strange companions, and men of peasant stock had proved their worth in the King’s cause often enough, as fighters and as strategists both. The Abbé Chassin was no fighter, but he was undoubtedly no fool... and it was not his presence at their councils that de Brencourt had, consciously or not, resented, but the nagging conviction that he was far more deeply in their leader’s confidence than the Comte himself as second-in-command.

They had not been friends. All the same, there had been a time when along with the rest they had sampled the same meagre fare, slept under the same hedgerows, and shared a raised eyebrow at the antics of de Céligny and his fellow juveniles, and if they had been estranged long before the end then de Brencourt was forced to admit that the dishonourable acts had been his own.

The Abbé knew, or had guessed, all the worst of him. The bald facts de Brencourt himself had flung in the little priest’s face; the motive behind them he was certain that the Abbé had already divined. But for all that, he had not succeeded in bringing about the death of the Duc de Trélan, in fair fight between them or otherwise... and the Duchesse Valentine was forever, as she had always been, beyond his touch.

It was for the sake of Valentine’s happiness that he had fought so hard to save Gaston de Trélan from capture and execution by Bonaparte, afterwards. For Valentine’s sake, and, perhaps, a little for the sake of his own self-respect, and —though this he had not even to himself admitted— for de Trélan himself, under whose command he had once, before he had known him to be Valentine’s estranged husband, been glad to serve.

Well, that estrangement was over now, despite everything that Artus de Brencourt had tried, and indeed it was almost certain that the Duc de Trélan owed not only his liberty but his life itself to his rival’s efforts. Only in her eyes, de Brencourt thought bitterly, he had never even been a rival. He had been nothing... but that, also, was not quite true.

He had given his word, to the Abbé and to himself, that he would not seek to see Valentine or her husband ever again. He had kept faith all those years before to her memory alone, with no thought of hope. At least now he knew her to be alive and well, and in no want. He had never thought to find himself grateful to the Abbé Chassin for his concern.

He had been glad to see the Abbé, he could admit that now. And Roland de Céligny, for all his evident shock, had been glad to see him; there had been no feigning in that reaction, even if one supposed the young man capable of it.

It was Lucien du Boisfossé who had been the sole prudent head among Roland’s friends, and the only one with the ability to keep his own counsel. It crossed de Brencourt’s mind for the first time to wonder what had happened to him. He, de Brencourt, had led that boy on a mission against odds verging on the suicidal at a time when he had sought only his own self-destruction, and had felt a certain remorse for it, afterwards. He must remember to ask de Céligny about him.

De Céligny, however, was still leading the way through a selection of side-chambers, with the distinct air of being in search of something —it could not be privacy as such, for they had already passed through at least one empty room— and showed no indication that he intended to embark upon that promised conversation at any point in the immediate future. The Comte, conscious, now that the moment was within his grasp, of a certain reluctance, was content for the present to continue to follow, through a world of light and music that was beginning to seem increasingly unreal.

When the young man halted at last and drew back abruptly on the threshold of a further salon, there was very nearly a collision between them.

“Forgive me, monsieur—” Roland had flushed; the exclamation jerked out of the Comte de Brencourt had not been complimentary.

He cast a look of appeal in the older man’s direction. “But there is someone here tonight who I think... whom I should like very much for you to meet.”

So that was it! Of course one should have known from the start that the boy had some other end in mind: some charitable benefactor, no doubt, or some further scheme of that sort inspired by an intolerable pity... Heat had run up into the Comte’s own face, half anger, half humiliation; but de Céligny had stood back with a gesture that made it quite impossible, under the circumstances, for Artus de Brencourt to do anything but pass through that door. He set his teeth and went in with all the demeanour, had he but known it, of a man facing execution.

The room beyond was small, but bright with candles that rendered the air a trifle hot... or perhaps that was his imagination. There was no-one present save for a tall, silver-haired gentleman in a bottle-green coat, whose attention was currently engaged by some small ornament upon the mantelpiece, over an unlit fire. He looked up sharply as the Comte came in, and their eyes met.

Despite himself, de Brencourt fell back a pace, recoiling. “De Trélan — you!”

The fine head that had been barely touched with silver at the temples when they first met had faded to iron-grey a year later, when the Duc rode out from La Vergne to face betrayal and arrest, flinging de Brencourt’s attempt at warning back in his face. They had not set eyes upon one another since.

It was entirely typical, the Comte considered bitterly, that the passage of time and cares that had ebbed the remaining traces of youth from the other man’s crisp, still slightly waving hair had served only to bestow upon its bearer a resulting air of distinction. The Duc de Trélan remained, as always, very much grand seigneur.

Unconsciously, his own head had come up. But there was no pistol barrel between them this time.

It was Gaston de Trélan who broke the silence.

“I gather that Roland did not follow my advice,” he observed drily. “When he approached me with this proposal on my arrival in London, I strongly recommended that he seek your permission first; he was obliged, of course, to ask mine. But he clearly concluded that if you were forewarned of his intentions you would never have come at all.”

“I should think not,” the Comte snapped out. “Mort de ma vie, this is intolerable!”

He glanced around for de Céligny, with sentiments at that moment little short of murderous. But the young man had contrived to absent himself, from motives of tact or perhaps of prudence, and the Comte was obliged to content himself with closing the door sharply, and wheeling around again to confront his adversary. “You— and he— do not dare to suggest that I am afraid to face you?”

“No man who knew you, monsieur, could possibly suppose that,” the Duc flung back, “whatever else he might suppose!”

He drew a visible breath. “This was not of my doing, Monsieur de Brencourt, and as I have told you, I did not approve. But if Roland was right, and you would not otherwise be here, then I must be glad that he disobeyed my express wish... for it is true that I have very much desired to speak with you, monsieur.”

“Indeed?” De Brencourt regarded him with something akin to stupefaction. Coming from the Duc it was a sentiment he found himself entirely unable to credit.

“For one thing,” Gaston de Trélan said steadily, “I believe that I owe you my life. And for another”—he had flung up one hand as the Comte made a sharp movement of denial—“there were certain words at our last meeting that I have... regretted.”

“I had already received your messages to that effect, monsieur.” De Brencourt cut him off. He did not want —morbleu! he did not want— an apology, in person, from the Duc. Not now. He wished only for this farce to be over. “The regrets were expressed, and understood. I see no further reason to resume the matter.”

But, precisely because de Trélan said nothing and continued to gaze at him with those uncomfortably clear eyes, he felt compelled to burst out in addition: “Surely you do not suppose that I sought to bring that warning in order to— to buy forgiveness?”

“I never —as you may recall— supposed that.” It was evident from the Duc’s tone that he too was remembering the accusations flung at their last encounter; flung at a man filthy and exhausted, by the commanding officer he had hated, and wronged, and sought to destroy...

“I did not want to bring it.” The words broke from de Brencourt on a sudden, bitter tide. “If there had been anyone, anyone else at all, who was prepared to carry the message, who could be trusted— But there was no choice. The information had fallen to me, and there was no-one I could send with such a warning through enemy lines... and so against my will, against my every judgement—”

“And yet you came.” The Duc’s tone was more dry than ever. One could scarcely blame him. “For the sake of the King’s cause, then? For justice?”

“I came,” de Brencourt retorted, “because what Bonaparte intended was infamous — and for the sake of the Duchesse!”

And small good that had done. You will kindly keep my wife’s name out of your fabrications: the whiplash of the Duc’s icy rage broke across him again in memory, and perhaps in the memory of the other man also.

“I understand also from Valentine,” de Trélan said quietly, “that in addition to my own life —for which you will accept no thanks— I owe you a debt of gratitude for the care you took of her during that time.”

That one week, yes, lived over and over again in sleepless hours since: one single week in which she had given him her trust, and leaned upon his advice, and allowed him to serve her in all things, because she had need. He had had the right at last in that hour to stand unquestioned at her side, and had asked for nothing more... and yet every waking moment of his days and every thought in hers had centred instead around the fate of Gaston de Trélan, hanging upon a thread.

“Admirable care.” He tried and failed to choke back bitterness. “Which one might consider to have placed me, had things gone otherwise, in a perfect position to console the grieving widow— or had that possibility not crossed your mind?”

“Not for one minute.” The Duc was smiling a little at him. “You see, I know my wife... And nor do I believe that, knowing her, it so much as crossed yours.”

Valentine de Trélan would never look elsewhere; he had known that. Hers was a steady flame that burnt onwards even without hope, and perhaps, for all its irony, it was that quality that had drawn him to her first amid the glittering infidelities of Liège.

She had been different from the rest, even then, even though she would have none of him, and when a tide of blood had swept across the prisons in ’92 and he heard that she had been held there, and was dead — hacked to death in the gutter amid a pile of butchered bodies— he had come within a hair’s breadth of blowing out his brains in earnest, as he had once told her wildly that he would do.

Almost impossible, now, to credit the follies of those days before the deluge, when one could threaten suicide because a woman would not take you on as her lover, as was the accepted custom of her class and yours, and all for the sake of a passing fancy... Only that fancy, if such it had been, had not passed. Had left him faithful still to a memory placed forever out of reach, and consumed with hatred at the last for the husband who had left her alone in Liège, alone at Mirabel to face the mob, alone in the prison of La Force — and who, believing her likewise martyred, had paid in full for all that he had done, and not done, in the former course of that marriage.

Gaston de Trélan was all she had ever wanted. He had thought he could change that. But Fate —and the Abbé Chassin— had brought the Duc and Duchesse back together, and granted Valentine her life’s happiness at last. And the Comte de Brencourt, who had dragged his honour through the dust to keep them apart, and yet had failed, had set the cold welcome of the pistol against his temple for one last time... and found himself denied even that escape.

He had sought death and not found it, and lived with the burning shame and horror of his own self-knowledge; and yet because he had lived, Valentine’s husband had escaped execution at the hands of Bonaparte. Had de Trélan been shot, she would have suffered horribly, but her love still would not have wavered. De Brencourt had believed, once, that the Duc’s death, real or contrived, would open the way for his own suit. He had known long before the end that it would not.

De Trélan was still regarding him with that odd half-amused composure.

“You were not there, on that night we left Paris,” he observed. “I had... hoped, amid other farewells, that there might be time for us to take leave of one another with a least a modicum of civility, after what had passed.”

He held out a hand, and the Comte found himself constrained to take it.

“It would have been folly for me to attend, still less to have made any attempt at escort upon that journey,” he said shortly, releasing his grasp. (Memory stung; but the last time, after the duel, it had been de Trélan’s uninjured left hand in his...) “It made far more sense for me to remain behind and give what assistance I could to Hyde de Neuville. The more of us present to no purpose and the more delay, the greater the danger; I would have kept Roland back if I could, but she— Madame de Trélan—”

He broke off.

“At least you had the prospect of being able to act to some purpose,” the Duc said into the silence between them, with unaccustomed bitterness. “My time is spent, and there has been nothing for me to do in these past months and years, save to sit in exile, down in English Sussex, and watch Bonaparte cement his rule with a hand of iron. All those lives and labour poured out in Finistère, and yet to what end— what avail? I rest upon my acres like Puisaye, while in France—”

De Brencourt laughed, harshly. “Don’t envy me, de Trélan. I have been a plotter and a spy, there is no other word for it, adrift in a world of rumours and suspicion and inhaling treachery with every breath. I was able to pass myself off, for a while, and move in the open, among the rising men of what is a new aristocracy in all but name, at the court of a self-made monarch. Paris was a nest of conspiracies and counter-conspiracies, of pamphlets and hot air and English gold. We met in corners and talked endlessly about the overthrow of the First Consul, gathering snippets of gossip as if they were state secrets. And all the time Fouché’s police were on our tail. It was only a matter of months before vital papers were intercepted, and the whole network came crashing down.

“My name was on the lists, and I had to go underground. After that— well, it was every man for himself, and things grew desperate. And desperate men, as you know”—the jibe this time was at his own expense—“are not over-scrupulous. It was dirty work, and became dirtier on both sides. Your hands are clean, at least... And it was all useless, that was the worst of it. Bonaparte’s grip tightened on France, and France knew a firm hand at last upon her reins and cared very little, if truth be told, whether that new master was King or a usurper.

“Do you know the one thing that was accomplished, in the months that followed— our one actual achievement? There was a wild plan afoot to assassinate Bonaparte on his way to the opera, by means of a wagon loaded with gunpowder. Only Bonaparte escaped scot-free, and the powder exploded in the middle of a crowded street.”

His voice shook. “We were not heroes then, monsieur le Duc. We were rats— rats to cower in our holes while the First Consul took political vengeance; rats and traitors in enemy pay. Hyde de Neuville, who had no hand in it, has been on the run for months now, even with friends and neighbours to shelter him. And I—”

The Duc’s steady gaze, unjudging, had not wavered from his even at that earlier allusion to de Brencourt’s own perfidy. Now at last beneath those calm grey eyes he found words spilling from him that he had not meant to reveal: the whole wretched story of incompetence, and mistrust, and folly, and a cause slipping away beneath their grasp from day to day and year to year. Horizons that narrowed down to mere survival, when the first false step could be one’s last, and the petty, grinding humiliations.

When the flood ebbed at last, it left him drained and shaken. He had not intended any such admission for young de Céligny’s ears; had no wish to lay himself thus open to any man, least of all this one. And now there would come the reckoning...

“I had not known things were so bad,” de Trélan said softly at length. He made no mention of any personal matter, for which the Comte was grateful beyond measure.

“The noblesse in London know little and care less.” De Brencourt’s harsh tone was as much for the lapse he had permitted himself as for the emigrés’ folly. “France belongs to Bonaparte now, and more and more securely with each passing month. The Revolution is over, but it was not we who managed to end it, and it is not us to whom she is grateful... There is a new court at the Tuileries, and plenty of families of ancient blood happy to flock there among the First Consul’s favourites and supporters. The Comte de Provence believed Bonaparte would be a new Monck — but Bonaparte has made of himself a new Cromwell.”

That dismissal held an ugly ring of cowardice in his own ears. He could see his words echoed in the Duc’s face; caught at old habit to fend off the verdict. “But what do I know, after all? I am no victorious general, emblazoned with foreign orders; no ingenious young conspirator to correspond with princes, with a pocket full of English gold. Perhaps in the weeks I have been marooned here in London Bonaparte has somehow overreached himself at last. But I can see nothing else that will unseat him now — certainly no effort of yours or mine!”

The Duc was wearing his Austrian Cross of Maria-Theresa tonight, of course, in honour of the occasion... only come to think of it de Trélan’s rôle at Rivoli, for which it had been awarded, had not been victorious but one of heroic defeat. Appropriate, as it had turned out.

For both of them, perhaps. A strangled sound overtook him that might have been a laugh. The outlines of the room had begun to waver in a quite unexpected fashion, and de Trélan, who had been watching him closely, sprang forward and caught him by the forearm in a quick, supportive grasp.

“Where have you been lodging? When did you last eat?— I thought as much. Don’t be a fool, de Brencourt—” this last as the Comte attempted to free himself but almost at once desisted, not so much in response to the tightening of that adamant grip, but to the discovery that the hard hand beneath his elbow had become for the moment the only fixed point in a world that was swimming unpleasantly.

He shut his eyes briefly. Set his teeth. “I don’t need... your charity.”

“Fortunate,” the other man returned in a tone that was very dry indeed, “since I had not the slightest intention of offering any... You had best come over here by the mantelpiece. Can you stand? Good.”

De Brencourt’s fingers closed rather blindly around the reassuring solidity of stone, and he found himself released. A sudden incongruous memory awoke of tapping the scrollwork above the fireplace at Mirabel in search of treasure, and Valentine’s face in the dark...

“Now,” the Duc was continuing, “I take it there is no chance of your being able to return to France?”

It was the same calm, incisive air with which the two of them had once discussed the placement of sentries or the prospects of a night attack, and de Brencourt pulled himself together to respond in kind.

“Scarcely. There is a sentence on my head — one thing at least that we have in common.”

“I have little liking for London these days, or those of our countrymen in it. Perhaps you share that also... At all events, I have at present the lease of a house called Brockford Place, near Chichestre”—he gave the name an unthinking French pronunciation—“and will be returning there in a day or two, accompanied, as we had arranged, by Roland and Marthe. If you wished to make one of the party—”

“I can assure you that I do not,” the Comte flashed back upon the instant, all resolutions forgotten. “I have neither the need nor the desire to become your pensioner, monsieur — and precisely how, among country neighbours, do you plan to pass off your Roland?”

That struck home at last. He had the satisfaction of seeing the Duc’s head go back with its old hauteur. “As my son— naturally. As I have already assured him, and as he stands openly acknowledged tonight.”

He added, beneath his breath, “So you do know...! I always thought you did.”

Reminded in turn of certain highly unpleasant remarks of his own, the Comte flushed against his will. “I imagine half the camp knew, or guessed... not least those over-talkative and highly indiscreet young men of yours.”

De Trélan ignored this sally. “He knows now, of course; he has known since before we left France. If the choice had been mine, he would have been told long since, but his grandfather forbade it... Do you imagine I am —could ever be— ashamed of him? He is a son of whom any man would be proud. As for passing him off, English society has always understood such matters in much the same spirit as our own: these things happen, and provided a man takes responsibility for his own offspring, the world thinks none the worse of it.”

And one could not even resent Roland on Valentine’s behalf, for she herself had been fond of the boy from the first; the Comte had borne witness to that. In any case it was hard to resent Roland for long, however ill-considered and thoughtless his grand ideas might be...

Or perhaps, de Brencourt thought wearily, letting his gaze fall, the passing years had simply drained the ability to sustain such emotions, just as they had ebbed away any sense of accomplishment in having finally —as it seemed he had— succeeded in needling his opponent onto the defensive.

“Then I wish you much paternal joy in him — and I mean that in all sincerity. He is a fine young man, and has grown up, I think, of late... But I cannot accept your proposal, or impose myself upon your family party. Here in London I have some former means remaining, sufficient to my needs.” He thrust himself upright away from the mantelpiece and met the other man’s eyes once more. “And, after all that has passed— if you owe me anything, then grant me at least the chance to keep what little remains of my pride.”

“I wonder quite what it would take to convince you that I am not offering charity,” the Duc observed, looking a little weary in his turn. “Or that we are quits, you and I... What is done, is done. We have both regretted it, I think. And perhaps”—again that unconscious lift of the head—“have both considered ourselves justified... Some minutes ago, Monsieur de Brencourt, you consented to take my hand, and it was not this time necessary for us to face one another at pistol-shot before we could do so. You have done your best to deprive me of my life, and of other things, and failed.”

So he, too, had been remembering their duel in that moment. There was an odd shock of recognition in it. The Comte drew breath, but de Trélan had not finished.

“At a subsequent period, and for whatever motive you may choose to acknowledge, you invested an almost equal amount of effort into ensuring my life and liberty— and succeeded. I am no more magnanimous than the next man, and believe me, I have hated you and your actions with every bit as much contempt as you purported to feel towards mine. But it is over. The past is between your conscience and yourself. Let the victory outweigh the failure, and let it be between us as it should have been on that night when we stood up to fight one another in all honour— and were, for a few hours at least, reconciled.”

He held out his left hand with the ghost of a smile, and the Comte took it with barely a moment’s hesitation.

The other man’s grip met his own; tightened an instant and then released him. “And now— unless, of course, you have any further dark secrets that should have been disclosed that night—”

It was an evident attempt to lighten the tone, but not without constraint, and de Trélan broke off. “No, stay— there is one thing I should like to ask, before we bury the subject. If you permit?”

And for once, Artus de Brencourt thought, that was a genuine question. One could refuse...

He steeled himself; fell back on formality. “If I can be of assistance, monsieur.”

“Before... circumstances intervened,” the Duc began slowly, “on the night when you learned that my wife was not, as we had all believed, dead, she requested —not knowing who I was— that you would carry back a letter from her to your commanding officer, and you consented to the task. If that letter had ever been written— would it have reached me, M. le Comte?”

A sudden vision again of her face, floating in the dark, glimpsed only by the light of her lamp; the face of a ghost, as he had thought it first. The face of a dream that had seemed almost within his grasp...

“No,” he said quietly. “Any such letter would have been... misplaced.”

The Duc nodded. “I thought so. Thank you, de Brencourt.”

“I had a wife, once.” He did not know why he said it, unless to fill the silence between them; unless it was the memory of Valentine that night, restored to him by a miracle when he had believed —told himself— that she was free at last. “We were married back in ’75, in much the same fashion and at much the same age as you were, I imagine. It was an advantageous match. Only it did not take very long for the two of us to establish that we did not share the least affection for one another, and to spend as little time together as could be contrived. She was no very great beauty, but then neither was I; at any rate, she was vivacious enough and did not lack for admirers.”

He had been... not naïve, never that, in that polished, corrupt society whose air they had breathed from birth, but unguarded still; plain of feature and lacking in graces, with only the freshness of youth to recommend him. His swordsmanship and skill with a pistol had been enough to gain him respect, and a biting tongue at the expense of others had won him favour among certain ladies, but few friends.

Henriette his wife had known how to use words to wound also. It had been the one thing they had in common.

“At twenty-four I thought myself knowing and sophisticated beyond all measure. One does, at that age. But it turned out my wife hadn’t restricted her favours to our own social circle. She saw fit to inform me over the breakfast table that she had taken to availing herself of my valet’s personal services, and found them infinitely superior to mine.”

The valet, Despard, had been a tall, handsome Savoyard with an air of insufferable elegance. One could sack him upon the spot, but the contrast, once made, was a jest too good to ignore. There had been stories circulating within weeks.

He’d thought Henriette’s infidelities held no power to hurt, but, as ever, she’d found a way.

“By the end, we barely saw one another. She claimed a passion for country living and spent much of the year down in Touraine, and I made sure to avoid her brief sojourns in Paris by occupying myself as far as possible abroad. It was at Livorno that I learned from a mutual acquaintance that Madame de Brencourt was said to be six months gone with child. I had not set eyes on her for almost a year.”

Gaston de Trélan made a sudden movement as if to halt the recital; the Comte brushed it off.

“I could have hastened back, but I saw no reason. Everyone knew we had been long estranged, and I had no intention of lending my countenance to my wife’s offspring; the situation was of her own making, and however she chose to pass it off”—another abrupt movement from de Trélan—“it was none of my concern.”

It would hardly be the first time an infant had been smuggled out of a fine lady’s chambers to be paid for under another name. Especially with a conveniently absent husband.

“I didn’t return until the summer. In fact, I was careful not to do so, and to give ample warning of my arrival down at the chateau in advance.” A harsh note in his voice at his own expense. “Only it was an unhealthy year... When the coach drew up at last in the courtyard, it was to find the household in turmoil and the whole estate in disarray. The Comtesse had taken the typhoid fever and died of it a week earlier, and the steward —her lover, of course— had fled the district. There had been a child; a girl. She had been fostered out somewhere on the estate, no doubt among the man’s kin, though they were too frightened to admit to it, and I could learn nothing more. If their mistress had been alive, the whole place would have been smooth and well-ordered, and there would have been nothing to learn at all.”

There was a little draught in the room. Something passed over de Trélan’s face, but it might have been the momentary flickering of the candles.

“What became of her — the child?”

“I have no idea.” The Comte kept his voice under control. “Became a peasant, no doubt, according to her mother’s choice... They broke into the chateau, you know, a few years later. There is nothing left now; it was all burnt. But I suppose she would have been about seven, at the time. Old enough to follow the mob. To wander through the Comtesse’s empty rooms, perhaps, afterwards, and pick up a few pretty baubles along with the rest before the first fire-brands were flung. Ironic, is it not, how life turns out?”

He turned away. “But then I wouldn’t know. I have no idea what became of her. I had never liked the place, and after that, I never went back.”

He’d gone abroad again. Sought whatever pleasure could be found wherever he could take it. He’d been back to Touraine once... but not to his own property there, but hers: Valentine de Trélan.

The Duchesse Valentine, whom men had called cold. Amid the gallantries and casual liaisons of Spa in Liège, where the world came to take the waters, she had moved quietly and alone, with a husband back in France who had long since gone his own way — but she would not listen to the importunities of Artus de Brencourt, for all that. She had been, he saw that now, the opposite of Henriette in every way, in ways neither of them had even known, not then, and perhaps that had been the start of it. But it had been no casual affair, for him.

He had never been much of a courtier. He’d flung himself at her feet with the clumsy, blind passion of a boy half his age and scarcely a thought for how foolish he must appear, and she had not laughed. But she had not consented.

Other men paid her polished compliments, and she would not take them either. He had known a torment the very existence of which he had never until then suspected, and forgotten all else in its hopeless grip. And in the end she had left Liège —he had not even let himself think that it might have been to avoid his suit— and gone back to France, not to her husband’s great house of Mirabel but to a country estate of her own in Touraine.

Even so small a thing as that brought him pleasure: that perhaps, unknowing, they had trodden the same soil, passed along the same dusty roads, seen the sun set across the other bank of the same river... And so he too had gone back in her wake and poured out his heart once more into her keeping, and been as adamantly and gently refused.

The best years of his youth had been spent, but they were neither of them yet old. She had been at the full ripening then of her beauty, tall and graceful with fine-boned features and grave far-seeing eyes, that held all too often, in unguarded moments, a sadness he would have laid down his life to take away.

In Touraine she had been courteous, and kind, and yet somehow every time he saw her more elusive and withdrawn. Until all at once she had turned at bay like a doe before the hounds, and told him she could bear it no longer: that love such as his, even unspoken, was no more than persecution, and that she could not endure the weight of his eyes upon her or the knowledge of his unsought presence.

He had held himself so rigidly to the boundaries of consent and starved himself so long of all but those few permitted scraps of her that he had seen his actions as the model of honour. He had not realised, until that single flash of anger and its paralysing wash of shame, that in desiring the unattainable he had been hurting her also, and against her will.

Standing there in her presence, he had been conscious only of waves alternately scalding and icy that broke across him, and of his pride and his vaunted love stripped away into the dust at his feet.

“I would say Forgive me,” he had managed at last in a voice less steady than he would perhaps have wished, “but that, too, I see now, is to make one more unwarranted demand... I have merited all that you say of me, and more, and since I please you only by my absence—”

“I do not find you displeasing, Monsieur de Brencourt,” Valentine said, quite gently. “But indeed I wish that you would go.”

And so —because he did love her— he had bowed wordlessly and gone, with that half-pitying rebuke burning across every thought of her like a brand of shame. In that hour, and for many days after, he had believed he would never be able to face her again... but the mortification had faded along with the memory of his own conduct, and left only the image of Valentine de Trélan, whom he could not forget.

He had existed on glimpses of her and smiles from afar, and the understanding that he was tolerated while he did not encroach, and knew a longing that despite everything did not die and left no room for any other woman. All around them an unrest had been building, unperceived, to which their world was almost wilfully blind. Artus de Brencourt —who, like so many others, cared nothing for his estates save for the meagre revenues they brought— had been oblivious to it until, in the summer of 1789, the first cracks had begun to appear in the face of that dam that would so soon be swept away by the oncoming flood.

A great many unwelcome truths had been brought home in the years that followed. He had not forgotten Valentine. But she had receded for a while to a high and holy symbol of all that was most under threat... and the news of her supposed death had come to him in exile with all the force of a thunderbolt. He had not even suspected that she was still in France, let alone in danger there.

In that hour the memory of Henriette had never so much as crossed his mind, still less any thought of her nameless daughter. In truth they had not overly troubled him since, save as an old, bitter background to betrayals and passions far more raw.

“Let us say, de Trélan, merely that I have been married, and have not greatly relished the experience— and that Roland’s existence was, if you like, a sore point.” And yet the whole unlovely, commonplace little recital had moved the man hearing it far more strongly than it had touched de Brencourt himself; he had been aware even while he spoke of that odd tug of acknowledgement. He thrust it back. He did not want fellow-feeling from the husband of Valentine.

“And just where,” he demanded, swinging round, “has Roland gone off to, in any case? I have a word or two to say to him on the subject of tonight...”

“You will not be too hard on him, I trust. He meant well... and he was right, you know.” The smile in the Duc’s eyes reached his lips, a little ruefully. “Besides, he would be penitent at once — and quite impenitent, underneath.”

“No doubt,” de Brencourt retorted. “But if he still hopes for reminiscence, then he will find himself disappointed. I have had quite as much of the past as I can take for one evening.”

He had indeed every intention of taking his leave. But de Trélan —confound him!— was between him and the door through which he had come. With a few brusque words he sought to thrust past, and found himself courteously but relentlessly detained. The other man had moved to block his path, and one hand closed about his sleeve with a force that was not quite insistence.

“A few more minutes of your time, de Brencourt, if I may.”

“You may not.” The Comte curbed, with an effort, the immediate impulse to wrest himself free. De Trélan’s grip was as implacable as of old, and they were both of them long past the age for an undignified schoolboy scuffle. “And since you are no longer my commanding officer, monsieur—”

“Ah, but I am myself under orders, and from a higher authority.” Again the ghost of a smile. “One who has as much reason as I to desire an interview with you, and more right than most to ask it... and who would not readily forgive me if you were to leave in such a manner, without a word.”

De Brencourt stared at him, conscious for the first time, as he followed the other man’s glance, of the inner door that led, no doubt, to further apartments. Gaston de Trélan had moved in the highest circles at Court. But he could not mean—

“The Duchesse would very much like to see you,” de Trélan said quietly. He had let fall his grasp and stepped aside, no longer interposing himself between the Comte and the exit. “If, that is, you consent.”

“You mean...” Any half-formed thoughts of Royalty were driven out on the instant by the hammer-blow of comprehension. “She— Madame de Trélan— is here, in London— here?”

It came to him in that moment of self-betrayal that somehow he had misunderstood— but no, he could read the answer in the Duc’s face. Of course the two of them had come together up to London. Of course the Duc had brought his wife tonight to the ball of my Lady Carnforth, to move once more as of right in the circles to which she was born. They had stood side by side no doubt in this very room, his head bent attentively down to hers, discussing the problem of Artus de Brencourt —he writhed inwardly— and she was here. Behind that door. Waiting for him.

He had never known himself a coward; save once, and the discovery of it then had all but broken him. But the Comte de Brencourt, who had been drawn here tonight with the explicit intention of gleaning what little second-hand contact with Valentine he could contrive, knew now a stab of something akin to blind panic.

The scars had been raw indeed, and run deep. But they had ebbed almost imperceptibly to the phantom ache of a missing limb, a stump to be rubbed at over and over without thinking, save when it hurt with an unexpected change in the weather. Now he must face the reality of her without warning, and the shame of his own reluctance bit more deeply than the awareness that he was afraid.

He kept his features, with an effort, in an unmoving mask. Mastered his voice. “She is here, then?”

De Trélan simply nodded, and crossed the room to hold open the inner door. “A few brief words— if you could. It would mean a good deal to her, I think.”

But the Duc gave no sign that he himself meant to enter. It would be a tête-à-tête, then...

The candle flames swam oddly for an instant, and de Brencourt put out a blind hand as if in search of support. Took a deep breath, and went through the door to face his own private Calvary... or perhaps Elysium. If ever he had known the difference, it seemed to him in that moment no longer possible to distinguish between them.