Ashes (Ch3)

[igenlode]

Finally got round to proof-reading this, long after I typed it and about nine months after it was written, mainly on the grounds that I need to upload it *before* uploading "Think Only This of Me" if it is ever to get any eyeballs on it at all. Twenty Years After fics get pitifully few hits anyway, but since there is no fandom whatsoever for "The Yellow Poppy" the only scenario in which anyone is ever likely even to glance at this is if they are reading something else of mine and are checking my other recent works. Although nobody is likely to get as far as chapter 3 anyway on that basis... I did a review swap on fanfiction.net and got a review on chapter 1 which said that, despite all my efforts on rewriting the start, it felt as if the reader was being "expositioned at", which is incredibly depressing: I *cannot* do any more rewriting on this, so am just stuck with a non-working story :-(

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Chapter 3 — Revelation

The long room was panelled in white and gilt, and Valentine de Trélan, seated at an escritoire at the far end, wore a gown of a dusky rose colour; not draperies of the modern fashion in Paris that left very little to the imagination, nor a daringly slim gown such as that worn by Marthe de Céligny, but a sedate dress more suited to one her age. Only she did not look any older.

As she turned and came swiftly to her feet, it seemed to the Comte de Brencourt in the kindly candlelight almost as if no time at all had passed since he had seen her first, poised amid glittering company at the resort of Spa. Her hair had been dressed high and powdered then; it was no longer the fashion for ladies to wear powder or jewels in their hair, and it was the passing years and not the powder-closet that had faded the colour from those fair masses tonight.

He had been carrying with him unthinking the image of her in those final days, two years past, when she had turned to him in desperation, made haggard by suffering and fear over her husband’s fate. Even in Liège, so very long ago, amid all the gaieties of Spa she had been marked by unhappiness.

The illusion of youth was brief. She was a handsome woman still, but she was nearing fifty now, and had made no attempt to hide it. Her grace and poise remained, and a tranquil beauty he had not seen in her before. The Duchesse was at peace at last, with nothing left to fear and her greatest wish fulfilled, and the happiness of it lay settled about her like a cloak of radiance.

He, Artus de Brencourt, had made that possible; had given her back the life of the man she loved, and helped bring them both to safety. Whatever wrongs he had done her or her Gaston, her present joy was his doing also.

There should have been some pleasure in that. He did not know why there was not.

He closed the door; made a rather stiff bow as Valentine came towards him, both her hands held out.

“You wished to speak to me, Madame?” Even in his own ears it sounded harsh and ungracious.

But she too had halted, on what sounded almost like a laugh. “Oh, but you have cropped your hair! I did not—”

Startled, he caught back a bark of laughter of his own, one hand going on instinct to the nape of his neck. He had long since ceased to miss the weight of the clubbed queue there... but the unacknowledged vice of pressure that had gripped his innards had eased. She had made it easy for them, after all.

“That was done long since, Duchesse. I could not risk being recognised... and it does not— did not pay to stand out from the rest, in my line of employment.”

“Indeed you have been running a very great risk all this time,” Valentine said vehemently. “And without any word— without so much as a goodbye. Even the Abbé Chassin had no news of you. For all we knew, you might have been imprisoned... or put to death.”

“I did see the Abbé Chassin.” He could not bear to lie again to her face; not beneath the reproach of those eyes. “I asked him to... to say nothing of our meeting. My service to you was done, and I thought it best you should be troubled no further.”

“And yet it was you, Monsieur de Brencourt”—;Valentine’s gaze was very direct—“do you not recall, who said to me once: why did you not send word that you were still alive? Was it kindly done, then, to leave those who knew you to wonder?”

As if he could forget; as if he had not turned over the memories of that night, of each and every moment with her, again and again like a string of polished beads. But that she should remember—

But then, cold conscience reminded him, it could scarcely be otherwise. For that night when beyond all hope he had come to Mirabel and found the murdered Duchess de Trélan still alive, in the person of Madame Vidal, the concierge— the night when, heart beating wildly, he had received her half-fainting into his arms— had, by the same token, been the night he had told her the great lie: that Gaston de Trélan, of whom no man had heard in years, was to his certain knowledge cold in his grave, and that she was free to live and love again.

He had known the news would come as a blow. He had not let himself believe, then, that her fidelity to that marriage had been anything beyond mere convention. But he could no longer pretend he had not inflicted bitter grief upon her. No matter that she had all but put the words into his mouth, that he had done no more than assent to what she had long feared; whatever excuse he might make, every sentence that had passed between them that night must surely be carved into her heart.

“To wonder as to my fate? I had not imagined that you would care.” It came out more bitterly than he had intended, and he cursed himself for the imputation. “That is, Madame—”

He broke off as Valentine came towards him— laid a hand on the breast of his coat, as if she were not conscious of his involuntary flinch. She was tall for a woman, and her face was almost on a level with his own.

“I do not forget my friends, Comte. And you were a friend to me —in spite of all else— when I needed it most, and had nowhere else to turn.” She was smiling straight at him, with a warmth in her eyes for which he might once have counted the world well lost. “Indeed, I never liked you so well as since you ceased to try to make love to me.”

Every vestige of good sense told him to pull away; shame akin to panic kept him in place. The words were thick in his mouth. “You sought my counsel, and you gave me your trust. You leaned upon such support as I could give. That in itself was more than I had merited from you, and a balm beyond measure. You believed me, Valentine, believed in me, and I did it all for you. And afterwards... Afterwards I could not see you, could not set eyes on either of you ever again—”

“And yet you have seen us both tonight.” Her hand moved a little on the lapel of his coat. “Oh, my friend, my friend, I am not worth it. All these years of your life, all that you could have had, dried up and made bitter by a fading dream that would turn to ashes if ever you touched it. You do not believe me, I know, but it is true; if you had what you thought you desired there would be no joy in that fulfilment, not now. It has passed, and all that is left is the habit of useless regret.”

Her other hand came up to touch his cheek, very gently, with the same gesture she might have used on a child desolate with grief. And then suddenly she was there within his arms, her light clasp slipping up about his shoulders, her mouth upturned to his as his own hold tightened almost instinctively to pull her close, support that yielding body as once before. Only he had the sensation that it was his own senses that were whirling away...

Her eyes were very clear; a little grave. Offering, without fear or expectation. And the years that had stood between him and this moment rose up and caught somehow in his throat, as if to prove the truth in what she had said.

Hammering disbelief was beating at his temples. “You would trust me— this far?”

“I do... now.” The tiny break in her voice held compunction, but no passion. “Take it. I trust you — and I give you full leave.”

With something akin to a gasp, the Comte de Brencourt bent his head and took her mouth with his at last.

The first kiss was reverent as well as unsure. Valentine, very still within his arms, made neither resistance nor response. Only she had closed her eyes.

De Brencourt kissed her again, and then again, with increasing urgency, as if to wake some answering leap of passion not just in her, but himself. There was a growing sickness of cold self-knowledge coiling within him, where it had lain since he had first learned of her presence. For he had shrunk from reality— had he not? He had clung so long to the dream of her, justified so much in the name of that hopeless desire, only to find himself flinching at last from any expectation of being once more required to act. And now... now he had been offered the fruits of Paradise, and found them, too long postponed, turned to ashes as she had warned.

The lack of her had been the lodestone of his life. Without that familiar quickening, he was nothing; was contemptible, even in his own eyes, in the part that he had played. Faithful follower, spurned suitor, blighted for love— nothing more than a posturing fool, who had made of his soul a desolation with Valentine de Trélan as its one guiding light, and so was left alone in the dark, mired in the wasteland of his own making.

When last he had held her, at Mirabel, it had been a moment of wild enchantment. Now she had come consenting into his arms, and there was no joy in it as there should have been; not even the passing tenderness with which she for her part had made the gesture. He caught her to him once more almost roughly, in sheer desperation.

Valentine submitted for a moment or two, then made a sound of protest that stabbed through him like a knife. De Brencourt released her at once and sprang back, sick to the heart. She was looking at him very sadly, and he could not endure it. He turned away. On his lips there clung the lingering taste of her pity.

“My friend, I liked you so much better when you ceased to try to make love to me,” Valentine said quietly behind him, and blind with hurt and shame he swung round on her.

“You have sufficiently proved your point, Madame. You need not—”

He broke off with the last vestige of his pride, thrusting silence between them.

“Oh, Artus”—the name, across a great distance, held real distress—“I wish you could come in from the cold.”

“It’s hard to find much warmth... in ashes.”

But the bitterness was no more than a numbed reflex. Like the reflex that had kept his thoughts circling back to her on the same easy path that closed off all else: Only you.

He could still find that ache if he sought for it: the emptiness of all that was wrong with his life, and that she had come to symbolise. She had been his beacon of belief, however hopeless, and now in despair he had no prospect of deliverance; it was not his idol that had proved to have feet of clay, but his own self-serving worship.

The fires of the body ebbed to embers with passing years. That humiliation he could bear. It was the long desire of his heart that had shaped and scarred those years, and to find it dwindled to a mere delusion left him stunned and flayed raw.

“You need not be so alone.” Valentine’s voice, reaching across the void, was insistent. “Roland spoke of you to Gaston; I have thought of you many times. There are other ways to exist. You should come down to Sussex, to Brockford Place with Roland and Marthe—”

“I said, no!” He had entirely forgotten for the instant that it was not, after all, her to whom he had said it. “Duchesse, if you have any kindness for me at all, then—”

He read the opening of the door on her face before he was conscious of the presence of her husband upon the threshold. There was no knowing quite how much de Trélan had heard, but the thought of the scene he must have witnessed had he entered a very little earlier was enough to appal the Comte on the spot.

But there was no shadow of constraint in Valentine’s eyes as she held out both hands to her husband, who came swiftly to take them in his own, smiling back down at her in return. “Oh, Gaston, I was just now trying to convince Monsieur de Brencourt to come to Brockford Place—”

“I have already been before you in that endeavour, ma mie. But I am afraid it is to no avail.” He glanced up across her head at de Brencourt, frozen alone where Valentine had left him. Whatever the Duc might or might not have guessed, that swift assessment held no resentment and a good deal of understanding. “We really cannot harass M. le Comte any further against his inclination... Valentine, I came to tell you that Roland has found his Marthe, and proposes to meet us in the supper-rooms in an hour’s time, when the refreshments are to be served. For the moment they have gone off to partake in the dancing. So if you wish to do likewise...?”

Valentine laughed and demurred. “We are all of us of an age now, I think, to be excused such an energetic entertainment.” She slipped one arm through his. “Truly, I had rather not.”

The deep pink of the gown she wore was vivid against the green of her husband’s coat, and it was very clear, de Brencourt thought dully, looking on, that they belonged together, both of them so utterly certain of one another and aglow in each other’s company. He could feel nothing at the sight, neither bitterness nor jealousy nor anguish. All that was left now, it seemed to him, was to remove himself with whatever speed he could decently contrive, and embark upon the prospect of the colourless future ahead.

For there would inevitably be a future, however grey and unwelcome. Anything else would be melodrama, and —his mouth twisted a little, into a smile utterly without humour— he could no longer find enough within himself to justify melodrama of that sort, or any other.

Somewhere in the distance through the open door there drifted the faint sound of music, and closer at hand a half-heard snatch of laughter and women’s voices, alien and English. But it was Henriette that he heard; his wife’s voice taunting him across the breakfast table with his marital insufficiencies. Henriette, of whose mocking memory he had believed himself cleansed by passion for Valentine de Trélan, so utterly unlike her in every way... only it was Henriette who had the last laugh now.

She had wanted to wound, and the Duchesse sought only to heal. He knew that.

It was too late. He had been faithful so long, and it was too late.

Despite everything some sort of sound must have escaped him, for they were both looking at him now. De Brencourt managed a few half-coherent words, conscious of little save an overwhelming desire to be elsewhere. His head was swimming, and for a moment he had an odd sense of detachment as if he were viewing the whole scene from above.

Valentine at her husband’s side said something urgent, to a response that he could not hear. Then she was suddenly in front of him, compelling his attention; not the Valentine of his longings and memories, but the flesh and blood woman before whom one could feel only shame... only she would not let him look away.

“Monsieur de Brencourt.” Insistent. “Monsieur de Brencourt— you were served an ill turn, I think, when you were brought here under false pretences, and I am sorry for it.”

“It was not your doing, Madame, but that of the Duc, and principally”—recollection stung his weary self-loathing to a more rewarding target—“of young Roland, your son!”

He could have cursed himself the moment the slip passed his lips; for Roland de Céligny, however presumptuous, however rash and well-meaning, however attached to him both Duc and Duchesse might be, was an insult to Valentine by his very existence and precisely because he was no son of hers, and all three present in the room were acutely conscious of it.

Only the Duchesse had not flinched but flushed up in unexpected pleasure at his mention of the young man in such a light... and there was an odd hint of comfort in the thought that he had brought that brightness into her face, however inadvertently, that took de Brencourt equally by surprise.

“Yes, it was entirely our young Roland’s inspiration when it came to him that the Duc and I were arriving in London,” Valentine admitted, with a little rueful look. “But it was I who urged Gaston to consent to such a scheme, though it carried an unwelcome air of intrigue. It seemed to me— it has always seemed to me that some things are better spoken openly than left unsaid.”

“There are things that cannot then be... unsaid,” the Comte struck in abruptly, with the self-revelations she had just enforced upon him uppermost in mind. But it was Gaston de Trélan who made a sudden movement, and Valentine threw a stricken glance back at her husband, paling, as if from a common chord of memory.

“Even so.” Her voice was very steady. “Even when matters cannot be changed, however much we may have wished them otherwise. Sometimes life will send us a— a Roland in return.”

“Some of us might prefer to be spared a Roland,” de Brencourt retorted with feeling, and drew the returning shadow of a smile from her in a manner that he had not altogether intended. Beyond the irritation of the moment he did not in fact dislike the boy, he found... and there was warmth, too, of another kind amidst the ashes in the discovery that he could be with her thus, without expectations.

“Say that sometimes, then,” Valentine amended, “there can be compensations of which we had not dreamed, before, and for which neither forgiveness or forgetting is needed.”

She looked round again, and he was all at once unsure if it was himself or the Duc to whom her words had been addressed. Or both, perhaps?

But the hand she held out was for him alone, and before he could bend to kiss it she had caught his fingers in her own, in the unaffected gesture of a convent schoolgirl. “For I do not forget my friends, Comte— least of all in exile. Two years ago, I laid all my trust in you, and was not mistaken. Will you not trust me now in this?”

“In what, Madame?” Her gloved hand rested very lightly on his, as if in the formal steps of a dance. There was no coquetry in it, but only a summons towards some uncertain harbour...

“Believe, if you can, that there may be joy also found in that which is neither sought nor desired. Trust that if we have survived then there is some higher purpose. And know, above all, that for some things it is never too late— friend!”

She drew the captured hand towards her and raised it briefly to her lips, as if in benediction, before setting him free. There was a sudden sheen of tears in her eyes, and Gaston de Trélan drew her close; but the radiance of her smile was undimmed.

“Ah, there you are, messieurs!” A cheerful, cultured English voice from the doorway, that belonged to a high-nosed woman in her forties, resplendent in full ball-dress; none other, de Brencourt realised with a jolt, than their hostess, milady Carnforth herself. “Young Roland de Céligny told me I should probably find you here. Now, I’m making up the tables for a few hands of quadrille in the card-room, and I must positively insist...”

Her energy was affable but inexorable, and it was true, as had often been observed, that a certain type of aristocratic Englishwoman did look very much like a horse.

He was saved from a light-headed impulse towards hysteria by the Duc, who had turned swiftly and made his bow.

“Pardon, madame,” de Trélan returned, in courteous English. “We have been poor guests so far, I fear. By all means we shall do our duty in the card-room.”

He offered an arm once more in escort to his wife, and sent a glance of enquiry in the Comte’s direction. “Your game is piquet, de Brencourt, as I recall. If you would care for a match?”

Endless games of cards played by candlelight on the head of a cask or on a rough peasant table, against the Abbé or other officers to while away the hours of waiting; there had been a great many such between them, in those early days of hedgerow warfare, and de Trélan, it seemed, had not forgotten. The shared recollection hung in the air for a moment, unspoken.

“You will not win easily,” de Brencourt warned.

“I am very much out of practice, and doubt I shall win at all.” The other man’s smile was somewhat rueful, though he had to be aware, like de Brencourt himself, of the tacit victory the Comte had just conceded. Only perhaps by that assent he had not conceded, but gained...

At present the lady of the house was busy sweeping up her guests into her wake. De Brencourt fell into step alongside the other two, scarcely conscious of the words in English being exchanged around him. He found a way at last to say what was needed, though his voice came out more harshly than he had meant. “There will be more time perhaps, for piquet at”—the name, half-heard in passing, escaped him entirely—“at your house in Sussex.”

Valentine swung round suddenly, her face alight. “You will come?”

“If I may.” He found a smile of sorts in return, stiff and unaccustomed.

De Trélan, brought to a halt by his wife’s impulsive move, said nothing at all. But his expression, unguarded, held a dawning welcome... and from the ashes, it seemed, like the firebird one could be reborn into the guise of someone completely new. A fresh chance, however stumbling the first few steps.

“There will always be a place for you,” Valentine said simply, and turned once more to follow Lady Carnforth.

On every side the world went on just as it had before, with lights and music and heedless voices in the face of joy and suffering alike. Only for Artus de Brencourt, who for twenty years had known little save bitterness, in the space of a single hour it had changed almost beyond belief.

He passed through the brilliant rooms on the heels of the Duc and Duchesse de Trélan, a greying harsh-faced shadow at whom no-one glanced twice; but de Trélan looked back to find him, and their eyes met in acknowledgement. The Duchesse Valentine held out sanctuary, and had smiled on him with open pleasure and neither pity nor pain. And the happiness of others need not always hurt, after all, but could become one’s own.