LITMIR.BIZ

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Her uncle, Reginald Northrup, will be at the Venus Club tonight. Perhaps you can find out more about her from him.’

      ‘Perhaps.’

      ‘A few years ago when I was in Paris I heard a rumour about a woman who sounded remarkably like Cassandra Northrup.’

      ‘What did it say?’

      ‘That she was kept a prisoner in southern France and that she was not released for quite some time.’

      ‘I see.’

      ‘Her rescuer was also mentioned in detail.’ The flint of gold in his friend’s eyes was telling and there was a certain question there.

      ‘It was you, Nat, wasn’t it? And she was one of theirs?

      ‘Whose?’

      ‘The French. One of their agents.’

      Anger sliced in a quick rod of pain. ‘No, Cassandra Northrup never held loyalty to any cause save that of her own.’

      ‘Others here might disagree with you. She is the chairwoman of the charity Daughters of the Poor.’

      ‘Prostitutes?’

      Hawk nodded, leaving Nat to ponder on how the circles of life turned around in strange patterns.

      ‘She must have been a child then, and scared. God, even now she looks young. And you got home in one piece, after all.’

      One piece? How little Stephen truly knew.

      Taking his hat and cloak from the doorman, Nat forced away his recollections and walked out into a cold and windy London night.

      * * *

      They were all there, myriad affluent men gathered in a room that looked much like a law chamber or a place of business. Nat was glad that Stephen stood beside him because he still felt dislocated and detached, thrown by the reappearance of a woman he had thought never to see again.

      He recalled Cassandra Northrup’s eyes were exactly the same as they had been, guarded in their turquoise, shuttered by care and secrets. But her hair had changed from the wild curls she had once favoured and she was far more curvaceous.

      If her eyes had not given her away her left hand would have, of course, with the half-finger and the deep scar across the rest of her knuckles.

      It had been a newer wound back then in the clearing, when she had reached forward and laid one cool palm across his back. He had flinched as she brought the knife she carried upwards to cut away the badness.

      The pain had made him sweat, hot incandescence in the cool of night as she simply tipped the heated flask up and covered ragged open flesh.

      The camphor helped, as did her hands threading through places on his spine that seemed to transfer the pain. Surprise warred with agony under her adept caresses.

      The poultice was sticky and the new bandages she bound the ointment with were from the bottom of her shirt. Cleaner. Softer. He could smell her on them.

      He wished that he had the whisky to dull the pain. He wished for a bed that was not on a forest floor, but some place warmer, more comfortable, some place where his heartbeat did not rattle against the cold hard of earth.

      ‘If you sit, it should help with the drainage.’

      He was shivering now, substantially, and went to drape his jacket around himself to find warmth, but she held it away and shook her head.

      ‘You are burning up. The mind plays tricks when the fever rages and as I cannot shift you to the stream we will have to make do with the cold night air instead. I had hoped it would snow.’

      Her accent was Parisian, the inflection of the drawing rooms and the society salons where anything and everything was possible. He wondered why the hell she should have been in Nay, dressed in the clothes of a lad, and when he inadvertently blurted the thought out aloud, he saw her flinch.

      ‘I think you should sleep, Monsieur Colbert.’

      His name. Not quite right. But he needed to be quiet and he needed to think. There was danger here. He wished he could have asked her who she was, what she was, but the camphor was winding its way into the quick pricks of pain and he closed his eyes to block her from him.

      * * *

      He would be sore in the morning if he lived. The wound or the fever could kill him, but it was the bleeding that she was most concerned about. She had not been able to stop it. Already blood pooled beneath him, more hindrance to a body struggling with survival.

      Tipping up the flask, she took the last drops of water.

      She was starving. She was exhausted. The embers of the fire still glowed in the dark, but outside the small light the unknown gathered.

      Baudoin had not existed alone and she knew that others would follow. Oh, granted, this stranger had hidden their tracks well ever since leaving Nay, his cart discarded quite early in the piece. She had watched him set false lures into other directions, the heavy print of a foot in a stream, a broken twig snagged with the hair from her plait, but she knew it would only be a matter of time before those in France’s underworld would find them.

      She held far too many secrets, that was the problem. She had seen some of the documents Baudoin’s brother had inadvertently left in Celeste’s chamber, documents she knew had been taken from the carriage of a murdered man on the road towards Bayonne. A mistake of lust and an error that would lead to all that had happened next.

      Her fault. Everything was her fault and her cousin had not even known it. The same familiar panic engulfed her, made her lean forward to catch breath, trying in the terror to hold on to the reason of why Celeste had done as she did. Cassie still felt the sticky blood across her fingers, the warmth of life giving way to cold.

      Softly she began to sing, keeping herself staunch; the ‘Marseillaise’ because it was fast paced and because it was in French.

      

      

      To arms, citizens,

      Form your battalions,

      We march, we march...

      

      

      Celeste was dead. And the Baudoin brothers. How quickly circumstances changed. In a heartbeat. In a breath. She looked across to the stranger, Colbert, and determined that he was still in the land of the living before she shut her eyes.

      * * *

      The girl was asleep, her hat pulled down across her head and her jacket stretched over the bend of her knees. As Nathaniel looked at her in repose there was a vulnerability apparent that was not evident when she was awake. She was thin, painfully so, and dirty. On a closer inspection he saw on her clothes the handiwork of small, finely taken stitches covering rips and larger holes. Her shirt was buttoned to the throat and the jacket she wore was tightly closed. More than a few sizes too large, it held the look of a military coat without any of the braiding. He knew she still had the knife, but it was not visible anywhere. Too big for the pockets, he imagined it tucked in under her forearm or secreted in one of the boots she wore beneath loose trousers.

      A child-woman lost into the vagaries of a war that could not have been kind.

      He felt stronger, a surprising discovery this, given his fever, and although the wound tugged when he shifted it did not sting like it had. Still, his vision blurred as he stood from the loss of blood or his own body’s heat, he knew not which.

      Camphor. Perhaps there was something in the doctoring, some healing property that would confound even the best of physicians? He resolved to use it again.

      She stirred across from him, wild curls escaping from the plait and falling around her face. In sleep she looked softer, the burden of life not marking the spaces between her eyes. Her ruined left hand sat on top of the right one and fire outlined the hurt in flame. Not a little injury and not an accident either.

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