‘You have bought me home and it isn’t as unsafe as you imagine. Celeste’s family has a position here, a power. I can be protected.’
She should take off the marriage ring held in warm white gold around her finger and give it back, but she could not quite make herself do that. For the first time in a long while she felt virtuous.
‘You cannot possibly think that a group of bandits whose secrets you know would stop pursuing you because of some aristocratic courtly authority? These people exist under far more brutal rule.’
Shaking her head, she placed one hand across his. She would go to the home of Celeste’s father’s best friend and his wife. She knew without doubt that they would keep her safe.
It all comes down to this, she thought, his life and her child’s safety. There was no room in any of it for her.
The ache around her heart physically hurt as she gave in to all that she knew she must do.
‘We have been flung together out of expedience and I thank you for the protection you have given me and for the things you have taught me, but...’ She swallowed away the ‘but’ and began again. ‘We are different in everything that we are and I want to go home, back to a life that I know. I am not used to such...a lack of luxury, you see, and eventually we would both feel embittered by our differences.’
Stifling grief, she looked directly at him, the stillness in him more worrying than any anger.
‘Just like that?’ he finally said, flatness in the words.
She nodded. ‘It will be better for us both. I am sorry....’ She could not go on, her hands spread in front of her gesticulating emptiness. Her smile was so tight it hurt the muscles in her cheeks.
They do not know you yet. They have no idea of exactly who you are.
‘I have a comfortable life in Perpignan and I am tired of the squalor that we have needed to exist in.’
‘I see.’
No, you do not see at all, Nathanael. You do not know what this is doing to my heart.
‘We could meet sometimes, if you wish. I wouldn’t be averse to that.’
‘For what reasons, Sandrine? To demand my conjugal rights?’
She shook her head, his anger gathering in the storm clouds of his eyes. ‘To reminisce.’
‘Reminisce about all these weeks of memories that mean nothing to you or about the importance of material acquisitions? I think I shall say no.’
She could only guess at what he must think of her, one moment this and the next moment that. Disbelief flourished amongst fury as he lifted the blanket he slept on from his bag and rolled it out underneath a thick bush. ‘We will talk again of this tomorrow when you have come to your senses. By then you may see the wisdom of my arguments and the half-witted nonsense in your own. The church, too, has strict and particular ideas about the sanctity of marriage.’
Then he simply turned away.
* * *
Cassandra’s eyes felt heavy but she made herself stay awake, the moon much higher now and the true silence of early, early morning upon the grotto. They had made their beds on opposite sides of a small field of grass and he had not spoken to her again, but now he was asleep. She could hear it in his breathing and feel it in the way he had been so still for all of an hour.
She watched him from her place across the clearing, the strong lines of his body, the dark of his hair. She could not see his face because even in sleep he had not let go of his anger and had turned away from her, the knife on a bed of leather beside him. Readied.
He would protect her to the death. She knew this. He would give his life for her without even thinking of the payment.
Her chance. To escape. Her chance to leave him here, safe against the darkness while she attempted to creep into Perpignan alone and disappear. She did not know why she had not thought that Lebansart and his men would be waiting in the one place they guessed she might have returned to.
Stupid, she chastised herself. You knew how dangerous they were, but you did not think and now you have placed Nathanael in danger also. Mortal danger.
Carefully, she sat up, each fraction of movement as slow as she could make it, her breath shallow and light. Then she stood, again stopping as she came fully upright, only the wind in the trees and the far-off call of a night bird.
One step and then two, the shadows taking her beneath them, blocking out the moonlight and then an open space on the banks of the Basse, a track to a bridge across the river and the gate on the old fortified walls. Open. It had not been defended for hundreds of years, a relic of a medieval past when nothing was as safe as it was now.
She smiled at her thoughts given all that she was running from and kept to the dark side of buildings as she came into the town proper. She hadn’t brought her bag because she did not want to lift it and hear the rustle of thick canvas. But she had brought her knife, tucked into her right sleeve in leather, the hilt extending from the thick fabric of her jacket.
Almost to the Rue des Vignes. Almost there.
Then a noise. Close. An arm snaked about her throat, cutting off breath, and the face of Guy Lebansart appeared next to her own.
‘We thought you would come, Sandrine, although perhaps not quite so soon.’
The warmth of his palm as it caressed the line of her cheek made her skin crawl.
* * *
Nathaniel came awake to emptiness. He knew Sandrine was missing before he even looked, though her bag still stood beside her blanket.
Only a few minutes, he determined, the wool covering still slightly warm when he checked, but the wind had come up and she had used the noise from the trees to depart.
Last night they had not spoken at all after she had told him she needed to go on alone. He swore at the absurdity of everything and the nonsense of her beliefs. Did she truly think she could just fit in again to all that she had been and forget what was between them? Had all of the past days been some kind of elaborate deception to allow her passage into Perpignan, his presence a necessary one to alleviate the sense of danger? Only that?
Nat could not believe this to be true. There were other things that she had not told him, and he needed to find out exactly what they were.
Bundling all their things together, he stuffed them into an empty space between one of the bushes nearby. He would come back for them later, but it never hurt to cover your tracks, no matter how much of a hurry you were in; spying had at least taught him that.
She would have cut along the river, he was sure of it, to cross at the next bridge. From memory the Basse had more than one bridge spanning it and was swimmable in places, though he could not see her wanting to get wet. From there she would move inwards, and the town was not so big that a good search would be impossible. No. He just had to look carefully and hope like hell that she had made the place of her destination safely.
He tipped his head, listening, but there was no sound that was different from the wind on the water and the trees, no sound that alerted him to danger or compromise. Three o’clock. The quietest hour of the night. Jogging along the track until the first bridge, he then went down on his knees.
There he had it. A fresh print in the mud showing damaged soles. She had come this way. Again he tipped his head. Now there was only the noise of the water and the first spots of rain in the wind. Tracking. His forte. He had done this so many times over so many years, following so many quarries. This time, though, the stakes were raised and he knew he had to be very careful.
* * *
‘What was in the document, Sandrine? The one Baudoin wanted me to see? Pierre said that he saw you reading them.’