Guy’s voice was close as he loosened her hair. ‘Perhaps you might tell me when we are alone, ma chérie?’ His fingers digging into her arm belied his nonchalance and around him others lingered. More than a few others. Ten or twelve, she supposed, and behind them in the shadows more would be waiting.
‘Silver-tongued Leb’, he was called back at the compound. A man who spun a web around his prey without fuss or contretemps. He had not even drawn his own knife, leaving that to those about him, their sharp blades seen against the dimness.
She had lost. She had rolled her dice and lost. But she had kept Nathanael safe and away in the arms of sleep.
The commotion started as a low roar and then a louder clatter. The sound of a neck breaking and a knife jammed into breath and he was there, beside her, reaching out, the touch of him breaking her heart.
Nathanael. Already the others were circling behind him, quiet in the early dawn, like a pack of wolves waiting for the command to attack.
She did not let him speak; one word and they would kill him. One wrong sound and it would all be over.
Instead she got in first, swinging her left hand around to his face and opening his jaw with the sharpened edge of her marriage ring at exactly the same time another hit him from behind, the sound of metal against his skull crunching.
He bent over, shaking his head as he did so, trying to find vision.
Do not speak, Nathanael. Do not claim me.
She thought quickly. Lebansart had ties with the government that he would not wish to jeopardise. ‘I have seen him before. He is a soldier of France so better to leave him alive. But do as you will, I really don’t care.’
Looking away, she tipped her head towards her captor, trying to bring forth all of her womanly powers. If they killed Nathanael she would die as well, but the threat of the might of the military seemed to have done its job.
‘We don’t need the army after us. So blindfold him and bring him along.’
Another thump against flesh and she turned back, the blood from his jaw spilling over his shirt and his lips red raw from a wallop. He looked dazed, barely conscious. No blades though, no telltale sign of an injury that he would not recover from.
She laughed in relief, the sound bringing the attention of Lebansart back to her before he had the chance to change his mind. ‘Perhaps we might find a place to speak, Guy.’
When his arm threaded round her and his hand cupped her breast she simply snuggled in.
‘Sandrine, the whore.’ She heard the voice of a man behind and knew that Nathanael would have known exactly what she allowed.
A whole lifetime of his years for a few moments of her shame. A tenable payment. She did not look back again as Lebansart led her away, his fingers closing in around the small shape of her ruined hand.
* * *
Nat came awake in a bed and a room, a priest at his side and the light of morning on his face.
‘Finally you have woken, monsieur. You were found beside the river Basse six days ago and have been in and out of consciousness ever since. In truth, we did not think that you would survive, but we prayed and God has answered us our call.’
Six days.
Sandrine would be long gone.
His head ached and his sight seemed compromised. The wound on the side of his jaw smarted, and he put up his hand to feel it.
‘We stitched it and it is healing.’
Sandrine. He remembered the look on her face as she had led the Frenchman away. Pleasure. Flirtation. Relief. She had not even glanced back at him as she allowed the enemy everything.
Sandrine the whore.
He hated her, this woman who was his wife, hated her lies and her easy betrayal. He had not known her at all in the days of their flight from Nay. A stranger. A harlot. A cheat.
‘There is someone waiting for you outside. He is an Englishman and he would like to talk with you. Do you feel up to this yet?’
When Nat nodded the priest rose and left. A moment later a tall man with sandy hair came through to stand beside the bed.
‘I am Alan Heslop,’ he said quietly, ‘from the British Service, and I have come to see what you know of the Baudoin brothers. It seems you were at their compound and a fight ensued? I ask this of you because two of our agents were targeted and killed this past week, brothers whose names were on the letters taken by the Baudoins from the overturned carriage of Christian de Gennes. Letters that were known to have been in the compound.’
Didier and Gilbert Desrosiers were dead? Sandrine would have seen the documents and told of them, then. He stayed silent.
‘My sources say there was a woman. A woman was reputed to have been there.’
He opened his mouth and then closed it. Even now, after all that had happened, he could not bring himself to betray her. If the British Service had word of her involvement they would hunt her to the ends of the earth. Garnering breath, he tried again.
‘I saw no one. I left after Anton Baudoin shot me.’ Lifting his shirt, he noticed the heightened interest of the newcomer. ‘By all accounts, de Gennes’s letters were at the compound, but I could find no trace of them.’
‘Did you speak with Baudoin?’
‘No. I was there in battle and there wasn’t a chance of conversation before I killed him.’
‘I see. You will start back for England next week. The Home Office has made arrangements for you to travel by ship, though I suppose you will need to answer more questions when you return.’
‘Of course.’
‘But for now you must rest. I will have warm broth sent in from the kitchen for you have lost a good deal of weight from the beating you received. It seems you were dropped in the river to drown, but your coat snagged on a pillar as the current took you away and a group of youths found you.’
‘A lucky escape, then.’
‘Perhaps.’ The man’s glance caught his own and without another word he left the room.
When he was gone, Nathaniel began to take stock of the wounds he had incurred. A heavily bandaged head, a broken right arm and two eyes that were so swollen it was hard to see.
Sandrine Mercier had betrayed both him and England to save herself.
Closing his eyes, he shut everything out and willed himself to survive.
On returning home, Nathaniel went straight to the family seat. His grandfather, the Earl of St Auburn, stood before him, a heavy frown upon his brow.
‘A further scrape that you have no explanation for, and a newly made scar on your chin that looks like you have been in another fight. And to top it all off you have lost your grandmother’s ring. An heirloom. Irreplaceable. I am almost seventy-three years old, Nathaniel, and you have never stopped disappointing me.’
Nat stood and finished his drink. It had been a bad idea to expect that William Lindsay might have welcomed him home after hard, long and lonely months abroad. Tonight, however, with the portrait of his father upon the wall above his head, Nat had had enough of such hostility.
‘I shall be at Stephen Hawkhurst’s for the next few weeks before going back to Europe, William.’
‘Running away as usual. The St Auburn inheritance does not simply see to itself, you know. A small interest on your behalf as the one who will inherit the responsibility would not go unnoticed.’
‘I