Velvet (32 page)

Nathaniel shook his head in mock reproof. “You’re an impossible woman, too much for any ordinary mortal to manage. Hurry back now into the warm.” He pulled the edges of the cloak tighter around her. “Go on, quickly!” He pushed her to the ladder.

“I’d expected a little more ceremony,” Gabrielle grumbled, obeying the hand in her back. “But I can’t think why, since this has been a most unceremonious evening, one way and another.” She edged backward onto the ladder and grinned at him, blowing him a kiss before the bright head vanished into the darkness below.

Nathaniel stood at the window, watching her run across the yard and slip safely into the inn.

How could someone so open, so gloriously candid in her desires and her needs and her loving, be treacherous? And how could he lose all sense of that when he was within her, when she was a part of him and he of her?

He’d asked himself the question before, and, as before, there was no answer.

“The spymaster is in Paris?” Talleyrand most unusually revealed his surprise as he poured wine into two crystal goblets in the study of the house on rue d’Anjou.

“Just so.” Gabrielle untied the ribbons of her hat and tossed it onto a leather couch. She peered at her reflection in the glass over the mantelpiece and tucked a straying wisp of hair back into the pins.

“Where?” Talleyrand handed her a glass of burgundy.

“Merci.” Gabrielle took the glass with a smile and inhaled the bouquet. “I don’t know,” she said frankly. “He wouldn’t tell me. I’m to wait to be contacted.”

“A cautious man, as one would expect.” Talleyrand nodded. He made a steeple of his fingers and gazed into the middle distance. “For some reason, your letter gave me the sense that there is a … a
frisson”
—his hands opened eloquently—“between you and Lord Praed.”

Gabrielle sipped her wine. How had he guessed that? She’d thought she’d been completely emotionless in her letter. But Talleyrand always saw beneath the surface, and there was never any point attempting to
pull the wool over his eyes. “Yes,” she agreed. “In fact, something rather more than that, I believe.”

“I see.” The Minister for Foreign Affairs examined her with the searching, assessing scrutiny of a connoisseur of women. “Passion becomes you,” he stated after a minute. “It has always been so. You looked thus after your times with Guillaume.”

Gabrielle met his gaze steadily. “There are similarities,” she agreed.

“They are—were—both master spies,” her godfather pointed out dryly. “It would seem you have a fatal predilection toward the devious,
mon enfant.”

“With such a mentor, does it surprise you?”

Talleyrand laughed. “Such a quick tongue, you have. How does your spymaster react to it, I wonder?”

Gabrielle rightly assumed that no response was required.

“So, does this added dimension alter your attitude in any way?” Her godfather shifted the subject, blandly matter-of-fact.

“He was responsible for Guillaume’s death,” she answered. “I can’t forget that, despite—” She shrugged. “Despite physical passion. We have that, certainly, but it alters nothing essential.”

Talleyrand stroked his chin. “Let us be sure we understand each other,
ma fille
. You are saying that despite physical passion, you still intend to be avenged on this man for his part in Guillaume’s death?”

Gabrielle wandered over to the fireplace, staring into the flames. Guillaume’s face rose in her internal vision. He was laughing, his eyes so alive, his beautiful mouth curved …

“Oh, yes,” she said, almost to herself. “I will use him, sir, in whatever fashion you dictate.”

Talleyrand nodded, satisfied. “There is much at stake. Too much to be sacrificed to blind passion.”

“I understand that.”

There was a knock at the door, and a footman entered
to light the candles, draw the long brocade curtains over the windows as dusk deepened, and make up the fire.

They were both silent as the man went about his work. Talleyrand looked down into his glass as if reading solutions to unanswerable questions in the ruby wine.

“You must be tired after your journey,” he said as the servant finished mending the fire and the door closed behind him. “Why don’t you go to your apartments and rest. I’m sure Catherine must be eager to greet you.”

“Yes.” Gabrielle rose immediately. “I’m glad you’re in Paris. I’d find it hard to weave my way through this tangle without your counsel.” She picked up her discarded gloves and slapped them idly into her palm before saying abruptly, “There’s a complication. Nathaniel’s son is with him.”

“In Paris?” Again Talleyrand revealed his surprise. “How old’s the child?”

“Six. He stowed away on the boat and there really wasn’t any choice but to bring him. Nathaniel has a safe house where he says the child won’t be remarked, but if Fouché were to hear of Jake …” She fell silent, chewing her bottom lip.

“He mustn’t,” Talleyrand agreed instantly. “You will have to submit to an interview with him. You must be very careful.”

“I know,’ she said simply. She bent forward for the avuncular kiss he placed on her forehead. “Will you be dining at home, sir?”

“I hadn’t intended to, but in the circumstances, I believe I shall,” he said, patting her cheek.

“You do me too much honor, sir.” Her eyes twinkled, banishing the seriousness of the last exchange.

“Go and do your duty to Catherine,” he said gruffly. “I don’t know what your father would say to this habit you have of forming highly improper liaisons.
It’s high time you found a husband and started having babies.”

“I would if I could,” she said, and the twinkle faded. “But I don’t seem to be attracted to men who want to lead conventional lives.”

“Probably because you don’t want to yourself,” her godfather observed briskly. “The vicissitudes of war suit you.”

“And what does that say about my character?” Gabrielle queried, shaking her head.

“I’m sure you can work that out for yourself.” Talleyrand waved her way, reflecting that Gabrielle was one of the people for whom fate had fashioned a twisted destiny, one of great passions and great sorrows. In many ways she was to be envied. She lived on the cutting edge, never in the comfortable safety of the middle, and she’d experience heights and glories that ordinary people would never approach. But such a life had its price, as she already knew. Twenty-five was young to have lost so much.

Gabrielle found the Princess de Talleyrand in her boudoir. Catherine had been married to Talleyrand for five years—a misalliance that shocked society as much as it puzzled. That Talleyrand, a descendent of one of France’s oldest families, should have married a woman of inferior birth, his own mistress of four years, and reputed to have been the mistress of anyone willing to keep her, was completely incomprehensible. Catherine was a silly woman with vapid conversation, no companion for the urbane and brilliant Minister for Foreign Affairs, and she was no longer young, although her fabled beauty was as yet barely dimmed.

Gabrielle privately believed that her godfather had married his immensely good-natured mistress because it was as easy to do so as not. As an excommunicated bishop, Talleyrand despised the church, and as an aristocratic intellectual, he despised bourgeois morality. So when Napoleon had conducted one of his periodic
moral sweeps through his court, demanding that irregular relationships be regularized, Talleyrand had yielded to imperial pressure simply because he didn’t give a tinker’s damn one way or the other.

Catherine greeted Gabrielle warmly but rather as if she’d just returned from a shopping expedition instead of an extended visit to England.

“
Ma chère
, how well you look.” She lifted her powdered, painted cheek for Gabrielle’s kiss. “Have you seen Monsieur le Prince?”

“Just now,” Gabrielle said. “He’s dining at home, he tells me.”

Catherine made a small moue. “What a nuisance. I am engaged to dine at the Bonnevilles and I can’t cry off. You’ll have to entertain him for me.”

Gabrielle hid her smile. Catherine’s ability to entertain her husband in any arena except the bedchamber was open to question.

“I have some straw-colored sarcenet,” Catherine was saying, examining Gabrielle closely. “It doesn’t suit me, I’ve decided, but it would look very well on you,
ma chère
. Clothilde could make it up for you. There is a perfect pattern for a morning dress—let me see, where did I put it?” She sorted vaguely through a stack of periodicals on a marble-topped Louis XV
desserte
table. “Ah, here it is.”

Gabrielle dutifully examined the pattern. Catherine’s taste tended to the flamboyant, to match her figure, and the frills and furbelows on the morning dress were not Gabrielle’s style at all. However, she made the right noises and promised to take the sarcenet.

Duty done, she went to her own apartments at the rear of the house, intent on ridding herself of the grime and fatigue of a journey that had continued at a breakneck pace for nearly two days.

Nathaniel had had the best of it, riding beside the chaise while she and Jake were jolted miserably over the ill-paved roads. The child had required constant attention
and resisted all Gabrieile’s attempts to engage his imagination in the journey. The unfamiliar food and the motion of the coach had made him almost as sick as he’d been on the boat, and he’d moaned fretfully whenever he wasn’t asleep. Gabrielle had developed a thundering headache by the afternoon of the first day, and Nathaniel, after one look at her drawn face and heavy eyes, had taken Jake up in front of him for a few hours while she slept.

Judging by Nathaniel’s tight-lipped relief when he returned the child to the chaise, the arrangement had been less than a success. Jake had whimpered constantly for home, for Nurse and Primmy, for Neddy, for milk and for bread without crusts. His small bladder had required frequent relief, and every attempt his father had made to entertain him had fallen on stony ground.

Nathaniel had handed him back to Gabrielle with the terse comment that it was now his turn to nurse a headache.

However, by the time they reached the outskirts of Paris and clattered through the narrow cobbled streets, Jake had perked up. He’d never been in a city before, and his eyes had grown wide at the sights and the noises and the varied smells. He forgot his nausea, subjecting Gabrielle to a flood of questions that in her fatigue she found almost as exhausting as his earlier complaints.

Gabrielle lay back in the hip bath before the fire and closed her eyes on an exhalation of pure joy as her aching limbs relaxed in the warmth. What were Nathaniel and Jake doing at this moment? It was a safe bet they weren’t luxuriating in hot water before a blazing fire.

Nathaniel had directed the chaise to the flower market on the íle de la Cité in the shadow of Notre Dame. There he’d dismounted and lifted Jake from the carriage.

“Here we say good-bye.”

“But where are you going?” Gabrielle hadn’t expected to part so abruptly in this bustle.

“You’ll be contacted,” he said. “At rue d’Anjou.”

“But when?”

“When the time is right.” His response had been implacable and his eyes were already roving the marketplace, assessing, speculating, on the watch. Gabrielle recognized what was happening. She knew what it was like.

“Very well,” she said calmly, and then leaned out of the window, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Jake, you’re going on a big adventure with Papa. You have to be his helper and not say anything unless he says you can. No one must know anything about us, where we come from, or anything at all. It’s a big secret and it’s
our
secret. All right?”

Jake, perched on his father’s hip, gazed at her, his eyes wide. He’d become accustomed to the fact that Gabby and his father spoke to each other only in French on this journey. He didn’t understand what they said to each other, but he could always tell the mood they were in, and now that the strangeness of this journey was wearing off, he was beginning to regain his equable nature.

“Where are you going?”

“That’s a secret too,” she said.

Jake thought about this, then he nodded. “We’ll pretend we’re invisible and no one can see us, an’ we can walk down the street and no one knows us, an’ we can watch them and listen to them and they can’t hear us.”

“Except when you and Papa are alone,” Gabrielle said.

Jake’s eyes shone. “Then we can talk like ordinary. When no one’s listening.”

“Exactly.”

“We have to go,” Nathaniel said, his voice curt
with anxiety. He held Jake closer to the window so Gabrielle could kiss him good-bye. Then he turned and strode off through the crowded marketplace, and was soon lost to view.

The post boy, already instructed, had mounted the riding horse and they’d continued to rue d’Anjou, where Gabrielle had paid off the coachman and the post boy, who’d conveyed them from the changing post at Neuilly into Paris.

And how long was she to wait here, lapped in luxury, before Nathaniel made contact? Jake’s presence obviously meant an end to whatever spying plans Nathaniel had had … something to do with an agent in Toulouse, he’d said. Would he expect her to work alone in that case?