Wildest Dreams (The Contemporary Collection) (29 page)

She wasn’t sure she was ready. She disengaged herself slowly from him. Turning her head, she looked across the lake at the distant mountains lying like dreams of coolness against the sky.

“Away where?” she asked quietly. “Back to Paris?”

“I think not,” he said. “It’s the first place your husband will look.”

“Yes. He — has made threats, you know.”

“I don’t fear them, but I would prefer that you not be troubled by him. I would like — I want very much — to live with you in peace and content. Perhaps, if it pleases you, it could be in Venice.”

Venice. With Allain.

To go with him would be to leave behind not only her husband, but her family, friends, the place where she was born, even her country. She would be embracing a tenuous future with a man she barely knew.

She gave a small shake of her head. “Gilbert won’t give up easily, I think. He is determined to — determined that I have a child.”

“I pray,” Allain said deliberately, “that any child you have will be mine.”

She turned to face him. Her face was somber, her eyes opaque yet measuring as she met his steady gaze. The unfathomable depths of love she saw there, and the promise, caused her heart to shift achingly in her chest. The summer wind ruffled the waves of his hair and stirred the ends of his silk cravat. He narrowed his eyes a fraction against it, but did not move as he waited for her answer.

A slow and lovely smile curved her mouth. Her voice chiming with soft gladness, she said, “When shall we go?”

He got to his feet, standing straight and tall. Reaching for her hand, he drew her up to stand beside him. His gray-blue gaze, the same color as the mountain lake, held hers as he spoke.

“Now,” he said. “At once.”

Allain hired a carriage to take them over the mountains to Milan. He demanded the best available and the fastest horses. The fee was exorbitant, but he made no complaint. He even added a generous
pourboire
to encourage the keeper of the inn where the arrangements were made to forget that he had seen them.

From Milan, they traveled by train. The journey seemed intolerably slow to Violet. She could spare little attention for the waterfalls that cascaded down the mountain slopes, the vistas provided by the rolling hills, or the views of fortified towns perched above the valleys. She could not be easy in her mind, but turned again and again to look back the way they had come. What Gilbert would do when he discovered she was gone, she hardly dared imagine. She did not consider for a moment that he would do nothing. His pride, if nothing else, would prevent it.

Allain, taking her hand as they rocked along the winding roads, said, “Calm yourself,
cara.
Your husband may guess you are with me, but he can’t know it. By the time he becomes certain, we will be far away.”

“I know,” she said, “but still—”

“Don’t think of it. Put him from your mind. Think instead of what we will do in Venice. You have left so much behind — clothing, jewelry, keepsakes. You have my word that they will be replaced, insofar as I am able.”

“I don’t care for those things,” she said.

“I do,” he said, his voice serious. “I would not have you deprived because of me.”

“You have given me so much more,” she answered, and meant it. The bargain was a fair one in her view: all she owned in exchange for this chance at happiness. It had been offered to her before in Paris and lost, refused because of duty and misplaced adherence to a code she had not made. Now it was in her hands.

Allain had not mentioned marriage. Children, yes, but not the state of grace that made them legitimate. It was not possible, of course, would never be possible while she was tied to Gilbert. If there were not religious constraints, there would be the difficulties of persuading her husband to parade his marital failure in full view of friends, community, and even the legislature of the state of Louisiana, which presided over such dissolutions.

She and Allain would be forced to live in sin. Strange, how little meaning those words had in her mind, when once they had spelled scandal and ruin. It could not be helped. Words could not hurt her; only people could do that.

They stopped for the night at a small inn on the outskirts of Milan. Too keyed up to sleep, they made love in the moonlight streaming through the windows, then lay in each other’s arms while the hours crept past.

By midmorning they were on the train as it puffed its way past red-tile-roofed villas surrounded by vineyards whose leaves shone in the sun, past straggling stone-walled villages alive with chickens and children and goats and edged with cemeteries studded with the dark green spires of cypress. They left the hills for the fertile plains. The air blowing in at the compartment window smelled of coal smoke, and also of blooming grass and farmyards. The sunlight streaming in was almost hot. Dust motes shaken from the velvet side curtains turned lazily in its golden shafts.

Violet had been impressed by the ease with which Allain had slipped from French to German, then into the dialect of Venezia, as he dealt with the various agents and officials at the train station. When she said as much, he only smiled. “It becomes necessary when there is no country you call home. Venice comes closest, perhaps, to deserving the name. I have relatives there still, my mother’s people.”

“Will we — that is, did you intend to visit them?” She was not sure she was ready to meet these relatives, whoever they might be.

The understanding in his face was disturbing as he answered, “Only if you wish it.”

“It’s because of your father that you have no true home?”

Allain agreed absently.

She shielded her eyes with her lashes as she asked, “Was he some kind of diplomat, then?”

“Why would you think that?” he asked, his gaze indulgent yet penetrating.

“You seem to have such official connections and — have lived in many places.”

He shook his head with a smile. “My father had a prominent position for some years, though not in the diplomatic corps; actually he left it before I was born. Any recognition I receive is merely because my ancestors tended to marry well.”

“Ah, because of wealth, then,” she commented. He spoke, and acted, as if money were of no consequence.

He hesitated only a fraction of a second before he said, “You might say so.”

“If the benefits of it are now yours, then I suppose your father is no longer alive.”

“Both of my parents are dead, or so I believe. My mother, once a diva of the opera, died in England only a few years ago. My father departed on a pilgrimage of sorts a short time after I was born. He was to return, but was never seen again. We heard rumors for a few years, then — nothing.”

It happened, men who were lost at sea, or else were robbed and killed on some lonely road with nothing left on the body to identify them. Sometimes men lost themselves on purpose, too, to evade family responsibilities or situations they could no longer endure.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He smiled a little. “Don’t be. It was long ago.”

“But your mother? Why was she in England?”

“It was her home, where my father had established her and where she had special friends in the social and theatrical circles. She would not leave it except for brief visits to Italy. She thought, you see, that he might return.”

A chill moved over Violet as she considered the implications of what he had said. His father had apparently taken his mother from her home, her people, and established her in a foreign land. Then he had left her. She was going away with Allain, leaving everything. Would he, could he, ever desert her in the same callous fashion?

“Don’t look like that,
cara
,” he said, reaching to take her hand. “I will never leave you. But I am flattered that you would care, just as it pleased my conceit that you have thought enough about me to be curious.”

Soft color seeped under her skin, though she met his dark gaze without evasion. Her voice soft, she said, “You have no idea how much I long to know.”

“Know it you shall,” he said in quiet avowal, “all of it.”

Soon afterward, he changed the subject, speaking of the countryside through which they were traveling and the uneasy situation of the Italian peninsula. Violet enjoyed listening to the deep timbre of his voice, was interested in his analysis of area politics, but she could not help wondering if his sudden loquacity was not a diversion. He might intend to reveal himself to her, but the time for it, perhaps, was not yet.

The northern section of the Italian peninsula, so Allain said, had been for centuries the battleground where the kings of Valois and Bourbon in France and the Habsburgs of Austria had settled their differences. Control of various portions of it had been traded back and forth a dozen times over. Since the Congress of Vienna after the defeat of Napoléon I, however, France had been excluded from the area. Venezia, with Lombardy, was still under Austrian rule, but the remainder of the peninsula was occupied by a number of smaller states, including the Kingdom of Sardinia, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Duchies of Parma and Modena, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and, of course, the papal dominions.

There were a great many titles, old and new, associated with the many different regions, and a great deal of jockeying for position among the holders of those titles. In addition, as with the rest of Europe since 1848, there were constant rumors of revolution in the air. It was Allain’s opinion that something, or some man, would eventually galvanize the peninsula into forming itself into a single strong republic. In the meantime the paramount faction, led by the King of the Two Sicilies, was hovering on the brink of committing itself to the allied cause in the war in the Crimea. There was no escaping the effects of that faraway conflict.

They reached the terminal station for Venice in late evening. Everyone surged from the train with much yelling and clanging of compartment doors. Baggage had to be collected and transfer made quickly to the ferry that would take them across to the city in the lagoon, as it was the last one of the day. Violet and Allain had little luggage to concern them; Allain carried his own small portmanteau that was all he had brought with him from Paris, while Violet grasped her rolled parasol in her hand. They had no choice, however, but to join the crush of people. It was the only way to get to the ferry pier.

They were leaving the station gateway in the midst of a crowd of a score or more when Violet was suddenly jostled to one side. She staggered, nearly falling as she tripped on her swaying skirts. There was a scuffle behind her. She spun around to see the crowd scattering while women screamed and babies cried. A small space had been left free. In the middle of it Allain was struggling with two men.

Terror washed over her. Hard on its heels came a rage more white-hot and blinding than any she had ever known. The parasol in her hand was sturdily made, designed for use as both sunshade and walking stick. Its straight silver grip was attached to a steel shaft, and the iron ferrule that finished the other end had the pointed shape of a spear. She sprang forward, swinging it like a sword.

Her first blow caught one of the assailants across the cheek and neck in a welling streak of blood. He turned on her with a growl.

Allain, snatching a glance in her direction, sank his fist into the abdomen of the other man to the wrist, then jerked free, lunging away from him. He caught Violet at the waist, whirling her behind him as he deftly plucked the parasol from her grasp.

The two attackers were lean, with dirt embedded in their skin and the scarred faces common to waterfronts the world over. One was short, the other taller and wider. Cursing, they closed in.

Allain never let go of his portmanteau. A faint smile hovered at the corners of his mouth, while his eyes were silvery with the fierceness of his intent and feline in their watchfulness. He attacked.

The first man gave a gurgling cry as he reeled backward. A stiletto fell from his lax grasp, glinting as it skidded over the paving stones. The second assailant swooped to grab for it. The parasol whipped the air with a soft-edged whine as Allain extended his reach. The man grasped his flopping wrist, stumbling backward.

Allain edged forward, the parasol level, steady.

The two broke and ran, stumbling over each other, clutching their wounds.

There was a ragged cheer from one or two in the crowd; the rest melted away with hardly a backward glance. Violet, reaching for Allain, gripped his arm so tightly that he winced.

“You’re hurt!” she said, her voice hardly more than a whisper.

“My own fault; they caught me off guard.” His smile appeared strained around the edges.

“Let me see—” she began.

He shook his head, indicating that they should proceed in the direction of the ferry landing. “It will wait until we reach some kind of lodging. I don’t think it’s much more than a slice.”

“Were they after money,” she asked in low concern as she walked beside him, “or was it — something else?”

“That is the question, isn’t it?” he said. “But if they were sent by Gilbert, he must have the devil’s own luck.”

They sought lodgings in an ancient palazzo just off the Grand Canal. It belonged to an elderly widow, the Signora da Allori, Allain said, a building of four stories built of mellow golden stone that was stained gray green at the waterline with the inevitable rise and fall of the water level. The facade facing its side canal featured double loggias on the second and third floors, with Gothic arches ornamented with stone lacework, which gave it an Oriental air.