The Misguided Matchmaker Page 5

  Not a muscle in the Englishman’s big body moved, but his grip on her arm tightened noticeably and his breathing sounded heavy and labored. She felt a brief moment of triumph. So, this seemingly imperturbable Englishman did know the meaning of fear after all.

  Moments later, the moon broke through the clouds to once again flood the courtyard with silvery light. The Englishman relaxed his punishing grip, uncovered the lantern, and held it aloft, his eyes still riveted on the open courtyard as if the patch of moonlit sky drew him like a magnet.

  “Well that’s that,” he said in a voice devoid of expression. “What now, lady guide? Have you any idea where we are?”

  Taking her cue from him, Madelaine pulled herself together and gazed about her, determined to hide the fear that still threatened to buckle her knees. “It is hard to tell from the light of a single lantern, but there is something about this passageway that looks familiar,” she answered in the same flat tone in which he had posed his question.

  “Good. The sooner we find our way out of here, the better. But if you have any doubts, for God’s sake, express them now. One wild goose-chase through these curst traboules is more than enough.”

  Madelaine stiffened. “I shall do my best to keep from inconveniencing you further, monsieur.” Crossing her fingers once again, she moved ahead of him down the passage. This one was wider and cleaner than the one they had previously traversed, and the doors lining it were more ornate and spaced further apart.

  With a sigh of relief, she spotted an alcove containing an ancient stone well and beyond it a narrow passage branching off the main one. If memory served her, the apartment that had been her grandfather’s lay but a few feet beyond this intersection.

  “Here is the door I seek,” she said, stopping to run her fingers over the two coats of arms. Just so, she had traced these carved emblems on her fourteenth birthday when her grandfather first brought her to this spot to hear the history of the noble family from which she’d sprung.

  She remembered well the bitterness in his voice when he’d explained. “I dare not take you to the front entrance, ma petite fille; we must stand here like fishmongers at the tradesman’s door, while a peasant occupies what has belonged to the Navareils for centuries.” Even now, years later, she felt choked with sorrow for the old man who had wasted a lifetime grieving for the wealth and privilege that had once been his.

  With one last look at her family’s coat of arms, she closed the door on her noble past and opened another on the unknown future to which this stern-faced Englishman was taking her. It occurred to her that he had been amazingly patient with her, considering the perversity of his nature. First he’d helped her give her grandfather a proper burial at great danger to himself; now he waited in this dark traboule while she bid her sad good-bye to her life in Lyon. Perhaps he was not so lacking in compassion as he appeared.

  “I am finished now,” she said, a tiny portion of her heart warming toward this enigmatic stranger her father had appointed as her protector. “I promise I will detain you no longer.”

  “And I promise I will remind you of that promise if you do.” His biting sarcasm made it all too apparent he was neither patient nor compassionate, but merely bent on completing the onerous task her father had assigned him with the least possible trouble. For some reason she could not fathom, this surly Englishman’s disapproval cut her to the quick. She found herself wondering what the going price was these days for delivering long-lost daughters to wealthy London merchants.

  “How much farther must we go?” he asked in an oddly breathless voice a few moments later.

  “I am not certain, monsieur. It has been a long time since I last visited the traboules.”

  “If you could bring yourself to walk a little faster, I would appreciate it,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “Faster, monsieur?” Startled by the intensity in his voice, Madelaine glanced behind her. He had that look again—the black one that made him appear positively demonic—and his fists were tightly clenched as if he were exerting every ounce of control he possessed to keep from doing her bodily harm.

  “Faster, mademoiselle. I would like to retrieve Forli’s horse and carriage before it goes the same way as my horse.”

  So that was what was bothering him. Because of her, his valuable horse had been stolen, and the loss to his pocketbook infuriated him. “Never fear, monsieur,” she said scathingly, “I will make certain my father reimburses you for your loss.”

  “Loss? What loss?” he muttered, mopping his streaming brow.

  She stared at him in amazement. Was the man mad? Or was he running a fever that addled his brain? Why else would he be bathed in perspiration when the cold dampness of the traboules chilled her to the bone?

  With the grim-faced Englishman on her heels, she forced herself to sprint the remaining quarter of a mile to the entrance of La Croix Rousse. “Here we are,” she said breathlessly. “We have only to cross through this district and we will reach the confluence of the Saône and Rhône rivers where Monsieur Forli said his horse and carriage were hidden.”

  “Thank God,” Tristan Thibault murmured, staring at the sky above him with a rapt expression in his strange, pale eyes. Here the walls of the buildings bordering the narrow alley were two stories high, but the passageway itself was uncovered. He leaned against the nearby wall, taking in great, gulping breaths of air, as if their short sprint had left his lungs totally depleted. For a man who appeared so strong, he was certainly in terrible condition.

  Madelaine pressed her finger to her lips, cautioning him to silence. Once again she covered the lantern with her jacket, but this time the waning moon and the light pouring from the many open doors lining the alleyway dispelled the darkness. She took a deep breath. The air was heavy with the waxy smoke of dozens of guttering candles and an odd, musty smell she remembered her grandfather telling her emanated from the bolts of fabric waiting to be delivered to the shops of the silk merchants for which Lyon was famous.

  Tristan Thibault touched her shoulder. “That noise? What is it?” he whispered.

  Madelaine listened to the familiar click, clack, bang…click, clack, bang. “The canuts—silk weavers—at work,” she whispered back. “Every household in the district has its own bistanclaque. The family members take turns weaving and sleeping in the lofts above so the looms are never silent.

  She frowned. “Weaving is hot work. The doors of the canuts’ apartments are rarely closed. We will have to pass dozens of open doorways to reach our destination. I pray we can do so without being seen.”

  “I take it these canuts are Bonapartists.”

  “To a man, though apparently not even the return of the emperor can lure them from their bistanclaques. Still, it is well known they hate the old aristocracy and anyone connected with it. They would turn us over to the gronards without a qualm if they suspected our true identities—or mine, anyway—and I cannot think how we would explain a priest and his acolyte wandering the traboules in the dead of night. We will not be safe until we put La Croix Rousse behind us.”

  Tristan paid but token heed to Madelaine Harcourt’s dire warning. In truth, he felt almost giddy with relief that he’d managed to keep from turning into a babbling idiot back in those beastly traboules, and even more relieved that the balance of their journey could be accomplished under the open sky.

  Shifting the knapsack to a more comfortable position, he prepared to follow her down the shadowed alleyway, but not before he caught a glimpse of the first candlelit loom and the nocturnal weaver who labored at it.

  Click, clack, bang…click, clack, bang. Over and over the white-haired canut threw his shuttle—as intent on his work as Rumpelstilskin, the evil dwarf of the German folktale Tristan had learned as a child at Lady Ursula’s knee. Never again would he wear a silk shirt without remembering the eerie sight.

  Past one open doorway after another, his slender, boyish-looking guide slipped, as silent as the shadows that concealed her. Past one open doo
rway after another, Tristan followed her, careful to keep the flickering candle within the lantern hidden from view beneath her jacket.

  He had just begun to congratulate himself on making it through this den of Bonapartists without mishap when they came to an area where two huge rolling carts laden with hundreds of ells of silk fabric blocked the passageway outside one of the apartments.

  There was nothing for it but to move one of the carts enough to give them room to squeeze past the doorway. Handing over the lantern, Tristan bent his shoulder to the task. Fortunately, the cart rolled easily despite its size; unfortunately the ancient wood wheels creaked loudly in protest.

  The stocky, middle-aged canut instantly stilled his spindle and looked up from his loom, staring mole-like into the darkened alley. Madelaine Harcourt flattened herself against the stone wall, her eyes wide with terror in the shifting shadows, and Tristan drew his pistol, fervently praying he wouldn’t be forced to use it.

  A terrible, waiting silence ensued. Tristan could see the horror etched on his young companion’s face as she stared at the lethal weapon in his hand, could sense her quick intake of breath when he cocked it and raised it to the ready. Then, just when his nerves were stretched to the breaking point, the weaver gave a typical Gallic shrug and returned to his work—and the two fugitives slipped silently past his doorway and continued their flight to safety.

  “One more potential disaster circumvented,” Tristan whispered, returning the pepperbox pistol to the pocket of his cassock. Madelaine Harcourt didn’t answer him—didn’t so much as glance his way—and a new weariness engulfed Tristan, born of the knowledge that she now found him more fearful than the enemy they were trying to elude.

  He was in no mood to pacify a squeamish female. He had been awake since dawn and it must be near that hour again. His head was pounding, his feet dragging, and the hellish trip through the traboules had sorely tested his belief in his own manhood.

  To add to his dilemma, much as he hated to admit it, his admiration for the young woman in his care was growing by leaps and bounds. In the past few hours, she had lost everything in life she held dear. Any other female he knew would have been utterly devastated by the tragedies she had faced. Instead she seemed to gain in courage and stamina with every passing minute—two qualities he himself had been hard put to equal. In truth, he was beginning wonder who was rescuing whom in this bizarre partnership they’d formed.

  At long last they left the lofts of the silk weavers behind and found themselves standing on the bank of the Saône River just as the first pink-hued rays of the rising sun tinged the horizon. The acrid smell of smoke filled Tristan’s nostrils. Behind him, the sky glowed red from the fires consuming the homes of Lyon’s few remaining Royalists; before him lay the grove of trees, just as Forli had described it.

  As he listened, a cheer rose from hundreds of throats. He heard snatches of the Marseillaise and the voices of men chanting names like Friedland, Marengo, Austerlitz, and other battles fought in the name of the emperor, and he knew that, as predicted, Lyon had fallen to General Cambronne’s grognards.

  Madelaine Harcourt covered her eyes in a gesture of despair. Instinctively, he reached out to her, offering the meager comfort of one stranger to another. “Unless my eyes deceive me, Forli’s horse and carriage awaits us in the grove yonder,” he said to divert her attention from the happenings in the city.

  She lowered her hands and raised her head to gaze where he directed. At the same moment, a lone figure detached itself from a stand of trees across the river and waved in their direction. Tristan pointed him out to the woman beside him. “It’s Forli, and devil take it, what is that he’s leading? A donkey? A cow?”

  “Stolen no doubt,” Madelaine Harcourt managed a ghost of a smile. “You were right, monsieur. I need not have worried about your little friend. But how will he join us when he is on the other side of the river?”

  “He won’t. We are heading north to Paris and eventually Calais. He is going south to Tuscany.”

  “There will just be the two of us from now on?”

  Tristan nodded. “Just the two of us. And an actual horse, I see now, that looks like a farmer’s nightmare.”

  She stared at him with wary, amber eyes that dominated her pale, exhausted face. As he watched, she swayed on her feet like a willow caught in a high wind.

  “Hold on, Maddy,” he exclaimed, slipping his arm around her waist. Half lifting, half dragging her, he strode forward into the trees to the waiting cabriolet.

  “Maddy,” she echoed, rubbing her eyes like a sleepy child. “You called me Maddy. No one has called me that in fifteen years. No one except father has ever called me that.”

  Tristan smiled. “It is what I shall call you from now on. Since it is not a name any Frenchman would have heard, it could just as well be that of a boy as a girl.” He busied himself blowing out the candle and stowing the lantern behind the seat. “And much as it may gall you, you’d best begin call me Father Tristan if we’re to carry off the disguise.”

  She leaned against the side of the carriage. “I should call you what?” Her voice slurred and her head dropped forward as if her neck was too fragile to hold it up.

  Tristan caught her before she could fall. She felt boneless and fragile in his arms and not at all like the young boy she was pretending to be.

  “Father Tristan,” he repeated, placing her gently on the seat of the cabriolet. He watched her curl her long legs beneath her and rest her pale cheek against the black leather seat cushion. “Did you hear me, Maddy?”

  She didn’t answer. Her eyes were closed, her mouth softly open, her breath slow and deep. His stalwart young traveling companion was sound asleep.

  Maddy dreamed of running through endless dark traboules, chased by a black-haired man with strange, pale eyes who threatened her with a shining silver pistol…and woke to find herself curled up on the seat of a carriage which was lumbering along a country road.

  The top was down; the sun warm on her face, and, good heavens, her head was on the shoulder of the very man who had dominated her nightmare.

  She sat up abruptly, planted her feet firmly on the floorboard, and looked about her. “Nom de Dieu, where are we?”

  “On the road to Roanne. Well on the road, I might add. You have been sleeping for hours.” The Englishman looked more than ever a minion of the devil with his unruly black hair tossed by the wind and a day’s growth of beard darkening his lean face.

  He turned his head and studied her with eyes that made a mockery of the priest’s cassock covering his powerful body. “Tell me, Maddy, how are you as a whip?”

  “A whip? I do not know the term, monsieur.”

  “Can you handle the reins? We are still too close to Lyon to risk stopping, but I am badly in need of sleep.”

  Madelaine stared at him, aghast? “I have never ‘handled the reins,’ monsieur. It is not a skill a lady of my station would be expected to learn.”

  “Maybe not in Lyon, but it’s all the crack in London.” He shrugged. “Well, no time like the present to learn. This old dobbin Forli provided us with is docile as a milk cow.”

  He passed her the reins. “It’s simple really. Pull on the right rein if you want him to go right; pull on the left if you want him to go left. Pull on both and say ‘whoa’ if you want him to stop.”

  Without further ado, he slumped down in the seat beside her, closed his eyes and promptly fell asleep.

  Heart pounding, Maddy grasped the reins. Fortunately, the road ahead was straight as a lance, and the horse plodded forward down the center of it with little or no guidance from her.

  By the end of the first mile, she’d come to the conclusion Monsieur Thibault had spoken the truth; handling the reins for the old dobbin required nothing more than a firm hand and a bit of common sense. By the end of the next mile, she even felt confident enough to relax her hold and let the blood flow back into her cramped fingers.

  A serious mistake. A small brown hare chose
that very instant to hop onto the road directly in the path of the dobbin’s hooves. With a startled cry, Madelaine yanked on the reins. The old horse stopped dead in its tracks, and Monsieur le Lapin, having safely reached his destination, wriggled his nose indignantly, has if to say, “Did you think a strong, young hare could not outrun a plodding old dobbin?” Then, with a final twitch of his floppy ears, he disappeared into the hedgerow.

  She could tell by the way the old dobbin snorted, he was not the least bit happy about the rough way she’d handled his reins. “I am sorry, Monsieur le Cheval,” she said contritely. “I am new at this business. I did not mean to yank your teeth from your mouth, and I swear it will never happen again. You may proceed on your way now.”

  The horse stood rooted to the spot.

  Madelaine tried coaxing in the sweetest voice she could manage, “S’il vous plaît, Monsieur le Cheval, it would be wise to keep moving with the Corsican so close behind us.”

  The horse snorted and flicked his ears, but his hooves remained firmly planted.

  Though she felt certain the old dobbin was of French origin, she tried coaxing in English and Italian, even German, just in case.

  Nothing happened.

  It was obvious the stubborn nag would never move a muscle until she gave him the proper signal. But the stupid Englishman had only told her how to stop a horse, not how to make it start again.

  Finally, in desperation, she shook the shoulder of the man who dozed so peacefully beside her. “Wake up, monsieur,” she cried. “I have need of you.”

  His eyes remained closed. But to her surprise, he reach up, caught her fingers and brought them to his lips, then turned her hand and flicked his tongue across the soft flesh of her palm, sending frissons of heat racing clear to her toes. “Go back to sleep, cherié,” he purred deep in his throat. “I will satisfy your need in the morning.”

  Madelaine snatched her hand from his. He was dreaming about a woman. Undoubtedly his wife, since he thought they were sleeping together. Her face flamed. And even an innocent could guess what need it was he thought she was asking him to fill.