C Harris - Where Shadows Dance

“Nearly ten years. I went first to Italy, then Majorca.” She leaned back in her chair, her fingers playing with her cup, an enigmatic smile touching her lips. “I was acquainted with your mother, you know. You are quite like her in many ways ... although not in all.”

Sebastian held himself very still. Some eighteen years before, on a hot, joyless summer day after the death of Sebastian’s two older brothers, the Countess of Hendon had staged her own death and disappeared to the Continent with her latest lover. He had mourned his mother for half his life before discovering that she was, in fact, alive.

It had been but the first of several unpleasant truths he had learned.

He’d tried in the months since that discovery to trace her fate. His agents had followed her to Venice and then to France, where they hit a wall built by war and an inexplicable, fearful silence.

Now he asked, his voice calm and casual and everything he was not, “You knew her in Venice?”

“Yes. She lived in a crumbling old palace on the Grand Canal with ...” Her voice trailed off.

“Her lover?” he supplied.

A sad, sympathetic smile touched her lips. “Yes. She used to give wonderful musical evenings—it’s how I came to know her. Her lover was a talented composer as well as a poet, you see. They were quite happy. But then, he died.”

Sebastian nodded. According to the last report he’d received, Lady Hendon had eventually taken up with one of Napoléon’s generals, but he had no way of knowing if that was still true.

Angelina Champagne reached out to touch her fingertips briefly, unexpectedly, to the back of his hand. “You need have no fear that I will speak of these things to others. The past is dead, and we who are left alive must go on, yes?”

She paused to take a slow sip of her coffee. There was a fragile, ethereal beauty to her features, a tautness that hinted at sadness and tragedy borne with a quiet stoicism and something else—something mysterious and well hidden. She said, “You know Ross was with the Foreign Office?”

“Are you saying you think his work at the Foreign Office had something to do with his death?”

“You doubt it? All of Europe has been at war for—what? More than two decades. Over the years, alliances have shifted and recombined, again and again. But it’s my belief that one day, historians will look back on this summer and see it as a pivotal moment in time.”

“You mean, because of Napoléon’s invasion of Russia?”

“Even without the successes of Wellington in Spain, it was most unwise. But as the situation currently stands?” She pursed her lips with contempt. “It goes beyond folly to madness. Tens of thousands will die. Perhaps hundreds of thousands. We have lost too many already—so many dead, so much of what once made France great, destroyed. And now this.”

He wondered how many relatives she still had in France, perhaps even serving in the legions that were marching on Moscow as they spoke. He said, “Napoléon claims the Czar left him no alternative.”

She let out her breath in an elegant sound of disgust. “There are always alternatives. The Swedes and Russians have ended their war with the Treaty of St. Petersburg, while the Treaty of Bucharest has ended the Russo-Turkish War. With their northern and southern flanks thus protected, the Russians will be able to throw all of their forces against the French.”

“Except they’re not facing just the French,” Sebastian reminded her. “Napoléon has succeeded in cementing a new alliance to bring the Prussians and Austrians with him against Russia.”

“Only because Prussia’s King Frederick William knew his choice was between a military alliance with Napoléon and the loss of his crown.”

“And Austria?”

“Austria has little to lose and much to gain from a war between France and Russia. Metternich knows this.”

She was an unusual woman, shrewd and well versed in current events and not the least hesitant to state her opinions. Sebastian studied the stark line of the tie for her eye patch, the sun-kissed skin of her cheek. In an age when most gentlewomen took excruciating pains to protect their delicate complexions from the sun, Madame Champagne obviously deliberately sought it out, and he found himself wondering why.

He said, “You take an interest in diplomatic affairs.”

“War tends to make us all students of diplomacy, does it not? There is a story that Napoléon once told the widow of the Marquis de Condorcet that he detested women who meddled in politics. Do you know her reply?”

Sebastian shook his head.

“She said, ‘You are right, of course, General. But in a country where one cuts off women’s heads, it is natural that they should wish to know the reason why.’”

Madame Condorcet had been a widow because the Revolution sent her husband, the famous philosophe the Marquis de Condorcet, to the guillotine. Sebastian’s gaze dropped to Madame Champagne’s left hand. She still wore a simple gold band on her finger, but the dusky lilac silk of her gown told its own story, for lilac was the color of sadness and mourning.

As if aware of the train of his thoughts, she said, “My husband was Baron Jean-Baptiste Champagne. He was killed in the September Massacres, in 1792.”

Sebastian had heard of Jean-Baptiste Champagne. Like the Comte de Virieu and Lally-Tollendal, Champagne had been an early supporter of the Revolutionary movement—before it turned violent and cruel and began devouring its own.

He said, “That’s when you fled France?”

“As soon as I was able, yes.”

Her voice quavered ever so faintly, and she turned her head, showing him only her flawless profile as she studied the flow of elegant carriages in the street, the endless parade of gentlemen on the strut. He found himself wondering about the life she’d once lived—and lost—in Paris, about the horrors she must have witnessed before she finally escaped it all and fled to Venice, and about all the lonely years she’d lived since then, bereft, with her memories.

They sat in silence for a moment, watching as a plumpcheeked dandy with exaggerated shirt points and a painfully nipped-in waist approached the adjoining door that led to the apartments above and disappeared inside. A moment later, the shuffle of his footsteps on the stairs could be faintly heard above the murmurs in the coffee shop.

Sebastian said, “These ‘dangerous men’ you say Ross associated with ... Do you know who they were?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know they were dangerous?”

Again, that faintly amused curving of the lips. “In my experience, men who turn up the collars of their coats and pull their hats low enough to hide their faces are generally to be avoided.”

“Did such men visit Ross often?”

“Often enough.”

“And the night he died?”

“You mean, last Saturday?”

“Yes.”

“What makes you think I would remember such a thing now, a week later?”

“Because on Sunday morning, when you heard Ross had died, you were suspicious. I think you gave some thought as to what you might have observed the night before.”

She raised her cup to her lips and took a sip. “You are very astute, are you not?”

Sebastian said, “Who visited Alexander Ross that night?”

She set her cup down with careful attention. “Well ... Let’s see. First there was a young woman. Or at least, I assume she was young, although it is difficult to be certain since she wore a cloak and had the hood pulled up.”

“A well-dressed young woman?”

“Her cloak was plain, but well cut. I couldn’t see more than that, since she also wore a veil. She was no woman of the streets, if that’s what you’re asking.”