Annie Burrows - Regency Innocents

Just as they reached the companionway, a messenger dashed up to them. ‘Countess of Walton? Formerly Mademoiselle Bergeron?’ he panted.

When she nodded, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a letter. ‘Thank heaven I reached you in time.’ He grinned. ‘Urgent, the sender said it was, that I got this to you before you left France.’ His mission complete, the man melted back into the crowd that thronged the quayside.

‘You had better open it at once,’ she heard Charles say, and he pulled her slightly to one side, so that they did not impede other passengers from boarding.

‘It is from my mother,’ she said, after swiftly scanning the few lines of hastily scrawled script. ‘Du Mauriac is dead.’

Translating for Charles, she read, “‘… the Royalist officials sent to arrest him employed such zeal that many Bonapartists rushed to his aid. In the ensuing brawl, somebody stabbed him. Nobody knows yet who it was …’”

She clutched the letter to her bosom, her eyes closing in relief. Charles was safe.

‘What violent times we live in,’ Charles remarked, wondering why it felt as though the dock had lurched beneath his feet.

Heloise had only married him to escape Du Mauriac’s clutches. What a pointless gesture she had made. If only she had waited a few days, and not panicked, she would not have had to make that ultimate sacrifice.

‘Dear me,’ he observed. ‘You need not have married me after all.’

Oh, poor Charles! He was already smarting from taking on a wife he did not really want, and now he had learned that at least part of his reason for doing so had ceased to exist.

But, instead of betraying his annoyance, he held out his arm and said in an icily polite voice, ‘Will you come aboard now, madam?’

Oh, dear. She gulped. How he must wish he could just leave her on the quayside and go back to England alone. But he was too honourable even to suggest such a thing. Laying her hand upon his sleeve, she followed him up the gangplank, her heart so leaden in her chest she wondered it could keep beating.

He showed her to the cabin he had procured for the voyage, then informed her that he was going on deck. His face was frozen, his posture rigid, and she ached for his misery. It hurt all the more to know she was the cause of it!

Charles hardly dared breathe until the last rope was cast off and the ship began to slide out of the harbour. She had not made a last desperate bid for freedom. Even when the coast of France was no more than a smudge on the horizon, she remained resolutely belowdecks.

Avoiding him.

He paced restlessly, heedless of the spray which repeatedly scoured the decks.

His conscience was clear. After a night spent wrestling with it, he had deliberately given her several opportunities to give him the slip during the day. Why had she not taken them? She was not staying with him because she was avaricious, nor was she all that impressed by his title.

The only thing that might explain her resolute determination to stick to their bargain was the fact she had given her word. Did it mean so much to her? He pictured her eyes, burning with zeal when she had promised to be the best wife she knew how to be, and accepted that it must.

It was a novel concept, to link a woman with integrity. But then Heloise, he was beginning to see, was not like any woman he had ever known.

Below decks, Heloise groaned, wishing she could die. Then he would be sorry. She whimpered, reaching for the conveniently positioned bucket yet again. Or would he? No, he would probably just shrug one shoulder and declare that it was a great pity, but after all he could always marry someone else. It was not as though he cared for her—no, not one jot. How could he, to leave her to endure such suffering alone?

Not that she wanted him to see her in such a demeaning state, she amended, heaving into the bucket for what seemed like the hundredth time.

Oh, when would this nightmare be over? How long before she could leave this foul-smelling cupboard and breathe fresh air again?

Never, she realised, after an eternity had rolled and pitched relentlessly past. Though she could hear the sounds of the hull grating against the dock, of officers shouting commands and sailors running to obey, she was too weak to so much as lift her head from the coarse cotton pillow.

‘Come, now, my lady,’ she heard her husband’s voice say, none too patiently. ‘We have docked. It is high time to disembark—Good God!’

The evidence of Heloise’s violent seasickness finally caught his eyes.

‘Go away,’ she managed resentfully when he approached the bunk, stern purpose in his eyes. He was a brute to insist she get up and move. Later, once the ship had remained steady for several hours, she might regain the strength to crawl. ‘Leave me here to die,’ she moaned.

‘Nobody has ever yet died of seasickness,’ he said briskly, swinging her into his arms. It was amazing how cheerful he felt to discover it was seasickness which had kept her belowdecks, when he had been imagining her lying there weeping for her lost freedom. ‘I know it must have been unpleasant for you, but you will be right as a trivet once you get upon dry land.’

‘Unpleasant?’ she protested. ‘I have never suffered anything so horrid. How could you be so cruel as to force me to go to sea in a storm? I think—’ she hiccupped down a sob ‘—that I hate you.’

‘I am sure you don’t mean that,’ he reproved her mildly. Although he wasn’t at all convinced. ‘Besides, the sea was scarcely more than a bit choppy.’ He consoled himself with the reflection that, even if she did hate him, nothing but the direst distress would ever induce her to endure another sea voyage.

He had planned to push on to London straight away, but he could not force Heloise to travel in her weakened state. He told the coachman to stop at the first hotel that could offer a suite of rooms.

He left her to herself for as long as he could. But when night fell concern for her had him knocking on her door and marching in before she had time to deny him admittance.

She was sitting up in bed, looking much better. Indeed, the nearer he got to the bed, the rosier her cheeks grew …

He checked in the middle of the room, biting down on a feeling of irritation. Did she think he was crass enough to insist on his marital rights, after she had been so ill? But before he could begin to defend himself Heloise blurted out, ‘Oh, I am so sorry, Charles, about what I said.’

‘What exactly that you said are you apologising for?’ He frowned, drawing a chair to her bedside and settling himself on it.

‘For saying that I hate you! I thought you meant to force me to walk off that ship and try to behave like a lady, when all I wished to do was die. I never guessed you were going to pick me up and carry me. And I had spent the entire voyage cursing you, so it was hard to get myself out of thinking that everything was entirely your fault. Indeed, at that precise moment I think I did hate you. But of course now I have calmed down I fully accept it is not your fault that I have seasickness. And you weren’t at all cruel to force me to go on that ship. It would only have been cruel if you had known how ill I would be—and how could you, when I never knew myself? For I have never been on a ship before!’

‘Nor will you ever set foot on one again,’ he said with determination.

She shuddered. ‘Indeed not.’

He paused. ‘You know, of course, that means you can never return to France.’