Ann Lethbridge - Regency Society

Paris seemed to reach out and consume him again, the subterfuge of ten lonely years lying heavily across the last weeks in England when his body had begun to uncoil into something approaching a normal life. With a hat pulled down over his eyes he was the man he had once been, the knife strapped to his ankle sharp and honed and another one hidden beneath the folds of his shirt equally as keen. He made his breathing slower by sheer dint of will, a trick he had learned from endless nights of marking time.

Finally, just as the sun had gone and the moon had taken its place, there was movement and the sound of footsteps on the wooden decking.

Hoisting himself up, Cristo stayed under the shelter of shadow, a silent shape stalking his quarry without sound. When he was close enough he pulled the knife from his belt, the silver tang of it heavy in his hand as he pressed it against the throat of the one he had caught.

‘Pas un mot, vous comprendez?’

Not a word, you understand?

As the man realized the danger, his fingers reached for his pocket. Cristo pressed his blade in harder and they instantly stilled.

‘De Caviglione.’

‘Dupont.’

Manners in the heart of death-dealing.

‘Where is Beraud?’

‘I do not know.’

The blade nicked through the cloth, drawing blood.

‘Wrong answer. Where is he?’

True fear beaded Dupont’s upper lip and the bottom one began to quiver.

‘In the building with the tower next to this one! He has your lady.’

‘He …? What …?’ Anger made the words lethal and fear chilled Cristo to the bone. ‘They have Eleanor? Why?’

The time to tread carefully was long gone and Dupont, reading his fury, began to sob. ‘I did not know he planned to do this. The child is only young …’

A child as well? Florencia.

Lifting the heavy hilt of his knife, he brought it down hard across Dupont’s temple and left him face down on the dirtied cobblestones.

Beraud’s lair was exactly where Dupont had said it would be and Cristo came in through the back door, dispensing with the locks in less than a minute.

Two men outside the room on the second floor were on guard. He met them in French with his beret pulled down low.

‘Beraud wants you downstairs now …’

By the time he had finished speaking they had seen his eyes and by then it was far too late. They fell quietly for large men and he dragged both into an empty room at one end of the corridor, binding their mouths, feet and hands with strips of leather he had brought with him for the purpose.

A chink of light showed beneath a door at the end of the passage way and even as he listened he heard the quiet crying of a child.

Eleanor came back to consciousness in a room that smelt of fish. Florencia was tucked in beside her, sobbing quietly. When Eleanor brought her finger to her mouth to ask for silence, she could hear the sea lapping at the floorboards.

A warehouse on the dock. She was sure that was where they had been taken and the next thought made her temples throb. If they were transported by boat out of London, anything might happen to them. Fear dried her mouth.

Lifting her other hand, she saw that the blood on her fingers was congealed and sticky. Pain lanced through her lip and her side and she shifted her position to accommodate the ache. To the left some twenty yards away the man from Paris and another stood talking, a pile of money stacked between them on a table.

Florencia shook in fear, hot tears running onto her silken dress and shadowing the yellow.

‘It will be all right, Florencia. I promise.’ Sometimes lies were a balm to truth but the terror in her was growing with each passing second.

‘The man gave me a bon-bon.’ She raised the sticky sweetness up, wailing as Eleanor knocked the treat from her hands and it rolled across the floor, collecting dust and wheat grains and fibre.

‘You must not eat anything they give you,’ she said even as she sidled to the right. There had to be something here she could hide, some solid sharp object that would allow her at least a moment of surprise. She found it in a hook embedded in a sack of grain, the shaft of it threaded with rope. When she tested the point, blood welled on the pad on her finger. If anyone touched Florencia, she would gouge out their eyes. She swore she would as she fitted the weapon into her palm.

Noises from outside made her start. A crash and some swearing and then the door was flung open, a voice she knew rising above others further out.

‘Where is she?’ The sound of a gun firing and then the stench of powder curling into the room!

Florencia screamed, frozen in terror, her dark eyes like two holes in her pale face, and then Cristo Wellingham was there, the boot of his heel through the door and the shot fired, loud and fierce, no quarter given. It was the metal shield he carried that had saved him, Eleanor realised later, though how he had known the man might aim for his head and not his chest …

Two knives flew almost in unison and then there was silence, the smoke curling as Cristo’s eyes met her own, dark amber cold as steel.

‘Eleanor?’ Her name? She could see him say it, but there was no sound, only his mouth opening as the distance between them closed. Two feet and then one. Her face damp with blood and sweat and tears as she came against him, Florencia in her arms.

Her heartbeat was dull in her head and then they were outside in the rain, heavy and cleansing, the chill of it washing away all traces of death.

She grabbed at her daughter, hands threading through silver and silver, hardly knowing where one of them began and the other one ended. As sound returned his words were not in English but in French, quiet and honest and infinitely calming.

‘It is over, Eleanor. You are safe.’

Nodding, she stayed there in his arms until her breathing softened. When she finally pulled away she saw his eyes were full of a pain that had nothing to do with the physical as he gazed at Florencia.

‘You would not have told me?’ His injured hand reached out for the silver in her hair.

Still in French. A protection, she realized, against his daughter listening. The muscles in his arms showed through the material in his jacket. Powerful. Strong. She watched as he touched Florencia for the very first time, infinite care and love in the movement.

‘Tell me that you would have told me, damn it. Eleanor. I need to hear at least that.’

His eyes were closed now and the muscle on the side of the jaw rippled in tension.

‘No. She is mine, Cristo, because to say anything else would be to destroy her. Don’t you see that?’

The shadows in his eyes when he opened them again were bruised with both anger and want.

‘Yet by saying nothing you destroy me?’

Her bottom lip quivered as the challenge registered. A choice, then? A man who had walked in the shadows of the world and whose sins were coming back to be visited upon those all about him, dangerous, perilous, the fortunate outcome of the evening’s happenings only decided by a miracle! He had killed two men right in front of her eyes and never blinked once.

Pulling back, she broke contact, the guilt of another feeling sticking in her throat.

‘The man you killed was from the Château Giraudon. I remember him as the one who hurt my thigh.’

He nodded. ‘Etienne Beraud. He was a French spy.’

‘As you were an English one? If anything had happened to Florencia because of our past … because of your past …’

Reality crashed in and his eyes acknowledged her withdrawal. Already the sounds of others were coming closer, the real world of London and its people, running steps and voices of authority. The constabulary. She saw the shape of their hats even as Cristo Wellingham drew away.