Naomi Rawlings - Sanctuary for a Lady

“I told you.”

“Don’t feed me another lie about Arras.” He dug the heel of his boot into the ground. “Quel est votre nom?”

He wanted to know her name? Her eyes fought the malevolent black of his gaze. Isabelle Cerise de La Rouchecauld, second daughter of the late Duc de La Rouchecauld, Louis-Alexandre. And after my sister was captured last week, all the province of Artois is searching for me.

The words burned inside her, though why after years of hiding she should desire to confess her identity to a band of soldats, she didn’t know. Her jaw trembled as she opened her mouth to recite the familiar story. “Isabelle Chenior. The daughter of a cobbler traveling to Saint-Valery to see her aunt.”

Her chest grew tight. What if he forced the true answer from her? The man carried enough power, he could make her talk. And if he learned of her heritage, he’d take her to Paris, where she’d be executed before the raucous mob. With her ancestry dating back to the tenth century, the crowd would be wild for her blood.

As the mob must have been for her sister’s. A sob welled in Isabelle’s chest, but she shoved it down. She’d not think of Marie now, nor of her role in her sister’s death.

The leader snorted. “Isabelle Chenoir, daughter of a cobbler? You lie again, but your name matters not. You all end up at the guillotine.”

Yes, let him think her name didn’t matter.

One of the soldiers trotted over. “Found the money.”

The leader held out his hand for the pouch of coins and bundle of assignats she’d hidden in the secret pocket of her valise. Her stomach clenched. Five years of her seamstress’s wages, and the man palmed it as though she’d earned it in an hour.

Even as he took the money, the leader’s gaze never left hers. A silent battle raged between them. Isabelle refused to drop her eyes. He was waiting for that very thing, it seemed. Her final surrender. If only her stare could fend him off forever.

He released the hair he’d been fingering and touched her cheek. She resisted an instinctive flinch as his cold skin pressed against her face. “You know what gave your identity away? That stare. A seamstress wouldn’t look at me as though she were a queen.”

He backed away. “Kill her, boys.”

With the first blow to her kidneys, she couldn’t stifle her scream.

* * *

Michel Belanger surveyed the land before him as the early sun painted the bare fields golden. He drew in a deep breath, smelled the earth and cold and animals.

His eyes traveled over the small, tree-lined fields as they did every morning.

Thirty-six acres. The land had been his for four years, seven months and thirteen days.

And he loathed it.

He’d promised to care for the farm when his father died, but the obligation choked him, forever chaining him to northern France.

His neighbors were fools for thinking a declaration from the National Assembly freed them. True, the August Decrees four and a half years ago liberated land from the seigneurs and Church. But before, a man could leave a farm and seek work elsewhere. Now peasants like him owned their land. And the ownership only tied them to the monotonous work. Shackled their children and grandchildren to the unforgiving earth.

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. It was a verse he’d rather not have memorized.

Michel’s eyes roved the fields yet to be planted and rested on the stone and half-timbered cottage that sat at the field’s edge. He knew every bump and crag of the chipping wattle and daub, the manner in which sunlight slanted through the windows, the way shadows played in the corners of the two rooms. He came into the world in that house, and despite his dreams, he’d leave the world in that same structure.

But a promise was a promise, and he would work the land until it drained the life from his blood, as had happened to Père. The Belangers hadn’t worked for three generations only to have the eldest son turn his back on the land. He would work hard. He would tame the land and add to it. And one day, he would pass it to his son. And mayhap that son would love the land as his late father had, as his brother still did, despite Jean Paul’s decision to leave home.

But the day for heirs and inheritance lay distant, the only flicker of hope against a broad, dark horizon.

Until then, he would work.

Fishing pole in hand, Michel turned his back and followed the deer path through the woods to the pond he’d fished for the past twenty-one of his twenty-seven years. He and Mère hadn’t much meat to grace their table. That should’ve changed with the Révolution, and had—for a time. Then last summer the beshrewed Convention in Paris said bread in the cities cost too much, so they imposed price controls on grain.

His grain.

Now a sack of wheat brought hardly enough to care for his mother. Let alone cover the cost of his seed.

Michel scratched the back of his neck. Five years, and the Révolution that promised liberty, equality and fraternity had given him nothing.

The four-kilometer path was as familiar to him as the texture of field dirt in his hand, his feet so used to the twigs and stones that the feel of the earth alone underfoot could have guided him. Tilting his face toward the sky, he let the budding light warm his skin. Another month and the sounds of birds and frogs would serenade him while squirrels chased one another up beech trees.

A stick cracked beneath his boot, and the noise sent a startled woodcock flying from the brush with its distinct whirr. He smiled, his eyes following the flight of the brown bird into the sky. Then he glimpsed something foreign in the familiar sea of earth and tree trunks and logs. A scrap of blue fabric. He veered from his path, took a step closer.

Cold sweat beaded on his forehead. Three meters past a ripped valise and the discarded dress that first caught his eye, a body lay facedown on the forest floor.

Chapter Two

A mass of wild black hair covered the back of the girl who lay before Michel. Her dress was torn and stained with mud and filth, one sleeve shredded and bloody with a thorny branch still entangled in the crude linen.

The flurry of footprints surrounding her told the story of her struggle. And struggle she had, against what looked to be a gang of four or five men.

Michel scanned the familiar trees, his fingers aching for the worn wood of his musket. Were her murderers still here? No movement caught his eye. No palpable tension raised the hairs on his neck. Most likely her attackers had dragged her from the road, brought her to the clearing to rob and rape, then killed her, abandoning the body immediately after.

He hoped her death had been swift. No one deserved such a painful and humiliating end.

He picked his way through the scattered clothes and neared the girl. Was there family to notify of her death? A father searching for his beloved daughter?

He crouched to touch her hand, and swallowed back a sudden surge of bile at the sight of her left forearm twisted at an impossible angle.

Whoever would treat an innocent girl such deserved death.

Laying his fishing pole in the dirt, he ran his fingers over her hand. Cold, but not icy, not stiff. Could she be alive? Using both hands, he gently rolled her onto her back.

And stilled.

A fairy-tale princess. She must be. Dark curls of hair fanned beneath her head and rippled like waves on a pond. Her creamy skin looked as though it had never seen a day under the sun. A curtain of dark eyelashes fell against her high cheekbones. But no deep red hue stained her lips. Instead, a deathlike white clung to their shapely form.