Lord of Regrets (20 page)

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Ten days had passed since the Russian Emperor had led his victorious procession into Paris. Napoleon had abdicated, but amidst talk about when and where the new peace talks would resume was the continued question of whether Bonaparte or Bourbon for the French throne. Now Marcus was entering Paris as well. However, all he truly cared about was talk of return to London.

At last he had had correspondence. The letters of his mother and cousin contained minutiae of everything that had occurred since his departure. And now that the end was in sight, the desire to leave, to sweep Natasha out of his grandfather’s decaying reach, nearly overwhelmed him. Who knew what damage had been done in a few short months? One more failure he now had to lay at his own feet. Marcus had promised to protect Natasha, and instead he had abandoned her. As time had passed, the painful edge of their last argument had dulled. Now it was only the echo of her cry, “you, you, you,” that kept him from begging her forgiveness again.

He pulled himself out of his thoughts, refocused his gaze just as they passed through the gates into Paris. Deafening. Even through the closed windows of his carriage. He had been curious about Paris, but this first view was nothing he had ever imagined. He would have missed the scents, the overwhelming smells that seeped into his carriage––dirt and dust and horse and masses of humanity. And death. The stench of decomposing bodies––human and horse––

“Strange, isn’t it, Pell?”

“Sir?” Pell looked at him quizzically.

“To be here at long last. Those summers I was sent abroad, to study diplomacy,” Marcus said with a laugh. Those journeys that were more filled with boyish exploration than any real academic education. “In all that time, I never went to France.”

“Yes, my lord,” Pell agreed. “It is strange at that.”

As eager as he was to return to England, as infuriated as he was by the knowledge that his grandfather had once again manipulated his life to his use, Marcus knew that this brief appointment had educated him in a way that Cambridge never had.

Diplomacy was as much about select inaction and restraint as it was about bold, obvious moves. He had learned the power of strategic science as a youth and discovered it anew in practice, but there were things that one knew and then things of which one needed to be reminded at intervals. Marcus had champed at the bit to leave Dijon and the Austrian Headquarters, and had at first thought it ridiculous that Castlereagh pleaded the easily proven false excuse of bad roads to delay the journey to Paris. But then they received word from Sir Charles Stewart, Lord Castlereagh’s half brother. By holding back, the foreign secretary was laying good groundwork with the Austrians for negotiations regarding Italy. He was also using the opportunity to see which way the wind blew before agreeing to whatever tentative terms had been hatched in Paris.

Those decisions were apparently to be made immediately as the carriage containing Lord Castlereagh and Prince Metternich stopped in front a large, imposing house at the corner of rue de Rivoli and rue St. Florentin, which was, Marcus was told, the home of Monsieur Talleyrand, where the Tsar was apparently residing. Leaving Pell to organize their own lodgings, Marcus followed the men inside. He settled in an antechamber while the other men were closeted away in discussion and careful negotiations. Marcus waited, presumably, for orders that might take him on any number of errands. There was something about the room in which he sat, some way sound echoed, or dust settled, which sent his thoughts barreling to memories that were more like a sense, a taste of a time before with Natasha. For those brief moments, it was as if he could live there, soar into that other life. Then the moment was gone, and he was left shuddering, wanting.

There was no going back. All that existed was the way forward, and though he had acted rashly, reacted to Natasha’s rage with an impulsive hopelessness, he knew there
was
hope. The lessons of diplomacy could be utilized at home as well as abroad.

After the first shock, he lingered over thoughts of Natasha, dragging up full memories that fed his fantasies. Under the shadow of a large hanging tapestry, he imagined Natasha’s bare skin, the slope of her shoulder, the greediness of her passion.

Hours later, in the darkness before the dawn, Marcus finally made his way to the rooms his valet had secured. They were a rather mean set of rooms, shared with another British attaché and that man’s servant, but Pell had been told by the belligerent landlord to be grateful to have secured any rooms at all as half of Europe’s soldiers had infested Paris. From what Marcus could tell, the man was correct. The armies of a half dozen countries peopled the streets, congregating in cafés and public houses, drinking, stacked ten to a room at night. Though the first two days were spent playing courier, taking letters back and forth across Paris, the next were nearly empty of duties as they were waiting until the soon-to-be king of France arrived in Paris. With few specific duties, himself negligible in the chain of power, and swallowed up by edifices so much grander than his imagination had ever been, Marcus found that every day he spent in Paris, he felt more lost.

Until the day he came back to his rooms and Gerard was there, dressed like a gentleman, the dark clothes of his shadow-life gone.

After the first brief moment of surprise, Marcus accepted his presence, found it unremarkable that this mysterious half brother of his would be able to track him down, would even want to find him again. He was family, in as inevitable a way as Leona and Natasha were.

“Even for a bastard son, these rooms are impossible,” Gerard declared, his deprecating gaze sweeping over the tiny apartment with its frayed decorations.

“They are what they are,” Marcus said with a shrug and a glance at Pell who was just visible in the antechamber through the open door. Gerard glanced as well, then scuffed the inside of his shoe against the worn parquet floor.

“I suppose they are that,” Gerard admitted. “You’d better stay with me.”

Marcus’s gaze shot up immediately. Those hollow eyes stared through him almost. A mask. What was behind it?

“I’m curious about you,” Gerard said, offering an answer to Marcus’s unspoken question. “About what I might have been.”

Marcus had no response to that, but Pell urged Marcus with pleading eyes to agree.

“I suppose we’d best,” Marcus said.

Later that evening, after Pell had overseen the transfer of belongings and Marcus had completed his last official duty of the day, he arrived at Gerard’s apartment.

It was every bit as commodious and luxurious as the man had intimated. Marcus wondered if this were the sort of apartment Natasha’s parents had lived in before they fled Paris. Or had it been something even grander, more in line with Talleyrand’s residence?

“Welcome,” Gerard said, clasping him on the back. “Here, let’s have a drink. Unless you had your fill at Monsieur Talleyrand’s?” He said the man’s name with an amused sneer.

“I was only there for a moment, to deliver letters. I thought the man part of Napoleon’s government, but apparently there is bad blood there,” Marcus said, throwing his coat across the arm of the sofa a moment before he threw himself down.

“Talleyrand,” Gerard repeated with a smirk. “The man is wilier than anyone and has no loyalty. He should be away from Paris, with the empress, but yet here he is.”

“What are you saying?”

“He arranged to make himself needed here so he could ensure Napoleon is deposed and ensure his own future security. Men like him, and like the Austrian Metternich, are wilier than even our grandfather. Remember that.”

There was a bond between Gerard and himself. Marcus wondered if the bond would be there with his other six illegitimate half siblings. Or was it the shadow of Lord Landsdowne that did this? Gerard had spoken of loyalty. Was he loyal to their grandfather?

“What do you do, Gerard, when you are not working for
grandpere
?” He emphasized the last word with a slight sneer, the way his half brother had first said it. “How are you supported?”

“Not by soap,” Gerard answered with a laugh and then gestured out the window, across the river. “Look, the lilac is in bloom. Abundant.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

…do not let my grandfather intimidate you. You need not answer to him in any way. He is not to be trusted. I am staying with my brother, Gerard––I did not write you of him yet––he is my half brother, older by several years and raised in Paris by a tutor my grandfather furnished. If you wish to write me, you may do so to this address. The post should be more reliable now. I do hope to hear from you.

The tenor of Marcus’s letters had changed abruptly from polite distance to something more familiar. There was nothing overt, no professed desire for her, no apologies, and yet, that very lack appealed to her. He wrote only of his experiences, and Natasha was able to view him just as a man, to share through his words the details of his life. In return, she did the same.

As May passed and edged into June, there was so much to recount. The Season was riotous, jubilant, and the new Viscountess Templeton was invited almost everywhere, her scandalous past overshadowed by the news of Napoleon’s abdication and by the fact that her husband was now
in France
at the center of the action.

Abdication. Elba. Routed. Napoleon
.

Marcus would be coming home. No anger filled her at the thought, merely a curiosity, an excitement, an idea that something would be different. In his absence, she was finding her place, enjoying London, some hybrid of the Natasha of her youth and the Mrs. Prothe of Little Parrington.

Life flowed, moved without anything to differentiate the days. Her friendship with Jane and her meaningless flirtation with Carslyle offered diversion. And though she knew it would anger Marcus to hear of that flirtation, its simple existence offered her confidence. No matter how limited her world, she had choices.

At a dinner at Lord Langley’s house, Lord Landsdowne pulled her aside, congratulated her on weathering the storm. He no longer terrified her, and the conversations of his intimates as well were ones in which she could hold her own.

The earl was hunched over his cane, shifting slowly from side to side, wavering almost, but the servant who was always by his side did nothing to steady him.

“Thank you, my lord,” she said quietly, knowing something was expected of her. “You have been kind to me.”

“You are family, Lady Templeton,” he chided. “Family is the most important. I have tried to impart this to Marcus, but he has always been stubborn. Set in his ways.”

She laughed, the warm rush of affection she felt for this image of her husband startling her. “He is stubborn. And determined.”

The earl inched closer, his shuffling bringing him almost to her ear, and when he finally spoke in a whisper, she realized that this had been his intent.

“Marchmont’s been keeping strange company, I hear.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Natasha demurred, though she had heard the same thing from Jane about the man widely considered to be one of the greatest scientific minds of their day. These people were strangers for all she went to their dinners, danced in their drawing rooms. If one were to label company strange, Natasha might very well find herself in that category, especially as she’d collected some of what Jane labeled a “fast set.” Especially as she had agreed to sit for Monsieur Aleceur.

“I am worried for my friends. Most of all for Lady Marchmont.”

“Worried, my lord?”

“Yes. Lady Jane calls me a foolish old man for my concerns, but you understand. Next to family are my friends, my dear friends, and I wouldn’t want them mixed up in anything that might endanger them.”

“Surely not. I can understand your concern, but I assure you I know nothing of it.”

“Perhaps if you spent some more time with Lady Marchmont,” he suggested, trailing off, shifting away.

The request was made so casually, so out of concern for his good friend, that it was only after Lord Landsdowne left that she recognized of the oddness of the request. All the little intrigues of his group were the sort she had heard of in her father’s stories of the Russian court, but yet were so different from the blunt brutality of her own family’s history. And Marcus had warned her not to trust Lord Landsdowne.

Sound came back to her in a rush as she looked around the room: the clinking of glass, the high pitch of female conversation and the lower thrum of the men, the discordant notes of the violinist’s instrument receiving its last tuning.

Jane stood with two men whom Natasha vaguely recognized. She had been introduced to them, but at that moment she could not name them.

“My luck.”

At the now familiar voice, Natasha looked to her right and found Carslyle holding two glasses of champagne. He was smiling, but as usual there was no smile in his eyes. She accepted her glass with her own surface smile. This was why she liked the man; to hide his own secrets, he would never wish to know what lay beneath.

“My sister says these are the driest gatherings in London,” Carslyle commented, scanning the room over his glass.

“I didn’t realize you had a sister, my lord.”

“Yes. How do you find these soirees?”

“The conversation is quite enlightening. Of course, my opinions seem to be in the minority,” she admitted.

“Ah, well. You aren’t like us. It’s refreshing,” he said, and she felt half offended, half relieved by his words. She didn’t want to be like these people, who talked about issues that affected thousands of people as if those people didn’t matter. As if all that mattered was what Jane called, “the essential preservation of our way of life.” But after all these months of playing along, braving the sideways glances and behind-hands whispers, a part of her wanted to belong.

“I am rather like one of those animals in the menagerie, caged and tittered at,” she said, punctuating her words with a studied sip of her champagne. She thought of the way her mother would lift the glass, the elegant curve of her wrist.

He laughed, and for a moment it frustrated her. It seemed that condescension oozed from these people like sap from trees. They could no more help it than the trees could. So smug, so settled in their knowledge. Marcus, for all his overbearing need to possess her, had never once looked at her as anything other than an equal.

Memories flashed through her mind like lightning: Marcus helping her clear the table, walking into the nursery with that puppy in his arms, standing at her front door with his declaration of love on his lips. She wanted to curl up and savor these images, and then the fondness of her thoughts shocked her.

“But in all seriousness, Lady Templeton,” Carslyle said, dragging her attention back to him. “Whoever would wish to cage you?”