Authors: Penny Richards
Chapter Twenty-One
“Y
ou met Danielle?” Lady Isabelle's dark eyes widened, and she gestured to a chair. “Perhaps you'd better sit down, Lord Gregory. I'll ring for tea. It seems you've quite the story.”
“I can't stay. I just...” Gregory ran a hand through his hair and stalked to the window before turning back to face her. “Why'd you do it?”
“I beg your pardon?”
His hands slicked with sweat and itched inside his gloves. “Why'd you marry your husband? French or not, you could have come to England and chosen any of two dozen men from the ton. Men of wealth and positionâpart of the society you were raised in. Yet you married a commoner.”
She straightened, a defiant gesture that would have caused him to blubber some apology at offending her had he not become accustomed to such actions with Danielle. “You probably think me weak or half-mad for marrying a peasant. But look me in the eyes, Lord Gregory Halston, and tell me, have you ever had anything that mattered ripped away from you? I'm not talking about the natural death of your father or lamenting some childhood friend who's fallen on hard times. I'm speaking of
everything
. Your house. Your servants. Your wealth. Your lands. Your parents, siblings, friends. Your very position in the world and your trust in your countrymen. All of it torn away in a night.”
Her voice shook, and a sickening sensation crept through Gregory's gut. Perhaps he ought not have asked. The French Revolution would have been terrible for someone of her station, and he'd never intended to dredge up painful memories.
“Lady Isabelle, there's no need to continue. I meant notâ”
“Imagine, if you will, what might happen if all your brother's tenants join with half the poor of Hastings and march on your house.” The words shot like little arrows, sharp and determined, from her mouth. “If they pounded down your door and flooded inside, stealing everything they could and smashing that which they couldn't take. Imagine your parents and brother being brutally killed, their heads paraded on pikes through the village, their bodies...their bodies...” She pressed a hand to her mouth while moisture welled in her eyes.
He'd never imagined such a thing, no. He fished around in his pocket for his handkerchief and approached. “I'm sorry. I didn't intend to upset you. I merely wondered...”
He clamped his lips shut. Why had he even asked? He hadn't needed her words so much as he needed to see her happy and contentâwhich she'd been until he brought up her past.
The chamber door swung open. “Lord Gregory, I'm glad to hear of your return. I trust...” Michel Belanger's gaze riveted on his wife.
“Isabelle?” Rather than offer his own handkerchief, he strode toward her and wrapped her in his arms. “Is something wrong,
mon amour
?”
She only sobbed harder.
Belanger turned furious eyes on Gregory. “What did you do to my wife?”
Lady Isabelle shook her head, still burrowed in his chest. “N-nothing. It's not him. He came to ask about Danielle. And I was just explaining...” She drew in another deep, shuddering breath.
“Danielle? As in my niece?”
She nodded and sniffled. “Lord Gregory and Danielle apparently met in France. I assume they came to know each other rather well.”
Michel Belanger glowered at Gregory over his wife's head. “I heard a rumor you'd gone to France for your brother, but I assumed it to be just thatâa rumor. Only a fool would attempt such a thing with Napoleon preparing to invade.”
And only a fool would fall in love with a common woman from Napoleon's country. “Yes, well, as it turns out, I happened upon Danielle and Serge quite by accident, but they proved invaluable on our journey. We arrived at dawn on Julien's fishing boat.”
Jaw hard, Belanger set his wife aside and took a step toward Gregory. “That's information you had best keep to yourself. If anything happens to Julien orâ
“He loves her.” Lady Isabelle pressed the handkerchief to the corner of her eye and gently wiped away the last of her tears.
“What was that?” Belanger turned back toward his wife, his brow marred with confusion.
“Lord Gregory, he loves our Danielle. That's why he's here. He wanted to ask me about why I married you, and if I regret it.”
Gregory swallowed tightly. The time for claiming his feelings were just some passing infatuation or fancy had passed. Perhaps he shouldn't love Danielle. Perhaps he had every reason imaginable not to love her.
But love her he did.
Then again, knowing the truth in his heart and admitting it aloud were two different things. Surely Lady Isabelle understood the impossibilities that faced him if he decided to wed Danielle.
“I...I can't care for Danielle that way.” His voice sounded weak and shaky, even to his own ears.
“So you're going to act like that, are you?” Lady Isabelle laughed derisively. “You're all the same, every last one of you English aristocrats. You look at me as though I'm poor for marrying the man I love and turning my back on the ton, but you don't understand that I'm rich in the ways that matter most. I never finished what I was saying before my husband entered. Allow me to do so before you take your leave.”
Gregory's gut twisted againâa reaction that Isabelle Belanger seemed quite adept at provoking.
“Everything I'd ever known, the entire world I'd grown up in was torn away from me in a matter of days. My own servants stole from me and my sister, the only other member of my immediate family to survive that first terrible night, and we became paupers living in a forgotten cottage on our aunt's decimated estate. I found work as a seamstress while Marie stayed and tended the house. We worked for four years to earn passage to England, and still, Marie was caught and taken to the...the...” She sucked in a heavy breath, her eyes welling with tears anew.
“Hush now, Isabelle. You don't have to share this story.” Belanger reached out to take her hand.
“I do. He needs to hear it.” She drew her shoulders back into her elegant, regal pose. “Imagine all of that, live through that, find a way to survive that. And I guarantee you,
Lord
Gregory Halston, that if a person finds you after all you've lost and offers you helpâ offers you food and water. Offers you life once more...you will not look down on him or her for who their parents are. Nor will you criticize the size of their house or number of their barns.”
She met his gaze, her eyes wet with moisture yet somehow strong and undefeatable. “You will see them as your equal. Because that's who they are. You think money, silks, carriages and lands make you valuable and equal to others with similar holdings? You're wrong. What makes you equal to a person is your heart. Look at a person like my niece and what's inside her heart. I'd wager, Lord Gregory, that hers will surpass the hearts of most young women you'll find in the ton.”
The jagged words lodged like shards of glass, barbed and biting, in his chest. Lady Isabelle was right. Here he thought himself different, better, commendable for giving Danielle a chance when Kessler had belittled her from the start.
He'd listened to her verses about equality and importance before God. He'd even ignored Westerfield and Kessler's warnings about how close he was growing to Danielle.
But he wasn't any better than Kessler or the rest of the tonânot if he was prepared to walk away from Danielle for his own pride.
“God forgive me. I don't deserve her. I've never deserved her. And I'm a fool for not understanding sooner.” He raised his chin and met Lady Isabelle's eyes. “If you'll excuse me, I've a rather urgent matter to attend to.”
One that had already waited far too long.
* * *
“Come back and release me!” Danielle rattled the shackles that chained her arms to the wall above her head. “You've no right to hold me hereâI've done nothing!”
No footsteps echoed and no lantern flickered in the deserted corridor beyond her prison cell, just like no footsteps or lantern or guard had appeared the last twenty times she'd called.
“Help!” she shouted again from her undignified position on the floor. “Please, someone, anyone. I'm not a smuggler. I didn't spy!”
Her words bounced off the bare stone walls and straw-covered floor, but no one came. No one could likely even hear. 'Twas probably part of the reason they'd imprisoned her in the lowest, darkest level of the house of corrections. They planned to forget she existed.
Either that or leave her there without food and water until they hanged her.
Perhaps if she could free herself, somehow find a way to loosen her hands from the shackles or the shackles from the wall, she could use them to bludgeon the guards when they came for her. She twisted her wrists inside the unforgiving metal bands above. They bit into her flesh, causing a thin stream of blood to trail down her arm, but they didn't slacken or allow her hands to slip in the slightest. She got up onto her knees and attempted to turn toward the damp stone wall. The chains that held her twisted in the process, and she gave them a good, hard yank.
The bolts anchoring the chains didn't budge.
She pulled again, the shackle on her left wrist dug fiercely into her flesh, producing yet another stream of blood. She yelped, then fell against the wall. 'Twas no use. Her side hurt from the strain her writhing put on her wound, and the bands weren't about to give.
It was probably just as well. Fighting the excise men and then the prison guards earlier had done little but get her face cuffed, her stomach bludgeoned and her arms chained above her head. Now she had to use the privyâor rather, the foul bucket over in the cornerâbut had no means of doing so.
“Come back! I need to be unchained.”
And she needed to know where Julien was. Both the excise men and the guards had been silent about him when she'd demanded answers, and she'd not seen him when the guards led her past the filled cells upstairs.
Was he chained down here as she was?
If so, would he not have heard her cries and answered? The small barred window in the cell door allowed at least some sound to carry. It also allowed the only bit of light she had, which flickered through the ghastly bars from the lantern across the corridor.
She raised herself onto her knees, trying to get a better view of the corridor through the window. Why did no one come? Where were the guards?
Where was Gregory?
She pressed her eyes shut against the hot flood of moisture that rushed through them at the mere thought of his name. Would he come for her? Did he know she'd been imprisoned? If so, did he care enough to help?
The hard set to his eyes when she'd declared her love for him that morning swam through her mind. He'd washed his hands of her, then turned his back and walked away.
Oui
, she'd told him to send one of his servants back to the beach with her money, but the servant would probably see the cave absent of people and the boat and assume they'd returned to France early.
With Julien having disappeared and Gregory thinking she'd already left for France, who would help her?
“God, did I do something wrong? Why am I here? I was only trying to help. Only trying to treat men the way You would have me treat them, even if they were English.”
She stared up into the darkness, at the eerie play of shadows across the cracked stone ceiling of her cell. But no heavenly answer drifted down from above.
To think she'd been worried about being thrust into a French prison, had even felt bad for what Westerfield and Kessler endured in her country. Now she suffered the same fate they had previously known. Was that why she was here? Some strange sort of justice that resulted from the hate-filled broken world in which they lived? First Westerfield and Kessler were wrongly imprisoned, now her?
She leaned back against the cold stone and shivered. That would make sense had she turned her back on Gregory and refused to nurse Westerfield, had she left them as she'd first planned to after learning all of France thought them spies.
But she hadn't turned her back on them. She'd helped.
And for what?
To end up rejected by the man she loved, rotting in the depths of some foul British dungeon for a crime she hadn't committed?
A tear slipped down her cheek, and she hadn't even the ability to brush it away.
Was it just this morning she'd dreamed of marrying Gregory? Had hoped he'd confess his love when she'd told him of hers? The idea seemed laughable now. Gregory wasn't coming. No one was coming. Westerfield and Kessler had languished in their dungeon for over a year. Would she languish just as long? Or would the excise men take her before a magistrate and see her hanged long before the year was out?
“Help!” she called one more time into the darkness, her voice weaker and quieter than when she'd first started shouting many hours ago.
Like all the other times, no one came.
* * *
Gregory ducked his head against the salty winter wind coming off the sea as his horse raced over the road toward the hills lining the shore. His saddlebags held six thousand pound notesâthe four thousand he'd promised Danielle, the one thousand he'd promised Julien plus an extra thousand for...
Well, he didn't precisely know, but Danielle and her family deserved it nonetheless.
He'd offer her every last note. He prayed she'd take none of it and agree to marry him. Or maybe she'd take all of it and still agree to marry him, sending the monies back to France with her brother.
As long as she became his wife. Then the two of them could sneak back across the channel to France, where they could live...but no, France wouldn't make a good home for him and his English accent. He'd be arrested as a spy within a week and end up in one of those forgotten dungeon cells, if not beneath the guillotine's blade. And Danielle would probably be accused of treason with him.