Promise Me Heaven (26 page)

Cat felt the lump of the pendant pressing against her leg. No one deserved to be tortured. Withdrawing the gem, she slid the bauble across the table in front of Daphne. It glittered and blinked, trapping the pale light and returning it as brilliant, dancing radiance. Cat heard the sharp intake of Daphne’s breath.

“
C’est magnifique!
”

“
C’est
fake.”

“Really?” Daphne held the pendant up to the window, studying it with a practiced eye. “Ah, yes. But such a good one!”

“If you are willing to risk having it discovered as paste, it’s yours.”

Daphne’s eyes held Cat’s for a second before her fist closed in a tight knot over the sparkling glass. She rose at once, as though having gotten from Cat what she wanted she had no further use of her. But then, on the point of leaving, she hesitated and looked down at Cat.

“I did everything I could to seduce him. Everything. But he was already seduced far beyond my ability to compete. By you.”

Cat made her way out of the café, her heart pounding painfully in her chest. She was alone, and no one was going to be coming for her. She was trapped without money, family, or friends. Fear worked on her, causing her legs to shake beneath her gown. She forced herself to walk calmly through the vacant lobby and up the stairs to her room.

She had to think. She couldn’t give in to unproductive hysteria. She wiped her damp palms against the soft wool of her skirts. There had to be a way. There had to be. If only Thomas were here.

Her surprise at discovering he had been a spy had ebbed. It made so much sense in light of what she knew. But other things the Frenchwoman had said worked torturously on her. She wanted so much to believe Daphne’s avowal that Thomas had resisted her.

And yet, Cat admitted to herself, it did not seem to matter to her heart what Thomas had done, or not done. The Frenchwoman’s words gave justification for something her heart needed no reason for. She did not love Thomas any more now than when she had been convinced of his amorality.

Even as she thought of him, her spirits fell. She did not know where he was, she only knew something must have kept him from her side otherwise he would have been here by now. Thomas saw her as his responsibility. He would never willingly turn his back on an obligation. But she must have faith in him. She must believe he would be all right. To do otherwise was to court madness.

It was nearly eleven. She had to face facts: she was going to have to get herself out of Paris. And there was no time to lose. If Daphne was right blockades were being set up even as she stood here in stupid immobility.

She went to Hecuba’s room. Her aunt must have left something of value behind. Cat hastily rummaged through the abandoned piles of clothing and boxes. Fifteen minutes later, she sank onto the bed, her shoulders bowed in defeat. A pair of gold ear studs, a tourmaline brooch, a poorly made paste choker, a small cameo, and an emerald chip clasp lay in her lap. She stared at the small hoard. Altogether they weren’t worth as much as the paste pendant she’d given Daphne Bernard.

Tears blurred her vision and she dashed them away with the back of her hand. She would sign away her future if she wasted valuable time crying. She picked up a lump of something and worried it with her fingers, forcing herself to think. A sharp pin pricked her thumb, and she dropped the lump, sucking at the bead of blood. What the devil was the confounded thing, anyway? It was one of Aunt Hecuba’s many bust improvers. There were dozens of the things scattered all over the place.

Cat’s eyes narrowed and she swiveled her head toward the vanity on which stood half-full pots of creams, lotions, and paints. Without a sound, she started to undress.

Monsieur Giroux, manager of the hotel, watched the old lady hobble unsteadily down the grand stairway, her hands clutched around a small but heavy-looking portmanteau. So Lady Montaigne White has rededicated her life to God, he thought sardonically, noting the thick swathing of dark wool around the stout, bowed body, the heavy veil, and the iron crucifix. Well, he sighed, it was as good a time as any to befriend God. Soon the dispossessed would arrive, and they would not be friendly to those they considered traitors. God might not be such a bad idea.

Lady Montaigne White had reached the front door of the hotel. She was pulling her voluminous cape tightly about her. Perhaps the old girl was trying to fly without settling her considerable account with the hotel. Were the young and delicious Lady Cat with her, Monsieur Giroux feared he would certainly have had to stop them. But Lady Cat had disappeared after breakfast. Irresolute, the manager stood, wondering if he should go after the ancient dame.

A sudden ear-shattering wail turned his attention toward the green baize door leading to the kitchens. One of the chambermaids, the one with a penchant for handsome English lordlings, was screaming that Napoleon’s returning armies would surely kill her. They should be so kind, Monsieur Giroux thought as, his course decided by this imminent crisis, he started for the kitchens.

He glanced over at the front door just in time to see the badly hemmed black skirts swish from view. He let her leave with a shrug of indifference. Where could she possibly run to, anyway?

Chapter 22

S
eward’s approximation of forty-eight hours before Paris heard of Napoleon’s march had been wrong. Not long after Thomas had left Merton’s, Peter Arbuthnot had arrived from the coast, breathless and disheveled. His garbled exhortations quickly deciphered, the other gentlemen had raised him onto their shoulders, from where he shouted, “Napoleon is in France! He marches on Paris!”

In the morning, a tidal wave of Englishmen flooded the streets trying to secure some means out of the city. Thomas rose late and, determined to confront Cat, went to hire a hack. There were none. Every available means of conveyance was occupied. Hay wagons pulled dukes and their duchesses. Drays carted lords and their ladies through the cold drizzle.

Thomas hurried the short distance to the Mertons’ address, seeking Cat and Hecuba’s location. The mansion was abandoned. Only a handful of servants remained gleefully, if fearfully, scavenging the treasures, toys, and pretties abandoned in the Mertons’ haste to leave. Thomas pulled the French valet to his feet and demanded to know where Lady Cat was staying. The valet shook his head. Angrily, Thomas flung him away. He went on to the next servant and then the next even as the minutes ticked away with brutal regularity: ten-thirty, three quarters past ten, and then eleven o’clock.

Finally a tweenie, the glint of greed sharp in her pale blue eyes, beckoned him forward to demand payment for her information. Wordlessly, Thomas pressed a stack of sovereigns into her hand, and she spat a name at him before darting away.

Fontaine
. He swore viciously. The Hotel Fontaine was miles across town. He left the house, the sharp pellets scoring his face as he jogged down the deserted streets, heading toward the river.

He had gone nearly two miles when he saw the horse. A small group of rough-looking men surrounded her as she danced at the end of her reins, made nervous by the press of the crowd. She was a big, ugly-looking nag, her eyes rolling in her great slab of a head.

Thomas was by her side in a trice.

“How much?” he demanded of the men in their own coarse patois. They eyed him suspiciously.

“You aren’t going to turn around and sell her to some stinking English dog, are you?” one of the men asked.

Thomas flashed his teeth in a violent grin. “No. No. This horse carries me.”

Another man stepped forward. “And what would a patriot want to run away for?”

Thomas grabbed him by the collar of his shirt, dragging him until he stood bare inches from Thomas’s snarling face. “Who said I was running away?”

The other men shifted uneasily on their feet. Sweat and sleet had plastered Thomas’s hair to his head and down his neck. His eyes burned in his workman-dark face. He appeared a true devotee of the cause. “How much can you pay?” a burly balding fellow in a leather apron asked.

Thomas fished into his pockets and withdrew a small leather purse. He untied the jesses and dumped twelve gold coins into his palm.

“This is what I have. Therefore, this must be her price.” He grabbed the burly fellow’s hand, forcing his fingers open, and pressed the gold into his palm.

“For Napoleon!” Thomas shouted, jerking the reins free and leaping onto the mare’s broad back. He wheeled her around, rearing away from the little group and galloped down the icy alleyway.

Her shaking was due more to fear than the cold, Cat knew. Hecuba’s bust improvers and her own dress worn beneath Hecuba’s gown kept much of the biting wind from her flesh. She had thought the hotel manager was going to stop her. She had seen his eyes narrowing as she hobbled slowly past him. But she had made it. She was on the streets, committed to her plan to find a way out of Paris. She forced herself not to think of Thomas, where he was, what danger he was in. He would be safe. He had to be. Because they had to be together again.

The few carriages that passed didn’t slow when she hailed them. Cat fought down her panic. Her own resourcefulness was her only hope of exiting the city, and that virtue was being quickly depleted.

A wagon pulled by a pair of plow horses clattered around the corner. A group of English, eloquent in their rigid silence, were crowded onto the hay-covered bed.

Cat dropped her bag and jerked it open, fishing frantically for a piece of jewelry. Her hand closed on the paste collar and she thrust it over her head, shaking it so its glass prisms would catch the driver’s eye.

The wagon was almost even with her now, and after a quick glance, the driver was once more clucking to the horses, urging them past her. An older gentleman, his face red and set, directed his angry gaze on her. His fleshy lower lip trembled before he lifted his walking stick and rapped the driver sharply on the shoulder. He said something to the man and—merciful heavens!—the wagon pulled to a stop.

“It will be a fine day when an English gentleman abandons a lady!” the gray-haired man sputtered, reaching down for Cat.