The Soldier's Dark Secret

Chapter Twelve

South of France—October 1815,

one month later

Celeste stood on the deck of the small blue-and-white fishing boat as they made their way into Cassis harbour after the short sea journey along the coast from Marseilles. A weak morning sun glinted off the familiar white cliffs. The sea was the same colour as the central stone in her locket. The sun dappling the water, the tang of salt, and of this morning’s catch, mingled with that herby scent she could not define but was the essence of the south, combined to fill her senses.

It was strange to be speaking her own language again, more strange to hear the rough dialect of Provence. She had forgotten how very beautiful it was here, and how much she loved the sea. Dread had been her primary emotion on every visit she could recall as an adult, and there had been blessed few of them. The last time, it had been to bury her mother. Today, she thought to herself with a sad smile, she was here to try to finally bury the past along with her.

The fishing boat bumped against the harbour wall. The fisherman jumped on to the jetty and tied up. Jack lifted their few bits of luggage out of the boat before helping Celeste out.

As he paid the man, talking easily in his excellent French, Celeste stood on the jetty, looking up at the village which ran along the edge of the shore. It had never felt like home, but today there was a sense of homecoming. She was excited to be here. She was a little daunted. She was afraid that despite Jack’s assurance that there was always something which had been overlooked, that they would reach another dead end.

He was still talking to the fisherman. His face was tanned from their days at sea, for he had spent much of their journey to Marseilles up on deck. He had explained their trip to Sir Charles as army business in such a way that his brother immediately assumed it was also cloak-and-dagger business. With the advantage of Celeste having met Wellington, he mendaciously informed his brother that the Duke himself insisted that she accompany him on this mysterious mission as part of his cover. Sir Charles was entirely unconvinced, but refrained from saying so, content to indulge Jack in the hope that whatever the purpose of his trip, it would aid his recuperation.

The arrangements for their travel had been made and executed so efficiently that Celeste could almost have been persuaded that Jack really was taking her on a secret mission. He had been, for the most part, the rather intimidating commanding officer she had witnessed at Wellington’s dinner. It effectively created a distance between them, which Celeste knew was the point. That night at Hunter’s Reach had been their beginning and their end. She could only surmise that his determination to expedite her quest was rooted in his desire to put an end to their time together. She tried very hard to persuade herself that he was acting in her interests as well as his own. She tried, with considerably less enthusiasm than she once would have, to persuade herself that she was as set upon remaining the one and only architect of her own future.

‘Ready?’

Celeste grimaced. ‘As I will ever be, I suppose. Jack, do you really think you will find something?’

He nodded. ‘I told you, there is always something to be found if you know where to look.’

She wandered over to the edge of the pier and gazed out to sea. ‘Such a—a tangle of revelations have brought us here. I still find it difficult to make sense of any of it. My mother was so reticent. She was like a mouse, scuttling about, hoping no one would see her. You know, I’d even forgotten how beautiful she was until I looked at the miniature in my locket. She always covered her hair with caps, and her clothes...’ Celeste wrinkled her nose. ‘Black, black, brown and black.’ Her face fell. ‘Why did I never notice that, do you think?’

‘Because she didn’t want you to?’

‘You are right. How she hated questions, Maman. Almost as much as she hated being noticed.’

‘I would imagine that you would have caused a great deal of notice when you were growing up. Even as a child, if the picture in the locket is true to life, you were ridiculously lovely.’

Celeste flushed. ‘It is just a trick of nature that makes my face appear beautiful you know. Symmetry...’

‘I don’t much care what it is. You have the kind of face and figure that turns heads wherever you go, as that dinner of Wellington’s proved.’ Jack touched her hair. ‘This alone must have got you noticed here in the south. The people here are generally very dark.’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Yes, but you were sent off to school when you were ten, weren’t you?’ Jack said, looking much struck. ‘And to Paris, where you would not exactly blend in with the crowd, but nor would you be quite so distinctive.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your mother patently came here to disappear. A daughter who would have every lad in the village setting his cap at her would hardly be conducive to anonymity.’

‘That’s ridiculous, Jack.’ Celeste rolled her eyes. ‘Though no more ridiculous than the idea of Maman being forced to go into hiding in the first place. And I suppose it is a little bit more palatable a story to swallow than that she wanted to be rid of me.’

‘I thought you had accepted by now that that simply wasn’t true.’

‘Oh, I think she loved me in her own way, but her own way was to make sure she didn’t show it. I don’t understand why.’ She brushed a tear away angrily. ‘Now you will think me a pathetic creature.’

‘I think you many things, but pathetic is not on the list.’ Jack dabbed at her cheeks with his kerchief. ‘The wind and the salt air are the very devil for making one’s eyes run.’

Celeste managed a watery smile.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jack said. ‘I have been so set on getting us here, that I have not thought about what an ordeal it will be for you.’

‘Not an ordeal. It’s just a house.’

‘Stuffed full of painful memories. Perhaps it would be best if you went to an inn, if there is such a thing here, and I can search the house.’

‘Jack, I am not precisely looking forward to going back to the house, but I do need to go. I’m sure if there’s anything to be found that you will find it, but you can’t lay my ghosts for me.’

‘When we first met, you were adamant that there were no ghosts to lay.’

‘When we first met, I was very sure about a good many things, and I have been quite wrong about almost every one. English cooking. English weather. Englishmen.’

Surrendering to the urge to touch him, she flattened her palm over the roughness of his cheek. He caught her hand, pulling her tight up against him. ‘Celeste.’ His lips clung to hers for a long, tantalising moment, then he dragged his mouth away. ‘If you knew how much I have to struggle not to— If you knew.’

The feelings she had been working so hard to control made her snap. ‘If it is such a struggle, Jack, then perhaps we are wrong to deny it.’

‘We know we’re not.’

‘You know we are not,’ she said sadly, turning away. Out at sea, the sky was darkening. A wind had blown up. The tide was on the turn. The fisherman who had brought them here was already on his way, the boat scudding along the white-crested waves, heading back to Vallons des Auffes. Celeste pulled her cloak around her. ‘We should go,’ she said to Jack brusquely, picking up a portmanteau and striding ahead of him, along the jetty and into the village.

* * *

The house stood apart at the far end of the meandering street, at the opposite end of which stood the village church. The key was where it had always been kept, under a large plant pot to the side of the door. Celeste struggled to turn it in the lock. The salt water made everything rusty here. Jack edged her aside and pushed open the door. She steeled herself, but the only smell was of dust. She took a tentative step into the hallway. ‘It’s cold,’ she said, turning to Jack.

He put down their bags and closed the door behind him. It creaked, just as it had always done. She’d forgotten. No, obviously she had not forgotten. She had rolled the carpets up when she was here the last time. Her feet echoed on the boards as she made her way to the sitting room. Her stomach was churning. As she opened the door, she realised she was half-expecting her mother to be there, sitting at the table by the window, making the best of the morning light, painting or embroidering or drawing.

‘Always doing something,’ she said to Jack. ‘My mother. Her hands were never still.’

The furniture was covered in cloths, as she had left it. The grate was empty. The spaces on the walls where her mother’s paintings had hung were clearly marked. As she stepped into the room, her nose twitched. The dusty smell of watercolours assailed her, mingling with the dried lavender her mother kept in a bowl on the hearth. The bowl was empty. The watercolours were in Celeste’s Paris studio.

She went over to the window. The surface of the table was covered in tiny droplets of paint. She could make out every colour. She ran her fingers over a bump of muddy brown, her failed attempt to mix red, she remembered. ‘Henri was furious,’ she said to Jack, ‘though Maman made more of a mess than I ever did.’

His chair was over there in the corner. Maman’s faced it. She had had a stool. It wasn’t here now. She’d never been back long enough to merit anything more comfortable. A few weeks ago, she would have sworn that this was because she was not welcomed. Now she recalled many times when she sought any excuse not to come.

‘You should start on your search while the light is still good,’ she said to Jack. ‘Let me show you the rest of the house.’ She led him quickly through the dining room to Henri’s study where the glass-fronted bookcases covered the walls. ‘I was never permitted in here,’ she told Jack. She led him down to the kitchen and scullery. Then back up to the top floor. The fifth stair creaked as it always had.

‘Henri’s bedchamber.’ Celeste threw the door open. ‘Maman’s bedchamber.’ Another door thrown wide. The bed was stripped, the mattress rolled. Her feet fixed themselves automatically on the very edge of the threshold, as if the invisible barrier was there still, even though her mother was no longer here to forbid her to enter. Celeste stepped boldly in and threw open the cupboard. Maman’s few remaining clothes were here. Thick woollen skirts and jackets. Her heavy black boots.

She could not have described that very particular smell that was her mother. Wool, powder, roses, but there was something else. She closed her eyes. It was still there. Faint, but there. ‘Essence of Maman,’ she said softly to herself. A fleeting image of herself howling in pain, of two hands swooping down on her, and then that smell as she buried her face in her mother’s neck and was comforted.

She blinked. Jack was watching her carefully. ‘Memories,’ she said, closing the cupboard. ‘Don’t look so concerned. They are not all of them bad.’

But some of them were. The last room was her childhood bedchamber. Thinking only that this had been her sanctuary, Celeste opened the door almost without thinking. It swung wide, the panel slamming into the coffer which was positioned behind it. Positioned in that precise place to obscure the corner of the room, where a small girl could crouch down, hidden from the open doorway, and where that small girl could cry inconsolably because there was no one to care that she cried, or why.

In a daze, Celeste entered the room, curling herself into the tiny space, wrapping her arms around her waist. ‘They never beat me. They never touched me. Neither cruelty nor love, but indifference is what they gave me, and forced me to give them in return. That was what was so hard.’

* * *

Jack lit the fire in the kitchen because it was the one room where there were no bad memories. They set out the picnic they’d brought with them from Marseilles. He had little appetite, though Celeste ate with her usual enthusiasm. The wine was rough and young. He drank only a little, contenting himself with watching her. She seemed different. Despite the tears she had shed, she seemed happier. He remembered the first time she’d broken down in front of him, how appalled and embarrassed she had been. She still hated to cry, but she no longer fought quite so hard not to. This afternoon, when she’d been curled up like a child in the corner of her bedchamber remembering God knows what misery, she hadn’t been embarrassed by his presence. She had shared her ghosts with him as she led him through this loveless place, not hidden them.

An odd melancholy gripped him as he watched her carefully spreading tapenade on a piece of bread. As she always did, she studied the morsel carefully, as if she was thinking of painting it, before popping it into her mouth. She wiped her mouth with a napkin before taking a sip from her wine glass, something else he had observed was an ingrained habit.

‘You’re not hungry?’ she said, looking up from preparing another morsel. She inspected it carefully, gave a satisfied nod and smiled at him. ‘Try this.’

The olives were rich and salty with anchovy. The bread was heavy with a thick crust. Jack nodded, smiled, because she was looking at him so anxiously. ‘Delicious,’ he said.

‘Tomorrow I will go to the church and put flowers on the graves,’ Celeste said. ‘Maman is buried beside Henri. They think she drowned, the people here. They don’t know that she— No one else knows about the letter.’ She handed him a thin slice of the blood sausage topped with a small square of hard goat’s cheese. ‘Try this.’

He ate obediently, aware that she was feeding him as if he were a child or an invalid, but happy to indulge her for the sake of watching her. There would not be many opportunities to watch her in the future. A few more days. A few more weeks. Too many to endure, and not nearly enough. He had already decided he wouldn’t be going back to Trestain Manor while she finished Charlie’s commission. Seeing her like this, conquering her ghosts, he had the strangest feeling, as if she was walking away from him, disappearing into the distance while he stood rooted to the spot, watching her, unable to follow.

Jack shook his head, mocking his own flight of fancy. Celeste handed him a neat quarter cut from a tart of roasted tomatoes and artichoke hearts. ‘I’m sorry I was so—so emotional today,’ she said. ‘It must have been embarrassing for you.’

He pressed her hand abruptly, perilously close to breaking down. ‘It was— I am honoured that you allowed me to— I was just thinking how horrified you would have been, only a few weeks ago, by my witnessing— I am honoured.’

‘You look so sad, Jack.’

‘No.’ He cleared his throat, took a sip of wine, coughed. ‘I did not like seeing you so sad, that is all.’

‘I was sad here, when I was little. I had forgotten how much I cried. I thought I never cried. But I’m not sad now. Today I remembered that it was not all so very bad.’ Celeste gave one of her very French shrugs. ‘Not so very good, but not always so very bad. Thank you for making me come here.’

‘I had no idea, Celeste, that this house held so many terrible memories. I was fortunate enough to have had a very happy childhood.’

‘Though you were deprived of Hector the horse?’ she teased. ‘Don’t feel sorry for me, I’ve done enough of that myself over the years, and you know, I think I have been a little bit self-indulgent. I was never hungry or cold. I have never been in want of a roof over my head. I was never beaten, and I’ve never been reduced to selling myself for money. Selling my artistic soul a few times,’ Celeste said with a chuckle, ‘but nothing else.’ Her smile faded. ‘In Paris, you would not believe the poverty which is taken for granted. Sometimes, I wonder what on earth our so-famous Revolution was for. These people don’t see much evidence of égalité.’

‘These are the people that armies rely on in times of war, sad to say,’ Jack said. ‘I doubt France is much different from England. Or Scotland,’ he added with a nod to Finlay. ‘Napoleon said an army marches on its stomach. I reckon more than half our enlisted men signed up to fill their bellies. Skin and bone, some of them are when they join, and riddled with— Well, what you’d expect from men who have spent their lives in rookeries where they sleep ten to a room, and you have to haul water from a pump fifteen minutes’ walk away.’

‘You seem to know a deal about it.’

‘When you eat, sleep, march and fight with the same men for months on end, you tend to learn a lot about them,’ Jack said. ‘Besides the fact that I helped write hundreds of their letters, and paid the occasional visit to the families of some of the men who died in battle.’ He grimaced. ‘Once, to check on a man—a very good man—who had lost both legs.’ Jack pursed his lips. ‘I remember at the time he said it would have been better for his family if he had died. I told him he was wrong, that they would rather have him alive at any cost. I had no idea how patronising that was of me, until I saw— Well, I’ve not forgotten it.’

‘Since Waterloo, the streets of Paris have been filled with men who fought with Napoleon. I don’t know what will become of them.’

‘London is no different.’ Jack took a sip of wine. ‘Victors or vanquished, the soldier’s fate is often the same. That is the true price of peace. Something ought to be done.’

‘I will paint them, and you will have engravings made of my work, and you will use them to show all the people with money and influence—your Parliament, your brother, the Duke of Wellington—and they cannot fail to see that something must be done.’

‘It’s a good idea, though I doubt Wellington will wish to have anything to do with it. Too embarrassing for him to be faced with the evidence. I know,’ Jack said, amused by the indignant expression on Celeste’s face, ‘they were his army. Without them he would not have had his great victory.’

‘Nor his great ego,’ she interjected.

Jack laughed. ‘You have his measure very well. It has to be said though, it was his great ego that won us the battle. He never once faltered in his belief that we would triumph, and there were times, believe me, when many other of his officers did.’

‘Not you?’

‘No, not me. The man is a pompous, conceited, philandering egotist, but as a soldier, as a commanding officer, he is second to none. Not even Napoleon.’

Celeste’s brows shot up. ‘You admire the man you spent all those years at war with?’

‘As a soldier.’

Jack looked down at his plate and discovered he’d eaten the tomato tart. His glass was empty. Celeste had folded her napkin neatly on her own empty plate. He got to his feet and moved the shabby settle closer to the fire, stoking the embers with more of the wood which he’d found neatly stacked in one of the small outbuildings. They sat together, watching the flames and sipping the last of the wine. ‘I don’t think I’d make a very good politician,’ Jack said. ‘I am a man of action. Or I used to be.’

Celeste’s hand found his. ‘You still are. If it were not for you, I would still have been trying to work up the courage to enlist the help of one of those Bow Street running men. You have solved the mystery of Maman’s locket and discovered the names of her parents. You have traced this Arthur Derwent, and you persuaded the great Duke of Wellington to tell you top-secret information that I would never have known existed, never mind obtained permission to read. Which puts me in mind of something I have been meaning to ask. Has he called in his favour and asked you to return to his service? Could you do so without returning to the army?’

‘Half of his staff have done so in diplomatic roles. The embassy in Paris is full of my former comrades. This most likely sounds paradoxical, given my former role, but I never practised or approved of deception. I may be wrong, but my impression is that deception, flattery and downright lies are at the heart of the diplomatic service.’

Celeste laughed softly. ‘In that case, I can think of no one less suited.’

‘I wish that were true, but you know it’s not.’

‘Jack, you could not be more wrong. It is the fact that you are honest, and that you have a conscience, and that you will not accept the lies of the army and of Wellington that makes you different from that Colonel Carruthers and all the others.’ Celeste turned sideways on, gently forcing him to look at her. ‘You are the one who is right, not them. What you saw, regardless of how it happened, it was a terrible thing, and it will always be with you. As it should be. But that is a very different thing from taking on the burden of blame.’

‘It was my fault, Celeste. I thought I’d made it plain.’

‘It may have been. It may not have been. I might have saved my mother from drowning herself if I’d listened to her. I may not have. You are so very set on proving that I could not have, so very set on sparing me the guilt that you are so very determined to keep to yourself. Are the cases really so very different?’

‘Yes,’ he replied automatically, ‘of course they are. You know they are.’

‘I know you think they are. Just as I know you think this—us—is hopeless.’

‘Don’t. Please don’t. I can’t bear it.’

‘Jack.’ She touched his cheek. ‘Jack, you don’t have to.’

‘I do.’

‘Then I must bear it too.’

Only then did he realise that she had hoped. Only then did he realise that it was already too late. He loved her. There was nothing that could be said, and so without access to words Jack did the only thing he could do to tell her, just this once, how he felt. He kissed her.

* * *

Celeste melted into his kiss without a thought of denying him, her lips clinging to his, her arms twining around his neck. It had been there for days, weeks, ever since that night they had made love, that knowledge. It had been growing more insistent throughout this day. This house and its ghosts had stripped her of the last of her armour, leaving her defenceless. Tonight, in the domestic intimacy of the one room not populated by ghosts, by the flickering light of the fire as they ate and talked, it had taken hold of her. She loved him. She was in love with him. She was in love with Jack Trestain.

She kissed him to stop the words babbling out. She was in love. ‘Jack,’ she said, because it was all she could trust herself to say. ‘Jack.’ She loved him. She kissed his eyelids. She loved him. ‘Jack.’ She loved him.

‘Celeste.’ He kissed her again. ‘Celeste.’ His voice was ragged. ‘Oh, God, Celeste, I want you so much.’

He caught her face between his hands and kissed her passionately. Then he groaned. ‘We shouldn’t.’

Panicking, she kissed him again. ‘We can. We must.’

He hesitated for only a second before his mouth claimed hers once more. His kiss was hot and hard and all she had craved since the last kiss, and all she would crave when this became the last kiss. She closed her mind to this and concentrated on remembering. She loved him. The silkiness of his hair. The way he let it grow too long over his collar. She loved him. The hollow in his throat. The peculiar gouge in his shoulder where the musket ball had been cut out.

She pushed him gently back and got to her feet. She loved him. She turned to allow him to unfasten her gown and her corsets. She slid both to the ground, standing before him in her shift and her stockings. She loved him. She slipped her shift from her shoulders. She loved the way his skin tightened when he was aroused. She loved the feel of his hands, gentle on her breasts, and that circling thing he did, and the soft pluck of his lips on her nipples that made her blood tingle.

She undid his waistcoat. She pulled his shirt over his head. She knelt at his feet and took off his boots. She loved him. She leaned over him to kiss him again, grazing her nipples on the rough smattering of hair on his chest.

She loved the way he looked at her. She loved the way his hands were always drawn to cup her bottom the way he did. She undid the fastenings of his breeches and helped him to kick them away. The firelight danced on their skin. She loved him. She kissed him. He tried to pull her on top of him, but she shook her head. She loved him. She knelt between his legs, licking and kissing her way down his chest, his belly. She felt the sharp inhale of his chest as she brushed the tip of his shaft with her mouth.

She looked up, willing all that she felt to be there in her eyes, and then she began to make love to him with her mouth and her tongue and her hands, trusting her instincts to teach her what she had never done before, nor desired to do.

She loved him. His hands were on her shoulders. In her hair. He was saying her name urgently. His chest was heaving. She licked and she kissed and she stroked. Satin skin sheathing hard muscle. He jerked against her. Swore. ‘Not yet,’ he said, ‘not that, Celeste. Delightful—dear God, delightful as it is. Please.’

Please. She let him pull her to her feet. He spread the blanket from the settle on the hearth, pulling her down with him. He kissed her. Firelight danced on her skin. Heat pooled between her legs. He rolled under her, lifting her on to him, and she sank down on to the thick length of him.

She was slick. She was tight. She tilted her body to take him in higher. Jack moaned, his hands on either side of her waist. She circled her hips, pulling him deeper. He shuddered. He cursed. His fingers curled around her breasts. She loved him. Celeste tilted back her head, and began a slow lift and slide, lift and slide, lift and slide, until she could hold back no longer, crying out as her climax shook her, the pulsing of her muscles triggering the same pulsing in his as he lifted her free. ‘Jack,’ Celeste said with a sigh, ‘oh, Jack.’

* * *

Afterwards, they lay entwined in front of the fire, watching the flames turn to embers, the embers to ashes. Celeste dozed fitfully. As dawn broke, she rose, carefully, reluctantly, with aching sadness, disentangling herself from the man she had given her heart to. He was sleeping. She stood for a moment, looking down at his beloved face, his tousled hair, in the grey light of dawn, before quietly gathering up her clothes and creeping up the stairs to her childhood bedchamber to ready herself for a visit to Maman’s and Henri’s graves.

The sky was overcast, the sea a froth of white. Clutching her cloak around her, the hood pulled over her face, Celeste made her way down the main street of the village to the churchyard. She sat by the graves for a long time, closing her eyes and allowing the memories, good and bad, to wash over her. There were still many more painful than pleasant, but she made no attempt to filter them. They were all hers, every one of them. She allowed herself to cry for the first time for the simple loss of her mother. Looking at Henri’s stark grave, she felt no sorrow, only pity for the very unhappy man she saw now he had been, and anger too that he had taken whatever ailed him out on the innocent child she had been.

‘As you did too, Maman,’ she said, kneeling down and spreading her fingers wide on the stone. ‘I love you,’ she whispered. ‘I can tell you that now that you are not here to prevent me. I love you and I wish—I am still angry, a little, with you for not allowing me to. So I do want very much to be able to understand, because I do want, very, very much to be able to forgive you. And myself.’

* * *

Leaving the churchyard an hour later, Celeste found herself reluctant to return to the house. Stopping at the café for a breakfast of café au lait and freshly baked rustic bread, she watched the last of the fishing boats set sail, and the sky, in the way it did at this time of year, change from grey to pale blue. As she approached the house, her footsteps began to drag. She did not want Jack to tell her that he’d been unable to find any clue as to her mother’s connection with Arthur Derwent. This was her last chance to find her answers, and she needed them more than ever. She didn’t want to have to live with thinking so badly of Maman.

More selfishly, she did not want to have to learn to live with the not knowing, and the guilt which nagged and niggled at her every time she thought of her mother’s last visit to Paris. She remembered all those weeks ago—goodness, a lifetime ago— asking Jack how the families of the men who had taken their own lives coped without answers. She furrowed her brow, trying to recall what he had replied, and realised that he had not. He had spared her the truth, that in most cases there were no answers. He would never know for certain why the girl chose to kill herself. He would never know if his being there made any difference. He would never know how close he had come that day to his own death. The girl had spared him. If only Jack would spare himself.

Celeste walked on past the house to the end of the village and the coastal path. The series of limestone cliffs known locally as calanques embraced the vivid blue of the Mediterranean like welcoming arms. Some were deep-water bays, some more gently shelving sandy coves. Here was the one where the deep fissures formed a cave she had once been taken to on a boat trip. It had been summer. She remembered diving from the boat and swimming into the dark, dank cavern. She closed her eyes, trying to picture herself. Twelve? Thirteen? So she had been home from school for the summer. Another memory she had suppressed.

The gentle breeze whipped her hair across her face. She had not bothered putting it into her usual chignon, but had tied it back with a ribbon. In the summer, the heat made walking along the calanques unbearable. Scrub fires were common. Surrendering to impulse, Celeste found the narrow footpath that zigzagged down the cliff to the sandy bay beneath. Sitting on the white sand, watching the waves lap at the steeply shelving beach, she finally allowed her mind to turn to last night.

She was in love with Jack. A smile played on her lips, thinking of the wonder of their lovemaking, only for it to fade into sadness as she faced the sheer wall of hopelessness. Her own journey into her past had peeled from her the years of hard-earned indifference, exposing her to the storm of emotions she’d weathered since first reading her mother’s letter. This new Celeste could be hurt. She cried far too much. She felt guilt and anger, but she also felt love for the first time in her life. That too would cause her pain, because the man she loved could not come to terms with the horrors lurking in his own past.

Thinking back to that night when Jack had told her about the massacre in the village, the horror of it struck her afresh, but she could not, as she had done until now, quite equate Jack’s story with Jack’s determination to make himself miserable. ‘Mon Dieu, that is exactly what he is doing, just exactly like Maman!’

She picked up a handful of the soft sand and watched as it trickled through her fingers. Guilt. An emotion with which she had become very familiar, thanks in a way to Jack himself. He had known from the beginning how inextricably mixed were suicide and guilt. His desire to save her from that guilt was, she saw now, her thoughts racing, one of the reasons he had been so eager to help her from the first. But why must Jack’s guilt be any different from hers?

And then there was the problem of Maman and the guilt which drove her to spurn her daughter’s love, and to reject her parents. Lord and Lady Wilmslow thought their daughter was dead. Who had told them this? Could it have been Maman? Ridiculous. Yet Jack had seemed certain only yesterday that Maman was hiding here in Cassis.

Questions and more questions and yet more, whirling around her head like a sandstorm. But there, at the centre, like the sun, was her love for Jack. Only an hour or so ago, she’d knelt at her mother’s grave and told her that she loved her. All those years she had been forced to suppress her feelings.

‘Not again,’ Celeste said decidedly. ‘Never again. Even if it is hopeless. Even if this terrible, dark secret of his stops him ever accepting it. I’m going to tell him before he leaves me for ever. After we come to the end of this other dark secret of Maman’s— however that might end. Then I will tell him.

‘I will tell you, Jack Trestain, that I love you, whether you want to hear it or not,’ Celeste shouted at the now cloudless sky. Throwing off her clothes, and plunging into the bay, gasping as the water stung her Parisian-pale skin, she struck out strongly into the waves.

* * *

He retched violently, spilling his guts like a raw recruit, in a nearby ditch. Spasm after spasm shook him until he had to clutch at the scorched trunk of a splintered tree to support himself. Shivering, shaking, he had no idea how long the young girl had been looming over him. She raised her hand and pointed the pistol at his head. In her other hand, clutched to her chest, was a bundle of rags. Her eyes were vacant. Jack waited, certain that this was his last moment. The girl turned the gun. So slowly, yet he did not comprehend what she was doing until he heard the sharp crack.

Jack sat up, gazing dazedly around him, the sweat cooling quickly on his naked skin. The room was freezing. The blanket in which they had slept was knotted around his legs. There was no sign of Celeste. In the scullery, he cranked the pump of the huge sink. Only then, as he ducked his head under the icy water, did he realise what he’d dreamt. The girl. The gun. Her face. His feeling of utter inertia. Just as he’d described it to Celeste, but never before had he dreamt it.

Pulling on his crumpled clothes, he checked his watch and was astonished to discover it was past ten. Outside, the sun was making an attempt to part the clouds. He lit the fire, filled the kettle with water and set it on the hook which hung from the chimney, having decided, after one look at the complicated stove, that it was beyond him. There were coffee beans in a box in the larder. They smelled dusty, but he ground them anyway. Still no sign of Celeste, but her cloak was gone from the hook at the front door. He remembered now that she had been intent on visiting her mother’s grave.

He could not decide whether it was progress or not, this extension to his dream. A direct result of his conversation with Celeste last night, that was certain.

You are so very set on sparing me the guilt that you are so very determined to keep to yourself. Are the cases really so very different? Were they?

The coffee tasted as dusty as it had smelled, but he drank two cups and ate some of last night’s stale bread. He had always assumed himself at fault. He had never once questioned that. Yet he had from the beginning seen Celeste’s case in completely the opposite way. Was he wrong?

‘Wishful thinking,’ he muttered, ‘and you know bloody well why, Trestain.’

He put his empty coffee cup carefully down. Love. He closed his eyes, but it didn’t go away. He loved her. Last night, he had made love to her. He was a bloody fool. He loved her. Jack swore. Then he frowned. That didn’t change the fact he had no right to love her, and he was not fit to love her. But, dear heavens, how he loved her.

Jack pushed his chair back, making it screech on the flagstones. ‘To work,’ he muttered. ‘Answers are what she needs, she told me so last night. And since I can’t provide her with anything else, the very least I can do is make sure that she has those.’

* * *

He was in Henri Marmion’s study when Celeste arrived back several hours later. Her hair was wet. Her skin was flushed. Her eyes sparkled. Jack’s heart gave the most curious little flip. Here she is, a voice in his head whispered insidiously. Yours.

He was already halfway across the room when he caught himself and came to a sudden halt, feeling decidedly foolish and a little bit sheepish and rather angry with himself. ‘Has it been raining?’ he asked gruffly.

‘I’ve been swimming.’ She smiled at him. ‘And thinking.’

‘Right.’ Did she want him to ask what she’d been thinking? ‘You look—different.’

Her smile widened. ‘Yes? That is because my hair is sticky with salt and my clothes are full of sand and my skin is red with the sun. And because I have made some very important decisions.’

‘What decisions?’

‘I will tell you, but not yet.’ She hesitated, then put her hands on his shoulder and kissed his cheek. ‘That is for last night. And because I know you don’t want to talk about it, then I won’t, but I want you to know that I will always, always remember.’

His arms went round her waist of their own accord. ‘Celeste...’

Her expression became serious. ‘Do not tell me you regret it, Jack.’

‘Never,’ he said fervently.

‘Bien.’ She slipped from his embrace and looked around the room, taking in the open doors of the bookcases, the stacks of books on the desk. ‘What on earth?’

‘I thought yesterday that this little library must have cost a small fortune to amass. Look at these,’ Jack said, pointing to a row of thick volumes bound in tooled leather. ‘A full set of the encyclopédies, no less.’

‘I feel so stupid,’ Celeste said, running her hand along the shelves. ‘I was never permitted into this room, but even when I was here in January, I didn’t think— It is like the school fees, no? Where on earth did the money come from?’

Jack grinned, producing the letter with a flourish. ‘At last,’ he said, ‘I think I might be able to answer one of your questions. I found this hidden away inside a copy of the Odyssey.’

Celeste gave a little squeak. ‘Jack! What is it?’

‘A letter from a Madame Juliette Rosser of Boulevard de Courcelles, Paris. Madame encloses a draft for the usual amount,’ Jack said, ‘and expects a receipt by return of post.’

‘And that is it?’

‘It is enough.’

‘But—what shall we do?’

‘Isn’t it obvious? We go to Paris.’