Velvet

Chapter 24

Silute, on the mouth of the Neimen where it opened into the Baltic Sea. A few hours ride. Nathaniel intended to leave by dawn; presumably it would take him until then to make his preparations, construct appropriate reasons and farewells. He wouldn't want to destroy such a useful cover by acting in haste. She, on the other hand, could be away within the hour.

Gabrielle sat impatiently on the edge of her seat as the carriage took her back into the French zone and home.

Talleyrand had already left for the Prussian ball, so she scrawled him a note explaining what she'd done and what she intended to do. She put the note on the desk in his study and then rummaged through the pigeonholes until she found the imperial seal that Talleyrand used for all his official documents. She wrote herself a suitably officious set of instructions, folded the document, and sealed it with the imperial eagle. It could well prove a useful passport or protection as she journeyed through Napoleonic Europe.

It took her a few minutes to change into her britches and throw a few necessities into a cloak bag. She dropped her pistol into the deep pocket of her cloak. A leather purse with a substantial sum of money went inside her shirt, close to her skin. Brigandage was rife among the disaffected population in the small towns of invaded Prussia.

She slipped quietly out of the house and round to the stables, where a sleepy lad saddled her horse. He was Prussian, a native of Tilsit, and regarded Gabrielle in her strange costume with scant interest.

It was still an hour to dawn when she left the town and turned her horse toward the sea, following the river to its mouth.

As dawn broke, the hamlets and villages she passed came to life, women opening doors, shooing out dogs, plying brooms. Children ran with buckets to the river and men appeared in the fields, anxious to start work before the blistering heat took hold.

No one took any notice of the black-clad rider. Prussia was an occupied land, and the peasantry plodded about their daily business, hoping only to be spared a ravaging column of French infantry who would pick them clean, chop down their woods for their own braziers, and trample the fields so that they were fit for nothing but to lie fallow for several years. If a lone rider offered no threat, then he could pass among them without hindrance.

The second rider, following an hour on the heels of the first, engendered the same lack of interest.

Gabrielle rode into Silute just before noon. Away from the open countryside, the atmosphere was different. The narrow, muddy streets were smothered in refuse that steamed and stank in the broiling heat. The houses were cramped and dark, the people pinched and scrawny, generally barefoot and clad in grimy rags.

Here a stranger riding a piece of prime horseflesh drew immediate and unwelcome attention.

Gabrielle rode straight to the small harbor, where fishing boats and several larger vessels were docked, waiting for the tide to turn. The smell of rotting fish seemed an almost palpable miasma on the hot, still air. She examined the assorted fleet critically, looking for one large enough to make a sea crossing.

A group of men surged out of a tavern and came toward her. They were silent except forthe sound of their heavy clogs on the cobbles of the quay.

Gabrielle's heart thumped, and she reached inside her pocket for her pistol, backing her horse against the water's edge so that she wouldn't be surrounded.

They formed a half circle and examined her in the same menacing silence. One of them put out a hand and touched the fine embossed leather of her bridle. He looked up and grinned, his teeth blackened stumps. Money, she decided, would incite rather than appease. Her pistol would probably do the same. She couldn't deal with six men with one shot, and there'd be no time to reload.

Slowly, she withdrew from her pocket the one talisman that in occupied Europe spoke louder than anything else. It was the document with the Napoleonic eagle. She held it up and the group tell back. One of them spat on the quaystones, but the danger was over. It was more than their lives were worth to interfere with an imperial courier.

Taking advantage of her ascendancy, Gabrielle asked in her halting Prussian if they knew of a vessel bound for Copenhagen. She had the emperor's message to deliver. Silver now glittered on her palm as she waited.

There was a guttural, staccato exchange, and then one of them gestured toward a small frigate anchored in the bay. A second coin on her palm produced the information that the master was to be found in the tavern. A third produced the master himself, a Dane, who, to Gabrielle's relief, spoke French.

He held a tankard of ale as he listened to her request for passage for two and named an extortionate sum, one eye disconcertingly squinting to the right while the other looked straight at her.

Gabrielle frowned, then said that for that price she'd expect him to accommodate their horses.

The master hesitated, examining Gabrielle's mount with his straight eye, then he drained the contents of his tankard and nodded. "High tide's at three. Ferry'll be at the quay at two. If you're not here, we go anyway." He returned to the tavern without a backward glance.

That left an hour and a half to kill and hopefully sufficient time to bring Nathaniel. Gabrielle was hungry and thirsty but didn't dare risk leaving her horse anywhere in this den of thieves while she went in search of sustenance. She wondered where best to await Nathaniel's arrival and decided to position herself at the end of the quay, facing the alley he'd have to use to reach the harbor. She decided it was not pointful to consider what she would do if he didn't arrive before the surly Dane's ferry left the quay, just as it was not pointful to anticipate his reaction to her presence. The man needed a serious push, and he was going to get one.

Nathaniel rode into the reeking town just after half past one. He was instantly aware of the eyes on him as he guided his horse through the narrow, ordure-ridden lanes toward the waterfront. Hollow-eyed children gazed from doorways at the well-dressed stranger on his glossy stallion. Men lounging against walls in the shade picked their teeth and spat as he rode past.

As he turned down a particularly dark, narrow lane, where a slice of water and a change in the quality of the light at the end indicated the quay, a stone flew through the air and thudded against his shoulder. He swore and turned his head. A group of men advanced on him from behind, cudgels and rocks in their hands. Another stone hit his horse's neck, and the animal squealed and reared.

Suddenly there were men all around him, emerging from passageways so narrow, they were barely wide enough for a man's shoulders, moving out of shadowed doorways, all bearing staves and knives.

It was, Nathaniel thought, about the ugliest mob he'd ever encountered, and he was its sole target.

His pistol was in one hand while the other loosened the cane he carried attached to his saddle; his eyes never left the gathering rabble. He pressed a catch in the handle of the cane, and a wicked blade sprang forth. Another stone flew, catching him full in the chest, almost winding him.

He fired his pistol straight into the line of men in front of him. A man went down with a scream, and for a second the line faltered. He put spur to his horse and charged through them, bending low over the saddle as he slashed with his sword. For a moment he thought he was through, and then his horse caught a hoof on an uneven cobble and as the animal struggled to regain his balance, a knife plunged into his neck, severing the carotid artery. Blood leaped in a pulsing fountain as the horse died instantly. Nathaniel flung himself sideways off the saddle before the animal rolled on him, and spun on the balls of his feet, his sword slicing through the mosaic of grim faces bearing down upon him. On his feet and with no time to reload his pistol, he hadn't a chance against such a number.

It seemed ironical that after a career of circumventing danger and treachery for the highest stakes he should meet his death in a squalid alley in a reeking port in Eastern Prussia at the hands of a starving mob.

And then he heard the sound of a pistol shot and a wild cry of fury. A horse plunged through the mob, rearing, caracoling, hooves flailing, forcing men to fall back or be trampled. There was a moment when he saw clearly through the bodies surrounding him to the glitter of water at the end of the alley. He flung himself toward the gap before it closed, and Gabrielle leaned low over her saddle, holding out her hand. He grabbed it and sprang upward with the same acrobatic agility he'd shown when he'd leaped into the rafters in the attic in Paris.

And then they were out in the sunlight of the quay and the milling horde was left behind with a dead horse, leather harness, and Nathaniel's portmanteau as prize.

Gabrielle rode her horse straight onto the flat-bottomed ferry waiting at the quayside. The Danish master of the good ship Kattegat was already on the ferry, supervising the loading of supplies. He glanced at the horse and its two riders and then came over to Gabrielle.

"Two horses, you said."

"Yes, but now there's only one."

"Same price," he declared, squinting ferociously.

" D'accord,"she replied with an impatient shrug, swinging off her mount. "I'll tether him to the rail."

Nathaniel said nothing. What he had to say couldn't be said on an open deck. Gabrielle had simply followed her own impulses as she always did, and he wondered vaguely why he hadn't expected this. She'd accepted his refusal in Tilsit with too much docility, and he should have been warned. Then he noticed that blood was dripping from her arm, leaving a sticky trail across the bottom of the ferry. Presumably, as she'd plunged into the fray, one of his assailant's knives had nicked her arm.

He pulled off his cravat. "You're bleeding all over the place. Let me bind it for the moment and I'll look at it properly when we get where we're going." He fastened the cravat tightly around the gash. "Just where are we going?"

"Copenhagen," she said with a weary sigh. "That vessel in the middle of the bay… the Kattegat."

Nathaniel sank down on the bottom of the ferry, propping his back against the rail, and lifted his face to the sun. A slight breeze offered some relief from the scorching heat and carried away some of the noxious stench of Silute. Gabrielle tethered her horse and came and sat down beside him.

She wasn't fool enough to believe that Nathaniel's present silence meant that he had nothing to say. The storm would break when he was good and ready, so she kept her own counsel until then.

Rowers pulled the ferry across the short stretch of water to the Kattegat. Gabrielle followed the master up a swinging rope ladder, Nathaniel on her heels.

"We'll manage the horse," the master said. "There's a cabin to starboard for you two… uh-" His straight eye rested on Gabrielle in open speculation, running down her figure. Her cloak was thrown back from her shoulders, and the britches and shirt offered little concealment to the rich curves of her tall body. "Gentlemen…" he added with something suspiciously like a leer.

Gabrielle kept her expression haughtily impassive, and Nathaniel stared out to sea, apparently stone deaf.

The master shrugged. "Not that it's any of my business. You pay your passage and I ask no questions." He held out his hand. "Forty livres, I believe was agreed upon."

Nathaniel's breath whistled through his teeth, but Gabrielle calmly withdrew the pouch from inside her shirt and shook out the required sum into the master's open hand. "I believe you'll find that to be correct. Be careful with my horse."

The master solemnly counted the coins, then turned and shouted orders to his seamen. Within half an hour Gabrielle's terrified horse had been hoisted aboard in a canvas sling and securely tethered in the stern of the boat.

Only then did Nathaniel speak. "Come below." It was a sharp command.

Gabrielle followed him down the companionway and into a small, sparsely furnished but clean cabin with a small porthole and two bunks set into the bulwark.

Nathaniel closed the door with a controlled slam and stood with his shoulders against it, regarding Gabrielle in fulminating silence. "Dear God," he exclaimed at last, "you ought to be beaten, Gabrielle!"

"Well, that's a fine thing to say, when I've just saved your skin," she retorted. "And for the second time too."

"I wonder why it is that my skin needs saving only when you're around," he declared dourly.

"Oh, that is so unjust," she protested. "It has nothing to do with me, and you know it."

He did, but was not yet ready to admit to anything. "I forbade you absolutely to come with me."

"Did you?" She glanced around the cabin with an air of interest. "Which bunk do you want?"

He ignored this. "Just what story did you spin to explain leaving your godfather?"

"The truth," she said, smiling blandly.

"What!"

"My godfather has infinite tolerance for the weaknesses of the flesh," she told him in perfect truth. "I told him I wished to pursue a liaison with Benedict Lubienski. I told him we were intending to spend some private time in Danzig, and I would decide where I would go next when we had satisfied each other."

Nathaniel stared at her. It was so damnably reasonable. She was no ingenue. She was a widow who'd had lovers in the past. Talleyrand was a man of the world. Napoleon had his Marie Walewska. Josephine wrote to him daily with endless protestations of jealousy. Talleyrand had innumerable liaisons. There was absolutely no reason why such a story shouldn't be believed… particularly when it bore the mark of truth.

"So I rode out ahead of you," she continued into his stupefied silence. "And arranged passage to Copenhagen on this ship. And then I assume we'll be able to get passage on an English commercial vessel to London, don't you think?"

She had simply put his own plan into operation. Simply and most efficiently.

"Come here and let me take a proper look at that gash on your arm," he said.

"Oh, it's all right… it's just a flesh wound," she responded cheerfully, recognizing his tacit acceptance and agreement in this oblique change of subject and perfectly prepared to settle for just that.

"I said come here!" Nathaniel bellowed, his temper finally loosened from the reins.

Gabrielle crossed the small space in two hasty steps. "There's no need to shout at me like that."

"I don't seem to have any other way of expressing my frustration," he gritted, unwrapping the cravat from her arm.

"I love you," Gabrielle said calmly. "And I've made my choice, and I'm afraid you're stuck with me. I'm quite happy to wait while you become accustomed to the idea, but I'm afraid you'll have to get used to it in my company. Because where you go, I go."

Nathaniel observed judiciously, “This may be a flesh wound, but it needs washing."

"Does it?" she responded, regarding him with her head on one side. "Have you become accustomed to the idea yet?"

Nathaniel dropped her arm and took her head between his hands, his fingers twisting in her hair. "Yes," he said savagely. "I know when I'm defeated. I accept the fact that I'm stuck with you. We'll see if that Danish robber on deck has the authority to perform a marriage service."

"Is that a proposal, sir?"

"No, it's not a proposal. It's a damn statement. It's past time I took the initiative around here."

"Oh, well, be my guest," Gabrielle said. "Imust say I'm getting a little tired of making all the decisions."

His fingers tightened in her hair, holding her head in a viselike grip. His eyes burned with a passionate intensity. "You are sure, Gabrielle? Sure you love me… sure you embrace all Istand for? Sure you're willing to trust me with your love?"

"Yes," she affirmed. "I'm certain of all those things. Are you also certain?"

Nathaniel nodded. "I'm still terrified, but Iknow that Ilove you and Iwill do everything Ican to make you happy."

He brought his mouth to hers, and Gabrielle thought, the instant before she was lost in the hard assertion of his kiss, that it was only the smallest white lie, the most technical of deceptions on which their future rested.