He could smell wood smoke and the tantalizing aroma of roasting meat, hear the murmured voices of tired soldiers. The burnt-out shell of what had once been a gracious villa sprawled nearby, its empty arched windows glowing orange from the light of scattered campfires kindled within the lee of its protective stone walls.
The woman was careful not to get too close to him. Her skin was kissed golden by the sun, her hair a halo of fire in the night. She wore the rough trousers and rugged shirt of a Spanish peasant, with a bandolier slung across the fullness of her breasts. She looked like a Spanish guerrillero, but she was not. She was French, like the men who had captured him.
She said, “He won’t let you die easily.”
Sebastian gave her a smile that was supposed to be cocky but, thanks to his split lip and swollen face, probably came out lopsided. “Is that why you’re here? To spare me the delights your Major Rousseau has planned for me in the morning? Out of the goodness of your heart, I assume?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Your colonel betrayed you. You do realize that, don’t you?”
He deliberately widened his smile and felt the cut at the corner of his mouth crack open and bleed again. “I don’t believe you.”
“Then you are a fool.”
“Most men are, sooner or later.”
She’d been hunkered down before him, arms draped over her knees in the posture of one who has spent many nights around a campfire. Now she pushed to her feet. “It doesn’t need to end this way.”
“With my death? I think that’s a foregone conclusion.”
“True. Yet death can come with agonizing, unbearable slowness. Or it can come quickly . . . when there is no need to prolong it.”
Sebastian forced himself to hold her gaze, his voice calm, although his guts were roiling with the knowledge of the horror her words promised. “I’ll think about your offer.”
“Don’t think too long.”
She took a step back, then another and another, careful not to turn away until she was far beyond his reach, as if there weren’t two guards with their muskets trained on him, as if he weren’t tied up like a hog ready for slaughter.
The pounding of the blood in Sebastian’s ears had grown so loud that he could no longer hear the rush of the wind through the cedars overhead or the melancholy song of a lark heralding the coming of the day. Then he opened his eyes to find a familiar room filled with the soft light of early dawn.
He turned his head to see Hero asleep beside him, her dark hair tumbled around her face, her lashes long and dark against the flesh of her cheeks. Yet the emotions from the distant past remained so intense that he had to suck in a deep, shaky breath in an attempt to ease them.
He swung his legs over the edge of the bed, his curled fists pressing into the softness at his sides. He felt Hero’s splayed hand warm against the small of his bare back.
“Bad dreams again?” she asked quietly.
“Yes.”
He rose to his feet.
She watched him walk across the room. “Going someplace?”
“I want to talk to Alexandrie Sauvage’s woman again.”
She pushed up on her elbow. “At this hour?”
“The sun’s nearly up.”
“Devlin—”
He turned to look back at her.
“When you knew Alexandrie Sauvage before, in Portugal . . . was she your lover?”
He went to kneel beside her on the bed, his knees denting the mattress at her hip, his gaze locked with hers. “No. I killed her lover.”
“Why?”
“Because otherwise he would have killed me.”
“Then she can’t blame you for it.”
“If she killed me—even in self-defense—would you blame her for it?”
Hero didn’t even blink. “Yes. Forever.”
Tuesday, 26 January
The frigid morning air smelled of coal smoke and fresh horse droppings and roasting coffee. Sebastian pushed his way through the early crush of apprentices, tradesmen, and women wrapped in their warmest shawls with the handles of market baskets looped over their arms, their breath showing white in the misty air. Heavy gray clouds pressed down on the city, obscuring the feeble light of the rising sun and promising more snow or a biting sleet. He was crossing the square toward Alexi’s house when one of the women he’d spoken to before, a street vendor, called out to him from behind her stall.
“She’s back, y’know.”
Sebastian paused beside the stall, the warm odor of eel pies rising from the tray before him. “You mean Madame Sauvage?”
“Aye. Came back just last night, she did. Got a big gash on the side o’ her head—just here.” She tilted her head and put up a hand encased in a darned wool glove to touch the matted gray hair above her ear. “Says she don’t know who done it, but we all know.”
“Oh? Who’s that?”
“That cabinetmaker, Bullock! That’s who. Any fool can see that.”
“You mean the man who holds her responsible for the death of his brother?”
“That’s right.”
“And how, precisely, does he blame her for the death of a man who succumbed to gaol fever?”
“She’s the one accused Abel Bullock of murder, she did.”