Jane Feather - Charade Read online

  He let his mind drift. Louise must be thirty-nine now. She'd been whisked back to the seclusion of the Languedoc estates after that brief season in London and at the French court. The de St. Varennes were known as a reclusive, miserly lot, eschewing the debaucheries of Louis XVI's court in favor of the cheaper but infinitely satisfying excitements available on their estates. They were a hard-drinking, hard-riding group of look-alikes with an innate brutality that characterized them all.

  Louise had been a dewy-eyed eighteen-year-old when Lucien, Vicomte de St. Varennes, had captured both her heart and her virginity. The Earl of March had yielded to his favorite daughter's eatreaties and consented to a marriage that all his instincts and society rumor made abhorrent. By the time the youthful Justin first succumbed to the charms of the young vicomtesse, Louise de St. Varennes had presented her lord with two stillborn sons in rapid succession. With a courage and fortitude extraordinary in a woman of her class she had banned Lucien from the marriage bed at the point of a dagger, demanding time for her body and spirit to recuperate before a fresh assault of pregnancy. The vicomte had given way, both because he still desired the svelte body and because the provision of an heir eventually was of paramount importance. He had also been not a little influenced by the dagger and the soft-spoken threat that an attempt at force would result in the death of his wife, or himself, or both.

  The excursion into society was an attempt to placate and to ensure eventual compliance. Louise, in spite of her willingness to share discreetly the joys of the flesh with the young heir to the Earl of Linton, had honored her side of the bargain and returned without protest to exile in the wilds of Languedoc. This scantily clad, emaciated, spirited little vagabond opposite him was clearly the living result of that bargain.

  "You appear, milord, to have lost interest in my story."

  The earl's eyes narrowed at the sharp tone. Despite her predicament, Louise's daughter was clearly far from subdued.

  "On the contrary, child," he said dryly. "My interest is merely piqued and awaits full satisfaction. Your mother was always a trifle unconventional, but I find it hard to believe she leant her countenance to this escapade of yours." To his dismay, two hot tears rolled slowly down the small face, were wiped away hastily by a firm thumb and the back of a small hand rubbed briskly across a damp nose. Silently cursing his thoughtless stupidity, his lordship drew a fine cambric handkerchief from a ruffled sleeve, passing it across the table with the brisk injunction, "Come, child, you are not on the street now."

  Those liquid brown eyes flashed fire for the barest instant before Danielle took the offering and blew her nose vigorously.

  "My mother is dead." Long restless fingers tore convulsively at the damp, flimsy material for a few moments before she scrunched it into a tight ball in her fist and raised a determined, defiant face.

  The flat statement came as no surprise now and the earl reflected irritably that he should have known it from the beginning.

  "I do apologize, Danielle," he said gently. "But I would like to know how and when."

  * * *

  It had been a brilliant February morning with a hard hoar frost glinting under the pale sun when Danielle de St. Varennes had sprung from her bed with all the eagerness of youth. There was a chill in the air, but in spiteof the early hour someone had kindled a fire in the grate. She had no idea who and it wouldn't have occurred to her to ask. Apart from Old Nurse, who had cared for her from babyhood, her mother's maid, and a few of the upper servants, those who scurried around the enormous chateau making life pleasant for its owners were merely faceless bodies.

  Once she had chanced upon her Uncle Eduard taking his pleasure in an embrasured window nook of one of the endless, draughty corridors. She had seen a pair of wide frightened eyes that for an instant locked with hers over the broad shoulder of her uncle, a pair of dumpy white legs in knee-length cotton stockings revealed under the simple peasant skirt now raised to the servant girl's waist. A soft voice had pleaded, "Je vous emprie, milord. Je suis enceinte," and Danielle had ducked behind the arras half fascinated, half disgusted, watching as Eduard's ample buttocks in their tight hunting britches pumped vigorously before, with a deep grunt, he expended himself and without a word moved away, adjusting his dress carefully, heedless of the silent swooning fall of the figure he'd been holding rigid against the wall.

  Danielle had slipped thoughtfully out of her hide, retracing her steps in search of her mother. She was not unfamiliar with the processes of mating and birth, growing up as she had in a careless, male-dominated environment where her predilection for roaming around the estate in a pair of britches astride a magnificent blood stallion had been viewed as perfectly reasonable. She had not, however, seen humans working in this way before—and it was work; that much she had learned hanging around the breeding sheds, the kennels, and the fields. If caught at her observations by her uncles, her father, or grandfather an indulgent box on the ear was the most she could expect. But something told her that what she had just witnessed did not quite fall into the category of rutting animals. Or did it? Louise had informed her succinctly that it did and the twelve-year-old Danielle had learned an interesting lesson.

  It was an unconventional upbringing for the daughter of one of France's aristocrats. Her father's only contribution to her education had been to toss his two-year-old infant onto the broad back of a supposedly placid mare. Since Lucien's idea of a placid horse was hardly congruent with the generally accepted reality, the tiny Danielle had tumbled from what child's eyes recognized as the highest peak of the universe. She had been instantly replaced, but this time, Lucien, with a rare flash of sense, had mounted behind her. By the time Danielle de St. Varennes was six there wasn't a horse in the stable she couldn't ride as long as someone was available to hoist her chubby little legs astride the saddle. Her Uncle Armand had taught her to shoot, Marc to fence, and her grandfather had instructed a willing mind in the intricacies of his wine cellar and the chessboard. But these attentions had been bestowed with a careless disregard for the developing girl beneath the quick, eager tomboy, and the child had realized early that she was interesting and worthy of notice only as long as she played the role of boy/heir to the dukedom.

  Louise had exchanged her male relatives' right to educate her daughter in the way they would have done her son for the right to provide the child with an intellectual education befitting her quick mind. The village cure was a gentle, disillusioned man of great learning who took immense pleasure in training and immersing the girl's sharp wit in the disciplines of the classics, mathematics, and philosophy. From her mother she learned about the female role in this male-dominated world that was her birthright. By the time Danielle was sixteen she was a curious hodgepodge of a young woman whose understanding and experience of the gently bred world of an eighteenth-century virgin being prepared for the altar of

  matrimony far exceeded respectable limits, a high spirited boy/girl who could outride, outshoot her male peers, whose prowess on the fencing piste was second to none, and whose exceptionally well-educated mind combined with a natural housekeeping ability to manage the intricacies of a nobleman's household.

  That early February morning, the day after her seventeenth birthday, Danielle had pulled on her riding britches, splashed her face in the cold water in the ewer, and headed for the stables. Dom was saddled and ready for her, prancing on the cobbles of the stable-yard, the elegant velvety nose uplifted to the fresh scents of the dawn. Steamy breath filled the air from puckered nostrils as the stallion snorted his readiness for a headlong gallop. The girl laid her foot in the ready hand of the stableboy and swung her leg across the saddle as he threw her up.

  Horse and rider made their way down the graveled driveway between the sweep of elegant lawns stretching into the distance on either side. The many-windowed chateau at their back stood tall, solid, magnificent, the epitome of a way of life that its enjoyers could never conceive ending. She had been riding for about an hour when the baying of hound
s in the distance indicated the presence of the hunt and, eagerly, she pressed her heels into Dom's flank urging him forward. A gallop to hounds was an enticing prospect on this frosty morning and as long as she obeyed the rules of the field and could keep up, her presence would be permitted by her uncles.

  They broke through the trees into a small clearing. Bitter nausea rose in Danielle's throat at the sight that met her horrified eyes. Hounds and horses milled around a small stone cottage, trampled heedlessly across the tiny garden and vegetable plot that would keep the cottage's owner just the right side of starvation. But it was not the wanton destruction that kept her sick and rigid—that happened all the time; the right of the seigneur to abuse his peasants' land in the pursuit of his pleasure was absolute and many a serf watched in stony faced desperation as hounds and horses carried La Ch'asse across his exiguous plot of land, sometimes even destroying an entire cornfield whose harvest represented the farmer's only means

  of paying the heavy tithes demanded by His Lord. No, what held the girl horror-struck was the sight of

  an old man struggling naked in the hands of several huntsmen who were binding his wrists to a low overhanging branch of a massive oak tree. An old woman sobbed and pleaded on her knees before Armand who, with a swift movement of a heavy booted foot, kicked her aside.

  Her uncle was in a towering rage. Danielle recognized the signs in the hard, narrowed eyes, the muscle twitching in a red face, the snarl of the thin lips. It was the face of de St. Varennes fury and she had learned to keep well away when any one of her male relatives carried that expression.

  Suddenly a lash cracked across the frail back of the figure secured to the tree, leaving a bright line of blood along the thin flesh; the white withered buttocks tightened in agony. Heedless of the consequences, Danielle threw herself from her horse and hurtled across the clearing.

  "Stop it! No, please, you must stop it, mon oncle, you'll kill him. Je t'emprie." Her hands clutched at Armand's arm and the furious face bent astounded toward her.

  "What the devil are you doing here, you interfering whelp!" Armand hissed. "Get back to the house, where you belong. Unless, of course, you've a mind to watch." Hard hands gripped her upper arms so that she cried out in pain. Terror filled her as she read the determination in the cruel face. He was quite capable of forcing her, child though she still was, to witness the barbaric murder of an old man at the hands of his henchmen—and Danielle knew it would be murder. The ancient was too frail and weak to survive the punishment still being meted out behind her. Accepting defeat she managed a wordless shake of the head and, when abruptly released, ran, blinded by tears, back to Dom, head averted from the oak tree, trying to shut out the agonized groans accompanying the hiss and snap of the lash.

  She rode herself to exhaustion, heedless of the day's passing and the rumbling pangs of hunger, and it

  was only when Dom stumbled wearily that she returned heartsick to home.

  She had never been ignorant of the cruelties imposed by her family on their serfs, who had no redress either practically or under the law. But she had never seen anything before. She had heard, of course, the screams of village girls accompanying the riotous drunken carouses of her uncles in the great dining room of the chateau, but her mother had always whisked her upstairs or sent her to the cure so her knowledge of what took place on these occasions was necessarily hazy.

  In the great marble-paved hall of the mansion Louise de St. Varennes paced restlessly. Her daughter had not been seen all day and whatever she had done to offend Armand had thrown her father into a passion. It would be as well for Danielle if Louise could catch her before she came to the attention of either Armand or Lucien. They were all drunk tonight and Louise had thankfully instructed the majordomo to serve the men as they pleased but to provide dinner for herself and Danielle in her own rooms abovestairs. But where was the child? It was high time that she grew up and stopped these unchaperoned excursions in that indecorous costume. An attempt to get her to ride sidesaddle had resulted in a true de St. Varennes tantrum and, as usual, Lucien, backed up by his brothers, had laughed and said the brat was a bruising rider and he saw no harm in her riding astride. Louise sighed now, as she wondered for the thousandth time how she was to find a suitable husband for an overeducated tomboy who had but once left the rural wilds of Languedoc. She must approach both the duke and Lucien again on the vital necessity to take Danielle to court in the next year. But even if she were to prevail in that quarter there was no guarantee that Danielle would behave with decorum in the rigidly structured, etiquette-governed life of Louis XVI's Versailles.

  These melancholy reflections led her to react with unusual anger when her daughter eventually came through the great front door, and Louise failed to notice the drooping shoulders or the dragging step that replaced Danielle's customary impetuous, bouncing progress.

  "Where on earth have you been, child? Have you no sense or consideration?" she railed, shaking the slim shoulders. "Dear God, you reek of the stable! Get upstairs and take a bath and if you've a care for your skin, you'll keep away from your father and your uncles!" She pushed her toward the stairs.

  Only as Danielle disappeared without a word up the broad, curving flight did her unusual meekness strike Louise.

  Danielle soaked in the hot tub before her bedroom fire, feeling its warmth ease her weary limbs and provide some comfort for her numb, deadened spirit. If the truth be told, she had heard almost nothing

  of her mother's angry words which had washed off her like water on an oiled skin.

  She was never sure quite what it was that first brought the goose bumps prickling on the back of her neck. It was as if a curious expectant silence hung over the house, but it was a silence bristling with menace rather than anticipation. Then a strange rumble filled the air. Danielle pulled a robe over her barely dried body, little knowing that the next bath she took would be many weeks later in a Parisian inn at the insistence of an English earl.

  She gazed in bewilderment at the scene below her window on the gravel sweep. Her eyes could not take in the reality of the vast mob advancing slowly across the beautifully tended park, mowing down her mother's beloved flowers under rough boots, wielding heavy cudgels, pitchforks, tree branches, and brandishing flaming torches. They all seemed to have the same face—heavy peasant faces set in lines of grim determination under the flickering torchlight. But it wasn't what she saw that lifted her scalp and sent cold shafts of terror shuddering through her slight frame so much as the sound, a low menacing murmur that seemed to swell as the wave of humanity reached the front steps. Gently she cracked her casement. "St. Varennes, St. Varennes," the voices rumbled as one, filling her ears, her head, becoming a part of her.

  Suddenly the great doors were thrown wide as the irate family, headed by the old duke, pushed out onto the steps to confront the now still but not silent mob. Cruel they most certainly were, blinded to the needs of their less fortunate fellowmen certainly, but no de St. Varennes could be accused of cowardice.

  Danielle watched in hypnotized horror as her grandfather began to harangue the throng. She could imagine his own bewilderment and disbelief—that they, the de St. Varennes, were being threatened by their own serfs. The duke gestured suddenly behind him and a group of henchmen from the house joined Antoine and his sons, training muskets on the crowd. For a second there was utter silence and the girl at the window held her breath, sensing that the confrontation could go either way at this stage. Numbers were on the side of the mob, but the traditional habits of obedience and the fear inspired by the show of armed force was on the side of their lords—until Louise de St. Varennes decided to play the last role of her life. In a flurry of velvet skirts she brushed roughly through the line of henchmen, pushed past her husband and father-in-law addressing the mob in cool, measured tones, sweeping away Lucien's restraining hand with all the contempt for him that the last twenty years had wrought. Her hands opened in appeal to the crowd and she began to walk down the broad shal
low flight of stone steps toward them. As she reached the gravel a large man brandishing a thick staff made a move toward her— whether in aggression or truce no one was ever to discover. Shots rang out from the steps and Danielle watched in disbelief the bright blood spreading from a tiny spot between her mother's shoulder blades to a wide stain covering the narrow back as Louise slipped in slow motion to the driveway. She was not the only casualty of the nervous, quick-fingered firing which now became totally uncontrolled, and figures in the front ranks fell under the hail of bullets. Suddenly the murmur changed, became a great, unanimous shout: "Lesaristos! Tuez! Tuez!"

  Danielle saw little else, just an image of blood and tumbled limbs scorched into her retina. She whirled as the door to her chamber opened and Old Nurse, white-faced, the old myopic eyes glazed in shock, ran to her, dragging her away from the window, muttering incoherently as she pushed the britches and the damp, grubby shirt she had been wearing all day into the girl's hands.

  "Vite, vite, mon enfant,'' the cracked voice repeated desperately, and, without understanding, the bemused Danielle obeyed. "The back stairs . . . you must go to the cure, he will help you, quickly, child!" The crone seized Danielle's hand, tugging her out of the room.