uh…”
She kept her face down, staring at the pattern on the old quilt. Why must she be so childish and lurch away? He’d meant nothing by the touch. He was just…what?
Her heart felt ready to hammer through her chest, and heat flooded her cheeks. Surely she did not desire his kiss.
He cleared his throat. “I, um, came to speak with you about your attackers. Was it a gang of thieves, or soldiers? And what do they know of you?”
Isabelle stiffened, her hand tightening around her money and pendant. Had he been kind to her only because he wanted information? She couldn’t tell him, not anything. If he knew her father had been a duc, he might yet turn her over to the soldiers. And if he allowed her to stay, he’d knowingly put himself and his mother in greater danger. Non. Information about her family would only put more people at risk. “You need know nothing of me.”
“Joseph Le Bon, the représentative en mission from the Convention, will be coming to Abbeville shortly. Now, whence come you?”
The représentative en mission? An icy finger of fear wrapped around the base of her spine and worked upward. Though the main guillotine for executions resided in Paris, représentatives en mission brought other guillotines with them and their soldiers when they traveled, carrying their own little Terror to other sections of the country. She and Marie had barely maintained their disguise when the Terror came to Arras last fall, but to have it come to Abbeville? Now? “Surely you jest.”
“I do not. And ’tis reasonable that I know who’s sleeping under my roof and eating my food. So I’ll ask again. Whence come you?”
She swallowed. The soldiers in the woods hadn’t believed her story, but perchance the farmer would. The tale had fooled people for five years. “From Arras, my father was a cobbler, but when my aunt in Saint-Valery suffered apoplexy, I—”
He gripped her wrist with frightening force, angling himself over her until she’d no choice but to look him in the eye. “You lie. And so easily at that. If your hair were not so obviously black and your eyes brown, you’d state they were red, both of them. Tell me, does it upset your constitution to lie so freely? I thought mademoiselles were especially sensitive to such falsehoods.”
She pressed her eyes shut, unable to meet his prying gaze. Non. She hadn’t always lied. She’d been nearly sick the first time she was untruthful about her heritage. But the seamstress, Madame Laurent, would have sent her to the guillotine had she gone to the shop claiming she was the daughter of the Duc de La Rouchecauld.
Had lying become so natural over the past five years she now thought nothing of it?
“I’m risking my neck and my mother’s by having you here. I’ll not hear any more falsehoods. I’d rather you refuse to answer than tell me an untruth.”
Isabelle opened her eyes and bit the side of her lip. She still couldn’t tell him who her father was, not even with the représentative en mission en route. Perchance Michel was willing to help some unnamed aristocratic girl, but in the eyes of most Frenchmen, helping the daughter of the Duc de La Rouchecauld would test even God’s mercies. She blew out a shaky breath. “I promise to speak honestly, but I’ll not give you my name nor tell you whence I come. Then if I am discovered, you can deny any knowledge of my heritage.”
“We both know that will make little difference.”
The truth of Michel’s words sliced her. They would all be killed if anyone learned her identity.
Chapter Six
“…They appeared of a sudden, coming out of the forest. I didn’t stop to look or count. I simply fled. I knew not whether they were thieves or soldiers, but when they started calling me, telling me stop in the authority of France, I knew who they were and what they would do to me.”
Michel scrubbed a hand over his face as Isabelle’s words swirled around him. He should have never asked to hear it. Her face shone deathly pale, but her words sounded hard, objective. Like a soldier who recounted someone else’s experience, rather than her own. ’Twould be better if she cried, raged, anything to get out what must be burning inside her.
“I should have been more prepared for a chase. I see that now. The handful of other times I happened upon someone in the road, I’d time enough to hide in the forest. But the soldiers, they emerged from the trees, not the road. What could I do but run? The shadows weren’t enough to conceal me. And I had my valise. I should have dropped it, left it for them. But…I couldn’t.”
Her voice hitched, followed by a tremble of the lips and the slightest sheen of anguish in her eyes. “I’d already lost so much.”
Her determination nearly broke him. How terrible to be forced from your home, constrained to travel at night with wild animals and thieves abounding, impelled to carry all possessions in a valise.
Michel hunched his shoulders and turned away from her. He wouldn’t feel sorry for her. He couldn’t.
Fire and damnation. Her kin had starved him, taxed his land, house, harvest and made him pay for use of the mill. Seigneurs refused him rights to hunt and fish. Now he sat beside a seigneur’s daughter, and he was supposed to pity her?
Michel stiffened, only half listening as she continued.
“Despite my advanced start, I could feel them gaining. Then my valise caught. I turned to jerk it free, but a soldier had hold of it. When I pulled, the bag ripped, but I continued forward. There was a copse of pine ahead, and if I could get there, I thought to lose myself in their dense branches. But I never…that is to say, I didn’t…”
She cleared her throat.
How had the woman courage to continue her story?
“One wore an old National Guard coat, and they all had on those hideous tricolor cockades. They wanted to know my name, where I was from and so forth. I told them the same story I told you, but they didn’t believe me, either. And when the leader demanded the truth, I refused. They were going to kill me regardless. Why give them the pleasure of knowing whom they’d taken?”
He’d not look at the girl. He couldn’t or he’d lose every drop of the hatred he harbored for the aristocracy. Tunneling a hand through his hair, he paced, but the room was hardly large enough. Four steps across from the chest of drawers to Mère’s bed and back again.
He wished he’d never found her. Then there’d be no dilemma, no danger to him and his mother by harboring her. No choice between whether to further aid her escape or kick her out once she regained her strength.
He’d not sneak into the woods again to fish for the rest of his days if he could send her on her way. Rid himself of the burden she’d become.
“The leader, a large man not unlike yourself, had at least enough decency to refuse the others the opportunity to violate me. I suppose I wasn’t worth dragging to the nearest guillotine, so they’d kill me there, in the woods. Then I felt a blow to my lower back and…”
He stopped pacing. Isabelle worked her jaw to and fro. Why didn’t she let her pain out? She should be in tears after reliving such an ordeal. Her hands trembled in what was surely a bitter fight for control, but her eyes stayed flat.
“…I can’t recall anything more.”
He raised his eyes to the thatched roof. Through the deaths of his father and Corinne, he’d clung to the fact that God didn’t make mistakes. Every morning when he rose to milk the cow and feed the animals, every midday when he planted or weeded or harvested rather than build furniture, he reminded himself God’s ways were best.
But the arrival of this…this… He knew not what to call her. He could hardly term her “wench” or “vixen” when she faced the memories of her attack with such strength. He could hardly call her “girl” when she had lived through such pain.
The arrival of this mademoiselle had him questioning