“Nothing wrong? Now, that depends on whether you’re an aristocrat. Where are you from?” Even in the gloom, malice shimmered in the leader’s eyes.
“Arras.” It wasn’t a lie. She and Marie had lived there since her family’s massacre five years earlier. “I’m a seamstress.”
“A seamstress?” The leader’s eyes ran slowly down her body, lingering so long her cheeks grew warm. “And what would a seamstress be doing alone? At night? So close to the shoreline?”
“I’m visiting my aunt. In Saint-Valery-sur-Somme.”
The leader laughed, a chilling timbre that sent fear into her heart. “Sure you are. Everyone travels in the dead of night when visiting an aunt.”
Isabelle licked her lips. “She suffered apoplexy, and we just received word. She needs someone to care for her. I’m traveling as quickly as possible, even at night.” She’d rehearsed the story a hundred times, even told it a time or two during the course of her journey. So why did her voice quaver?
“Hah. A likely story.” The leader’s gaze darkened. “She’s an aristocrat, men. Has to be.”
Isabelle dropped her gaze and clutched at the hard arm around her chest. “Non, please!” They had to believe her. It wasn’t a lie, not all of it. She was a seamstress. She was from Arras.
The leader smirked and took a strand of her hair between his fingers. Isabelle stiffened, bile churning in her stomach as he toyed with a curl.
“Pretty as you are, you’re not worth the trouble of dragging to a trial.” The leader separated her hair into little sections between his thumb and middle finger and stroked it. “We’ll take care of you here.”
The breath clogged in her throat. So they wouldn’t cart her to the nearest guillotine or to Paris. They’d kill her in the middle of the woods with only the trees as spectators. Better than the alternative. But if she could get free somehow and make it to the shrubs, she could still hide in the tall grass. All she needed was a distraction. Something to make her captor lose his hold. But what…?
The arm around her middle loosened. Her captor’s hand slid up, and he brushed his thumb along the base of her rib cage. “We got time to have this one before we kill her. She’d be worth it.”
The air left her lungs in one hard whoosh. Please, Father, don’t let them rape me. After five years of prayers falling on deaf ears, if there was any prayer God deemed fit to answer, surely this would be it. She didn’t move or even breathe as she focused her eyes on the man in front of her.
If You’ve any shred of mercy, Father, spare me. Her hands, still held against her chest, sought the familiar outline of the cross beneath her dress.
The leader’s eyes darkened, yet the fury embodied there shot past her and speared the man who held her. “You’ve a wife at home, Christophé.”
She tried to suck in a relieved breath, but her captor’s arm cut so tight she couldn’t inhale.
A low growl escaped from the throat behind her. “You never let us—”
“I said no!”
The arm around her vibrated with tension, though the man remained silent. But the leader’s attention slipped back to her.
“Who are you, wench? Truly?” The massive soldat pinned his eyes to hers, as though he already knew the truth.
“I told you.”
“Don’t feed me another lie about Arras.” He dug the heel of his boot into the ground. “Quel est votre nom?”
He wanted to know her name? Her eyes fought the malevolent black of his gaze. Isabelle Cerise de La Rouchecauld, second daughter of the late Duc de La Rouchecauld, Louis-Alexandre. And after my sister was captured last week, all the province of Artois is searching for me.
The words burned inside her, though why after years of hiding she should desire to confess her identity to a band of soldats, she didn’t know. Her jaw trembled as she opened her mouth to recite the familiar story. “Isabelle Chenior. The daughter of a cobbler traveling to Saint-Valery to see her aunt.”
Her chest grew tight. What if he forced the true answer from her? The man carried enough power, he could make her talk. And if he learned of her heritage, he’d take her to Paris, where she’d be executed before the raucous mob. With her ancestry dating back to the tenth century, the crowd would be wild for her blood.
As the mob must have been for her sister’s. A sob welled in Isabelle’s chest, but she shoved it down. She’d not think of Marie now, nor of her role in her sister’s death.
The leader snorted. “Isabelle Chenoir, daughter of a cobbler? You lie again, but your name matters not. You all end up at the guillotine.”
Yes, let him think her name didn’t matter.
One of the soldiers trotted over. “Found the money.”
The leader held out his hand for the pouch of coins and bundle of assignats she’d hidden in the secret pocket of her valise. Her stomach clenched. Five years of her seamstress’s wages, and the man palmed it as though she’d earned it in an hour.
Even as he took the money, the leader’s gaze never left hers. A silent battle raged between them. Isabelle refused to drop her eyes. He was waiting for that very thing, it seemed. Her final surrender. If only her stare could fend him off forever.
He released the hair he’d been fingering and touched her cheek. She resisted an instinctive flinch as his cold skin pressed against her face. “You know what gave your identity away? That stare. A seamstress wouldn’t look at me as though she were a queen.”
He backed away. “Kill her, boys.”
With the first blow to her kidneys, she couldn’t stifle her scream.
* * *
Michel Belanger surveyed the land before him as the early sun painted the bare fields golden. He drew in a deep breath, smelled the earth and cold and animals.
His eyes traveled over the small, tree-lined fields as they did every morning.
Thirty-six acres. The land had been his for four years, seven months and thirteen days.
And he loathed it.
He’d promised to care for the farm when his father died, but the obligation choked him, forever chaining him to northern France.
His neighbors were fools for thinking a declaration from the National Assembly freed them. True, the August Decrees four and a half years ago liberated land from the seigneurs and Church. But before, a man could leave a farm and seek work elsewhere. Now peasants like him owned their land. And the ownership only tied them to the monotonous work. Shackled their children and grandchildren to the unforgiving earth.
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. It was a verse he’d rather not have memorized.
Michel’s eyes roved the fields yet to be planted and rested on the stone and half-timbered cottage that sat at the field’s edge. He knew every bump and crag of the chipping wattle and daub, the manner in which sunlight slanted through the windows, the way shadows played in the corners of the two rooms. He came into the world in that house, and despite his dreams, he’d leave the world in that same structure.
But a promise was a promise, and he would work the land until it drained the life from his blood, as had happened to Père. The Belangers hadn’t worked for three generations only to have the eldest son turn his back on the land. He would work hard. He would tame the land and add to it. And one day, he would pass it to his son. And mayhap that son would love the land as his late father had, as his brother still did, despite Jean Paul’s decision to leave home.
But the day for