“A boat,” she repeated. Her hands were shaking. She hid them in her shawl.
He nodded. “To England.”
Impossible. She was no student of geography, but Paris was many miles from the coast. She had not slept long enough to make such a journey.
Her dream rushed in on her, the swirling stars, the cool night flowing and parting around them like a river, the road a silver ribbon unspooling between the hills below. The texture of his shirt againt her cheek. The strength of his arms.
She shoved the memory aside.
And England . . .
Loss blanketed her, heavy, wet, cold. Her head was a roaring snowstorm, her stomach a lump of ice.
“You tear me away from everything I know.” Everything loved and familiar. “You will rip me apart.”
“I saved you.” His voice was deep. Implacable.
“You are killing me,” she said passionately.
She wanted to die.
“I offer you life,” he said at last, softly. “In accordance with your mother’s last prayer. What you make of it is up to you.”
Almost, she was ashamed.
A door creaked in the silence. Her breath stopped. Sounds drifted from the stable below that were not made by cows or mice. The scrape of a boot. A jingle of harness.
Cold sweat snaked down her spine. Had they been followed? Maman was gone, Papa and little Philippe, dead. In her guilt and grief, she longed to join them. But the will to live was not so easily extinguished.
She did not want, after all, to be discovered.
“Stay,” her rescuer commanded.
He flowed past her and climbed—jumped—floated down the ladder. His cape billowed from his shoulders as he dropped silently to the floor.
Aimée sat frozen in her nest of hay, her heart beating like a rabbit’s. Snatches of conversation rose through the trapdoor.
“. . . into Portsmouth . . .”
“. . . look the other way . . .”
“. . . pay for passage . . .” In her rescuer’s deep voice.
“We don’t need your money.” She could barely make out the langue d’oil of northern France, spoken with a distinctly British accent. “These little trips pay for themselves.”
“If you sell her,” her rescuer said, clear and cold, “I will destroy you.”
“We don’t traffic in children.” Equal disdain in the speaker’s voice.
She crept closer to the trapdoor, trying to get a glimpse of the men below. They were barely more than shapes in the dark: her tall rescuer in his broad-shouldered cloak; a burly fellow in an oversized coat and battered hat; a younger man, slim as a steel blade.
“Your girl isn’t the first aristocrat we’ve smuggled across the Channel,” the burly man continued.
“You’re one of us,” the younger man said. “You should know that.”
One of what? Aimée wondered. Smugglers? English?
A light flickered. Not a flare like a match, not the honest yellow glow of lamplight, but a slow growing silver light, cupped like a ball in her rescuer’s hand. The eerie light illuminated his face, cold, pale, and perfect as the statue of Apollo in the chateau gardens. Wide, clear brow. Long, straight nose. Firm, unsmiling mouth. His fair hair fell, unpowdered and untamed, to his shoulders.