On My Lady's Honor (Secrets of the Musketeers Book 1) Page 10

He stumbled over an uneven patch on the cobblestones and she gave a groan. He held her tighter to his body to protect her against the roughness of her ride. He was carrying a woman disguised as a man, and wearing the uniform of a soldier. He had never even imagined such a thing before.

  A woman. No wonder she had rushed to the aid of the serving wench in the tavern. She had seen her own self in the figure of that poor bedraggled maid servant and had rushed to her defense.

  Fool that he was, he had not gone to her aid but had let her battle it out on her own against the drunken mob intent on her blood. He shivered with the realization of the danger she had been in – that he had allowed her to face without him by her side. She was only a woman, and fighting against half a dozen men twice her size. She could have been killed as he stood by.

  She relaxed in his arms, nuzzling her cheek against his rough linen shirt.

  No wonder her face had gone was white as milk when he had torn her shirt. He’d intended it only as a lesson for the lad to hold his tongue when he was in no fit state to fight. It was better that he learn that lesson in a hurry from one who wished him no harm, or he would not live long.

  He’d caught a glimpse of some strange undergarment the lad was wearing, and then his pupil had surprised him by leaping to his feet with more agility than he would have thought possible, given his sorry state.

  From the moment his friend had returned from the Camargue he had been Gerard and yet not Gerard. Those blue eyes that were so like Gerard’s had looked right through him without a shred of recognition or warmth. He had recognized the face of his friend, but that familiar face had hidden the soul of a stranger.

  No wonder he had been so confused, wondering how his friend could be the same on the outside but different in every other way from the man he had once known. The explanation had been so obvious he had never seen it hiding under his nose all the time. Gerard had never returned.

  Instead God had sent him Gerard’s sister, so like her brother in face and feature. He would marry her as he had promised and look after her as well as he could. He owed his friend that much. Foolish, impulsive, beautiful girl that she was, she would need a lot of protection.

  He gathered her closer to him, thankful for her safety. He would never let her be in such danger again. Now he knew who she was, he protect her with every last drop of blood in his body.

  He could not take her back to her lodgings as he had first intended and leave her there to the scant cheer of her landlady. He knew the Widow Poussin from old. She was a grasping, cheerless old woman, concerned only with feeding her avarice and adding to the pile of coins she had stacked up under the mattress of her bed.

  His own lodgings were close by. He could take her there and keep an eye on her until she was better again. Once she was well, he would find out both the reason for her masquerade and the fate of his friend.

  Soldier that he was, he felt his eyes fill with tears as he though of his friend. He had little hope that Gerard had survived. If he were alive, his sister would not be alone, in Paris, living an unnatural life as a common soldier.

  He could not imagine the desperation she must have felt to have driven her to such extremes. Once again he cursed his own foolishness that had so nearly gotten him killed by a peasant with a pitchfork. He had made the ultimate error then in underestimating his enemy. He vowed he would never do so again.

  She opened her eyes as he carried her over the threshold. “Where are we?”

  “At my lodgings.”

  She groaned, sounding as if she were about to breathe her last. “I thought you were going to take me back to the Rue de Fosset.”

  He climbed the last of the stairs and pushed open the door to his apartment on the second floor. “The devil take me if I was going to carry you that far, you great lump of lard,” he said, as he put her down gently on an ottoman. In truth, she was such a light weight that he had barely noticed carrying her. “This is quite far enough.”

  She looked like she was going to protest. “Besides, you reek of stale wine,” he added. “It almost made me sick to the stomach to carry you.”

  She looked at her stained shirt in embarrassment. “Lend me a shirt to go home in, will you?” she said with forced cheer. “I’ll bring it back to you on the morrow.”

  He shook his head. “No shirt of mine is going on your back until you’ve had a bath.”

  The look on her face was almost comical in its dismay. If he hadn’t already known she was a woman, he would have guessed at it simply by her horror of taking a bath in his company. “N…no bath,” she said. “I shall catch cold.”

  He could not resist teasing her. After all, he still owed her for that annoying scratch on his arm. How humiliating, to have been wounded by a mere girl! “Don’t worry, I’ll have the water well heated.”

  “I’m perfectly clean,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to bother your landlady for hot water when it isn’t necessary. All I need is a clean shirt and I’ll smell as fresh as a daisy.”

  He looked tellingly at her soiled breeches and stained jacket. Her entire outfit looked as if she had been carousing in it all night. “You will?”

  She looked down at her battered clothes and sighed. “I had a rough night last night. I’ll bathe in my own lodgings.”

  He sighed. What kind of a virago was this strange fiancée of his? “More brawling?”

  She held out her hands. They were cut and torn, and covered in weeping blisters. “No more brawling - I never fight without good reason. I was escaping the effects of the first one. I never knew I could climb a stone wall in less time than it takes you to snap your fingers.”

  He took her hands in his and stroked them, probing gently to see how deep the sores went. She winced at the touch of his fingers. “They look bad. They need to be tended to.”

  “They are little enough.” She gave a wry smile. “My feet are worse.”

  Despite her protests, he unlaced one of her boots and pulled it down her thigh and over her ankle. It made his guts churn to see how the stocking on her foot was covered in crusted blood. “Have you been walking in them all morning?”

  She nodded.

  Was his pretty Amazon slow-witted as well as quick-tempered? “Did you not have the sense to tend to them last night?”

  “I did not make it home last night,” she admitted, her face going pink around the edges. “I was drinking with two of my fellows deep into the night, until I fell asleep on the floor with my boots on. I had no time to change my stockings and no clean linen to change into.”

  A pang of fury shot through his heart that Sophie, the girl to whom he should be married by now, had spent the night with a couple of his own comrades. “Who did you spend the night with?” he growled, barely able to disguise his anger.

  She put her nose into the air and gave him a haughty stare. “That is no concern of yours.”

  She was wrong. It was definitely a concern of his.

  He had promised Gerard that he would take care of his sister if anything were to happen to him. He had thought that Sophie’s death had absolved him of his promise. Now that he knew better, nothing on earth would keep him from her side. He would even marry her as he had promised, beautiful, brawling Amazon that she was. He owed his dead friend that much. “A simple question deserves a simple answer.”

  The haughty look had not left her face. “Is there a law against sleeping on your comrade’s floor?”

  He glared at her, wishing he could shake some sense into her pretty head. “Don’t be absurd.”

  “Then why do you care?”

  What kind of a foolish question was that? She knew full well that he was her betrothed husband – even if she didn’t yet realize that he knew it, too. “You should not be sleeping on the floors of strange men.”

  “They are not strange. They are Musketeers – the same as you and I.”

  He shook his head at her answer. He still could not get over the fact that she had successfully disguised herself among the regiment for
so long. How could he have missed the signs that were so obvious now that he knew the truth? How could he have missed the feminine tilt of her chin, or the haughty way she had of looking down at him, as if he were a maggot under her heel? How had he so easily managed to dismiss her sudden incompetence with a sword, when his efforts with Gerard the year before had turned the lad into a passably good swordsman? Suddenly, she made sense to him, where before he had seen only confusion and contradiction.

  She was a woman. There was no point in arguing with her any longer. If she was like every other woman he knew, she would talk the head off a donkey before he would ever convince her that he had a right to care for her.

  He stuck his head out of the door and shouted for the landlady. She appeared in a bustle of warmth, smelling like the good roast beef she turned out daily for his evening meal. “I need a tub and some hot water up here right away. A comrade of mine has been in the wars and needs attending to.”

  She smiled at him. “Certainly, Monsieur le Comte. Would you be wanting anything else?”

  “Some bandages, too, if you would be so kind.”

  “Right away, Monsieur le Comte.” She bustled away again with a busy air.

  Sophie was glaring at him with a look that would freeze the ocean over, her arms crossed over her chest. “I will not get into that bath.”

  He would not argue – he would demand. “Yes, you will. You’re filthy.”

  Her dagger was in her hand, threatening him with its shining blade. “I will not get into that bath. You cannot make me.”

  Did she think she would frighten him with that little pinprick of a knife? He sat down opposite her and looked her straight in the eyes. How could he tell her kindly that he knew her secret? “Believe me, I know why you do not want to bathe.”

  Sophie looked back at him with defiance writ large over her face. “I doubt that very much,” she muttered, so low that he barely caught the words. “I will catch my death of cold,” she said aloud.

  He could not imagine her catching her death of anything, unless it was at the point of an enemy’s sword. “You’re a good deal stronger than that, if I’m not mistaken.”

  She dropped the dagger in her lap, gave an artificial cough and looked up at him with a face full of misery. “The plague weakened me.”

  He would have laughed at her had he not known how unpleasant one’s very first hangover felt. “Did it also turn you from a man into a woman?”

  All the blood rushed from her face and her whole body was trembling. Even her voice shook with shock and disbelief when she spoke again. “What did you call me?”

  He felt sorry for her distress. She had guarded her secret so well that he hardly had the heart to tell her that her disguise had been penetrated. “I called you what you are.”

  She picked up her dagger again and held it in a wavering hand. “I will kill you for that insult.”

  He did not move. He doubted she could see straight to kill anything that morning. She was probably still seeing two of him. “Come, Sophie. The time for playacting has past. I know what you are. I know who you are.”

  All the fight went out of her on the sudden and she collapsed on to the ottoman as if she had lost all the strength in her legs. “What did you call me?”

  “You are Sophie, aren’t you? Not Gerard, but his twin sister?”

  “You are mistaken. I am Gerard.” Her voice was flat and lacked all conviction.

  He looked at her in silence. Her lip wobbled as she tried to face him down. After a moment, she hung her head and looked away. He spoke with utter certainty. “You are not Gerard.”

  She nodded, her face blank with desolation. “I am not Gerard.”

  “You are Sophie?”

  “I am.” Her voice was dead and cold.

  “What happened to Gerard?”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “He died of the plague.”

  Lamotte bowed his head in grief to have his suspicions so baldly confirmed. “I guessed as much.”

  He took her hand in his and held it in silence for some minutes as together they mourned for the death of the brother and friend they both had loved. The touch of her hand was comforting in his grief. Gerard had passed on to a better world, but he had left a part of him behind on earth. He would cherish and protect Gerard’s sister as best he could.

  After some moments, she wiped her eyes on her shirtsleeve and made a visible effort to control her grief. “How did you find me out?”

  The real question was how had he taken so long to find her out? “You have been bothering me for weeks. You were Gerard, and yet not Gerard. I watched you and took note of everything you did, but I could not work out why you had changed so much. Then when I picked you up in my arms this morning, it all became clear. I knew then that you were no man. I knew you were a woman.”

  She raised her head again and looked at him with a spark of her usual fire. “What are you going to do about it?”

  He had been thinking about that since the moment he realized who she was. “I will marry you, as I promised Gerard I would, and send you to safety in Burgundy as we had agreed. My mother was looking forward to meeting my new wife. She will take good care of you. She has run the household by herself for many years, and will no doubt appreciate some help now that she is growing older.”

  Sophie shuddered. “I became a Musketeer so I would not have to marry a stranger and be sent off to exile in Burgundy. I will not marry you now.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. She was not being reasonable. What other kind of marriage could she expect?. With no father to arrange matters for her, and after her time spent as a Musketeer, what other marriage could she possibly make? She was lucky that he was contracted to her and his sense of honor obliged him to marry her. She would find no other husband else. “What else can you do?”

  “I can be a Musketeer – as I am now.”

  How unreasonable and impractical women could be sometimes. “But you are a woman – you cannot survive the rigors of the barracks.”

  She looked at him in silence for a moment. “I already knew how to ride before I came to Paris,” she said at last. “In the last few weeks I have learned how to fight. I have worked every day until I collapsed on my bed with exhaustion. I fought off a dozen louts bent on mischief last night, and escaped the guard sent to arrest the brawlers. I wounded you in a fair fight and faced death with my eyes open. Exactly what rigors can I not survive?”

  He could not understand why she wanted to accept such hardship when an easier option was open to her. “You are a woman. You should be allowed to spend your time raising children and running a household, as other women do. You should not have learned to fight.”

  “You taught me how.”

  He could not argue with that. He was already regretting everything he had taught her. “You are a woman, not a soldier.”

  The look on her face would be enough to make a seasoned warrior quail. “I will kill you before I let you disclose my secret.”

  He believed her capable of killing him – had she not tried to once already? - but he would not fight a woman.

  “My comrades believe me to be Gerard. They will laugh at your claim. I will deny that I am a woman. I will fight you over the insult.”

  She seemed to forget that he could easily prove his claim – she had shown him how the prior evening. All it took was the sharp point of a sword to rip apart the lacings of a man’s breeches and he would not need to say word. “You want to be a Musketeer that much?”

  She nodded. “I brought the plague into the household that killed Gerard and all my family. I owe him the honor he would have received as a Musketeer. I loved my brother, my twin, more than I loved anyone else in the world. I will not let you rob him of that honor I will win in his name.”

  He thought of how fondly Gerard had spoken of her. Her love had been returned in good measure. “Gerard loved you, too.”

  Surprisingly, her eyes filled with tears at his words. He would have thought that her heart
was hardened beyond her sex. He was glad to see that she was capable of some softer, more feminine emotions. “I know he did,” she whispered.

  A knock at the door heralded the arrival of the tub and plenty of pitchers filled with steaming hot water.

  He saw the yearning in Sophie’s eyes as she looked at the water being poured into the tub. “Bath time,” he said.

  She glared at him again, but held her tongue until the landlady had left the room once more. “You know that I cannot bathe with you here,” she said, not taking her eyes of the water as she spoke. “It would not be seemly.”

  For such an Amazon, she was surprisingly prudish. “Are we not soldiers together? Comrades-in-arms?”

  “Very amusing.”

  At least she had some shreds of modesty left in her. He had been starting to wonder whether she was male in all but the shape of her body. “I’ll find you some clean linen and leave you alone while you wash,” he said. “You smell too bad to have in the house else.”

  Once left alone with the steaming tub of water, Sophie could not get her clothes off fast enough. How long had it been since she had immersed herself in water and gotten really clean? She could not rightly remember.

  All through the winter she had washed in cold water, not wanting to waste the firewood she gathered so painstakingly on luxuries like keeping clean. She had spent all her energy on keeping herself warm and fed.

  Her lodgings in Paris offered her no such luxury, either. She had had to make do with a pitcher of lukewarm water grudgingly delivered to her each evening by her ill-tempered landlady. She would never have dreamed of asking for an entire tub full of hot water. She would not have gotten it even if she had asked, she was quite sure. Her landlady would have swooned with the mere shock of being asked.

  With an exhalation of pure delight, she tossed off the last of her filthy linen, pushed it into a pile with her foot and stepped into the deliciously warm water.

  The blisters on her feet stung, as did the cuts on her hands, but she hardly cared.

  Lamotte’s landlady had even brought soap – wonderful soap that smelled of heady purple lavender. She ran the precious cake all over her body, rubbing it into a rich, foamy lather over her legs, her arms, her belly, her breasts. There was even a long-handled scrubbing brush for her back. She lathered the soap on to the brush and brushed her back vigorously, feeling every particle of dirt and grime dissolve away.