Page 30 of Lessons for Marquesses
“We are, as they say, at an impasse.” Nicholas descended the slope.
“I will tell her who you are!”
“Tell her. Tell them all. I don’t give a damn.”
“Will you kill her?” Oliver shouted after him.
Nicholas froze.
“Is that the line?” Oliver’s breath came in rasps. “Everything but murder, or will it come to that? Why not now? It would be the expedient path. Save you a bloody hell amount of time and effort.”
“You think I would kill her?” Hadn’t he imagined it or at least fantasized on acts that might hurt her?
Oliver shook his shoe. “Isn’t that your plan, to strip her pride, send her to debtors’ prison? To take what she loves and crush all that is noble in her? So go on, kill her if you want. But be quick about it. Because heed me, she plans to sell Farendon to the walls! And soon!”
“I don’t want to destroy her.” But he did, didn’t he?
“You tell yourself so. And better yet, spare Georgiana, and put yourself out of your misery.” Oliver grimaced at the slope he had to ascend to return to the cottage. “Now I’ve had my say. Good day.”
Nicholas dropped to the grass and drowned Oliver’s words in whiskey.
Put yourself out of your misery.How close his friend’s suggestion was to the desperate inclinations that gripped him after a string of sleepless nights. A pistol to the head. René Durand’s knife to his throat. The hanging he went to war to avoid.
He drank more and let the ghosts overtake him.
René Durand stared upward into the sweltering July sky, the knife seated in his heart. Nicholas couldn’t feel his own heart, but it was beating. Because air heaved from his lungs as he screamed.
Nicholas gripped the letter soaked with blood. He made out the address: Lisieux, France. He turned from René’s corpse and there, in the middle of the forest, cannon fire blasting the frontier, was a desk.
Nicholas wrote out René’s words in French as the cannon fire drew closer. The screams. The scatter of shot and limbs.
Angelique, raconte-moi, qu'on puisse amor ensemble de nouveau.Tell me, that we can love together again. And if the day does not come, know you are in my heart.
Nicholas raced to finish the letter against the pounding strides of French regulars and their Huron allies. A musket ball whistled past his ear. Another stung his flank.
René was dead. But, no, he was alive. Sitting up. Standing up. The knife planted in his coat. Walking toward the desk. Pulling out the knife. Enveloping the mossy earth with a torrent of blood.
“Will you kill her?” René asked.
Behind René the first of the French line appeared. Edmund led the charge.
“Be quick about it,” his brother whispered. Too far away to hear it but it was there, in his brain. “It’s the expedient path.”
Nicholas splashed through the blood to steady himself. “I’m not a killer.”
“Do it soon, Nick. Soon.”
Edmund drew nearer, shifting, his figure thinning, his eyes shining cerulean in the dappled light. Georgiana St. Clair ran at him. Nicholas shoved her. She landed on the forest floor, a knife plunged into her breast, long tresses of white hair floating in the rising blood, her face slowly receding.
“Killer.” She laughed with a wink. And then, no more, she was swallowed by the sea of blood.
Nicholas’s back sprang up from the grass. He shook his head, bracing against his knees in the dark, trying to calm his breath, trying to hear anything other than the blood whooshing in his ears.
He was on the heath. To the left, Devil’s Dyke. The bottle of whiskey sat at his feet. He had drunk too much after Oliver left. Too much and not enough.
A broken cry wrenched from his throat. There was nothing to be done. And if there was by some miracle a chance to right his wrongs, who would listen to his plea?
He scanned the night sky and the million glittering witnesses to his crimes before swiping at the whiskey bottle. The fingers of his left hand were numb and incapable of doing what his mind ordered. He pounded his hand against his thigh. Was this it? Drunk and dreaming of killing Georgiana St. Clair? This was when his hand would be lost?
