Page 65 of Beyond the Lavender Fields
“That was a long time to get held up by crowds.” Gilles took up a needle. Should he try to strap down her arm? It’s what he would have done on the ship. Somehow the thought of tying her to the table, even for her own good, soured his stomach. “I don’t think they’d believe it.”
“We will have to think of a story.”
He prodded a fiber in the cut. Caroline flinched, and he drew back the needle quickly. “You will need to hold very still.”
She tensed, but as he went to continue his extraction, she twitched again. Gilles sat back, chewing on his lip. This wasn’t going to work. He’d only hurt her more, potentially pushing the debris farther into the wound, if she moved.
“I’m sorry,” her small voice murmured.
“Not to worry.” Gilles turned his back to her and straddled the bench. He pinned her elbow between his arm and side, then grasped her wrist with his free hand. An awkward arrangement, but they’d have to make do.
“I mean for everything. We should have kept walking.”
Yes, they should have. “That wouldn’t have been very like you.” Gilles poked at the thread again. This time he managed to keep her arm relatively still, despite her reaction to the pain. What he wouldn’t give for a set of pincers like Dr. Savatier’s. This needle wasn’t nearly as effective. Maman might have had some pincers, but he didn’t know where to look. After a few attempts, he lifted the fiber enough to trap it between the needle and his thumb.
“Why are they so eager to kill?” she whispered. “What did that man do to any of them?”
Gilles pulled out the thread and laid it on the cloth covering the table. “These people have been oppressed for generations.”
“So they should take innocent lives in revenge?”
He started on another piece, this one deeper in the center of the wound. “We don’t know whether the man was innocent or not.”
“They were too eager to see that machine in use.” She sank against his back, her hair grazing his neck.
A tremor surged across his skin, lovely and strange all at once. Gilles froze. “Yes, the bloodlust is out of hand.” He tried to breathe normally. There was a task to complete, but he wanted to sit and drink in her touch, her feel. Evenings cuddled together before a fire played across his hopelessly diverted mind. What would he give to make those visions a reality?
“I was stupid to think I could do anything about it,” she said.
He blinked away the fantasies and lowered his head to his work. “You stood up to the injustice you saw. I think most would call that courage.” The candle was making the kitchen too hot. Or perhaps it was his concentration, or the lingering warmth of the hearth. Or maybe it was the press of her, the way she curved so comfortably against him.
Love wasn’t supposed to find him now. What was he to do? Make her wait the long years it would take for him to finish his schooling in order to provide for her? Take his father’s offer and return to sea?
He dipped a rag into water and wrung it over the wound. Nothing else seemed foreign in the cut, but a few more rinses would help his confidence. The plaster bandage needed trimming and warming. He dabbed water and blood from the wound and reached for the shears. She’d relaxed, and her breathing had deepened. He didn’t think she’d fallen asleep, but he moved slowly in case. Studying with Dr. Savatier onle Rossignolhadn’t prepared him to work under such distractions.
“Thank you.” Her low voice swept through him, a welcome breeze on a hot and motionless sea. “You did not have to help me like this.”
“And leave you to confront that louse on your own?”
“He might have been a Jacobin,” she said.
That distinction was growing less and less important to him. “Asans-culotte, more likely. Though they’re really just names, aren’t they?”
She nodded against his shoulder. “How one acts carries more weight than what he professes.”
Gilles held the plaster over the candle’s flame to loosen the adhesive. She had proven that, to be sure, and had proven she believed it. He licked his lips. “Your Nicolas. He was a Jacobin?”
In her following silence, Gilles kicked himself. But so many questions had circled his mind in the weeks since she first mentioned her former intended.
“He was a Cordelier,” she finally said.
Ah, yes. She’d mentioned he was a devotee of Danton. Georges Danton and the Cordeliers had melded into the Jacobins in the last couple of years. “Is that why you were so against the idea of us?”
She lifted her head to rest her chin on his shoulder. Her soft eyelashes brushed the tip of his ear, sending bumps across his flesh.Ah, Caroline.Did she know how she undid him with her touch? “Of us being friends?”
Gilles tapped the plaster to check its stickiness. “Or ... or more.” Too much too soon. Idiot. If only his brain functioned just now.
“Yes. It frightened me. Even though I didn’t expect ... That is, even though you only asked for friendship.”
