Page 103 of Lord Ashley's Beautiful Alibi
Gus swallowed her tears. “And still she will do this.”
“She has the means to keep those she loves from harm.”
Gus shook her head. “She will save many, but not Ramsey.”
“Not now. Not today,” Kane said. She went into her husband’s arms. “To those we love, we never stop trying to save them, help them help themselves.” He kissed her lips.
“And we go on.”
“We do. We walk on through storms we did not create, through winds of fate we cannot avoid, and we stand by those we can, most especially those we love.”
She cupped her husband’s cheek. “And if we cannot convince them that we need them beside us through those storms, we wait and pray and love them all the more. We go on.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Gus put asideher inability to dissuade Amber from her course, and threw herself into those things she could change. She devoted herself to planning grand dinners and balls. All of Paris came, and her husband benefited by making new friends and associates.
She tried to repair the damage done to her chain of information, but Luc Bechard continued to fail to appear on the twenty-fifth of each month in the bathhouse near the basilica of St. Denis. She busied herself with aiding her husband to buy porcelain and stoneware, rugs and porcelains, and the occasional load of corn or barley or wheat. She introduced him to a friend of hers and Amber’s who ran a fleet of barges up the Loire from Blois to St. Nazaire. She knew a clerk in the port of Rouen whose mother had been British. That lady sent letters written in code to Gus. They described troops who marched past her home up to the Citadel of Lille.
Kane welcomed all the recruits and knowledge he could get. But he knew his time—and that of all British in France—grew short.
By Christmas, the city of Paris bulged with the high and mighty of London. Charles Fox, a politician, had come to town with his entourage and had dined with Bonaparte in the Tuileries. The notorious Earl of Egremont had come, too, trailing three of his lovers. The Earl and Countess ofCholmondely spent the entire winter in Paris. The Earl of Elgin stayed long past his original plan. His wife, too, remained. But then, of course, she maintained a separate household. After all, she was pregnant by her lover and not welcomed in her husband’s home.
The night before Christmas, another attempt was made on the life of Bonaparte. Kane had nothing to do with this one. Bonaparte acted quickly to punish those who attempted to destroy him.
Kane and Gus attended many court functions during the colder months. But Gus’s condition, delicate as it was with the impending birth of their first child, meant she chose more and more carefully those events requiring their presence.
Aunt Cecily kept Gus up on the news. Bonaparte recently cut his hair, a more attractive mode for him. He had his tailor improve the style and fit of new coats. One was a fine red, which he favored. He then had a few duplicates made. Another coat, a purple satin velvet, was one Gus and Kane saw him wear one evening. Gus told her husband she found that more suited to Bonaparte’s complexion.
“It is true,” Gus’s Aunt Cecily told Kane and Gus as they took her home in their coach one evening, “the first consul presents much better now that he is close-shaven. When he smiles, his lips are drawn back at the corners of his mouth and his teeth show. They are large and straight, but he must be careful, as they are not very white. I declare that his chin projects a bit too much to make him handsome. But he is courteous and inquisitive of his guests.”
“I guess that makes up for his teeth,” Gus remarked to the laughter of her husband.
Bonaparte took other airs unto himself. Kane returned home one night from a dinner party with British colleagues and reported to Gus that Bonaparte had ordered attire at Tuileriesbe that of a formal court. “Starch is the new order of the day. He wears white silk stockings and hangs a little sword from his belt even at dinner parties.”
The first consul was becoming enamored of prestige, place—and his own power.
By February, Kane told Gus that relations between the first consul and the newly arrived British ambassador Whitworth were testy. Bonaparte had asked for troops from German princes, one of whom was the former Margrave of Baden, now a newly minted duke. Dirk Fournier, who was still in his grandmother’s home, wrote often to Kane in code. His letters were filled with the promises the first consul made to the land-hungry German. An agent of Kane’s in Amboise wrote of Bonaparte’s movements of troops to the Atlantic Coast.
“The first consul has ambitions,” said Kane to his wife one night in March, “that we will never accept.”
Gus had ordered Corsini to begin to pack their belongings. Kane had begun to arrange with Corsini for the household staff to have pensions and a plan, should he and Gus have to leave Paris in haste.
Then, one night in mid-March at the Tuileries, Bonaparte and Whitworth openly argued.
The next few days, the air grew raw with speculations that the Treaty of Amiens drew to a close.
Kane ordered Corsini to ready them all to close the house and depart at his order. “I will want everyone prepared well. Traveling reticules packed. Money at the ready. Destinations they have decided upon. And no traces left in the house of where anyone has gone. Thegendarmeswill come for me and my wife to see if we are in violation of any passports. They will also come for any employees here, Corsini. I want all of you safe and compensated.”
Indeed, Kane had used Scarlett’s money well. He depleted the entire amount she had given him, again as much as her original this year as last. With it, he gave each member of his household enough funds to live on for two years.
“I fear it will not be enough,” he whispered to Gus one night as he held her close in their bed. “This war to come will not last one year or two, but much longer. Bonaparte wants the world, and we British will not share it.”
“The staff will remember with gratitude and respect what you did give them, Kane. Perhaps, over time, we can find a way to give them more. Besides, you have built a good network.”
“With your help.”
Gus grinned. “If it can pass secrets, it can certainly pass coin.”
