Page 54 of Lord Appleby's Gorgeous Imposter
He sat down beside her, but put his glass to the nearby table. “I do. She had no reason to lie to you today.”
“Exactly. I took her by surprise. She had no time to dissemble.” Her features grew pinched with disbelief. “The manshe seduced was René Vaillancourt,” she murmured, her dulcet voice a wreck. She stared at Tate. “I’ve met him.”
“As have I.”He is the law, and here, above it.“A dangerous man.”
Her fingers curled over his cravat in a desperate clinch. “I am undone that Charmaine paid that woman to seduce him. How does one do that? And to trap one’s own sister? I knew…IknewCharmaine could be… But not this. Not this.”
Tate had always thought little of Charmaine. He should have sensed the enormity of her cruelty. “She knows no bounds.”
“That is not…not who she is today!” Viv stared at him. “Or so I thought.”
He threaded his fingers through her soft hair and stroked the fullness of her lower lip with his thumb. To respond with his disbelief that people never changed would not be helpful to Viv.
Terror stood in her sapphire eyes. “Vaillancourt took Diane to a prison.”
“Carmes.” Ramsey had told him a few details about those who had been incarcerated there. A living hell from which few emerged.
Viv opened her mouth, a memory flitting over her lovely face. “It is not far from rue du Four.”
“If Vaillancourt was attached as a gendarme to the local police in the Croix-Rouge crossroads, he would have ordered her taken there.”
Viv shuddered. “Why would he want her? Diane was young, fifteen, no threat to anyone.”
“A question only he can answer. But I’d say he wanted to use her as a trade for your father.”
“To offer up to Robespierre?”
“Exactly.”
Tears welled in her eyes. “And what good has it done anyone?”
Tate curled her against him. He would not recount those lost to the horror of that evening.
“Even she,” Viv said with a desperate groan, “Jocelyn Gatel, has not profited. After more than a decade, she is in poor health. Living in a filthy hell. Destitute. The ten francs I gave her before we left will do little for her for the rest of her life.”
His heart melted. “You pity her. After all she revealed today. Amazing that you can do that, my darling. I must say you are a remarkably forgiving soul.”
She took a quick gulp of her cognac, let it slide down her throat, then shook her head. “Forgiving? Not me.”
He curled her against him and lifted her face. “You forgave me my failure to rescue Diane.”
“Oh, Tate! Your intention was honorable. The odds were against you. We all wish we’d had greater success at some endeavors. Me too. Mama, who cried her heart out that she could not save Diane. Oh, to fail is…”
She shot from the settee and snatched up her reticule and pelisse.
He was behind her, his arms to her shoulders. “Where are you going?”
“A walk. A ride. A swim in the Seine!” She laughed wildly, then hung her head.
“I’ll go with you.”
She spun and stared up at him. “No! You have done enough. I must save myself.”
“You do, my darling. You have saved not only yourself but everyone else in your family.”
“Not Charmaine.”
“Even her. You were thirteen when we left here. But in your soul, you were wiser than your years. You accepted that you were in another country without home or money.”
