Betrayed Countess (Books We Love Historical Romance) (3 page)

The King had panicked and called in his foreign mercenaries to protect the monarchy, inciting more hostility. The working classes attacked and destroyed the Bastille prison, screaming that the government drove up bread prices for its own gain.

That’s when Lisbette and her mother had fled Paris for Château Jonquiere in Poissy.

Angry rebels who knew nothing about her had snatched away her orderly life.

Lisbette stood with a groan, whisking away grass and patting down her skirt. Madame Hilaire had argued with her about wearing coarser attire, and she wished she had listened. Especially now that her cloak floated in the Channel.

She resumed walking, her bundle pressed to her chest. She passed crude wattle and daub cottages capped in thatch and larger dwellings of pale stone. Rolling green meadows stretched behind stonewalls or hedgerows speckled in fragrant pink dog-roses. England appeared to be a pretty country, if cooler than France, and she studied the landscape to soften her turmoil.

A cart trundled by. A man under a round hat grinned at her with big brown teeth. “Need a ride, sweeten?”

Lisbette increased her stride, blister pinching. She bunched her fichu closer around her throat and tucked it into her low-cut bodice.

“A gypsy jade, are you? All that black hair. Ole Joe has the ripe puddin’ for you.” He slowed the cart. When she glared at him he pursed his lips together in a parody of a kiss. “Dark eyes, too. Read me fortune, aye?”

“I am not a gypsy, monsieur, and you are too forward.” She disliked being rude to underlings, but cringed at his lecherous grin. She missed the care of a servant, though Armand had wavered badly in Boulogne, to protect her from such insults. “How far is the city of Bath, if you please?”

“Oh-ho, a Frenchie jade.” He sniggered and winked. “Don’t know nothin’ about no city called Bath. But if you hop in me cart I’ll show you something better.”

“Leave me alone.” She turned and stumbled through the grass, away from him, her heart heavy with disappointment. Armand couldn’t have been mistaken about the city. The cart rattled off and she let out her breath.

A church steeple poked up above the trees ahead. She’d walk to the next town and decide what to do. She hoped he wasn’t wrong about the people she was supposed to contact. Armand swore they were decent, friends for years who would be honored to aid a nobleman’s daughter. Like his ‘niece’, her guardian had never claimed to have friends in England before. Her resentment toward him deepened each minute. She should have defied him and refused to leave France. But after what she’d suffered, few could blame her for bad judgment.

* * * *

The hook-nosed woman behind the desk at the inn in the next village—a clump of half-timbered buildings leaning into one another—narrowed her eyes. “Where’s your menfolk? And how old are you?”

Lisbette poked through her skirt slit into her inside pocket for the small leather purse that held her gold coins. She put one on the desk. “Ah
… my brothers will meet me here soon. They are delayed.” She glanced around the dirty, low-beamed lobby, avoiding the woman’s scowl. “May I have a bath, too, perhaps?”

“What kind of coin be that? Is it real gold?” The clerk picked up the coin and bit it between her yellow teeth before flipping a book open on the counter. “This ain’t no big city place. No baths here. Sign there, if you can write. You want your own room? It’s cheaper if you share.”

“No sharing, Madame.” Lisbette wondered if the woman teased her. Dipping the quill in the ink bottle, she paused. Armand warned her to protect her identity. You never knew who in England might be sympathetic to the revolution in France. She wrote down ‘Bettina Laurant’. The last name was her cousin’s, who married a businessman with little connection to aristocracy. For a first name, she used her childhood nickname. An Italian nurse had addressed her as Signorina Bette, and her father rolled it together into Bettina. She poked the quill back in the ink and resigned herself that Countess Lisbette no longer existed. The radicals had abolished all titles of hereditary nobility. “I want change from my coin, please.”

The clerk shoved four silver coins at her. Bettina vowed to learn the deciphering of English money—she was certain she had just been cheated. The woman pulled a key from a hook and showed her up a narrow crooked stairway to a room in the back.

“I’ll bring you some water to wash,” she muttered, scratching her neck, glaring down at Bettina’s dress. “Your brothers best get here quick. I run a decent place.”

“Of course, Madame
,” Bettina grimaced. She knew she looked like a bedraggled waif, a serving girl wearing her lady’s discards, but this tradeswoman needed a lesson in manners. She closed the door and leaned her forehead against the rough wood. At least her father hadn’t lived to see the stripping of his feudal rights as a member of the
noblesse
d’epee
. Yet these very ‘rights’, the exorbitant taxes the commoners paid to support the nobles, sparked the anarchy. Bettina shook her head, lamenting where she might fit in this chaos.

She turned and looked around the tiny chamber, which was filled with only a washstand and narrow bed. The mattress crackled under her bottom when she sat, the straw scratching into her thin dress. She longed for her soft down-bed at home, but was there any home left? Perhaps in the morning she’d awake to hot chocolate on a silver tray before her bedroom fire and her mother’s sweet smile.

The air in the room stank of perspiration, so she slipped off her shoes, climbed onto the bed and pried open the window. The stench from the alley outside was worse. Cabbages, onions, and other scraps from the inn’s kitchen were apparently dumped to rot below her window. A black beetle scurried over the sill near her hand. She stifled a screech, almost falling off the bed. Other crawling occupants probably lurked in the corners, awaiting her drift into slumber.

The door opened and the woman held out a pitcher of water. “Don’t be standin’ on the bed. Ain’t you got no manners? Looking out for your brothers, aye?”

“Merci, for the water, Madame.” Bettina hopped down and took the chipped pitcher. She’d have to resign herself to no privacy as well. “May I have a meal sent up?”

“I’ll bring you bread ’n cheese, if you pay for it.”

After eating the bland cheese and dry bread, which sat like a lump in her stomach, Bettina realized that food had become as exciting as any finery had been in the past.

She removed her once fashionable blue polonaise gown. Normally hitched and poofed out over her petticoat, the gown now drooped without ribbons and drawstrings and the stout cotton
cul postiche
in the effort in Boulogne to make her appear ordinary. Denied the convenience of a maid to assist in her toilette, she was thankful for front-lacing stays. Untangling the stiff laces, she sighed in relief, retrieved a bar of soap from her bundle, and scrubbed her face and hands. Peeling off her stockings, stiff with filth, she washed her sore feet.

She studied the writing on the envelope she needed to deliver: Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Little, 65 Great Pulteney Street, Bath. This couple was anxious for the information she held—information to further the royalist cause that must reach them sealed. Or so Armand said. Again, she wondered why he gave this task to her, an unchaperoned, vulnerable girl. But he insisted that she needed to flee the country and this was the perfect opportunity.

Clad in her cotton chemise, Bettina snuggled under the thin bedclothes. She flexed her fingers and toes, then trembled, her eyes damp with tears. The unfamiliarity of being so alone weighed her down like a soaked rag, and she buried her face in the sour pillow.

People quarreled somewhere in the inn, bringing back that morning in France. The arguing in the next room before Armand had rapped on her door, begging her to get up. Half asleep, Bettina had thought it was a confused dream. Now the angry words filtered in: Madame Hilaire insisted that they send someone to Paris. Armand objected vehemently, saying “she wouldn’t know anything, she couldn’t help them.”

Bettina knew they spoke of her, but why, and who were ‘them’? Despite what Armand had said earlier, she knew revolutionary sympathizers had met in that townhouse. How could she, an aristocratic, fatherless daughter, have any value to such scourge? She foundered in unanswered questions she’d have to rely on the Littles to explain. Listening to her own breathing, she drifted into a dream where she rushed over wet cobblestones toward a misty harbor beside a man with no face.

* * * *

Bettina sat up, jerked from a restless sleep by a banging on the door. She gasped and blinked in the dark as the noise increased. It was her nightmare again. She gripped the pillow and tried to clear the fog from her mind. No aroma of chocolate awaited, only the dank smell of her own body.

“Here now, open up afore I come in and get you,” a gruff voice called through the door.

Wrapped in the blanket, Bettina crawled from the mattress. With her foot, she shoved her package beneath the bed. She squeaked the door open to reveal a plump, florid-faced man holding a candle.

“What is the problem, monsieur?”

The churlish desk clerk stood behind him in the passage, a cynical smile on her lips. “That’s her, just like I told you, Constable.”

The man barged his way in, belly first. “Travelin’ with no menfolk, an’ no baggage, that do make me suspicious.”

“And you should’ve seen her dress. Of fine silk it was. Much too expensive for the likes of her,” the desk clerk said. “You know you can’t trust no frog-eaters, and I run a proper place here.”

Bettina shrank back, clutching the blanket around her. “But I have paid for the room, and the dress is mine. My men
… brothers, they are only late.”

“This ain’t no brothel, miss.” The constable waddled farther in and she backed to the wall. “You’ll have to leave. You’d be wise to go home to your parents, not livin’ this sorta life. No decent woman travels by herself.”

“
Il me confond
, what are you saying? You cannot put me out in the dark.” Bettina’s throat thickened, but she refused to cry. “I am certain we can—”

“It’s almost daylight. She should leave afore any quality come. I wouldn’t have let her stay, but felt sorry for the chit.” The desk clerk crossed her skinny arms over her chest, her head bobbing like a stringed puppet. “But her escorts never showed. Maybe she did expect a man, since she wouldn’t share. But not in the way she’d have us believe.”

Bettina’s cheeks burned. “Madame, I have never done as you accuse.”

“Awright, get dressed. When the sun comes up, you be on your way.” The constable lumbered out. He turned to the desk clerk. “Now, Sarah, she don’t look as bad as all that. If you weren’t my wife’s sister…
.”

Their voices faded down the hall and Bettina closed the door. If
‘quality’ meant the rich in England, why would they bother to stop in this dismal village? Stumbling in the dark, she dressed and gathered her possessions. She tied her fichu over her head in a makeshift bonnet, tucking the ends into her bodice. Soon the sun peeked over the hills in the distance through the narrow window, but it brought little warmth to her life.

“
Merde
,” she said, echoing the sailor’s foul word on the ship, to denounce Armand for forcing her into this hostile country. He had better send word of her destination to her mother, as promised, though he should never have acted without her permission.

When she stepped down to the lobby, which was dreary in shadows, she found the constable waiting.

“Pardon, monsieur,” she said. “This is a mistake you have made. But can you tell me how to find the city of Bath?”

The man now looked embarrassed. “If you has money for coach fare, I’ll flag down the early coach when it passes through in an hour. Might take a week or more to get to Bath. No one should
have sent you off alone, girl. Where’s your family?”

“A week it is?” Nausea rose up in her throat and she swallowed it down. Such a long journey lay ahead, but she was grateful the city existed. “I would be happy if you would, how you said, flag down the coach.”

* * * *

An elbow jabbed into her side. The coach swayed and jostled on and Bettina scratched at the bug bites from the last inn. The surly woman across from her continued to glare.

“Must be a mess where you come from. Over there in that French place.” The man beside her, the woman’s brother, kept trying to make conversation. She wouldn’t have minded, except his fingers strayed over onto her lap. “Travelin’ alone is dangerous too.”

“I am fine, I assure you.” She nudged his hand away and pretended indifference. She pulled the second-hand straw hat she had bought in one village down close to shield herself. She fingered the frayed shawl, her skin prickling at the idea of wearing a stranger’s clothes. Without the trappings of wealth, she was as low and helpless as any peasant. The revolutionaries strived for that, this equality of the classes.

“The rise of the middling sort. We’ve that problem here in England. I heard your king’s brother run off after that Bastille business. Not very brave, aye?” He droned on, undeterred, his breath foul. “People a’feared for their lives. Heads on pikes? Is that true?”