Minuet (33 page)

“You must hire us a yacht and get us home at once, Henri,” she decreed.

“Yes, Mama, but you will observe the ocean does not come to us, here at Abbeville. It will be much easier for the yacht if we proceed to St.-Valéry. How much money do you have?”

“Well over a hundred pounds. Madame Belhomme thought to get the money out of me for the next month a day early, but I held her off, knowing we would not be there. I had a little left of my own.”

“Good, and I have over ten. No difficulty.”

They continued to St.-Valéry, a little spot on an inlet of the ocean, and while the rest of the group ordered dinner, Henri went into town to make inquiries. When he returned, he had made contact with a fishing boat that did not usually cross the Channel, but that was large enough to do so, and willing to try it for fifty pounds.

“Ah, that smells good,” he said, sitting down to the table that was already spread. “Bouillabaisse,
hein?
I haven’t had it in years.”

“What kind of a ragoût is this?” Degan asked, looking with suspicion at the soup, floating with strange pieces of shell that he mistook for bones, and smelling very odd.

“It ain’t a stew, Degan; it’s a fish soup,” Édouard informed him.

“Oh well, one man’s meat is another man’s
poisson,”
he said, and dug in. He was not sure he cared for it, but at least it wasn’t cheese.

“He improves, eh?” Minou said aside to Henri. “For a first joke, it’s not bad.”

“Bilingual, too,” Henri congratulated her. “Your friend improves upon longer acquaintance. If we had another thousand miles to go, he would rival Henri Mérigot as a
gallant.”

“No, he will never be so dashing as
you,
Henri. Pity you had to be my half brother. It was very inconsiderate of you.”

“We will place all the blame on Mama,
non?”

Chapter Twenty-four

Night was falling as they piled into the fishing boat to be swept across the water that kept them from England and safety. But really they had felt comparatively safe for a few days now, once out of Paris. Travel was fatiguing. Doubly so for Lady Harlock, with an ailing son, recovering but slowly due to the rigors of travel, and a daughter who seemed bent on ruining herself.

For choice, Minou was never anywhere but at Degan’s elbow. Quite obviously infatuated with the man, she hadn’t the wisdom to stay away from him till she had made herself presentable. Lord Degan as well, despite the frequent assurances of her elder son that he was indeed a gentleman of lofty morals, did not behave in the least like one. She was ready to swear on a Bible she had seen him embracing Minou in the shadows of the ship in a way that did not speak of morality, nor anything but lasciviousness.
That
with the girl’s mother not five yards away!

What had passed between them during that period, which she imagined to be twenty-four hours, when they had been alone in Paris? She doubted there were enough clerics in the country to have prevented the inevitable. Minou was ruined, and like others of his kidney, Degan would undergo a reversion to rectitude once he set his feet on that cold, fog-shrouded damned island. He would turn tail and bolt to some whey-faced heiress the minute he got home. Henri would be forced to call him out and kill him, thus ensuring John’s animosity forever, and if Minou was not left with an illegitimate child on her hands, it was the best to be hoped for. These were her gloomy thoughts as she was swayed to nausea on the deck of a small fishing vessel that would likely crack up before it made shore, drowning them all.

The arrangement was for the fisherman to deliver his live cargo at Folkestone, where both Degan and Mérigot had left their carriages. This involved a crossing of some seventy miles rather than the twenty-five from Calais to Dover, and was not completed till dawn was beginning to break over the shimmering ocean.

None of the party had the least desire to be seen in broad daylight without repairing some of the ravages of their ordeal. They went immediately to the largest inn in town, to take rooms. They slept till midmorning in all their filth and rags, at which time the kitchens were set bustling to deliver basins of hot water above. Degan and Mérigot made contact with their grooms and were soon outfitted like the gentlemen they were. Degan was unhappy with his outfit, one of his severe black jackets and plain waistcoats, but with a fresh shave he looked presentable if not precisely stylish.

The same could not be said for Minou. Henri’s groom had kept track of his master’s habiliments, but the young lady’s had been left behind at some undetermined spot, and were not available to her. After her bath, she looked at the canopies and draperies of her chamber, but her mother ordered her into bed and went into the streets herself to try to find in some little hole called Folkestone, with not an elegant shop in the entire town, an outfit to ensnare Lord Degan.

Minou had her breakfast in bed, and when Lady Harlock went belowstairs to meet the gentlemen, she said the girl was unwell, and not to be disturbed. A glance at Degan told her he had reverted already to propriety, as she had foreseen happening. He looked a very tooth-drawer in his black outfit, but he was not to be allowed to shab off on her daughter for all that.

With a French flair undiminished by her incarceration at the asylum, she set about buying up the most innocent-looking material she could lay a hand on to belie her daughter’s shame. White—she must be made to wear white to stress her youth and innocence. No low-cut gowns (pity, for she had very nice bosoms), no garish colors or excess of bows and finery. No, she must be presented as a sort of human saint, with a smattering of rice powder to hide the bloom on her cheeks and create an aura of vulnerability. These machinations took considerable time, and with the word that his beloved had fallen ill, Degan had no notion of being away from her for an instant.

When the mother returned to the inn, she found him in Minou’s room with the door closed, looking as guilty as a fox in the chicken coop with a mouthful of feathers. Certainly he had been sitting on her bed! The depression left by his big body was still to be seen. He was requested in a lofty tone to please await them below, as she saw Minou had recovered somewhat, and could be dressed now.

She could not be dressed in a gown without several hours’ work by modistes, but she was soon pinned into yards of white peau de soie and sitting demurely in the morning parlor with her mother on one side, Henri on the other.

A meeting was then called to determine their course. Lady Harlock did not wish to return to her husband without some embellishment to her own person, nor was it wise to keep jostling Édouard about needlessly. She decided to send a groom off to London to inform John of their safe return, and to request him to come after them. He disliked any bother or fuss, but being put a little out of his way after ten years was not considered too great an imposition, particularly as it would save him the greater bother of producing another son and heir.

She did her husband an injustice to judge him so severely. He had pelted down to Dover days before, after fretting for forty-eight hours over the disappearance of Minou, Henri and Degan, and after a few consultations with Fox. When no trace had been discovered in Dover, he further discommoded himself by a trip in his well-sprung chaise to Margate, twenty miles north, then to Folkestone, ten miles south. He had discovered there that his relatives had left from Folkestone, and he himself was at that moment putting up with a judge with whom he had some connection not five miles away. The man had a marvelous wine cellar. He heard of the arrival of the group, for it was big news in Folkestone and the area, at about the same time Henri’s groom set out for London, and long before dinner he was hastening toward them.

He had been very worried at first, as word of Robespierre’s arrest and execution came across the Channel, followed by talk of more purges. But on August 1 the guillotine had stopped. No more executions were carried out. True, one hundred heads had rolled in the last three days; they were saying close to three thousand in all, in Paris alone since September of ‘93, but then everything was exaggerated, and the papers indicated this was the end of it. There was talk of prisoners being released from the jails, and if Henri and the others had only been a little patient, none of this awful trip would have been necessary.

It was his own awful trip to the coast he had in mind. A nice little sail across the Channel for three hardy youngsters would have been enjoyable, and Paris was a lively spot. With the revolution as well as over when they got there, he thought they must have had a pleasant visit.

He arrived at five o’clock, when the group had just begun to break up. Minou’s gown had begun coming apart and she went abovestairs to repair it. When Degan had taken a step after her, Lady Harlock told Henri he would like to go out for a walk with Lord Degan, and to stop at the chemist’s shop and ask him to step around to see Édouard, or to send a doctor if he knew one. She was about to go up to Édouard herself when John bolted into the inn. He stopped on the threshold of the parlor, from which she was emerging, and stood staring.

“Well, so you’ve come back,” was his salutation to his wife after ten years absence under the most terrible of circumstances.

She was furious. He had caught her after hours away from her mirror, without her hair done, her cheeks rouged, or any attempts at a more elegant toilette than she had worn in the asylum.

“What does it look like?” she asked in a waspish tone.

He laughed nervously. “It looks like you, and it
sounds
like you, still with that demmed accent. Glad to see you, Marie.”

He closed the door behind him and came toward her, hesitantly. “I hope you mean to stay this time?”

“It is more than a visit,” she replied encouragingly.

“Ah, Marie, I’ve missed you, lass,” he said penitently, and put his arms around her. Not till that minute did he realize how much he had missed her, but when he had her safe in his arms, he began to feel very sorry for himself and his loss. Ten years! “No jogging off on me this time, hear?” he said sternly.

“The terms remain the same, John,” she warned him.

“You speak of your son, I suppose.”

“Yes, Henri. I cannot be parted from him again. If you do not wish to be parted from our children, you will take him into the bargain.”

“Oh, as to that, he has as well as lived with me and Minou all the while she was with me. We have patched up all that business,” he said with resignation.

“Ah, Jean, you are kind,” she said in a tearful voice. She was a very good actress, and as shrewd as can hold together. John was unconscionably selfish, but then so was she, and she had won at last. She could be generous with words.

“I would have accepted him sooner, but Fox said it would be better if it not be talked up, your connection with the Virais. That would have done you no good in Paris.”

She placed not a jot of reliance on this story, but did not permit it to shadow the tender scene of reconciliation that was being enacted, and soon reenacted abovestairs where John went, eager to see the son and heir. Edward made up for a multitude of transgressions. Harlock to the tip of his long nose and long jaw. Didn’t even have the same Frenchie accent as Marie and Minou. As thin as a string, but good English mutton and fog would take care of that.

“We’ll take the lad off to Harlock Hall to fatten him up,” John decided.

It was early August, with the season a month away. A sojourn at Harlock Hall resting amid gay country parties and shopping trips to London was not unfaceable, and she capitulated without a complaint. Then it was time to settle Minou’s fate.

“About this Lord Degan who came after us, Jean—”

“Lud, you could have bowled me over with a feather,” he answered. “Degan, of all people, to go off half-cocked. But he didn’t know Henri was her brother, and was outraged at the impropriety of Sal’s dashing off with him. A very high stickler along those lines.”

“What concern was it of his?” the mother asked.

“Well—my cousin, after all. He would not like any scandal to attach to any of the family. We have been close the last years, Rob and myself.”

“He loves Minou?” she asked.

“Loves her? He can’t abide the sight or sound of the girl. He is too nice for our Sal. Don’t go getting that idea in your noggin, m’dear. He has done nothing but jaw and nag at her since the night she landed in, swearing and slugging brandy and wearing tatters. He was shocked at her behavior. Well, sleeping with men in hayricks—”

“Jean, what do you mean? I heard nothing of this.”

“Nothing to get in a pelter about, Marie. It was all innocent, but the looks of it is very bad, you must own. Degan felt I ought to get her buckled up fast to someone, and I began to see after she set the town on its ear with her liberty caps and so on that it was a good idea, but as to Degan having her, it is no such thing. Nor he wouldn’t do for her either. He is so strict there’s no comprehending the man.”

“Why did you permit her to make a scandal of herself in London?” Marie asked, indignant. “As to Degan being a pineapple of perfection, you have a wrong idea of that young man, I tell you. He has not behaved at all
comme il faut.”

“It wasn’t like him to go dashing off half-cocked to Paris,” he admitted foolishly.

“No, and not like him to be making love to her every time my back was turned either.”

“You’re wrong,” John answered simply. “Would never occur to him.”

“Wrong, am I? Henri said he would marry her.”

“Oh, Henri and Degan never had a common thought in their lives. Hated each other on sight, but I won’t let it stand in the way of accepting Mérigot. Tell the town who he really is, if you like.”

“I like very much, but Degan—”

“Lud, quit harping on Degan. He wouldn’t have her if she were a princess, which she ain’t, and he isn’t the man for her, either. We’ll arrange a good match for the girl, never fear. Aunt Dee left her the Dorset place, you know.”

“Yes, you told me in a letter. How large is it?”