AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Very well. By the way, take care if you are going in there.’ He jerked his head at the building behind him. ‘I think our uncle is there. Lissie described him to me and told me to avoid him at all costs. Luckily the foyer was crowded. He was pacing the floor, but then he was hailed by someone who knew him and they stopped to talk and I slipped out. I am sure he did not see me.’
‘Good. Now off you go. Keep to that disguise.’ He smiled. ‘It is very good. You could deceive almost everyone but me.’
‘It would be strange if her own husband could be fooled. Oh, I nearly forgot…’ He fetched Lisette’s letter out of his bodice. ‘She bade me give you this.’
Jay took the letter, stared at it for a moment and put it in his pocket. As soon as he had seen Michel hurry safely out of sight, he strolled over the bridge and into the Conciergerie, curbing his inclination to rush. The court had finished sitting for the day and the place was crowded with people leaving. They were all discussing the trials and took no notice of him as he sat on the bench so recently occupied by Lisette to read what she had written.
Chapter Eleven
‘My dear Jay,’ he read. ‘If you are reading this, it means Michel is free and I am in prison in his place. It was the only thing I could think of to keep you all safe.
‘I told you the truth when I said my first meeting with Mr Wentworth—I will not call him Uncle—was by chance. He talked to me of you, but I told you that, did I not? What I did not tell you was that he persuaded me to confide in him, claiming that he would use his influence with Messieurs Robespierre and Danton to have Michel freed. What his connection is with those gentlemen I did not think to question. Nor did I tell him the whole truth.
‘I said that I had met a French Comte and his daughter at the home of Lord and Lady Drymore and the young lady had begged me to see her brother and persuade him to return to England with us. I said I had, since coming to Paris, discovered he had been arrested and I was at a loss to fulfil my promise to her. He asked me the name of the prisoner and I told him. It was a terrible mistake and put everyone—me, you and your friends—in great jeopardy because, of course, he recognised the name. He was allowed to see Michel and immediately realised who I really was. He came to see me at the Embassy and that was the beginning of the blackmail.
‘I was instructed to discover the names of the Englishmen who were helping the émigrés to escape which, you recall, Robespierre had asked of you. He said if I gave him the names, Michel would be freed and we would be given safe passage out of France. He gave me until today to meet him and deliver the names. I would never do that, Jay, never, but I did keep my rendezvous with him, hoping to stall him until you had effected Michel’s release and we had left. It was then he told me that Michel had been taken from La Force to the Conciergerie for his trial and that Henri Canard and the two Honfleur gaolers had arrived to give evidence. I knew then it was too late to rescue Michel in the way you planned and I had to think of something myself.
‘I told Mr Wentworth I wanted to speak to my brother before I gave him what he asked for and the list would be given to him by Madame Gilbert when we had safely left. He agreed to arrange it and that was how Michel came to be with you now. I commend him to your care. Take him to England. My father will be overjoyed to be reunited with him.
‘Jay, I am so very, very sorry. I have been a fool, a miserable pig-headed fool, who has brought you nothing but trouble. I would much rather have brought you lasting happiness, for I do not believe the lies Wentworth told me about you. No one could be kinder, more chivalrous, more truly good, than you are. I shall, in my heart if not in fact, always be your devoted but inconvenient spouse. Take care of yourself and return safely to England and your children. My prayers are with you.’
Jay, the stoic, the man who kept calm no matter what, found his eyes brimming with tears. She had made this sacrifice to save Michel, to save him and Harry and the others, and expected to die for it. And she loved him. He screwed the letter up in his hand and sat numb and unmoving, his sight too blurred to see who came and went about him.
‘Jay.’ It was Harry standing in front of him, dressed in a smart suit of black cloth with a pristine white shirt and cravat and a wide-brimmed black hat, the garb a priest or a lawyer might wear.
Jay scrubbed at his face with the back of his hand and gave him Lisette’s letter without speaking.
Harry smoothed it out and read it. ‘Now we are in a pickle,’ he said, folding it and handing it back. Jay put it in his waistcoat pocket.
