Page 77 of The Boxing Baroness

“Oh, when was that?”

“It was only briefly, a long time ago, and I was quite young—not much more than ten, I should think. My father took me with him to look at some horses. I don’t recall the town, but it was outside Paris. I do remember how woeful my schoolboy French was.”

“I heard you speaking to the ostler—it sounds as if you’ve gotten much better.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Praise from you, Marianne?”

She flushed. “I’m not—”

The door to the outside flew open hard enough to bounce off the wall, almost hitting a passing waiter. The man who stumbled into the room was soaked to his skin, pale as parchment, and shaking. He gazed around the room with wide, almost crazed eyes, and then shouted, “Napoléon a quitté l’île d’Elbe; il se dirige vers Paris!”

Napoleon has left Elba; he is marching on Paris!

Sin and Marianne turned to gawk at each other while the room exploded as everyone spoke at once, shouting questions to the visibly harried man.

The messenger climbed onto a chair and waved his arms. “Il a appelé tous les Français fidèles et patriotes à le rejoinder.”

At the news that he was calling on all loyal, patriotic Frenchmen to join him, people began pouring in from the courtyard—villagers who must have followed the half-mad man as he rode into the tiny town.

“Could this be true?” Marianne asked Sin.

“I hope to God it is some kind of jest,” he said. But a heavy sickness settled in his belly as he studied the messenger. He was as pale as a corpse, but there was a fervor that burned in his eyes. It did not look like the face of a man who was bent on a jest.

If Napoleon had truly escaped Elba and was raising another army, that meant the hell of the last two decades was about to begin all over again.

And they would be caught right in the middle of it.

Chapter 20

They left before the cock crowed the following morning, the weather even more miserable than the day before.

Barnabas Farnham steadfastly refused to believe what they’d heard in the dining room.

“The English would never allow him to escape, and Frenchmen would never want him back,” he’d insisted when Sin had asked him what his plans were if the country were to erupt in war. “We will keep to our schedule until we receive more reliable information.”

So they trudged on to Lille through the heavy rain.

But it became clear, the closer they got to the city, that rumor of Napoleon’s escape had already spread far and wide.

By their third night in the small, but vibrant, city there was no denying the truth of what they’d heard: L’Empereur was on the march toward Paris, and he was gathering an army along the way.

Sin had served as Nora’s knee man that night since her brother had caught a nasty cold and was keeping to his bed.

After the boxing match finished and he’d seen to Nora’s few injuries, Sin went looking for Elliot and Guy, whom he’d barely had a spare moment to talk to since arriving in Lille.

He spotted Guy watching Blade’s routine from the wings.

“I thought it was your turn to volunteer tonight,” Sin said, going to stand beside him. They’d finally decided the best way to deal with the unpleasant task of having guns fired and knives thrown at their persons was to alternate, from week to week.

“It was,” Guy admitted and then winced as Blade threw a knife through the center of a playing card that Elliot held between his fingers. “But Smithy said he’d take all Blade’s acts from now on.” He cut Sin a knowing smirk and dropped his voice to a whisper. “I’d say our Elliot might finally have developed some interest in the gentler sex.” He snickered like a twelve-year-old boy. “I think this might be our Elliot’s twisted notion of flirtation.”

Sin snorted as another knife thwacked through a playing card, pinning it to the colorful board behind Elliot’s head.

Blade turned to her audience, as if to take a bow, but Angus called out, One more! in French and flew another knife over to his mistress, earning an outraged squawk and angry glare from Elliot, which made the crowd howl with laughter.

Blade’s show ended a few minutes later, and Sin nodded to Elliot when he came off the stage. “We need to talk.”

“Follow me,” Elliot said, leading them to a relatively quiet corner not far from the back door to the theater.