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Suddenly his eyes narrowed and he frowned. ‘You were selling oranges in the Place today. You’re not going to grab me again, are you? I don’t like being grabbed.’
The wariness in his eyes lanced her heart. ‘I won’t do anything you don’t like, I promise.’ Trying to buttress her fast-fading hopes, she said, ‘What nice soldiers you have! And a pony, too.’ She gestured towards the infamous glass-eyed toy horse against the wall behind him.
‘I’m too big for it now,’ Philippe said, seeming reassured by her pledge. ‘Maman says this summer, she’ll get me a real pony. I love horses. I shall be a soldier, like my papa.’
If you only knew, Elodie thought. ‘Is your maman good to you?’
Philippe shrugged. ‘She’s Maman. Whenever she goes away, she brings me a new toy when she comes back. And reads me a story before bed at night.’ He giggled. ‘She brings me sweets, too, but you mustn’t tell! Nurse says they keep me from going to sleep.’
Elodie pictured the comtesse in her elegant Parisian gown, sitting on the narrow nursery bed, reading to her son, ruffling his silken hair, kissing him goodnight. Tears stung her eyes. It should be me, her wounded heart whispered.
‘I won’t tell,’ she said.
Philippe nodded. ‘Good. I don’t like storms. When wind rattles the windows, Maman comes and holds me.’ His eyes lit with excitement. ‘And in summer, when we go to the country house, she lets me catch frogs and worms. And takes me fishing. But she makes Gasconne put the worms on the hook.’
Each smile, each artless confidence, drove another nail into the coffin of her hopes. Anguished, frantic, she said, ‘I could take you to the bird market, here in Paris. They have parrots from Africa, with bright feathers of green and blue, yellow and red. Wouldn’t you like to see them?’ She held a hand out to him.
His smile fading, he scuttled backwards, away from her outstretched hand. ‘Thank you, madame, but I’d rather go with Maman.’
She’d frightened him again, she thought, sick inside. ‘Can I ask you one more thing? Will you look very closely and tell me if I remind you of anyone?’
Obviously reluctant, he focused on her briefly. ‘You look like the orange lady from the park. Will you go now? I want Marie.’
He scuttled back further, seeming to sense the fierce, barely suppressed instinct screaming at her to seize him and make a run for it. Keeping a wide-eyed, wary gaze on her, he clutched two of his soldiers to his chest … as if hoping they might magically spring to life and defend him from this threatening stranger.
From her. From a desperate need to be together that was her desire, not his any longer.
Agonising as it was, she couldn’t avoid the truth. With her own eyes, she could see her son was healthy, well dressed and well cared for. From his own lips, she’d heard that the comtesse was an attentive, loving mother. One who could afford to give him a pony, who had a country manor probably as elegant as this town house where they could escape the disease and stink of the city in summer.
He was loved. Happy. Home.
Her breath a painful rasp in her constricted chest, she stared at him, trying to commit every precious feature to memory.
A patter of approaching footsteps warned her the nursery maid was approaching. Though her mind couldn’t comprehend a future beyond this moment, she knew she didn’t want to risk being thrown into a Parisian prison.
Even so, only by forcing herself to admit that fear of her lurked behind the mistrustful stare of her son, only by repeating silently the plea that had stabbed her through the heart—will you go now?—was she able to force her feet into motion.
‘Goodbye, Philippe, my darling,’ she whispered. With one last glance, she sped from the room.
To Will’s surprise, Elodie returned to the kitchen well before the thirty minutes he’d allotted her … and alone. Pale as if she’d seen a ghost, eyes staring sightlessly into the distance, she took a place at the back of the crowd, not meeting his gaze. Wondering what new disaster had befallen her, Will wrapped up his cajolery with a few short words, curbing his impatience as the customers he’d enticed took their time purchasing laces, ribbons and shaving mirrors. At last, he was able to pack up the remaining merchandise and bundle them both back outside.
As soon as they turned on to the small street bordering the Hôtel de la Rocherie, he halted and turned to her. ‘What happened? Is the child ill?’
‘Oh, no. He’s in excellent health.’
‘Then why did you not seize him?’
She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t.’
‘Ah, too difficult in full daylight?’ he surmised, well understanding her frustration. ‘No matter. You know the lay of the house now. We’ll come back tonight. It’s clouding over, so the sky will be—’
‘No,’ she interrupted. ‘We won’t come back.’
Will frowned at her. ‘I don’t understand.’
Shivering, she wrapped her arms around herself, as if standing in a cold wind, though the summer afternoon was almost sultry. ‘He was playing with soldiers. Very well made, their uniforms exact down to every detail. His own clothing, too, is very fine. He summers at a country manor, where there are streams to fish and ponies to ride.’ A ragged sigh escaped her lips. ‘I can’t give him any of that.’
‘What does that matter?’ Will asked, his gut wrenching as from the depths of his past rose up the anguished memory of losing his own mother. ‘You’re his mama!’
‘I used to be,’ she corrected. ‘I’m just the “orange lady” from the park now; it is the comtesse that he calls Maman. She dotes on him, reads him stories, even takes him fishing. All I could offer is love, and he already has that, along with so many other things I could never provide.’
‘Besides …’ she turned to face him, her expression pleading, as if she were trying to convince him—and herself ‘… bad enough that stealing him, tearing him away from everything familiar and comforting, would terrify him. The comtesse married into a powerful family; she would very likely utilise all her contacts to track him down and drag him back, putting him through another round of terror and uncertainty. He’s only four and a half years old! I can’t do that to him.’
‘So you’re just … giving up?’ Will asked, incredulous.
Elodie seemed to shrink into herself. ‘He doesn’t need me any more,’ she whispered.
Abruptly, she turned and moved away from him down the street. Not trying to escape him, he realised at once. There was nothing in her movements of the purposeful stride that had taken her from the Hôtel de la Rocherie this morning into the Place Royale, or even of the frenzied tramp around the pathways that followed her first rendezvous with her son.
This was the aimless walk, one plodding foot in front of the other, of someone with no goal and no place to go.
When he had obtained the cart and goods necessary for their current reincarnation as tinkers, Will had also provisioned them for a rapid flight to the coast. Avoiding the usual crossing points at Calais or Boulogne, he intended to engage a smuggler’s vessel from one of the smaller channel ports to ferry them over to Kent, where several easy days’ travel would get them to Denby Lodge, Max’s horse-breeding farm.
They had no need for a cart now—and no reason to linger any longer in Paris. With some additional blunt, he could exchange the vehicle and its wares for horses, and they could head for the coast at once.
An instinctive itch between his shoulder blades kept telling him to put as much distance as possible between them and the danger posed by Paris. Philippe, intelligent child that he was, would doubtless have told his nursemaid about the ‘orange lady’s’ return. It wouldn’t take any great leap of imagination for that woman and the footman who’d guarded the child in the park to connect the sudden arrival of a tinker and his wife to the man and woman who’d accosted Philippe in the Place Royale. After viewing the sumptuous, well-tended Hôtel, he didn’t need Elodie’s warning to realise the comtesse had powerful connections who wouldn’t hesitate to set the authorities after anyone who threatened her child, an annoyance Will would rather not deal with.
But Elodie looked so limp and exhausted, her face and body drained of the fire and energy that normally animated them, Will wasn’t sure she could stand a gallop to the coast now. Perhaps he should settle for obtaining horses and getting them to an inn north of Paris, and start the journey in earnest tomorrow.
Remaining within easy return distance of the city would probably be prudent in any event. Though at the moment Elodie seemed to have lost all the purpose and determination that had driven her to survive St Arnaud’s brutality, evade pursuers on the road—and elude him—in order to find her son, that might change, once she’d had a chance to rest her exhausted body and spirits. No point getting her halfway to England aboard some smuggling vessel and having her decide she must return to Paris and try again.
He knew only too well the agony of thinking you’d lost the one person you loved most in the world. But unlike a mother claimed by death, Elodie’s son was very much alive. Though he understood that love made her put her son’s best interests over her own desires, everything within him protested the unfairness of forcing her to make such a sacrifice.
