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“On the contrary, you declined my offer quite gently,” he said. “You told me I was kind and generous.” He couldn’t altogether keep the bitterness from his voice. It was the same as telling a man, We can still befriends. He couldn’t be her friend. That wasn’t enough. He understood now, not merely in his mind but with every cell of his being, why Clara had told him it wasn’t enough.
“You were kind and generous enough to deserve the truth,” she said. “About me.”
Then he remembered the stray thought he’d had after he’d seen Lucie for the first time. “Damn it to hell, Noirot, you’re already married. I thought of that, but I forgot. That is, Lucie had to have a father. But he wasn’t in view. You were on your own.”
“He’s dead.”
Relief made him dizzy. He moved to stand at the chimneypiece. He pretended to lean casually against it. His hands were shaking. Again. He was in a very bad way.
“Your grace, you look very ill,” she said. “Please sit down.”
“No, I’m well.”
“No, sit, please, I beg you. I’m a wretched mass of nerves as it is. Waiting for you to swoon isn’t making this easier.”
“I never swoon!” he said indignantly. But he took his wreck of a body to the sofa and sat.
She walked back to the library table and took up a cup from the tray resting there. She brought it to him. “It’s gone cold,” she said, “but you need it.”
He took it from her and drank. It was cold, but it helped.
She sat in the nearest chair. A few, very few feet of carpet lay between them. All the world lay between them.
She folded her hands in her lap. “My husband’s name was Charles Noirot. He was a distant cousin. He died in France in the cholera epidemic a few years ago. Most of my relatives died then. Lucie fell gravely ill.”
Her husband dead. Her relatives dead. Her child on the brink of death.
He tried to imagine what that had been like and his imagination failed. He and Longmore had been on the Continent when the cholera struck. They’d survived, and that, as far as he could make out, had been a miracle. Most victims died within hours.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I had no idea.”
“Why should you?” she said. “The point of all this is my family, and who I am.”
“Then your name really is Noirot,” he said. “I’d wondered if it was simply a Frenchified name you three had adopted for the shop.”
Her smile was taut. “That was the name my paternal grandfather adopted when he fled France during the Revolution. He got his wife and children out, and some aunts and cousins. Others of his family were not so lucky. His older brother, the Comte de Rivenoir, was caught trying to escape Paris. After he and his family went to the guillotine, my grandfather inherited the title. He saw the folly of trying to make use of it. His family, the Robillon family, had a bad name in France. You know the character, the Vicomte de Valmont, in the book by Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses?”
He nodded. It was one of a number of books Lord Warford had declared unfit for decent people to read. Naturally, when they were boys, Longmore had got hold of a copy and he and Clevedon had read it.
“The Robillon men were that sort of French aristocrat,” she said. “Libertines and gamblers who used people like pawns or toys. They weren’t popular at that time, and they’re still not remembered affectionately in France. Since he wanted to be able to move about freely, Grandfather took a name as common as dirt. Noirot. Or, in English, Black. He and his offspring used one or the other name, depending on the seduction or swindle or ruse in hand at the moment.”
He was leaning forward now, listening intently. Pieces were falling into place: the way she spoke, her smooth French and her aristocratic accent ... but she’d told him she was English. Well, then, she’d lied about that, too.
“I knew you weren’t quite what you appeared to be,” he said. “My servants took you for quality, and servants are rarely taken in.”
“Oh, we can take in anybody,” she said. “We’re born that way. The family never forgot they were aristocrats. They never gave up their extravagant ways. They were expert seducers, and they used the skill to find wealthy spouses. Being more romantic and less practical than their Continental counterparts, the men had great luck with highborn Englishwomen.”
“That must hold true for English men as well,” he said.
Her dark gaze met his. “It does. But I never set out to get a spouse. I’ve lied and cheated—you don’t know the half of it—but it was all for the purpose I explained early in our acquaintance.”
“I know you cheat at cards,” he said.
“I didn’t cheat during our last game of Vingt et Un,” she said. “I merely played as though my life depended on it. People in my family often find themselves in that position: playing a game on which their life depends. But cheating at cards is nothing. I forged names on our passports to get out of France quickly. My family often finds it necessary to leave a country suddenly. My sisters and I were taught the skill, and we practiced diligently, because we never knew when we’d need it. We were well educated in the normal ways as well. We had lessons in deportment as well as mathematics and geography. Whatever else we Noirots were—and it wasn’t pretty—we were aristocrats, and that was our most valuable commodity. To speak and carry ourselves as ladies and gentlemen do—you can imagine the fears it allays, the doors it opens.”
“I can see that it would be much easier to seduce an aristocratic English girl if you don’t sound like a clerk from the City or a linen draper,” he said. “But you married a cousin. You have a shop. You didn’t follow the same path.”
She got up abruptly from her chair and moved away in a rustle of petticoats. He rose, too, unsteadily, and he couldn’t tell whether that was the aftereffects of fighting and drinking or the hope warring with the certainty he’d lost her.
