‘I’ll fetch in some more wood for the fire,’ he said.
Mrs.Linton sat up with the sick man through the night and in the morning, at Hannah’s insistence, took a rest, leaving Hannah on sickroom duty. Sickrooms reminded her of her father’s drawn-out death and of a life that was no longer hers, but as she pushed open the door, her heart gave an unfamiliar jolt at the sight of the man in her bed.
His face was turned away from her, and beneath the open neck of one of William’s old night shirts, a gold chain glinted in the morning light. He lay so still that for a horrible moment she thought the man tangled in the bedclothes was dead.
She drew a chair up to the bed and took his hand, his fingers as icy as they had been when she first met him.
He stirred, and his fingers tightened on hers. She let out her breath as his eyes flickered open and he smiled.
‘My angel of mercy,’ he said, in French.
Grateful for her parent’s insistence on her education, Hannah responded in French. ‘How are you?’
‘I’ve been better,’ he said.
‘Mama says the wound was not so bad. She managed to clean it properly, and she thinks you will live.’
‘I don’t think I will ever be able to repay your mother’s kindness. She has no reason to care for an enemy of this country.’
Hannah withdrew her hand from his. ‘That’s because she is not seeing you. She is seeing my brother.’ She paused. ‘Were you there? At Trafalgar?’
He shook his head. ‘No. We were patrolling the Spanish coast.’
‘So you have no reason for regret,’ she said. ‘William is dead. Nothing will bring him back.’ She paused. ‘I saw what happened yesterday. I don’t understand why you would be so close to England?’
A slow smile lit Fabien’s unshaven face.
‘Is this an interrogation, mademoiselle?’ He shook his head and the smile vanished. ‘The stupid, drunken fool of a captain put us off course. By the time I realised where we were, he was in a drunken stupor, and I had an English frigate on my tail.’
‘So you were in command when the frigate caught you? It was amazing sailing. You nearly got away.’
His face hardened. ‘We would have done, but the rudder broke,’ he said with marked bitterness in his voice. ‘Could I trouble you for a drink of water?’
She poured him a cup from the jug on the small table and he pulled himself up in the bed with a grimace. After he had drained the cup, he thanked her and sank back on the pillows.
He closed his eyes and Hannah sat quietly watching while he slept.
Chapter Three
LONDON, 18 DECEMBER 1816
‘Fabien, mon chere, please sit down. Your pacing is making me quite weary.’ Marie, Countess Lidbury, looked up from the letter she had been writing for the last half hour. ‘Is it the negotiations that trouble you?’
Fabien stopped his perambulation of the room and looked at his sister. Since the ball, he had hardly spared a thought for the important negotiations that had brought him to London.‘Negotiations? No.’
His sister laid down her pen.
‘Then what troubles you?’
‘Are you acquainted with a Lady Maxwell?’
A smile curved the corner of Marie’s mouth. ‘One of your married ladies?’
Fabien stared at his sister in horror. ‘One of my ...? Mon dieu, Marie, you make me out to be some sort of monster!’
The smile vanished from Marie’s face and she held up a hand.
‘I apologise. Please, Fabien, sit down and tell me what is bothering you and how it concerns Lady Maxwell?’
