“They did.” She snuggled into the warmth like a nesting animal, giving a deep, feminine chuckle. She found that amusing, did she?
The last quilt had found refuge under the bed. He fished it out and spread it across the rush-bottomed chair. When he propped his feet up on the windowsill, he pulled the ends around him. It would get cool later on.
Annique’s chest rose and fell gently, slow and even. That either meant she was asleep, or she was getting ready to attack him again. He’d wait and see.
Seven
ANNIQUE WOKE LAZILY. SHE WAS WARM AND THE bed was soft. That was a great comfort to the many sore places on her body. She smelled bread baking.
She realized she was naked.
She snapped alert, knowing in an instant exactly where she was. It was not the first time she had awoken surrounded by enemies. She made not the least movement, allowed no change in her breathing. The quilt had slipped down her body at some time in the night. Now it slanted across her buttocks, not hiding them at all. Grey could see any of her he wished to. It made her feel odd inside, knowing that.
He was not in bed. It was not such a large bed one could lose an entire person in it. When she listened, she heard him breathing, off to the left.
How long had Grey looked upon her while she slept? Did he desire her? She did not want to hear that question in her mind, but it was most assuredly there.
She had always been a woman of measured detachment toward men. Now she lay in bed hoping a spymaster of the British would look upon her nakedness and be aroused. It was, perhaps, a form of madness. In any case, she did not want it.
“I can tell you’re awake.” His voice came, closer than she’d expected. “You might as well get up and stop pretending.”
“I am hoping you are a ghastly dream and will go away if I stay asleep long enough.”
“I can’t be a nightmare. It’s morning, and I’m still here.”
She sat up, pulling the quilt across her breasts. Her forehead she put down upon her knees to hide her face. She was entirely miserable about this whole situation. Leblanc might find her at any moment. She was plagued with an inconvenient passion for this English. She had no clothes. Soon she must face Grey, with open eyes, in the daylight. It was all most discouraging. “I am used to nightmares that are still there in the morning.”
“Do you have any idea how silly it looks when a woman of your skills sulks like a five-year-old?”
“I do not sulk. Why do you not go away so I can get dressed.” Perhaps Grey would wander somewhere else for a while or even fall off the face of the earth altogether if she were exceptionally fortunate.
“I’m not leaving you alone. I don’t have time to hunt you down this morning. I don’t want to fight with you either.” He sounded impatient. “Look at me. I’m tired of talking to your spine and a handful of bedspread. I don’t evaporate just because you ignore me.”
She didn’t move while he crossed the room toward her.
“I don’t…For God’s sake, will you look at me when I talk to you?”
It was time. When he was close, she lifted her head and faced him squarely and opened her eyes.
Darkness. As always. It had been darkness for five months. She no longer expected anything else when she opened her eyes, unless she was roused suddenly from sleep and did not remember where she was.
He stopped abruptly. He was a man who did not make noise while he was thinking. Either he talked or he was silent. She waited. After a time, she felt a wind across her face. They tried that sometimes, waving their hands at her to see if she would blink.
“You’re blind.”
“I am not blind.” Always, it made her angry, these people who thought they knew everything. “I cannot see. That is all.”
“Dear God.” He took her chin tightly and tilted her face from side to side, though she could have told him nothing showed. “I can’t believe this. How? When?”
For some reason she told him the truth. “Last May. It was not even a battle. Just a village and a…a game for a patrol riding through from one place to another. They destroyed that little place for no other reason than that they were armed men and bored and they could. I took a saber cut on the head.”
She should not have spoken of it. Memory assaulted her—the last images she would see with her eyes. A bright tablecloth trampled by horses. The long, dark hair of a woman, flying loose as she tried to run. A man crumpled on the ground. Death after death. Even women and children. A village of innocents with no chance to fight back, dying for nothing at all.
Her eyes closed convulsively, and she pulled free from him and turned away, dragging her quilt with her. She took the pictures of death and folded them away small, as if she were packing winter clothes into a press and closing the lid tightly down. Mostly she did not think of that last day at all, except in bad dreams.
He said, “There’s no mark.”
“It is not the eyes themselves.” She took a deep breath. She hated speaking of this. “The doctor at the university in Marseilles—he was a very important man with unpleasant breath—said it is the head wound from the saber. Something presses upon the optic nerve, a knot of blood or a splinter of bone. With a great many Latin terms, he says this, you understand, since he is charging my mother a great deal of money for each long word.”
She made a good broad gesture to take his attention away while she wiped her face with the other hand. A conjurer’s trick. “If that something should go wandering about in this skull of mine, the so-important doctor says, I will see once more. But then I will most probably die at once. Or possibly not, which is the other choice. He does not commit himself. Instead he advises me not to get hit on the head again, which is advice anyone could have given without poking at me for an hour first. Me, I think he does not know very much.” There. She had the tears wiped off. Perhaps he had not noticed.
“You’ve been like this for five months.” She was not sure what was in his voice. It was not pity.
“I am not like this or like that. I am me, and I have been like me for much longer than five months. My eyes are not me.”
He snorted in her face and took hold of her again to go searching through her hair for the thin, smooth scar above her temple. He drew the line of it with his fingertips. “Here, was it?”
“As I told you.” She was furious with him that he examined her this way and she could not escape. To be naked before him was nothing to the exposure she felt when she uncovered this secret. She wished, oh most completely to the bottom of her heart, she wished she had escaped before she was forced to reveal this to Grey.
“It’s healed cleanly,” he said.
“Most pleasingly. I am told one cannot see the scar now that my hair has grown out again.”
“You were with your mother when she died, weren’t you? How did you get from Marseilles to Paris, blind?”
“It is no concern of—” His hands tightened on her. She decided not to try his temper further this morning. “I walked.”
“You…walked? You didn’t just walk. Not blind. Not alone.”
“Maman has…” Pain clenched at her throat. Maman was dead. “Maman had…many friends. It was a network all her own from the years even before the Revolution. They helped me.” So many people had helped her. Maman’s network. Friends of Vauban. Friends of old Soulier, who had been Maman’s lover and who was most senior in the Secret Police. Friends of her colleagues René and Françoise. Men who had known her father. Friends she had made herself over the years. She had come so far because of a legion of ordinary people she could call upon for a favor worth a life.
The British did not know how remarkable her memory was. Her mind held more than the Albion plans and her many, many secrets. Five thousand names and directions were safe in her head—names that meant sanctuary and aid in any corner of France. She would call upon some of them when she shook herself loose of Monsieur Grey. “I was passed from hand to hand for the whole way, until I was betrayed, and Henri came to take me to Leblanc.”