He told himself to focus on his mission and became brisk.
“Why don’t you save us some time and tell me which clothing she took with her?”
She took a steadying breath, then released it in a surrendering sigh. “A mauve half-mourning dress. Afine blue cloak with a lined hood. A green wool walking dress . . .”
And as she continued to list them, he swiftly took notes on a scrap of paper with the little pencil he kept in his pocket.
When she was done, she sat expressionlessly silent, drained. Her thoughts seemed turned inward.
He sat with her a moment, pondering what to say next.
He leaned toward her and said quietly, with conviction, “Madame Aubert, you have my word of honor that I will only tell my employer that I have reason to believe that Aurelie set out to see her brother in Boston. He will never hear your name from my lips. And my word of honor is all I have left in the world, so I don’t give it lightly. I think you have a sense of me now, and so any assumptions you may make about what I would do to protect the integrity that I have would likely be correct.”
He smiled again, this time somewhat crookedly.
She searched his face with a certain wonderment. Her cheeks flushed burgundy once more.
And then he stood and peeled off pound notes and he laid them on the table next to her, one after another. Her eyes went larger and larger. It would be enough to tide her over until she found another position. Or until Aurelie returned, should that day arrive.
He had the sense that she didn’t believe it would.
“I thank you very much for your time, Madame Aubert. You have been immeasurably helpful.”
He stood and took his hat between his hands. He took two steps toward the door. Then paused to look back at her, considering what to say.
Suddenly self-conscious with his eyes on her, she turned her bruised cheek away from him.
“I believe that you are as sensible as you claim Lady Aurelie is, if not more so. And that you will make a wise decision about what to do now.”
He said this in all seriousness. The implication was that she ought to take herself where Brundage couldn’t find her.
She returned her gaze to him. Her expression mingled cynicism and admiration.
“I think in some ways you’re more frightening than your employer, Mr. Hawkes.”
“Oh, now you’re just flirting withme, Madame Aubert,” he said, and restored his hat to his head and departed.
Chapter Five
Aurelie’s sleep was like a candle snuffed: sudden and black.
When she opened her eyes again, she wasn’t certain whether twenty hours had passed or just a few. The light pouring through the little window scarcely seemed changed. She sat up abruptly.
A quick inspection told her the shadows in the room were a little longer now. She’d taken note of where they fell across the floor when she arrived, as though they were furnishings like the braided rug and the soft blue knitted coverlet and the blossoms in a vase. Probably because her senses were still so amplified and abuzz everything seemed delineated in significance. Requiring assessment as a threat.
The strangeness was heightened by the fact that the fabric of her dress felt foreign against her skin. For a disorienting instant, she felt outside of her body, looking down. She was wearing what amounted to a disguise. The fit was close but not perfect, and yet somehow this very fact was comforting: it was a reminder that someone had cared enough to help her. That someone cared at all. Someone had believed her urgency and distress without asking for details.
She was a bit chilly from lying still. She sprang up from the bed and seized the poker and stirred thefire. When new flames leaped forth, she felt like a conjurer.
Then wearing Madame Aubert’s clothes, she did what used to be Madame Aubert’s job, and unpacked her trunk and hung her borrowed dresses in the little wardrobe.
Once upright, she cautiously admitted to herself that she felt better than she had in weeks, courtesy of the very good tea, scones, kindness, and sudden nap, not to mention being behind a locked door on the third floor of a building far away from Paris. The little mirror on the wall—just the size of her face—was large enough to reveal she had lavender circles beneath her eyes.
The quiet nearly rang after days of clattering wheels and rushing water and milling crowds chattering in dozens of accents. It amazed her, it filled her with absolute steely amazement, that she had done it.
It was ironic to find bliss in the blessed soft, dim aloneness. She’d never before craved being alone any more than a fish would crave the water in which it lived. It was a fact of her days. She’d thought loneliness would finally end when she married Brundage.
Louis had been killed in an uprising. He’d remembered their parents well, and perhaps that was why he’d never stopped being angry, and never seemed to stop fighting. And Edouard had emigrated to Boston, where no one was currently trying to kill French people.