Betrayed Countess (Books We Love Historical Romance) Read online

  Lisbette scrutinized her new surroundings—a long shingle beach where small boats were drawn up to a harbor bustling with activity. Around them teemed a mixture of scruffy seafarers, dockworkers and a few of the finer dressed. A drenching despair washed over her. “This voyage … it was not my idea.”

  “Running away, non?” His chuckle pricked up her spine. “I think the captain would be interested in who you are and what you’re doing here.” He looked down at her bag. “The British authorities might put you in prison, to find out more about our troubles.”

  Lisbette stepped back, her hands tighter around her bundle. Prison? Her head swam. “Ah … I must remove my damp cloak, if you do not mind? I am shivering.” She inhaled the invigorating breeze, the sun so warm on her face. That fool Armand hadn’t forced her into England to face the same threat as in France.

  “You are a pretty girl, like I said. Sound educated enough.” The man smirked and leaned closer. “Are you an aristo? What did you plan to do over here?”

  “I will tell you in a moment, please. My cloak is soaked, an awful mess.” She shrugged from the garment, smoothed her hand over the moist material and wondered if she could outrun this sailor. She glanced once more at him and smiled, then slapped the cloak into his face.

  He swore and tripped back over an uneven plank. Stumbling near the quay’s edge, he lost his balance and fell over the side, dragging her cloak with him. Arms and legs flapping, he splashed into the sea.

  “Good Lord!” someone gushed out the words at her unladylike conduct, while others sputtered their amazement. “Did you see what that wisp of a girl…?”

  Her bundle crammed under her elbow, Lisbette lifted her skirt and petticoat and raced along the harbor under the chalk cliffs. The shocked observers parted to let her by, before a man stepped out and blocked her path.

  “What happened down there?” he demanded, his English sounding guttural to her ears. “Did you just arrive on that vessel?”

  Swallowing a cry, she stared into his jowls and poked a finger on his chest to give herself a moment to think. “I came to rencontrer … to meet someone. Then that roué, he tries to … did you not see this?” Lisbette adjusted the fichu at her throat as if to prove her affront, but more so to calm the trembling in her fingers. “You should be careful who you allow on the quai.” She hated her thick accent and in her fluster had lapsed into French.

  “Show me what you’re carrying in there.” He loomed over her.

  Fingers stiffening, she hesitated, then opened her bundle just enough to reveal her extra chemise and stockings.

  “Be off with ya then, wench,” he said with an impatient wave of his hand. “Don’t be plyin’ your trade here. You French whores keep to the taverns.”

  Lisbette strutted past him toward the town at the base of the cliffs, hoping the heat in her cheeks didn’t show. A whore? Once out of his sight, she dashed into a market square, weaving through a blur of stands, people and carts. She hurried along a narrow, winding lane crowded with overhanging buildings and cow pens reeking of manure. Her breath wheezed, the blood pounding in her ears at the fear of being pursued once they fished that sailor out of the water.

  Chapter Two

  Lisbette stopped near a cow pen and gasped for breath, then regretted inhaling the stink. Leaning on a fence rail, she gripped the splintered wood to steady herself. A ragged girl about her age led a calf down the lane in front of her. “Please, Mademoiselle, where may I find a coach?”

  “In the King’s Arms,” the girl said, pointing behind her before ambling past.

  Lisbette frowned at that saucy reply. What did the arms of their sovereign have to do with coaches? She must have misunderstood. Slumped against the fence, she crushed the canvas bundle to her chin. She’d studied English in her lessons, but it might prove a stranger language than she anticipated.

  She walked on, taking deep breaths to calm herself. When she reached the other side of the shabby town, she found a road leading uphill. Perhaps she’d find the coach station there. Following the road’s steep incline, her calf muscles straining, she observed a castle spread out higher on the cliffs. The walled fortress loomed in vigilance over the town below. Lisbette turned at the road’s summit to stare across the Channel. Through sudden tears, she saw the coast of France shimmering on the horizon, oblivious to her exile.

  Her mother once told her that at the age of fourteen, when she was sent to marry the Dauphin, Marie Antoinette was stripped of her Austrian clothes and handed naked to France. Lisbette ran a thumb over her bodice, the silk mottled with stains, and felt stripped bare in England.

  She smoothed back loose tendrils of hair and shook out her blue skirt. Her privileged upbringing had ill-prepared her for this adventure. The music, riding, and language lessons seemed a very weak defense.

  Her father had often praised her tenacity and intelligence, though advised her to behave less headstrong. That dunked sailor would have agreed with him.

  She smiled at that, but her throat tightened at the mere idea of her father. Her mother had found him slumped over his desk—a heart attack. Lisbette had never realized he had a bad heart, or any frailty. She pushed away the grief that clung to her.

  Shoulders stiff, she looked before her. The straight road that led away from Dover bustled with drays, carts, wagons, and men on horseback. She stepped around steaming horse manure and stood on the roadside, wondering what to do. Never in her life had she been totally alone, without family, a nurse or a servant. She’d honor her father by testing his praise.

  A coach and six thundered down the road from behind her, kicking dust in her face as it rumbled by. Her muscles clenched, but she didn’t dare return to Dover to risk facing any British authorities. A town must be ahead and Bath might be near. Armand said Bath lay to the west, but perhaps she should have insisted on geography lessons instead of pianoforte.

  Lisbette walked at a quick pace, staying on the side of the road where nettles brushed her skirt and snagged her stockings. Moving distracted her from her gloomy thoughts. Her delicate slippers swished through the grass and she savored the earthy smell instead of the rotting fish of the ship.

  A stream burbled to the right. She knelt and quenched her thirst by sipping water from her cupped hands. If not the eau du roi from the Seine, the brackish water cooled down her throat. Removing her shoe to shake out a pebble, Lisbette winced at the blister forming on her right heel. She resisted the urge to kick off both shoes, white with chalk powder.

  Instead she pulled the pins from her hair and let it fly loose. Armand’s supposed niece had put up her thick locks, with angry ministrations and glares at the old man, to make her look mature. But Lisbette had forgotten and left behind the old-fashioned cabochon cap they forced on her, having removed it to dry in the ship’s hold.

  A flock of birds in the branches of a nearby birch tree squabbled at her presence, then launched into the air. They soared into a clouding sky that looked too bleak for July.

  She rested her forehead on her knees.

  The previous year loomed over her again. Would she ever stop smelling the smoke from the wealthy Parisian homes—so close to theirs—burned by tradesmen over wage-cuts? Bullets cracked as soldiers fired into the mob. She and her mother fearfully read the seditious pamphlets that accused the royal family and many aristocrats of starving those beneath them. Furious trades people flooded the streets, demanding weapons to ensure their rights.

  The King had panicked and called in his foreign mercenaries to protect the monarchy, inciting more hostility. The working classes attacked and destroyed the Bastille prison, screaming that the government drove up bread prices for its own gain.

  That’s when Lisbette and her mother had fled Paris for Château Jonquiere in Poissy.

  Angry rebels who knew nothing about her had snatched away her orderly life.

  Lisbette stood with a groan, whisking away grass and patting down her skirt. Madame Hilaire had argued with her about wearing coarser attire, and
she wished she had listened. Especially now that her cloak floated in the Channel.

  She resumed walking, her bundle pressed to her chest. She passed crude wattle and daub cottages capped in thatch and larger dwellings of pale stone. Rolling green meadows stretched behind stonewalls or hedgerows speckled in fragrant pink dog-roses. England appeared to be a pretty country, if cooler than France, and she studied the landscape to soften her turmoil.

  A cart trundled by. A man under a round hat grinned at her with big brown teeth. “Need a ride, sweeten?”

  Lisbette increased her stride, blister pinching. She bunched her fichu closer around her throat and tucked it into her low-cut bodice.

  “A gypsy jade, are you? All that black hair. Ole Joe has the ripe puddin’ for you.” He slowed the cart. When she glared at him he pursed his lips together in a parody of a kiss. “Dark eyes, too. Read me fortune, aye?”

  “I am not a gypsy, monsieur, and you are too forward.” She disliked being rude to underlings, but cringed at his lecherous grin. She missed the care of a servant, though Armand had wavered badly in Boulogne, to protect her from such insults. “How far is the city of Bath, if you please?”

  “Oh-ho, a Frenchie jade.” He sniggered and winked. “Don’t know nothin’ about no city called Bath. But if you hop in me cart I’ll show you something better.”

  “Leave me alone.” She turned and stumbled through the grass, away from him, her heart heavy with disappointment. Armand couldn’t have been mistaken about the city. The cart rattled off and she let out her breath.

  A church steeple poked up above the trees ahead. She’d walk to the next town and decide what to do. She hoped he wasn’t wrong about the people she was supposed to contact. Armand swore they were decent, friends for years who would be honored to aid a nobleman’s daughter. Like his ‘niece’, her guardian had never claimed to have friends in England before. Her resentment toward him deepened each minute. She should have defied him and refused to leave France. But after what she’d suffered, few could blame her for bad judgment.

  * * * *

  The hook-nosed woman behind the desk at the inn in the next village—a clump of half-timbered buildings leaning into one another—narrowed her eyes. “Where’s your menfolk? And how old are you?”

  Lisbette poked through her skirt slit into her inside pocket for the small leather purse that held her gold coins. She put one on the desk. “Ah … my brothers will meet me here soon. They are delayed.” She glanced around the dirty, low-beamed lobby, avoiding the woman’s scowl. “May I have a bath, too, perhaps?”

  “What kind of coin be that? Is it real gold?” The clerk picked up the coin and bit it between her yellow teeth before flipping a book open on the counter. “This ain’t no big city place. No baths here. Sign there, if you can write. You want your own room? It’s cheaper if you share.”

  “No sharing, Madame.” Lisbette wondered if the woman teased her. Dipping the quill in the ink bottle, she paused. Armand warned her to protect her identity. You never knew who in England might be sympathetic to the revolution in France. She wrote down ‘Bettina Laurant’. The last name was her cousin’s, who married a businessman with little connection to aristocracy. For a first name, she used her childhood nickname. An Italian nurse had addressed her as Signorina Bette, and her father rolled it together into Bettina. She poked the quill back in the ink and resigned herself that Countess Lisbette no longer existed. The radicals had abolished all titles of hereditary nobility. “I want change from my coin, please.”

  The clerk shoved four silver coins at her. Bettina vowed to learn the deciphering of English money—she was certain she had just been cheated. The woman pulled a key from a hook and showed her up a narrow crooked stairway to a room in the back.

  “I’ll bring you some water to wash,” she muttered, scratching her neck, glaring down at Bettina’s dress. “Your brothers best get here quick. I run a decent place.”

  “Of course, Madame,” Bettina grimaced. She knew she looked like a bedraggled waif, a serving girl wearing her lady’s discards, but this tradeswoman needed a lesson in manners. She closed the door and leaned her forehead against the rough wood. At least her father hadn’t lived to see the stripping of his feudal rights as a member of the noblesse d’epee. Yet these very ‘rights’, the exorbitant taxes the commoners paid to support the nobles, sparked the anarchy. Bettina shook her head, lamenting where she might fit in this chaos.

  She turned and looked around the tiny chamber, which was filled with only a washstand and narrow bed. The mattress crackled under her bottom when she sat, the straw scratching into her thin dress. She longed for her soft down-bed at home, but was there any home left? Perhaps in the morning she’d awake to hot chocolate on a silver tray before her bedroom fire and her mother’s sweet smile.

  The air in the room stank of perspiration, so she slipped off her shoes, climbed onto the bed and pried open the window. The stench from the alley outside was worse. Cabbages, onions, and other scraps from the inn’s kitchen were apparently dumped to rot below her window. A black beetle scurried over the sill near her hand. She stifled a screech, almost falling off the bed. Other crawling occupants probably lurked in the corners, awaiting her drift into slumber.

  The door opened and the woman held out a pitcher of water. “Don’t be standin’ on the bed. Ain’t you got no manners? Looking out for your brothers, aye?”

  “Merci, for the water, Madame.” Bettina hopped down and took the chipped pitcher. She’d have to resign herself to no privacy as well. “May I have a meal sent up?”

  “I’ll bring you bread ’n cheese, if you pay for it.”

  After eating the bland cheese and dry bread, which sat like a lump in her stomach, Bettina realized that food had become as exciting as any finery had been in the past.

  She removed her once fashionable blue polonaise gown. Normally hitched and poofed out over her petticoat, the gown now drooped without ribbons and drawstrings and the stout cotton cul postiche in the effort in Boulogne to make her appear ordinary. Denied the convenience of a maid to assist in her toilette, she was thankful for front-lacing stays. Untangling the stiff laces, she sighed in relief, retrieved a bar of soap from her bundle, and scrubbed her face and hands. Peeling off her stockings, stiff with filth, she washed her sore feet.

  She studied the writing on the envelope she needed to deliver: Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Little, 65 Great Pulteney Street, Bath. This couple was anxious for the information she held—information to further the royalist cause that must reach them sealed. Or so Armand said. Again, she wondered why he gave this task to her, an unchaperoned, vulnerable girl. But he insisted that she needed to flee the country and this was the perfect opportunity.

  Clad in her cotton chemise, Bettina snuggled under the thin bedclothes. She flexed her fingers and toes, then trembled, her eyes damp with tears. The unfamiliarity of being so alone weighed her down like a soaked rag, and she buried her face in the sour pillow.

  People quarreled somewhere in the inn, bringing back that morning in France. The arguing in the next room before Armand had rapped on her door, begging her to get up. Half asleep, Bettina had thought it was a confused dream. Now the angry words filtered in: Madame Hilaire insisted that they send someone to Paris. Armand objected vehemently, saying “she wouldn’t know anything, she couldn’t help them.”

  Bettina knew they spoke of her, but why, and who were ‘them’? Despite what Armand had said earlier, she knew revolutionary sympathizers had met in that townhouse. How could she, an aristocratic, fatherless daughter, have any value to such scourge? She foundered in unanswered questions she’d have to rely on the Littles to explain. Listening to her own breathing, she drifted into a dream where she rushed over wet cobblestones toward a misty harbor beside a man with no face.

  * * * *

  Bettina sat up, jerked from a restless sleep by a banging on the door. She gasped and blinked in the dark as the noise increased. It was her nightmare again. She gripped the pillow and tr
ied to clear the fog from her mind. No aroma of chocolate awaited, only the dank smell of her own body.

  “Here now, open up afore I come in and get you,” a gruff voice called through the door.

  Wrapped in the blanket, Bettina crawled from the mattress. With her foot, she shoved her package beneath the bed. She squeaked the door open to reveal a plump, florid-faced man holding a candle.

  “What is the problem, monsieur?”

  The churlish desk clerk stood behind him in the passage, a cynical smile on her lips. “That’s her, just like I told you, Constable.”

  The man barged his way in, belly first. “Travelin’ with no menfolk, an’ no baggage, that do make me suspicious.”

  “And you should’ve seen her dress. Of fine silk it was. Much too expensive for the likes of her,” the desk clerk said. “You know you can’t trust no frog-eaters, and I run a proper place here.”

  Bettina shrank back, clutching the blanket around her. “But I have paid for the room, and the dress is mine. My men … brothers, they are only late.”

  “This ain’t no brothel, miss.” The constable waddled farther in and she backed to the wall. “You’ll have to leave. You’d be wise to go home to your parents, not livin’ this sorta life. No decent woman travels by herself.”

  “Il me confond, what are you saying? You cannot put me out in the dark.” Bettina’s throat thickened, but she refused to cry. “I am certain we can—”

  “It’s almost daylight. She should leave afore any quality come. I wouldn’t have let her stay, but felt sorry for the chit.” The desk clerk crossed her skinny arms over her chest, her head bobbing like a stringed puppet. “But her escorts never showed. Maybe she did expect a man, since she wouldn’t share. But not in the way she’d have us believe.”

  Bettina’s cheeks burned. “Madame, I have never done as you accuse.”