Scars of Betrayal

‘The tree canopy will dissipate the smoke,’ he said after a few moments. ‘The low cloud will take care of the rest.’

* * *

Half an hour later flame shadow caught at his torso as he removed his shirt, the bandages following. His wound showed shattered skin, the tell-tale red lines of inflammation already radiating.

‘Don’t touch.’ Her directive came as she saw he was about to sear the edges of skin together with a glowing stick. ‘It is my belief that dirt kills a man with more certainty than a bullet and I can tell it is infected.’

Crossing to him, she wiped her hands with the spare leaves and poured water across the sap. When she touched him she knew he had the fever. Another complication. A further problem.

‘I have been ill like this before and lived.’ He had seen her frown.

Lots of ‘befores’, she mused, lines of crossed white opaque scars all over his body. The thought made her careful.

‘You are a soldier?’

He only laughed.

Or a criminal, she thought, for what manner of man looked as he did? When he handed over the flask of water, she did not take a drink.

‘I will heat it to clean the wound. It might hurt for it has been left a while. If you had some leather to bite down upon...?’’

He broke into her offered advice. ‘I will cope.’

* * *

Stephen Hawkhurst’s voice made Nathaniel start, the echo around the marbled lobby disconcerting as all the years past rolled back into the present.

‘You look as though you have the problems of the world upon your shoulders, Nat. Still thinking of the Northrup chit, I’d be guessing: fine eyes, a fine figure and a sense of mystery. Her uncle, Reginald Northrup, will be at the Venus Club tonight. Perhaps you can find out more about her from him.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘A few years ago when I was in Paris I heard a rumour about a woman who sounded remarkably like Cassandra Northrup.’

‘What did it say?’

‘That she was kept a prisoner in southern France and that she was not released for quite some time.’

‘I see.’

‘Her rescuer was also mentioned in detail.’ The flint of gold in his friend’s eyes was telling and there was a certain question there.

‘It was you, Nat, wasn’t it? And she was one of theirs?

‘Whose?’

‘The French. One of their agents.’

Anger sliced in a quick rod of pain. ‘No, Cassandra Northrup never held loyalty to any cause save that of her own.’

‘Others here might disagree with you. She is the chairwoman of the charity Daughters of the Poor.’

‘Prostitutes?’

Hawk nodded, leaving Nat to ponder on how the circles of life turned around in strange patterns.

‘She must have been a child then, and scared. God, even now she looks young. And you got home in one piece, after all.’

One piece? How little Stephen truly knew.

Taking his hat and cloak from the doorman, Nat forced away his recollections and walked out into a cold and windy London night.

* * *

They were all there, myriad affluent men gathered in a room that looked much like a law chamber or a place of business. Nat was glad that Stephen stood beside him because he still felt dislocated and detached, thrown by the reappearance of a woman he had thought never to see again.

He recalled Cassandra Northrup’s eyes were exactly the same as they had been, guarded in their turquoise, shuttered by care and secrets. But her hair had changed from the wild curls she had once favoured and she was far more curvaceous.

If her eyes had not given her away her left hand would have, of course, with the half-finger and the deep scar across the rest of her knuckles.

It had been a newer wound back then in the clearing, when she had reached forward and laid one cool palm across his back. He had flinched as she brought the knife she carried upwards to cut away the badness.

The pain had made him sweat, hot incandescence in the cool of night as she simply tipped the heated flask up and covered ragged open flesh.

The camphor helped, as did her hands threading through places on his spine that seemed to transfer the pain. Surprise warred with agony under her adept caresses.

The poultice was sticky and the new bandages she bound the ointment with were from the bottom of her shirt. Cleaner. Softer. He could smell her on them.

He wished that he had the whisky to dull the pain. He wished for a bed that was not on a forest floor, but some place warmer, more comfortable, some place where his heartbeat did not rattle against the cold hard of earth.

‘If you sit, it should help with the drainage.’

He was shivering now, substantially, and went to drape his jacket around himself to find warmth, but she held it away and shook her head.

‘You are burning up. The mind plays tricks when the fever rages and as I cannot shift you to the stream we will have to make do with the cold night air instead. I had hoped it would snow.’

Her accent was Parisian, the inflection of the drawing rooms and the society salons where anything and everything was possible. He wondered why the hell she should have been in Nay, dressed in the clothes of a lad, and when he inadvertently blurted the thought out aloud, he saw her flinch.

‘I think you should sleep, Monsieur Colbert.’

His name. Not quite right. But he needed to be quiet and he needed to think. There was danger here. He wished he could have asked her who she was, what she was, but the camphor was winding its way into the quick pricks of pain and he closed his eyes to block her from him.

* * *

He would be sore in the morning if he lived. The wound or the fever could kill him, but it was the bleeding that she was most concerned about. She had not been able to stop it. Already blood pooled beneath him, more hindrance to a body struggling with survival.

Tipping up the flask, she took the last drops of water.

She was starving. She was exhausted. The embers of the fire still glowed in the dark, but outside the small light the unknown gathered.