He was gone, she told herself for the second time. Lost, slipped the line she had cast for him. She should not have to tell herself a third time. Then again, her physical joints should not feel quite so locked-up, as though she'd been ducked into a frozen pond and could not manage to thaw out, escape from those who had ducked her.
Flight was her only option, and quick. Quick as she could. Back to Paris? Further out still, into the countryside?
To Sarazin and his court—or away Sarazin, and his court?
How she wished Athos had invited her to eat something. She could have had one more meal within her, she told herself, one less thing for which she must scavenge and scheme. It was only the loss of the sustenance she regretted, she told herself, grabbing for the first of several handfuls to place in her trunk. But he had made no such invitation.
He had, in fact, barely seemed to note her presence when she found him at speaking to Madame Concierge about settling his bill and buying something of provisions for a trip to come.
How peculiar he had been. How unlike the man she had come to expect to be pleased to see her, a man whom she had come to realize gave her pleasure to see. Anne stood slightly to the side (she had never again needed—not since their original meeting—to draw attention to herself to gain his notice), waiting until he turned toward her.
And waited. And still he did not turn. Not even a nod of his head in acknowledgment.
"When you have these packed for travel, you may see to it they are given to my—the—man lately arrived," he said, seeming to conclude matters.
A man, lately arrived?
Athos turned, his eyes surely must have apprehended her presence, and yet, still, nothing. She did not like being nothing. To him. He completed his turn and made his way toward, and then up, the stairs.
The concierge turned toward Anne, and the look upon her face at the woman known as Anne was familiar enough: contempt. Yet, a look that since the dusty swordsmen had taken an interest the widowed Anne the other woman had kept largely at bay. There was no such restraint left to her now. Something had shifted.
Packed for travel?
Her mind stuttered. Had her over-step been so very grave? She felt flush with a need for haste, felt instinctually that there was no time to lose in setting her error right. Carelessly, she did not pause, even, in her own chambers to freshen her appearance before going after him.
She lifted her hand to knock—the first time she had ever done so—upon his chamber's door.
He did not startle at the sound of the knock on his chamber's door. It was too much like La Fere, knocks at the door, servants needing entry, his father, Le Comte, come to track him down.
Athos assumed it was the courier who had arrived, or the meal he had ordered delivered to his rooms—he had no stomach for the public room presently.
"Come," he said, his voice colorless and without curiosity—as any noble's might be.
He did not even look away from what he was doing to mark who entered. After a moment his brain did register that no one had spoken, no noise of a trencher or flagon being set down had been made. He looked up.
Before him was Anne. Seeing her, he surprised himself by feeling…nothing. Not the remembered tickle of the errant hair charmingly escaped from her coif against his cheek, not the corset that like a panoply shielded him from her feminine shape, its molded form leant of necessity against his doublet's front, the heat of which had melted the wax on Catherine's letter, as he had been so keenly aware when they rode double on Hyperion, back from his lesson but a scant hour earlier. He had been a cacophony of sensations, then, as alive as an exposed nerve.
Now it felt as though he were detached from her by a divisive fog which left her obscured, muted, frustratingly out-of-focus. As though his nerves, what powered his reflexes, had abruptly dulled.
He said nothing, no word of welcome.
"I came to apologize," she said, and he should have spoken then, but everything in his head seemed to churn twice as slowly as usual. "Today—on your horse—"
"I am leaving," he said, his words starting slowly until they tripped upon each other by sentence's end, his mind barely registering the content of what she had been about to say.
"Oh." Her mouth a perfect, and ideal, oval. "Oh," she said. "You need not," she said. "Please, I am sorry. I-I will arrange to go. I did not mean to behave so imprudently—"
"What?" he asked, trying to communicate across the descended fog, the afternoon kiss between the two of them at once as distant as last year's snow, and yet as present as the shape of her lips as she spoke her dismay. "Why would you go?"
"So that you may stay. Your studies here, your swordmaster's instruction. You must not abandon it, surely."
He closed his own mouth, which had fallen open with his realization that she believed her own actions to be the cause of his exit. Fallen open mimicking her own, in another life where he had never seen Catherine's letter opened, desiring to join his to hers, her breath taken into his lungs, even as now, in this life, he felt hopelessly drowned by the revelations of the past hour.
"I am called home," he told her. "First, by a letter," he felt its heavy weight even now, the existence of which was anathema to him, a pirate's black spot. "And now," he gave a truncated scoff, "by messenger, sent express to collect me…" he added under his breath, "as one might a delinquent school boy," he felt his voice trail away as his breath ran short, "or a condemned man." The words too quiet for her to make them out.
He saw Anne's back straighten with this news. She was coming into sharper focus now that she was here, that she was present. It had been dangerously easy to lose sight of her as he was overcome with things of La Fere pressing so tightly, over-coloring his vision. Dangerously easy to closet her away in his mind once he had arranged what little he could for her. Easier to shoulder the guilt that he could not do more for her situation when he was not so confronted.
"You may not lengthen your stay?"
"There is illness. My family…has fallen ill."
"Oh."
Had that been the best—the right way to explain, he thought? "Do not," he began. "You must not," he started again, meaning to address that moment's intimacy between them, and failing. "I have paid what I could toward your future board here, do not let Madame tell you otherwise," he turned away. It was easier, perhaps, not to look at her, there. "She and I have settled your rooms through at least the end of the week. I regret that I cannot leave more, but the journey ahead, and its expense—"
"No. No!" she protested him. "I must stand on my own, now that I am recovered. And, you have been too kind, from the beginning of our—acquaintance."
"Yes," he said, though he did not mean to sound of agreeing to it. He had been the correct amount of kind, after all. He felt as though a door were closing, a door that would separate them, keep them apart, and he was trapped in a bleak, colorless world without even so much as a window through which to witness and dream of the bracingly bright and colorfully brilliant outdoors. His back remained turned.
"Athos," she said, and he wondered—had she called him by name before? If she had, how was it possible this voicing of it fell upon his ear so perfectly, so melodiously—as though no other should ever speak the word of it to him again. It was a parting gift he did not deserve.
He turned toward her—but his reflexes, this trained swordsman's reaction time—proved too late, too sluggish from dread and loathing and what he now realized to be grief, and she had broken off whatever she had meant to say, and he was again alone in an empty room, with only his now-packed saddlebags to partner him.
He was gone. She had watched him ride out from the inn's stables from her second-floor chamber's window, the emissary sent by his family bringing up the rear, following the far more elegant mount that was Hyperion, Athos' stallion.
His family was ill, he had been called to return home. She told herself not to waste time thinking about such an oblique statement. Sarazin's doxy spy could not afford to care about wife, child, or betrothed of the men she targeted, though Sarazin's doxy spy—and Anne—and the woman who chafed at occupying the space between those two constructs-had none of them apprehended the dusty swordsman to have any such domestic connections.
Her bill might be paid through week's end, but she could not wait to see what week's end might bring. Life was fluid, and livelihood not easily held onto, as the afternoon abundantly proved. She must make ready to embark on the next public coach.
She was as skittish as a cat put out into the cold, unable to stop moving for the threatening chill all about her. Sarazin's doxy railed at Anne, at what Anne had fallen for—and taken them all with her. Poor, widowed, simple uncomplicated Anne, this character developed to acquire wealthy men's patronage, a way into their beds and valuables.
Well, she had managed her way into neither these past weeks. Surely Anne was to blame. No, not entirely. 'Twas life with Sarazin and the many men he had tasked to her that had birthed an understanding of manipulation. Its subtlety, its intricacies. She had slipped up, perhaps, kissing her mark when it was not to plan. But she could not have predicted she would lose the time needed to repair such damage.
He could not even bear to look at her when she had followed him to his chambers. He had seemed unusually pale under the sun-hardened skin he had earned while at his swordplay. Disliking seeing her, so mis-timed had her instinctual advance been.
What sort of man did not open his letters?
Had she but known such a letter might come, she might have—what? Increased the pace of her pursuit? Worked to possess him more aggressively? Turned her grift into a simply robbery?
Sacre, she knew the answer, and it showed what a disaster she had let herself become since the loss of the child. She would have savored every possible moment in his presence. She would have been tempted to abandon the Anne persona altogether. She would have implored him read to her from Signor Egnatius. She would have lived twenty lifetimes at this inn, and sworn to herself to recall each in perfect detail no matter what might follow. She would have lain herself, like as a faithful hound, upon the threshold of his chamber door of a night, so that she might be the first to see him of a morning, and the last before he retired to bed.
She was horrified to learn, to understand how deeply unhappy his departure would leave her. How dissatisfied she began to apprehend she was soon to become. She worked faster to pack—grabbing things of hers as well as anything in the room not specifically nailed down.
This had never been a part of her before, this understanding—this capacity of feeling. Early days there had been a time she had thought she loved Sarazin, but such uniformed, ignorant foolishness she had shed soon enough in light of his treatment of others—of her. But not since then. Men were either by-turns sweet, or despicable. And even the sometime sweet ones grew despicable easily enough in private company.
She was completely shaken by her discovery. She saw about it nothing in which to revel. It frightened her, and left her certain of only one thing: she could not return to Paris—to Sarazin—with this overpowering secret inside her. She had to run—quickly in the opposite direction until she could master it, conceal and possibly eradicate it. Then, then she could return—several new conquests in hand to soften Sarazin's anger upon her delayed appearance.
She would murder Anne, construct a new identity for herself during her flight from here by coach. She would—she must-forget this inn—deny her mind the memory of all that happened here. She must not stop moving, must not settle in, not accept the fickle lure of security. Not even that purchased board, available to her through week's end.
'Twas rest had brought her to this. Rest, and unearned kindness—they had betrayed her.
...tbc...