‘I will come to you then.’ He knelt by the bedside and looked steadily at her. ‘What can you see?’
‘My own reflection. Your cynicism. Weariness.’ She made herself relax, let herself sink into the wide grey gaze. ‘Truth. Truth and anger.’
‘Ah.’ He sat back on his heels. ‘I will tell you then, but you must swear to keep it secret.’
‘Who am I likely to be able to tell?’ she demanded.
‘You never know.’ He got to his feet and went back to the table. ‘My mother was Lady Isabelle Mallory and she married my father in 1775. In 1791, when the king was forced to accept the written constitution, I was fifteen. My father was strongly in favour of the new order and believed that bloodshed and revolution would be averted by the more democratic form of government.
‘Maman insisted that it would be a disaster and said she would return to her parents in England. I wanted to stay in France, but my father told me my duty was to look after my mother and that he would send for us when France became the stable land of freedom and prosperity that he predicted.’ He paused and Averil found she was holding her breath. ‘She was right, he was wrong and he paid for it with his head during the Terror in ‘94. Our loyal family servants followed him to the guillotine.’
‘Oh, I am sorry. Your poor mother.’ He spoke so flatly that she could only guess at the emotions under the words, what he must have felt when the news reached England. ‘You speak very good English. I would never have guessed you were French.’
‘I have thought in it for years. I was already in the English navy when my father died. I went from being Comte Luc d’Aunay to Midshipman Mr Luke d’Aunay—or Dornay—and I did my level best to be an Englishman. But they called me Frenchy and it stuck—the name and the whispers and the lack of acceptance. I was never one of us, never quite English. But I worked and I was lucky and my mother lived long enough to see me gain post rank.’
‘She must have been very proud of you,’ Averil said. Poor, tragic woman, her husband executed, an exile in her own home country, her son far away and in danger.
Luke—no, she supposed she should say Luc— shrugged again, but it was not modesty, she could see that. He knew what he had achieved and against what odds and he was not going to discuss his feeling about his mother’s death with her.
‘What went wrong?’ she asked. She wrapped her arms around her knees, wincing a little as the movement stretched the bruise on her shoulder where the stone had hit.
‘Admiral Porthington was what went wrong,’ Luc said. He took the knife from his pocket and began to throw it into the tabletop, pull it out, rethrow. ‘I was seconded to assess intelligence and I found a pattern of events that pointed to leaks originating from here. The islands are used a lot by navy shipping, and by supply vessels, and they are conveniently close to France. I dug deeper and found that it all appeared to lead back to a certain gentleman who has interests here. I presented my evidence and it was set aside.’
‘But why would it not be accepted and the man investigated?’
‘He is Porthington’s second cousin. I had not dug deeply enough.’
‘Oh.’
‘Oh, indeed. I was not permitted to investigate any further. Porthington ridiculed the work I had done and refused to countenance any action being taken. I lost my temper.’ Averil could imagine, but she bit her lip, unwilling to provoke him now by saying as much. ‘I brooded on things, drank rather too much and decided to confront him in his quarters—this was at Portsmouth. I would give him an ultimatum—do something or I would go to the Admiralty and lay it before them.
‘I barged in and found he had company—very unwilling company. A young woman who he was about to force.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Asked him to stop. He laughed in my face and told me to get out. I hit him.’
‘Oh, my goodness.’ Averil knew what would have happened to an East India Company naval officer if he had done such a thing. ‘What happened?’
‘Porthington demanded a court-martial, but someone in the Admiralty seems to have had his suspicions, too. I was called in and given one chance—two months to prove
my theory right or I would face a court-martial, which, if it chose, could sentence me to death for striking a superior officer. I could not deny I had done it.’
To face death as it stared you in the face at sword point or, as she had experienced, in the form of a towering wave, was one thing. To live with a potential death sentence hanging over you for weeks was a refined form of torture.
‘That is terrible,’ Averil burst out.
‘It was more than I deserved for striking him. I have shot men for less.’
‘You were doing your duty by pressing for him to listen to you and you were acting as any gentleman should by defending that woman—surely they saw that?’
‘Porthington denied that he had forbidden me to proceed and said I had been told merely to exercise caution while he considered tactics. He portrayed me as headstrong and likely to blunder in and blow the entire investigation. Losing my temper did not help prove him wrong! And as for the woman, she was a servant, not a lady. They seemed to think it made a difference.’ He raised one of those slanting eyebrows. ‘Don’t make me a saint.’
‘I am very well aware you are no such thing,’ Averil retorted. ‘I might dislike you personally—’ he raised the other brow ‘—but I hate injustice. Where did the crew come from?’
‘The condemned cells. If I am correct and we track down the source of the leaks, then they are pardoned. If I am wrong, or we fail, they die.’
‘They do not have very much to lose by killing you and escaping, have they?’ And if they killed Luc, then they would not hesitate to do their worst with her.