The Marked Man

by Meriol Trevor

Genres: Historical Romance; Regency Romance

Synopsis

Born to a life of wealth and ease, the innocent, dreamy-eyed Claudine knew nothing of the ways of the world. Nor could she hope to resist the advances of Gabriel, the dashing rebel hero. Gabriel, gallant scion of the hated Comte de Villerange, was never more than a town ahead of his pursuers. As determined as he was courageous, he would let nothing stand in the way of his obsession to rid his country of its invaders...until the girl with the deep-grey eyes smiled upon him.

Release date: August 15, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 192

Sample

The two sisters started out together, but they had hardly crossed the parterre when Seraphine was called back by one of the teachers.

“What have I forgotten now?” she exclaimed, making a face. “You go on, Claudine, up to the ruins. I’ll catch up with you.”

And she ran back along the paths between the flower beds—bare because it was November, although such a mild day that the girls were making for their favorite haunt, the ruins of the old castle of Villerange.

Seraphine ran, swinging her hat in her hand, her mop of yellow curls flying free, back to the great château. Built foursquare round a courtyard, it now housed a school for girls, run on enlightened principles and founded after the flight of the château’s owners in the revolutionary wars. She was sixteen, and her sister two years older. They went to the school because their father, M. de Trévires, a republican in sympathies, was its founder and supporter. Their mother agreed because she did not think the present situation in Luxembourg was quite suitable for bringing her daughters out into society.

Claudine climbed slowly up the steep path to the ruins, thinking about the peasants’ rebellion. For this was 1798, and it was three years since the fortified city of Luxembourg had yielded to the French Revolutionary army, the Austrian garrison had marched away, and the Tree of Liberty been planted in the Place d’Armes. The ancient duchy, once part of the Holy Roman Empire, had been incorporated into the new France and was governed by a commissaire and a bureaucracy of officials and police, with soldiers stationed there to hold down the people of a country which had no sympathy either with the French or with their revolutionary principles. This year, when conscription had been introduced, the peasants had revolted and there had been fighting in September and October.

It was hopeless of course, for what could peasants, some armed only with wooden staves, do against seasoned troops? It was terrible to hear of the slaughter and almost worse to hear of the young men rounded up, marched off to Luxembourg and thrown into the dungeons there. A guillotine was set up, just as in Paris; the prisoners were brought before tribunals and many were sent to execution. Claudine had wept at night, thinking of this terror.

And now the soldiers were in the villages, disarming everybody, hunting for rebels, some of whom were still hiding in the woods. The officials called them brigands.

The headmistress, Madame Bilsdorf, called them brigands too. The girls were warned not to go beyond the gardens, for fear the brigands might carry them off. Seraphine had immediately become very keen to take a long walk in the woods. It was a moot point whether the ruins were in the garden or not; they were up on a ridge, and the woods began on the other side of the steep ravine which they overlooked. Seraphine hoped some rebels might come up there; Claudine was sure they would not. But she was thinking of them that November afternoon as she climbed up among the broken walls and crumbling towers of the medieval castle, once the fortress of the robber counts of Villerange, the proud family of Erlen.

Claudine was taller than Seraphine. She was even a little taller than her father, which embarrassed her when she was walking with him, for she had a great respect for his wisdom. But she was not the tallest girl in the school, though she was the eldest. Nor, to her shame, considering whose daughter she was, did she often reach the top of the class.

“Don’t dream, Claudine!” Mademoiselle Charpentier would say, sharply.

It was true, Claudine did dream; her mind was often far away from classrooms and lessons. She might be thinking about the Revolution—why republican ideals, which she accepted from her father as the best, should have issued in violence against the simplest of the people. But she might just be trying to remember the words of a song. She had a clear sweet voice, but she was too shy to sing by herself in public.

Now, when she reached level ground, she began to sing an old ballad in the Germanic dialect of the country, which she had learned as a child, though brought up, like most people of good family, to speak French. France had once been the home of all that was civilized.

The November sun glinted on the grass, green after rain. Claudine walked to the edge of the plateau and stood in a broken archway, looking across the steep valley to the woods on the other side of the deep narrow river that ran below. In this thin slanting light the golden leaves still on the trees gleamed; even a crimson-leaved cherry she saw, far down the slope.

Claudine pulled off her hat and shook her hair free. A silky golden brown, it waved back in heavy locks to her shoulders. M. de Trévires believed in the beneficial effects of nature, and both girls were sturdy and graceful. Claudine had a creamy skin, but not pale. Her face was quiet and gentle, not soft, and she had large serious gray eyes under wide dark brows.

The ballad was still running through her head. It had a sad farewell quality which appealed to her youthful sense of romantic melancholy. She sang the refrain again, throwing her voice across the valley, and suddenly became aware there was an echo.

From the golden woods opposite, her own voice, sounding not her own, came back to her with the last syllables of the phrase she sang. It was strange—as if there was someone else there, an invisible dryad echoing her.

Claudine began to play with the echo, calling out words and listening to the faint, the hollow reply. Sometimes she sang them and they sang back, a falling note. It was a double echo; she could hear a two-syllable word return.

“Attendez, fantôme!” she called.

“Fantôme!”

It sounded so eerie, that ghost, that she suddenly recalled all those so recently dead, killed because they would not fight for the Revolution, for the French. Perhaps some had gone through that very wood, a few weeks ago.

Tears came into her eyes and she looked down to find her handkerchief. As she did so something moved on the slope below her and suddenly she saw three men standing there in the scrub.

Her heart gave a bound of fear, but then she saw their rough clothes and leggings; they were peasants. They were quite near, only some yards below on the steep hillside. They were all looking at her. Then she saw they had guns slung over their shoulders, and he heart beat hard again.

She looked down at them and they looked up at her. The one in the middle was very tall, with thick black hair cropped to his ears, and there was a jagged red scar on the side of his face, noticeable even through the dark scrub of unshaven black beard. That one certainly did look a brigand, as the French called the rebels, Claudine thought.

And then this brigand, who was gazing up at her, suddenly smiled and kissed his hand to her.

Claudine stepped back, alarmed.

“Claudine!” called Seraphine’s clear young voice behind her. “Where are you? Claudine!”

The next moment a shot tore through the still air, ripping echoes from the valley.

The three men dropped down among the scrub and started crawling away down the hill.

It was none of them who had fired the shot. Claudine looked the other way and soon picked out dark moving shapes, and the flash of tricolor badges. A company of French soldiers were beating their way along the hillside. They had evidently caught sight of the rebel peasants and were now in pursuit of them, but were going carefully because they had seen that they too were armed.

Seraphine ran up and caught Claudine round the waist.

“What is it, Claudine? What’s happening?”

“The French—after some of the rebels,” said Claudine, searching the hillside with her eyes. For a few moments she could not see the three men, so well had they disappeared into the rough country. But after all, the slope was steep and the bushes not big, nor did they cover the ground. She saw one of the men crawling, heard shots from the French, and another shot cracked out.

Then the French began to run forward in a straggling line; they had bayonets fixed on their muskets.

The three rebels, giving up the attempt to remain unobserved, leapt up and ran away headlong down the hill It was so steep that the running was dangerous. They jumped, slid, stumbled and crashed on down towards the woods at the bottom where the little river ran to join one of the many tributaries of the Moselle which drained the country eastward towards the Rhine.

“Why don’t they stop and fire their own guns?” Seraphine said. She had seen the rifles slung on the men’s backs.

“There are too many of the French—and too near,” said Claudine. “It would take too long to stop and load and aim. …”

For some moments the French too had been running and scrambling without firing, but now, as they came to a ridge, it looked as if the peasants were going to get safely into the woods. Orders were shouted and several men dropped, each on one knee, and took aim. It was a regular salvo of shots.

“Oh heavens, have they killed them?” Claudine cried in an agony.

She could not see the rebels down below the ledge, for the ground fell too steeply there.

“There goes one—falling down,” Seraphine said, with a gasp.

Claudine saw him too now, on the last bank that sloped to the stream. It was the black-haired man who had kissed his hand to her, and by the way he was falling she thought he must be dead already. His body slid and rolled and tumbled down the rough cliff, crashing through bracken and bramble, right down and into the river, disappearing with a splash into a long dark pool.

“Oh, God!” whispered Claudine, holding on to her sister.

The French cheered, but they did not attempt to go down that precipitous slope to the river. They moved sideways, evidently in pursuit of the other two men, and presently the whole hunt vanished beyond a bluff.

The two girls stood staring down in horror at the river. They were too shocked by this sudden disaster to move. It was one thing to hear about the rebels being hunted down, even though they had felt sorry for them; it was another to see it happen. Only a few minutes before, that man had been alive, so much alive that, as Claudine could not forget, he had kissed his hand to her. And now he was dead.

It was Seraphine who said suddenly, in a shaky voice, “Claudine … isn’t that his head?”

“His body, coming up,” said Claudine with a shudder, not looking.

“No, but it’s his head … Claudine, it’s moving. I believe he’s still alive!”

That seemed almost worse to Claudine—a terribly wounded man, still conscious. Shrinkingly she looked down once more and saw a black head far below, and it was certainly moving. Carried by the stream, she thought at first, but then she saw a brown hand splashing. The man was not dead—he was trying to swim, or trying to get to the bank. Then he was carried under some overhanging trees and they could see him no more.

“Let’s climb down and try to help him out,” said Seraphine impulsively.

“Seraphine, how can we get down there? You saw him falling down! But we might go around, to where the river runs out into the meadows … if there’s time.”

But as she spoke two things happened. A bell started tolling behind them and the French soldiers came back round the bluff. They had no prisoners with them, but whether they had escaped or were dead, the girls did not know.

Afraid that they might be seen and questioned they ran back through the ruins and down the path towards the château. The bell was ringing for the afternoon lesson, in any case.

As they hurried, breathless, through the paths of the parterre, the bell suddenly stopped. In the hall they found two irate French officials.

“It is strictly forbidden to ring bells,” one of them said sternly. “All bells will be dismantled. Clock bells also. No weapons, no alarm signals. It is by order.”

“Dear me, I did not know that,” Madame Bilsdorf, the headmistress said, flustered by this sudden inspection.

“It’s is a new decree,” said the unsmiling official. “From Paris.”

The two girls edged to the staircase and hurried up it to take off their pelisses.

“They’re frightened of us Luxemburgers,” said Seraphine exultantly. “They think we might rebel again, any time.”

“As if we could, when they’ve hunted down the men,” said Claudine.

In her mind’s eye she kept seeing the black-haired man with the scarred face falling helplessly down the cliff into the river. But had he got away after all?

Seraphine was evidently thinking the same thing. “I hope that poor fellow wasn’t drowned,” she said.

“If he comes out in the meadows, they’ll probably catch him,” said her sister despondently.

“Mesdemoiselles—citoyennes!” called out one of the teachers, who never could remember the new rules of address. “To your places, vite, vite!”

It was almost impossible to attend to lessons that day.

By evening everybody in the château knew about the hunting of the rebels; they were all talking about it—girls, teachers and servants. The servants had mostly been chosen by M. de Trévires on the advice of Carl Kieffer, the former major-domo at Villerange, a man who had not had much use for the aristocrats he had served. But some of the grooms and kitchen staff came from the village, and one of the chambermaids, as the girls knew, though no one else did, had a brother who had taken to the woods.

Claudine and Seraphine found her in the bedroom they shared, taking off the counterpanes and bedewing them with tears.

“Lisel! What’s the matter?” They ran to her, full of concern.

“Don’t you know? They’ve shot him—everyone’s talking of it.”

Lisel did not know French; they spoke in dialect with her.

“Not your brother, Lisel?” Seraphine said, hesitating.

“No, not our Wenzel, thanks be to God,” said the girl, wiping her eyes with her apron. “But his captain, his leader—the one the French call Le Cicatrisé.”

Claudine immediately remembered the scar she had seen on the man’s cheek.

Seraphine, who did not know about that, asked if her brother had been with him.

“Yes, and he’s so upset, poor Wenzel, he admired Gabry—that’s what we call him—so much. Even though the rebellion has failed, he has kept them together, and rescued some of the conscripts.” Lisel folded a counterpane and put it on a chair. “It was such bad luck. Wenzel and the other got away but Gabry was shot through the head—he’s tall, an easy target.”

“Has he got black hair?” asked Seraphine excitedly. “But Lisel, he can’t have been shot through the head. We saw him in the river. He wasn’t dead.”

She began to tell Lisel what they had seen. At first the girl seemed unable to take it in, but then she became very excited.

“Mademoiselle! This is wonderful! I must go and tell Wenzel at once. Oh if—Gabry is not dead, we may save him. But he will need help. Thank you, thank you, mademoiselle.”

She ran away along the passage and they heard her feet clattering down the wooden backstairs.

Claudine said, “I daresay the French will find him first—have found him already.”

“What a pessimist you are!” cried Seraphine. “If the French had found him, we should have heard by now. Wouldn’t they bring him here, the nearest place? And they certainly would not be rambling about in the woods after it got dark.”

All this was so true that Claudine felt more cheerful. Seraphine had a lot of common sense, in this taking after their mother rather than their father.

The next day they knew for certain that the rebel had not been caught, for someone brought a newspaper from Luxembourg—a mere sheet of official news, much of it copied from the Paris papers—in which there was a paragraph exulting in the violent end put to the activities of “Le Cicatrisé”—the man with the scar. It was evident that the authorities considered him one of the most dangerous of the rebels, for there was muck abuse of his murderous cunning in setting ambushes for companies of soldiers conducting recruits.

“Rescuing prisoners, that means,” observed Seraphine, as the girls all leaned over the table where the paper was laid.

“Seraphine!” exclaimed a serious girl who believed firmly in the ideals of the Revolution. “How can you say that—you, the daughter of Citoyen Trévires!”

Seraphine only laughed; she had not such reverence for her father’s wisdom as Claudine had, perhaps because she was not such a reader of books as her sister. She knew she was safe from Lotte, who could hardly report the daughter of the school’s founder for antirevolutionary sentiments.

Of course she had said nothing of their belief that the rebel was not dead. They wondered what was happening, but did not see Lisel at all that day, or the next.

On the third day after the chase behind the ruins it rained hard and there was no possibility of going out during their free time in the afternoon. Seraphine was playing battledore and shuttlecock with an energetic friend, and Claudine wandered away by herself as she liked to do whenever she had the chance. She had always felt a great need of being alone for stretches of time.

The château of Villerange was larger than the school’s needs, and one side of the building was left almost empty in winter, for it contained a gallery and ballroom and was difficult to heat. Claudine wandered through these empty halls, dreaming over the landscape pictures—none by the best artists, for the Erlen family had been chiefly interested in recording themselves for posterity. Claudine was already familiar with the array of earlier counts, in armor or displaying decorations of the Austrian Empire, with their dark arrogant faces and curling lips—it was easy to believe in their reputation for evil temper.

“Robber counts!” her father had said once. “That’s what they were called in the Middle Ages and that’s what they’ve remained, in effect—petty tyrants.”

Claudine, although she had been fourteen before the French had driven the Austrian army out of Luxembourg, had never met the family of Villerange because of her father’s republican views. But since being at school in their house she had heard many stories, especially about the late Comte Bertrand d’Erlen, killed in the war of ’92, who was said to have had such a violent temper that his servants went in terror of their lives. And Rémy Lefèvre had often told the girls how the old count had had him beaten for calling him “tyrant” to his face.

Ré. . .