Page 53 of Love Beneath the Guillotine
The warning twist in Léon’s stomach was interrupted before it registered, by Henry, returned with a young man, whom he directed to take both horses and the carriage around back, asking him to water them and lodge them in the stables for the night.
Hearing this, Léon rushed up. “But I need to go back.”
“We’ll find you some other horses,” Henry suggested. “Faster ones. Shall we?” He held out a hand towards the door of the inn. Léon paused only long enough to hold his own hand out for Souveraine, who gladly took it, with a glace askance for each Catherine and Henry on the way past.
The inn was about as empty as such a place located in the middle of nowhere was always likely to be. It operated more as a logistical necessity than a bar, a place for lodging the night before attempting the next leg of a long tour—a place for resting or changing horses. It was, or should have been, the perfect place for Léon to get some fresh animals to make the journey back to Reims, but the moment they set foot inside, the landlady yelled out, “Oh, no, you can’t come in here looking like that.”
Léon halted on the flagstones, ashamed and embarrassed of his bulging nakedness, a sudden and gnawing horror of what he must have looked like overtaking him. He cast his eyes down, and now that he was in the light, he saw his skin was entirely red with blood and blood-red rain, right over his shoulders and curvaceous chest, down his abs, and to his tight black leather pants that sat some way below his navel. His hands, when he turned them over, were a darker shade still, and the still-bloody axe was doing nothing to soften his image.
His eyes flicked quickly to Henry, by his side. Henry had fared better than him, somewhat. His cuffs were blood-stained, and he stank just as badly, but he pulled leather gloves off clean fingers, wiped his boots, one, two, on a horsehair mat, then started forward.
He raised a chin to the lady of the establishment, who raised one right back at him. She must have remembered him from earlier in the day when he dropped Souveraine and Émile off there, Léon surmised. Henry reached into his pocket, leaning over the counter for a quiet word in her ear, sliding some money across at the same time. Léon soon followed him, dropping in on their conversation, assuming, naturally, that Henry was enquiring about the horses.
They both fell silent.
“Are there any?” Léon asked hopefully.
“Any what?” The woman ran her eyes over Léon’s bare chest.
He crossed his arms over himself. “Horses.”
She looked up at Henry, he looked down at her, and she scratched the money up off the counter. “Last pair just went,” she replied with a sorry shake of her head. The lines above her small mouth pulled into the tight crevices of an almost smile. “Won’t have anything until the morning.”
“That can’t be,” Léon declared, perfectly bereft. “I need to leave. I need to get back to Reims. It’s very important.”
“Then I guess you’ll be walking.” She offered no more compassion than that, and Léon set to thinking the matter over. He could walk it. He’d be back by morning, and hopefully not freeze to death if he set a good pace. But not Émile. He could never carry him that far, and certainly not out in the cold. And he couldn’t ask it of Souveraine. Hopelessly, he said, “Is there a farm? A property nearby where I could enquire of the owners? I’d bring them straight back tomorrow.”
“I wouldn’t lend you my horse,” she said dryly, eyes on the blood beneath his fingernails.
“It was only the rain,” Léon tried, pathetically, scrunching his hands closed.
“I don’t care what it was. You and your,” she glanced at Catherine in her bloody dress, “lady of the night?—”
“What did you call me?” Catherine, silently listening until then, stepped forward with a grim, surprisingly menacing little smile on her face. At that exact second, Léon became aware of a clanging of bottles behind the bar, a tinkle of the copper pots that decorated the walls as they began to shake.
“Catherine,” Henry said in a low voice that sounded to Léon’s ears like a warning.
“No offence, dear,” said the woman, accompanying the words with a snarky smile. “Only, I don’t want the clap in my sheets.”
“I’ll give you something even better,” Catherine replied on a snarl.
A puff of dust, loosened from a shaking beam above, landed by Léon’s hand on the counter. The room seemed to double in brightness as the flames in the fireplace grew, and the rattling increased all about, chairs sliding on the floor, tables banging, a decorative plate falling from a hook and smashing on the floor.
But above all this din, it was Henry who drew Léon’s eyes as he bolted forward, breathing out an anxious storm of, “Cathy-Cathy-Cathy-Cathy-Cathy-calm-calm. Shhhh.” He brought two hands to her shoulders, pausing her forward movement, and he said quietly, “We need to stay here tonight.”
She glared at the landlady. “But she said?—”
“Catherine, please.” He stroked her cheek. “Look at me.”
Her eyelids flickered a little lower at the woman in pure spite, then she did as Henry asked. And he spoke soft words that Léon could no longer hear, and the anger on her face lessened.The glasses settled, the chairs stopped moving, and the firelight dimmed back to its usual light.
“Thank you,” Henry whispered. Catherine gave him a slight nod, and he returned one of his own.
He came back to Léon’s side, a different man to the one who’d just been so oddly placating, almost subordinate. This man was as charming as he had been when he stole the carriage, smiling, and saying with overt enthusiasm, “These tremors we’ve been having lately! The very thing that upset our carriage. We barely got out of there, but as you can see, my sister fell in a puddle of this strange red rain. It’s the darnedest thing.”
“Your sister?” asked the landlady, locking eyes with Catherine’s, which remained dark, though she’d retreated into a brooding silence.
“Yes. A lady of the first order, and once she’s dressed in her usual garments, which are with the rest of our things, currently upstairs in the suitcases I brought in today, you’ll find she’s just as respectable as I am.” Henry stood a little taller as he said it, and it was clear his clothes and hair and good looks went a long way to supporting his claims.
