Joy V. Sheridan writes

Charity Amour

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR part 2

**

If Charity’s unmeditated departure from the bed-chamber of Madame d’Esprit caused any ripples of consternation to mar the pools of sensual bliss which Lord Rispian and Natalie d’Esprit were immersed in, then they merely ruffled that wave-crested ocean of passion. 

“Leave her, stupid creature,” Madame had drawled, once the realisation had perpetrated through to her throbbing consciousness that Charity had escaped, “She can’t get far. More likely it is that she will run straight into the arms of your men.” 

Lulled into a near-metaphysical compliance with his fast recouping amatory antagonist, Lord Rispian had merely been inspired to work the harder to achieve his supremacy between the sheets, taking time to drawl betwixt times: “You’re ... more’n probably right, Natalie - anyway she cannot figure too closely in our plans now... uhhm ... some more of this!” 

So the twosome had continued in this embroilment until greater commotion roused them from their tactile and tactician’s strategies. The smell of burning vegetation, wood and flesh was beginning to filter through, even to the enclosed seclusion of Madame d’Esprit's bedroom. Shouts and screams and a melee of other sounds made their vibrations very much felt to the energetically entwined couple. 

Madame, her heart beginning to flutter at an accelerating speed, had leapt from the bed and rushed to the window. Panic-stricken, she had all but ripped the heavy stuff of the curtains to the floor. One glance out over the balcony and down to the flag-stones below told Tier that there was something very much amiss with the Château des Amourettes. 

“Get dressed, Rispian,” she had yelled, in the meantime searching for her own costuming, searching frantically for suitable attire, dislodging expensive, unique gowns to the floor in her haste.

Lord Rispian was a trifle slower, “ ...... WHAT... what the deuce is happening...?” He looked blank: “A fire...surrounded ... what in the name of heaven is going on?" “I don’t know,” Madame had all but oathed her reply, her tongue pressed hard down onto her palate, “But there’s no getting out that way!” She indicated the locked door. 

“Still, we have time. Help me to collect what valuables I can and put them in this!” 

Lord Rispian was by this space buttoning the opening to his breeches, hastily knotting the lace cravat about his portly neck. Doing as he was bid, he scooped handfuls of precious jewels into the yawning abyss of a bag. Madame was reaching up and inside a secreted opening hid by a flaring pair of candelabra. 

She threw some heavy but transportable packets to the floor. 

Then, turning halfways upon her heel, reaching up to press cool fingers against the unnatural flush of her forehead, closing her eyes momentarily, she deduced their next course of action. 

With no time to disguise her near baldness, she had divested herself of her brunette wig and was busy fitting another in its place. This completed her ensemble, so that at first glance, she might appear a handsome, if delicate, male. With a sigh, she selected a couple of garments from the huddle upon the floor, another hairpiece, and was filling a second valise. 

She hurried across the thickly carpeted floor, throwing over some exquisitely-crafted lacquer tables, kicking back a rug. 

All the while, the shouts and cries were getting closer, coming nearer to where they hovered. “HERE! Fitzroy. Pull this damned thing will you? Tis too heavy for me!”  

Beneath the rug was a be-ringed trap door. Cursing to damnation whatever and whoever was causing the horrendous momentum, sweating profusely, Lord Rispian had the door eased open. Quickly Madame skirted about the chamber, picking up a candle-stick with stubs still glowing. She set about setting light to the flimsiest fabrics in the room. 

In her example of pushing highly inflamable material against the locked door, she was soon copied by her companion, who thereby also set about firing items. Thus was formed a barrier of flame. 

Breathless, they repaired to the secreted exit, finding stairs leading downwards. 

“I think,” Madame d’Esprit said as she directed his lordship before her, candle-stick in hand baggage about his person, “That we shall be seeing ‘La Farouche’ quicker than we had anticipated. I had so often dreaded things coming to this kind of pass!" 

Hurriedly, she snaked as much of the carpet covering back over the trap-door as she could. Then with a resounding echo, she fixed the bolts inside the door and they, all but stumbling, fell down the steps. “Give me the light, Fitzroy: I know this passage-way, I daresay, slightly more intimately than you!” 

She proved to be an able guide and after a few minutes, she cautioned Lord Rispian to be still and silent. They were standing beneath the stables. Taking unmitigated action, she opened the doortrap and, fortune favouring, beckoned that his lordship should follow her with alacrity. Silhouetted in the thin light of new morning was the figure of a man. Not bothering about the niceties of her conduct, with a feline, almost leonine stealth, she was upon him, thrusting in deeply the point of a seven inch blade, all but up to the hilt. 

The man buckled forward, twisting to turn as he did so. He died quickly but not before Madame d’Esprit, in venomous wrath, had butted him about the head and body with her booted feet.

Issuing urgent commands, she directed Lord Rispian to the boxes. Contemptuously, she unplugged her dagger and cleaned it on the dead man’s clothing. 

Thus it was that Lord Rispian of Andover and Natalie, Madame d’Esprit, began the first stage on their flight to safety. 

If things had been slightly different, they would have had the immediate accompaniment of Lord Rispian's two hired henchmen. However, this foursome were destined not to be parted that easily. 

It had been the clash of tempered steel upon ill-humoured righteousness which served as the fulcrum to bring Jarvis completely to his senses. He it had been who had been designated to check upon the lower floors of the Château and who had encountered the interlopers, fresh from their work of arson now looting, raping and murdering.

For, despite the high-falutin’ rhetoric of their inspired leader and champion, one named briefly Monsieur, later, Citizen, D'Eath, there was a certain amount of jealousy, envy, lust and avariciousness which helped the raiding party in their odious tasks. 

Unsure of how to treat this armed and seasoned veteran, two of the invading ‘Justice Party’ had lain in wait, hidden behind the buttress of a massive oaken beamed overhang. It was, perhaps, fortunate for Jarvis that the flab of their wrath was yet to be whittled to the lean skeleton of bloodlust and death. Eyeing each other uncertainly, the two men had desisted from running the lone walker through and had opted for the less blood-thirsty action of hitting him soundlessly, but soundly, over the head with a club of hard wood. 

Thus had Jarvis been reduced to an immobile huddle, his limp bulk being rapidly conveyed to beneath a vacant and adjacent trestle bench. Here he had lain, embroiled in a dreamless sleep, until the sparking flash of metal upon metal had roused him, coupled with that acumen of audible battle-warnings accreditting him with the sure knowledge that all was not as it should be.

Pushing himself forth from under the mouldy canopy of carved oak, he had shook his head and glanced about him to see where the sounds of battle were emanating from. 

There was something else which alerted his campaigner’s sixth sense: the sharp acrid smell of burning. Not just one aroma, but a mix of such, provoking his nascent senses into acute awareness of absolute peril. The ballet of steel continued and as he listened, this ringing rhapsody told him that it was none other than Hinches who was fighting - and fighting to win. Shaking his head again, lifting a heavy hand, he felt the swelling upon his cranium. 

With a final guttural exclamation, his colleague had finished his opponent off with an elegant, concluding, metallic arpeggio. Hinches had turned as Jarvis rounded the corner of the passageway, his hands still clasped over the hilt of his weapon; he had quickly removed his eyes from where they surveyed the now sprawled corpse of his unknown, unbidden and unlucky adversary. 

Hinches had smiled in welcome to the missed companion. Then, deducing between them that something was more than slightly amiss at the Château des Amourettes, and of a mind to return to his lordship, Lord Rispian, they had found to their great consternation that their way was barred by a sheeting dense with flame and smoke.

Diverting their footsteps they had traversed through thickly billowing smoke to come to an annexed floor on the middle part of the Château. 

Not oblivious to the screams and cries which had penetrated their senses, they were, after all, paid to serve only one purpose and one master and they declined to assist. They surveyed the prospect of reaching Madame de Esprit’s apartments and their appraisal left them dismal of countenance. 

For, with the fierce scorchings and great voracious caverns of flames, sparks and smoke, cauldroning that area, they decided that there was no hope of saving anyone from there. 

They best set about saving their own skins. And from those who dared remain in the house and who had undeniably ordered the savagery. The door to the chamber they were in had bolted suddenly with a buckling explosion behind it, forcing it to be backed from behind with several tons of masonry and burning timbers.  

They spotted a solitary look-out who was, even as they balanced precariously, reaching for the bolt of his weapon. 

Screaming wildly and trusting that his leather thigh boots would save him from too much damage, Hinches had volleyed through the roof and quickly overpowered his would-be executioner. Jarvis had followed suite, leaving a cloth souvenir: a piece of his coat behind. 

Undaunted, the two, in possession of more than a sketchy knowledge concerning the lay of the land - gained by Jarvis’s earlier explorations - headed towards the stables. They would willingly have bartered their souls just then for a horse apiece!

Had they but known it, they missed the fracas Madame d’Esprit had distributed by a matter of only a few minutes. Their arrival was propitious for the stabled inmates however. A small but powerful zephyr had blown up and had blown a few flaming sparks towards the ready tinder-box of the stables.

With zealous abandon, the two men threw themselves about the place, releasing those of the terrified creatures as they might. Jarvis had looked thoughtfully down upon the already apparent deadness of the interloper whom Madame d’Esprit had dispatched to a premature end. Selecting with rapidity, a mount apiece, the two set off to discharge themselves from the ill-fated estate.

So it was that they followed, albeit, somewhat circuitously and blinded by the enfolding grey eddies of mist, after the likewise fleeing Madame and her companion. Fate works, so it might seem, likewise in mysterious fashion. For had not Madame dispatched the solo guard to his maker, and had not Jarvis and Hinches saved the condemned horses in the very nick of time, then the stampeding creatures should not have formed the equestrian help which later conveyed Charity, Lord Seyton Clover and the Fibbins brother and sister more hastily from the haunted grounds of the de Esprit estate, - and the burning configuration once called the Château des Amourettes. 

Madame, perhaps wisely, had desisted from riding forth from the estate by a direct route and wheeling about in the smoky opaqueness of the mists, had made her and Lord Rispian's mutual survival known to the hidden party of Lord Seyton Clover. 

That Lord Rispian's henchmen also still breathed was made evident some minutes later with the misty apparitions of these two appearing about the deserted pavilion. They had, much to the Seyton Clover party’s relief, ridden on. Then had come the break of near-frenzied horses and with a continuing invisible assistance, two mounts had been miraculously acquired. Following the white ribbons, strident, vivid and peculiarly near-phosphorescent signposting the milky foliage of bushes and trees, the abducted Charity and her saviours were re-routed on their path to freedom.

Later intelligence, gleaned from Pierre Le Bon, the amiable landlord, assured Lord Seyton Clover of what he had suspected: “Mais oui: the people ’ave taken Justice into their own 'ands. That wicked place an’ that wicked woman shall be no more!” 

Fearing that Charity and Molly Fibbins’s appearance at the inn would lead to speculation that they were latterly willing or unwilling but nonetheless tainted incumbents of the now-fired mansion, His Lordship had bidden them stay without the immediate environs of the village.

He had acquired a fresh nag for his man, Fibbins, and, paying off the Inn-keeper, had reclaimed his own mount. Thus it was decided that Lord Seyton Clover, Charity and Molly and John Fibbins, that loyal duo, should go off towards Bordeaux, in search of the errant malignancy of Madame d’Esprit. And his lordship Lord Rispian of Andover. 

Tempers had been kindled and hatred now blazed. Lord Seyton Clover swore eternal damnation upon his kinsman and would not rest until this had been met with appeasement.