Page 4 of A Christmas Love Redeemed

Chapter Three

‘Fabien, mon chere, please sit down. Your pacing is making me quite weary.’ Marie, Countess Lidbury, looked up from the letter she had been writing for the last half hour. ‘Is it the negotiations that trouble you?’

Fabien stopped his perambulation of the room and looked at his sister. Since the ball, he had hardly spared a thought for the important negotiations that had brought him to London.‘Negotiations? No.’

His sister laid down her pen.

‘Then what troubles you?’

‘Are you acquainted with a Lady Maxwell?’

A smile curved the corner of Marie’s mouth. ‘One of your married ladies?’

Fabien stared at his sister in horror. ‘One of my ...? Mon dieu, Marie, you make me out to be some sort of monster!’

The smile vanished from Marie’s face and she held up a hand.

‘I apologise. Please, Fabien, sit down and tell me what is bothering you and how it concerns Lady Maxwell?’

Fabien hitched up his coattails and drew a chair up to his sister.

‘What do you know of her?’

‘Maxwell?’ Marie frowned. ‘Ah, I recall! She is the chaperone of that silly girl, Sophie Westhall. I believe her husband, Sir Simon Maxwell, left her nothing, and she must earn her living as a companion or a chaperone. But why should she concern you? She is a woman of no great consequence, certainly not your usual preference.’

Marie’s careless shrug added emphasis to her words, dismissing Lady Maxwell from consideration.

But Fabien did not hear the last remark. Hope sparked in his chest.

‘Maxwell is dead?’

‘I believe so. Were you acquainted with Sir Simon?’

Fabien rose to his feet and paced the room again as the memories came flooding back.

‘It was so long ago …’ He turned to his sister. ‘Do you recall when that stupid drunken sot of a captain sailed the Marguerite into English waters?’

‘Of course, mon chere. How could I forget? You were a prisoner of the English for how long?’

‘Eighteen months, but that is not the point. There was a girl called Hannah Linton who saved my life. She and her mother tended my wound and cared for me, before I was captured.’

‘Hannah Linton?’ Marie’s eyes widened. ‘Surely not this Lady Maxwell?’

His silence gave Marie the answer she sought. She rose to her feet and patted his cheek as only an older sister could.

‘Fabien,’ she said. ‘That was nine years ago. In the circumstances, any tendresse you may have felt was just infatuation. I must remind you that you have a great future in the new France and any woman you choose must be of the first order, not a shabby little English widow.’ She laughed.

‘Tiens! She has probably forgotten you.’

Fabien turned his back on his sister and crossed to the window.

Clasping his hands behind his back, he looked out on the busy street scene below him, seeing not the carts, pedestrians and flower sellers, but the rugged cliffs of Dorset and an angel with chestnut ringlets and a smudge of dirt on her cheek.

‘Of course you are right, Marie. You always are,’ he said.