Page 28 of The Tides of Time (Storm Tide #1)
L ili Minet was as stubborn as she was remarkable.
They were still finding glass and splinters on the floor of her room and tucked into furniture even three days after the horrifying storm. Armitage had insisted she keep using his room. She had insisted she could sleep on the floor of the storage room. He’d countered by saying that was where he could sleep. For a time, it had looked as though they would be at an impasse indefinitely. He’d finally convinced her by saying he seldom had the opportunity to be heroic and she’d be doing him a favor if she let him claim this one.
Being a hero, it turned out, gave a person a horrible crick in his neck.
He waited that day until he spied Géraud down on the beach. Mikhail and Grandfather were at the top of the tower, doing maintenance. This was Armitage’s chance to talk with Lili without interruption or being overheard.
She was sitting on the sofa in the parlor and looked up as he stepped inside from the galley.
With a sigh of self-directed annoyance, she said, “I cannot countenance how easily exhausted I am.”
“You were attacked by a tree three days ago.” He sat next to her, tucking his book on his other side. “I think some weariness is to be expected.”
“I caught sight of myself in a mirror this morning. I am surprised you don’t all run away screaming in fright every time I’m nearby.”
He nodded solemnly. “It has taken a lot of effort, Lili.”
She bumped his shoulder. The whisper of a smile she sometimes wore had been even fainter these past days. He suspected her face hurt too much for anything more significant than this attempt.
“I’m needing to ask you about something, Lili.” He took her hand. “I’d intended to let you introduce the topic when you were ready, but I can’t sort something out.”
She watched him closely. The bruising and cuts on her face broke his heart. His sweet Lili, she was hurting physically, and he suspected he was about to cause some emotional distress as well.
“I found this at Mr. Vaughn’s bookshop.” With his free hand, he set his book on his lap where she could see it. “And I’ve been reading it.”
He could tell the moment she’d read enough of the title to realize the topic. She stiffened.
“Before you panic,” he said, “I know, Lili. I know. ”
She looked up at him, hesitancy and hope warring in her expression. “You know?”
He nodded. “You’ve said some things, and I’ve seen some things, and I’ve pieced together others ... and I know where you came here from.” He lowered his voice a little. “I know when you came here from.”
He wasn’t certain she was even breathing.
“You believe in the Tides of Time?” It was an almost silent question.
“I didn’t a few weeks ago,” he said.
“Neither did I.” She shook her head. “I hadn’t even heard of them.”
They could have spoken for hours on that topic alone; they likely would at some point. But he needed to ask her about something else.
“Your name is in this book, Lili.”
Her mouth dropped open a bit. “ C’est ?”
He’d marked the page with a slip of parchment, having stared at it countless times since first discovering her name.
“I do not know if I wish to discover what is said of me,” she said. “But if it has upset you ...”
He shook his head rather adamantly. “What I read didn’t upset me.”
“Does it upset you that I didn’t tell you myself when I’d come from?”
He smiled at her. “I understand why you didn’t.”
The poor woman sighed loudly. Clearly, she’d been worrying about that.
“Are you equal to me reading this to you?”
She squared her shoulders and nodded.
Armitage opened the book to the page he’d marked.
During this time of terror, while most of Paris lived in fear of the Tribunal and its power over life and death, some secretly undermined their efforts. Many assisted in more than one escape, but perhaps none saved more lives than Parisian seamstress Lili Minet.
She wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were focused far away.
The true number of people she secreted out of Paris and France, some even as the agents of the Tribunal were at their door, may be higher than what was recorded. But confirmed accounts from the time indicate she saved seventy-eight individuals in a matter of months.
She shook her head and whispered to herself, “Seventy-six.”
Seventy-six. She had saved the lives of seventy-six people in direct opposition to the all-powerful Tribunal révolutionnaire .
“What would them have done to you if them’d caught you?” He knew the answer, but his heart wanted to hear that, somehow, she hadn’t been in as much danger as he was certain she had been.
“The fate of anyone the Tribunal and the Comité considered traitors was always the same: the guillotine.”
“And yet you took the risk.”
“I would not return hurt for hurt.” Lili leaned a little against him. “And I wouldn’t let my family be the reason someone else grieved for their family.”
“You told me once that Géraud took the opposite path you did. Him’s an agent of the Tribunal, I suspect?”
“Yes. I read the papers he received and listened to his conversations. It was how I knew who was to be arrested and how best to avoid the agents being sent after them.” She folded herself into Armitage. “I was living in the same home as someone who, if he discovered what I was doing, would be inescapable.”
“Your own brother would have handed you over to the Tribunal?” Armitage didn’t want to believe it, but he’d seen firsthand the wrath Géraud aimed at Lili.
“Hate is a powerful thing. So is fear. The Tribunal brought terror to France, the Comité helping them kill with impunity simply on suspicion of a person not being enthusiastic enough about dismantling the social order. Even those who agreed with their ends could be condemned for not cheering their tactics or embracing the violence they justified in the name of their cause. Blood flowed in the streets. Everywhere was death and fear.” She took a shaking breath. “Géraud believed it was a needed cleansing, and I sabotaged him. He was determined to see me pay the price for that betrayal.”
“ Was determined? Or still is ?” Surely she knew as well as he did that Géraud’s anger hadn’t cooled in the least. “You said, when Géraud first arrived, that you didn’t think you were in danger with he here. But, Lili, him is clearly a threat to you.”
“He’s my brother,” she whispered. “I wanted to believe that still meant something. I wanted to think that we hadn’t become one of the countless families who are resigning each other to that fate.” She pushed out a frustrated breath. “ Resigned, not are resigning . I cannot seem to remember that this all happened long ago. In my mind, it still feels like now. ”
“Because until you came here, it was now for you.”
“I find myself worrying that those I know in France will be killed. I fret, and I grieve the possibility, and then ...” Another soul-deep sigh. “Then I remember they are all dead now regardless. They’re all gone. All of them ... except Géraud.” Lili didn’t speak for a moment, and then when she did speak, she did so hesitantly. “He’s the only connection I have left.”
“A ‘connection’ that might very well still try to kill you, Lili.”
“I do know what he is. Even when I lie to myself about what my brother has become, I still know.”
“Then, why tell yourself the lie?”
“He’s my brother,” she repeated, emotion crackling in the word. “I don’t trust him, and I am on my guard every moment I am with him, but underneath all that is a little boy I chased the sun with. I can’t let go of him entirely. I’ve saved so many people, Armitage. But I’ve lost my entire family.”
Armitage held her more closely, careful of her wounds. “You can’t save a person who doesn’t want to be saved.”
“Unfortunately, I couldn’t save all the people who did want to be saved. That haunts me every single day. The Tribunal and the Comité killed so many.”
He gently kissed the top of her head. “Them would have killed you too. That haunts me, Lili. The tides, I am realizing, are fickle. There’s no predicting who will be snatched away or when them’ll be taken. What if you and your brother hadn’t been pulled to now? What if him had managed to get you back to Paris?”
“I managed to run far enough,” she whispered. “Géraud said in Honfleur that it wasn’t possible for me to escape my dance with the guillotine.”
The guillotine. If not for her still-healing wounds, he would have pulled her more tightly into his embrace.
“Except, Géraud found me here. Who’s to say the Tribunal cannot as well?”
“Even if the tides were that cruel,” Armitage said, “them’d have no authority in this time or place to drag you away.”
“What I’ve read of the Tides of Time says they cannot be predicted or controlled, that they are seemingly random. Even if I were swept away by them again, heaven forbid, the likelihood of me being taken back to that brief flicker in history feels tiny.”
The fickleness of those tides meant he couldn’t ever be certain she wouldn’t be taken away or that the danger she’d fled couldn’t find her once more. Somehow, he needed to make peace with that, or at least not be devoured by the constant worry of it.
“I am happy here, Armitage. I don’t know if I’ve told you that.”
“And I don’t know if I’ve told you how much I’d like you to stay,” he said. “I’m a little desperate for you to, in fact.”
A teasing glint entered her eyes. “If I so much as thought about leaving, Mrs. Dixon, Mrs. Willis, and Mrs. Goddard would drag me back.”
“And for once, I wouldn’t find their interference exasperating.”
“I have wanted to tell you the truth of all this for so long. There is such relief in not having to keep the secret from you any longer.” Until that moment, he hadn’t realized how tense she was all the time. And he knew then only because he felt her relax in a way she hadn’t yet with him.
“Us’ll still have to keep all this from the village.”
“ Je sais .” She didn’t seem upset at the prospect. “It was keeping it from you that broke my heart.”
Armitage lowered his voice. “I think you like me, Lili.”
“I think I love you,” she answered earnestly. “That is not a small thing for me, Armitage.”
“For me either.” He bent toward her. “Perhaps the Tides of Time are motivated by love and knew us needed to be together.” Armitage kissed her ever so softly.
The door below to the lighthouse tower squealed open in that exact moment. They’d not be alone more than a moment longer.
Lili stepped away. It did his heart good to see that she seemed reluctant to do so.
She loved him. This brave, remarkable woman loved him.
Armitage had a bit of a skip to his step as he made his way into the heart of Loftstone Village two days later. Lili was healing, however slowly. She was also noticeably more at ease. He’d been so reluctant to accept the reality of what he’d suspected about her origins, yet knowing that about her and sharing that secret between them had eased so much of her tension. He wished he’d done so sooner.
He wanted her to not merely feel like she could find her place on Loftstone Island in this time; he also needed her to know how cherished she was, how loved. And he’d had an idea.
Mrs. Willis greeted him warmly as he stepped into her shop. “Us had the loveliest visit with that sweet Lili of yours yesterday.” She sighed quite contentedly. “Her English is improving. And, oh, Armitage, how her eyes light when her talks of you.”
He very much liked hearing that. “I’m main certain my eyes do the same when I speak of she.”
With a look of delighted amusement, Mrs. Willis said, “Every time.”
“I hadn’t expected when Lili first arrived that I’d fall for she so swiftly and so entirely. I find myself understanding Dad all the more, losing his heart to Mum so soon after meeting she.” He wished his parents were still with him. They’d have loved Lili, but they’d also have helped him navigate the past weeks of uncertainty.
“Lili’s injuries are healing well.” Mrs. Willis clicked her tongue as she shook her head. “Poor thing. That were a bit of bad fortune.”
“I’m hoping to cheer she a bit,” Armitage said. “The shawl that caught her eye when us was here a week or so ago, do you have it still?”
“I do.” She continued in a conspiratorial voice. “I set it aside in case Lili came back hoping for it.”
“You are an angel, Mrs. Willis.”
She patted his cheek, then stepped into her back room, emerging a moment later with the shawl in her hands. “I think her might’ve purchased it that day if not for her brother being such a pill. Broke my heart seeing how coldly him rejected her sweet offering.”
Géraud had been playing least in sight since the morning Armitage had revealed what he knew. It was for the best, really. Armitage felt hard-pressed not to pummel him. Though Géraud certainly deserved it, Mikhail and Grandfather would’ve needed some kind of explanation, and Armitage didn’t know if Lili was ready for two more people to know the truth of her situation.
He took the shawl, immediately struck by how soft it truly was. Little wonder Lili had been able to speak of so little else about it. The remembered sight of her brushing the wool over her cheek had popped unbidden into his thoughts countless times since then. He’d enjoy watching her do that again.
“What am I owing you for this?”
Mrs. Willis shook her head. “The women and I decided as us walked back from the lighthouse yesterday that if that sweet gull decided her wanted the shawl after all, that us’d purchase it for her.”
“I can’t ask you to do that.”
“You aren’t asking.” She was quite suddenly on her dignity. “Us loved your mum, Armitage. Loved she like family. And if Eleanor were here”—Mrs. Willis’s voice quavered a bit—“Lili’d have this shawl already because Eleanor would’ve insisted on it.” She set a hand on Armitage’s arm. “Allow we to do this, for Lili and for Eleanor.”
Armitage was not always wise, but he knew in that moment not to argue. “Thank you.”
“You can thank the three of we by not letting that darling woman slip through your fingers.” Mrs. Willis offered the request in the tone of a warning best not ignored.
“Set your minds at ease.” Armitage actually laughed. “I have no intention of ever letting she go.”
With Lili’s gift wrapped in paper, tied in twine, and tucked under his arm, he stepped from the shop once more. It was a cold day but a clear one. And Armitage was feeling rather pleased with the world.
And the world, it seemed, meant to offer a bit of further help. Captain Travert, of all people, passed the shop. A Frenchman, one Lili had asked about a few times.
“Captain Travert,” he called out, catching the man’s attention.
“ Monsieur Armitage.” They shook hands. “What can I do for you?”
“No doubt the village’s whispers over tea have reached you and you know us has a French visitor up to the lighthouse.”
The Captain’s mouth twitched a bit with amusement. “Current whispers are that you have two French visitors. Unless you are telling me the Loftstone rumormongers can no longer be trusted.”
“Them are as accurate as ever.” He walked alongside the captain. “ Ma mére would be horrified at the state of my French, though I’ve been trying. If you have time while on Loftstone to visit the lighthouse and speak French with my Lili for a spell, I’d be grateful to you. I can tell her misses speaking the language her’s most comfortable with. And her’s been curious about you, a fellow Frenchman, in this tiny corner of the world.”
He nodded. “I will if I’m able.”
“I appreciate that.”
Another quick shake of hands and they went their separate ways.
Armitage whistled as he walked away from the village along the road leading home. He’d a gift for Lili, one he knew she’d be entirely pleased with. His honorary aunts loved her and looked after her. Captain Travert might come speak French with her.
Armitage had felt a little ridiculous telling Lili he was attempting to be heroic the other day. But in that moment, he thought he might actually be managing it.