Lessons in French by Laura Kinsale Read Free Book Online

IMPOSSIBLE TO HAND CALLIE INTO A CARRIAGE without skeletons
    rising up to point accusing fingers at him. Trev had been exquisitely polite as he bid her
    good night. Fortunately there was little moonlight, so both of them could direct their full
    attention to the mundane matter of safely negotiating her way onto the steps. He watched
    the carriage lumber into the darkness of the narrow, tree-choked lane.
    He was beset by skeletons in Shelford. His mother, whom he had neglected beyond
    shame. His sisters, lost to scarlet fever, lying in graves he had not visited. His
    grandfather, unmourned and full of condemnation, rising up like some vengeful character
    from a play by Shakespeare. And Callie—shy, passionate, a very much living reminder of
    one of the more reprehensible moments in a notably careless career.
    He still found it difficult to comprehend that she had not married. When he had left,
    he'd been sure that she would be wed within the year, if not sooner—as soon as her father
    could arrange for it.
    He had not cared to stay and watch the ceremony. He was a contemptible French
    scoundrel, so he went to France. To his bloodthirsty delight, he'd found that Bonaparte
    had good use for young men with bruised hearts and even more deeply lacerated pride.
    For a few years Trev had labored under the name of Thibaut LeBlanc and shot at
    Englishmen, starved hideously, looted Spanish peasants, and learned how far down he
    could plunge into brute existence. What final vestige of pride or humanity he retained
    was burned out of him at Salamanca. He had not rejoined the crushed remnants of his
    company as they retreated; he'd surrendered instead to a British aide-de-camp who
    recognized him from their school days, and spent the rest of the wars in the reasonable
    comfort of various officers' prisons, interrogating French captives for Wellington's staff.
    He might have gone back to Shelford after Waterloo. Instead he had remained in
    France. He'd begun to write to his mother, but somehow he had not told her of the battles
    or the ruin he had found at Monceaux, or the burned-out shell of her childhood home in
    Montjoie. Somehow he had written instead of how he would win it back for her, the
    fabled château and the titles and everything she had lost.
    He knew all the stories. His grandfather had made certain of that. Instead of nursery
    rhymes, Trev had been weaned on tales of the Terror, of his father's heroism and his
    mother's sacrifice. His father had not surrendered, like Trev, but gone as a true nobleman
    to his fate. His mother had barely escaped the mob. Trev owed his life and his baptismal
    name to one Captain Trevelyan Davis, an enterprising Welshman who had smuggled her
    and her five young children across the channel just two days before she gave birth to him.
    In spite of the bloody backdrop, his childhood had been golden. He didn't miss a father
    or a country he'd never known, but he remembered his pretty mother laughing while she
    taught his elder brother to dance. Trev had worshipped Etienne as only a seven year-old
    could worship a dashing brother of thirteen. Those had been the sweet, carefree times, the
    years of perfect boyhood bliss. Then one day Etienne had tried to raced his hot-blooded
    horse past a carriage, and amid a crush of wheels and his mother's frenzied grief, Trev's
    brother had died, and the sunny world of childhood ended.

    From that time, it was Trev's duty to regain all that had been stolen. Like a personal
    guillotine, that expectation had hung over him, repeated with every blessing his
    grandfather said at meals, in each letter sent to him at the English school, repeated
    whether he fell ill or whether he recovered, when he was thrashed and when he was
    praised, repeated until Trev had been sure he would throttle his grandfather, or shoot
    himself, if he heard it one more time.
    He had done no such thing, of course. Instead he had seethed like the silly, mutinous
    boy he'd been, at least before