Free The Price of Glory by Seth Hunter Page A

was in.”
    â€œThere is a woman I have been asked to seek out. She was said to have escaped the guillotine almost a year ago in Paris and fled south, to seek refuge among the Chouans.”
    He was aware of Bennett’s scrutiny, even in the dark. His own face was in the light and he moved away from it a little before he continued.
    â€œHer name is Sara, Countess of Turenne, but she may be calling herself Seton, or some other name.” It was absurd. Even if she had lived, how could Bennett have met her, or even heard of her? And why the Vendée? She was from Provence, in the deep South, half Irish, half Italian, born into a land of sunshine and wine and song, and she always said she would go back there, if she ever had the chance. He could hear her now, her soft voice in his ear, as they lay together in her apartment in Paris.
    â€œThere is a little town called Tourettes, near where we lived in Provence. I used to go there as a child, with my father. A walled town on top of a hill. There is a café in the square where I drank lemonade and ate the little cakes made of oranges and watched the people coming to market. If I leave Paris, that is where I will go, to Tourettes—that is where you will find me, drinking lemonade and eating little cakes made of oranges and waiting for you there
.
”
    â€œThe Countess of Turenne?” There was surprise in the man’s voice, but not the expected ignorance. “Yes, I have heard of her. I have even met her. They call her La Renarde. The Vixen. She is the mistress of François de Charette and fights at his side. She is there now—at Auray.”

CHAPTER FIVE
the Vixen
    N ATHAN STRUGGLED OUT OF A TROUBLED SLEEP , stiff-limbed, parched, his brain chasing the fleeing remnants of a dream. Sara was in it somewhere and the guillotine … and a dark catacomb lined with skulls. He lay on his back staring up at one. There were sounds, too, of rats …
    Then he was awake, properly awake, in the stern cabin of the gun brig
Conquest,
riding at anchor in the Gulf of Morbihan, and gazing up at the dawn, weakly filtered through a murky skylight. And what he could hear was the sound of the watch changing.
    The morning watch. He closed his eyes again with a sigh. He could sleep for at least two hours yet without troubling his conscience. But his restless mind would not let him. How could he be sure the woman Bennett had spoken of was Sara? She would not be the first to pluck a title from the bloody pile left at the foot of the guillotine.
    But he had asked Bennett to describe her to him. A beauty he had said, a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty, “like the women of Spain or southern Italy.”
    And the lover of a Chouan general whose men called her La Renarde
.
    The Vixen. With its connotations of promiscuity and lust. Was it the bestial screaming they made whilst coupling? He had heard that whores in London used to wear a fox’s tail stitched to the rear of their skirts to denote their profession …
    Did he think her a whore?
    That would be absurd. Unjustified. He had no claim on her. Yet the thought of her with another man disturbed him more than he could ever say.
    He should not be thinking of this. There were more important things to think of than this. Clambering out of the narrow cot, he dressed clumsily, forced into an ungainly crouch by the meagre proportions of the cabin, more suited to a child of ten than a man over two yards tall. Though they were into the first week of July, the air felt unusually chill and a violent flurry of rain on the skylight persuaded him to reach for his heavy boat cloak before climbing the short companionway to the deck.
    A huddle of officers in tarps and tricorn hats, like wet owls, grudging the dawn. Balfour, the brig’s commander, an elderly lieutenant, past forty with the face of a Scots pastor, nursing the moral certainty of everyone’s damnation but his own; the master, Rigsby, who had the morning