Free Pale Moon Rider by Marsha Canham

father had been taken almost a year before. Celia was at the guardhouse, begging one of the guards for information about her husband. He was the same guard she had bribed in the past so that she might be allowed to carry food and clothes to Sebastien d’Anton, but the gendarme only laughed this time and pointed to the column of ugly black smoke that scrolled over the city, telling her the former duc and his sons were no longer receiving visitors. They had been declared traitors to the republic and executed by order of the Committee.
    Celia had collapsed on the rough cobblestones and Antoine had broken away from Finn to run out and help her. The guard was still laughing, calling to his comrades, nudging the dazed woman with the toe of his boot. The other guards had gathered around, kicking and spitting, taking long pulls out of the bottles of sour wine that gave them so much courage. Antoine had tried to reach his mother, but he was roughly shoved aside. He tried again but one of the men shattered a bottle over his head and when Celia saw him staggering back with blood streaking down his face, she screamed and lunged at the guard, her nails gouging at his eyes and throat.
    A crowd had begun to gather, and now that they had an audience to impress, the guards took turns kicking her and beating her and inviting the onlookers to vent their anger on the filthy aristo . The cheering citizens picked up stones and threw them. Some carried pikes and clubs, and they joined the guards in beating the crumpled, bloodied form until it lay still and lifeless at their feet.
    When there was no more sport to be had beating a dead woman, they remembered Antoine, but where they had left him there was only a guardsman writhing on the stones, his hands clutched around a knife protruding from his belly. Someone reported seeing a tall, skinny old man half dragging the boy down the street … and the chase was on.
    The three could not return to their house on Rue Dupont and they dared not appeal for help from anyone who might be greedy to collect the reward that would soon be on their heads. Being English had kept Celia and her children safe up to then, but with her husband branded a traitor and a guard dead by Finn’s hand, they would be taken directly to the guillotine if they were caught. Hoarding his own grief for a later time, the resourceful Finn stole a gun and some ragged clothing into which they could change, and, convincing a dung collector he was an expert shot, forced the terrified peasant to carry them out of the city in his stinking cart.
    Much of what followed ran together in a blur of freezing nights and days when they were too exhausted and too hungry to do more than huddle together under a pile of hay, numbed by a sense of loss so deep and chilling Renée feared she would never know the pleasure of feeling warm again. When they reached the coast, it had been no simple matter to find someone willing to ferry them across the Channel or, once they were in London , to present Renée and Antoine—half-starved and lice-infested— to Charles Holstead, Lord Paxton, as the children of his estranged sister.
    They had not expected him to welcome them with open arms and an open heart. It had been thirty years since he had seen his sister, and no less than thirty days since he had received a letter from the French government informing him the entire family of the ci-devant Duc d’Orlôns had perished. At first Renée had thought her uncle was just shocked to see them alive, but she soon came to understand that it was the shock of having to assume the burden of their welfare that had sent him staggering back, his hand clutched over his heart. With almost indecent haste he had proposed her marriage to Edgar Vincent, showing a callous indifference to the fact that she was still in mourning for her parents.
    She had refused, initially, to even consider the marriage. For the first four and a half months they had lived in London, nothing, not the