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  Janie gasped. “Listen, you!”

  “Janie!” Nicole snapped. “The twins are more important now. I’ll take her some bread and cheese. She’ll have to make do with that. I’ll join the search as soon as possible. Please,” she added when she saw Janie glaring at Gerard. “I need help now. Please don’t add to my problems.”

  Janie and Isaac left the house as Nicole began tossing bread and cheese into a basket. Adele’s tapping was urgent now, and Nicole was unaware of the way Gerard watched her as he leaned nonchalantly against a wall cabinet.

  Nicole felt guilty about the way she had fairly tossed the food into her mother’s lap, and she could see the hurt in Adele’s eyes. Leaving her mother added to her guilt feelings, but the twins must be found. Even as she ran out the door and started calling the twins, she saw the two wayward children running across the yard toward her.

  Chapter 17

  GLANCING AT THE CLOCK ON THE CABINET BY THE door, Nicole moved slowly from the fireplace to the kitchen table. She must remember to punch down the brioche dough in ten minutes. The twins were playing quietly in the far corner of the room, Alex with several carved wooden animals and Mandy with a wax-faced doll that was supposed to be a farmer’s wife.

  “Nicole,” Alex asked, “can we go outside after we eat?”

  She sighed. “I hope so, if the snow stops falling. Maybe you can get Isaac to help you build a snowman.”

  The twins grinned at each other as they returned to their play.

  The door opened, and the rush of cold air threatened to extinguish the fire. “This is the coldest March I have ever seen,” Janie said as she held her hands out to the fire. “I don’t think spring will ever come.”

  “Nor do I,” Nicole whispered. She balled her hand into a fist and punched it viciously into the rising dough. Spring! she thought. The time when she and Clay were to go away together. Janie said that this winter had been the wettest and coldest she had ever seen in Virginia. Because of the snow, they had all been housebound—four adults and two children caught together in the small house. In the month since Gerard and Adele had arrived, Nicole had seen Clay only once. Yet even then he had looked distracted, worried about something.

  “Good morning,” Gerard said as he came down the stairs. Immediately after his arrival, the sleeping arrangements had changed. He and Adele now slept in the twins’ bed upstairs, while the children slept on mattresses set up each night on the first floor. Janie and Nicole slept upstairs, a curtain separating them from the married couple.

  “Morning!” Janie snorted. “It’s nearly noon.”

  Gerard, as usual, ignored her. They had come to dislike each other with a great intensity. “Nicole,” he said in a pleading voice, “do you think you could do something about the noise so early in the morning?”

  She was too tired from cooking and cleaning and taking care of so many people to make any answer.

  “And also, the cuffs on my lavender jacket are soiled. I do hope you can clean them,” he continued, holding his arms out and studying the clothes he wore. His blue jacket reached to his knees, tight about the waist, fastened with heavy black braid, and flaring broadly over his slim hips that were covered in breeches buttoned at his knee, above silk hose leading to thin, flexible pumps. A vest of yellow satin, embroidered with bright blue stars, covered a white silk shirt fastened with a green cravat. He’d been appalled when he discovered that Nicole didn’t know that a green cravat meant he was French nobility. “It’s a small way in which we can separate ourselves from the commoners,” he said.

  The tapping on the ceiling made Nicole look up from her bread. Adele was awake earlier than usual.

  “I’ll go to her,” Janie said.

  Nicole smiled. “You know she’s not used to you yet.”

  “Is she going to start screaming again?” Alex asked anxiously.

  “Can we go outside?” Mandy asked.

  “No and no,” Nicole answered. “You can go out later.” She grabbed a small tray, poured a glass of sweet apple cider, and carried it up to her mother.

  “Good morning, dear,” Adele said. “You aren’t looking well at all this morning. Aren’t you feeling well?” Adele spoke French, as she always did. Although Nicole had tried to get her to speak English, a language she spoke quite well, Adele refused.

  “I’m just a little tired is all.”

  Adele’s eyes twinkled. “That German count kept you dancing for too long last night, didn’t he?”

  It was no use to try to reason or explain, so Nicole merely nodded. If her mother came back to reality for even a short time, she began to scream, and drugs had to be used to make her stop. Sometimes, she wavered between hysteria and a fanciful calmness. During a calm stage, she spoke of murder and death, of her time in prison, of her friends who walked out the door and never returned. Nicole hated those times the most, since she remembered too many of the people her mother said had been executed. She remembered sweet, frivolous women who had never known anything except luxury and comfort all their lives. Every time she thought of those women walking toward their deaths, she could hardly keep from crying.

  A voice from downstairs drew her attention. Wesley! she thought with a surge of joy, grateful that her mother was leaning back against the pillows of the bed and closing her eyes. Adele rarely got out of bed, but she sometimes demanded hours of attention.

  As always, feeling a little guilty, Nicole left her mother and went down to greet her guest. She hadn’t seen Wes since that awful Christmas dinner more than three months ago.

  He was deep in discussion with Janie, and Nicole could tell she was explaining about Gerard and Adele. “Wesley,” she said, “it’s so good to see you again.”

  There was a big smile on his face as he turned, but it faded instantly. “Good God, Nicole! You look awful! You look like you’ve lost twenty pounds and haven’t slept in a year.”

  “That’s about the truth,” Janie said irritably.

  As Wes looked from Janie to Nicole, he saw that neither woman looked good. The roses were gone from Janie’s cheeks. Behind the women was a little blond man standing over the twins, watching the children with a slight curl of distaste on his thick lips.

  “Alex and Mandy, do you think you can get some boots and heavy coats on? And Nicole, I want you and Janie to dress warmly, too. We’re going for a walk.”

  “Wes,” Nicole began, “I really can’t. I have bread rising and my mother—” She stopped. “Yes, I would like to go for a walk.”

  Nicole ran upstairs to get her new cloak, the one Clay had had made for her because she had won the bet on the horses at the Backes’s party. The deep maroon camlet, a mixture of mohair and silk, shimmered from the long, lush nap as she swirled the heavy cape around before fastening it about her shoulders. The hood hanging down her back showed the deep, rich, black mink that lined the entire cape.

  The outside air felt good and clean with the snow still falling, the flakes often landing on her lashes. The dark mink framed her face as she drew the hood up.

  “What’s been going on?” Wes asked as he drew Nicole aside once they were outside, watching Janie, the twins, and Isaac engaging in a halfhearted snowball fight. “I thought everything would be fine between you and Clay after the Backes’s party and after we got you off the island.”

  “It will be,” she said confidently. “It will just take time.”

  “I have no doubt Bianca is at the bottom of this.”

  “Please, I’d rather not talk about it. How have you and Travis been?”

  “Lonely. We’re getting sick of each other’s company. Travis is going to England in the spring to look for a wife.”

  “To England? But there are several beautiful young women right around here.”

  Wesley shrugged. “That’s what I told him, but I think you spoiled him. Personally, I’m going to wait for you. If Clay doesn’t wise up soon, I’m going to try to steal you away from him.”

  “Don’t say that, please,” she whi