Fanning myself as hot wax fell from the chandeliers onto the table near my hand, I fretted, “But when they did notice, it could be said we ran from our own wedding, and then the duc d’Ayen would be wroth. He told me we must not risk the slightest misstep.”
“Do you always do as your lord father commands?”
Everyone did as my lord father commanded—except for my mother, of course, whom he punished with cold indifference. Which is why I had tried so hard, and for so long, to conceal my rebellious heart. “I am a dutiful daughter.”
Gilbert’s fingers drummed again on the arm of his chair. Then he rolled a shoulder. Tapped a foot. “As your husband, I could command you to steal away with me . . .”
This time it was a frisson of excitement I felt, and warmth blossomed on both my cheeks. “。 . . and do you command it?”
He looked very much as if he wished to, yet said, “No. Wherever you go with me, Adrienne, I want you to go freely.”
That wasn’t the answer I anticipated. Certainly not an answer any of the swaggering men in my family would give. It seemed my new husband had no talent for courtly flirtation, yet his answer invited trust and emboldened me further. Like all the Noailles, I knew the rules and could, perhaps, turn them to my advantage. “If I felt dizzied, it could be considered nothing short of gallant for the groom to escort me for fresh air to recover myself.”
“。 . . and are you feeling dizzied?”
I was. For in the depths of his hazel eyes—a ring of earthy brown wreathed in leafy green—it seemed as if the mysteries of an enchanted forest were awaiting discovery, and so I nodded, a little breathless.
Gilbert needed no more encouragement. A moment later, the boy from Chavaniac rose, sweeping me up and away from our wedding feast. As he hurried me to the courtyard, helping me to turn so my pannier side hoops would fit through the tall glass doors, I teased, “You seem far too practiced at escape for a lord. Have I married a brigand by mistake?”
All too earnestly, he replied, “Never a brigand, but I have been climbing out of tower windows and sneaking through the secret passages at Chavaniac since I was a child.”
“Why would you sneak out of your own castle?”
He laughed. “Have you heard of the Beast of Gévaudan?”
I nodded. “A fairy tale.”
“Au contraire. Quite real. When I was a boy this creature terrorized the peasants. Some said it was a mountain lion, some a wolf. I thought maybe it was a hyena prowling my pine forests. My aunt told me I must keep indoors, but I was the little lord of the castle! Wasn’t I meant to protect my villagers? So I escaped to hunt it with my wooden toy sword.”
I laughed with delight to discover he was such a precocious child. “Did you find your prey?”
Gilbert smiled. “I am still hunting . . .”
It was then and there in the privacy of the gardens, with petals raining down on us from the almond trees, that he boldly placed a kiss on my lips. A kiss that was nothing like the chaste one he had given in front of the priest and our wedding guests. This kiss—intimate and soft and breathy—was only for us.
Overcome and astonished, I shivered. My first real kiss! My first—
“Adrienne!” hissed the governess sent to find us. “Do you wish to cause scandal?”
Our moment of freedom, our gift to each other, had been brief, but I cherished it. It helped sustain our spirits through the hours of the fete, and the humiliation of the bedding ceremony, of which Maman had mercifully insisted upon a truncated version with the bed-curtains drawn and the guests withdrawn, so that we might be alone.
Maman had not kept me ignorant of what happened between man and wife, but now, in a partial state of undress, my groom asked, “When I kissed you before, you shivered. Do I frighten you, Adrienne?”
I shook my head, only a little alarmed by the way my heartbeat fluttered.
“A shiver of revulsion, then?” he asked, half-teasing, half-sincere.
“It is a shiver, I think, of the most peculiar pleasure.” My cheeks flamed hotter at this admission.
Yet Gilbert clasped me around my waist with boyish enthusiasm. “It is pleasurable for me too.”
“I am happy to know it,” I said.
“Then why are you trying to escape me like a cat who does not wish to be stroked?” he asked, glancing down at the palm I had unwittingly planted in the center of his chest.
I did not know the answer until I blurted, “I know that you were told by your surviving relations that you must enter into this marriage agreement.”