Heiress Without a Cause

CHAPTER FIVE

The next morning, Madeleine awoke with the dusty, bitter taste of ashes in her mouth and a scream in her throat. Shivering, she pulled the heavy quilts closer to her face. Unless the cold was truly unbearable, she refused to sleep with a fire in the grate. When she did need a fire, she slept badly, waking often and reminding herself that the crackling of burning wood was not something to fear.

There was no fire this morning, but the nightmare had come anyway. It came less frequently than it did when she was a child, and she sometimes wondered if it would fade away altogether, lost with most of her memories of France. But it always came back.

Madeleine turned onto her side and curled around one of her pillows. Her eyes felt gritty, but she no longer cried after the dream. And last night's dream was only a brief series of fragments - the memory of Josephine crushing her hand in her grip as Pierre drove them off into the night, of her family's chateau overcome by towering orange flames. Her parents no longer came to her in her nightmares. She hoped they were at peace, their bones resting quietly somewhere in Paris.

She had much bigger problems than her long-dead parents. Ferguson's attempt to make her his mistress topped the list, followed closely by what would happen when he recognized her - or what her life would be if she survived the theatre to become an unnoticed spinster again. But the old nightmare didn't care about her current problems, just that there were questions she would never know the answers to.

When, after months in England, Uncle Edward and Aunt Augusta had told her that her parents would never come for her, she had a thousand questions and could not find the voice for any of them. They answered some without waiting for her to ask - she would live with them forever, and they already loved her as much as they loved their own children. She never needed to fear being sent back to France alone.

But others they could not answer. Those questions still haunted her, even though her memories had faded. She no longer thought about her parents except after her nightmares, or occasionally when she was standing at the edge of a ballroom feeling like she did not belong. She would never know how they spent their final moments, whether they thought of her - whether they thought their duty to France was worth leaving her alone.

Madeleine rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling. The room, painted a delicate blue, was less ornate than her old nursery in southern France, but it suited the woman she had become. She didn't mourn what she might have had at the French court of Versailles, even if it would have been nice to have a life of her own. She should have been grateful - she was grateful - that her aunt and cousins loved her, but it wasn't any easier to accept that she would spend the rest of her life dependent on their kindness.

At least she had finally done something wholly for herself. It wasn't something she could build a life on - but she could hope that the theatre would give her something else to dream of.

And if she didn't dream of the theatre, she would prefer to awaken from dreams of Ferguson's kiss instead of old nightmares of France.

She had never spared a thought for how she would react if a man propositioned her; it was too ludicrous. But now that it had happened, she knew how she would react - with shock, dread... and longing.

Perhaps she only felt longing because it was Ferguson. There was something about his eyes that drew her in, made her believe he could cherish a woman for more than her body.

And didn't it say everything that she was more offended when he asked her to chaperone his sisters than when he tried to take her to bed?

There was the briefest of knocks at the door, and it swung open before she could gather the energy to respond. Josephine entered, carrying a pitcher of warm water. Amelia followed, with what was sure to turn into a lecture for the ages.