First Strike
Please note this is Book 2 of the 'Beyond My Control' series. Make sure you read Book 1 first. The full book has already been written and I will drop new chapters every few days.
She learned of it on a Thursday morning, and it took her the better part of ten minutes to be certain of what she had learned; then she sat with it a while longer, very still, her hands folded in her lap and her breath drawn shallow, in the stillness she kept for occasions when feeling arrived before she was ready to let it show.
It was this: Clémence, who had served as her lady’s maid these two years past and was sensible and capable and loyal beyond question, had for several weeks been meeting Valmont’s valet on Tuesday evenings. This much Isabelle had known already, and had taken no particular view of it, for Clémence was her own person once the household duties were done, and the valet was, by every account, an agreeable young man. What she had not known, and what reached her on the Thursday through a source she saw no need to name, was that the arrangement had, on the most recent Tuesday, enlarged itself to include the Vicomte de Valmont.
Clémence had not been warned beforehand; the valet had presented the whole affair to her as a happy accident, and Clémence, who was two-and-twenty and not yet practiced in the finer manoeuvres of aristocratic company, had believed him.
She did not blame Clémence.
On this point she was clear at once, and without needing to deliberate: the girl had been used and deceived, her innocence turned against her by men who ought to have known better; she was young, and there was no accounting in which the fault could be laid at her door.
She blamed Valmont.
Not for the seduction itself; she would have been a hypocrite to resent him for that alone, given all that had passed between them, and hypocrisy was not among her vices. What she could not forgive was his choice of target: the deliberateness of it, the message folded into that choice, that this was no longer the indirect contest the two of them had been carrying on at arm’s length these past few weeks.
This was him reaching directly into her own house, laying his hand upon a woman under her protection, and telling her, without a word spoken where she could hear it, that nothing of hers lay beyond his reach, not even this.
She sat with it a while longer, and then she sent for Clémence.
She was kind about it. She told her plainly, and without a hint of reproach, that she was in no difficulty and was not being dismissed, but that she wished to place her in the household of the Marquis de Crécy, where she would be well treated, well paid, and where neither the Vicomte de Valmont nor his valet would trouble her again. Clémence, who was not wanting in intelligence, understood at once everything that lay beneath the offer, and accepted it with gratitude.
When she had gone, Isabelle was alone in the room.
What rose in her once Clémence had gone was a plainer, hotter anger than the counterfeit she had been wearing these past months. This anger admitted no clever reading and required no interpretation; it climbed her throat as a heat with nothing behind it but itself, and it refused, this time, to be schooled into anything gentler.
She picked up a small porcelain figure from the mantelpiece, weighed it a moment in her hand, and set it down again with care, for she was not a woman who found any use in breaking things.
Then she went to find Crécy.
He heard her out without a single interruption, which was, of his many qualities, one of the better ones.
When she had finished, he was quiet a moment, turning his glass slowly by its stem before he set it down. “The man has made a significant error,” he said at last.
“Yes,” she replied.
“What do you want to do?”
“I want,” she said, “to make him understand that this kind of move has consequences.”
Crécy regarded her with that careful expression she knew well, the one that meant he saw precisely what she was thinking and was weighing whether to say, in return, what he thought of it.
“Say it,” she said.
“Let it go,” he said. “I know that is not what you want to hear. What he did was a personal insult, and you are right to be furious. But every move you make in response ties you to him more firmly. Every reprisal is also a declaration.”
She looked at him. “I hear you.”
“But you are going to do it anyway,” he said.
“I have not decided yet,” she said, and this was true only in the narrow sense that she had not yet settled upon precisely what she meant to do.
Crécy knew the difference between I have not decided and I will not, and he did not press the point. He refilled her wine instead, and they sat together a while longer while he talked of other things, and she let her anger settle. Or rather, attempted to, and irrevocably failed.
Ferrante was the first to hear of it, and her answer came flat and immediate: “Absolutely not.” Armand, when his turn came, folded his hands and considered her with the dry patience of a man who already knew he would lose, though he had not yet properly begun to speak. “I understand the impulse,” he said, “and I would ask you to resist it.”
Théo, for his part, leaned forward with the transparent eagerness of a man convinced he had found the answer. “I think you should let us handle this,” he said, and when she asked what precisely he intended to do, he laid out a plan of such thorough impracticality that she very nearly smiled despite herself.
In the end she found all arguments entirely reasonable, understood every word of them, and was not in the least persuaded by them.
She had chosen the Villeneuve assembly for one plain reason: Raoul de Marceilles would be there, and Valmont would not. This she had confirmed through the careful application of Paris’s social intelligence.
Raoul de Marceilles was dark-haired and possessed of the rangy ease of a man who had been excellent company for so long that the effort of it had long since disappeared. He had been the Vicomte de Valmont’s closest friend since the two of them were young men, and he was not without attractions of his own.
She arrived at nine o’clock in the ivory silk, the most effective gown she owned, and found him within the first quarter hour, standing near the east windows with two other men. She made her way toward that side of the room by a route calculated to cross his line of sight, and she saw the moment he noticed her.
She did not approach him directly. She spent the better part of forty minutes elsewhere in the room before she found herself drawn, by apparent accident, into his conversation, brought there by a mutual acquaintance discussing the new ambassador, a man who had no notion of what he was actually arranging.
Raoul de Marceilles was no fool. He regarded her with the attentive eyes of a man who had heard a great deal about the Marquise de Crécy and was discovering, in the moment, that the reality proved a good deal more interesting than the account had promised. He was alert, engaged, entirely absorbed first in the matter of the ambassador, on which she held strong views, and then in a pamphlet lately circulated, over which they disagreed in a manner she found immediately and genuinely diverting.
Her interest in him was entirely genuine, and he was, as she had noted of him in the abstract, a man truly worth talking to.
She watched him relax, by degrees, into the conversation: he leaned forward, he stopped watching the room the way he had at first, and by the second hour he was giving her the whole of his attention, with the warmth of a man who had held a great many conversations in his life and knew an exceptional one the moment he found himself inside it.
By the third hour they had found a settee near the far wall, and the conversation had become the kind that renders the rest of the room irrelevant.
He told her a story of a disastrous diplomatic dinner in Warsaw that made her laugh so hard she had to set down her glass, and she gave him something in return; what she told him made him regard her with the expression of a man who had been given something he had not expected and did not quite know what to do with.
He was charmed, and she could see it plainly, in a register quite unlike the usual admiration the room generally paid her, the practiced flattery deployed for advantage: this was a man taken by surprise and helpless against it.
“I have been in this city for fifteen years,” he said at one point, “and I do not think I have had this conversation before.”
“That is either a compliment or an indictment of the city,” she said.
“Both, possibly,” he said, watching her with warm, direct eyes. “I think it is primarily a compliment.”
She looked back at him, aware that the evening was succeeding, aware, too, that it succeeded in part because she was not straining after its success, and aware that this was the most effective version of herself she possessed..
He finished his wine and looked at her a moment with the expression of a man arriving at a conclusion he had not entirely seen coming. “I have a better fire than this at home,” he said.
She looked at him and thought that Valmont would hear of this by Saturday morning at the latest.
“Then let us go,” she said.
She made certain she was seen leaving, though this took no special effort: the assembly had been well attended, the hall at departure was full of people offering their goodnights, and Raoul de Marceilles, being a recognisable figure, made her own position as the Marquise de Crécy leaving on his arm at midnight exactly as visible as she had intended.
The rest of the evening belonged to itself alone, and she saw to it that it remained so.
