Trigger warnings: murder/(non-spousal) violence, brief talk of a deceased child, descriptions of burning
********
I wrote this as a historical romance novel for a friend. It took me about two and a half years, but I finished it, and that makes this a miraculous endeavour. Now that she has it, though, I didn't really know what to do with it, so I thought I would just share it.
It's set in France in 1724, when Rochelle, a judge's daughter, is kidnapped by a nefarious highwayman seeking her father's assistance. By Literotica standards, it's quite long, with a slow build-up for only a couple of ~spicy~ scenes. It's kind of enemies-to-lovers, but there's more lovers than enemies.
If even one person enjoys it, then I'm glad.
Thank you most gratefully to Kaitlyn and Harmony for their generous thoughts and feedback, and overall kindness.
Enjoy!
********
For Ashley--
The littlest, the mightiest, the finest of friends
********
CHAPTER 1
********
Rochelle's father insisted she be given water before they departed the dusty inn. The pock-faced young porter wrung his hands, explaining that it was impossible. The well recharged from the same source as the empty river and, in the middle of a drought, that could take a full day.
Her father wouldn't hear it. "You had enough water for the horse trough."
"Monsieur... there is no more water."
"Lower the bucket," her father sneered.
"Monsieur, I cannot draw water from the mud. The well--it does not work so."
"Listen to me, you cumberground." Her father's voice sizzled to a point. "Draw the damn bucket."
"Papa, please," Rochelle soothed. "I can drink from the trough."
Her father ignored her and instead stabbed his finger at the boy. "Lower the bucket. Let it be what it is."
The porter sighed. He redrew the bucket from the well, its side coated in muddy grime, and he poured a half-cup of clear water from it. Rochelle offered it to her father, but he drank from the trough instead.
The water rejuvenated her, but only an hour later her throat was parched once more from the itchy dust that bloomed amid trundling wheels and stepping horse hooves.
Ahead, hazy blue hills drew them forth, and still Dijon seemed no closer than the pale bowl of moon that hung over the world's edge. It had been seven days they'd lurched along on the highroad, and though at first their journey had taken them over gentle green hills and past thin creeks of clear water, here drought had seized the land, and all around them the flat fields and orchards stretched on for leagues like the dry scapula of the earth.
Since that first day, Rochelle's complaining had quieted, and so had her father's snippy remarks about unladylike scowls. She would have rather ridden in a saddle than be swept onwards by the pull of a carriage, but her father had told her it would be unseemly for him, a man of newly appointed station, to ride in to Dijon by carriage while his daughter saddled a horse. There were expectations, after all, and women of some newfound privilege should not discard that privilege because it became momentarily inconvenient.
The fields stretched on as they drove. The grain was stunted. Orchard leaves drooped in mangled patterns over lanes of brittle grass. Ahead, a white windmill hunched on a fold of ground, the organ of its sails limp and unstirred, and as they passed under its shadow Rochelle looked to the fields of dark blue sky above, which laid as hopeless and dry as the land itself.
That whole hot morning she expected not to see another living soul, but all along the road peasants tilled the fields in their dirty dress, wiping their filthy brows and leaning on the long handles of their hoes. The carriage jostled by, and Rochelle watched them with admiration as it did. When the rivers ran so bare and the dry land showed no more care for them than the landlords for whom they worked it, their toil seemed pointless, but still they worked.
In the carriage opposite her, her father managed a stack of papers with empty care. Things would have been so much more comfortable if, for the entire trip, he had not insisted she wear her gown and petticoat and corset and all those other silks. Scarcely anyone would see her until the day they arrived, and it seemed cruel to be made to be so hot when a lighter dress would do just as well.
When he'd given the dress, he'd called it a gift--a celebration of his appointment as Provost Marshal of Dijon--and when she'd first seen it, she had been overjoyed. Its intricate stitching was beautiful, and the feel of the soft silk in her fingers was like a rich wax. By necessity, her father's gifts were rare and modest, but with her dress he'd spared no expense. After seven days of bouncing in the choking dust and heat, though, it seemed more a gift for him than her.
Her small chin tilted back as he shuffled papers from one leather case to another. He stopped. He read one word here, another there. The complacency on his wrinkling brow annoyed her, and her own eyebrows knitted together in frustration. He would have her play the role of beatified daughter so that his subordinates may look well upon him, yet here he was, free to dress as comfortably as he pleased.
They passed into woods which sprung up thin and green around them. They would not arrive in Dijon even by nightfall, and tomorrow there would be another day of heavy petticoats and a confusion of sweaty silk stuck to her legs. That thought pressed on the bone atop her spine with an indelicate weight. And so, delicately, she folded her hand fan, placed it in her lap between her fingers, and she looked with a sigh to the virgin woods around them.
"I will consider Monsieur Toussaint's proposal," she said.
Like the laying of a cannon, her father raised his head. "Wonderful." His voice was solid oak. "Shall we stop the carriage here, that you may begin the walk back to Strasbourg?"
She scoffed. "Even that would hardly worsen my day." The hand fan snapped open, and she cooled herself once more.
Her father pulled off his thin, round glasses and set them on the papers in his hands. "How long would it take, do you think?"
Her fanning stopped. "To what?"
"To walk back to Strasbourg."
She made an annoyed sound and looked away.
Harrumphing, he fit the glasses back to the bridge of his nose, their hooks latching around his wobbly ears, and he looked back to his papers. Her father's face was weathered and tanned, wrinkles breaking out along the folds of his face. Under his right eye were the same three beauty marks that she had on her left cheek--what he'd sometimes called the cascade of their family history.
"Monsieur Toussaint will likely have already made a half-dozen more proposals by the time we arrive in Dijon." He peeked over the top of his glasses. "If it's a rise you want out of me, you're better off threatening to renew your vows."
"I would not wish to make you so hopeful to be rid of me."
A smile grew beneath his downwardly pointed nose. "But, now that it has been mentioned..."
"Oh stop!" She huffed. The fan snapped shut. "I hate this carriage. This dress. This heat! I am tired of everything so violently shaking." She leaned to the window, calling to Monsieur Batton, the coachman. "Do you not know how to avoid any of these craters?"
Only the wheels creaked on, unconcerned.
"Yet you would have me believe you would do all of this again to be returned to Strasbourg and Monsieur Toussaint?"
Rochelle eeped, hands folding in her lap. "Well... perhaps not right away."
Her father looked down and chuckled.
She laid her head back on the leather seat cushion and loosed a more pointed sigh. At the back of her head, the thin feathers of her dark brown hair tickled her damp neck. She strained to ignore them, fidgeting with her fan once more.
Monsieur Toussaint was not a good match. He lacked charm, and the way his eyes raked over other women had always made her uncomfortable. One could do far worse than marrying a man with a wandering eye, though, and she knew him well--the way she'd known the city of Strasbourg. Even for his faults, and the faults of that city she'd so long called home, it filled her with dread to leave behind the familiar for something so unknowable.
"There will be other offers," her father consoled. "My position here will afford me greater opportunities than Strasbourg. I will not be without cordial inventions on our new friends, and, in meeting new people, you will find better opportunities for yourself as well. Though not without some social grace, Monsieur Toussaint is not the kind of man I would hope for you."
"No," she said, "you would hope for princes that they might benefit you."
He didn't deign to look up. "Which, again, of the cardinal sins is ambition?"
"Are those now the only sins?"
"Go then," he snorted, waving the back of his hand towards her. "Marry your weaver. Live in a house of wool, and wear wool, and eat wool, and sew yourself into a bed of wool each night until you have wool children, and all you dream of is--"
"Wool?"
He eyed her suspiciously.
"Sheep."
Her head tilted from him, and she fanned even harder. A strand of hair fluttered over her left ear with each gust, and that annoyed her even more.
The carriage lurched between the trees of a small wood, long shadows silently bumping and stretching over the carriage top as it rolled. She hoped there might be some relief among the shade, but soon they pulled on through and the landscape fell again to fields and distant hills. Even under the sun, though, there was no comfortable difference between it or shade. Perhaps it wouldn't have been so bad had there been relief from the commotions of the carriage, but the violent jarring made her unwell.
She let a breath out.
That her father hadn't resisted her threat to marry Monsieur Toussaint had brought upon her a light concern. "You would truly let me marry him?"
Her father looked over the rims of his glasses. "I would not hold you so tight, not when the years run on so fast." He turned over a stack of papers. "You are not a child. If Monsieur Toussaint's courtship is what you desire, then have it. You are already nearing spinsterhood, and I would not deprive you of your life based only on my misgivings of a man."
She frowned.
"And besides," he continued, "who knows the shape of a man's heart, but the man himself? He might, in some way, grand or small, be more well-suited to you than I could imagine."