A Soul of Steel by Carole Nelson Douglas Page B

taken aback at this challenging response to his apologetic beginning, but added in the language of this land, “Yes, Madame, I speak French. Yet in any language I must apologize for casting myself upon the mercy of strangers. I cannot imagine what weakness came over me.”
    “Can you not?” Irene did not sound even slightly merciful at the moment. “Come, come, sir. You dissemble.”
    “D-dissemble?”
    “Or, as the plain folk put it, you lie. At the least you mean to mislead us. You have suffered from fever for some time.”
    “But not in this climate, not so far north. Is this what you mean by deception, Madame?” He was more bewildered than defensive.
    “Not at all. There is also your insistence that we are strangers to you.”
    “But—” He eyed Godfrey and Irene with rather pitiful confusion. “You are.”
    “And Miss Huxleigh—whose name you have called out not once but several times in your delirium?” Irene pointed to me at a moment when I most would have liked to sift through the floorboards into safe invisibility downstairs. “What is she to think of you now calling her a mere ‘stranger’?”
    “Really, Irene,” I murmured. “The gentleman is quite correct.”
    The man’s gaunt face had stiffened like a soldier’s on parade. “I may have said a great deal of nonsense in my delirium. They do not call it ‘senselessness’ for nothing.”
    “On the contrary.” Irene drew a side chair to the bed the better to interrogate her victim. “You have not forgotten an iota of what you said while raving. It is merely that with a cool head again, you are prepared to deny it.”
    “I cannot blame you for thinking me a liar and rogue, considering the circumstances in which you found me. Give me my robes and I’ll be gone.”
    “Oh, I cannot in good conscience do that,” Irene murmured. “You are too ill.”
    “And this is how you treat an ill man, Madame?”
    “This is how I treat a prevaricator, sir, well or ill. If you will not answer my questions frankly, I will be forced to bully the answers out of Miss Huxleigh.”
    The patient’s eyes gleamed with fresh spirit. “I do not know what position this unfortunate lady occupies in your establishment, but she does not have to suffer such mistreatment.”
    “As I thought. You seek to protect her—now, and by your continuing silence about yourself.”
    A silence ruled the room. Godfrey had watched the exchange with the same sharp attention he would give to a rival barrister’s cross-examination, as if more were going on than was evident. I myself was embarrassed by Irene’s rough accusations. Yet she had hit a nerve. For the first time I saw color flush that dusky visage.
    The man sighed. “You overestimate the chivalry that I am capable of at this point in my life,” he said wearily. “It is far more likely that I seek to protect myself.”
    “And your identity,” Irene prodded. She smiled and leaned back in the chair. “My dear sir, you have in the past few hours escaped a horrible and intentional death. Can the truth of your identity be worse than that fate?”
    His expression became more bitter than the black coffee Irene and Godfrey consumed so copiously in the morning. “Truth is almost always worse than death, especially to one who has lived on the other side of the veil between East and West.”
    “Ah.” Irene settled happily upon her hard chair. “A story. Begin with who you are.”
    “Should you not tell me your identity first?”
    “A good point. I am a dead woman, sir, but you may call me Madame Norton. And this dashing gentleman is my husband, Godfrey, also presumed dead. Miss Huxleigh you know, and her mortality has never been in question, nor has anything else about her. Miss Huxleigh is of impeccable intentions. Her position in this household is as strict guardian of propriety, and a terrible tyrant she is, too.”
    “You jest with me,” the poor man said.
    Godfrey forsook his position lounging against the bureau