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shoulder and carried her, kicking and screaming, to a mossy mound between the cemetery and the church wall. “Arrogant chatte, you’ll pay for that, and the ale you threw on me. So you think you’re above us? Here you’re the same as any other girl in the tavern. Liberté, egalité, fraternité. Vive le France! ”
    The bitter irony tasted like gall. Yes, in post-revolutionary France there was equality and fraternity if you were rich, talented, or French. Liberty was yours if your neighbors didn’t report you to the latest committee or paranoid leader, if you didn’t work with whores by necessity, or—
    LeClerc pushed her on her back, and the memory of her last birthday flashed into her brain. Not again, never again! She twisted and kicked, arms flailing. “Help me! Rape!”
    No candle lit in all the row houses across the road. No sound from the presbytery she’d just passed. Echoes of the night at The White Goose were screaming from the abyss of memory.
    She’d known all along these idiots worked for Alain, but this was cruel, even for him.
    The knife! She pulled it from her cloak, but with a blow to her wrist, LeClerc sent it spinning. With an exasperated huff, he put a cupped hand over her mouth, the other hand pressing his fingers into her throat until she choked, fighting for air. “No more tricks, or I’ll really hurt you.”
    She bunched her hand into a fist, gathering dirt and grass, and threw it in his face.
    LeClerc’s blow to her temple sent broken gravestones spinning behind her eyes. “Hold her.” Tolbert grabbed her arms. LeClerc hitched up her skirts and loosened the tie at his breeches.
    â€œRelease the lady if you want to live.”

CHAPTER 3
    Abbeville, France
    August 18, 1802
    T HE GROWLING VOICE CAME from the darkness close by. The unmistakable noise of pistols cocking followed. Tolbert and LeClerc gasped and released their grip on her.
    Lisbeth’s eyes snapped open. Was he a figment of her desperate imagining? But Tolbert’s low-lit lantern and the uncertain moonlight illuminated a tall man swathed in a cloak, aiming two pistols at her attackers.
    â€œI shoot with both hands equally well.” With a subtle Spanish accent, he made her think of the banditti, professional killers. “But I don’t have a shovel to bury you. So start running.”
    Tolbert bolted, tripping over crumbled gravestones, taking the low outer wall at a leap, arms windmilling in an attempt to go faster. LeClerc ran after him, holding his undone breeches with one hand while the other flapped, like a one-winged bird.
    The stranger returned his pistols to his cloak pockets. “Did they hurt you, madame?”
    The words barely penetrated the fog in her mind. She couldn’t stop shaking. All she knew was that her bunched-up clothes exposed her to the waist like a harlot. If she still had her pantalets, as a lady of breeding . . .
    Pull down your skirts! But her arms remained above her head, refusing to obey her will.
    He stooped down. Energized by panic she scrambled back, but he only pulled her dress and her cloak over her. “May I see you home?”
    She stared at him. Beautiful manners. Pure Picardy-Norman French now, with no accent.
    Looming over her in the darkest hour of night, he was so big . With the hood pulled down, she couldn’t see his face.
    â€œPlease tell me you’re not hurt, madame.”
    Strange concern in his low murmur. Faceless, anonymous, a stranger. I don’t even know his voice, but he called me Madame. Does he know me?
    Stupid! Everyone knows you. You’re the only British whore in Abbeville.
    The random observations felt like a ship’s log being filled, coming one after the other, adding to her confusion.
    â€œWill you let me help you, madame?”
    That he asked her permission felt like cement slapped over broken bricks: it smoothed the shards of her dignity, yet the cracks