Page 151 of The Boxing Baroness

Guy looked from the rapidly disappearing woman to Elliot. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“Blade already has an occupation,” Cecile said, addressing this comment to Elliot before her gaze, hard and unpleasant, slid to Guy. “The three of us will have our hands full operating the theater. We shall be busy working.”

Guy cleared his throat and inched away from her venomous look.

Cecile turned back to Sin. “I have convinced Marianne that she will need to focus all her attention on business matters. She will no longer be fighting.”

Sin already knew that. It was the only promise he’d extracted from her after she’d told him her plans to continue operating the Fayre. He had to admit the promise had relieved him of his worries for her health.

Unfortunately, that reassurance did little to fill the hollow void inside him.

* * *

Although Marianne didn’t know it then, the summer of 1815 would be unlike any other summer in her life.

As miserable as she was after stepping off the packet in Dover, she was somewhat distracted by the heavy, expectant atmosphere that colored the weeks of May and early June—weeks that felt like months.

The collective national horror at the slaughter and death that took place over those few days in June made the rest of the summer feel like a post-nightmare fugue.

The mood of the allies after Waterloo was determined: Napoleon Bonaparte would not escape punishment for his actions.

For several weeks Marianne wondered, along with the rest of the world, whether her father would be executed in a spectacle in Paris, escape to America, or—as he seemed to hope—yet again rouse France to his defense.

As it happened, he surrendered without any fanfare on July 15, 1815, one day after Bastille Day, Marianne’s twenty-first birthday.

It was the same day she received a letter from a French lawyer informing her of an account in her name, bearing the princely—or princess-ly—sum of five thousand pounds and the assurance of an annual amount of fifteen hundred.

Another letter came, as well, this one sent by a woman named Marie Dupont. Marianne had smiled at the name, pleased that her mother had found a way to write to her.

The mood in Paris is a somber one, she wrote. Twice in as many years this magnificent city has been brought low. With the restoration of the Bourbons have come repeated entreaties for me to assume my own duties in the Frozen North. Those last two words had been underlined multiple times. I am holding firm against the pressure, but I cannot be sure how long I will last.

I spoke with your father shortly before he left Paris and made his pilgrimage to his beloved’s grave.

Marianne knew she meant Malmaison, which had been Joséphine’s last home, near the small town where she was buried.

I spoke of you. You should know that was the first and last smile on his face—when he learned how his daughter had once earned her way. “She is her father’s daughter,” he said. “A fighter until the end.”

Had Marianne cried when she’d read that?

Well, maybe a little.

But she’d been as relieved as the rest of the world when, on July twenty-third, her father had boarded the Bellerophon, the ship that took him halfway across the world to his new prison, the island of Saint Helena.

Sin’s name was often mentioned in the political section of the nation’s newspapers that summer and fall. But not until winter, and what was called the Little Season, did she begin to see him mentioned in the society columns. The crack in her heart grew a little each time his name was linked with that of some young, eligible, and likely beautiful woman.

His betrothal announcement was inevitable, she knew that. After all, the Duke of Staunton had long been a marital prize, rivaled only by Lord Carlisle.

By the end of 1815, with people both rich and poor wanting to put the tumultuous year far, far behind them, the speculation in the society columns had begun to run wild.

Eighteen-sixteen, the gossips predicted, would be the year when both Staunton and Carlisle took wives and settled down.

Marianne stopped reading the newspapers entirely at the beginning of the New Year.

Chapter 36

The first few months after Sin’s return, he was far too busy with the mess Marianne’s father was causing on the Continent to wallow in self-pity.

Indeed, his duties in Parliament kept him busy through the fall and into the winter of 1815.