Belle Morte Bites (Belle Morte 4.3)

Maurice

France, 1720

It had rained recently, and mud caked Ludovic de Vauban's shoes, damp creeping through the battered fabric.

But he barely noticed the cold.

A year.

Clementine had been missing for a whole year.

The rest of the family had given up on her, but he couldn't. Not his little Clemmie.

Her face flitted through his mind, her red curls and dimples, the way her laugh sounded like bells ringing, and his heart twisted. How could it have been a whole year since he'd heard that laugh?

Ludovic crested a small rise in the land, and paused, looking down. From here, he could see his house, maybe half a mile away. The sun was setting, painting the stone walls with orange, and a thick curl of smoke rose from the chimney, dark grey against that bright sky.

This had used to be home for him.

When he was a boy, he and his older sister Jacqueline would play in the fields that spread out around them, inevitably incurring their mother's wrath when they returned home with muddy knees and skinned elbows. But she was never angry for long.

His father was rarely around to help discipline them – a successful merchant, he'd spent much time at sea, bringing back tar from Finland and hemp from Russia. When he was home, he'd felt like little more than a stranger to Ludovic and Jacqueline.

When he was killed at war, when Ludovic was seven, they had mourned him, but they hadn't really missed him. Clementine had only been three at the time, Henri and Bernard barely just born – they didn't even remember the man who'd fathered them.

Then their mother remarried and everything changed.

Maurice Demont was a cruel, abusive man, who freely used his fists against his wife and stepchildren. Their happy home became a place of fear, where the children crept around in silence, desperately trying not to arouse Maurice's anger, but he was always looking for an excuse to lash out, and nothing anyone did was good enough.

When he found out that Ludovic was still using his father's surname of de Vauban, rather than Maurice's surname, he'd beaten him until he couldn't walk for two days, and when his mother tried to protect him, Maurice broke her nose and cheekbone.

Ludovic hadn't been surprised when Jacqueline left.

But that was it – she had left. She'd packed a bag, taken some food and money – which had sent Maurice into a rage – and disappeared in the night.

Clemmie had taken nothing.

She'd just disappeared.

A wave of grief crashed into Ludovic, so strong that his legs buckled and he fell to the ground.

He had searched every town and village for miles around, and spent so many fruitless hours walking the crowded streets of Lille, the nearest city to their country home, but there was never any sign of her, and now, after a year, it was finally time for him to accept what he'd somehow known from the day he woke up and found her small bed empty.

Clemmie was dead.

The tears that he had been holding back for so long escaped, and he howled, beating his fists into the mud.

Losing Jacqueline had been painful enough. Only a year separated them, and they had always been close. Waking up to realise that she'd gone and that she'd left Ludovic behind was like being kicked in the heart, but with time, he'd come to realise why she'd done it. He'd been seventeen when she left, the oldest after her, and someone had to look after Clemmie, Henri, and Bernard. Someone had to shield them from Maurice. Taking all of them would have slowed Jacqueline down, and she'd known that Ludovic would never leave them. So she'd saved herself, and abandoned them. Sometimes Ludovic was still angry about that. Most of the time he grimly understood why.