Read On My Lady's Honor (All for one, and one for all) for Free Online Page B

she turned her pain and her guilt outwards and focussed her loathing on the enemy she could hate without destroying herself in the process - Count Lamotte.
    For the first few weeks after her recovery she had waited for him to appear.   He had promised her brother that he would care for her.   Where, then, was he when she had most need of him?
    Had he come to her then and saved her from the horror of spending the winter alone in a house of death, she would have welcomed him with open arms.   She would nigh have welcomed the Devil himself, if he had come to rescue her.
    Lamotte was her betrothed, she told herself over and over again as she huddled in front of the tiny fire she kept in the kitchen grate, eating her meager rations and trying to stop her teeth from chattering with cold.   Surely when he heard of her plight, he would ride to her rescue.   Gerard had had faith in him.   She did not want to believe that the Count was so afeared of the plague that he would break a solemn oath to her brother.
    The weeks passed by at a snail’s pace, until snow covered the ground, making travel impossible and utterly destroying her hope that he might come to her.   She grew stronger in her solitude, but gradually she also grew more and more embittered against the man who might have saved her from this solitude but had not.
    Lamotte had not come to claim her.   As the snows of winter started to melt she had to face the miserable truth – that like a sniveling coward he had stayed away to save his own skin, leaving his comrade-in-arms and his betrothed wife to die a miserable death.  
    Were he ever to renew his suit, she would treat him with the derision he deserved as a false friend and a traitor to loyalty and honor.   Lamotte: coward, traitor and false friend.   How she wished to make him suffer as her family had suffered.   How she hated him for being alive when all she loved were dead.
    Lamotte.   The very name sounded evil on her tongue.   She could never wed him.   She would sooner murder him and cut open his heart and throw it to the wolves.
    Spring arrived at last, and with it the knowledge that another such winter would drive her mad.   With spring came the news that Jean-Luc was dead, along with his father and much of their household.   She had no grieving left in her, but she said a rosary for their souls so that they may rest in peace the sooner.
    A handful of villagers had survived the plague.   The most trustworthy of the survivors she made her steward, while she put into action the plan she had dreamed up at her lonely fireside.   As Sophie, she had nothing left to live for – she would become a ward of Louis XIV and sign her destiny over to the whim of the King.   She determined to remain Sophie no longer – instead, she would become her brother.
    As Gerard, she would take control of her life.   As Gerard, she would win the honor that should have been his.   As Gerard she would live and as Gerard she would die.
    Well she knew that she was a weaker, paler version of the proud Musketeer who had left Paris seven months ago to attend the betrothal and wedding of his twin sister.   That would easily be explained away by the weeks of illness she had suffered and the months of recuperation she had had to undergo before she, in the guise of her brother, had recovered sufficiently to be deemed fit for active service once more.
    She only hoped that those who had known Gerard intimately would not be able to detect the slight softening of her features and the unusual smoothness of her chin, untouched by any razor.   With her hair cut short to curl around the nape of her neck, and wearing Gerard’s breeches and boots, she was an exact copy of her twin.   She would defy even her mother to tell them apart from more than ten feet away.
    Neither would she be discovered a woman by lack of skill in the martial arts.   She had spent her last few months wisely – practicing with Gerard’s sword until her arm