Hearts Beguiled (41 page)

❧

Like Gabrielle, Max's first thought was that the duc de Nevers was behind the abduction.

He saddled a fresh horse and galloped the ten miles back to Versailles as if a pack of wolves bayed and snarled at his heels. He had never been more frightened in all his life, or more filled with self-disgust. He could hear his own voice, cocky and confident, saying Dominique is my son now, and I will protect him. Instead he had failed her, Gabrielle, his wife, his love, his life. Again.

The palace was a pink and gold confection, glittering even beneath the overcast skies. Max didn't see its beauty; he saw only a blood-red haze of rage. He asked the first person he came upon—a woman who could have been Marie Antoinette for all the attention he paid to her—where he could find the duc de Nevers. He followed her pointing finger toward a pair of doors that opened into the Oeil-de-Boeuf.

The Oeil-de-Boeuf was a reception room adjoining the king's state apartments, a waiting room for high-ranking court dignitaries. It took its name from the two distinctive bull's-eye-shaped windows in the domed ceiling. Max paused in the doorway to scan the faces in the room. The duc wasn't there.

Ignoring the startled gasps of the lounging nobles and the shocked looks on the faces of the king's bodyguards, he barged directly into the king's apartments without permission and without waiting to be announced.

The first sight that met Max's eyes was a pair of broad buttocks straining the seat of vivid blue satin breeches. The king of France was bent over a telescope that pointed out the window, focused onto the courtyard below. The duc de Nevers and a handful of other fawning sycophants were standing beside him.

The king straightened, turning, and actually smiled. "Well, it is my astronomer, the vicomte de Saint-Just. Have you come again to see my laboratory?"

Max ignored him. He didn't even make a perfunctory bow. It was more than ever a sign of how France had changed in the last several months that, although mouths fell agape with shock, no one made a move toward him or insisted he pay proper subservience to his king.

Max crossed the room in three strides and seized the duc de Nevers by the lapels of his velvet coat, lifting him off his feet.

"I say!" one of the nobles exclaimed.

Max shoved his face into the duc's, and his voice was deceptively soft. "Where are they?"

"What?" the duc squeaked.

Max flexed his arms, and the duc rose higher off the ground. "My wife and the boy. What have you done with them?"

A hand fell on Max's arm and he jerked his head around, snarling like a rabid beast. The nobleman, who hadn't really wanted to interfere anyway, backed off. The duc's eyes fluttered and started to roll up in his head, showing the whites, and his jaw sagged. Max shook him roughly. "My wife!"

"Ma foi, spare me. I don't know ..."

Max relaxed his grip and the old man sank all the way to his knees. His head was bowed and he was breathing heavily, his hand pressed to his chest.

"The lawyer, Louvois," Max demanded. "Where is he?"

Two seconds ticked off and Max took a step toward the panting, bent figure. The duc painfully lifted his head. "I don't know, monsieur. I swear it. I don't know."

Again Max drove his flagging horse the ten miles back to Paris. Louvois had them, he was sure of it. The bastard had had them for over eighteen hours now. Max's mind recoiled at the thought of what could have been done to them during that length of time. By now they could be—

No! His mind slammed down on the thought. If she were dead he would know it. He would feel it in his gut, and then he would kill himself, because he didn't care about surviving anymore. He'd already learned that bitter lesson once—life was nothing without her.

One dark, wet night over a year ago Max had followed the lawyer Louvois from an abandoned slaughterhouse in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine to an apartment on the Place de l'Ecole. Max had no trouble finding the apartment again. On that other night he had climbed silently through a window. Today he kicked down the front door.

Louvois's servant was witless with fright and Max had to rein in his temper in order to get the man to speak. Once started, the servant wouldn't stop. He hemmed and rambled, scratching his head, and finally said he thought he remembered Monsieur Louvois saying something about an appointment at the Bastille. He had thought monsieur to be joking at the time. Monsieur Louvois, the servant said, had a strange sense of humor.

❧

Smoke seared Simon Prion's face and teared his eyes. He crouched behind a burning hay wagon in the outer courtyard of the Bastille. Between the rioters and the fortress was another wide moat. Although the mob repeatedly called on the defenders to capitulate, so far the wooden drawbridges remained up.

From time to time a musket ball whizzed past Simon's head as the soldiers fired sporadically from the crenels in the battlements. The man with the missing front teeth who had climbed onto the roof with him now lay dead at Simon's side, in a steam of muddy water, his chest torn open by a musket ball.

A stranger with a soot-blackened face ran up behind Simon and touched him on the shoulder. Two columns of French Guards with cannons, he said, were on the way to reinforce the soldiers in the Bastille. Some of the leaders were thinking about withdrawing, and he waited patiently for Simon's opinion. I'm going to die, Simon thought, and he could taste the fear in his mouth, salty and metallic, like blood.

Just then a loud cheer erupted from the rear of the mob and word was passed from mouth to mouth. The cannon were being pointed at the fortress. The French soldiers had joined the mob.

Then another cheer went up, this time from those in front. The drawbridges were being lowered. The Bastille had surrendered.

❧

Max smelled the acrid scent of gunpowder and heard the roar of the mob long before he saw the tall crenelated towers of the Bastille. He was amazed to find the drawbridges lowered, the moats clogged with paper. From one of the towers overhead, men were dumping stacks of the fortress's archives into the water below. It was the only thing in the Bastille to loot.

Within the inner courtyard he saw soldiers, disarmed and facing the wall, and guarded by men with pikes and pitchforks. A small, ragged group of people were huddled together in one corner and Max urged his horse toward them. He scanned the pale, frightened faces.They were all men.

"Are these the only prisoners released?" he said to the back of the man who guarded, or protected—it was hard to tell which—the ragged group.

The man turned and looked up.

"Monsieur Max!" Simon Prion exclaimed. "How did you get here? Did you ride with the French . . . Guard?" His voice trailed off as he got a good look at Max's face. "Gabrielle?"

"Louvois has her. And the boy. I thought he brought them here."

"Sacre bleu..." Simon paled and shook his head. "They weren't locked up with the other prisoners in the tower cells." He gestured over his shoulder. "Only these few pathetic wretches."

"The dungeons?"

"I don't know whether they were searched or not." Simon turned to shout a question at another man, but Max didn't wait for the answer.

Lighting a torch from one of the burning wagons, Max methodically searched the dungeons. He felt nothing as he went from cell to cell, for he had at last walled off all feeling. There would be time enough for grief and rage later. Now he had only one thought, and that was to find her.

He doubted these cells had been used in years. They smelled rancid, as if something had been shut tip in here long ago and left to die. In the deepest, darkest part, at the end of a long, lpw-ceilinged tunnel that dripped water, he found a locked door.

He banged on it with his fist. "Gabrielle!"

Nothing.

He didn't want to take the time to search the entire fortress for the key; he doubted he would find it anyway for it was probably at the bottom of the moat by now. He stepped back and fired his pistol at the lock, then kicked the door open with his boot. Stepping inside, he raised the torch above his head.

She was in the corner, curled tight into a ball with her arms wrapped around her legs, and she was naked. In the dim light her small, slender body looked bruised and broken, and a sob tore at his chest.

He set the torch into a bracket on the wall and knelt beside her. As gently as possible, he touched her shoulder.

"Gabrielle ..."

She raised her head and looked at him with blank, unseeing eyes.

Then, slowly, her gaze focused and he knew she saw him, and the feelings of failure that had been like a dull ache in his gut all morning became as sharp and twisting as a knife.

"Too late," she said to him. "You're too late."

W
ith the help of Simon and his friends, Max searched the dungeons and towers and then the entire fortress looking for Gabrielle's son. One of the guards, who had been taken prisoner and was now eager to be helpful, admitted that the boy had been there at one time, locked in a cell. Now he was gone. So was Louvois.

Max had found a blanket on one of the bunks in the guardhouse and, with hands that shook uncontrollably, he wrapped it around his wife's pale, dirty, and bruised body. Although he held her, stroked her, and crooned words of love and reassurance to her, he could not erase that stricken, tortured look from her face. She was no longer aware of him, nor did she recognize Simon or anything around her. She seemed to be reliving some unimaginable terror over and over in her mind. But except for the bruises and a few minor cuts he could find nothing seriously wrong with her. On the outside.

Too late, she had said. You're too late. God, Max wondered, what had the bastard done to her?

There was a particularly terrible purple mark on her cheek and he pressed his lips to it, shuddering as a violent rage consumed him. If it took him the rest of his days, he would hunt down the man who had done this and he would kill him, slowly, so that he died in agony.

Lifting her in his arms, Max carried her out to the courtyard, where Simon had appropriated a cart.

"I'll take her back to the shop," Simon said. "To Agnes. She'll need a woman's care in case she was . . ."He couldn't finish, but the words hung in the air. In case she was raped.

Max's lips were bloodless, his eyes the color of flint. "I'm going to question those guards further in case Louvois let something slip about where he was going. Then I'll check all the barrieres. He's sure to have left Paris by now. If he has, it was by coach and it was through one of the gates.

"Dominique?"

"The last anyone saw of him he was still alive. We'll have to believe he still is."

❧

It was early the next morning before Max led his weary horse up to the pawnshop on the Palais Royal. He found Simon and Agnes in the kitchen.

"She's upstairs," Simon said immediately before Max could ask. "Sleeping."

"Has she ... ?"

"Nothing. If only she would cry, or scream, or I don't know, do anything, it might . . . help." He sighed and pushed his hand through his thinning hair. "Agnes doesn't think she was raped."

Max squeezed his eyes shut, hiding a sudden rush of tears. He felt a jumble Of emotions—rage and pity and relief for Gabrielle that she had at least been spared rape, but also, to his shame, a relief for his own sake. He was a man, with all of a man's possessive pride, and he couldn't bear the thought of his woman being violated by another.

Wordless for once, Agnes pressed a cup of steaming coffee into his hand. He sank down slowly onto the oaken settle before the hearth. "I found a man—it was one of the last barrieres I had left to check, the one on the road to Reims— who remembered seeing someone late last night matching Louvois's description riding in a heavy black berlin and accompanied by a small blond-haired child. The man said he thought the child was asleep because it was wrapped up tight in a cloak. It was why he couldn't tell the child's sex." Max's lips twisted bitterly. "They let Louvois through because he was so obviously a bourgeois and a friend to the revolution."

"Jesu ..." Agnes muttered, and glared at her revolutionary husband.

"I'm guessing Louvois is making for the border," Max went on. "Right now the roads are packed with people leaving Paris—it's almost impossible just to get out of the city. He's way ahead of us, and once he crosses into the German states we may never find him." Or Dominique, they all thought, although no one said it.

The streets were clogged with barricades made of anything that came to hand—bits of fences, church pews, paving stones. The barricades were manned by armed guards who refused to let anyone, particularly those suspected of having royalist sympathies, pass. Shops were closed, and many of the great houses shuttered, as noblemen and rich bourgeois tried to flee what had become a city of terror and violence.

"I'm going after him with the aerostat," Max said.

"What!" Simon exclaimed.

"It's possible," Max said, thinking out loud. "It just might be possible."

During the past year Max had made considerable progress with his hydrogen-filled balloons. For one thing, he had found a much quicker way to produce the gas, isolating the hydrogen content of water by passing steam continuously over hot iron particles set in a brick furnace. He had also perfected a flexible varnish containing india rubber with which to coat the envelope, thereby reducing leakage. One of Max's new aerostats could remain inflated for as long as three months, and there was one tethered and waiting for him now in the field at the Jardin des Plantes.

"The aerostat's my only hope," Max said. He stood up, rejuvenated with a rush of energy. "He's got at least a six-hour head start, and with the roads jammed as they are I'll never be able to catch him any other way, even on horseback. But the sky is empty. Look ..."

Max paced the small room in his excitement, working the plan out in his own mind as he spoke out loud, explaining it to the others. "We know he's taken the Reims road, traveling east, right in the direction this rainstorm is moving. If it weren't for these strong westerly winds it would be impossible. Even with the winds on our side it's going to be damnably difficult to follow that road with the aerostat. But I think I've come up with a way to control its lateral movement somewhat, and so . . ."

He had named them risers—a series of pulleys around the balloon capable of collapsing a small portion of the envelope at a time, thereby allowing him to control the aerostat's movement from side to side, as well as vertically. Of course, he would still need the wind in his favor, but he had the wind in his favor and it was going to stay in his favor if he had to make it so by sheer willpower alone. He couldn't, wouldn't, fail Gabrielle another time.

"I'm going after Louvois in the aerostat," Max declared. "It's our only chance—"

"I'm going with you."

They all turned at once. Gabrielle stood at the bottom of the stairs. She wore one of Agnes's nightgowns, which was several inches too short for her, showing a pair of impossibly frail-looking white legs. Her eyes were as purple as a bruise, and they stared at Max from a face that was drawn and pale, except for the livid mark on one cheek.

Slowly, tentatively, Max went to her. He stood before her, searching her eyes to see if she still hated him for failing her. It was only a moment, he might even have imagined it, but he thought he saw a spark of love flaring quick and bright within those violet depths, before they turned cold and blank again.

He gathered her into his arms and buried his face in her hair. Agnes must have washed it for her, because it was clean and silky, and he rubbed his cheek back and forth across the top of her head. "Gabrielle ..."

"Louvois has our son," she said,

Our son. For the second time that morning, Maximilien de Saint-Just almost wept from relief.

He brushed the curls off her face, kissed her forehead. "I'll get him back, ma mie. " Even if it costs me my life, he added silently.

"I'm going with you," she said again.

Max looked over the top of her head to Simon and Agnes, and they both nodded mutely.

Agnes stepped forward and took Gabrielle's hand. "Come, cherie. You can't go wearing my nightgown. I'll lend you some clothes."

"Make it something warm," Max said. "Bundle her up with lots of petticoats and lend her a cloak, the heaviest one you've got, and a fur hat if you've got one, and gloves."

As they prepared to leave the pawnshop in the Palais Royal, Simon pinned a red and blue cockade on Max's hat and one to the lapel of Gabrielle's cloak.

"It's the new symbol of the revolution," he said. "This way they won't stop you at the barricades." And it worked, for it took them less than an hour to make their way on foot to the Jardin des Plantes.

Throughout that time, Gabrielle spoke not another word. She was wrapped in her own silent world of fear and pain, and Max couldn't even begin to break through to her. He could only hope that she would recover after Dominique was found. He prayed he was doing the right thing to bring her along, but both Simon and Agnes seemed to think that if he didn't, something inside her would snap completely, perhaps leaving her mind permanently damaged.

His plan was to take the balloon up as high as he dared, at least ten thousand feet, to catch the fast stream of westerly air that circled the globe. At that height the wind would push them along at a good pace, at least three or four times that of carriage speed, and they could make up a lot of time on Louvois. When they got within probable range of him, they would descend to just over treetop level and start searching the road for the black berlin.

This early in the morning and with the excitement of the day before, there was no one at the Jardin des Plantes but the caretaker. The skin of the new aerostat—red and white striped this lime—sparkled with a sheen of morning dew. It was taut, still filled with just the right amount of gas, and even in the midst of his anxiety over Gabrielle and Dominique, Max felt a flash of pride in his new invention.

He had a little difficulty releasing the mooring ropes by himself, but then Gabrielle was suddenly at his side to help him. He gave instructions and she followed them precisely, although in a strange, tense silence.

He took the balloon up through blanketing clouds thick as rain that soaked their skin and clothes. Up until they burst out into an icy blue sky shimmering with sunshine. And higher still, until he began to feel the telltale sharp pains in his ear and jaw that told him if he went much higher he would run out of what he thought of as breathable air.

At this height what air there was was cold and dry, and his extremities quickly grew numb. He worried about Gabrielle and kept asking her if she was all right. She wouldn't answer him. Except for her eyes, which blazed now with a strange light, her white face could have been carved from marble, it was so expressionless.

He navigated using his mariner's compass, the sun, and those years of experience sailing a ship across a wide, flat ocean, praying all the while that the road to Reims would still be beneath them when they descended back through the clouds.

After a couple of hours, when he figured they had come far enough to be only an hour or so behind Louvois, Max decided to bring the balloon down. The cloud cover seemed to have thickened, and as they sank into it, the world became a suffocating white shroud. Max had visions of church steeples and trees waiting below for him like spikes in a wolf trap, and then suddenly they were free, skimming across the green and brown earth, and there below them was a road. Let it be the right road, Max prayed.

By alternately varying and throwing out ballast, and pulling on his risers, Max maneuvered amid the low-altitude winds, able to follow the twists and turns in the road as he searched for a black berlin. Gabrielle, who had stood unmoving the entire time, clutching the edge of the aerial car, suddenly leaned way over the side.

Alarmed, Max grabbed her arm. "Careful, ma mie. " He tried to smile. "Remember, it's a long way down there."

"He'll be in a black berlin," she said. They were the first words she had spoken since standing on the stairs in Simon's pawnshop.

"Would you recognize it?" he asked, careful to keep his voice neutral.

"Yes."

It seemed only moments later when she pointed. "There. There he is." There was no excitement in her voice, only a hard resolution.

Max aimed the balloon for a spot in the road beyond the approaching carriage. He controlled the speed and direction of his descent by carefully shedding ballast and pulling on the risers. He glided the balloon onto the downhill side of a wooded, sloping rise just as the berlin crested the top.

The team of horses reared in their traces, whinnying in terror, and the berlin slewed off the road into a gully. Max pulled on the rip panel—another of his inventions—venting gas rapidly and collapsing the balloon almost immediately, before it could rise again.

— Max vaulted out of the car, hauling Gabrielle with him with the strength of his right arm. He held his pistol in his left hand, but he switched it to his right as he and Gabrielle ran toward the berlin. The coachman, terrified already at the sight of the balloon seeming to descend out of nowhere right on top of him, abandoned his master and took off running down the road.

It was so silent Max could hear the moisture dripping off the trees. Clouds of vapor billowed around the horses' heads and one stamped his foot nervously. The black berlin was tilted at an angle, one wheel in the ditch, and there was no sign of life behind the dark, curtained windows.

Max slowed down, grabbing Gabrielle's arm to hold her back, and they approached the carriage warily. He pointed the pistol at the door.

"Louvois. Open the door and let the boy down. Slowly and carefully."

The door swung open. Dominique was dangled out over the side, held by invisible hands.

His face was dirty and smeared with dried tears. His eyes went immediately to his mother. "Maman," he croaked hoarsely, and Max heard a sob tear from Gabrielle's throat. He let out a slow, shaky breath, for the boy appeared to be all right, then caught it immediately when he noticed the big carving knife held tight to Dominique's throat.

"Throw the pistol on the ground, Saint-Just. This way," said a cold voice, "or I'll slit the boy's gullet."

Max didn't hesitate. He tossed the pistol toward the carriage door.

For a long moment nothing happened, and then Dominique was whisked back inside. Gabrielle cried out and took a step forward. Max flung out his hand, stopping her.

Clutching Dominique tight under the armpits, Louvois descended awkwardly from the berlin, still pressing the knife under the boy's chin. He backed up a step until he was leaning against the open carriage door. He hitched his hips onto the edge, balancing Dominique against his stomach. Shifting his arm, he clamped his hand across the boy's mouth and pulled his head back, gruesomely exposing the small, pate throat to the silver blade of the knife.

"Now, Gabrielle . . ." Louvois Was panting hoarsely and his eyes bulged insanely behind the distorting spectacles. "You will pick up the pistol. Pick it up!" he snarled when she didn't move.

She stumbled over to where it lay and picked it up. Max made a tiny, reflexive movement, and the knife blade jerked. Dominique's eyes opened wide, and a muffled sob came from behind Louvois's hand. A tiny trickle of blood oozed down the boy's throat, and Max clenched his fists, forcing himself to stand still.

Louvois smiled. "Please do not move, Monsieur le Vicomte. I'm feeling rather nervous, as you can see ... Do you love your husband, Gabrielle?"

"Oh, please don't . . . He'll do as you say." She turned pleading eyes to Max. "Won't you, Max?"

Louvois laughed. "Do you remember, Gabrielle, that first time we met in your mother's house?" Gabrielle stood unmoving, looking bewildered. "Do you remember?" he shouted.

"Y-yes," she said quickly.

"I promised that day I would find the price of your pride and that I would destroy you with it. I have found your price, Gabrielle. And you owe me. For the scar, for the years you made a fool of me, for thinking yourself so damned invincible. Well, you're not invincible now, are you, my fine and haughty aristocratic bitch?"