Surrender to a Stranger (9 page)

“Surely there would be no harm in your at least telling me where we are going?” she persisted. “If something happens to you and we become separated, it would be helpful if I at least knew what direction I am headed in.”

He hesitated a moment, weighing the validity of her words. Finally he relented. “I am taking you to England, to live with your sisters and Sir Edward Harrington.”

She looked at him with pure dismay. “But I cannot go to England,” she protested. “I cannot leave France. Not yet. Not until I have found out what has happened to Antoine. If he is alive, and I am certain that he is, I am not leaving Paris without him. We must find him and free him. I told you that last night.”

She turned her attention back to her food, fully expecting him to argue with her. After all, it was obvious he had overlooked Antoine’s fate, and would probably not be happy about having to change his plans. She waited for him to inundate her with all the reasons why they should flee now, without trying to rescue poor Antoine. But he said nothing. The meaning of his silence slowly wrapped itself around her.

“No,” she whispered, finally looking up at him. She shook her head in denial as a mixture of horror and grief began to well up inside her.

“Mademoiselle,” he began, his voice soft and hesitant. He knelt before her and reached up to take her hand.

“No!” she screamed abruptly, flying off the bed and racing over to the window. She stood in front of the frosted glass and looked out, not seeing anything, wrapping her arms tightly around herself and shaking.

He moved to stand behind her. She trembled violently as she tried to get control of her fear, unwilling to ask the question. She stared out through the lacy gaps in the frosted pane, at the gray lines of laundry that were frozen stiff, and the garbage that littered the ground. It was cold. Surely that was why she could not stop shaking. It was November, after all, and she could not remember a November ever being as cold and gray as this one.

If she had been home, she would have ordered one of the few remaining servants to throw more wood on the fire. Every room at the Château de Lambert had a huge, magnificent fireplace, with intricately carved mantels of the finest Italian marble. Some bore the De Lambert crest, while others sported fanciful designs of naked angels fluttering in stone carrying garlands of flowers and grapes. The fireplace in this room was tiny and black, and choked with powdery ashes that were cold and gray. She wondered absently how much one had to pay in a place like this for a fire to be lit. She remembered it had been very cold in her cell. She wondered if Antoine, who was so sick when they came to arrest him, was cold. A sob of deep, pure grief escaped her.

She sensed his hand rising up to touch her.

“Don’t touch me,” she choked. “I don’t want you to touch me.”

He withdrew his hand and silently moved away. Jacqueline continued to stare out the window. She could not cry. She felt she should. She wanted to. But something inside her would not let the tears come, something hard and dark that filled her with a grief and despair so heavy it threatened to crush her from within. She ground her jaw together and reached out with a thin, trembling hand to touch the frosty lace on the windowpane. The icy glass chilled her fingertips, making them tingle and burn from the cold. And then, slowly, the heat from the pads of her fingers melted into the frost, leaving five little clear ovals in the grainy white glaze.

“Did they execute him?” she finally asked, her voice barely a whisper.

“They did not have to.”

She stared vacantly at the frozen laundry, letting the meaning of his words sink in. Antoine had been very sick, too sick to possibly endure the hardships of a freezing cold cell and rotten food. And of course those soldiers of the National Guard had all taken a turn kicking him at the time of his arrest. It was possible he died of an internal injury. It did not matter. Either way he was dead, as dead as he would have been had he mounted the steps to the guillotine. And for that there was only one person to blame. Nicolas.

“Why didn’t you tell me last night?” she demanded suddenly as she turned around to face him.

He regarded her calmly. “Because you were exhausted and I wanted you to get some sleep.”

A simple, practical answer. She could not fault him for thinking in practical terms. That was his job. “Was it not possible to rescue him?” she asked quietly, fighting to keep her voice steady and controlled.

Citizen Julien let out a harsh sigh. “When Sir Edward originally told me of you and your brother’s arrest, I planned to rescue both of you. I found out where you were easily enough, but I could not locate Antoine. There was a record of his arrest, but no one seemed to know where he had been imprisoned. The Republic’s record keeping leaves much to be desired, and with so many arrests these past few months it is difficult to get hold of the proper paperwork,” he explained in frustration.

“The proper paperwork,” she repeated absently, as if something in those words would help her to understand Antoine’s death.

He began to pace the floor. “It was clear he had not yet gone to trial. But given his illness at the time of his arrest, I thought perhaps he had been sent to a prison hospital, or at least to a prison with better living conditions than the Conciergerie. I checked into the rosters at all the hospitals and prisons, and finally I found an inmate registered under the name Lambert. But when I went to see him, it turned out he was an old man, a common forger, and his correct name was Lavert, not Lambert.” He stopped pacing and looked at her. “Spelling mistakes and errors in the rosters are common.”

“A spelling mistake,” she repeated with a nod, as if that somehow explained everything.

He began to pace again. “Several days ago I adopted the character of Citizen Julien, and used him to get into the Conciergerie so I could casually question some of the prisoners to see if any of them knew of your brother. I decided that since you were being held there, it was possible Antoine was as well, despite the fact that he was not listed in the records. After a few days I finally found someone who remembered seeing a young man being half carried, half dragged down the hall to a cell on the same evening you and Antoine were arrested.”

Jacqueline clenched her hands until her nails bit deep into the palms. “What happened to him?” she whispered.

He stopped pacing and looked at her. “He died that night. He was buried in a common pit the next day.” His voice was soft, apologetic, as if he felt that somehow it was his fault.

Jacqueline shook her head. “There is no proof that it was Antoine,” she told him firmly. “It could have been someone else. You cannot be sure.” Her denial made her feel better. If there was the slightest hope that he lived, Jacqueline would find him.

He took a step toward her. “Mademoiselle,” he began in a low voice, “it was he. The prisoner heard the jailer who had guarded him boasting to another of the fine ring he removed from the body before they came to take it away. A gold ring bearing a crest with a lion, a fox, and a bird.”

The flicker of hope she had nursed for those few seconds went out. He had just described the De Lambert crest. “The bird is a dove,” she whispered raggedly. “That I may rule with strength, wisdom, and peace.” She turned away again and rested her forehead against the icy cold pane of the window, struggling to accept what he was telling her. Antoine was dead. Her wonderful, handsome, intelligent brother, who had always been so gentle and good, except when he was teasing her or playing childish pranks as a boy, was dead. It did not make any sense. Nothing made any sense. She tried to focus her thoughts on something simple and tangible.

“The ring was my father’s,” she told him quietly. “He gave it to Antoine when he was in prison. He said that Antoine should keep it safe for him until he was released.” She said the words calmly, as if she was telling him about something that happened to another family, or describing people who were quite distant to her.

She leaned heavily against the windowpane and tried to understand what had happened to her life. Antoine was dead. And her father was dead. She was supposed to be dead, but she was not. Suzanne and Séraphine were safe, far away in England, a place where the evils and bloodshed of this hateful revolution could not touch them. Jacqueline was glad of that. At least she had had the foresight to send them away as soon as her father was arrested, as risky as that move had been. The Château de Lambert and all its artwork and furnishings would be confiscated, as were her father’s investments and bank accounts. She had nothing. It did not matter. She had been spared. Her life was a bonus. All she had to do was decide what she was going to do with it.

The answer came to her easily.

“I want you to help me kill someone,” she announced calmly as she turned around to face him.

He looked at her with a mixture of surprise and pity. “Mademoiselle, you are upset,” he told her, his voice calm and soothing. “You must realize you cannot bring this revolution to an end on your own. A political assassination would only martyr your victim and secure your own death.”

She shook her head impatiently. “I am not interested in plunging a knife into Robespierre,” she replied, referring to the powerful member of the Committee of Public Safety who was a major force in purging France of her enemies through terror and bloodshed. “Although I must confess the image of it does give me a certain amount of pleasure. The vengeance I seek is on a far more personal level.”

“Who is it?” he asked, his curiosity piqued.

“His name is Nicolas Bourdon.” She spoke the name harshly, bitterly, as if it was acid on her tongue.

“The man who attacked you in your cell?”

She nodded and turned her attention back to the window. “He was a friend of my father’s,” she ground out, her voice filled with loathing. “Or at least that is what he led my father to believe. He came from absolutely nothing. He must have thought himself very clever indeed to fashion a friendship with a man as great and powerful as the Duc de Lambert.”

“That matters a great deal to you, Mademoiselle, doesn’t it?” he observed. “The background a person comes from.”

“Until my father became involved in philosophy and politics, I never thought about it very much,” she informed him brusquely. “There was a system in place that had been created by God, and everyone knew where his place was. I am no more responsible for the fact that God made me the daughter of a duc than for his making another the daughter of a peasant. That is simply the way of things. It certainly isn’t my fault they are poor.” She realized her tone was defensive, but years of revolutionary rhetoric had made her sick of constantly feeling she should apologize for her birthright.

“Mademoiselle, have you ever met a peasant?” he asked curiously.

“Of course I have,” she shot back. “What would you call those foul pigs who have watched over me in prison these past few weeks?”

“But before the revolution,” he qualified. “Did you ever leave the grounds of the château and see how the families who rented land from your father and paid dues to him actually lived?” His tone was not accusing, merely one of genuine interest.

She thought for a moment. “Not really,” she admitted indifferently. “Once a year my father would have a party on the grounds for all the peasants, and they would come with their wives and children and eat and drink and celebrate the arrival of spring. And sometimes Antoine and I would go riding in the fields and that would take us past their cottages, but we were usually in too much of a hurry to stop and talk to them.”

“And while you were out enjoying yourself by riding through their fields, did you ever stop to consider that two horses trampling at great speed through a planted field might destroy part of its crop?” he demanded.

“In the first place, they were my father’s fields,” she pointed out defensively. “And seigneurial law permits the landowner access and right of way whenever he chooses. Secondly, with crops planted for miles around, there was more than enough to compensate for the small amount of damage we may have done.”

He shook his head. “No, Mademoiselle. There was not more than enough. Between the harshness of the weather, the inefficient farming techniques, and the constantly increasing rents, dues, taxes, and tithes collected by your family, the church, and the state, the peasant farmers barely had enough left over to keep their family in a state of semistarvation and seed their fields the following year.”

“I did not create the system,” she informed him bitterly. “God did. And it seemed to work well for hundreds of years.”

“From the point of view of the nobility, I suppose it did,” he agreed, his tone blatantly sarcastic.

“Citizen Julien, you have been hired by my father’s friend to rescue me, and I will not tolerate a mere employee lecturing me on the perceived evils of my class,” she snapped furiously.

His jaw tightened and his expression grew dark. It was obvious she had insulted him, but she did not care. There was a moment of taut silence, and Jacqueline sensed that he was fighting to control whatever he was about to say to her. Then, as if by an act of will, his expression softened to one of amusement and his whole body seemed to relax.

“Then with your permission, Mademoiselle,” he drawled out as he swept into a low, mocking bow, “I will leave you to continue the task I was hired to perform.” He started toward the door.

“Wait a minute,” she ordered.

He hesitated, but did not turn to her.

“You have not yet told me if you are going to help me kill Nicolas,” she reminded him.

Slowly he turned to look at her. “No,” he replied in a low voice. “I am not.”

“Naturally you would be paid for your services,” she quickly assured him. She realized she probably should have discussed the issue of his fee before asking if he would accept the job.

He looked at her with amusement. “So you wish to employ me now, do you, Mademoiselle? How very interesting.” He paused, as if he was considering this turn of events. “And what, may I ask, do you propose to pay me with?” His tone was infuriatingly mocking.