The Forbidden Rose (17 page)

If she were upon the most important peak of a great mountain, one of those in Switzerland or the great ranges of the East, with the ground distant below and she tripped off the edge and fell, there would be a feeling of floating and a rushing wind and she would seem to hang motionless between earth and sky. All the long minutes of falling, she would believe destruction was not inevitable. She would hold that hope in her heart till the last instant when the ground came up, quite suddenly, and all was finished.

Being with Guillaume had been such a fall. Now, she encountered the solid earth. She could not go to walk across Normandy with him again. She could not even return with him to Jeanne’s small room. In every important way, they had already said farewell. She stood upon the doorstep, trying not to think about what came next. Trying to resign herself in a wise fashion. Truly, there were limits to the uses of philosophy.

“Or we can stand here a while,” Guillaume said. “It’s a nice day.”

“One more minute. Then I’ll knock.” She had a stone in her chest instead of a heart. “Will you ask my father to pay you? We have not talked about this at length.”

“I’m going to insist on it.” He had become curiously without expression, as if even his endless invention had found its limits. “It’ll look odd if I don’t.” Another minute. “I didn’t take you with me for the money. You know that.”

“I know nothing about you except an assortment of lies.” She had no right to disgruntlement. She indulged in it anyway. “Now you will be finished with even the small trouble of telling lies to me. You will be pleased.”

“Right. That’s me, grinning like an eel.”

She would not forget his voice, would she? It was like grindstones rubbing together. No one else spoke like that.

“It was good. Being with you.” She spoke each word with care. Their interlude was almost over. “If matters were different, I would . . .” She pushed the air out of her lungs and stopped talking, because there was nothing to say, really. “But things are as they are.”

He still kept the ring he had taken from her. Her mother’s ring. She had not asked for it back and he had not offered to return it. Was she wrong to leave it with him and think he would treasure it?

She would imagine him keeping it and taking it out, sometimes. To look at. To hold his hand. There was no end to her foolishness.

“Let’s get this over with.” He slipped past her and raised his fist to bang on the wood, making a sound that was loud and hollow and final.

I have tasted his hands. I have bitten into the marrow of his strength. He is mine.
The heart has no sense at all.

Janvier, who was Papa’s steward, was already awake to open the door. He was dressed in black jacket and knee breeches and a plain linen shirt. No lace and silk livery for the servants any longer. The veneer of revolutionary ideals was thick in her father’s house.

“Mademoi—Citoyenne
.
What?” His jaw hung open. He looked to the street. Looked in both directions and saw no carriage. No maid. No footmen unloading luggage. His eyes fixed on Guillaume’s scar. “What has happened? Where is the carriage? Why are you dressed like that?”

No soldiers had come to her house to arrest her. The betrayal that struck across Normandy had not touched La Flèche in Paris. And no one had brought word of the burning of the chateau.

“You sent no message, mademoiselle. We thought you were safe at Voisemont.” Janvier retreated before her, sputtering.

“It seems I am not. Where is my father?” She must acquaint Papa with various sorts of bad news. And Victor. Victor would complain and blame her. He would have blamed her if lightning shot out of heaven and burned the chateau.

Guillaume brought his large presence into the entry hall. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, face-to-face with a woodland nymph, naked, in gilded bronze. He studied it with a grave expression.

“The master is not . . .” Janvier searched the street again, as if he expected a carriage to suddenly appear, then closed the door. He stood, being suspicious of Guillaume.

“My father is not what?”

“He is not here. Precisely.”

Fear trickled into her. “Where is he, precisely?”

Janvier said nothing. He was no fool, her father’s steward, or he would never have survived being in charge of Papa’s household. Like any good servant, he had a highly developed sense of when to keep silent.

Something was wrong. There was no sign of it in this calm, clean, well-ordered entry hall, but she knew. It was as if she walked the icy surface of a winter lake and heard the thin sound of ice cracking under her. “How long has my father been gone? An hour?” Janvier would tell her, eventually. Or she would find someone who would. “A day? A week?”

Had Papa been arrested? Pulled from his bed in the middle of the night and hurried away by a troop of
gardes
. It was the way of things these days. It could happen to anyone. Even Papa. Even wily, infuriating Papa.

If he was in prison, it might already be too late. It was infinitely hard to rescue men once they were in prison.

She had given Papa a hundred opportunities to leave France and become émigré. Argued with him. Told him to go to England and be safe. He would not. She could only hope he was in Oslo again, making notes upon the nesting habits of Norwegian geese, instead of wandering some battlefront, gauging the skill of Austrian artillery officers. With Papa, one never knew.

Guillaume did not watch her directly. He looked in the long mirror and followed her with his eyes, his face without expression.

The door opened behind her. It was not her father who came from the salon. It was Victor. Who should not have been here, in her house, at this hour of the morning.

“Cousin Victor.” She made the hurried small curtsy that brushed the edge of rudeness. How many times had her father told her to be polite to Victor? “Janvier has lost his tongue. Tell me. Where is Papa?”

“Where have you been, Marguerite? We heard—” Victor bit off the rest. “Why are you dressed like that?” He looked to where Guillaume was inspecting more nymphs. The way Guillaume looked at them was not the way a man looks at Renaissance art. It was in the appreciative way a man looks at statues of naked women. “Who is he?”

That was a question she’d been asking herself for a while. “I will explain to my father. Where is he? In short words, if you please. Why is he not—”

Victor cut her off. “Later.”

The last time Victor had been in her house, he had not given orders. Something was dreadfully wrong. “Why are you here?”

Victor snapped, “Not in front of the servants.” He scowled at Janvier—Janvier, who had known every family secret for two generations—then turned to glare at Guillaume. “You have not yet told me who this man is.”

“That is a matter for my father to deal with. But if you wish to be private with me, let us do so. Come. The salon.”
Act as if Guillaume is nothing. Not important.
At the last minute, as if she had almost forgotten, she paused to say, “Sit down, Citoyen LeBreton, and wait. Use the wooden bench and do not touch anything. My father will pay you.”

Victor did not move.

She said, “This is nothing for you to be concerned with.”

“In the absence of your father . . . yes, it is my concern. The explanations will come to me. And it seems I must conduct this business for you.”

A sick weariness overwhelmed her.
Guillaume must leave. I must get him out of this house. Away from Victor.

Victor was not only her cousin and the de Fleurignac heir. He was a powerful man in his own right. A radical, a member of the Committee of Public Safety, and a friend of Robespierre himself. He was an idealist. A humorless man, self-serving as a weed, with stern morals and unshakable, very dull convictions. The opposite, in short, of Guillaume LeBreton.

Victor could have Guillaume killed by the lifting of a finger.

She sighed, noisily. “I have been in the dust of the road for four days, Cousin. I am hungry and filthy beyond endurance. You tell me Papa is in some trouble too complex to explain. Citoyen LeBreton can wait.” She barely glanced over her shoulder. “Go now and come back tomorrow. We are busy.”

Briefly, Guillaume looked up, straight at her. His eyes showed not a gleam of what had been between them.

“Who is he?” Victor repeated. “Explain this, Marguerite.”

She threw up her hands. “Very well. Perhaps you are the one to handle this matter, after all. This is Citoyen LeBreton, a peddler of small goods about the villages. When there was disaster in Voisemont—and there has been more than you can possibly guess—he was kind enough to bring me safely through the countryside, all the way to Paris. I promised to reward him. Take money from the strongbox and pay him for me, if you please.”

“A hundred louis d’or.” Guillaume seated himself firmly upon the bench. He folded his arms across his chest and transformed into the Tradesman Citoyen LeBreton, his eyes filled with calculations of money and value, his hands apt to handle the shape and form of merchandise. One could see there would be an occasional short weight among Citoyen LeBreton’s goods. “Gold. Not silver. Not paper.”

“Patriots accept assignats.” Victor was silkily threatening. “Only reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries demand coin. Do you know it is against the law to refuse assignats when they are offered?”

“The bargain was for coin.”

How did Guillaume do it? A twist of his mouth. The scar revealed to the light. A change in his voice. He became a man of the alleys and dirty streets in the crowded faubourgs east and south of Paris. Even his hands, resting on his arms, looked crude and dangerous. The same hands that had been like the hands of a god upon her skin.

She did not glance once at Guillaume. She did not trust herself to lie with her face and eyes as well as he did.

“Cousin.” She pushed past him impatiently. “We have troubles more important than dickering with merchants. Send Janvier to pay him and come to the salon. Please.”

Important matters would appeal to Victor. He was a man with a great belief in important affairs, all with him at the center.

He nodded. “You’re right. Go ahead of me.”

She opened the door to the salon. Behind her, Victor spoke softly. But she heard him.

“You should beware, Citoyen LeBreton. Men mount the guillotine every day for less than this single insolence you have shown me. Janvier will bring coin. Do not let me see you again.”

DOYLE WALKED AWAY FROM HÔTEL DE FLEURIGNAC, clicking a pouch of gold pieces.

Hawker didn’t approach till he got the hand signal. Then he caught up. “You just walked off and left her?”

“Right.”

“Was the father there?”

“Not a sign or a whisper. There’s a cousin who’s moved in. An interesting fellow. She doesn’t like him.”

They fell into step, the donkeys forming an auxiliary corps at the rear. The boy didn’t ask for a good long time. Two hundred paces. Then he gave in. “Interesting, how?”

“The number of men he’s killed.”
I could drag you halfway across Paris by that curiosity of yours.
“Bit of a Utopian philosopher, Victor de Fleurignac, which these days means chopping the head off anybody who disagrees with you. About a dozen so far. He thought about adding me to his bag. He would have, if Maggie hadn’t been standing right there. That is a man darkly and justifiably suspicious of me.”

He took a right into the Rue Riquier, stopped, and did a check of the straps of the panniers on both donkeys. Probably they weren’t being followed. Hard to tell in this part of the city.

Hawker stood alongside, fuming. “You left her with a cousin who kills people.”

“Not just with his own lily-white hands, he don’t. It’s all clean and judicial. Orders of the Committee of Public Safety.”

“You walk off and leave her because you think her father’s going to show up.”

“Or she’ll go find him. One or the other.” He patted the straps and clicked at the donkeys. “She is what we call bait.”

“You do that to her. You take her upstairs with you and then you do that to her.” Stomp. Stomp. Oh, the boy was outraged. “I could smell you two when you came down. Like a couple of alley cats. You grinning and her purring and stretching.”

That had been good, strolling along beside her, knowing she smelled of him. “I’m hoping that cousin of hers don’t have your extensive experience. Which he apparently don’t, or I’d be on my way to the chop right now.”

“Fine. Just fine. What about this pair?” Hawker poked an elbow back toward the donkeys. “We’re through with them, aren’t we? Why don’t we sell them, too? Lots of good, savory meat on those bones. Donkey fricassée.”

“Thought that was what you wanted.”

“You don’t eat your own donkey. And you don’t use your own woman as . . .” Hawker kicked a loose chunk of cobble in the gutter. It rolled end over end and rapped up against a wall. “Bait. That’s one of those delicate distinctions gentlemen make.”