The Forbidden Rose (26 page)

There was more to it than shrugs. Clothes, for instance. Doyle made him change his clothes from the skin out before they crossed the Channel. He’d cut his hair. He kept telling him how to eat and how to sit and how to walk.

Ten thousand tricks. Doyle knew them all. He’d bet Doyle could tell a Frenchman from an Englishman by the smell of his farts.

The footman who’d left Maggie’s house had headed straight here, easy as you please, and handed over a letter at that door down at the far end of the courtyard. He didn’t wait for a reply. Be interesting to know who in Maggie’s house was sending letters this time of night. Interesting to know what you put in a letter you sent to the most powerful man in France.

As to Robespierre’s house . . . Doyle would say, sometimes the direct approach is best. Just walk in.

Nobody paid attention when he sauntered through the wide passageway, into the carpenter’s yard. He faded into the space behind a pile of long boards somebody was going to find a use for, one of these days.

He’d wait a bit. An hour, just to be on the safe side.

This was a trusting household. No candles inside. Shutters closed and the window sashes thrown up. They were sleeping the Sleep of the Just in there. Probably they tired themselves out with being Incorruptible all day.

 

 

DOYLE found Talbot gone from Rue Palmier. Talbot wasn’t the most brilliant man England ever spawned, but he was a conscientious Service agent and if he was away from his post, he’d be following someone who’d slipped into or out of Hôtel de Fleurignac. Considering the hour, that was probably somebody interesting.

In the attic lookout, Doyle found the chair empty. Hawker was gone.

The promising note was that somebody—he’d guess it was Hawker—had pulled out a brush and bootblacking from the possessions scattered around the room and written a big note on the wall. SWIVE.

He wouldn’t put it past the boy to go off swiving whores, but he wasn’t going to express himself in Old English. That might be his attempt at some part of the verb
suivre—
to follow—and mean that Hawker was tracking somebody.

He’d brought stew meat, wrapped up in bread, for the boy. Since Hawker wasn’t in sight, he didn’t mind eating it himself.

It looked like he had the night watch. That was the great joy of the Service. You never got too senior to pull the short straw. He sat in one chair and put his feet up on the other, watching Maggie’s house.

Her room was at the back of the house, second floor. He couldn’t see the window from here. Her bedroom would be dark, this time of night. She’d be in her bed, lying on top of the covers, letting the wind run over her. She’d have a proper bed tonight and a proper linen night shift on her, but she wouldn’t be lying prim and stiff and proper. She’d be sprawled out, hugging her pillow, tucking it between her legs. She slept like a man had just finished with her. Like she was soft and satisfied and grabbing a few minutes of sleep before they started again. That was the way she always slept. He’d watched her doing it every night on the road.

That scrawny, blond man she met in the baths would be Jean-Paul Béclard, her partner in La Flèche. An old lover, obviously. A former lover, unless he missed his guess. That meant he didn’t have to track the man down and beat him up in an instructive manner.

 

 

THE noise in the city leaked away. It got quiet. It was the hour for what Lazarus would call nefarious deeds.

Hawker slipped from hiding. The courtyard was full of moon and that damned lantern light from the street out front. He kept to the edges of the yard where the shadows were. He could smell dog. There was a whuffling snore from upstairs that might be a dog sleeping. Which went to show that some dogs weren’t worth spit when it came to guarding a house.

The front door opened out of the work yard. It was ready to stand off battering rams. The window next to it was guarding the house with a pair of flimsy wood shutters closed with a latch. God, you’d think there weren’t any thieves in this city.

Take the knife out. Slip it in between the shutters. Lift the latch. He held his breath till the shutters folded back without squeaking. He swung his feet in.

For a man who was chopping off a couple hundred heads a week, Robespierre was damn unconcerned about his own safety. Upstairs, five or six snores said they slept heavy, the way honest folks do. Seemed they had an honest dog, too.

Light came in through the shutter he’d opened. Enough to see around the room. A letter lay in the middle of the dark wood table. That’d be the one the footman brought from Maggie’s house.

He nipped it up as he walked by. The door to the right let him into the kitchen, with a fire glowing on the hearth. He didn’t like to put a good knife into a fire. It played hell with keeping an edge on the blade. But sometimes you do what you don’t want to on a job. When the blade heated up he lifted the seal off the letter.

What he had was lots of scrawl in black ink. He couldn’t read it. He couldn’t read print all that well and sure as hell couldn’t read twisty French handwriting. But the signature said Victor.

Take it with him, or close it up and put it back so they wouldn’t know he’d been here?

Lazarus used to set him problems like this. He’d lay out the problem and give him the time it took to breathe in and out to think what to do. The next breath, Lazarus cuffed him halfway across the room if he hadn’t decided.

A big, square box to the side of the hearth had sheets of fine writing paper in it, screwed up long and tight. That was to light candles with or carry fire from one room to the other. The paper had writing on it.

Not just the one letter. Lots of letters.

Just made you wonder what kind of a careless household they ran. A powerful man lived here. What were the chances those papers had something interesting on them?

He stuffed papers down his shirt. All the paper spills. The letter from Victor de Fleurignac. Then he went out the window he’d come in through.

He was out of the courtyard, out into the streets. He left the Rue Honoré as soon as he could and found the smaller ways where they didn’t bother to light them, holding to the middle of the road where no one could jump him, not hurrying, walking through the dog-chewed edges of the night toward the Marais and the house with blue shutters.

MARGUERITE KNEW WHERE TO FIND PAPA. DEEP in the park, at the end of a lane of poplars, a statue of Diana stood naked to every weather, endlessly drawing an arrow from her quiver. Here was an oval rose garden. They had come here when she was very young. He had explained the theory of numerical sequences while she sat on the grass and collected fallen rose petals. She told him about the fairies who lived in the rosebushes. He explained how to calculate the orbit of the moons of Jupiter.

He was there, among the rosebushes, waiting for her.

She said, “I will tell you the bad news first. They have burned the chateau.”

But one of Papa’s servants—he would not tell her which—had already come to him with this news. The first shock of it was over. She need only relate the whole round tale, which did not take long. It was necessary to admit that she had not saved his library.
I did not save my own writing. I was concerned with saving myself.
She again admitted she had not saved the library. She admitted it several times. She agreed that, certainly, Papa would have prevented the destruction if he had been there. She heard the speech he would have made from the steps of the chateau to stop the mob. It was moving.

“They would have listened to me,” he said. “You are certain you did not save any of the library?”

He was dressed oddly, even for Papa who always dressed oddly. He wore a tricorne hat and a military coat, much too large for him, dark blue. Its brass buttons glinted even in this light. The scarlet of his waistcoat was forceful enough to be seen by the light of the lanterns in the cafés across the street. His hair hung untidily around his face. Everything about him was at once shabby and flamboyant.

Papa looked up at the sky above Paris and sighed
.
He would have liked to ask yet again if she did not possibly save any of his books.

After a long and melancholy moment, he said, “We lay our possessions on the alter of history. It was inevitable the chateau should be destroyed. It has outlived its time. The Republic will take all the grand mansions, in the end, and put them to rational use. Schools. Prisons. Manufacturies. Perhaps orphanages and hospitals.”

“They did not take the chateau and put it to good use. They destroyed it to a heap of rubble.”

He did not answer. He had a vast ability to hear only what he wanted to hear.

“Everyone is wondering where you have gone, Papa. Some of us are worried.” She ran her fingers into her hair. “What are you doing with Nico? He should be at the Peltiers’s house.”

“I took him. Sylvie left him with servants, after all, and I needed him.”

“You wanted a monkey?”

“I am an organ grinder. I need a monkey. It is not easy to find a monkey in Paris these days.”

With Papa, one never knew how much of what he said was slyness and how much was his small madnesses and how much was rational thought expressed in his own particular dialect. A box leaned against the tree at his feet. She recognized it now by the bright colors and the hand crank. It was the box of an organ grinder. A hurdy-gurdy. “You are a street musician?”

“One must do something. If I stay in my rooms and write, they become suspicious of me. No one stays in their rooms. With Nico, I am above suspicion.”

“You collect money in a hat?”

“Do not be ridiculous. The monkey does that. I play music.”

“I should have seen that.” She leaned against the low wall of marble that separated a walkway of raked gravel from the flowerbeds of the rose garden. Nico snuggled in the crook of her arm. He liked being scratched behind his ears and over the top of his head, so she did that. “Do you feed him properly? He looks thin.”

“Of course I feed him. I feed him my own dinner. Marguerite, will you stick to the point? Did you bring money?”

She had brought all the coin she had in her room, which was a goodly amount. She never knew when La Flèche would call upon her resources. “I will give it to you when I understand what is going on.”

“I am Italian. I play music upon the streets. I speak only Italian. I live among Italians of the city. I am from Padua.” He brooded over that for a moment. “Padua was a mistake. It is a city I abominate. But once I had said it at random I could not take it back. I have told them my father was from Sospel, however, so I am French and have French papers.”

Sometimes when she was with her father—this was one of those times—she wanted to howl like an animal and beat her fists upon the ground.

She reached into her pocket—the left pocket that held several small, useful things, not the right one that held money—and fed Nico another of the comfits he should not be eating. He had, she hoped, a digestion of iron.

Her own stomach was much disordered. She had been ill upon the cobblestones, suddenly and unexpectedly, on the way to the Tuileries. She still felt sick. It was from something she had eaten, doubtless. “You are pretending to be Italian.”

“Have I not just said that? Pay better attention. Did you know, I bought papers for myself in the Rue Manon for twenty-seven livres. It is very inexpensive. I was surprised.”

“There is a vigorous industry in false identity papers, Papa. We are all shocked by it. Why have you suddenly chosen to become Italian?”

“I am in hiding.” He brooded. Her father brooded often and with great thoroughness. “To escape my enemies. Perhaps I should have become German. The Germans are a more serious people.”

“You have no enemies, Papa. The burning of the chateau was not sanctioned by Paris. There is no arrest order for you. I asked Victor.”

“They do not want to arrest me. They want to kill me. That is an entirely different matter. Even in a time of revolution, there is still murder. They tried to stab me.”

“Who?”

“Two men, in an alley. I do not know them.” On top of the hurdy-gurdy was a thin, braided strap. Nico’s leash. He took it now and ran it through his fingers to get to the end. “They may be Martinists. Or Fouché has sent them. But it is probably the English. The English are almost certainly enraged. They might even burn the chateau.” He mulled it over. “To smoke me out. Yes. It is the English.” He nodded. “I hope you’ve brought enough money. There’s a copy of Rahn’s
Teutsche Algebra
for sale in the Rue Percée that I must buy. They will not give it to me unless I bring hard cash. There are several other texts of interest.”

Papa had been to England. Not once, but several times in the last year. “What did you do in England, Papa?”

“Nothing of importance. And I do not intend to go back. The food is barbarous. You should give me the money you brought and return home. It’s not safe for you to be out this late at night. People watch you, and there are criminal types abroad.”