The Forbidden Rose (32 page)

Althea set the tray down on the small table beside the empty grate. “The Convent of Saint-Barthélémy on Rue Tessier.”

“I’ve seen the outside. An impenetrable pile of stone. Do we have any ties to the place? Anyone who knows anything about it?”

“Not yet. I’ve sent out word, asking.” Althea poured boiling water from the black kettle into the teapot.

Carruthers’s face showed every one of her years. The discipline that contained her was very apparent. Her anger, close to the surface. “Look at the guards, of course. We’ll try bribery.”

“We cannot get the accusation withdrawn. It was made by Victor de Fleurignac.”

“This is the way we lose agents. Some fool lifts a skirt. Some pig must defend his cousin’s honor.” She crumpled the newspaper in front of her and tossed it into the basket by the desk. “Not for politics. Not for ideals. Not for useful intelligence. Just a woman. Even with a man like Will Doyle. Where is she?”

“Not arrested. Not returned home.” Althea shrugged. “She’ll be good at hiding.”

“Then we will be good at finding her.” Carruthers stared out into the afternoon slanting its way across the courtyard. “We have eyes inside La Flèche, of course.”

“None of them close to Finch. Or we would have known who she is months ago.” One lump of sugar clicked into the teacup. Thea poured tea, then dripped in three drops of milk.

“I said I’d take care of her. To do that, I need to know where she is and what she’s doing.”

“She will be making plans to rescue Will.”

“Or betraying him further.” Carruthers’s lips narrowed.

“Don’t make Will’s mistake. We have no reason to trust her.”

“Everything we know about Finch says she’s a good woman.”

“She is a good Frenchwoman. She is an admirable leader of La Flèche. That doesn’t mean she’s on our side. Marguerite de Fleurignac is not one of us.”

Althea stirred the cup and handed it across. “Now, Helen . . .”

“I am less enamored of young love than you are. I expected better of Doyle. I trained him better than this. What damned asinine foolery is he playing with in the middle of a job?”

“You are becoming a cynic. Will doesn’t make mistakes about people. If he has put his life in her hands, they are reliable hands.”

“You’re a romantic, Thea.” Carruthers came to her feet, impatiently, and strode to the window. She stood there, holding the delicate cup. “Very well. Let’s say she’s trying to save him.”

“She may succeed. Finch of La Flèche is better at what she does than anyone we know. No one in the Service can match her.”

“We know her work.”

“If you could pick anyone to free Will, she is the one you would go to.”

“Perhaps.” Carruthers watched the youngest of her agents cross the courtyard. Paxton. He was seventeen. Any of her men and women might be in prison tomorrow and dead next week. She’d never thought it would be tough, unkillable Will Doyle, though. “La Flèche has tried to take men from prison before, and failed.”

“They have also succeeded. Many times. She will get her Guillaume back, Helen. There is no force on earth stronger than a determined woman.” Althea tidied the tea tray. When she judged sufficient time had passed, she said, “We must help her.”

“She has La Flèche to draw upon.” A long, reflective sip of tea. “But you’re right. If we find her, if help is needed, we’ll offer it. Tell the others. And we will keep her alive. For that much, she is one of ours. Who are you sending to the prison?”

“Me. I’ll go myself.”

“Take some of the counterfeit Will brought. Be careful, bribing. The prisons are overrun with fanatics.” Below her, at the kitchen door, Claudine finished sweeping the flagstones and set the broom aside to pump water into a bucket set in the stone basin. “Idealists are the devil. Has that rat of a boy come back?”

“No.”

The courtyard overflowed with red and yellow flowers and brilliant green leaves. Althea’s boundless love of gardening spent itself in a few square yards. Carruthers said, “Don’t take risks at the prison. I can’t afford to lose you.”

“We can’t afford to lose William Doyle.”

“I’m afraid we’re going to.” Carruthers’s face was still as marble. “If the boy is taken, he will betray us. He may already have betrayed Guillaume.” She put the teacup down, precisely and carefully, on the windowsill. “Tell the men to find Adrian Hawkins. Kill him.”

MARGUERITE CAME TO THE PRISON ALONE, CARRYING a basket, armed with money and her wits.

She was not a beautiful woman. She regretted that for a few minutes about once a week. Right now, a plain face served her well. The guards would interest themselves in somebody pretty. They’d remember her. The women of La Flèche did not try to be pretty.

At the big wooden door, she pinched her lips together. Angrily. She held on to that look through the entry yard and into the guardroom at the front of the prison.

They had made themselves a sty in what had once been the visitors’ parlor of the convent. It smelled of stale wine and sweat. Revolutionary slogans and obscene drawings scrawled the walls. Three clubs, thick and ugly, lay upon the table. They would use those for subduing prisoners.

Guillaume did not fight when he was taken. There were five men, armed. Did he fight here, at last, when he realized he could not talk his way free? Did they hit him and hurt him, where no one could see what was done?

“Guillaume LeBreton has been brought here.” She made it the firmest possible statement. She did not want to be questioned about how she knew this.

“You have business with him?” Boredom filled the man at the long table. If one must deal with guards, it is good for them to be bored with you. “Show me what you’re carrying.”

Prison guards were of all sorts. Some were revolutionary idealists. Some small despots, puffed up in their new power. Some were men with a grudge, here to take revenge on the upper classes. Some were bullies, pure and simple, who enjoyed frightening and inflicting pain on anyone who showed fear.

She did not, therefore, show fear. She was dressed as a shopwoman, neatly but not richly. She did not come hesitant and trembling. She marched forward, enraged.

“You have arrested my man and dragged him here.” She banged her basket down on the table. “
Why
, I do not know.”

She jerked back the napkin that covered the basket. “He is useless.” She slapped down bread. “He is a lout and a drunkard.” A sausage came next, long and black and of the cheapest sort. A brown wine bottle. Then, in one handful, three meager, sour yellow plums that rolled away and wobbled to a stop. “But he is a good patriot.”

“Good patriots are not denounced to the Tribunal. If Citoyen LeBreton is innocent, he will be freed.”

It was treason to suggest otherwise. She glared and said nothing.

The guard helped himself to the bottle of wine and motioned her to pack the rest away.

She had seen four guards. The senior officer was to her right, at the end of the table, a man of straggling gray hair and deep lines across his face. He had set himself a tedious task that involved removing the small springs from inside his gun and laying them out on a white handkerchief in front of him. He looked as if he knew what he was doing.

Not that one. A man who does such intricate, careful work will think too much. He will hesitate and reconsider even when the money is in his hands. He cannot be trusted to take a proper bribe.

This other man, though, the one who searched the basket . . . He had the loose lips and complacent eye of one who indulges himself. This pilferer of cheap wine might serve her purpose.

He set his forefinger upon the
carte de sûreté
she laid down before him. It was a recent forgery, but thoroughly dry. She’d checked before she left the loft.

“You are Citoyenne LeBreton? You are his wife?”

He cannot read.
“I am Citoyenne Odette Corrigou of the Section des Marchés. I am not his wife and not likely to be his wife since you have locked him up. What I am to do with a baby coming and no husband to help me, I do not know.”

That was more than enough excuse to be exasperated and a good reason to visit Citoyen LeBreton in prison. Even to visit him many times. The guards would show more compassion to a girlfriend than a wife. Men generally liked their girlfriends better than their wives.

She repacked the basket. “Will you let me see him?”

The senior guard nodded that she was to be let into the prison. A morsel of sympathy showed before he turned again to his bits of metal and his gun. The guard of the soft and paunchy belly—he was called Hyppolyte by the other man—led her into the hall to the door to the inner prison. She noted the number of steps and the direction. She would make a map later.

Once, this door had separated the nuns from the outside world. Now, it marked the division between guards and prisoners.

Hyppolyte carried the bottle with him, not wishing to lose his spoils to his fellow guards.

“I would like to bring Guillaume the wine,” she said. “It is one of his small pleasures.” She did not care whether the wine reached Guillaume or not. She wanted to know if Hyppolyte could be bribed. A man who would take a small bribe would take a large one.

She drew a pouch from her pocket and took out a folded bill, an assignat for fifteen sous. It was counterfeit—one of many counterfeit notes Adrian had somehow produced and given over to her—but this guard did not know that. Fifteen sous would have paid nicely the whole price of such a wine.
Now we will see.

Hyppolyte held his hand out. He took the bill and continued to hold his hand out and took the next bill as well and then the coins. When her purse was empty, he held the bottle up.

He tossed the bottle to her. She was quick enough to catch it before it fell and broke.

“Tell your lover to drink a toast to me.” He rattled his keys and opened the door and let her into the prison. The lock turned behind her. She did not let herself think how frightening that was. Six minutes here, and already she had learned something useful.

She stayed where she was. Faintly, through the door, she heard Adrian say, “It’s nothing to me, citoyen. Open it or leave it sealed. I get my tip either way.” He had entered the prison behind her, carrying an entirely convincing letter addressed to an unfortunate grain merchant who had been accused of hoarding. The letter asked, Was he the Michel LaMartine who was the nephew of Naoille LaMartine of Quesmy in Picardie? There was the matter of debt to be settled in her estate.

Adrian was saying, “I’m supposed to wait for an answer. I got all morning.”

Messages went in and out of the prisons. Business was conducted. Letters written. No one looked at delivery boys. Adrian would be invisible, poking into every corner.

She found Guillaume in the third of the rooms in the long hall. This was the lodging for ordinary prisoners who could not afford to pay for better quarters. He sat on the floor, cross-legged, on a gray straw mat, talking to two other men. His head was bare. His hair chanced to fall in a shaft of sunlight. The brown of it was like the side of a chestnut, smooth and richly colored. He wore no cravat or waistcoat or coat. He had not been beaten, not that she could see.

When he saw her, he rose to his feet, simple as a peasant in trousers and his shirt. “This is a surprise.” He took up his jacket as he walked by, and closed a hand around her arm and drew her away, thunderously silent, out of the open room where the men slept. “We can’t talk here.”

In the corridor outside, he pushed brusquely past the men and women gathered in their twos and threes and brought her to narrow stairs that led upward.

He wanted privacy and was taking her off to it, forcefully. In privacy, she could hold on to him. Just hold him. That was not possible in the midst of these bored, curious, and doomed people.

She said, “Were you hurt?” and when he did not answer, “We are of one mind here. A touch and a nod will tell me where to go with you. It is not necessary to drag me as if I were a sullen child.”

His face was unrevealing, as always, and she did not have leisure to tease out signs of what he might be feeling. His muscles and the hold on her arm said he was angry. That was not entirely a surprise. He would be angry she had come here even while he was glad to see her. She was filled with joy, only to touch him, and with her own fear and anger. They were both in the grip of such conflicting emotions, it was amazing they did not fly apart like poorly wrapped parcels.

Men and women sat on the lower stairs, since there were no chairs anywhere. Guillaume glared them aside or pushed past. It was a long climb to an upper hall, dim and bare, lit by one small, high window at the end. Three men had taken the floor at the top of the stairs, casting dice. Two wore the clothing of the poor. The third, a velvet coat and knee breeches, much wrinkled.