The Forbidden Rose (34 page)

She didn’t remember losing it. And her mind . . . And her mind. “My cap is under the table. You have had a little practice in helping ladies dress. I find that attractive in a man. It argues a certain thoroughness.”

“Oh, I’m thorough. That’s what I’m scared of. I’ll get that for you. And that’s the last of it. Damn, but you’re fine.”

“I am what the cat drags in.” She combed her hair with her fingers, making it lie down neat. She was barely done when he fished out her cap and dropped it on her head.

“You are the most beautiful woman on earth. We’re going downstairs now and getting married. I think I can manage it.”

“Now? At this moment?”

“At this moment.” His face was sober, utterly. “I have money. Enough to keep you. I’m not just . . .” He gestured to his clothes. Himself. “I’m not just this. My family’s not the equal of the de Fleurignacs. But—”

“I know what you are. You are the son of some house of great respectability that has not the least idea what to do with you. The de Fleurignac who rode to the Crusades was exactly a man like you. He besieged any number of cities with great success and carried a sword as tall as I am. He also wrote poetry. I am not entirely an idiot, Guillaume.”

“I didn’t fool you for a minute, did I?”

“Not so many minutes. And we will speak of marriage at some time in the future when your life is in less danger.”

“We’re not going to talk about it. I want you gone from here before Victor arrives. What possessed you to put yourself right in his path?”

“I am not in his path. It will be a miracle, a black and unlikely miracle, if he locates you before this afternoon.”

“You shouldn’t have taken the chance.” Guillaume was not angry, precisely, but he was in a mood that did not lend itself to rational discussion. He stopped before opening the door. “Why did you come here, Maggie? You know better.”

“I am planning to rescue you. This will take some work on both our parts. The first—”

“God’s frogs.” He stomped out.

“I do not yet know how I will do it, but I am very good at such things. It has been my work for years, this rescuing of people.”

“You’re not rescuing anybody. You’re leaving Paris.” He got to where Adrian sat cross-legged at the top of the stairs. “He’ll take you to London.” Guillaume scowled as he pushed past and headed down. “Hawker, you get her out of here, you understand me? Out of this damned deathtrap of a city. Out of France. Put her in a sack and carry her if you have to.”

“Understood.” He scrambled nimbly to the side, just in case. He was a boy who had dodged many informative blows in his time. “Now?”

“In a minute. First I have to marry her.”

“Fine with me.” The boy followed them down the stairs.

“I HAVE SAID I WILL MARRY YOU.” SHE WOULD HAVE preferred to stay in the room upstairs and make love, but it was not prudent. She could be as prudent as any number of Guillaume LeBretons. “You will admit there are minor difficulties.”

“That’s not going to stop us.”

The cloister was square, open to the sky, the carved stone arches and columns beautiful. It lay at the heart of the old convent, between the chapel on one side and the refectory and dormitories on the other. A well stood in the center with a roof over it. Two men were taking turns lowering a bucket, yard by yard into the well, and winding the windlass to bring it up again, full.

The chain shrieked. The bucket clanked and clattered. The men splashed across the courtyard to spill pails of water into a long trough on the shadowed side. A dozen girls and women had rolled their sleeves back to wash clothing. It was an agreement that the garden was left to the women in the morning, Guillaume told her. It was the men’s turn in the evening.

Guillaume intruded into this world of women and laid claim to a corner of this courtyard. He cordoned an invisible barrier around them by sheer force of will. In ten minutes, he had gathered a crippled priest, a cheerful middle-aged nun, the stiff, acerbic Marquise de Barillon, who remembered her, with disapproval, from Versailles, and Adrian.

It very much looked as if she was getting married. Almost immediately. She was willing, but she had not quite prepared for this in her mind.

Thirty feet away, women worked in line at the long trough, chatting to one another, as the women might in any village washerie. Here was a nun, elbow to elbow with a prostitute. A brown countrywoman splashed suds next to the soft, pink descendent of seven generations of nobility. They washed their clothing. They washed themselves. An old woman combed her long gray hair out over her back to dry. The courage of women expressed itself in these hundreds of small braveries. It was wholly admirable.

She would need small braveries of her own. It was not that she had not thought about marriage. But she had expected to be dutiful about it and somewhat resigned, as was proper for a woman of her class. She had not expected to marry the man she wanted. In prison.

She could not even contemplate the unlikelihood of marrying an English spy.

Père Jérôme read the service. She would be no less married if he gabbled out nonsense syllables by rote, but it was comforting to have this madness done by a scholarly priest who understood the words he spoke.

She had confessed to him ten minutes ago, standing beside the pear tree in the corner where they would not be overheard. It had been a hurried but sincere confession of her attempt to murder the Jacobin who attacked her at the chateau and the matter of making love to Guillaume. With two mortal sins to lift from her conscience, she had not added the details of her uncharitable thoughts toward her aunt, and the telling of many lies, and other small faults. Her brain had run perfectly dry and she could not even remember them.

The priest was not as shocked as she had expected. But then, he had come to her fresh from confessing Guillaume.

Latin whispered in the thick air. The low stone walls and the bushes and trees everywhere were spread with linen, drying. The sun fell blinding white, giving the cloister the look of an etching. There were no degrees of shade, no soft compromise, only a stark confrontation of opposites, black shadow and bright light, one against the other, with no mediation between them. July, in Paris, had been like that.

The planted beds on the four sides of the courtyard were abundant with flowers. Someone, perhaps a succession of these women, had been watering them right along.

She had always thought there would be a procession to the church and a silk canopy over her head. They would dance afterward and everyone would eat a great deal and become silly from the wine. She would be wearing a much prettier dress. The priest did not speak the whole Mass, only the consecration of the bread and wine. It was as if they stood on a battlefield and he performed the most necessary things.

When Death reached out, ready to close his fist, one saw what was necessary and important. Marguerite de Fleurignac could indeed marry Guillaume. She would choose.
This is what I want.

The women at their washing looked and then looked away with only quick glances back. They did not allow themselves to show curiosity about the ceremony going on across the cloister, though certainly they would talk about it at length, later.

Guillaume stood beside her, patient and serious. The sun slid over his great brutal strength. The scar was counterfeit, he said, but it seemed part of him. She would miss it. She had not seen him as marred for a long time. The line on his cheek was part of him, as if a lightning bolt slashed a tree, marking it but not making it less. She would someday see him without it, and he would be altogether different. Yet another Guillaume for her to know.

She knelt to take the small tearing off of dark bread from the hands of the priest. Guillaume did the same. Then, coming forward, the marquise and the nun.

The wine was sour stuff. The cheap glass was accidentally elegant in its simplicity. It was their wedding, so the priest gave wine as well as bread. When she had drunk, and Guillaume also, the priest wiped the lip of the glass with a white cloth and finished what was left of the wine to the dregs, making a face when he did so, but conscientious. His cuffs were deeply frayed. He had been in prison long enough to become shabby.

Father Jérôme set the cup down and lay folded cloth across it. “Another forbidden Mass in Paris. I like spitting in Robespierre’s eye. We may be interrupted at any moment, so I will spare you my homily on the sacred nature of marriage. It is somewhat boring.”

He opened his breviary so Guillaume could lay a gold ring upon the open pages.

“To the marriage, then. Guillaume,
vis accípere Marguerite hic præséntem in tuam
—”

Guillaume interrupted. “William. I am William Doyle Vaudreuil Markham.”

Father Jérôme nodded. Truly, nothing surprised him. “William,
vis accípere Marguerite . . .”

Guillaume said, “
Volo.
”
I do.

“Marguerite, do you take William . . .”

It was her turn to decide and agree and become. Behind her, Adrian and the nun and Madame la Marquise de Barillon stood quietly.

But she did not.
“Volo.”

“. . . faithful to her in all things as a man should be faithful to his wife, according to the command of God?”

Guillaume made his response, serious and grave, not taking his eyes off the priest.

At Versailles, she had lived among the great men of France, the brilliant, influential men who ruled half the world. Men of privilege and ancient title, of wit and dashing charm. Guillaume was the warrior who enters the king’s hall in black armor and throws down his gauntlet. Beside Guillaume, the men of the court looked like vicious children, playing corrupt games.

He had become distant and strange to her, even while he took the ring from the priest’s hand and slid it on her finger. Guillaume married her with her mother’s ring, the wedding band of her grandmother, which he had extorted from her. Guillaume, who was William Doyle and other names she could not recall. Who was a spy. Who was English. Who must be dissuaded from menacing Papa. Who must be rescued from this prison and from death.

She was married. Somewhere between one word and the next, it had happened. She changed her name. Her nation. She was becoming English in this very moment. It swept across her, inch by inch. It was like being transformed to a tree or a statue of gold or a red deer by some careless spell.

When she glanced up, Guillaume was laughing at her silently, with every obscure and sneaky particle of himself. Perhaps he knew what she was thinking. She was wedding a mountain of slyness.

I do not know how to not love him.
He was breath to her lungs, the fire of her nerves, the light of her eyes.

Father Jérôme said, “
Dóminus vobíscum.
”

“Whatever the fashion in civil law this week,” the priest said, “in God’s eyes, you are married.”

“Good.” Pounding impatience, barely held in check, radiated from Guillaume. In most marriages, it would be the eagerness of a husband to bear his wife away to the wedding bed. Here, it was Guillaume’s determination to be rid of her. “We need this written down.”

The priest opened the breviary. “In the back. Here. My brothers at Saint-Sulpice will add your names to the parish registry. I will write marriage lines for your lady as well. I need paper.”

Guillaume gestured to Adrian. “Inside. Sharpish. Find paper. I want you two out of here.”

“I’ll do better than that.” Adrian was already jerking his shirt free as he walked, headed behind a stone column. “Let me not show this to the whole bloody world. I have . . .”

Under the boy’s shirt, a wide band of linen wrapped his chest and belly. A money belt, of sorts. He pulled loose an end and unwound. “I have paper.”

“Helped yourself to some money, I see.” Guillaume didn’t sound disapproving.

“Irresistible temptation. You knew the minute I lifted it.” Adrian glanced around. Nobody was watching. He passed across a thick stack of assignats. “I’d give you the lot, but we’re going to need them. This is your paper. I collected it a night back. Decided I didn’t want to hand it over to that woman you work for.”

“I don’t work for her,” Guillaume said.

“Of course you don’t. And if that woman doesn’t terrify you, you lack imagination.” He unfolded a dozen creased sheets of pale cream writing paper. “Here. Wedding present.”