The Forbidden Rose (35 page)

Guillaume peeled off the top sheet. It was clean on one side. He smoothed it flat against the nearest column and passed it to the priest. “Use this. Marriage lines for Marguerite.”

“I will write that with some dispatch.” The priest sat on the low wall. “This is no place for your wife.”

Guillaume took up her left hand and looked at the ring upon it. “If I live, and you want it, I’ll give you another ring.”

“I am content.”

“Then I’ll give you rubies to go with it.” He kissed her knuckles, where her ring was. “It’ll have to do. Hawker—Adrian—will take you to friends of mine. They’ll keep you safe.”

“I have my own friends in this city. I have not been transformed into a ninny by marrying you.”

The grin was so fast it didn’t twitch his features, just glinted in his eyes, like sun on water. Then it was gone. “A month from now, I want you in London.”

“I do not—”

“Maggie, listen. Go to England. To a man named Galba, in London. Hawker knows him.” Another gleam of a smile. “At Meeks Street, number seven. If there’s a child . . .” His hands tightened. She felt the trembling of his tendons, deep in his flesh where it didn’t show. “If there’s a child, Galba will make it right. He’ll make him legitimate.”

“When I go to London, you will be with me and deal with any small legalities.” She pounded her certainty into the rocks of reality as if it were an iron stake.

“If it’s a girl, name her Camilla. That was my mother’s name.”

Do not say this as if you will not be there.
“Camilla. William, if it is a boy.”

The priest sat on the stone bench and wrote. The ink bottle rattled ever so slightly when he took more ink.

The round, bustling nun picked up the papers Adrian had left on the wall. “These are very dirty.” She shuffled through them, frowning. “There is writing on them. Let me run inside and find you clean sheets.”

“This will do.” The priest left off writing. “Madame, if you will sign in this book and upon this paper I have prepared.” He held the last page of the breviary open for her. The Parish of Saint-Sulpice and the date, in the old style, was written.

When one married a man like Guillaume, one must not expect an ordinary marriage register in the corner of the parish church and a procession of giggling girls and dancing and little cakes. She wrote her new name in an old breviary with a sputtering quill, then signed marriage lines that had been written on the back of some discarded letter.

“Guillaume, my son. Your signature.”

He took her place and signed the book quickly, with his English name.

The marquise signed as witness. “I do not say your father will disapprove. De Fleurignac was always an oddity.” She considered Guillaume. “I’m not certain I disapprove either.”

“Sister Anne. If you would.” The priest was patient with the nun’s observation that the breviary was not a marriage register and that banns had not been called. That the paper was dirty and creased. He looked up. “And you.”

“Me?” Adrian’s voice cracked.

“You.” The priest filled the pen with new ink and wiped the clinging drop off on the lip of the bottle. “Here.”

Adrian held the pen as if it might turn and bite him. He drew his name, letter by letter, slowly.

“It is done.” The priest gave her the marriage lines. She held the paper by the edges. The signatures had not dried. On the back there was writing. Lines and lines of it.

Guillaume was giving orders to Adrian. He could as easily have saved his breath. “If she’s in Paris when they chop me, you make sure she don’t see it. Lock her up somewhere. You’ll figure out a way to do it.”

“You want to order me to stuff the moon in a box, you go right ahead,” Adrian said. “Don’t expect anything to come of it.”

He had a realistic view of the situation, Adrian. And what was this, written here on the back of her marriage lines?

“. . . a false idolatry that tolerates corruption, weakness, vice, and prejudice in men unworthy of the ideals of the Revolution.” There was more of it. “. . . monsters who have plunged patriots into dungeons and carried terror into all ranks and conditions . . . demands that we expunge from our midst those who prepare political counter-revolution by . . .”

Then came names. Names added, scratched out, added again. Joseph Fouché, Tallien, Vadier, d’Herbois. A dozen more.

She said, “This is very strange, this paper. I know who these men are, of course. Where did you get this, Adrian?”

Guillaume took it from her, frowned at it, then stuffed it back in her hand and went to find the other papers where they lay on the stone wall, fluttering like feathers on the wing of a bird. For a while he stood, going through one page after the other. He became very still. A less intelligent wife would have annoyed him with questions. She was not such a fool.

Guillaume looked at the boy. “Talk.”

It was a short explanation.

“Let me get this straight. You walked into Robespierre’s kitchen.”

“I wanted to know—”

“You walked out with his next speech.” Guillaume was shuffling from one paper to the next. “These are the names.”

Adrian said, “What names?”

She explained it to herself, as well as him, seeing the possibilities as she spoke. “He has said he will denounce his enemies to the Convention. Robespierre said this. Tomorrow or the next day everyone is expecting him to stand before the Convention and call for their deaths. All of Paris is waiting to see who he will name.”

“Lots of men want to know if their name is here. In this speech.” Guillaume gathered the papers together.

“Robespierre is not sure himself. Look. He thinks of one and then another and then marks that one out.”

“There’s what? . . . Seven . . . eight names.”

She said, “We can warn them. They have time to run.”

“I don’t want them to run. I want them to turn and fight.” Thumb and forefinger, Guillaume considered the page he held. Assessed the paper. “Look at the names. These are men who’ll fight if they’re cornered. If they see their death written out and there are enough of them . . .”

She met his eyes and knew what he was thinking. What he planned to do. “You will send copies of these,” she gestured to the pages he held, “to Fouché, Tallien, Vadier. All the men he names and crosses off and writes again.”

Guillaume nodded.

“It is more than that. You have the skill to add any names you want to these papers. You can send them to anyone, even Robespierre’s allies. No one feels safe. Each of them will feel the blade on his neck. His allies and his enemies, both, will conspire against him.”

“If I can get this to them before Robespierre walks into the Convention and gives his speech.”

Robespierre had not made the Terror by himself, but he drove it onward, cracking the whip. He had taken Papa’s work—Papa’s silly, harmless musings on the growth of genius—and twisted it to evil. Made Papa part of the cowardly assassination of young men.

It would be fitting to take Robespierre’s speech, in his own writing, and destroy him with it.

She said, “Varenne. Add Varenne. And Barère.”

He was already nodding. “Hawker, go inside. Find a man called Ladislaus. He’s a forger. I need him.” He jerked his thumb. “On the double. Run.”

MARGUERITE CLEARED A PATH IN THE LONG LOFT at the whorehouse so she could pace back and forth and think. She could not think sitting in one spot. “We have two days, maybe three, before Guillaume is taken to trial.”

Jean-Paul said, “Two days. Victor will make sure of that.”

No time.
She walked and turned and walked again. “We have two days, then. The easy way, the obvious, is to bribe a guard. We enlist his aid. We provide some small excuse for a guard to walk Guillaume out the gate.”

Jean-Paul sat in the armchair at the end of the loft. He had been there a long grumpy hour. “Release orders.”

“They would send back to check such orders if they did not come with the regular messenger.”

“Transfer orders. That’s the next obvious choice. We wave some paper at the guards and hope they deliver Guillaume into our hands. We need a carriage. A horse. We can steal those. Two men to play guards and a driver. We’ve done this before. Many times.”

At the end of her path she confronted a stack of crates and a decrepit chair. She came back again. “We did that five years ago, in the first chaos of the Revolution. All was in disorder. We could have fooled prison guards with chalk scrawled on a schoolgirl’s slate. It’s not the same now.”

“The basic principle hasn’t changed. Men look at a paper and do what they’re told.”

“When we played that game, we were the first. Too many romantic fools have traipsed in and out of Paris since then and bragged to half of Europe when they succeeded. The easy subterfuges are known.”

“Then we will find something that is not known to everyone.”

“It is not known to me, either.” She walked again, letting her mind revisit each corner she had seen in the prison. The answer was there, somewhere.

A small child, no more than four, sat on a box, watching her. She belonged to one of the whores of the house, doubtless, and was left to run free in the stable yard during the day. It was good to see that the mother kept her close, clean and well fed. There was love in the carefully combed hair and the little necklace of coral beads. But it was sad to see a child who would grow to take up her mother’s profession.

“What do you think?” she asked the girl. Her name was Séverine. “Shall we knock on the front gate with forged papers and obvious ploys?”

The blond head shook gravely. “No.”

“You are right. We have not survived by being dashing heroes with colorful disguises. We are like mice. There is no one more unobtrusive than a mouse.” She began pacing again. “I must find a mouse hole into that prison. There has to be one.”

Jean-Paul rose to take another look at the sketches and plans and maps spread out across her bed. He did not approve of what she was doing. He would risk his life to help her. Was that not the definition of a friend? And he did not approve of her marriage. He called Guillaume “that great rack of muscle” and “that walking lump,” which lifted her heart utterly. After all, who would want an old lover to endorse one’s marriage?

He arranged the sketches into a new order. When she came near, he picked up one on the left. “The baker.”

“The baker.”

“The wall he shares with the convent is covered by his ovens. We’d have to take them apart to get through. He employs three boys, who sleep in the shop.”

“That is not promising.”

“Here,” he held up the next paper, “we have Citoyen Vilmorin who lives with his good wife and two children. His garden backs to the church. It’s all open space, overlooked by three houses. He has a cellar of beaten earth. If there’s a crypt beneath the church—and we don’t know that—it’s thirty feet from his basement wall.”

“We have dug tunnels. We have knocked holes in walls. It is not impossible.”

Jean-Paul took up the next sketch. “The Widow Desault. Lives alone with a dog of noble aspect. Shares a wall with the convent. Again, it’s the chapel wall. Some of the guards are sleeping in the chapel apparently. This next one . . .”

He went through them all, one after another. He had done masterful work, he and the others. A dozen members of La Flèche had been at it all night and all morning. Her own plan of the prison lay on the makeshift table. The corridors and the cloister and the cells were laid out, each with the distances she had counted off. Adrian’s contribution was exact and careful, adding rooms she had not seen.

She would not let herself despair. She started walking. Jean-Paul went to sit in his chair, glaring out the window.

Séverine said, “Is your friend in very much trouble? The one who is a walking lump?”

“As much as can be.”

The child said, “The times are difficult. We must all be patient and clever.”

“You speak a great truth. I will not be patient, exactly, but I will try to be clever. If I were Sinbad and I did not have my roc handy—”

“What’s a roc?”

She stopped and knelt down. “That is a good question. A roc is a great white bird with wide wings. They would stretch from one side of the market square to the other if a roc landed there. They eat only elephants and ginger, and if you ask one nicely, he will give you a ride upon his back. They are especially fond of little girls who dress in blue. Did you know that? Is that why you wore a blue dress today?”