The Forbidden Rose (40 page)

“Well, no one will burn these.”

“Where’d you get the books? Steal them?” He liked to think she’d had the initiative, but she probably just bought them. He came over to open one. Lots of writing. He recognized some of the words.

“They are lent to me by a friend. You will be careful with that.”

“My hands are clean.” For God’s sake, she acted like he wasn’t good enough to even touch one.

“I didn’t mean that. It’s just . . . no one comes here. I have lost the knack of hospitality.”

No. Men didn’t come to this narrow broom closet of a room. No sign of it. Whatever Justine did in this house, it wasn’t making the beast with two backs in this room. Interesting to speculate on just what she did do for a living. If Doyle was alive tomorrow, he’d ask him what he thought.

He held the book up, asking permission.

He felt silly, sitting on the froufrou, dainty bit of a chair she had, so he took the book with him and sat with his back to the wall under the window where the light was good.

She’d set him a mat here, last night, on the clear space under the window. He didn’t need watching over for a few scratches on his arm, and he didn’t need it washed and rebandaged this morning. But if a girl offered, he wasn’t going to turn it down. That was what you might call one of the guiding principles of his life.

He’d found out last night that Justine snored. A burring, feminine little snore. Kind of pleasant.

The book he’d picked had small print, but there were pictures. That helped. He couldn’t figure a lot of words. Pictures let him know the general territory he was walking around in.

Halebarde
. He put his finger under the text and started working his way along.
Arme offensive composée d’un long bâton d’environ cinq piéds, qui a un crochet ou un fer . . .
And there was one of those words that didn’t seem to mean anything much. Even if he could figure out how to say it, likely as not he’d never need it.

Justine sat down beside him and took the book away. “You cannot pronounce French at all. You speak as if you came from the smallest hill village of Gascony. I think you are very stupid. And whoever sent you to France is even more stupid. Listen to me.” She read it off, making the words sound Parisian. “This is Diderot. The
Encyclopédie
. Everything there is to know is in here.”

Now that was interesting. He’d like to know everything there was to know. “Read some more.”

It turned out a
halebarde
was a stick with an iron hook on the end. Not useful just at the moment, since no one was waving one in his face, but it might come in handy someday. He said the words after her, memorizing and trying to get them right.

She didn’t sound like Daisy, who’d taught him to speak French. From Gascony, Daisy was. He could learn two accents. He’d sort them apart in his head when he was talking.

He put his arm behind Justine’s back so she could lean on him, instead of on the wall, him being softer and warmer than plaster. He wasn’t pushing. She could take him up on the offer or leave it.

After a few minutes, Justine leaned against him and set the book half in her lap, half in his.

They’d got to “
halibran,
” which was a baby duck and another word he was going to have only moderate use for, when she stopped and looked sideways at him. “Guillaume LeBreton was well when you went to see him?”

“Well enough.” Doyle had got himself beat up in prison, but he was walking around. He’d do. “We didn’t take time to chat.”

They’d had three minutes’ meeting in the open corridor. Time to pass over a ball of twine and tell him to send it down the well. To say the rescue was planned for midnight. That Maggie was waiting for him in the dark. Time to point out that nobody on earth was going to talk Maggie out of doing whatever she set her mind to and they were all just helpless corks bobbing in her wake and Doyle might as well get resigned to it.

Then he’d slipped off to deliver another puzzling communication to the merchant they’d made use of before. More questions about inheritance from a relative he had never heard of, this relative being a figment of the imagination.

“Will this work? Can your LeBreton do this?” Justine asked.

“If he can pick two locks and get to the courtyard and he doesn’t come across something more interesting to do. He said he’s bringing other people out with him.”

“That is unwise.” Justine frowned. “And it makes our part more difficult.”

“Which I am sure is an object of great importance to him. Anyway, I didn’t have time to talk him out of it.”

“You think he will be there, at midnight.”

“I think he has to be.” There was no one else he could say this to, so he said it to her. “He told me his name was read out. They’re coming for him in the morning. If we don’t get him out tonight, he’ll die on the guillotine tomorrow, round about teatime.”

MARGUERITE PUT THREE LAYERS OF GOLD LEAF upon each toenail, stopping in between to knit and read poetry and let everything dry. She heard the voices before the tramp and shuffle of boots because they did not trouble to keep themselves quiet. Then the click and clank of metal they carried also announced their coming.

When she held Jean-Paul’s watch to the candle she saw that it was eleven o’clock. Time had passed more quickly than she had thought.

They were stars in the dark, the men who came with their lanterns, and there were a dozen of them. Two of them hefted huge coils of rope. Others carried lumpy sacks.

“My Marguerite.” Poulet came in front of the others and dropped down to sit cross-legged beside her. “You must put your shoes on or my friends will go mad with desire. You have the most exquisite feet.”

“I am told that,” she said. “It pleases my vanity no end.” His friends were young, all of them. Her own age, or younger. They dressed with great aplomb and style, expensively, in an extravagance of fashion that put large brass buttons upon their coats and spread lapels like wings across their breasts. Two of them wore gold hoops in the left ear, like pirates.

They were not very good at being silent. They had dined well and smelled of wine and some of them were a little tipsy. When she listened to them speak, it was obvious that every one of them had been in these caverns many times before. They came to the quarries for the adventure of it. Because it was forbidden and dangerous.

They were not of La Flèche. They told her their names, carelessly, openly. They made her feel old.

In a while, when they would not be silent, Poulet took them into the next chamber to lay out ropes and rungs and assemble the ladder Jean-Paul had designed for this endeavor. Jean-Paul himself came not many minutes later, with Hawker and three more of these young men, and went off to supervise.

She sat with her back to the wall of the well, waiting and listening.

Lights appeared, the furtive, faint glows of dark lanterns, and with them, a third group of men.

They approached silently, only their lights revealing that they were there. These were suspicious men who studied her and every corner of the cavern, and slid off in twos and threes to investigate the distant voices Jean-Paul supervised.

Justine was with them. “I brought friends.” She stood, frowning. First one man and then another came up to whisper in her ear. She nodded. The men, and their lights, retreated to separate, distant corners of the cavern.

None of them was well dressed, none laughed or made jokes, and none of them told their names. However, several also smelled of wine.

Justine sat beside her in a companionable way. “They are smugglers, but they are also friends of mine. They can be trusted.”

“I had thought they might be. The traders of the coast are remarkably similar to your friends.” She passed Poulet’s flask across. Justine thanked her and drank and cleaned the mouth of the flask politely against her sleeve before she gave it back.

“What is the time?” Justine asked.

“Twenty minutes short of midnight. The ladder is almost ready, I think.”

Justine nodded.

There were a few minutes to wait so she spoke of what was puzzling her. “Why did you bring me smugglers? It is not that I am ungrateful, but I do not know precisely what to do with them.”

“I am almost sure we will need them.” Justine laughed softly.

Doyle lined men and women up across the courtyard and down the cloister, touching a shoulder to say “Keep quiet.” Touching an arm to say, “Wait.” They’d be scared, pulled out of sleep in the middle of the night. His lieutenants, three men and one woman, were holding their sections of the line tight and quiet.

Five minutes to go. He pulled the healthy, young ones out of line and moved them up first. These were the ones he could move fastest. The ones who had the best chance.

Two candles stood on the rim of the well. Little lights that wouldn’t be seen on the other side of the wall. Everything else was black. Nobody whispered. Nobody shuffled his feet. Nobody even breathed loud. Guards were patrolling twenty feet away, beyond the wall.

The great danger was a
mouton,
a spy among the prisoners, who’d give them away. They’d left one tied hand and foot in the cells—the man they all knew about. Now everybody was on the lookout for another, watching the man next to him.

Ladislaus, the Polish forger, carried a watch. The candle gave enough light to read the hands. Midnight.

The bucket was by the well, upside down. They weren’t going to use that tonight. Bucket and chain made an unholy racket. He’d send a scout down, sneaky and quiet. Strong, brown string, the kind gardeners used to tie up plants.

Hawker hadn’t had time to explain. He’d passed over the ball of twine and said, “Get to the well at midnight. We’ll be down in the bottom. Maggie’s taken it into her head she has to be waiting for you.”

He knew Maggie’s plan. Knew it just as if she were standing here telling him the whole thing. He could have sat five hundred years in this lockup without thinking of the quarries. Maggie thought of them right off.

He’d filled a handkerchief with dirt and tied it to the end of the twine. Another handkerchief was tied on, floating out free, making a big white flag. Nothing more useful than handkerchiefs. He walked past men and women, up to the well, and let his bait down over the rim, into the cup of dark. Fishing for a way out. He hoped they were ready, down there, for the crowd he was bringing with him.

He played out a dozen yards, then another ten, keeping track, feeling the rough edges of the well shaft as the bag caught and bounced over the stone.
She’s down there right now. I’m sending this down to her.

When he hit the water, he’d bring it back up and try again. They might not be ready yet.

Hand over hand, slow and easy. Then he felt someone take hold of the other end. Felt the twitches that meant somebody working. Then three hard tugs.

He took back his sixty feet of twine, pulled in rope that had been tied to it, then reeled in still heavier cordage. Ladislaus helped him bring up the last of it. It came slowly, bumping awkwardly. What they had was heavy burlap bundles wrapped around big iron hooks. The hook went over the rim of the well. The rope ladder trailed down from that, disappearing into the depth and the dark.

He barely had the hooks secure when he felt the jerks of somebody climbing up. A minute later, a head poked out. Hawker. He came aloft scowling at the line of men and women, disapproving as a cat in a glue factory. A bare whisper of sound. “You lost me ten sous.”

The first man in line was a soldier from the Vendée. A bandit, they called him in Paris. He didn’t need help getting over the rim. He knew how to follow orders and he was fast. A good choice for the first man out.