The Forbidden Rose (5 page)

The servant boy carried in the last of the donkey baskets. His gaze upon her was neither friendly nor unfriendly, merely assessing. It did not surprise her that a man like LeBreton would employ such an unsettling servant.

LeBreton started a fire with dry palm fronds, then laid on small lengths of charred timber. The boy took the canvas off the donkey panniers and lifted out smaller baskets with lids and leather bags, cooking pans and a coffeepot. He set everything out without hesitation, having a pattern to it, as if he’d done this many times. He put water to boil in a black kettle, exactly like the kettle in every cottage in Normandy, but his firewood was table legs and broken curio cabinets.

LeBreton finished his own unpacking and came over to her. He sat beside her, tailor fashion, so close his knee almost touched her. He’d pulled his hat off and left it somewhere so she had a clear view of his scar and his various other brutal features. His dense, weighing regard rested on her. “Let’s give you some coffee before I start asking questions.” Probably he had no expression that did not look menacing.

The boy, Adrian, came up carrying a blue and white china cup full of black coffee. Its handle was broken off and the rim was cracked. It was from the set the upper servants used. Had used. LeBreton wrapped her fingers around it till she had it steady.

“Drink this. Then we’ll talk.” He had the hands of a laborer. Blunt-fingered, calloused, capable, broad of palm. Hands like well-forged steel tools that had seen a lot of use. Hands like a treatise on engineering. “I’m not a villain, Maggie.”

A man like you is anything he chooses to be.
“I am Citoyenne Duncan. Or Miss Duncan. Not Maggie.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” He took the corner of her blanket, where it was slipping away off her shoulder, and pulled it higher. “You didn’t jump out of your skin that time. We’re making progress.”

There was no progress. She was exhausted, and she did not wish to spill coffee upon herself. She did not feel it necessary to explain this to him.

The coffee was hot and very sweet. True coffee, from Haiti, not the brew of roots and barley that filled the markets these days. “You do not make me less frightened of you by crowding in upon me like an overgrown bush.”

“Of course not. I do it by showing you how harmless I am. Look over there, Citoyenne Maggie.” Over there were the four donkey baskets. “That’s my stock in trade—Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Lalumière—the approved instruction list from the Committee of Education. Some children’s books with proper sentiments in them . . . ‘
C
is for counter-revolutionary. May they all die.
D
is for duty to France. Let us all try.’ That sort of thing. I got packs of playing cards. Those have fine revolutionary pictures on them. The single pip is a guillotine, which is just going to liven up a game, ain’t it? And I got me some nicely illustrated copies of the Rights of Man, suitable for framing and hanging over the fireplace. You see before you Guillaume LeBreton, seller of fine books.”

There was no slight possibility this man traveled with donkeys and sold books for his living. It was nonsense. This was the wolf who claimed he cobbled shoes. He did not fool her for even the tiniest moment. “That is a respectable trade, certainly.”

“Bringing revolutionary thought to the provinces. That’s my job. When I see the schoolmasters using the old books full of superstition and lies, I haul them out and burn them. The books, not the schoolmasters. That’s my little joke there.”

“It is very amusing.”

“Then I take orders for the approved books, which they’re eager to buy at that point for some reason. With luck, the books are still approved when I get back to Paris.”

“Yours is an uncertain life, citoyen
.
”

The fire snapped and shot out sparks. The servant boy went out into the rain and came back with armloads of straw from the stable.

LeBreton shifted, so the light of the fire was strong upon the ruined side of his face. That was deliberate. He was showing her the worst of him so that she would become accustomed. It worked better than it should have. Already she was less afraid of him.

He had been unlovely even before he acquired that scar, a man of blunt eyebrows, emphatic nose, and stern jaw. She decided now that he did not look evil, only hard and filled with grim resolve. He was like one of the stone warriors laid in the vault of an old cathedral, holding the hilt of a stone sword, waiting to be called back into battle at the Apocalypse.

She drank this coffee the sly giant provided. It warmed her. The rainy dusk, beyond the sad, broken windows, seemed brighter. She raised her knees to balance the cup upon and blew on the surface to cool it and made herself take it delicately, in little sips.

They had brought a china cup to her so she would have something civilized to drink her coffee from. It was a small, astute kindness that impressed her deeply. She was seated beside a most perceptive intelligence.

“You’d want tea,” he said. “You being from Scotland.”

“I do not much care for tea. I have never seen Scotland myself. It was my grandfather who was born in Aberdeen.” This was the story of her governess, the true Mistress Duncan, who was sandy and freckled and forty years old and married to a staid banker from Arles.

“But you’re still Scots.”

“One does not stop being a Scot so easily.” He was lying. She was lying. They traded prevarications. Perhaps they would become complacent, each of them thinking they made a fool of the other.

He did not know she had learned to lie at Versailles, in the old days, when the king was alive. Lying had been an art, formal and elegant as the minuet. The proper lie, the angle of a bow tied under the hat, a message slipped from one hand to another in a crowded corridor. The air had been dense with intrigue. Uncle Arnault had been at the center of most of it. She was no amateur at reading lies.

She took another sip. The coffee was sweetened with white, clean sugar that dissolved completely. Coffee from Haiti. Sugar from Martinique. These luxuries were expensive in Paris, but far cheaper in the port towns where the ships from the islands unloaded.

LeBreton might have innocently delivered books in Dieppe or Le Havre last week. But perhaps he had visited the small fishing villages of the coast, where the smugglers pulled their boats ashore. Perhaps he was one of the men who carried contraband across France—letters from émigrés in England, foreign newspapers, bank funds, messages from spies. He might even be a spy himself, Royalist, Austrian or English. He might be an agent of the Secret Police in Paris.

He could be part of La Flèche.

The servant boy, having made three pallets of his heaps of straw, was toasting bread by the fire. She sat straight and drank coffee, holding her hands elegantly, as she had been trained to do. She was very hungry.

“We’ll eat in a minute,” LeBreton said. “Have you stopped being afraid of me yet? I’m hoping for that.”

“I am surprisingly tenacious. This is good coffee.”

“Better than the wine we have. And we are finally going to feed you, looks like.”

The boy brought bread with cheese melted on it, juggling it from hand to hand because it was hot. He sat on his heels and held it out, balanced on his fingertips.

“If you think she has sense enough to eat slow,” LeBreton was genial as carded wool, “give it to her. You can clean up when she empties her belly out.”

Nothing changed in the boy’s dark face. “You feed her, then. She’s your pet.” He tossed the bread in LeBreton’s general direction and walked off.

They should not show her the bread and take it away. She would have clawed the world apart to get to that bread.

“I keep him around because he’s so fond of the donkeys.” LeBreton picked the bread up and brushed it off. Tore it into parts and laid them along his thigh. He blew on a piece before he handed it over. “Then there’s his honesty. You’d look long and hard to find a lad with his kind of honesty. And that amiability of his.”

She did not stuff bread into her mouth, snatching like an animal. She ate neatly. With restraint. She had been taught so well to be a lady.

When she was done, he took up another piece, ate half, and gave her the rest. “He didn’t think about you needing to eat slow. Now he’s annoyed at himself.”

“One is sincere at that age, and easily offended.” Maybe she burned her mouth. She didn’t feel it.

Another morsel broken between them. Bread for her. Bread for him. They might have been friends sitting at the hearth, toasting bread and tearing off hunks to share back and forth. LeBreton kept talking, but she paid him no attention. “. . . with your mind running round and round like a squirrel in a cage. If I was going to do terrible things to you—which, I point out, I ain’t got around to yet despite these numerous opportunities—there’s not much you could do about it, me being twice as big as you are and strong as an ox. And that’s enough for right now.” He got up and set the rest of the bread on the upturned planter they were using as a table.

He was right. She was still hungry, but she should not eat more.

“You concentrate on keeping that down, just as a favor to Adrian.”

He fed her and pretended to be harmless. He was subtly intelligent. He was a pillar of deception from the long, untidy hair he shook down to hide his face to the worn soles of his boots. Such a man did not wander to her chateau by accident.

She offered the most common of all the passwords of La Flèche. “If the wind is right, you can smell roses in the garden.”

“Roses? I saw some as we passed by. Pretty.”

It was not the right answer. She had not expected to feel so disappointed.

“When you finish that, I’ll lay a blanket by the fire and leave you to sleep,” he said.

He was right in this much. If she was to escape, she must sleep first. There would be some chance in the night, when he was less attentive.

He took the cup away from her, because it was empty. “Or you can just lie awake, thinking up all the things I might come do to you that I’m not doing now.”

 

 

THE long dim twilight of July was winding to a close when Doyle finished going over the grounds and got back to the orangerie. A drizzle had been coming down, off and on, for a while. Mostly on. He was damp clean through.

From every side of the garden, he’d been looking back toward the light in the orangerie. He couldn’t see the woman sleeping on her pile of straw, but Hawker was there, with his back to the wall, a candle lit beside him, a book in his lap. Alert. Keeping watch. Glancing up at the end of every couple lines, walking a round of the orangerie every ten or fifteen minutes. There was something to be said for recruiting cutthroats from the London rookeries. The King of Thieves, Lazarus, trained his crew well.

When Doyle showed himself outside the windows, Hawker set the book down and came to him. They found an oak tree far enough away that their Frenchwoman wouldn’t hear them talking, close enough they had a clear view of her. And they weren’t getting actively rained on, which was all to the good.

Maggie was edged close to the wall, rolled in her blanket, curled up tight. She’d lived through men burning the chateau and four days of lurking in the woods. He’d wrung the last strength out of her, scaring her. With food in her stomach and being warm, maybe she’d sleep the whole night.

“Now what?” Hawker spat, accurately, hitting an inch to the side of Doyle’s boot. “You bring her in and dry her off and feed her and tuck her in like a lost kitten. She’s de Fleurignac’s daughter. Right?” He waited for confirmation. “Does she know where her father is?”

“Most likely.”

“Fine. Do we ask nicely where the old man is, or do we haul her out and torture her in the small, cool hours before dawn?”

“We let her sleep.”

No way to tell whether the boy was disappointed not to have a chance to apply his skill with sharp implements. “And tomorrow?”

“We see if she’ll lead us to him. He’s probably not in these parts, or he’d have showed up by now.”

“So he’s in Paris.”

“If he is, we’ll take her to Paris. We have to go there anyway to drop off the money.” The donkey baskets were half full of counterfeit assignats, headed for British Service headquarters in Paris. One more yapping pack of nuisance to deal with.

He’d brought a bundle back, under his arm. He tossed it to the boy. “I found this. What do you read in it?”

Slowly, suspiciously, Hawker unrolled the length of white cloth and turned it over, frowning. “A woman’s shift. Blood on the front.” It was marked with big, rusty-brown patches. “Some on the back of the shoulder. On the sleeve.”

“We have ourselves a goodly selection of blood.” It had been a jolt when he caught sight of it, tucked under the bridge, and climbed in to dig it out.

“A night shift. It’s hers. Right length. Right shape to cover those apples.”

“Is it, now?”

An instant of grin from the boy. “I’ve got eyes.” He sobered, fingering the white-on-white embroidery around the neck. “Besides. This . . .”

He supplied the words. “
Piquer. Broderie
.” Stitching. Embroidery.

“This embroidery. You don’t see it. You feel it. And these little pearl buttons. Not fancy. It’s . . . quality. It matches her.” The boy shook his head impatiently. “The blood’s not hers. She’s not hurt. Not this much.”

“What else? What does your nose tell you? Go ahead.”

Hawker held it up and sniffed gingerly. “Blood. Dirt. Some kind of . . . perfume?”

“That blood’s a couple days old. Two or three weeks and you wouldn’t smell it the same way. The dirt’s because I found it rolled up small and hid under a bridge in the garden. That’s where she’s been sleeping. She left a trail back and forth.”

“Under a bridge. Sounds damp.” Hawker started to say more. And didn’t. He fingered the cloth and sniffed again. “Plants. Dirt. I’d know it’s been left outside. That’s soap, not perfume.”