The Forbidden Rose

Twelve

“RIGHT, THEN. PRETEND I’M A DESERTER, COME UP from the army in the Vendée.”

“I would rather not.”

“I spotted you.” LeBreton waved in the general direction of west. “Over there. I take off after you. I’m big and I’m angry and I’m dangerous.”

“That does not require great amounts of imagination to picture. Nevertheless—”

“You come panting up the hill, meaning to hide in these bushes around up here. But I catch up to you. And look what’s loose here.” He lifted her braid. Picked it right from her shoulder and closed his hand around it. His knuckles were scraped with dozens of fine, red-brown lines from where he had hit the gardes. “I grab hold of this, which any man would, by the way. You have an irresistible braid. Now what? What do you do?”

Adrian, who was keeping an eye upon the road, snorted.

She said, “I would offer you a bribe.”

“I don’t feel like being bribed.”

“I would employ some clever stratagem. I would fool you into thinking I was the mayor’s wife. I would pretend to wave at him, coming up the hill there. When you turned that way, I would hide.”

“What if I found you?”

“If you are going to write the tale to your own liking, then any sort of disaster might overtake me. What if the sky poured down poison toads? What if I were abducted by Bulgarians?” She did not like to be held against her will, not even so lightly as the hold he kept upon her braid. She sparked inside with a swarm of little angers, like crackles of fire. “Very well. I would hit you.” She looked directly into his eyes. “Hard. Possibly here.” She doubled her hand into a fist and brought it forward slowly, to rest against his chin.

Those damned laughing eyes of his. Seconds passed while they looked at each other. Slow, important seconds. He said, “That’s a butterfly landing on me.”

“I know.” She dropped her hand. “I am a mouse beneath the cart wheel if I meet villains upon the road. This is a sad fact of life.”

They were on the hilltop that overlooked Bertille’s house, in an orchard hidden by long windbreaks of hawthorn and alder. Adrian lay at length upon a horse blanket, propped on his elbows, looking through a break in the low brush with a pair of night glasses, studying to see if anyone would come to Bertille’s cottage. The night glasses folded and unfolded from a metal case that pretended to be the handle of a valise. Such glasses belonged on some naval vessel, watching ships, not in the baggage of an honest seller of books. But then, LeBreton was so obviously not an honest seller of books.

“Stand there and I’ll teach you how to be a mouse with fangs.

“I do not want fangs.” One could not discourage LeBreton. He ignored her attempts.

He smiled, just with the corners of his eyes. The rest of his face was perfectly sober. “You are going to be dangerous. So. Let’s say I’ve just chased you up this hill. We’re pretending you don’t have a cradle handy, which could happen if you were out in the countryside like this. What you do . . . No. Give me that.” He took her fist and unfolded it. “If you have to hit somebody, you put the thumb out of the way so it don’t snap off like a stick of barley sugar. You do like this.”

She looked at what he advised to do with her thumb. “I cannot believe that is right.”

“You are many things, Mistress Maggie, but a pugilist is not one of them. Now listen. You have one chance—if you’re just as lucky as hell—you have one chance to hit this deserter.”

“Or bandit. Let us be fair and say he could be a bandit.”

“Or bandit.”

“Or an officer of the dragoons. Or perhaps a persistent farm laborer. There is always that.”

“So there is. Pay attention. You’re going to fight this man with all the cleverness you got in you. He’s coming along like this.” He raised his arms up, wide. “What do you do? I’m being terrifying.”

“You are ridiculous. You are like a dancing bear rearing up, saying, ‘Hit me.’ ”

“You can’t count on getting attacked by some little fellow. Now, if I’m attacking,” LeBreton took the fist he’d made of her hand and held it pressed against his stomach, “you don’t hit me in the belly, since that’s not going to do you any good.”

“I will not hit you in the belly.” I have tried that. It does not work. “I will not hit you anywhere, Monsieur Dragoon-Brigand-Deserter. I will run.”

“Run like the devil. That’s your first choice. But if you can’t run . . . if you’re cornered . . . You take this.” He opened her fist and curved her fingers together to make a claw. “You come here.” He brought her fingers to his eyes. Set her fingernails to his eyelid. “You dig in. Go for both eyes if you can. He can’t chase you if he can’t see.”

“I cannot do that. I could not.”

His eyelid was soft as velvet. How amazing that this man should have any vulnerable place upon him.

“Yesterday, you would’ve said you couldn’t hit somebody over the head with a cradle. See how wrong you can be?”

“Or you can stab them.” Adrian had turned on his side to watch them and be amused. “Doesn’t take much strength.”

“Except she ain’t going to carry a knife around in her boot, her not being a bloodthirsty blot upon the landscape like some I could mention.” LeBreton let her go. She noticed, then, that he had been holding her hand all this time. “A knife just encourages you to stand and fight when a sensible person should be running. Now pay attention. If you can’t get to his eyes, you go for a man here.” Crudely, LeBreton reached down and cupped himself between the legs. “You kick his cock. Hard as you can. Or you reach down and grab hold of his nob and yank it right off.”

I cannot do any of this. “That is a very unpleasant idea. I would rather not think about it.”

“Well, just as a secret between the two of us, it’s unpleasant for a man to think about, too. What I’m saying is, you can hurt somebody my size if you go about it right. Look at the boy here.”

Adrian’s chin lifted. His expression was inscrutable.

“I wouldn’t want to face him in a fair fight, leaving aside that the term fair fight don’t actually exist in his vocabulary. He’d hurt me, and he’s smaller than you are.”

“I’m nastier.” Adrian went back to being attentive toward Bertille’s house.

The fields behind this hill and Bertille’s valley had been left fallow. Sheep grazed there in a tight, suspicious flock. Every once in a while a fretful bleat came from that direction. Adrian inspected them with the glasses, frowning.

LeBreton was waiting to get hit.

She did not indulge him. “Let us pretend I am encouraged by the examples you present. I do not run. I perform horrible measures upon your eyes. This irks you so much you strangle me. It is a dismal prospect.”

“At least you fight. Could be, that’s enough. Maybe a friend shows up. Maybe your soldier brigand goes into an apoplexy and drops dead. Now.” He raised his arms and shuffled forward. “Hurt me. Do it right.”

He will not cease nagging at me until I fight with him. She tried to hit him.

“Try again. Go for my eyes.”

He was very fast. “I am not—”

“Again.” He lunged at her. She had no time to get ready. Her hands shot up.

“That’s better,” he said.

The next time, she feinted to the right when he came in.

“Good. Again.” He circled. Closed in. He let her graze his cheek before he knocked her hands away. “This time, surprise me. Kick for the crotch.”

Ten more times. Twenty more times. Sometimes she tried for the eyes, sometimes for intimate parts. By this time she was breathing hard and entirely prepared to hit him in the cock with her knee. She did not quite succeed. Not quite.

“You’re getting vicious,” he said. “I couldn’t be prouder of you.”

Adrian, who had been watching, raised his hands and clapped slowly. “That was fun. If I’d known you wanted your eyes gouged out, I’d have obliged.”

“You try that, one of these days.” LeBreton’s hands rested on her shoulders, lightly. There was no reason to keep them there, but they stayed and stayed and she did not move away. He took the edges of her fichu where they tucked into her neckline and spread them flat against her skin. “It’s all in knowing how, Maggie. The next man who corners you in a stable, you kick him in the bollocks.”

She smiled at that. Then she looked into his eyes and saw herself in his thoughts.

When she was a child, she had wondered what color the eyes of dragons would be. Now she knew. They were brown, stirred with ambiguous thoughts. Thoughts that folded and fit together the way those night glasses did.

Guillaume LeBreton had dragon eyes. She was inside him there, in his mind, in that bright, hot center of him. There was no way on earth to tell what he was thinking.

Neither of them said anything. They stood this close and his hands were on her. What they weren’t saying was the loudest thing in the landscape.

“When you’re through doing that,” Adrian said, “come over here and take a look.” He gave the night glasses over to her, not LeBreton. She knelt.

LeBreton eased the brush back. “Visitors.”

She put the glasses to her eyes and swept in a dizzy way along the brown and green of the road to find where the men were. Yes. She adjusted her sight, squinting, and she could see.

The sun was low in the sky to her right, round and gold as a coin. The valley was a bowl of silence tipping away into a flat distance. Tiny figures of men had come out an hour ago to dig at a ditch in a field close to the horizon. Their piles of mud marked both sides of the black slash where they had worked. A sort of punctuation.

Where the road descended the hill, two men and three horses came into sight, making their way toward Bertille’s house. One slouched, thin man. One loutish, large one with a white bandage across his face, over his forehead and eye. She handed the night glasses to LeBreton.

“It’s our friends from Voisemont,” he said.

“Yes.” The red vest and striped trousers were almost a caricature of proper sans-culottes attire. These were the Jacobins from Paris, men who carried credentials from the Committee of Public Safety.

They dismounted and entered Bertille’s cottage. Within minutes, they came out again with the two gardes who ran to the cowshed behind the house and led their horses out. The four together rode down the road, making some haste.

Where the men were digging ditches in the field, the Jacobins stopped. Blue smocks gathered around the horses. Even from here she saw the arms spread and heads shaken. The farmers were denying all knowledge of events. They had not been in that field when Bertille and Alain drove away in quite the opposite direction.

The four men spurred onward. The soldiers rode more skillfully than the Jacobin officials.

“South and east,” LeBreton said. “That means the Paris road.”

The horsemen became black dots against the brown haze of fields. Now, they were in sight. Now, the road curved and they were gone.

They’d come from the Committee of Public Safety, carrying twelve arrest orders. They’d come to gather up La Flèche and destroy it. They knew her friends. Knew their names. Knew the pathways and safehouses of La Flèche. She had been betrayed, most completely.

The betrayal came from Paris. That was where she must go.