The Forbidden Rose

Fifteen

PARIS HAD CHANGED, EVEN IN THE THREE MONTHS she’d been away. It was more shadowed. More afraid. Darker. Fear seeped from the mortar of the houses, from the cobbles of the streets. It was like coming again to the home of an old grandmother, with each visit finding her a little weaker, a little more mad.

“We’ll stop for coffee,” Guillaume said.

“It is just as well. I would wake up the household and worry them if I arrived at this hour.”

She did not need to eat. She needed twenty more minutes with Guillaume LeBreton. She was hungry for five hundred words from him. For two accidental touches of her hand upon his. For hearing him laugh just once more.

They ate in a café in Rue de Lombard, not far from Les Halles, at the Café des Marchands. Guillaume was known here. Everyone nodded to him as he took a table. They stared at her with some interest. It was a café frequented by market men and women, all of them hungry and in a great hurry. The slices of bread in the basket on the table were of fine flour, better than she had seen in the boulangeries of the best streets. There was something to be said for eating in a café patronized by the violent, well-organized merchants of Les Halles. They could ignore regulations. The coffee, too, spoke to her of stores kept under the counter and sold only to special customers.

Adrian, narrow-eyed, watching everything, took a bowl of milky coffee outside and squatted by the donkeys to defend the carrots from pilferage. It was as if a cat came to a new neighborhood and was not certain he liked it.

Guillaume drank red wine. He took it in quick gulps, without tasting, the way the men around him did, as if he, too, were in a hurry, his mind on a spot in the market and the exchange of copper sous for vegetables. He ate neatly, taking a hard bite of bread and washing wine over his teeth to soften it before he chewed. It was a workingman’s way of eating, crude and efficient. A stoical fueling of the body. He was intensely, alertly aware of her the whole time. She felt him thinking about her even though he did not look at her once.

He said, “Still not hungry?”

She shook her head.

He spoke, very low, “I think you’re safe. There’s no order posted at the barrière. I looked, when we passed the guardhouse. No order for your friends either.”

She had seen the same thing. No arrest order. It was one more question of the many questions she was collecting. She would have liked to ask Guillaume what he thought this meant, but, of course, she could not.

So she was silent. After she’d taken a few more sips, she said, “I like this place. They serve good coffee.”

“I come here when I’m in Paris. If you leave a message with these people, I’ll get it.”

“There will be no occasion. After today, we will not see each other again.”

Soon they would leave this place and go to the Hôtel de Fleurignac. She would become Marguerite de Fleurignac again. She would become immeasurably distant from Guillaume LeBreton, seller of books, rogue and smuggler.

One cannot put the fruit back on the tree. One cannot unbreak the egg. She could not, not ever again for all of eternity, unknow what she knew of his body. Someday, when she was old, she would take this knowledge out as if it were a letter she had treasured. By then, the pain would be thin and crackly, like old paper.

She would be changed as well. She was quite certain old women did not feel this sort of pain. As if the air were knives that cut, going in and out of the throat.

She was not Marguerite de Fleurignac yet. She was still Maggie. She would not be logical.

“We cannot stay here for two hours and not invite curiosity. I have a friend who lives in this quartier, not far from here.” She set her coffee down on the table and looked directly into his eyes. “She will let me use her room. Will you come with me?”