The Forbidden Rose

Seventeen

“STREET’S EMPTY.” GUILLAUME SLOUCHED UP TO her. “Let’s go.”

Marguerite could not say how this slouching he did down the Rue Palmier was different from what he had performed in the countryside, but it was. There, he had been a shrewd peasant, a man with fields and, most probably, a local feud or two. Now he was a city man, knowledgeably sly in a way that had to do with narrow alleys and cafés on the boulevards.

He took her arm, something he had not done in the countryside. Thinking about it, she realized this, too, was a difference between the city man and the country man.

It did not disturb her that Guillaume LeBreton should change in this subtle way. She did not know all of what he was. Probably she did not want to know. But he was also the man who had made love to her an hour ago. It was that man she would say good-bye to.

“That’s where they’d put somebody to watch for us. See?” Guillaume slowed.

Adrian glanced into the passageway between houses, narrow and not too clean. “Obvious. No art to that.”

“Most folks are not what you’d call artistic. A better spot . . .” Guillaume looked up to the very highest attics under the roof where poor men rented cheap rooms. “Up there, up with the pigeons, in one of those windows. That’s where I’d put my man. Nobody ever looks up.”

The Hôtel de Fleurignac was a hundred feet ahead, on the left. It had been built sixty years ago of the cream-colored stone they mined from under the foundations of Paris. The blocks might have been quarried from under the very roots of the house, fifty feet down. Hôtel de Fleurignac wasn’t the grandest house of the quartier, but it had not been sacked in the last four years, which was a great advantage.

Guillaume walked with the firmness of a citoyen vegetable farmer who had business to conduct in some café or shop or at the back door of one of these mansions. They were not alone on the street. One woman passed them briskly, without nodding, carrying bread in a basket. A little servant girl, head down, wearing a floppy mobcap, swept a doorstep.

“On the other hand, if it was the Secret Police doing the watching,” Guillaume continued, when they were out of earshot of the maidservant, “which it’s likely to be in this town, they’d bully the patriotic citoyens of . . . ah . . . that house, I think, or the one next to it, and put their man in the front parlor. If he was careless, you might see a curtain pulled back. Maybe a light.”

“There is a timber merchant living there.” She could be informative, having followed the fortunes of all these houses. “He was a Dantonist, two months ago, which is no longer a desirable political association, of course. Now he is an enthusiastic follower of Robespierre. He would keep a battalion of infantry in his parlor if the police asked.”

But no one would bother to watch for her. If the Committee of Public Safety wanted her, they would simply send gendarmes to pound at the door. Aristo women waited at home, terrified, until the police came to get them. She had rescued enough of them to know this. La Flèche always found them, proud and disbelieving and stupid as rabbits, hiding in their parlors.

The Hôtel de Fleurignac had not been given over to timber merchants or land speculators from Lyon. Five years ago, Lafayette himself had stationed guards to protect the house from the mob. In the disorder of the bread riots, Danton’s men had been posted outside, drinking heavily and pissing in the stone flowerpots. When Lafayette had fled and Danton was dead on the guillotine, the authority of Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety protected them. Cousin Victor arranged this protection, leaping from one party to the other as circumstances dictated.

Victor was the son of Papa’s younger brother. He was the last to bear the de Fleurignac name, the others having made ill-judged stands against the march of the Revolution. His sense of timing was exquisite. He should have been danseur noble of the corps de ballet, he executed such clever jetés and pirouettes on the stage of politics.

“You live here.” Adrian ran his eyes over the ledges and carvings and the bowed iron railings of the windows. “Nice handholds all the way up the side. Be easy to get in. Bit of a plum, really.”

“You’d see that. I want you to keep walking. Make a . . .” Guillaume marked a figure eight in the air with his index finger, “up and down some streets and come by here again. Keep doing that till I’m finished.”

Till I’m finished. They were almost finished with one another, she and Guillaume LeBreton.

It was good-bye to Adrian as well. She turned in the middle of the street and kissed him quickly on the forehead, astonishing and appalling him. “Be safe.” It was a pleasure to break his perfect self-containment for one instant. “If you are ever in trouble, go to the kitchen door and tell them you have a message for me. If I am alive, I will come. Remember that.”

Guillaume said, “Which is better than you deserve, boy. Off with you.”

She stood beside Guillaume LeBreton and watched Adrian take his grin and the two donkeys away, down the street, around the corner.

“The boy doesn’t know what you’re offering. What it means to be a de Fleurignac in this country. And he’s talking the simple truth about robbing the house.”

“So I believe. I have never known a professional thief before. You must find him an interesting traveling companion. Are we so very easy to rob?”

“For him. Yes.”

When one had walked for days to arrive, it was a great foolishness to discover one did not want to be there at all. She crossed the empty street to go home. She had five minutes more to be with him. Maybe ten. Some small number. She had avoided thinking about this, as one would detour around a deep swamp that one did not wish to be swallowed up by. There was no more avoiding the subject. They had arrived. If she looked down, she would see her feet sinking.

He did not take her arm again. He had assumed yet a new identity and trailed a half pace behind her, as well-trained servants did. As respectful inferiors did. It was nicely done.

She stopped at the door. Several important tasks would fall upon her shoulders the moment she stepped through. She would be Citoyenne de Fleurignac. She would much rather have stayed Maggie a little bit longer.

After a while, when she did not move, Guillaume said, “If you want that open, you’d better knock on it.”

“You are a fountain of wisdom.”

He showed a mild interest in the mansard roof and the carved garlands above the windows and none at all in her. This would have hurt her, if she thought his face revealed any tiny particle of what he was actually thinking.

If she were upon the most important peak of a great mountain, one of those in Switzerland or the great ranges of the East, with the ground distant below and she tripped off the edge and fell, there would be a feeling of floating and a rushing wind and she would seem to hang motionless between earth and sky. All the long minutes of falling, she would believe destruction was not inevitable. She would hold that hope in her heart till the last instant when the ground came up, quite suddenly, and all was finished.

Being with Guillaume had been such a fall. Now, she encountered the solid earth. She could not go to walk across Normandy with him again. She could not even return with him to Jeanne’s small room. In every important way, they had already said farewell. She stood upon the doorstep, trying not to think about what came next. Trying to resign herself in a wise fashion. Truly, there were limits to the uses of philosophy.

“Or we can stand here a while,” Guillaume said. “It’s a nice day.”

“One more minute. Then I’ll knock.” She had a stone in her chest instead of a heart. “Will you ask my father to pay you? We have not talked about this at length.”

“I’m going to insist on it.” He had become curiously without expression, as if even his endless invention had found its limits. “It’ll look odd if I don’t.” Another minute. “I didn’t take you with me for the money. You know that.”

“I know nothing about you except an assortment of lies.” She had no right to disgruntlement. She indulged in it anyway. “Now you will be finished with even the small trouble of telling lies to me. You will be pleased.”

“Right. That’s me, grinning like an eel.”

She would not forget his voice, would she? It was like grindstones rubbing together. No one else spoke like that.

“It was good. Being with you.” She spoke each word with care. Their interlude was almost over. “If matters were different, I would . . .” She pushed the air out of her lungs and stopped talking, because there was nothing to say, really. “But things are as they are.”

He still kept the ring he had taken from her. Her mother’s ring. She had not asked for it back and he had not offered to return it. Was she wrong to leave it with him and think he would treasure it?

She would imagine him keeping it and taking it out, sometimes. To look at. To hold his hand. There was no end to her foolishness.

“Let’s get this over with.” He slipped past her and raised his fist to bang on the wood, making a sound that was loud and hollow and final.

I have tasted his hands. I have bitten into the marrow of his strength. He is mine. The heart has no sense at all.

Janvier, who was Papa’s steward, was already awake to open the door. He was dressed in black jacket and knee breeches and a plain linen shirt. No lace and silk livery for the servants any longer. The veneer of revolutionary ideals was thick in her father’s house.

“Mademoi—Citoyenne. What?” His jaw hung open. He looked to the street. Looked in both directions and saw no carriage. No maid. No footmen unloading luggage. His eyes fixed on Guillaume’s scar. “What has happened? Where is the carriage? Why are you dressed like that?”

No soldiers had come to her house to arrest her. The betrayal that struck across Normandy had not touched La Flèche in Paris. And no one had brought word of the burning of the chateau.

“You sent no message, mademoiselle. We thought you were safe at Voisemont.” Janvier retreated before her, sputtering.

“It seems I am not. Where is my father?” She must acquaint Papa with various sorts of bad news. And Victor. Victor would complain and blame her. He would have blamed her if lightning shot out of heaven and burned the chateau.

Guillaume brought his large presence into the entry hall. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, face-to-face with a woodland nymph, naked, in gilded bronze. He studied it with a grave expression.

“The master is not . . .” Janvier searched the street again, as if he expected a carriage to suddenly appear, then closed the door. He stood, being suspicious of Guillaume.

“My father is not what?”

“He is not here. Precisely.”

Fear trickled into her. “Where is he, precisely?”

Janvier said nothing. He was no fool, her father’s steward, or he would never have survived being in charge of Papa’s household. Like any good servant, he had a highly developed sense of when to keep silent.

Something was wrong. There was no sign of it in this calm, clean, well-ordered entry hall, but she knew. It was as if she walked the icy surface of a winter lake and heard the thin sound of ice cracking under her. “How long has my father been gone? An hour?” Janvier would tell her, eventually. Or she would find someone who would. “A day? A week?”

Had Papa been arrested? Pulled from his bed in the middle of the night and hurried away by a troop of gardes. It was the way of things these days. It could happen to anyone. Even Papa. Even wily, infuriating Papa.

If he was in prison, it might already be too late. It was infinitely hard to rescue men once they were in prison.

She had given Papa a hundred opportunities to leave France and become émigré. Argued with him. Told him to go to England and be safe. He would not. She could only hope he was in Oslo again, making notes upon the nesting habits of Norwegian geese, instead of wandering some battlefront, gauging the skill of Austrian artillery officers. With Papa, one never knew.

Guillaume did not watch her directly. He looked in the long mirror and followed her with his eyes, his face without expression.

The door opened behind her. It was not her father who came from the salon. It was Victor. Who should not have been here, in her house, at this hour of the morning.

“Cousin Victor.” She made the hurried small curtsy that brushed the edge of rudeness. How many times had her father told her to be polite to Victor? “Janvier has lost his tongue. Tell me. Where is Papa?”

“Where have you been, Marguerite? We heard—” Victor bit off the rest. “Why are you dressed like that?” He looked to where Guillaume was inspecting more nymphs. The way Guillaume looked at them was not the way a man looks at Renaissance art. It was in the appreciative way a man looks at statues of naked women. “Who is he?”

That was a question she’d been asking herself for a while. “I will explain to my father. Where is he? In short words, if you please. Why is he not—”

Victor cut her off. “Later.”

The last time Victor had been in her house, he had not given orders. Something was dreadfully wrong. “Why are you here?”

Victor snapped, “Not in front of the servants.” He scowled at Janvier—Janvier, who had known every family secret for two generations—then turned to glare at Guillaume. “You have not yet told me who this man is.”

“That is a matter for my father to deal with. But if you wish to be private with me, let us do so. Come. The salon.” Act as if Guillaume is nothing. Not important. At the last minute, as if she had almost forgotten, she paused to say, “Sit down, Citoyen LeBreton, and wait. Use the wooden bench and do not touch anything. My father will pay you.”

Victor did not move.

She said, “This is nothing for you to be concerned with.”

“In the absence of your father . . . yes, it is my concern. The explanations will come to me. And it seems I must conduct this business for you.”

A sick weariness overwhelmed her. Guillaume must leave. I must get him out of this house. Away from Victor.

Victor was not only her cousin and the de Fleurignac heir. He was a powerful man in his own right. A radical, a member of the Committee of Public Safety, and a friend of Robespierre himself. He was an idealist. A humorless man, self-serving as a weed, with stern morals and unshakable, very dull convictions. The opposite, in short, of Guillaume LeBreton.

Victor could have Guillaume killed by the lifting of a finger.

She sighed, noisily. “I have been in the dust of the road for four days, Cousin. I am hungry and filthy beyond endurance. You tell me Papa is in some trouble too complex to explain. Citoyen LeBreton can wait.” She barely glanced over her shoulder. “Go now and come back tomorrow. We are busy.”

Briefly, Guillaume looked up, straight at her. His eyes showed not a gleam of what had been between them.

“Who is he?” Victor repeated. “Explain this, Marguerite.”

She threw up her hands. “Very well. Perhaps you are the one to handle this matter, after all. This is Citoyen LeBreton, a peddler of small goods about the villages. When there was disaster in Voisemont—and there has been more than you can possibly guess—he was kind enough to bring me safely through the countryside, all the way to Paris. I promised to reward him. Take money from the strongbox and pay him for me, if you please.”

“A hundred louis d’or.” Guillaume seated himself firmly upon the bench. He folded his arms across his chest and transformed into the Tradesman Citoyen LeBreton, his eyes filled with calculations of money and value, his hands apt to handle the shape and form of merchandise. One could see there would be an occasional short weight among Citoyen LeBreton’s goods. “Gold. Not silver. Not paper.”

“Patriots accept assignats.” Victor was silkily threatening. “Only reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries demand coin. Do you know it is against the law to refuse assignats when they are offered?”

“The bargain was for coin.”

How did Guillaume do it? A twist of his mouth. The scar revealed to the light. A change in his voice. He became a man of the alleys and dirty streets in the crowded faubourgs east and south of Paris. Even his hands, resting on his arms, looked crude and dangerous. The same hands that had been like the hands of a god upon her skin.

Do not challenge Victor. Take assignats and leave.

She did not glance once at Guillaume. She did not trust herself to lie with her face and eyes as well as he did.

“Cousin.” She pushed past him impatiently. “We have troubles more important than dickering with merchants. Send Janvier to pay him and come to the salon. Please.”

Important matters would appeal to Victor. He was a man with a great belief in important affairs, all with him at the center.

He nodded. “You’re right. Go ahead of me.”

She opened the door to the salon. Behind her, Victor spoke softly. But she heard him.

“You should beware, Citoyen LeBreton. Men mount the guillotine every day for less than this single insolence you have shown me. Janvier will bring coin. Do not let me see you again.”