The Forbidden Rose

Twenty-three

THE BATHS WERE RESPECTABLE, OF COURSE. THE most proper woman might come here. But also, no one would be amazed to find improper activities. It was a fine place for secrets. Marguerite had met Jean-Paul here more times than she could count.

Boots shuffled in the corridor outside. A man’s boots, not the clogs of the maidservants. There was the smallest scratch on the door.

She said, “Enter.”

The high windows and the transom above the door were open to let out the steam of the bath. But no one could linger to eavesdrop in the hall or in the garden below and not be seen by Olivie. All the rooms nearby would be kept empty.

He opened the door. Familiar, reliable, dear Jean-Paul. Olivie would have told her instantly if he’d been arrested. Marguerite had known he was safe, but it was still a great joy to see him with her own eyes. All the way across Normandy, she’d been afraid for him.

When she ran to embrace him, he held her briefly and strongly and then pushed her away. “I wish you’d wear clothes.”

“But I am.” She was wrapped in the heavy, white linen robe of the bath. Perfectly decent. It covered her to her ankles. She wore less on the street. “Do you know, I did not expect you to grow up to be a prude. It is marriage, I think, that destroyed your sense of humor. You became very serious after you married and had children.”

“I became older. Much, much older.” Jean-Paul sighed and turned and closed the door behind him. “If there were churches in the city, instead of Temples of Reason, I’d light fifty candles in gratitude. Marguerite, when I heard the chateau burned, I thought you were dead.”

“I was not even toasted, except a very little upon the palms of my hands, which have now healed. When I was at Bertille’s house she put butter upon them, which she claims is a sovereign remedy. It makes one sticky, however.”

“Gabrièlle cried for two days. I would very much like to shake you until your teeth rattle.”

I am glad to see you, too, Jean-Paul. “I thought I would come to Paris and it would be too late. You would be arrested. Or dead. I feared for you.”

“And I was sick with worry, knowing you were on the road, alone.” He reached to her, to touch his knuckles, once, to the back of her hand. “I find you pink and well washed and happy. Naturally, I’m infuriated.”

“Oh, naturally. I would like to hit you a little, too, just to relieve my feelings.”

He stripped out of his jacket, setting the scene of elegant depravity in the afternoon, in case anyone should come. Because he was Jean-Paul, he arranged his coat carefully upon the back of a chair. It was a habit to drive one insane.

He was strong and slender, of course. To be a chief botanist of the Jardin des Plantes was to move heavy exotic plant specimens all day long. He was—he had always been—beautiful to look upon, blond and fine-featured, though he was deeply scarred upon his back, of course. Uncle Arnault had done that to him when he had caught them together. Still, if she had come to the baths for dalliance, she would certainly engage in it with him.

He had not been skilled in lovemaking when they were fifteen. Probably he improved later. She had never known quite how to ask that question of Gabrièlle.

His waistcoat followed his jacket to the chair. “We have nothing but rumors here. What happened in Normandy?”

“What did not happen? The chateau burned. That is first.”

“I hoped that wasn’t true.”

“It is wholly gone. Invading Visigoths could not have wrought a more thorough destruction. The servants are safe. The mayor will care for them. I have sent money.”

He paused with his hand on the back of the chair. “You’ve lost your writings. Your records. Your books. I am so sorry.”

“I have copies of most of it, here in Paris.”

“Not all,” he said.

“Not all.” He knew what she had lost. Jean-Paul had gone with her to peasant huts to listen to the old women tell stories. He’d taken her seriously, when everyone else laughed. “I remember some of it almost word for word. I have already started rewriting my notes.”

He slipped free the knot at his throat. “I’ll help, if I can. I don’t have your memory.” He held the ends of his cravat, half undone, and looked at her. “When the men came to the chateau, to burn it, did they . . . Did anyone . . .”

“I was not hurt.”

“You would say that, but—”

“I will intervene before you ask in plain words what will embarrass us both. No harm came to me. Not in the least. Wren was there, you know, and we fought like Amazons. Truly. Wren will tell you about it someday. Make her dwell particularly upon the moment where I slashed the man with a letter opener. I was intrepid and resolute beyond measure.”

He laughed. He sounded young as a boy and very relieved. “I don’t doubt it. Where’s Wren?”

“I have sent her to England. No, do not complain. She has become too well known. It is time for her to retire.”

“You’re taking away my right hand.” He loosened his shirt and sat to take his boots off. One cannot hold a convincing rendez-vous in boots. “But it’s time to send her away. You always know.”

“We are not greedy. That is why we’re alive after four years of running these risks.”

“Five years. It’s been five years.” He grunted, struggling with his boot. “Good God. Remember how we thought this would be over in a month? How everybody would come to their senses and the deaths would stop?”

“By October. I remember you said October. We met with the others in that coffee shop, seven of us, whispering like schoolgirls, to set up the first waystations. One line to take them from Paris to the coast. We’d move fifty or sixty sparrows and disband. We’d never need to do more than that. Here. Let me.” As she had done a hundred times, she knelt in front of him and took hold of his boot and pulled. She rocked back on her heels because it came off suddenly. She had tumbled backward a hundred times.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that.” He sounded testy, but he shifted to put the other boot in her lap.

“Gabrièlle does not pull your boots off for you in the evening?”

“Gabrièlle is seven months with child, which you would remember if you came to see us more often. I keep a husky servant for the express purpose of carrying coal and water and removing my boots at night. Will you please get up?”

“Of course.” It was a pleasure to tease him. He was so respectable these days. She tied her robe with great modesty and precision, so he would notice her doing it and be exasperated at her. “What you may not have heard yet is that Jacobins from Paris led the men to the chateau, having bought them many brandies and harangued them into a mob. It is said they had official papers. We were not on such cordial terms I could ask for them.”

“There’s no arrest order. You know that? Even in all the confusion of the committees, they wouldn’t have lost yours. I set our man to looking everywhere. There’s nothing.” He was up, stalking the length of the bathing cabinet. She had drawn the hanging cotton curtains all around the bathtub. He brushed his hand across the curtain each time he passed, setting it billowing. “No official papers. Not for you. Not for any of us. No denunciation to the Committee of Public Safety.”

“That’s what Victor says. I do not generally listen to him. But in this case—”

“He would know.” Jean-Paul rolled his sleeves as he walked, to up above the elbow. One could see the thin lines of scar on his upper arms. “I hear he’s moved his mother out of their rooms, into your house.”

“Which charms me beyond measure. And my father has disappeared. It says much about my life that that is the least of my worries.”

Jean-Paul pulled his shirt from his trousers. “I thought he’d gone to Voisemont. I assumed you had him in hiding somewhere.”

“It is one of those false doctrines. I have no idea where he is. One of the few blessings of this last week is that I did not have Papa on my hands. But now he is missing and that becomes worrisome when the rest of this inexplicable disaster happens. And it is inconvenient.”

“I’ll let our people know. We’ll try to find him for you.”

“I suppose we must.” She began to untangle her hair, using the carved wood comb Papa had brought her back from England. “Victor is fiercely annoyed that the chateau is gone. It seems I am a poor guardian for the wealth of the de Fleurignacs that will someday be his.” She made a face. “I should not have survived the fire, apparently, or walked across France on my own. I now have no more reputation than a stray cat in an alley.”

“Your reputation is pure gold and your cousin is a pig. He was a pig when he was twelve and enjoyed beating me up. He hasn’t changed.”

Jean-Paul had raked his fingers into his hair. He wore the simple cravat of an artist or intellectual. It hung loose on either side of his neck, down the front of his shirt. They were a fine disheveled pair. They would look entirely guilty of adultery if anyone should come upon them.

She said, “Men came to arrest Egret. Did Crow tell you?”

“I have word from Egret himself. He’s in hiding. The man has a hundred blood brothers along the coast. He’d be safe in the floods of Noah.”

“They came for Bertille.”

“My God. No.”

“I would not sit here smiling if any of us were taken. She escaped, and the children, and Alain. None of them was hurt. She is determined to work again. Always, the same Bertille.”

She had carried the knowledge for days. Now she would give him the burden of it. “The soldiers who came to take her knew her name. They knew where she lived. They knew us all—Wren, Egret, Crow. Me. Twelve of us who work in Normandy. But no one in Paris.”

“Oh, Marguerite.”

“It is not just one of La Flèche.” Her stomach was like lead. “The traitor is mine.”

“It’s one of the sparrows. They go to England. They chatter.”

“There is no sparrow who could put so many names together on so many different routes. Only one of us.” She had hung a towel across her shoulders to keep the wet of her hair from soaking into the robe. She took it off to rub at her face. “It’s someone as close as my eyelids. Who do I trust the most? That’s the one who betrayed me.”

“We knew this might happen someday. We’re ready. Your people have taken new names. New stations. We’ll start replacing the passwords. We go on.”

“And the traitor goes on with us. You will have more sparrows for me soon.”

“Not soon. Today. A family of five. Their arrest has been ordered for tonight. Owl is moving them into the loft at the brothel.”

“I can’t—”

“They leave Paris with the laundry wagons at dawn. Who will you send to meet them?” Jean-Paul’s eyes fixed on the wall behind her, an imitation of white marble with black veins in it. “The son is fourteen. Old enough to go to the guillotine with his father.”

The pipes in the baths were never entirely silent. One could hear the force of water in them as a burr. A throb. A low hum. “You are saying I have no choice. Even now, with this risk to all of us, we go on.”

“Or I can tell the sparrows to find their own way out of France.” He waited. Jean-Paul had come a long way from the boy she once knew.

Bertille had said it. No one in La Flèche did this to be safe. “Linnet. I will send Linnet. Tell Olivie to pass the message herself. With her own hand.”

She brooded upon the ten thousand catastrophes that might come of this and could think of no way to avert them. Jean-Paul waited patiently for her to finish.

Her people would not draw back. Their part was to be the heroes they were. Her part was to send them into danger.

“Nothing has changed,” Jean-Paul said. “Not from the first night when you named us La Flèche. We can’t turn back.”

“Then we are very stupid. And up to our necks in sparrows. Robespierre will make Paris a city of the dead if he has his way. Oh, I will tell you a clever scheme I came up with while I was waiting for disaster to fall upon me at the barrière this morning.” She combed her hair and outlined a plan that involved sparrows marching out the gate at dawn, dressed in the uniform of army recruits. “The boots will be the greatest problem. There are no boots exactly like army boots.”

“We can steal them.”

She shook her head. “We will commission them quite openly and say they are a shipment for Lyon. You will forge some orders. No one knows what is happening in Lyon. Not even the army. They are in sufficient turmoil in Lyon that we could commission petticoats for the army and they would not—”

Very faintly, in the corridor outside she heard something. There might have been the click of opening and closing. There might have been the sound of feet.

Then the door to the room swung back. Guillaume LeBreton stood in the doorway with the light behind him.