The Forbidden Rose

Twenty-six

MARGUERITE FINISHED HER LETTER TO HER banker in Rouen and began one to the citoyen mayor of Voisemont. There were orders to be given about the hay harvest. A dozen women in the village had been left with no support when the army took their sons. It was all very well for the louts in the tavern to talk loudly of killing the aristos. They made no plans to pay the schoolmaster or give food to those women. She must.

There were more letters to write. Concerning the orphanage in Rouen. Concerning the factory in Lyon and fifty women out of work there. It would be some time before she could sit at peace and write fables again.

When it began to be dark, she lit candles. Four on her desk, one beside her bed, one on each end of the mantel. She pulled new paper across the desk and began another letter.

The door of her bedroom opened. She looked up and saw Victor in the mirror, carrying a cup and saucer.

People appear small in a mirror. Victor stood in the doorway, and he was of a size she could have held him in her hand like a doll. She could have picked him up and tossed him out the window. Unfortunately, he did not live in a mirror.

“You should not come to my bedroom.” She said it to his little reflection, without turning around. “It is improper, even for cousins. Your mother would comment extensively.”

“I have no intention of telling her.” He balanced the cup across the room and set it on the desk, at her elbow. “I wish you wouldn’t fight with Maman. It would be more generous of you to give her the small signs of respect she covets. It costs you nothing.” He tapped the cup. “Chamomile. Your cook says it’s your favorite. I remember you used to go out into the fields with that little maid of yours, Berthe, Berenice . . .”

“Bertille.”

“That’s it. You’d gather flowers and stew them into some stinking mess. Chamomile was one of them.” He leaned his hip against her desk and made himself comfortable, planning to stay. “We’ve always been honest with one another, have we not, Marguerite?”

I have avoided speaking to you. There is a difference. “I am tired tonight. Can we—”

“We are friends as well as cousins. You were a great favorite of mine, even when you were a little girl.”

How strange they should look at the same childhood and see such different stories.

From family, there is no escape. If she drank the tisane he had brought, perhaps she could give him the empty cup and tell him to take it away.

“Tell me what you want.” She lifted the letter she was writing to the edge of her desk to dry, then took cloth and began wiping her pen down.

“You’re an intelligent woman, Marguerite. Educated. Responsible. You are a reasonable woman.”

“Thank you.”

“Your father is not a reasonable man.”

“My father is entirely mad. He always has been.” She laid the pen on the desk, next to the tisane he had brought her. “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know.”

“Did you know he’s visited England twice in the last six months? Secretly. No one goes to England but criminals and counter-revolutionaries.”

She tried to remember what Papa had said about his trips to England. He had not spoken of them. Why did Papa say so little? Uneasiness ran down her spine. “When I find him, he’ll have some perfectly logical explanation. He went to London to buy new boots or make an observation of the phases of the moon from the roof of St. Paul’s. Next he will want to go to Milan because they have a new mechanism in the clock tower. It’s always the same.”

“This is why you must help me find him. You understand him better than anyone else.” Victor stood with his hands behind his back, his eyes hooded. “It’s for his own good. Robespierre has become suspicious of everyone these days. He sees plots everywhere, even in the wanderings of a mad old man. Even I have no way to influence him. If your father is caught leaving France, he’ll be brought to Paris and condemned. You may be arrested as the daughter of an émigré. The property will be confiscated—” He glared down at her. “Your father has to be stopped.”

She did not need Victor to remind her of these unpleasant possibilities. “When my father returns—”

“We can’t wait. Police spies are everywhere. Your father is not inconspicuous. Think, Marguerite. Where is he? Where could he possibly be? Who would he go to?”

“Anywhere. He was in Strasbourg once, for ten weeks, measuring the river flow. He always comes back.”

“He has never thought about the rest of the family. Never.” Her cousin paced. His frustration rippled behind him like the wake of a black fish in a dark pond. “This time, he’ll pull us all down. You haven’t been in Paris these last weeks. You don’t know what it’s been like.”

But she did know. The sparrows came, more of them, more desperate than ever, more filled with disbelief that the machinery of the Revolution should turn to rend them.

She was at her wits’ end over what to do with them. Every safehouse in Paris was full. The Normandy network was a shambles. She touched across the letters she’d written. They were not yet dry enough to stack. Eventually Victor would make a salient point or go away. One must be patient.

Finally, Victor breathed out a sigh and halted. “You can’t help me.”

“I will ask his friends. Sometimes he tells them—”

“Let it be. I want no rumors spreading.” He pinched at his shirt cuff and adjusted it a quarter inch. Nervously toyed with a button of his striped waistcoat. “I’ll find him myself.” Abruptly, he started for the door, as anxious to leave her room as he had been to enter it.

“Drink the tisane while it’s still hot.” He left without looking back at her.

When Victor had gone, she tasted the tea, but it was bitter and tepid, with a film on top, so she took one more sip and left it. The Meissen clock on the fireplace mantel chimed. Ten o’clock.

Her windows were open over the little piece of garden behind the house. The air was full of the grumble of the city. She must accustom herself to it, after weeks in the silence of the country. Wagons did not cease on the streets because honest folk had gone to their beds. Rather the opposite. Now that the streets were empty, tradesmen delivered wood and fishes and flour across Paris.

The moon was bright quarter, holding the dark of the moon in its arms. She could see only the brightest stars. Coal smoke and the damp haze from the river hung between her and the sky.

She should ring for Agnès and change to her night shift and sleep. She was tired, as she had told Cousin Victor. There was work she must do tomorrow, and the day after that, and for many days to come.

Jean-Paul’s five sparrows would leave Paris at dawn in the laundry cart. La Flèche would be loading other sparrows on to the coal barge tonight. They were already taking them aboard and hiding them. This was the third of four weeks they would use the barge. Then they would stop. Every scheme must be put away while it was still fresh, before it was detected.

However many sparrows she saved, there were always more. She was trying to dip the sea empty with a teacup.

She wished she could talk to Guillaume.

He might be looking at the moon now. He could be in the next street. Or he might be on the road to Rouen, sleeping under the sky, watching the moon rise above a dark lace of trees. In either case, he was immeasurably distant from her.

She leaned to pull the curtain. A face floated in the air before her. A white, skeletal mask of a face outside the window. Coming toward her.

She jumped back, gasping. Caught her balance. Realized what she was seeing.

Not a ghost. She laughed, yes, laughed, though she was still shaking. It was Nico. The Peltiers’s monkey. He had climbed the carvings of the wall and here he was, to frighten her to death. When she held out her arms, he jumped to her and landed with a thump. He thrust his nose against her skin, licking at her cheek, sniffing and chattering.

“You will hush. I strenuously advise this.” He was a capuchin monkey and wise for his breed, but he was excited. “Calm yourself. No, you do not wish to make the acquaintance of my aunt Sophie. And I am certain she does not want to meet you.”

His chittering and chirping, sharp as the complaint of an exotic bird, would bring someone to her room. “You must be still.” She gathered him up and stroked him and he quieted.

He was Madame Peltier’s Nico. Surely he had been left safe when the Peltiers fled for Geneva. There was an old nurse who cared for him. How had he come halfway across Paris and found his way to her back garden? He knew it well, of course. He had come to visit with Sylvie Peltier for many years and played in the flowerbeds while Sylvie conducted an affair with Papa. Nico was very familiar with the walls and drain spouts of Hôtel de Fleurignac.

“You have found me. You have been nimble and clever as . . . well . . . as a monkey. Wait, I will find a nut for you. Let me look. Shhh.” There were no nuts or raisins in her bedchamber, but there were anise comfits in a Limoges box on her bureau. Nico loved them.

“These cannot possibly be good for you. I have told you time and time again.” But he played upon her sympathies skillfully, and in the end she gave him three. He popped two in his mouth, one in each cheek, and became silent as an apple. He held the third tightly in the hand that was not clinging to her.

When she walked back to the window to look out at the way he’d come, his arm wrapped her neck, clinging. “You were afraid out there in the dark, alone, pauvre petit. But now you are safe. Tomorrow you will go back to your home.” He wore a red jacket, bright as cherries, with tiny gold epaulettes and the red, blue, and white cockade of the Revolution upon his chest. The jacket draped long about him, with a slit in back so his tail could move freely. “You are looking very fine, are you not? And patriotic. I do not know what it says of our life in Paris today that the sight of a monkey wearing the symbol of the Revolution seems perfectly rational.”

There were wide pockets in his jacket. In one of them was a folded note.

No sane man would use a monkey to deliver a letter.

Ah well, that left the other sort, did it not? Papa. When she took the note from Nico—poor Nico, he was reluctant to let it go—she was not surprised to see the first letter of her name written on the outside. An ornate M.

Nico abandoned her and went to search her writing desk, stepping in the cold tea and leaving monkey paw prints across the blotter.

She unfolded the sheet. It contained two words in Papa’s writing. Tuileries and money.

Papa must have released Nico into the garden and sauntered onward to—she looked at the paper again, though there was no need—the Tuileries. Papa knew she would apprehend exactly the one spot in the vast gardens. He knew she would come to him immediately.

He was mad and perfectly selfish. She disagreed with him about everything important in the world. But they understood each other completely. What a thing it was to have family.

Nico, deciding this was a night for insanity and eccentricity, ransacked the comfit box.