The Forbidden Rose

Thirty-six

MARGUERITE CAME TO THE PRISON ALONE, CARRYING a basket, armed with money and her wits.

She was not a beautiful woman. She regretted that for a few minutes about once a week. Right now, a plain face served her well. The guards would interest themselves in somebody pretty. They’d remember her. The women of La Flèche did not try to be pretty.

At the big wooden door, she pinched her lips together. Angrily. She held on to that look through the entry yard and into the guardroom at the front of the prison.

They had made themselves a sty in what had once been the visitors’ parlor of the convent. It smelled of stale wine and sweat. Revolutionary slogans and obscene drawings scrawled the walls. Three clubs, thick and ugly, lay upon the table. They would use those for subduing prisoners.

Guillaume did not fight when he was taken. There were five men, armed. Did he fight here, at last, when he realized he could not talk his way free? Did they hit him and hurt him, where no one could see what was done?

“Guillaume LeBreton has been brought here.” She made it the firmest possible statement. She did not want to be questioned about how she knew this.

“You have business with him?” Boredom filled the man at the long table. If one must deal with guards, it is good for them to be bored with you. “Show me what you’re carrying.”

Prison guards were of all sorts. Some were revolutionary idealists. Some small despots, puffed up in their new power. Some were men with a grudge, here to take revenge on the upper classes. Some were bullies, pure and simple, who enjoyed frightening and inflicting pain on anyone who showed fear.

She did not, therefore, show fear. She was dressed as a shopwoman, neatly but not richly. She did not come hesitant and trembling. She marched forward, enraged.

“You have arrested my man and dragged him here.” She banged her basket down on the table. “Why, I do not know.”

She jerked back the napkin that covered the basket. “He is useless.” She slapped down bread. “He is a lout and a drunkard.” A sausage came next, long and black and of the cheapest sort. A brown wine bottle. Then, in one handful, three meager, sour yellow plums that rolled away and wobbled to a stop. “But he is a good patriot.”

“Good patriots are not denounced to the Tribunal. If Citoyen LeBreton is innocent, he will be freed.”

It was treason to suggest otherwise. She glared and said nothing.

The guard helped himself to the bottle of wine and motioned her to pack the rest away.

The wine is a good test. Now I know.

She had seen four guards. The senior officer was to her right, at the end of the table, a man of straggling gray hair and deep lines across his face. He had set himself a tedious task that involved removing the small springs from inside his gun and laying them out on a white handkerchief in front of him. He looked as if he knew what he was doing.

Not that one. A man who does such intricate, careful work will think too much. He will hesitate and reconsider even when the money is in his hands. He cannot be trusted to take a proper bribe.

This other man, though, the one who searched the basket . . . He had the loose lips and complacent eye of one who indulges himself. This pilferer of cheap wine might serve her purpose.

He set his forefinger upon the carte de sûreté she laid down before him. It was a recent forgery, but thoroughly dry. She’d checked before she left the loft.

“You are Citoyenne LeBreton? You are his wife?”

He cannot read. “I am Citoyenne Odette Corrigou of the Section des Marchés. I am not his wife and not likely to be his wife since you have locked him up. What I am to do with a baby coming and no husband to help me, I do not know.”

That was more than enough excuse to be exasperated and a good reason to visit Citoyen LeBreton in prison. Even to visit him many times. The guards would show more compassion to a girlfriend than a wife. Men generally liked their girlfriends better than their wives.

She repacked the basket. “Will you let me see him?”

The senior guard nodded that she was to be let into the prison. A morsel of sympathy showed before he turned again to his bits of metal and his gun. The guard of the soft and paunchy belly—he was called Hyppolyte by the other man—led her into the hall to the door to the inner prison. She noted the number of steps and the direction. She would make a map later.

Once, this door had separated the nuns from the outside world. Now, it marked the division between guards and prisoners.

Hyppolyte carried the bottle with him, not wishing to lose his spoils to his fellow guards.

“I would like to bring Guillaume the wine,” she said. “It is one of his small pleasures.” She did not care whether the wine reached Guillaume or not. She wanted to know if Hyppolyte could be bribed. A man who would take a small bribe would take a large one.

She drew a pouch from her pocket and took out a folded bill, an assignat for fifteen sous. It was counterfeit—one of many counterfeit notes Adrian had somehow produced and given over to her—but this guard did not know that. Fifteen sous would have paid nicely the whole price of such a wine. Now we will see.

Hyppolyte held his hand out. He took the bill and continued to hold his hand out and took the next bill as well and then the coins. When her purse was empty, he held the bottle up.

He shows me he can keep that or give it to me. Now we will see if he is sensible enough to think of future bribes.

He tossed the bottle to her. She was quick enough to catch it before it fell and broke.

I have found the man who can be bribed.

“Tell your lover to drink a toast to me.” He rattled his keys and opened the door and let her into the prison. The lock turned behind her. She did not let herself think how frightening that was. Six minutes here, and already she had learned something useful.

She stayed where she was. Faintly, through the door, she heard Adrian say, “It’s nothing to me, citoyen. Open it or leave it sealed. I get my tip either way.” He had entered the prison behind her, carrying an entirely convincing letter addressed to an unfortunate grain merchant who had been accused of hoarding. The letter asked, Was he the Michel LaMartine who was the nephew of Naoille LaMartine of Quesmy in Picardie? There was the matter of debt to be settled in her estate.

Adrian was saying, “I’m supposed to wait for an answer. I got all morning.”

Messages went in and out of the prisons. Business was conducted. Letters written. No one looked at delivery boys. Adrian would be invisible, poking into every corner.

She found Guillaume in the third of the rooms in the long hall. This was the lodging for ordinary prisoners who could not afford to pay for better quarters. He sat on the floor, cross-legged, on a gray straw mat, talking to two other men. His head was bare. His hair chanced to fall in a shaft of sunlight. The brown of it was like the side of a chestnut, smooth and richly colored. He wore no cravat or waistcoat or coat. He had not been beaten, not that she could see.

When he saw her, he rose to his feet, simple as a peasant in trousers and his shirt. “This is a surprise.” He took up his jacket as he walked by, and closed a hand around her arm and drew her away, thunderously silent, out of the open room where the men slept. “We can’t talk here.”

In the corridor outside, he pushed brusquely past the men and women gathered in their twos and threes and brought her to narrow stairs that led upward.

He wanted privacy and was taking her off to it, forcefully. In privacy, she could hold on to him. Just hold him. That was not possible in the midst of these bored, curious, and doomed people.

She said, “Were you hurt?” and when he did not answer, “We are of one mind here. A touch and a nod will tell me where to go with you. It is not necessary to drag me as if I were a sullen child.”

His face was unrevealing, as always, and she did not have leisure to tease out signs of what he might be feeling. His muscles and the hold on her arm said he was angry. That was not entirely a surprise. He would be angry she had come here even while he was glad to see her. She was filled with joy, only to touch him, and with her own fear and anger. They were both in the grip of such conflicting emotions, it was amazing they did not fly apart like poorly wrapped parcels.

Men and women sat on the lower stairs, since there were no chairs anywhere. Guillaume glared them aside or pushed past. It was a long climb to an upper hall, dim and bare, lit by one small, high window at the end. Three men had taken the floor at the top of the stairs, casting dice. Two wore the clothing of the poor. The third, a velvet coat and knee breeches, much wrinkled.

“Out.” Guillaume’s tone would have dislodged hungry lions feasting upon an antelope. It had no difficulty removing three dice players from the hall.

He took her halfway down the hall before he halted and let her go. He stood, frowning at her.

“I will not stay long,” she said. “We have only a few minutes together.” He knew this. She was just telling him that she understood as well. “There is no need to glare at me that way.”

“Tell me you’re out of that house.”

“My own house? Yes. Entirely. I have retreated and left it to Cousin Victor. It is very cowardly of me, but I do not have time to deal with him if I am to get you out of this place.”

She laid her hand on his arm. For an instant, he held still, as if he waited while he changed inside, or made some decision, or lost some battle he held with himself.

He reached out to touch her. To take a strand of her hair that had fallen loose. He held it as if it were his first touch of any woman.

“You shouldn’t have come,” he said.