The Forbidden Rose

Four

IT WOULD BE POINTLESS BEYOND MEASURE TO KICK at this walking monolith, so Marguerite did not. She would find a way to checkmate him, eventually.

Or he would kill her. He could do that at any time. He need only choose among several methods and get on with it.

Monsieur LeBreton pulled her to her feet. He took the letter opener from the straw and studied it on both sides before he slipped it into a place inside his jacket. He then suggested, by his hand upon her arm, that she accompany him out the door of the stable, into the wide-spaced drops of rain. He was not cruel or hurtful about it, but he was very determined. It was like being carried off by a huge bird of prey that was on its best behavior. A roc perhaps, as in the fable of Sinbad. One does not discuss alternatives with a roc.

She was not to be abused and strangled in the open air of the garden, it seemed. He dragged her to the greater discretion of the orangerie.

Her journey across the courtyard concerned itself with small practicalities. She hooked her toes into the sabots so she wouldn’t lose them. If she was not to be killed, she would need her shoes.

“Adrian,” LeBreton called. “We have a guest.”

The servant boy stepped from between white planters and disheveled palm trees. He was dark and lithe and sullen, grumpy as a genie called forth by an impatient magician. He looked unsurprised to see his master with an unwilling woman in tow. This was probably not a good sign.

LeBreton remained a pace behind her while the boy swept glass from the tiles with a bundle of palm fronds, limping a little as he went about the work. He was a handsome boy, unlike his master who was ugly as several sorts of sin, in all of which he was doubtless proficient.

When a space was clear, LeBreton took his coat off and swirled it down on the tiles at her feet. There was a story . . . One of the courtiers of the old English queen had spread his cloak upon the dirt of the street for the queen to walk upon, a century and more ago. The queen was Elizabeth. She did not remember the name of the courtier.

“Sit. Don’t faint.” LeBreton pushed at her shoulders and she sat with a thump. She did not know why he bothered to give orders, if he was going to shove at her anyway.

Fear sustains one for a time, but it is a false friend. It departs, taking all strength with it. A chill spread along her skin. The edges of her sight darkened. The shush of the makeshift broom and the scratch of tumbling glass became distant. She felt as if she were falling into a dream. Not a good dream.

She had sent men and women of La Flèche into infinite risk, telling them to be strong and clever. She had promised that one may endure anything.

Now it was her turn to discover the truth of this.

LeBreton’s coat was large, as one would expect. It was a brown so dark it became black in this dim light, lined with the reddish brown of fallen oak leaves. She sat in the middle of it like a frog on a lily pad, surrounded by a desolation that had once been a garden, and shivered.

“There’s no use being afraid,” he said. “No need for it either. I told you that.” His hand opened, as if he might reach out and touch her.

She flinched. Just a little, but he’d seen it. “I would like to leave now.”

“You been hiding here since they burned the house, haven’t you? I don’t blame you for being scared. There’s packs of scavengers loose these days. Deserters. Outright bandits. You’re damned lucky it was me that came along.”

“I am properly grateful.”

“No. You’re terrified of me. I’ll fix that in a while. Stay where you are.” Perhaps his words were meant to be reassuring. If so, they did not work.

She was left alone to consider the matter of who Monsieur LeBreton was, who spoke like a villager of Brittany and pretended to be a simple man when he was not in the least simple, and why he had come to peer and poke around her chateau, not looting, and what she should do about all this.

If she tried to run, there’d be another demonstration that he was larger than she was, and faster. She would sneak away when it was dark. Not now. Not yet.

Wind, heavy with mist, blew in steadily from the west. Her skin prickled into little bumps. Hunger twisted in her stomach like a live thing. If she had killed the rabbit, like a sensible woman, and taken it into the woods to cook, she would not have met Monsieur LeBreton and she would not be in this situation. Jean-Paul always says I would get us all killed, being impractical.

She pulled herself into a tight ball and laid her cheek upon her knees and closed her eyes. Perhaps when she opened them she would be somewhere else—Cloud Cuckoo Land or the island of Tír na nÓg or the Atlantis of Plato. One of the mythic places of the old stories. It was not likely, but it was not impossible.

LeBreton sent the boy to fetch baskets from the donkeys and took over the task of sweeping the floor. She heard him grunting and dragging big copper planters from one place to another. She could not imagine why he did that and did not waste her energy in pointless speculation.

When the chateau burned, they came here to throw stones again and again. It was as if the orangerie were an adulterous woman, crouching in fear, and they destroyed her. How strange that it should be so cold. It was always warm here.

When she was a child, this had been her playhouse, her secret kingdom, with flowers like spears of sunlight, flowers like fans and feathers, like waxy red swords. The stoves ran night and day all winter long, keeping oranges and cyclamens and the ferocious, stubby pineapples alive.

Jean-Paul was the son of Maître Béclard, botanist of the Royal Gardens, who had come with a shipment of orchids and bromeliads and stayed to tend them. Jean-Paul told her the story of every plant in the glasshouse, invincible in his belief she wanted to know.

One day when she was fifteen he had plucked down an orange blossom for her and tucked it into her hair. “That’s one less orange for your dinner, Marguerite.” He had kissed her.

Boots scraped beside her. LeBreton towered over her, perhaps a mile high. He’d come carrying a donkey blanket. He flapped it out and let it fall softly over her shoulders, doing this all in one motion, without touching her. She was circled in it now, like an Arab in his tent.

If he is going to hurt me, what is he waiting for? She did not wish to imagine what complex villainies a man might approach in this leisurely fashion.

He said, “You go right on being afraid of me, if you want to. But stop shivering. Makes me chilly just looking at you.”

“No one would wish you to be uncomfortable.”

“That’s good. That was a bit of a smile. You keep doing that.” And he left her alone.

The servant boy carried in the last of the donkey baskets. His gaze upon her was neither friendly nor unfriendly, merely assessing. It did not surprise her that a man like LeBreton would employ such an unsettling servant.

LeBreton started a fire with dry palm fronds, then laid on small lengths of charred timber. The boy took the canvas off the donkey panniers and lifted out smaller baskets with lids and leather bags, cooking pans and a coffeepot. He set everything out without hesitation, having a pattern to it, as if he’d done this many times. He put water to boil in a black kettle, exactly like the kettle in every cottage in Normandy, but his firewood was table legs and broken curio cabinets.

LeBreton finished his own unpacking and came over to her. He sat beside her, tailor fashion, so close his knee almost touched her. He’d pulled his hat off and left it somewhere so she had a clear view of his scar and his various other brutal features. His dense, weighing regard rested on her. “Let’s give you some coffee before I start asking questions.” Probably he had no expression that did not look menacing.

The boy, Adrian, came up carrying a blue and white china cup full of black coffee. Its handle was broken off and the rim was cracked. It was from the set the upper servants used. Had used. LeBreton wrapped her fingers around it till she had it steady.

“Drink this. Then we’ll talk.” He had the hands of a laborer. Blunt-fingered, calloused, capable, broad of palm. Hands like well-forged steel tools that had seen a lot of use. Hands like a treatise on engineering. “I’m not a villain, Maggie.”

A man like you is anything he chooses to be. “I am Citoyenne Duncan. Or Miss Duncan. Not Maggie.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” He took the corner of her blanket, where it was slipping away off her shoulder, and pulled it higher. “You didn’t jump out of your skin that time. We’re making progress.”

There was no progress. She was exhausted, and she did not wish to spill coffee upon herself. She did not feel it necessary to explain this to him.

The coffee was hot and very sweet. True coffee, from Haiti, not the brew of roots and barley that filled the markets these days. “You do not make me less frightened of you by crowding in upon me like an overgrown bush.”

“Of course not. I do it by showing you how harmless I am. Look over there, Citoyenne Maggie.” Over there were the four donkey baskets. “That’s my stock in trade—Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Lalumière—the approved instruction list from the Committee of Education. Some children’s books with proper sentiments in them . . . ‘C is for counter-revolutionary. May they all die. D is for duty to France. Let us all try.’ That sort of thing. I got packs of playing cards. Those have fine revolutionary pictures on them. The single pip is a guillotine, which is just going to liven up a game, ain’t it? And I got me some nicely illustrated copies of the Rights of Man, suitable for framing and hanging over the fireplace. You see before you Guillaume LeBreton, seller of fine books.”

There was no slight possibility this man traveled with donkeys and sold books for his living. It was nonsense. This was the wolf who claimed he cobbled shoes. He did not fool her for even the tiniest moment. “That is a respectable trade, certainly.”

“Bringing revolutionary thought to the provinces. That’s my job. When I see the schoolmasters using the old books full of superstition and lies, I haul them out and burn them. The books, not the schoolmasters. That’s my little joke there.”

“It is very amusing.”

“Then I take orders for the approved books, which they’re eager to buy at that point for some reason. With luck, the books are still approved when I get back to Paris.”

“Yours is an uncertain life, citoyen.”

The fire snapped and shot out sparks. The servant boy went out into the rain and came back with armloads of straw from the stable.

LeBreton shifted, so the light of the fire was strong upon the ruined side of his face. That was deliberate. He was showing her the worst of him so that she would become accustomed. It worked better than it should have. Already she was less afraid of him.

He had been unlovely even before he acquired that scar, a man of blunt eyebrows, emphatic nose, and stern jaw. She decided now that he did not look evil, only hard and filled with grim resolve. He was like one of the stone warriors laid in the vault of an old cathedral, holding the hilt of a stone sword, waiting to be called back into battle at the Apocalypse.

She drank this coffee the sly giant provided. It warmed her. The rainy dusk, beyond the sad, broken windows, seemed brighter. She raised her knees to balance the cup upon and blew on the surface to cool it and made herself take it delicately, in little sips.

They had brought a china cup to her so she would have something civilized to drink her coffee from. It was a small, astute kindness that impressed her deeply. She was seated beside a most perceptive intelligence.

“You’d want tea,” he said. “You being from Scotland.”

“I do not much care for tea. I have never seen Scotland myself. It was my grandfather who was born in Aberdeen.” This was the story of her governess, the true Mistress Duncan, who was sandy and freckled and forty years old and married to a staid banker from Arles.

“But you’re still Scots.”

“One does not stop being a Scot so easily.” He was lying. She was lying. They traded prevarications. Perhaps they would become complacent, each of them thinking they made a fool of the other.

He did not know she had learned to lie at Versailles, in the old days, when the king was alive. Lying had been an art, formal and elegant as the minuet. The proper lie, the angle of a bow tied under the hat, a message slipped from one hand to another in a crowded corridor. The air had been dense with intrigue. Uncle Arnault had been at the center of most of it. She was no amateur at reading lies.

She took another sip. The coffee was sweetened with white, clean sugar that dissolved completely. Coffee from Haiti. Sugar from Martinique. These luxuries were expensive in Paris, but far cheaper in the port towns where the ships from the islands unloaded.

LeBreton might have innocently delivered books in Dieppe or Le Havre last week. But perhaps he had visited the small fishing villages of the coast, where the smugglers pulled their boats ashore. Perhaps he was one of the men who carried contraband across France—letters from émigrés in England, foreign newspapers, bank funds, messages from spies. He might even be a spy himself, Royalist, Austrian or English. He might be an agent of the Secret Police in Paris.

He could be part of La Flèche.

The servant boy, having made three pallets of his heaps of straw, was toasting bread by the fire. She sat straight and drank coffee, holding her hands elegantly, as she had been trained to do. She was very hungry.

“We’ll eat in a minute,” LeBreton said. “Have you stopped being afraid of me yet? I’m hoping for that.”

“I am surprisingly tenacious. This is good coffee.”

“Better than the wine we have. And we are finally going to feed you, looks like.”

The boy brought bread with cheese melted on it, juggling it from hand to hand because it was hot. He sat on his heels and held it out, balanced on his fingertips.

“If you think she has sense enough to eat slow,” LeBreton was genial as carded wool, “give it to her. You can clean up when she empties her belly out.”

Nothing changed in the boy’s dark face. “You feed her, then. She’s your pet.” He tossed the bread in LeBreton’s general direction and walked off.

They should not show her the bread and take it away. She would have clawed the world apart to get to that bread.

“I keep him around because he’s so fond of the donkeys.” LeBreton picked the bread up and brushed it off. Tore it into parts and laid them along his thigh. He blew on a piece before he handed it over. “Then there’s his honesty. You’d look long and hard to find a lad with his kind of honesty. And that amiability of his.”

She did not stuff bread into her mouth, snatching like an animal. She ate neatly. With restraint. She had been taught so well to be a lady.

When she was done, he took up another piece, ate half, and gave her the rest. “He didn’t think about you needing to eat slow. Now he’s annoyed at himself.”

“One is sincere at that age, and easily offended.” Maybe she burned her mouth. She didn’t feel it.

Another morsel broken between them. Bread for her. Bread for him. They might have been friends sitting at the hearth, toasting bread and tearing off hunks to share back and forth. LeBreton kept talking, but she paid him no attention. “. . . with your mind running round and round like a squirrel in a cage. If I was going to do terrible things to you—which, I point out, I ain’t got around to yet despite these numerous opportunities—there’s not much you could do about it, me being twice as big as you are and strong as an ox. And that’s enough for right now.” He got up and set the rest of the bread on the upturned planter they were using as a table.

He was right. She was still hungry, but she should not eat more.

“You concentrate on keeping that down, just as a favor to Adrian.”

He fed her and pretended to be harmless. He was subtly intelligent. He was a pillar of deception from the long, untidy hair he shook down to hide his face to the worn soles of his boots. Such a man did not wander to her chateau by accident.

Are you one of us? Are you La Flèche?

She offered the most common of all the passwords of La Flèche. “If the wind is right, you can smell roses in the garden.”

“Roses? I saw some as we passed by. Pretty.”

It was not the right answer. She had not expected to feel so disappointed.

“When you finish that, I’ll lay a blanket by the fire and leave you to sleep,” he said.

He was right in this much. If she was to escape, she must sleep first. There would be some chance in the night, when he was less attentive.

He took the cup away from her, because it was empty. “Or you can just lie awake, thinking up all the things I might come do to you that I’m not doing now.”

THE long dim twilight of July was winding to a close when Doyle finished going over the grounds and got back to the orangerie. A drizzle had been coming down, off and on, for a while. Mostly on. He was damp clean through.

From every side of the garden, he’d been looking back toward the light in the orangerie. He couldn’t see the woman sleeping on her pile of straw, but Hawker was there, with his back to the wall, a candle lit beside him, a book in his lap. Alert. Keeping watch. Glancing up at the end of every couple lines, walking a round of the orangerie every ten or fifteen minutes. There was something to be said for recruiting cutthroats from the London rookeries. The King of Thieves, Lazarus, trained his crew well.

When Doyle showed himself outside the windows, Hawker set the book down and came to him. They found an oak tree far enough away that their Frenchwoman wouldn’t hear them talking, close enough they had a clear view of her. And they weren’t getting actively rained on, which was all to the good.

Maggie was edged close to the wall, rolled in her blanket, curled up tight. She’d lived through men burning the chateau and four days of lurking in the woods. He’d wrung the last strength out of her, scaring her. With food in her stomach and being warm, maybe she’d sleep the whole night.

“Now what?” Hawker spat, accurately, hitting an inch to the side of Doyle’s boot. “You bring her in and dry her off and feed her and tuck her in like a lost kitten. She’s de Fleurignac’s daughter. Right?” He waited for confirmation. “Does she know where her father is?”

“Most likely.”

“Fine. Do we ask nicely where the old man is, or do we haul her out and torture her in the small, cool hours before dawn?”

“We let her sleep.”

No way to tell whether the boy was disappointed not to have a chance to apply his skill with sharp implements. “And tomorrow?”

“We see if she’ll lead us to him. He’s probably not in these parts, or he’d have showed up by now.”

“So he’s in Paris.”

“If he is, we’ll take her to Paris. We have to go there anyway to drop off the money.” The donkey baskets were half full of counterfeit assignats, headed for British Service headquarters in Paris. One more yapping pack of nuisance to deal with.

He’d brought a bundle back, under his arm. He tossed it to the boy. “I found this. What do you read in it?”

Slowly, suspiciously, Hawker unrolled the length of white cloth and turned it over, frowning. “A woman’s shift. Blood on the front.” It was marked with big, rusty-brown patches. “Some on the back of the shoulder. On the sleeve.”

“We have ourselves a goodly selection of blood.” It had been a jolt when he caught sight of it, tucked under the bridge, and climbed in to dig it out.

“A night shift. It’s hers. Right length. Right shape to cover those apples.”

“Is it, now?”

An instant of grin from the boy. “I’ve got eyes.” He sobered, fingering the white-on-white embroidery around the neck. “Besides. This . . .”

He supplied the words. “Piquer. Broderie.” Stitching. Embroidery.

“This embroidery. You don’t see it. You feel it. And these little pearl buttons. Not fancy. It’s . . . quality. It matches her.” The boy shook his head impatiently. “The blood’s not hers. She’s not hurt. Not this much.”

“What else? What does your nose tell you? Go ahead.”

Hawker held it up and sniffed gingerly. “Blood. Dirt. Some kind of . . . perfume?”

“That blood’s a couple days old. Two or three weeks and you wouldn’t smell it the same way. The dirt’s because I found it rolled up small and hid under a bridge in the garden. That’s where she’s been sleeping. She left a trail back and forth.”

“Under a bridge. Sounds damp.” Hawker started to say more. And didn’t. He fingered the cloth and sniffed again. “Plants. Dirt. I’d know it’s been left outside. That’s soap, not perfume.”

“Lavender soap.”

The boy pulled the cloth flat between his fists, stretched out. “A handprint on the back. Somebody grabbed her when he was bloody.”

“And?”

“She got away. Citoyen Bloody Hand got the worst of that meeting, didn’t he?” Hawker looked off in the direction of the orangerie. “In the village they say one of the men from Paris got hurt during the fire. A knife slash. She doesn’t look the type to knife a man, somehow.”

“The best ones don’t.”

“You think she’s in it with her father? Part of the killings?”

“Well, somebody’s hunting down young officers and murdering them. It’s his list. She could be helping in a loyal, daughterly way. She’s got the brains for it.” Maggie was quiet in a corner, either sleeping or pretending to. “I wonder if she’s got the ruthlessness. I’ll go run a few errands. Always something to do when you have a woman to take care of.” He tapped the nightdress. “Burn this. Stir the ash. Toss the pearl buttons down the well.”

“I’ll make it disappear.”

“Don’t take your eyes off her. Don’t let her leave. Don’t hurt her. Don’t wave a knife in her face and terrify her.”

Deep irony. “I’m not the one she’s scared of.”

A pebble hit her arm. She heard it skip and rattle on the flagstones. She woke immediately. She had not flung herself deeply into sleep, in any case.

She faced a low, whitewashed wall. Above that, broken windows. She was in the orangerie. She lay on straw, on the floor, wrapped in a rough blanket.

The second small pebble bounced next to her with a clear ping. With it came, “Do not move. They can see you.” The words formed themselves in the patting of the rain, a whisper made of water. “If the wind is right, you can smell roses in the garden.”

The Crow’s messenger. At last.

Beyond the empty windows the bushes and trees were indistinguishable in the gray evening. The voice was almost as muted. Again came, “If the wind is right, you can smell roses in the garden.”

The fire made its accustomed small noises. She did not hear the boy servant breathing or turning pages. She turned a cautious inch to look. There was no one within the circle of light of the fire. No one in the open space of the orangerie, anywhere. No one in the shadowed patterns beyond the window.

She gave the reply, softly. “The roses are lovely, but it is forbidden to pick them.”

Leaves crackled, as if a body moved on the other side of the wall. “Ah. You are the one, then. You are Finch.” It was a child’s voice. “I was afraid you’d have the sense to be gone.”

“I expected you three days ago. You see the disasters here.” Marguerite took hold of the blanket. “I will come—”

“Stay where you are. The two men have stopped under a tree, not so far away. They are watching.”

The child was right. LeBreton would have his eye on her. He was not the man to let her just stroll away into the garden.

The whisper came again, with a child’s simplicity. “I do not need to see your face, Citoyenne Finch.”

The men and women and—yes—the children of La Flèche did not indulge in curiosity. No one could be forced to tell what they took care not to know. “That is wise.”

“I am entirely wise. I was watching from the woods when you were captured by that man. Do you want me to help you escape? It should not be impossible. You can travel with us, if you want.”

The men who burned the chateau were scouring the countryside for her. She would not lead them to the wagons of the Gypsies. To Crow’s family. “Thank you, no.”

“As you wish.” The shrug was unmistakable in that voice. The boy—surely no one would send a girl child on this errand—said, “I would not like to disengage myself from such a large man, entirely on my own. But Crow says you are wily in the extreme. Doubtless you have a plan.”

“Several. I am weaving them even as we speak.”

“Then I will deliver my message and go, before it is too dark to find my way through the woods. I am charged to say this—‘Finch, I saw your signal. I can’t go back the way I came. Skylark is on the run, with soldiers after him. Dragoons are stopping the wagons of the Rom everywhere west of Rouen, looking for me. It’s not safe for me to hold the sparrows. What are your orders?’ ”

It was worse than she’d dreamed. La Flèche was in disorder all across Normandy. Wren, Skylark, Crow. All unmasked. What was happening in Paris? How many of her friends were already arrested? Or dead?

“Tell Crow this—‘You are on your own, my old friend. I sent Heron away yesterday with the last of my sparrows. There’s no one left here. We are all scattered and in flight.’ ” She rubbed her forehead. “Tell Crow to go north and west, all the way to St. Grue. He knows the roads to the coast better than I do. I can’t advise him.”

“He will not like this. We do not—”

“There’s no choice. Say to him, ‘Pass the word everywhere. The chain is broken. Everyone is ordered into hiding. Send the sparrows westward as best you can.’ ”

The sparrows still in Paris—men and women condemned to the guillotine, hiding, struggling to get out of France—would have to wait.

“We cannot—”

“There is no other way. Now listen. We may have very little time.” She kept her voice to a bare thread. “At St. Grue, one mile south of the village, there is a shrine at the crossroads. The Lady’s face is broken. You will leave three white pebbles there, in a row. Pebbles the size of a baby’s fist. Camp in the dunes. Grebe will find you.”

Grebe was the last link to the smuggler who carried sparrows across the Channel. If Grebe had been taken, God help them all. “Let me say this again—”

“It is not necessary. My memory is excellent.” The brush outside did not quiver, but she felt a sense of readiness behind it. “You have given me a great basket of news to carry. You are sure you will not come with me to the wagons?”

“I am sure.”

“Then go with all good luck, Citoyenne Finch. I think we will all need a great deal of luck in these next days.”

No sound marked the transition, but she knew she was alone. “Be safe, child.”

She rolled over, to keep an eye upon happenings inside the orangerie. Silence gathered around her, with the smallest murmur at the bottom of it, like a cricket deep down in the well. She had lied about one thing. She had no clever plan for disengaging herself from Citoyen LeBreton.

After a time, the boy Adrian returned. She let her lids open, just a crack. She could see him sitting cross-legged next to the fire, his head bent, a book across his lap, his fingers tracing the line of words. He moved his lips when he read.

He limped from some injury. Perhaps she could outrun him.

His eyes shifted. They looked at each other.

He said, “I wouldn’t try it.”

“As you say.” She lay watching smoke coil and uncoil in the upper reaches of the ceiling, piled into shapes by the wind, lit red from below. LeBreton’s servant boy went back to reading Lalumière.

She had taken the name of La Flèche from Lalumière . . . where he wrote of the wild geese, rising from the winter marsh, all at once, all of them knowing when they must leave and where they must go, because it was natural for them. They made an arrow in the sky, flying toward safety.

La Flèche. The Arrow.

LeBreton did not come back to the orangerie. He had wandered into the dripping evening to see to some concern of his own.

He looks at my breasts when he thinks I will not notice. After a while she slept.