Royal 02 - Royal Passion (29 page)

"Go? There is nothing under God's blue bowl of heaven that will make me do that."

"But you must!” She had to get away, had to contact de Landes to find out what he meant to do with Grandmère Helene.

He moved to loom over her. For all its quietness, his voice was inflexible as he came finally to what he wanted to know. “Must I? Screw up your courage, Mara, my own Chère. Scrape your brain pan and rake over the embers of your heart. Make me listen, tell me something I will believe. Give me a reason why I should."

She bit the inside of her lip. “I could tell you, but you would not understand."

"My imagination has a level or two you have not yet explored. I recommend you try."

The bronze planes of his face were angular and hard with determination, but behind the blue glitter of his eyes lay a fathomless stillness. Her answer was important to him. He would not press her further, but he would have an answer, no matter how long the wait. For this moment censure and condemnation were suspended, but in return he required no less than the absolute truth. What he wanted of her, she knew with paralyzing certainty, was total capitulation.

It was not a desire she could afford to disregard, even if it seemed wise to do so.

She drew a deep breath. Her tones strained, she said, “It's my grandmother."

"Your grandmother."

The words were blank. Mara knew a moment of gratification that she had been able to surprise him, but it was shortlived. Haltingly, the story came out, of Dennis Mulholland and his death, of the journey to Paris, of de Landes and Grandmère Helene's addiction to gambling, and of the consequences, Once she began to speak, she could not seem to stop. With tears rising slowly in her eyes, she told him of her fears for the elderly woman and her horror of what de Landes might do to her in revenge for the failure of the evening before.

"You must let me go,” she said, her voice near breaking as she put out her hand. “I have to see de Landes to persuade him to let me see Grandmère, to know how she fares. She is old and frail and—and used to having her way. She won't be able to bear being held against her will for long. I've done what he asked of me, and it may be that he will release her or at least let me find some other way of paying the debt."

He turned sharply, moving away from her. “What of your debt to me?"

"What debt?” She looked at his broad back in bewilderment.

"The price of betrayal."

She rose and moved swiftly to stand in front of him. “You don't understand! My grandmother—"

"I understand. And for the sake of a blood tie I am to allow you to prostitute yourself to a traitor? Oh, no, Mara. No."

"I wouldn't!"

"Wouldn't you? If it was required? Your loyalty is an endearing trait, but not one I care to encourage, not at that expense."

She looked away from him, then down at her hands."What else can I do?"

"You can leave it to me."

The words rang with the promise of concentrated action. She jerked her head up, her eyes wide. “You? What do you mean?"

"I will find your grandmother and return her to you."

It did not occur to her to doubt that he could, or would, do exactly what he said. “Why? Why should you do that?"

"Let us say,” he answered, his expression noncommittal, “that my nature is altogether vindictive. I dislike being made to play the fool. If I remove your grandmother, supposing there is a grandmother, I take the advantage now held by de Landes. She becomes my hostage."

"Yours? But for what purpose?"

He smiled, a brief movement of the lips that left his eyes cool. “Oh, for your conduct in and out of my bed. What else?"

Swinging away from her, he moved to the door, where he sent a footman running to fetch the cadre.

It was the gypsies who found Grandmère Helene. Infiltrating every village, stable, and chicken run; seeing, hearing everything while they bought and sold horses, juggled, tumbled, and sold love potions and told fortunes at fairs. They knew every time a foal was dropped, a hen went to nest, or a maiden fell from grace. They certainly knew when a stranger entered their district. The request went out in the
calo
language, traveling as fast as men could ride in relays, for information about an elderly woman of a certain description being held at some gentleman's seat. Back came the answer so quickly that it might have been carried on the wind. There was such a one at a chateau in the Loire Valley not far from the forests of Chambord. She was well and happy, all amiability in fact, though perhaps a little mad.

By the time the news arrived, the rescue expedition had been organized and was ready to mount. They left Paris in the dark hours before dawn, a group of men on horseback riding at the pace of the fast traveling carriage that swayed along among them. The carriage was low-slung and lean, painted gray-black. Inside it Juliana lay back on the cushions, trying to sleep, while Mara sat upright staring out into the darkness. The prince's sister had come because she could not bear to miss the excitement, Mara from a need to see her grandmother—and because Roderic insisted. She thought he did not trust her to remain at Ruthenia House if left alone, though he had said that her presence was to reassure her grandmother when she was confronted by her would-be rescuers.

As a traveling companion, Mara could not have asked for better than Juliana. She did not complain or chatter or exclaim at every alarm and she kept to her side of the carriage seat. On the other hand, her ability to sleep under less than ideal situations limited her use as a distraction.

Mara could not sleep, had hardly closed her eyes in the forty-eight hours since the night of the ball. After Roderic had summoned the cadre to outline his plans, she had gone to her room. She had not left it, though she had waited in momentary expectation of a summons from Roderic. It had not come. She had been left alone with her thoughts and her fears.

The first of these was that they would fail. She was terrified that de Landes, anticipating an attempt at rescue, would be before them, that he would remove her grandmother, even kill her; or, failing that, would post a guard impossible to defeat. The second was that they would be successful, that Roderic would return triumphant with her grandmother to Paris, where Grandmère Helene would then be forced to witness in intimate detail the degradation of her granddaughter at the hands of the prince and know herself the cause.

There was a third fear. It caused her to return again and again in her mind's eye to the scene at the house of the Vicomtesse Beausire. She pictured the waiter and the men gathered around him, the sighing thud of the thrown knife. Who had killed the man?

It might have been one of the king's guards overzealous in his protection of the monarch. It might have been a guest enraged by the danger to which the waiter had subjected those present. But, most of all, it could have been the prince and his cadre who had killed him, the men who held him in custody. It might have been Roderic, silencing the man who knew the part he had truly played.

Suspicion. It was a dark and dangerous thing, eating away at the mind. Far better to bring it out into the open. But how could she? The greatest threat of suspicion is the fear that it will be confirmed.

What would it mean if it had been Roderic who had ordered the waiter killed? Would it, could it, mean that it had been Roderic who had planned the assassination? Roderic, who had, with his conspicuous protection of the king, thrown up a screen for the actual deed, then, for reasons of his own, stopped it, removed the instrument of it to protect himself?

She could not forget the terror she had seen in de Landes's face. Had it been for his fear of discovery? Or had it been terror of the men he had unwittingly unleashed upon his country?

And what would happen now? Would the prince keep her near him until he tired of her? Would she be released with a generous stipend as payment, a token of his gratitude? Or would she be found some morning in an alley, stripped of identification, a woman who had found favor with an important man, but one who knew too much?

Ruthless, the prince was ruthless. He had taken her with him to Paris as if she were no more than a stray animal he had found. He had scratched Trude's face with his sword to prove a nebulous point. He used men and women to further his own ends, extracting the information they could give, then sending them on their way. He took their homage, their loyalty, as in the case of Luca, and what did he give in return? Bright, flashing words. The honor of his presence. Excitement. Brief moments of being fully alive, of living on the sharp and dangerous edge of pleasure. Nothing that was solid. Nothing that could last.

The carriage jolted onward. They left Paris behind, heading south. The hills rose and fell away. They passed fields lying fallow and orchards where the last leaves clung to trees of peach and pear and apple. They went through villages with the houses built almost upon the crooked streets, crowding close to one another as if for protection. Dogs barked and cattle lowed. Peasants stared with blank curiosity as they swept past in clouds of dust.

They stayed for the night in some such small place, eating beans and ham and drinking a delicious red wine before tumbling into feather-cushioned beds to sleep dreamlessly. Morning saw them far away.

And finally they came to the Loire Valley where the river wound in wide, lazy, leaf-green curves among its sandbars. Here lay dozens of chateaux, monuments to the tastes and amusements of generations of French nobility, from medieval fortresses to fairy-tale palaces, from hunting lodges and monastic retreats to
châteaux de plaisance
. Here were the homes of royal mistresses and the great fortresses where once protestants had been hung by the dozens from the battlements. Here were the places where laughter had rung out and tears had been shed, where all the pageantry and glory of living had been played out and then forgotten when that way of life was ended by the revolution.

They rode along the winding roads, passing the gypsies camped beside the river, entering and leaving forests that had once been called royal. They saw the crumbling aqueducts and the roads that were the legacy of ancient Rome, the towns where gothic cathedrals loomed above the river, beautiful in their indifference to time. And in the dark of night, as a round and yellow moon was setting, they came at last to the chateau that had been claimed by de Landes.

It was a tumbledown building of stone, the pride of some architect from some distant year but now crumbling and nearly uninhabitable, with bats flying around its moss-grown towers with their blank windows, carved crosses, and vines making a dark tracery on the walls. Woodland, interspersed with fallow fields, grew up to the doors. The cadre settled down in the shadow of the trees to wait.

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Dawn, the time when visibility was most uncertain and men slept the soundest, was chosen for the assault on the chateau. There were a few brief words from the prince before they started out, but they hardly seemed necessary. Each man had his place and his purpose, and knew them well. There was not one among them who did not know that a misstep, a moment of carelessness, could mean death. They were ready, honed by endless training, careful praise, and pithy comments on their few weaknesses. They would not be there if they were not able men eminently suited to the task. This assurance they had in full from their prince, who was not at all easy to please.

Michael had once more been placed in charge of Mara. If it was a duty he found onerous, he did not complain. He guided her as they ghosted through the forest by a touch on the arm, a whispered suggestion. She was grateful for his forebearance, grateful also that it was not Roderic who moved beside her toward the chateau. In these final moments her mind was filled with doubts as to his purpose and his methods of gaining it. She did not question that these doubts would have communicated themselves to him as surely as the growing light of morning would banish the night.

She did not want that. She saw no need to put him on his guard against her any more than he was already, but, just as important, she did not want to jeopardize in any way his attempt to take her grandmother into his own custody. After a careful weighing of the alternatives, she had found that she preferred to be indebted to the prince rather than to de Landes. If there was any other implication to that discovery, she did not care to think about it.

The walls of the chateau loomed gray-beige and solid ahead of them. A short strip of open field lay between them and the woods. One by one the cadre drifted across it to merge with the shadows of the wall. Somewhere an owl called, a mournful sound. A mouse in the rolls of dried grass squeaked and was still.

Then came Michael and Mara's turn. He took her hand. She picked up her skirts with the other. Bending low, they hurried across the clearing on a track that took advantage of every shifting patch of shadow. They drew up against the wall and stood panting, waiting for the others. Around them they could just make out the crouching forms of those who had gone before them.

"Now, my friends,” Estes said softly when they had all gathered beneath the wall. As if at a signal, the cadre moved toward him, grouping, climbing with silent speed one upon the other, forming a human pyramid as effortlessly as if they had been in the long gallery at Ruthenia House.

"Hoopla!” came the suppressed whisper when they stood tall, wavering in the fast-growing dimness.

Roderic, who had been standing to one side, turned. He took a few swift steps, then swarmed up the convenient ladder they made. They were short of the top of the wall. The prince sprang upward the last few inches, catching the edge of the top of the wall with his hands. With the bunching of taut muscles, he levered himself onto the ledge. Seating himself, he made a quick, hard gesture, then waited.

"Now you, mademoiselle,” the Italian called in a husky whisper.

"What? Surely the prince will be able to open the gate?"

"If he should not, you must go with him to pacify the old one. Hurry. There is no time to lose."