The Forbidden Rose (14 page)

“That’s poetic.”

“I am fanciful sometimes. It may come from collecting old stories from the people in the countryside. I take an interest in such things and write them down. Or it may be because I have spent hours and hours of my life imagining I was somewhere else.”

At Versailles, through all the long months at the King’s Court, she had stood, wearing heavy, beautiful, uncomfortable clothing. Being on display. Being a de Fleurignac. There was no boredom more complete than to stand about being clever all evening. The queen’s ladies said, “Oh, come. Come hear Mademoiselle de Fleurignac’s latest witticism. Come hear her little fable from Normandy.” They said, “So dear, so sweet, her new story.”

LeBreton was still. She could see the white of his shirt rising and falling with his breath. “You lost those stories when the chateau burned.”

“Some of them are copied elsewhere. Many of them.”

Silence. Then he said, “It’s bad to lose what you’ve made. You can’t ever make it again the same way.”

“Not quite the same.”

“I had to walk away, once, and leave everything. My books. Ideas I’d written down. Essays.” He didn’t move, but his stillness changed in quality. “My father burned it all.”

She did not rush to fill the silence up, in case LeBreton might have a use for it.

He said, “It felt like losing blood.”

Wherever he came from, it had not been happy in that house. Perhaps that was where he learned to sink into impenetrable depths inside himself. Learned to study the world so carefully. Learned to see into the souls around him so well that he could select, from all her losses, the one that hurt the most. It was not comfortable to deal with a man who wielded the scalpel of such perception.

On the other hand, he also instructed her in how to remove the eyeballs of her enemies. She thought about Guillaume LeBreton for a while, but could come to no conclusions. She said, “I will take my turn at watching, when Adrian is done.”

“You don’t have to.”

“If I am expected to claw the eyes from my enemies, I can certainly wander about in the dark for a few hours searching for them.”

He sat up. They were very close, when he did that. Almost touching, body to body. He took her hand and threaded his fingers in between hers. They slid together smoothly in this way, the fingers of Marguerite de Fleurignac and Guillaume LeBreton.

She had not known what to expect when they touched so deliberately. The shiver that trickled through her was a surprise. Her body didn’t know quite what to do with it.

“I’ll wake you before dawn,” he said. “You can have the last watch.” He looked at her hand and continued to hold it, the fingers interlaced. “Generally, when women come wandering by in the middle of the night, I know what they want. Not this time.”

“I am not sure, myself.”

In the days of the Old Regime the great ladies of the aristocracy would take a man like this to bed. They would amuse themselves with a man of the people, unrepentantly earthy and strong. He would be a sort of plaything. She had seen gardeners and grooms and the soldiers who guarded the palace of Versailles invited into the boudoirs of the ladies of the court. She had thought it decadent at the time.

Tonight it did not feel decadent, desiring Guillaume LeBreton. Choosing him.

“Thank you for saving Bertille, and Alain, and the children,” she said. “And me. If you had not been with me, I would have walked into the house alone and been taken captive. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Now, go back over and lie down. Try to sleep.” But he didn’t let go of her hand. That knowledge lay between them—that he was holding her with a warm touch, soft as kid leather, hard as the knots of trees.

Men hunted La Flèche up and down the roads of Normandy. Tomorrow, she would walk between the jaws of death.

But that was tomorrow. She had tonight. “You know I am Marguerite de Fleurignac. You have always known.”

“From the first minute,” he said equably.

“You did not mention it.”

“Seemed impolite to contradict you. And you were shy of me. Scared.” He lifted their joined hands and brought her knuckles close to his mouth so that she felt his breath. “You still are. Scared. Go to bed, Mistress Maggie. It’s late and we have a long way to go tomorrow.”

Her fingers tightened into his. She could not see the scar that marked him. In this silver dimness, he might have been a gentleman as easily as a criminal or spy or smuggler—whichever he was. She did not care what he was. The night was heavy with possibility.

“I am not a virgin,” she said.

There was enough light to see him smile. “That’s a coincidence. Neither am I.”

“What you are is a great treasure-house of sarcasm.” She shook her hand free. “Guillaume, you understand what it is to be a de Fleurignac. I am a woman of purpose and family and duty. It is all very tiresome and dreary. Everyone in France has the
liberté
we all speak about. This is mine. This is my one small part of all that freedom. I belong to myself. I can give myself where I wish.”

“Give yourself. You mean lie with me?”

“Yes.”

His touch passed up the skin of her arm like a bird over water, leaving the shadow of his passage. Then the palm of his hand was warm as sunlight on her cheek. His thumb hovered soft at the curl of her nostril. Came to lie upon her lips. Softly. Softly. Who would know she was so sensitive there? “Why?”

She did not say that she had begun to ache for him at the threshold of her body, between her legs. That he was simple bread to someone who had been hungry for a long time. That he was the shelter of trees to a traveler lost in the freezing rain. That he set her free, for the space of one night. “I become one of my stories when I touch you.”

He was so tall. Even sitting, he made a great shadow against the dim sky. He leaned closer and drew a line around her lips with the side of his thumb, confident and delicate. Strange to think of him knowing the shape of her lips this well.

“Does it hurt? Your lip.”

“Not now.”

“You have a pretty mouth,” he said.

“It is not small and feminine. Monkeymouth, my aunt Sophie called me when I was small.”

“There is no man on earth who’d call you that. There’s no man alive who wouldn’t want your mouth on him. You are beautiful.”

Whatever dreadful things would happen to her in the next days, she would keep this moment in a place apart, inside herself, put away safely. Guillaume, tracing the shape of her lips and saying he found her pretty.

His fingers left her lips and slid downward slowly along her throat. She wore no fichu. She had left her vest unbuttoned. Her breasts were barely covered by the loose shift. He slipped inside her clothing, giving her time to think about it, being easy and not in any hurry.

He took her nipple between thumb and forefinger and stroked it. Her skin drew up everywhere, shivering. The shock that centered on her breast echoed low in her belly. She made some sound of surprise. Surprise at the immensity of the feeling.

“What am I going to do with you, Maggie?” he murmured.

But he would know what to do.

He said, “This is where I send you back to your blankets. Alone.” But he caressed her breast.

She closed her eyes, strung too tense to move. She was plucked like strings with each small, small touch. His fingertips were harsh, blunt, rough as tree bark. So gentle on her. Barely, barely touching.

He leaned to her breast. Kissed the nipple. “I wanted this,” he whispered. “Couldn’t get the picture out of my head. You, by the fish fountain, dressed in nothing but morning. That’s not something a man forgets.”

He pulled her to him. Her cheek found bare skin where his shirt was unbuttoned. His chest was full of his heartbeat. She could become lost in this man, in territories of amazement, countries of sensation. She felt the currents of his blood. He was not merely LeBreton, villain and rogue. He was more complex than that, and simpler. Night stripped away the man and left myth. It was the myth she hungered for. This was the way the Old Gods came to the daughters of men. In dark strength, wearing the night around them like a cloak.

Closer. She would get closer to him. She would get this clothing out of the way.

“Don’t move.” She felt his voice in his chest when he said that. “We are going to stop this.”

The heat between her legs throbbed. Her whole body shook with the pounding of her pulse. “I am willing, Guillaume.”

“We’re going to stop. Right now. Or else I am going to tip you back and take you on a pile of blankets on the ground with sheep and donkeys and that thrice-damned, cutthroat boy wandering past any minute.” His breath rasped down into her hair. “We aren’t going to do this.” He let her go.

She breathed deeply. Rubbed her face, trying to scrub the feelings away. “You are very sensible.”

“Right.”

“I hate you for it.”

“I ain’t so pleased about this myself. I’m going to go stomp off downhill and kick trees.”

He did not, however, kick anything. It was not his way. She heard him later, talking to the donkeys in his grit-and-sandpaper voice, sounding calm and good-humored. She was deeply asleep when he fulfilled his promise and came to wake her to take the last watch before dawn.

MARGUERITE HAD NEVER CONSIDERED THE PROBLEMS of getting into Paris. Transporting sparrows out was difficult enough.

It was the hour before dawn, when the light was thin and drawn out. Farmers lined up on the right side of the road, two dozen ahead of them, more dozens arriving to wait behind. All of them took their places with the resignation of long practice.

The men wore ribbons with the Revolution’s colors—blue, white, and red. Guillaume’s was particularly large. He’d pinned it on his hat this morning.

“Good for the digestion, patience.” Guillaume selected an approach to the donkeys that did not leave him vulnerable to attack and pulled a loaf of bread from under the vegetables he’d packed into the top of the panniers. “We’ll be a while. Take some.”

“I cannot eat,” she said. “But thank you.”

“Tired?” He touched her cheek, as if he were entirely accustomed to doing so, and lay a finger across her mouth for an instant. Reminding her. Saying,
Speak softly.

There was aristo in her accents. Aristos died in Paris these days.

It was also death to look discontented when standing in a bread line for one of the brown, chaff-filled “patriotic loaves.” Death to mention that something—anything—was better in the old days or to step into the street without the revolutionary cockade in one’s hat. Death stalked Paris, hungry as a wolf and not at all particular.

She did not whisper, which would attract attention, nor did she stay silent, which would also be noticed. She stood close to him and pitched her voice low. “If these donkeys had fewer teeth, I would lean against one of them and fall asleep.”

“Come lean against me. I’d enjoy that.”

He was needlessly provocative. He had not laid a finger upon her since their discussion in the fields above Bertille’s house. They had slept last night within arm’s reach of each other, side by side, in the leaves and moss of the woods above Chaville, and he did not touch her. She had lain awake for a long time, lying on her back looking at the sky, knowing Guillaume did the same. She would swear they breathed in unison.

Now he teased her. Perhaps he thought irritation with him would leave no room in her for being afraid. He was wrong.

Adrian and another lad his size knelt in the dirt, rolling dice in the light cast by a lantern on one of the carts. Around them, drivers gathered to watch, sucking their teeth meditatively and scratching.

Guillaume had become the quintessence of peasant this morning, communing with his donkeys, feeding them morsels of bread. An uncomplicated man. An incurious plodder. She did not know how he did this so perfectly.

She took knitting from the pocket in her apron. This was Bertille’s apron and Bertille’s knitting, a plain black sock, half-finished, dangling from four needles. Her Scots governess had taught her to knit, holding that it was second only to oat porridge in building character. She was rather out of practice these days, but she wrapped wool around her fingers and applied herself and became a thrifty farm-wife, working instead of standing idle.

And it kept her hands from shaking.

“Do you know one of those men at the gate?” She barely spoke it, just a whisper of words, so the men nearby would not hear. “Is that why we’re here, and so early?”

“No.” He glanced at the
barrière.
“Strangers to me. They look like good revolutionaries.”

The gate guards were volunteer sans-culottes
,
drawn from the district committees of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the Faubourg Saint-Martin, men loyal to the radical wing of the Jacobins. The officer in charge could be seen through the window of the guardhouse, his boots up on a barrel, his chin on his chest.