The Forbidden Rose (2 page)

Her snare circled its throat. She had caught it with a line of red silk, teased and spun from the torn strip of a dress. It could not escape. Even when it heard death coming toward it through the brush, it didn’t struggle. Being sensible, it had given up.

“The analogies to my own situation are clear. I do not like them.” Marguerite de Fleurignac sat down and pulled her skirts to lie smooth over her knees. The grass was slick and sharp-edged on the bare skin of her ankles. Behind her rose the ruins of the chateau. She did not look in that direction if she could help it. “I am starving to death, you know. Not as one starves in stories, nobly and gracefully. I starve stupidly. I scrape up oats from the bottom of the feed bins and pick berries. I pull wild carrots from the earth and gnaw on them in my cave under the bridge. None of this rests easily in my stomach. It is very sordid. I will not share the details with you.”

The rabbit’s eyes stared beyond her.

“Life is not like the fables. No magical bird alights on the rooftop, bearing messages. You do not offer me three wishes in exchange for your life. No prince rides up on his white horse to rescue me.”

Rabbit fur was a brown made of many shades, like toast. The guard hairs were darker than the down that clung close to its body. Inside its ears was a delicate velvet, pale as cream, and she could see the pink skin underneath. Its eyes were fringed on top with a row of short, thick hairs. It had eyelashes. She hadn’t known rabbits had eyelashes.

It had been a mistake to look so closely at the rabbit. She should not have talked to it.

When she was five or six, Old Mathieu, the gamekeeper, had let her tag along behind him through this wood. He set snares and made great slaughter among the rabbits and put them in a big leather game bag to carry home.

He had been dead fifteen years. In his last illness, she’d visited him every day in his dirty, crowded hut by the river. She’d brought him the best brandy from the chateau cellars to ease the pain.

Uncle Arnault, who was marquis then, had scolded and given orders, which she had ignored. “You spoil these peasants. You make pets of them.” Papa had pointed out that spirits were not good for the humors of the body. She should take the man seawater and a mash of beets. Cousin Victor sneaked after her and pushed her down and spilled open the basket and broke everything inside.

Uncle Arnault was long dead, having discussed politics with the guillotine. Papa was marquis now, inasmuch as anyone held the empty title. Victor had joined the most radical of the revolutionary groups, the Jacobins. The casks of brandy had exploded in a ball of blue flame when the fire fingered down to the wine cellar. It had never mattered a bean that she had given brandy to a dying man.

Old Mathieu’s sons had been in the mob that came to burn the chateau. She’d seen them with the others on the lawn in the light of torches.

A pulse rippled in the rabbit’s throat, under the fur. That fluttering beat, in a hollow the size of a copper sou, was the only sign of life.

“I make up stories in my head and I am always remarkably heroic in them. When men actually came to destroy me, I ran like a rabbit, if you will forgive the comparison.” She wiped rain from her face. Her forearm was gritty and smelled like crushed grass and sweat. And smoke. “You are doubtless stultified with boredom to hear my problems. One’s own disaster is of compelling interest. The disasters of others, less so.”

Clouds hung flat and close overhead, the color of old bruises. A few sharp tiny points of rain hit her face when she looked up. Even this far from the chateau, thin black flakes of ash had caught in the leaves of the trees. The rain fell with ash in it.

“Here is the story, if you wish to read it.” She caught drops on the palm of her hand. “This,” she lifted one speck of black onto her forefinger, “came from the destruction of curtains in the blue salon. And this,” another bit of ash, “was a page from a book in the library. A mathematics text. This . . .” She picked a fleck of ash from her forearm. “This is the period at the end of a sentence in one my notebooks. That was the only copy of an old tale of the people. It is lost now.”

She let the drops of water run away. She was very tired. She had been up all night, two nights in a row, walking the last shipment of sparrows to safety. She had taken three men, three women, and a child through the dark fields to the deserted mill that was the next waystation. She’d waited with them till Heron’s son came to take them onward. Then she had trudged the long way back. Because Crow—careful, reliable Crow who never missed a meeting—had not yet come. He was late, and she worried.

The sparrows had complained a great deal that she had no food to give them. No one had asked what had happened to her in the burning of the chateau.

They would go to London, those sparrows, and tell everyone how brave they had been and what dangers they had undergone, fleeing France. None of them would speak of the bravery of Heron’s young son who came at night, alone, to lead them onward. Or of Jeanne, who was the Wren, who risked death to smuggle them out of Paris. Or of Egret and Skylark and the others who hid them along the way. The sparrows would take it all for granted.

She shivered, which was what she deserved for sitting on the ground in this small rain, talking to a rabbit. “I will tell you what I should do. I should go deep into the woods, carrying—you will forgive me for being blunt?—carrying your dead corpse, and light a fire and put you on a spit and cook you. Then I should begin my walk to Paris in the dark of the night.” Rubbing her arms did not make them any warmer. “Crow is more than wise. I should leave him to take care of his own sparrows and go warn the others.”

The rabbit’s fear was like the whine of iron on a grindstone.
Terror terror terror.

The wind coming from the chateau pushed at her back, smelling of smoke, ugly and somehow metallic. “Do not expect pity, Citoyen Rabbit. I am without a heart. It was the first thing I ate when I became hungry.”

The rabbit did not flinch when she laid hands upon it, but inside its fur, it shivered. The knife in her pocket was sharper than it had been four days ago when it lived the placid life of a letter opener. She worked a finger into the snare of silk that held the rabbit. “Instead of being sensible, I will chew on parched grains that do not agree with me and let you go free.” She cut the red thread. “You will not be grateful. I know. You will come back tonight with a hundred rabbits and burn down the bridge and me underneath.”

It did not move.

“Go. Go. You annoy me, lying there. Go, before I change my mind and eat you with wild onions and watercress.”

The rabbit shook from end to end and wobbled to its feet. It lurched off into the drab grass of the drainage ditch. The waves of terror departed with it.

It was a relief to be free of that. “It would have made me sick, I think, to eat something so afraid.”

SHE WAS A LITTLE DIZZY, SO SHE SAT A MOMENT longer, looking down the parting in the grass where the rabbit had disappeared, wondering whether it would live to a ripe old age and become a patriarch with grandchildren at its knee or be eaten, almost immediately, by a fox.

Then, from beneath the rustle of rain, voices slid like snakes. Men’s voices.

She grabbed up her skirts and ran.

There was no time to get to the woods. She ran toward the chateau. Down the long path of the flower garden, lavender and foxglove and marigold caught at her. Pebbles scattered under her clogs. She was making noise. Too much noise.

It wasn’t men from the village walking up the back lane. Men from Voisemont wouldn’t come this late in the day, in the rain. They could pick better weather to loot the chateau. They’d roll up in squeaking carts she could hear a hundred yards away. Crow’s messenger, when he came to find her—if he came—would be silent.

She ran across the courtyard to where the stable door hung open and ducked inside. Her sabots clicked down the rank of stalls where each window stood open to the gray outside. No whicker came. No click of a hoof. Only the dry commentary of barn swallows, nesting in the eaves. The stable was empty and desolate under the high roof. The heart had gone out of here with the horses.

The villagers had come, thrifty and sharp-eyed and acquisitive. There was not one small valuable object left in place. Not a blanket. Not a jingling bit or rein or a braided rope. Not a scrap of worked leather. They’d even emptied the feed bins into sacks and carted the oats away, all but a handful in the bottom of the bin. The chickens of Voisemont would eat well this summer.

At the last stall, she stopped below the hayloft where the ladder slanted down. She stood ankle deep in straw, well back in the shadow. The shutters were open everywhere, creaking in the light wind, dripping with the damp congealed on the boards. It would have taken three minutes to close them, but no one had bothered. Perhaps it was a revolutionary principle that good straw should spoil in the rain.

There was a clear view of the courtyard. She would make certain this was not the messenger from Crow. Then she would slip away out the back door and leave them to occupy themselves with looting.

In the courtyard, voices separated into a deep, heavy rumble and answers, lighter and higher. Two men, at least.

They could be chance travelers, looking for a dry spot to spend the night. They could be philosophers or scholars, knights-errant, pilgrims, heroes in disguise, wandering minstrels. They might be veritable princes among men, bent upon good works, full of benevolence.

She had become skeptical of benevolence.

The high bushes of the lane were hazy under the desultory scatter of raindrops. They emerged. A tall man, dressed like a prosperous tradesman but brown as a farmer, strode ahead. His servant boy lagged behind, struggling with a pair of donkeys.

The big man stopped in the center of the courtyard and stood with his back to her, his head tilted to look up at the streaked black and gray facade of the chateau. He was not a man of fashion, certainly, but he was no shabby vagabond. He dressed substantially and practically, outfitted for hard travel with a plain coat and high boots. His hands, heavy and motionless, hooked into the waist of his trousers. His wide-legged stance was calm and meditative.

He could have been a soldier, surveying a captured city, preparing to raze it and salt the earth, or a builder, inspecting the blocks of a fallen Roman villa, calculating tonnage, planning to buy and transport the marble. As she watched, he pulled his hat off and slapped it against his thigh. There was decision in that motion. The whisper of great force, held easily in check.

He carried no sign to say he was Crow’s messenger. A red ribbon with a knot in it, any bit of red cloth, knotted, would be enough. He was only a stranger in her domain, pointless and useless to her.

He did not, of course. He set his hat back, low over his forehead, and flipped the collar of his coat up. He turned slowly, taking in the dairy house and the coach house, working his way around. At this distance, she couldn’t make out his features. Weak, gray light slid across his face, drawing a suggestion of high, flat cheekbones, a jaw dark with stubble, a jutting nose. His hair was brown and hung raggedly on his neck.

If he had inhabited a fairy tale he would have been the giant, not the prince. Giants are more chancy to deal with than princes.

This was what came of clinging to the stones of the chateau like damp moss. She had not gone to seek danger on the Paris road, so danger had come to her, stalking her right to her own doorstep. She was like the man who ran away from Death, all the way from Baghdad to Samarkand. Death found him anyway, because it was his fate.

The stranger surveyed his way around the outbuildings. When he came to the stable, for an instant he seemed to look directly at her. The force of his concentration grabbed her breath and twisted it in her lungs. Knowing she was invisible, knowing she was wrapped in shadow, she froze.

His attention moved on. To the stone wall that hid the fishpond garden. To the tall iron grille of that garden, standing open. To the kitchen plantings beyond, with that gate left open as well. Perhaps there was some unwritten rule that mobs and looters did not close doors after themselves.

The servant boy tied the donkeys to a post, swearing a staccato chain of annoyance. A trick of wind blew the words to her. “Donkey feet in butter
.
Donkey
en croûte.
Donkey soup. You just wait.”

He spoke with a Gascon accent. He looked Gascon also, dark haired, with the smooth, dark skin of the south of France. He was a servant many miles from home.

Master and servant were occupied with their own business. She could slip out the back door of the stable and crawl in the direction of the garden shed, pretending to be something unnoticeable. A hedgehog perhaps. Or she could wait. This pair might gawk at the chateau for a dozen moments, then leave for a warm fire and dry, comfortable beds in the village. She could climb to the stable loft and watch from there. There was always the chance they might call out and identify themselves with one of the passwords.