The Forbidden Rose (30 page)

DOYLE SET HIS BACK TO THE WALL AND LET HIS legs collapse out from underneath him and slid down to sit on the floor, hugging his knees.

No one was looking. He put his head on his arm and took some breaths. His skin pulled tight over a core of ice inside. Damn, but he was afraid.

He picked the knowledge up and looked it over. His death. Here in France. Soon.
Everybody has a time and place waiting for him. This is my time. My place. Now I know.
Funny in a way. His father always said he’d hang. Looked like he was wrong about that.

No love lost between him and the earl. When he was a boy, he’d do some damn fool thing. Some typical boys’ nonsense. He’d get called to his father’s study and caned till he couldn’t lie on his back in bed. He always wondered what he’d done to make his father hate him so much.

One day they’d been about to go through that exercise when he’d looked at his father . . . looked down at his father. The earl was shorter than he was. Neither of them said anything about it, but he never got caned again.

It had been five or six years since he’d talked to the old man.
I wonder if he still calls me “that papist mongrel.”

When he had his face blank and stupid, he lifted his head. No privacy here. No way to make any, not with men packed like herring in a barrel. They were sleeping on pallets on the floor, with just barely room to walk between. Men piled valises and clothing at the foot, marking off a bit of territory.

Twenty-five straw mats. So, about that number of men, more or less. They’d set themselves in groups with some of the pallets edged up close to each other. Friends. Factions. Tonight, when everybody lay down, he’d get a feel for the men. Figure out who the leaders were.

If he could get to the guardroom in the middle of the night and kill two or three men, he might live to get out. There might be a couple of these prisoners willing to try it.

At least they’d go down fighting.

They were handing out bread in the corridor. Men came back carrying a black-colored loaf and hunched down on their pallets to eat. Aristos on that side. Common criminals on this. He had to wonder which side they’d sort him to.

This was the refectory of the old convent, a room thirty-by-fifty feet. The paintwork and bosses on the ceiling were sixteenth century. No one had bothered to climb up to destroy any of that yet. The walls were older than the ceiling, built with limestone taken out of the quarries that ran under Paris. Big blocks of stone, an arm’s-length thick, covered with a coat of plaster and whitewashed.

Only one door into this room, currently open to let air in. They’d lock it at night. The lock was nothing. He could get through the lock. That would put him in the corridor outside. Whether that would do him any good remained to be seen.

What else? Four windows, high overhead and barred, which was a right discouragement any way you looked at it. He thought about the map he was piecing together in his head. Getting through one of the windows put you in the cloister garden, where you ran up against twelve-foot walls with spikes on top. And guards on the other side. Any plan that started out in the cloister was a plan that needed a bit of work.

He wiped his mouth. His beard was rough as wheat stubble. The fake scar was going to start peeling off if he kept sweating. He had three replacements in the pocket of his jacket. Maybe he’d stay alive long enough to need them.

He wished he’d had more time with Maggie. Even one more day. There was something wrong with her and he’d left her alone—

He closed his eyes, feeling the space around him. For four hundred years nuns had been eating in this room, doing needle-work, keeping accounts, peeling apples. There should have been prayers lingering in the walls. The stones should have been thick with serenity. Layered deep in contemplation.

Whatever had been here once, it was stripped away. Too many men had waited for death right where he was sitting. The walls whispered desolation. The air was heavy inside his lungs, like dead men had been breathing it.

He pulled his hat off and let his head fall back against the plaster. His hair was wet with sweat. And his shirt, under the waistcoat. Fear sweat. He was used to being dirty when the job called for it, but this felt clammy and filthy.

Hell of a way for a spy to end, done in by a jealous little Frenchman, protecting his family honor.

Maggie could take care of herself
.
But not when she was sick. Her eyes were strange, the pupils all dilated. Something wrong. Something very wrong. He had to get out of here. Had to get to Maggie. Had to—

Put it away. Put it away till you can do something about it.
Carruthers would take care of Maggie. She’d do that for him. He could trust her to do that.

There was a general shuffling in the hall outside. More men filed in the door. Twenty-three men. They sat on the mats in the clutter of their possessions, or leaned against the walls, or paced back and forth, stepping over things—all of them talking, stinking, coughing, breathing each other’s breath, their bodies heating up the stifling air.

Nobody came near him. Nobody looked at him straight. Nobody stopped to talk. They knew how to treat new prisoners here. They left a man alone to make his own peace with the situation.

He needed that time.

He set his hat down beside him, deliberate and careful, keeping his breath steady. Getting through one more minute without breaking and throwing himself at the walls.

The floor under him was black oak, boards worn smooth from being scrubbed religiously for a couple centuries. There was a layer of stickiness on them now, made of fear and dust and sweat and worse than that. Nobody’d washed them since the Revolution.

Victor de Fleurignac had been waiting for him.

I played right into his hands
.
Love is the very devil.

Maggie.
The muscles in his chest tightened and wouldn’t let loose.

A guard appeared at the door, one he hadn’t seen before. So the guards changed at noon. Middle-aged, medium height, fifteen stone, wearing the red Phrygian cap that showed he was a loyal revolutionary. He was better dressed than the other guards. Might mean he had a careful wife. Might mean he was a dandy among the sans-culottes
.
Might mean he took bribes.

And this one could read. He went through a paper, looking up, looking down, matching names and prisoners.

The guard finished and went off to check the count in the next room. There were women in there, including some nuns. He’d seen them walk by in the corridor.

Galba would be the one to tell his father that his youngest son was dead, on the public block, in France. That was a poke in the eye for the old man. A Markham, even an extra son nobody had any use for, didn’t die in a public execution. Just like his father always predicted, he’d finally made himself a blot on the Markham escutcheon.

Maybe he’d take that thought to the guillotine with him and pull it out at the last minute to warm himself up, so he wouldn’t start shaking at the end.

He wouldn’t waste his last minutes thinking about that bitter old man. He’d be thinking about Maggie.

He swallowed. His mouth was foul and dry from being afraid. On the way in, they’d marched him past the door to the cloister and he’d seen a well out there. When they let the men out of this room, he’d get himself a drink of water out in the courtyard.

He wouldn’t feel so trapped if he had sky overhead.

He’d been feeling an eye on him for a few minutes.

A priest, wearing the black cassock, headed in his direction, walking crooked and painful, stopping to rest and talk with one man and then another. He’d be one of the priests who wouldn’t swear to the Republic. Not too many of them left in Paris. The guillotine cut them down like ripe grain.

“A newcomer.” It was a clear, educated Parisian accent.

“Don’t get up. I will join you, if you don’t mind. We have a shortage of chairs, so the ground must serve me.”

The hand that clamped down to take the support of Doyle’s shoulder was surprisingly firm. There was something wrong with the man’s legs, though. The weight of the priest was nothing at all—the bird bones and the tough leather flesh of the old.

Doyle reached up and grasped forearms with the man, helping him down to sit next to him. The cassock was ragged at the hem but made of heavy black silk. He’d been an aristocrat among priests.

“Father.” Doyle settled back down.

The priest took three or four shallow breaths before he spoke. There was pain inside the man. You could see it in his eyes. Not much life left in him. Hardly enough to be worth the Republic’s while killing him. Maybe they were hoping he’d die in prison. The priest said, “Yes. Thank you.” Another breath. “Your name, my son?”

“Guillaume,
mon Père.
Guillaume LeBreton.”

“By your voice, you’re a long way from home, Guillaume LeBreton. I am accustomed to write letters for men who wish to send them. I’ll attempt to send one for you even as far as Brittany, if this would comfort you.”

“There’s no one left to send it to. No one’s expecting me back.”

The priest touched his sleeve with a stick and tendon of a hand, half scarecrow. “Then no one there is afraid for you. It is a poor comfort, but a real one. I am Father Jérôme, a priest of Saint-Sulpice, paying for a misspent life with an uncomfortable ending.” He carried a black box under his arm. When he set it across his lap it was topped with a black and white inlay of squares. Not a book. A chessboard. “I discovered, in the end, that I possessed a conscience. A most inconvenient appendage. And you? Why are you here, my son?”

“A mistake.”

“We are fifty mistakes in this place.” Under the murmur and cough of the other men, the priest chuckled. “Except possibly a few of our criminal brothers who admit to some small errors in honesty. We have our thieves, and our whores, and one poor forger who was unwise enough to print political writings when he was not forging. If you are a thief, I have some fine sermons about thievery.”

“I’m not so lucky. Seems I’ve committed a crime against the Revolution. I’m that buffle-headed, I can’t remember doing it.”

“That is unfortunate, Guillaume. But you will find the invention of the Tribunal is nearly infinite. You will be amazed at what you’ve been up to.” Father Jérôme shifted and sighed with the dry breath of old age. “I take confession in the hall upstairs in the evenings. The guards look the other way for an hour. You’re a big block of a lad. You will help me up the stairs tonight. The pair who have been assisting me left this morning.”

“They left” meant they’d gone to the Conciergerie and trial. They’d be dead by now, or on their way to it.

“Glad to. I’ve a broad back for it.”

“We will put your back to good use then. When they count us tonight and bring the bread and soup, collect an extra loaf to be the Host. The guard will pretend not to see. Bring it upstairs with us. We will pass the climb discussing your sins, which are doubtless numerous.”

“There’s a few.”

“You shall be my first absolution of the night. My penances are light these days. Leave me in the dark at the top of the stairs. It serves as my confessional. Those who have been called to trial tomorrow will come last. When they’re finished, come for me again. I say Mass on the stairs. How long has it been since your last confession, Guillaume?”

“Years.” Maybe he’d believed in a benevolent God when he was a child. Not for a long time. “That’s a chessboard.”

The priest sat up straighter. “Do you play?” He touched the box he held. “They allow me to keep this and my breviary. I hate to admit they’re both comforts to me. My last chess partner, alas, has moved on.”

“I play.” He watched in silence as the priest opened the box and set the chessmen on the floor. It was an old set. Venetian papier-mâché, painted and gilded. Each man was detailed and delicate, with banners and bright robes. What was it doing in this godforsaken place? “Beautiful.” He lifted the white knight.

“It was given to me by the young man who was my chess partner for a while. He had it from another man, who had it from yet another. No one knows how long the set has been moving from prisoner to prisoner.” The priest lay the box flat, opened facedown, to make the board. “We will play chess on the edge of doom, you and I. There’s some Christian moral in this, my young Breton, but I cannot find one that does not sound sententious. Take white, if you will.” He set red men on the board with practiced speed.

“I don’t mind opening the game.”
What’s happening to Maggie? She’s sick and she’s alone in that house with her cousin. I can’t get to her.