Viridian (The Hundred-Days Series Book 2) (30 page)

The truth
, a voice demanded.
She had to tell the truth now, or at least enough of it to be convincing. Did
she even know what was true anymore? She couldn’t bear him thinking she had
turned against him, but the words were still stuck, as buried now as they had
been when she’d penned her letter to Ethan. Humiliation at her weakness
strangled any explanation. There was no telling him the mess her feelings had
made of things without admitting how she had managed to trap so many other
things inside.

“Why did you do it, Olivia?”

“Philipe!” she blurted it out
without thinking.

Ty hung before her, frozen, face
contorted as though he'd been slapped.

“Philipe. He was so charming, and
we spent so much time together. Everything became muddled. Real feelings and
invented ones. And then, when I was at my most confused...”

“He was....” Ty nodded, unable to
finish.

“Now you begin to understand.” The
lie tasted awful, passing her lips. Even worse was the look on Ty’s face, the
distance in his eyes. He was closing up, putting on a mask, as they were so apt
to do.

“Olivia –”

She cut him off, snapping up a
hand. “You're right. I have betrayed you, in a sense. I allowed my feelings to
interfere with our mission, and it's made me a dangerous partner.”

“
Olivia
–”

Sighing, she shook her head,
straightening away from the wall. “I'm going back in, and I'm going to sleep.
In the morning, if we ever get out of these godforsaken woods, I'm going home
to London.

She turned, but Ty grabbed a
fistful of her sleeve, jerking her back. “Does Grayfield know?”

“He does.”

Ty seemed to forget the
conversation at hand and screwed his face up, confused. “You never shared La
Porte's bed. I know where you spend your nights. And where he spent his,
whether I wished to or not.”

Olivia planted hands on her hips.
“Grayfield doesn't
know
that.” She jerked her shirt free of his grip.
“I'm going in, and I don't want to talk about this anymore tonight.”

She stomped back inside, chased by
the anguish she’d caused him, annoyed that her throat ached with the need to
cry, and too humiliated to do it in earshot of Ty.

Falling to the mattress, she turned
away from the door, hating his footsteps right behind her.

“Olivia, can we –”

“No, Tyler!” She flipped to her
back, crying in earnest despite every effort, not able to see his face through
her tears in the dark. “I was not being coy when I said –”

“By God, woman, will you shut up a
moment and hear me out!”

He dropped to his knees beside her
on the mattress.

“You're not going back to London.
I've already spoken to Grayfield. I told him it was all a mistake.”

“You did
what
?” How long had
he known, and what had Ethan told him? “Never mind. It’s irrelevant now. What
matters is that I cannot fulfill my duties. I'm an unfit partner.”

He pressed her arms hard against
the mattress until her shoulders ached. “You'll have to give me a reason that's
a damned sight better than that, Olivia. We’ve been through too much.”

She said nothing; nothing was all
that came to her. Grinding out an oath, Ty let her go, falling beside her on
the very edge of the rough mattress.

She was ashamed. It occurred
finally, as she lay in the cold silence, staring at his back. She’d always had
control, but her love for Ty was not rational or manageable, and the happiness
she had earned was not a lasting thing. There was no admitting any of that to
Ty without admitting her worst flaws: she was lonely and determined to be alone.
Rolling away from him, she buried her face in the blanket's rough folds, tears
wicking silently into the wool.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Not two words
.

Since waking that morning, from the
edge of the Verriere all the way to the outskirts of Paris proper, Ty wagered
they had not spoken two words to each other.

Partly, it was pride. Since their
falling out the night before, he didn't much feel like being the first to break
the silence. The rest was confusion; he had no idea where to start. Why had she
truly asked to be recalled, and why was she still lying to him now? What had
happened to Thalia, and where did they go from here?

Only one thing was entirely
certain: When they reached the city, Olivia was leaving him. Despite sitting
close enough to him on the horse that he could smell her hair, her stiff back
for most of the ride had made him feel miles away. No touching, no speaking.
Olivia had put an ocean of distance between them in a day's time.

He suspected that she only sagged
against him now because of the tell-tale way her head lolled from side to side.
He envied her fitful moment of sleep until she cried out, muttering softly.

He steered their horse through the
old town gate, now just a pile of timbers that hung like finger bones, their
rusted hardware bolted tenuously into the crumbling stone wall. Houses stood
tall on either side of the high street where it curved up the hill, dirty
plaster battered away by wind and weather in patches, revealing the medieval
stone beneath. They looked down with vacant black eyes onto a roadway whose
cobblestones had been appropriated years before, leaving only a muddy path.
Some of the houses were masked by boarded openings, doors and windows shored up
to create a gentleman's agreement which no one remained to enforce. Ty could
see no rhyme or reason to the efforts, why one structure had been protected and
another, sometimes statelier one had been entirely neglected.

Whatever the case, their fates had
common cause: The Reign of Terror. The more upper class residents may have
fled, leaving holes in the fabric of trade and infrastructure. Or perhaps they
had been taken in a purge, leaving their tenants joyously free of a landlord
until a leaking roof was not repaired, the rents went unpaid and the properties
were confiscated by the State. The guillotine, directly or indirectly, had
emptied the town one building at a time until only the rats and owls remained
to rebel against the Empire.

At the top of the high street,
above the silent decay, the road narrowed and became dustier, spared the
pooling rainwater of winter's end by a river stone gutter cutting down its
center. The road's brown line curved away to the left, nearly in a hairpin,
disappearing behind thick stands of trees silvery and plush at the top with
overburdened pussy willows. Their destination lay just beyond the elms, if he
recalled the tunnel map correctly.

Whitehall's tomb map was old,
tattooed onto a scrap of leather sometime just after the Terror had begun.
Paris’s underground was riddled with limestone passages, some worn by water and
time, others constructed for a secret purpose hundreds of years before.
Affairs, assassinations, and rebellions had all shaped the hidden web,
branching from the city’s infamous catacombs. He had studied it for months,
memorizing routes in case he and Olivia were forced to slip back into the city.
At the time, he couldn’t have foreseen them using it under such dire
circumstances.

Behind the copses, the land rose
again into more of a low knob than a hill. The chateau at its peak was nearly
invisible, smudged into the silver and pewter sky behind it by the predawn
light of a cloudy day. As they climbed the knoll and the sun moved farther up
the horizon, he could more easily make out details of the abandoned mansion. It
was ugly in its squareness, hardly more than a large cube of derelict stone.
Its architect, a genius of a bygone era, had used that plain canvas to showcase
his ornaments, lovely still in the midst of decay. A turret-like portico
divided the face of the house, concluding in a baroque arch once set with a
small window. The bell-shaped pediment clung to the last black-shingled
remnants of a roof, the few pieces not having been claimed by rain or fire. It
was nearly comical, hacked and rotting shutters still guarding the high
windows, while the wide front entrance stood doorless. In the face of so much
ruin, somehow a tenacious rosebush crept between the ground-floor windows,
putting on eager buds in celebration of spring. The sight cheered him, and for
no sound reason, he felt a shred of optimism about what lay ahead. Despite the
guillotine’s harvest, years of war and suffering, he believed what he had told
Olivia. Napoleon could be stopped and France could be saved.

They gained the last of the slope
to an old circular drive now overgrown to a patchy green lawn. He wondered if
Olivia would recognize the chateau. Had she ever been there? She would surely
be aware of the place. Would she put the pieces together and identify it as her
father's summer home?

When he brought their horse to a
stop at the top of the drive, she slipped down without waiting for help,
standing with her back to him, arms wrapped around her midsection. He pulled
his coat free of the roll behind him and held it out to her on a hooked finger.
“Cold?”

“No.” She didn't turn around, or
even glance over her shoulder. There was no way to tell without seeing her face
if she was upset about the previous night, the house, or both. Probably a
combination of all of it. Hopping down beside her, he decided to let her be and
collect their gear.

He unstrapped his haversack and
slung it across his shoulders, wriggled into his coat, and stuffed Olivia's
conscripted pistol into his trousers. The other sack he dropped at Olivia's
feet, letting her decide whether to claim it. Finally, he unfastened the bridle
from the horse and gave the beautiful chestnut's coat a deep scratch. “Lots to
eat up here. You'll be king of the place.” He rubbed behind the horse's ears
one last time and started for the house.

A high limestone wall stuck out on
both sides like arms, still topped along most sections by wrought-iron work.
The black metal arches twisted up into points like little fleur de lis,
imposing enough to deter any scaling of the walls below, even after a hundred
years.

They would have to pass through the
crumbling house, an equally perilous endeavor.

He mounted the fan of front stairs,
catching the sound of Olivia's footsteps behind him as he passed over the
threshold into a once grand hall. It was nothing now; just a passage from the
front of the chateau to the back, stretching to a bright rectangle where the
rear doors had been torn free. Doves cooed from somewhere deeper inside the
house, and a few drops of rain kissed his forehead through a hole in the
floorboards above.

There was something infuriating
about the house's chaos. It hadn’t been looted, just ransacked. The mahogany
frame of a little sofa was upended, barring a doorway to the right. Among the
wood shards and leaf litter, he could spy the rat-chewed leather spines of
books and a silver candle stick. They hadn’t come here to steal, hadn’t come out
of greed or hunger. It was hate. And ignorant hate, at that.

Ty lifted his boot over a
splintered section of elaborately carved banister, but a hand on his shoulder
gave him pause, surprise at her touching him with purpose. Her fingers curved
to his sleeve, but her eyes were fixed on a shadowed doorway to their left.
After a breath, she moved toward it, one slow step at a time, leaving him with
the feeling that she was under an influence not her own. She was compelled, and
he could not have stopped her had he tried. Instead, he followed behind Olivia,
casting nervous glances at the beams creaking overhead.

It had been a drawing room, if he
had to guess by what remained. Arms and legs of fine chairs, now silver and
weathered like driftwood were scattered about the floor. Shreds of drapes,
velvet weight still pulling at the rotted fabric, hung loosely about the window
or littered the ground underneath. They might have been Bourbon blue or a rich
vermillion once, now an ash gray.

Olivia picked her way across the
room over heaps of detritus, not seeming aware of where she was, or that he was
there. She knelt beside a cobweb strung fireplace, its plaster work
impressively still intact under layers of dust, and ran her fingers along the
top of a portrait. The gilt frame was gone, pilfered or destroyed. Only the
rough wood strips to which the canvas had been fastened still remained. The
fabric was torn from left to right a few inches from the top. The ragged flap
hung to the floor, a sail fluttering a little in a breeze that whispered
perpetually through the house's skeleton.

Olivia pinched the corner and
raised it up.

He had expected the portrait to be
pristine, intact, a face staring back at them across time. He wondered,
watching Olivia smooth the canvas and align the tear, why he'd thought it. Time
and weather had not been any kinder to the oil paint than it had been to the
rest of the house. Around the edges, the brush strokes were chipped, and swaths
of color crazed into little islands like an unfinished puzzle. The tear,
however, had been a sort of boon, preserving enough of the work that he could
perceive the heart of the painting. A sweep of chestnut hair framed a fine pair
of blue eyes holding a seductive feminine challenge. He had seen the same look
in Olivia's eyes often enough.

She grabbed a free edge of the canvas
and began to pull, intent on saving what was left of the portrait. As she
stretched the canvas out from the frame, dry, aged paint surrendered under the
tension, crumbling to the floor in slow-drifting flakes.

“No, no!” Olivia pressed at the
crumbling portrait with desperate fingers, but her efforts only made it worse.
More bits of paint clung to her hands, floated like ashes to join the rest of
the rubble beneath her knees. Her shoulders slumped, rolled forward, and Olivia
hung her head. Never had he seen her so defeated, so crushed.

His heart broke. “Olivia? Is there
something –”

“No.” She rubbed hands over her
face, but there was no telling if she was crying or just tired.

“There's a knife in my pack. I
could cut it.”

She stood and crossed the room
impressively fast, given the obstacles, and pushed past him out into the hall.
“I'm ready to go.”

He should say something, but he had
no idea what. Swallowing down an ever-growing ache in his chest, he led Olivia
through the house and into the remains of a garden. Old, matted grass and a few
patches of gravel and tree branches were all that remained. They passed through
a rusted iron gate on the far side, its weathered cry serving as a warning that
only the dead lay beyond.

It was modest as family plots went,
only a few rows of headstones testifying to the legacy of a large and powerful
family. Perhaps it was because no one could ever agree who should be buried
there. Wives or mistresses, and the children of each created enough discomfort
to drive the other off, even in death. Ty knew the dance well, had observed the
same friction in his own family. His sister, whenever she died would be
gloriously interred at Westminster without question, while even a hint of his
joining her would cause half the family to brick up the cathedral doors. Time
had got the last laugh here though, having reduced all but the newest
headstones to a blank slate. Anonymous and forgotten.

The crowning centerpiece of the
hallowed yard was a mausoleum. It was a miniature replica of a Roman temple,
complete with arched doorways framed with Corinthian columns. He could imagine
the shoulder-high urns that had flanked the steps once overflowing with
well-tended flowers, but now they housed only clumps of moss and bony twigs.

Fishing a hand inside his pack, Ty
produced an awl he'd taken from the cabin and a small pocket knife he'd found
at the soldiers' camp. While Olivia wandered the yard behind him examining
headstones, he knelt and went to work on the gate's heavy iron lock, feeling a
momentary pang at his set of lock picks, lost somewhere amongst the insanity of
the last few days. He’d had them a long time. Sighing, he took stock of the
puzzle before him. There was little skill involved. He guessed it had kept
people out more by looking imposing, driving looters to find easier booty, than
by any real complication of the mechanism.

A moment later, with the protest of
a quarter-century, wood and iron doors swung inward.

He had begun to wonder at Olivia's
lack of interest regarding their destination until he turned and saw the slack,
defeated manner in which she stood before one of the grave markers. She stared
for long minutes, which would not have been strange, except that the stone was
entirely blank. Ty began to worry that the last two days, their fight, and
whatever had come before at the camp was taking a dangerous toll. He came down
the steps, not close enough to intrude, but near enough that he wasn't forced
to shout her name. “Olivia? Whenever you are done...”

She nodded, slowly at first and
then faster, as though working her mind back into her body. “I am. I'm done.”
Practically dragging the sack behind, she made her way to the mausoleum steps,
not looking him in the eye.

He stared at her back as she walked
away from him, a thousand words on his tongue, none of them spoken. He shook
his head and started after her.

Though it was cold outside under
the canopy of clouds, on the cusp between winter and spring, inside the
mausoleum was even more chilled. The granite was damp, giving off a dank odor.
Not even sun that fighting through narrow stained glass windows high above
could chase away the gloom. The interior was much simpler and more beautiful
than he would have expected for a marquis and his lady. Pale gray stone formed
walls and was angled seamlessly into wide benches that sat below the windows,
dotted with the jewel tone spots of light by a sun that was finally above the
horizon. Even the sarcophagus was tasteful and plain, like an ancient altar.
Scrollwork adorned its head and foot, and white marble carved into garlands
draped along its face. Even the marquis himself, lying still in effigy, was
dressed eternally as a Renaissance chevalier rather than a modern nobleman.