Why Kings Confess (23 page)

A
lexandrie Sauvage was hunkered down beside the entrance to Gibson’s surgery when Sebastian walked up to her. She had her head bent, her attention focused on the bandage she was wrapping around a ragged child’s finger. He knew she saw him, for she stiffened. But she didn’t look up, saying to the child, “Next time, Felicity, remember: Geese bite.”

The little girl giggled, thanked her prettily, and ran off to join the gang of urchins waiting for her in the shadows of the Tower.

Alexandrie Sauvage rose slowly to her feet and turned to face him. “Why are you here?”

“We need to talk.”

The wind fluttered the locks of dark red hair framing her face, and she crossed her arms at her chest as if she were cold. She made no move to step into the surgery, but simply stared back at him with wide, unblinking eyes.

He said, “Why didn’t you tell me that Damion was only your half brother?”

“‘Only’? You say that as if our different mothers should make him somehow less important to me. Is that what you’re suggesting?”

“No. I’m suggesting the fact that some people believed him to be the Lost Dauphin of France might have had something to do with his murder. Why the bloody hell didn’t you tell me?”

“Mother of God; why would I bring up some ridiculous, decades-old rumor? Damion was my brother—my half brother, if you will. He was no Bourbon.”

“Are you so certain?”

“Yes!”

“How old were you when your father brought Damion home?”

Her eyes glittered with animosity. “Fourteen.”

“Yet you had never seen him before?”

“No. I did not even know he existed.”

“You didn’t find that odd?”

“Then? Of course. Now?” She shook her head. “No. His mother was a noblewoman. The birth would have been seen as something shameful, something to be hidden. Her parents cut off all contact between her and my father.”

“Did your brother ever talk to you about his mother?”

“Not really. He remembered little of their life before prison. When the trauma of one’s life becomes too great to deal with, the mind sometimes ceases remembering it.”

“Was his ordeal traumatic?”

“He and his mother spent years in prison, without light or proper food, in conditions considerably worse than those endured by Marie-Thérèse. Then his mother was torn from his arms and killed. He never completely recovered from the experience, either physically or mentally. He had dreadful nightmares, and his legs were always weak—it’s why he was never able to serve as a physician in the French army.”

“And why he hated the dark?”

“Yes.”

The implications of that fear and the knowledge of how he had met his death weighed heavily in the silence between them.

Sebastian kept his gaze on her face. “Your father has never said anything to suggest that he might have been involved in an attempt to save the Dauphin from the Temple Prison?”

“Good God, no! How many times must I tell you?
Damion was my brother.
”

“Did your brother know about the speculation that he might in fact be the Lost Dauphin?”

“Of course he knew. Nothing would make him more furious.”

“Sometimes anger is a product of a refusal to believe the truth.”

“Not in this case.”

She went to stand beside an ancient stone watering trough set in front of the stepped-back facade of the neighboring house. She still had her arms crossed, as if she were hugging herself, and her features had taken on the flatness of those who look into the distant past.

She said, “When my father performed the autopsy on the body of the boy in the Temple, he removed his heart. For nearly twenty years now he has kept that child’s heart in a crystal vase in his study. Why would he do that if he knew the boy was an imposter? If he knew that the real Dauphin was alive and masquerading as his own son?”

“Perhaps he feared that he himself might have been deceived. I doubt the plan of substitution was his own. Knowing that he was simply one player in a much larger plot, he may not have known whom to trust. Whom to believe.”

“And so he took the heart on the off chance the dead boy might indeed have been the real son of Louis XVI? Is that what you’re saying? But if what you’re suggesting is true, then why not tell his own children? Why not tell Damion himself?”

“For your protection, perhaps?” said Sebastian. “The very fact that he kept the child’s heart suggests to me that your father retains some royalist sympathies. Did Damion?”

“Hardly. He despised the Bourbons.”

“As do you.”

“As do I.”

She stared off down the lane, to where the children were now tossing withered cabbage leaves at a pig in an effort to capture its interest. Her face was set in tight, hard lines. But he could see the telltale tic of a muscle along her jawline.

He said, “In a sense, it doesn’t really matter whether your brother was the Lost Dauphin or not. All that matters is that someone believed he was—someone who considered him a potential threat to the current line of succession to the French throne. A threat to be eliminated.”

She brought up one hand to press the fingertips against her lips. “You’re saying that’s why they took his heart? Because they thought he was a Bourbon? What are they planning to do with it? Enshrine it someday in the Val-de-Grâce? As if he were another martyr of the Revolution rather than a man they themselves murdered?”

“I suspect they do consider him a martyr of the Revolution.”

“And the colonel with the French delegation? Why kill him? Why gouge out his eyes?”

“To disguise the true motive behind Damion Pelletan’s death, perhaps? To frighten Vaundreuil into abandoning peace negotiations that might end with Napoléon still on the throne of France? I’m not sure.”

She dropped her hands to her sides. “Who? Which of the Bourbons do you think was behind this?”

“I don’t know.”

She studied his face, her eyes hard and searching. “I don’t believe it.”

When he said nothing, she expelled her breath in a harsh rush. “I keep going over and over that dreadful night in my mind. The bitter, numbing cold. The glitter of the ice. The echo of our footsteps in the stillness. I keep trying to remember something—anything—that might help. But I can’t.”

“You said you thought you heard footsteps behind you, in the lane.”

“Yes.”

“One set of footsteps or two?”

“Only one. Or at least, only one close at hand. There may have been others, farther in the distance.”

“A man’s footsteps, or a woman’s?”

“A man’s. Of that, I am certain. Why do you ask?”

“I found the prints of a woman’s shoe in the alley.”

She shook her head. “If there had been a woman there, I would have known it—I would have
felt
it.”

Another man might have questioned her assurance, but not Sebastian. As acute as his senses of sight and hearing were, he had learned long ago to rely even more on those senses to which language had as yet given no name.

She said, “Surely you’re not suggesting that Marie-Thérèse of France or one of her ladies stalked my brother through the wretched alleys of St. Katharine’s and thrust a knife into his back?”

Sebastian shook his head. He didn’t believe even Lady Giselle would do her own killing. She would leave the dirty work to men like the dark-eyed assassin who had attacked Sebastian outside Stokes Mandeville, a man Sebastian had once assumed was English but whom he now realized could as easily be a Frenchman who had lived the last twenty-odd years in this country, losing all trace of his native inflections.

Yet he found himself coming back, as always, to that bloody imprint of a woman’s shoe. And he was aware of a conviction that he was still missing something terribly important.

And that time was running out.

T
ha
t night, a fierce wind blew in from the north, scattering the dense, choking fog that had smothered the city for days and bringing with it a killing cold.

Sebastian could hear the wind even in his sleep, a low, mournful cadence that joined with a chorus of inconsolable grief. He dreamt of sad-eyed women with flailing arms that reached up to the heavens as they cried out with an anguish borne of empty wombs and empty cradles, even when the blood of their murdered infants stained their own hands. Then the wind became the thunder of the surf beating against a rocky shore, and he was a boy again, standing at the precipice of a sheer cliff face, the sun warm on his face as he stared out to sea. Watching, waiting for a golden-haired, laughing woman who would never, ever return.

He jerked awake, his eyes opening on the tucked blue silk of the tester above. He sat on the side of the bed, the breath coming hard in his chest, like a man standing against a gale so strong he had to fight to draw air. The room was filled with dancing shadows, the wind eddying the dying fire and shifting the heavy drapes at the window.

He rose to his feet and went to throw more coal on the fire. The icy air bit his naked flesh, but he ignored it, standing with one hand resting on the mantel, his gaze on the leaping flames. He heard a soft whisper of movement from the bed, and Hero came to drape a blanket around his shoulders.

He had returned home that evening to find her kneeling on the bed with her arms folded on the mattress and her forehead resting on her hands. She might not trust Alexandrie Sauvage to manipulate the child in her womb, but she was desperate enough to spend twenty minutes every two hours in an ungainly posture that thus far had done nothing to encourage his recalcitrant offspring to assume a position best calculated to preserve her and her mother’s life.

She said, “You can’t solve every murder, unravel every mystery, right every wrong.”

“No.”

She gave a soft huff of disbelief. “You say that, but you don’t really believe it.”

He gave a crooked smile. “No.”

She snuggled into the chair beside the fire, a quilt held close around her. “Do you seriously think it possible that Marie-Thérèse could be behind all this?”

“When you’re brought up to believe that you’re descended from a saint and that your family has been anointed by God to fill a position of limitless power and authority, it does tend to have a somewhat warping influence on your thought processes—even without the damage inflicted by three years of hell locked in a tower and guarded by men who hate you.”

Hero was silent for a moment, her eyes clouded by a troubling memory.

“What?” he asked, watching her.

“I was just thinking about a dinner party I attended a few years ago. Marie-Thérèse was there, and she told a story about her brother, about a time when Marie Antoinette allowed the children to milk the cows at the Petit Trianon, and how the little Dauphin squealed with delight when he was accidentally squirted in the face with the warm, fresh milk. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen her looking relaxed and vaguely happy. I think she remembers the days before the Revolution when her mother and father and brother were all alive as a golden age in her life, a sacred time of joy and love and serenity. If she genuinely thought Damion Pelletan was the Lost Dauphin, I can’t believe she would have had him killed. The others? Perhaps. But not a man she believed to be her beloved little brother.”

“You could be right. It’s possible she knows nothing about it. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t done to benefit her.”

“By whom?”

“I’d put my money on Lady Giselle.”

She blinked. “Can you prove it?”

“Prove it? No. To be honest, I’m not even entirely convinced I’m right.” He gave a wry smile. “It isn’t as if I haven’t been wrong before.”

She watched the flames lick at the new load of coal. “How do you explain the explosion at Golden Square? I mean, why would Lady Giselle try to kill Alexi Sauvage? Simply because she was there when Damion Pelletan was killed?”

“It’s possible. Although I’m not convinced the Bourbons had anything to do with what happened in Golden Square. That was probably Sampson Bullock’s handiwork.”

“Then how do you know he didn’t kill Damion Pelletan too?”

“I don’t. I’d probably think he
did
kill Pelletan, if it weren’t for the removal of Pelletan’s heart. That, and the way everything seems to keep circling back to the Bourbons.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re to blame.”

“No. But they are involved. Somehow.”

She pushed up from the chair with the slow, stately grace that had come to characterize her movements of late. The dark fall of her hair glowed in the firelight, a soft smile curling her lips as she bracketed his cheeks with her hands and kissed his mouth. He rested his hands on her hips, breathed in the familiar heady scent that was all her own. He kissed her again, then leaned his forehead against hers as he felt his heart swell with a flood of love and joy, all tangled up with a fear more terrible than any he had ever known.

Even after they had gone back to bed and she had fallen asleep beside him, he found the night’s shadows haunted by dreamlike images of empty arms and silent cradles.

Friday, 29 January

Early the next morning, Sebastian was coming down for breakfast when Morey opened the door to Lady Peter Radcliff.

She carried an overstuffed satchel and had brought with her the child known to the world as her brother. He stood on the top step with his two wooden boats clutched to his chest. There was a pale, pinched look about his face, and he kept shivering as if he were so cold he might never warm up.

Lady Peter wore a cherry red velvet pelisse with a high white fur collar and a silken bonnet whose stiffened velvet brim hid her face. But when she turned her head, Sebastian saw the thin line of blood that trickled from her split lip and the purple bruises that mottled and swelled her once pretty face.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, her voice a cracked whisper. “I know I shouldn’t have come here. But I didn’t know where else to go.” And then, as if she had been holding herself upright by a sheer act of will, her eyes rolled back in her head.

Sebastian caught her just before she hit the tiled marble floor.

•   •   •

“I don’t think she’s sustained any serious internal damage,” Gibson said, keeping his voice low. “Although it wasn’t for lack of trying on someone’s part. Who did this to her?”

“That would be her husband, the younger son of the Third Duke of Linford, and brother to the current Fourth Duke.”

They were standing just outside the door to the darkened chamber where Lady Peter lay beneath a pile of warm quilts. Her eyes were closed, although Sebastian didn’t think she was sleeping. Hero had carried off the boy, Noël, to the morning room, where she was plying him with milk and cookies and trying to coax the disgruntled black cat into being sociable.

Gibson said, “I tried to get her to take some laudanum, but she refused. Perhaps you can convince her to change her mind.”

After Gibson left, Sebastian went to sit beside her. He watched her throat work as she swallowed and opened eyes that were swimming with unshed tears. Then she blinked, and one tear escaped to slip sideways into her hair.

“It’s all right,” he said. “You’re safe now.”

She shook her head, although whether it was to refute his statement or to deny her need for safety, he couldn’t have said. “Peter . . .” She swallowed. “He never beat me like this before. Not this bad. In the past, he was always careful to hurt me where it wouldn’t show. But this time . . . I thought he was going to kill me.”

“What set him off? Do you have any idea?”

“He was out drinking most of the night and came home in a rage. He’s badly dipped, you see, and his brother is refusing to pay his debts. The last time the Duke rescued him from dun territory, he swore he’d never do it again. I knew he meant it, but Peter refused to believe it. Now he’s getting desperate. He ran through everything I brought to the marriage years ago, and he wants to get his hands on what my father left for Noël. I told him I wouldn’t help him do it—that I’d rather die. That’s when he started hitting me.”

She was silent for a moment, then said, “He called me . . . such names. Said he had put up with my bastard all these years, that the least I could do was help him now, when he needed it.”

“He knows Noël is your son?”

She nodded, the tears sliding freely down her cheeks. “I never deceived him.”

“Did you tell him Damion Pelletan was the boy’s father?”

“No. But I think he might have guessed.” Her fingers picked at the lace trimming of the sheets. “When Damion first begged me to go away with him, I told him I couldn’t do it. I wanted to, but I’d made a vow and I believed I owed it to Peter to honor it. But then . . .”

Her voice faded away. Sebastian waited, and after a moment she swallowed and started up again. “Last Wednesday, Noël left one of his boats lying in the entry hall. Peter tripped over it, and he turned around and backhanded Noël so hard he made his nose bleed. I couldn’t believe it. Peter had never hit him before. But that’s how it started with me; one day he lost his temper and slapped me across the face. He swore he’d never do it again. But he did. So I knew . . . I knew it would be the same all over again with Noël. That’s when I realized I had to leave—with or without Damion.”

“So you told Damion you’d go with him when he left for France?”

“Yes.”

“Is it possible Lord Peter discovered what you were planning?”

“I don’t know.” Her face crumpled with the force of her sobs, splitting open the cut on her lip so that it began to bleed again. “He may have.
Oh, God.
Has this all been my fault? Did Damion die because of me?”

Sebastian knew most people in their society would blame her, whether Damion died because of her or not. She had borne a child out of wedlock, then conspired to leave her noble husband for her former lover.

But he could not find it within him to either judge or condemn her for the tangle her life had become. She had been young and vulnerable when she gave in to her passion and the enchantment of love, and unwisely created a child. Torn from the future that might have been hers, she was forced by her parents and the dictates of their society’s stern, unforgiving sense of propriety to disown her own child and marry a man who agreed to give her a veneer of respectability in exchange for her father’s wealth. It was a contract she entered into in good faith, determined to honor the vows she made to a man whose easy geniality and practiced charm hid an angry, self-indulgent, and ultimately abusive petulance.

He said, “Lord Peter claims he was home with you the night Damion was killed. Was he?”

She shook her head from side to side against the pillow. “No. He was supposed to meet Brummell and Alvanley at White’s for dinner that night, but he never showed up. He said he spent the night drinking in some low tavern in Westminster and ended up getting into a brawl there. When he came home early the next morning, his clothes were covered in blood.”

“Was he hurt?”

“No. I think his knuckles may have been skinned, but that was all.”

“Where is he now?”

“I left him sleeping.” She drew in a deep, ragged breath. “I’ve made such a mess of things. What am I to do?”

Reaching out, Sebastian laid his hand over hers where it rested on the counterpane. “Right now, all you need to do is rest and get better.”

“Noël—”

“Is petting our cranky black cat in the drawing room. He’ll be fine.”

“I should see him—”

“I’ll have him come in after you’ve had some sleep.”

Her hand trembled beneath his, then lay still. And it occurred to him as he watched her eyes close and her breathing deepen with sleep that whoever had killed Damion Pelletan hadn’t only robbed a caring young physician of his life.

They’d also deprived a little boy of his father and a lonely young woman of the chance to reach again for the gentle love and happiness that had been snatched from her so long ago.