C. Harris - Why Kings Confess

Sebastian studied her fiercely proud profile. She was a woman who had been trained from infancy to dissemble, to never show her true thoughts or emotions. Yet there was no disguising the intense anger that smoldered beneath her carefully correct exterior. He said, “I wonder, do you know a man by the name of Harmond Vaundreuil?”

He expected her to deny it. Instead, she curled her lip and said, “Fortunately, I have never personally encountered the man. But I have heard of him, yes. A vulgar parvenu who believes himself the equal of his betters. There are many such in the government of France these days. But by the grace of God, all will soon be dispersed. Once the Bourbons are restored to their rightful position, Vaundreuil and his kind will be like so many roaches, fleeing before the bright light of God’s divine will.”

Sebastian kept his own features carefully bland. “What about a Frenchwoman, Alexandrie Sauvage? Do you know her?”

“Sauvage?” Marie-Therese drew up at the end of the allee and pivoted to look him full in the face. “I do not believe so, no,” she said with perfect calm. “And now you must excuse me. I wish to walk on alone. Lady Giselle will accompany you back to the house.” And she turned on her heel and left him there, her head held high, her spine stiff as she strode determinedly away.

“I’m sorry. She is rather. . tense today,” said Lady Giselle, coming up beside him.

In Sebastian’s experience, Marie-Therese was always tense. But all he said was, “I suspect I’m quite capable of finding my way back to the house without assistance, if you would rather go after her.”

Lady Giselle shook her head. “She meant it when she said she wishes to be alone.”

They turned to walk side by side back down the allee. After a moment, Lady Giselle said, “I know many find the Princess cold and stiff, even aloof. But she truly is an admirable woman, strong and devout. Her days are spent helping her uncle, or visiting establishments for the relief of orphans and the poor.”

“Is that what she did this last Thursday?”

“Last Thursday? Oh, no; Thursday was the twenty-first of January.”

“The date is significant?”

She looked vaguely surprised, then let out her breath in a rush. “Ah, it is because you’re not French; that is why you do not know. Marie-Therese’s father, King Louis XVI of France, was guillotined at ten o’clock on the morning of January 21, 1793. Did you know she has the chemise he wore when he was killed? His confessor saved it for her. It is still stained dark with his blood. Every year on the anniversary of his death, she closets herself with the chemise in her room and spends the day in prayer. She does the same on the anniversary of her mother’s murder, as well.”

Twenty years, thought Sebastian. Her parents had been dead for twenty years, and she had yet to put those dark days behind her and learn to embrace the joys of the living. He wondered if Lady Giselle passed the anniversary of her own parents’ deaths closeted in prayer with a bloody relic. Somehow, he doubted it.

Aloud, he said, “She stays in prayer all day?”

“From before dawn until midnight. She does not leave her room, not even for meals. Her uncle always has trays sent up for her, but she never touches them.”

“So she spent Thursday alone?”

They had reached the long eastern facade of the house, its elegant row of recessed, arched windows forming an incongruous backdrop to the tethered goats and flocks of chickens. She pivoted to face him, her eyes narrowed, her head tilting to one side as she regarded him intently. “What precisely are you suggesting, my lord? That the daughter of the martyred King of France gave us all the slip and crept out to murder some insignificant Parisian physician in a London back alley?”

When Sebastian remained silent, she gave a humorless laugh and said, “But since you asked, I will answer your question. No, she did not spend the day alone. Every January twenty-first since her release from prison, I have been at her side, praying with her, and holding her when she weeps. No one has ever seen Marie-Therese weep in public, and no one ever will. Just as no one will ever know the torments she bears in private.”

He became aware of the creak-creak of a wheeled chair carrying an enormously obese man toward them from around the side of the house. It was pushed not by a footman, but by a thin, foppishly dressed gentleman with a narrow, delicate face, a halo of chestnut-colored curls, and the steady, relentless gaze of a man who decided long ago to meet the world on his own terms and shrug off the consequences.

Lady Giselle cast a quick glance toward the wheeled chair. Then she gathered her skirts in a clenched fist. “Good day, my lord.”

Sebastian stood on the ragged lawn and watched her long-legged stride scatter the bleating goats and squawking, disgruntled chickens as if she were chased by the squeak of the wheeled chair rolling ever closer.

S ebastian nudged away a speckled hen that was showing rather too much interest in the shiny toe of one of his Hessians, and walked forward to meet the wheeled chair bearing the uncrowned King of France.

He’d been born Louis Stanislas, fourth in line to the French throne, and given the title Comte de Provence. No one ever expected the plump, self-indulgent Comte de Provence to someday be king. And so he was allowed to go his own way, neglecting his studies, amassing staggering debts, and growing fatter every year. His younger brother, the Comte d’Artois, was slim, dashing, and handsome. But not Provence. Even as a young man, he’d been obese. Now in his late fifties and crippled by gout, he could barely walk without assistance.

“Devlin!” he cried when he was still some feet away. “Don’t run off yet! I want a word with you.”

“Your Majesty,” said Sebastian with an elegant bow.

The Comte de Provence laughed, his plump, rosy-cheeked face still surprisingly youthful and creased with a smile of habitual good cheer. “How very diplomatic of you, young man! And without a moment’s hesitation too. Most people in your position hem and haw in painful indecision. You can almost see the agonized thoughts tumbling one after the other through their heads. Do I address him as if he were indeed the crowned King of France, rather than an impoverished exile? Should I call him the Comte de Provence? Or I should follow Napoleon’s lead and refer to him as the Comte d’Isle? ” The Bourbon’s enormous, protuberant belly bounced up and down. “At least I have yet to have anyone address me the way my niece styles Napoleon, as ‘the Criminal’!”

“Does she really?”

“Oh, yes; she has for years.” Twisting awkwardly in his chair, he reached up with noticeable tenderness to touch the right hand of the man pushing him. “Ambrose, if you would be so kind? A walk toward the chapel might afford the most privacy, don’t you agree?”

Ambrose LaChapelle glanced over at Sebastian, a faint, enigmatic smile curling his lips. “Oh, most definitely.”

Sebastian had met LaChapelle before. Born into an aristocratic family in Avignon, he’d fled France as a youth to fight in the counterrevolutionary emigre army led by the Prince de Conde. When the army was disbanded, he’d joined the Comte de Provence in exile, first in Russia, then in Warsaw, where he’d risen quickly in his royal master’s favor. Sebastian had heard that he owed his rapid elevation to his willingness to do anything for his uncrowned king.

Anything.

“Your father and I were good friends in our youth, you know,” Provence said, his voice raised so as to be heard above the squeak of the chair’s wheels and the crunch of the weed-choked gravel beneath their feet. The winter-bared oaks and elms of the neglected park closed in around them, dark and somber in the flat light.