C. Harris - Why Kings Confess

“What if they did show her the child’s body, only she was so horrified by his condition that she blocked the sight from her mind?”

“I hadn’t thought of that, but you might be right.”

He went to pour himself a glass of brandy. “I think both the Comte de Provence and Marie-Therese were perfectly aware of the fact that Damion Pelletan was the son of the man who treated the Dauphin at the time of his death in the Temple.”

“Surely you can’t think that’s the reason Pelletan was killed? Who would murder a man for something his father did nearly twenty years ago?”

“Isn’t that what the revolutionaries did? They killed a ten-year-old boy for the sins of his forefathers.”

“But. . Provence is far too fat and crippled to have done something like this.”

“I’m not suggesting he did it himself. But he could certainly have hired someone. Someone such as the gentleman who tried to kill me outside of Stoke Mandeville.”

“I can’t believe it of him.”

“I notice you don’t say the same thing about Marie-Therese.”

She started to say something, then stopped and bit her lip.

“You can’t, can you?” said Sebastian.

Hero shook her head. “There is much about Marie-Therese that I admire. She survived a terrible ordeal and suffered a brutal succession of heart-wrenching sorrows. That she came through it with anything even vaguely resembling sanity is truly remarkable. But for all that, I still cannot like her. It isn’t just the haughtiness, or the rigidity, or the ostentatious, intolerant piety. Someone once described Marie-Therese to me as a consummate performer, and I suspect that she truly is. To my knowledge, no one has ever seen her looking happy, although you also never see her appear anything but calm in public. Yet I’ve been told that in reality she is anything but calm. She has hysterics. She’s been known to faint at the sight of a barred window, and she trembles violently at the beat of a drum or the peal of a church bell. She has never really recovered from what was done to her. And while no one could ever in any way hold that against her, I still-”

“Don’t trust her?”

“I wouldn’t trust either her sincerity or her sanity.”

Sebastian was silent for a moment. Then he said, “LaChapelle told me something else. He said that as part of the autopsy, the boy’s heart was removed.”

Hero’s gaze met his. “Oh, God,” she whispered. “You think that’s why Damion’s killer stole his heart? In some twisted kind of revenge?”

“I don’t know. But what are the odds that Philippe-Jean Pelletan would participate in an autopsy that removed the dead Dauphin’s heart, only to have the heart of his own murdered son taken some twenty years later? What are the odds?”

Monday, 25 January

B y morning, the temperature had risen a few degrees above freezing, the thaw turning the snow-filled streets of the city into thickly churned rivers of brown slush. But the wind was still icy cold, with a pervasive, bone-chilling dampness that sent market women scurrying down the footpaths with shawls drawn up over their heads and their shoulders hunched.

Sebastian turned up the collar of his greatcoat and resisted the urge to stomp his cold feet. He was standing on the pavement outside the French Catholic chapel near Portman Square. The church had no bell tower, under a decree of King George III himself; only a simple Latin cross set back into the facade helped differentiate it from the two stables flanking the plain brick building. But he could hear a rustling from within, and a moment later, as the Anglican church bells of the city began to chime the hour, a small huddle of older men and women, their bodies portly and dressed almost uniformly in black, exited the church’s plain doors and drifted away.

Sebastian stood with his hands clasped behind his back and waited.

He’d heard it said that every morning of her life, Marie-Therese rose with the dawn, made her own bed, and swept her own room, before devoting the next hour to prayer. It was what she had done each day of the more than three years she’d spent in a lonely prison cell in Paris, and she had never lost the practice. At Hartwell House, she attended daily mass with her own chaplain. But in London she came here, to the French chapel, to pray with her fellow exiles.

There were some who found the story of a king’s daughter continuing to make her own bed admirable, and in a way it was. But to Sebastian it also spoke of the kind of deep and lingering trauma only too familiar to any man who had ever been to war.

Somehow, alone in her prison cell in the tower of the Knights Templar’s ancient monastery, Marie-Therese had convinced herself that the daily practice of this homely ritual would keep her sane. It had. And so, even though she had now been free for nearly twenty years, she’d never dared to relax her self-imposed regime. It was as if the very act of making her bed and sweeping her room still kept the demons of madness at bay. Perhaps it did.

The bells of the city had long since tolled into silence. But it was another ten minutes before Marie-Therese herself made an appearance, trailed by her long-suffering companion, the Lady Giselle Edmondson.

“Monsieur le Vicomte,” said the King’s daughter, her half boots making soft, squishy noises in the slushy footpath. “This is unexpected.”

He swept a gracious bow. “Your uncle told me you had decided to spend a few days in town.”

“Yes. As much as I enjoy the country, I find that I do miss the theater.” She cast him a speculative sideways glance. “Although I was disappointed to hear that Kat Boleyn is not treading the boards this season. She is always such a joy to watch. Don’t you agree?”

An observer might have thought the remark entirely innocent-might have believed her ignorant of the fact that the actress Kat Boleyn had for many years been Sebastian’s mistress. But he saw the spiteful gleam in her eyes, and he knew better.

The jibe was both deliberate and breathtakingly malicious.

“It is a pity, yes,” he said, keeping his own voice bland with effort. “But understandable, given the circumstances of her late husband’s recent death. One can surely appreciate her need to spend a few months away from the city, recovering from such a loss.”

“True.” She sucked in her cheeks. “You wouldn’t by chance know where she has gone?”

“No,” he said baldly.

He did not, in truth, know where Kat had sought refuge. But wherever it was, he hoped she was finding the peace of mind she so desperately needed.

A faint frown of disappointment pulled down the corners of the Princess’s lips, then was gone. She smoothed a hand over her pelisse. “So many murders! The streets of London are very dangerous, are they not?”

“They certainly can be. I’ve been wondering, did you know that Dr. Damion Pelletan was the son of Philippe-Jean Pelletan, the physician who treated your brother in the Temple Prison?”

Her lips flattened, and she shook her head determinedly from side to side. “No; I did not.”

For someone who had spent a lifetime dissembling, she was a terrible liar. He said, “That’s not the real reason you decided to see Pelletan?”

“You dare?” A vicious snarl twisted her lips and quivered the tense muscles of her face. “You dare to contradict me, daughter of a king of France? Me, a descendant of the sainted Louis himself?”

Sebastian held her gaze. “Whoever killed Damion Pelletan also removed his heart. Do you have any idea why they would do that?”

The violence of her reaction both surprised and puzzled him. Her eyes widened, and she gasped, one fist coming up to press against her lips.