C. Harris - Why Kings Confess

“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-Grace? 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 Napoleon 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-Therese 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 hat 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-Therese 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-Therese 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.”