Joanna Bourne: The Forbidden Rose

Not even a nod. The boy fitted toes into the wall and was up and over in an instant. Noiseless.

Voices pricked the surface of the silence. Paris voices, out of place against a background of country birds and crickets. They were close. LeBreton said, “Don’t move.”

He had done this before. He’d hidden from men hunting him. She stayed still.

He drew his coat around her. Pulled her to him and wrapped her deep in it. LeBreton was earth brown. His hat, his clothing, even his skin were the dun and buff of the trees around them and the wall at her back. He would be invisible in this corner of garden among the disorderly branches of the pear tree. And she was hidden by him. Surrounded by him.

She took fistfuls of his shirt. Pressed close. The warm cloth, the sense of his muscles underneath, the tension of his skin, his breath moving in and out, steadied her. The scar on his face was altogether harsh and menacing. But this time, all that menace and power stood between her and whatever was coming up the drive.

He settled his coat one last careful time around her and opened it a slit to let her see out. The iron grille that was the gate of this garden showed a narrow slice of courtyard.

He listened as if he were sorting a hundred sounds apart, assigning meaning to each one. He was still, the way an animal is, in the woods, when a man walks by.

They waited. One cannot stop breathing. She did it in shallow, slow breaths, very quietly.

Soft thuds and then crisp, loud scrunchings came, marking a transition from dirt paths to gravel. Adrian came out of the kitchen garden and slouched into their line of vision, leading the donkeys on the full length of rein. They were transformed, those donkeys. He’d piled the panniers and the backs of the donkeys high with great heaps of green herbage. Basil. Lavender. Rosemary. Sage. On top he’d tied bundles of long hazel poles, the ones the gardeners cut and peeled to make bean towers.

The animals disappeared beneath the load. He’d smeared dirt on their necks and legs. They were the meanest of village donkeys now, muddy, unkempt beasts kept by the lowest farm tenants. Adrian had become slovenly as well. The cheeky defiance was gone from him. Slumped, dull, placid, moving at a snail’s pace, he strolled through their sight.

LeBreton set his hand on her bare shoulder, a tight, warning touch. He must have known what was coming next.

“You! You there. Halt.” The harsh Parisian accent came at a distance. Hooves speeded up. “Come here.”

Adrian had dallied in the courtyard in a lackadaisical way. The riders had seen him and the donkeys. He was caught.

“Who are you, boy?”

I know that voice. Edged like a razor, carrying with it the slums of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine to the east of Paris. This was the man who’d broken into her room the night the chateau burned. The man she’d fought. The one who’d come to kill her.

“You have no business here. What are you doing?” The clop of hooves. She could see nothing, but she could hear the breath of the horses. “Explain yourself.”

LeBreton’s muscles registered no surprise. He’d sent the servant boy to play out this scene in the courtyard. Exactly this.

“Looting is forbidden.”

The Jacobin had screamed when she slashed his face. He’d shrieked loudly enough to be heard by the mob on the lawn. His blood spilled over her hands. Covered the letter opener she held like a knife. When she fought to get away the night candle fell from the desk. Her papers caught fire. The curtains went up in flames.

He’d survived. Hidden in the dark, in the damp niche under the bridge, shaking and sticky with blood, she’d heard him howl her name.

“We will not tolerate a plague of scavengers, stealing from the people.”

Crouched like an animal in her hiding place, she’d watched that man stalk through the mad carouse of the burning. She’d seen him, his head dressed in a rough bandage, going through the crowd, grabbing women to search their faces, rolling drunken couples on their backs to get a good look, yelling, “Where’s the de Fleurignac bitch? She has to be here somewhere. Find her.”

The servant boy whined. He had done nothing. Nothing. The people could have the greens. He didn’t want them. Here. Take them. His grand-mère would find other herbs for her stew. Nobody told him he couldn’t—

The outraged squawk said Adrian had been booted to the ground. The men snickered. That was the sport they brought out of Paris these days, bullying a farm boy.

LeBreton closed his hand on her. Quiet. Quiet.

Adrian had a widowed mother. His grand-mère was aged. She had no teeth.

“God rot your grandmother.”

The boy hurriedly mentioned more destitute relatives.

The Jacobin said, “They are a plague upon us. If we tolerate vermin like this, they will strip France bare.”

Adrian would give everything back. All of it. They were only herbs from the garden. He was not a plague. Please.

“Better to hang a dozen now as an example.”

“He’s a boy.” That was the other voice. Slower, deeper, better-natured. She had seen this man as well, that night, wandering his way through the rioting, wine bottle in hand, annoying the young women. A long pole of a man with the loose jowls of a hunting dog.

“Boys his age are fighting for France. No, I don’t want a load of damn weeds. What do I—” The squeal of a horse. “ Fils de salope . It bit me!”

One of the donkeys had helped itself to a chunk of Jacobin.

A barked obscenity. Horses stamped. Gravel scattered. Adrian let loose a dozen panicked apologies, fitting them between snarls and gutter oaths from the men.

I wish I could see.

From the sound of it, the Jacobins had their hands full, keeping their horses under control. They were city men. Not used to riding.

“Get those stinking asses out of here. Out! Get out. Allez! ”

Reins jangled. Hooves scraped iron on stone. A donkey brayed. Paris accents cursed the horses. Adrian hurried past the grilled gate, limping and bent over, being a hapless country lad. Lying with every inch of his body. The donkeys were in on it, too. They nosed along after him, heads hanging, mistreated and down-trodden. It was not altogether her imagination that they looked pleased with themselves.

Quiet. LeBreton said it through his hands, pressing the message into her skin.

The Jacobins trotted by. One man, then the other, then a horse on a lead, loaded high with bags and bundles of loot from the chateau.

They’d confiscated themselves better horseflesh than they could manage. The man in front, heavily bandaged, jerked the reins, making no impression on the mare. The other Jacobin, pale-skinned and pockmarked, followed, clinging to the mane of his horse, riding like a sack of potatoes.

They did not glance into the goldfish garden. They jogged through her sight and away.

She had learned stillness at Versailles, in the hardest school on earth. One does not fidget in the presence of a king. Hungry, thirsty, exhausted, with pins sticking into one’s bodice, with feet that ached, hour after hour, one does not wriggle. Those first weeks at Versailles, Uncle Arnault stood behind her and pinched her every time she blinked.

The thud of hooves turned dull on the grass beyond the terrace. The path in the front took up the noise. Long minutes later, three horses, not matching steps, took the road that led toward Paris. A busy, rustling wind blew by and scattered the sound of the last hoofbeats.

Time lengthened. She closed her eyes and released the breath she was somehow holding and let herself relax against Guillaume LeBreton. Her cheek comprehended the folds of his shirt. A noisy little piece of her mind insisted on figuring out each line, each seam, but she ignored it. She let herself stop thinking.