Joanna Bourne: The Forbidden Rose

WILLIAM Doyle, British spy, stood in the French rain and thought about destruction.

Decorum and Dulce balked at the gate. Laid their ears back and refused to set hoof on the open gravel in the courtyard. They didn’t like the stink of burning. They smelled death, maybe. Something they didn’t like, anyway.

Wise as cats, those beasts. The boy hadn’t learned to appreciate them.

There weren’t any remains lying about in an obvious way. No bodies hanging from the trees like ripe fruit. Always the possibility somebody was tucked away in a corner, dead.

Dulce snaked out to bite Hawker. Missed him by a hair. The boy was getting downright nimble, wasn’t he?

“Rutting bastard of a—” Hawker dodged, “sodomite monk.”

He learned that one from me. I am just a shining example to youth. The boy had come to him speaking some French. He was improving the lad’s vocabulary.

The donkeys were what he’d call a pointed lesson in how to deal with a problem you couldn’t out talk and couldn’t stab in the jugular. Sometimes it was a real pleasure to educate the lad.

Hawker hanked the reins up with a last jerk, looking like he knew what he was about, which was a tribute to his acting skills. “I’m going to boil your entrails down and make goddamn donkey glue. ”

“When yer through chatting with the livestock, maybe we can reconnoiter a bit. Take the back garden, down to that shed. Then go round the west side.” He did a slice and circle, saying the same thing in hand-talk. After this, the gesture would be enough. Hawker learned the first time.

The boy stuck to the wet grass where it was quiet and let the boxwood hedge screen him from sight, taking city skills and applying them. He was beginning to move like a countryman.

They had Chateau de Fleurignac to themselves. No Jacobin radicals waved official papers. No servants clacked buckets at the well or broke dishes in the kitchen. No chickens underfoot. No horses in the stable. Not even a dog came out to discuss meum et tuum with trespassers.

No sign of the mad, old Marquis de Fleurignac or his daughter.

In the tavern in Voisemont, they said the old man had escaped before the Jacobins came to arrest him and drag him back to Paris, to the guillotine. He’d driven away in a coach and four, his pockets stuffed with jewels. He’d been seen going north to join the armies attacking France.

Another contingent claimed he’d been spirited away by one of the fraternities of heroes and fools who flipped a finger at the Revolution and rescued aristos. He was hid in the false bottom of a wagon, joggling along the road to the coast.

Then there was a lively group that said the marquis had been trapped in the fire. Oh, yes. They’d seen him with their own eyes, beating at the windows to get out. Burning like a torch. He was buried under eight feet of ashes with a fortune in gold clutched in his charred, bony fists. All a man had to do was dig him up.

Himself, he thought de Fleurignac had never been at the chateau. De Fleurignac was a city man. He’d gone to ground where he felt safe. Paris. That’s where he’d find him and his damned list.

But De Fleurignac’s daughter had been here. In the tavern there was complete agreement she’d been in the house when the Jacobins came. Nobody speculated on what had become of her. They passed quick glances back and forth and said nothing. Always interesting, what people didn’t talk about.

He looked around, writing his report in his head.

Chateau de Fleurignac was the size of his father’s house, Bengeat Court. It was the same age as Bengeat, too. Sixteenth century. Built with the local granite they’d been passing in every field all the way from the coast. The roof had caved in unevenly when the timbers went, making a gray hunchback of a ruin. Every window was topped with a fan of black soot.

They burned the hell out of this place, didn’t they?

Statues had toppled from their niches at the roofline. A stone hand, holding a scroll, lay in fragments at his feet. The broken line of marble over there was the drape of a toga. Late classical work. Roman, not Gallo-Roman. Emperors and poets, brought crashing down by the farmers of Voisemont-en-Auge. A lonely end, a long way from the sun of Italy.

In the neat formal gardens, the marble statues of nymphs had been systematically beheaded. That was the fashion in France these days. Beheading.

Hawker threaded his way across the rubble of the courtyard, deft and fastidious about where he put his feet. “What’s the word . . . that long animal?” He slithered his hand sinuously. “On the ground. With fur. The mean one.”

He meant weasel, probably. “Belette.”

“That’s it. I’m going to drop weasels down their long, furry donkey ears. Let them chew on their brains.”

“That’ll work.”

“I want ’em to die slow, so I can take my time and savor it. There’s nobody in the gardens, alive or dead. The grass is all churned up with carts and horses. Four different carts, since you’re going to ask. And there is nothing anywhere here worth stealing.” The broken chairs, muddy silk, and torn paintings got a scathing appraisal. “I will give you my expert opinion. You can loot a place or you can burn it to the ground. It’s a mistake trying to do both at once.”

“Bad planning on somebody’s part. See that, up there?” Lead had melted from the roof and cooled into thick black icicles.

“That’s . . . ah . . .” Hawker rubbed his forehead, tracking down the French word. “Lead.”

“Right. Lead. That’s about the third most important thing here, so I’m taking an interest in it. Why?”

Hawker didn’t know. He hated not knowing. “Reminds you of the lead soldiers you played with as a nipper?”

Very funny. “There’s a shortage of lead in France. That’s three—maybe three and a half—tons of it. They’ll hack that down to make bullets for the Republic. We’ll be dodging that lead, one of these days, on some battlefield.”

Cold eyes looked out of an unlined face. “You, maybe. Not me. It’s stupid men who die on battlefields.”

Not an ounce of patriot in you, boy. Considering the hellhole you come from back in London, I can’t think of any reason there should be. “I’d be careful, saying that. The gods have a sense of humor. Not a nice one. We’ll camp here tonight.”

Fire had played favorites with the outbuildings. The dairy house was intact. The carriage house, burned out completely. The carriages, hauled into the open, overturned, and set on fire. Nothing left of them but the wood frame and hanging leather straps. The stable was untouched.

When his father was angry with him or his brothers were on a rampage, he’d slept in the stables at Bengeat. But he didn’t like to sleep closed in, in hostile country. The orangerie was a better bet. “That way. Let’s get in out of the rain.”

The orangerie was open to the wind, a disorder with a roof over it. Every window was broken, the orange trees trampled, the planters thrown down on their sides. The hothouse plants had been stomped into the tiles. Glass covered the ground, thick near the walls, and scattered out in every direction for a dozen yards, glinting.

He made a circuit of the place. Open space on three sides. He’d see visitors coming through those big, naked windows and hear ’em walking on glass. He hated getting sneaked up on.

Hawker followed him, crunching glass into the gravel. “The boys in that stinking little village waited years to do this.”

“Did they?”

“They dreamed of it. They’d sit in those pig houses in the village with the shutters closed and the wind leaking in. They’d think about these fancy weeds in here, being coddled, all warm and happy behind glass. Down there, they were freezing in the dark. Up here, they were growing flowers.”