Joanna Bourne: The Forbidden Rose

She pulled herself into a tight ball and laid her cheek upon her knees and closed her eyes. Perhaps when she opened them she would be somewhere else—Cloud Cuckoo Land or the island of Tír na nÓg or the Atlantis of Plato. One of the mythic places of the old stories. It was not likely, but it was not impossible.

LeBreton sent the boy to fetch baskets from the donkeys and took over the task of sweeping the floor. She heard him grunting and dragging big copper planters from one place to another. She could not imagine why he did that and did not waste her energy in pointless speculation.

When the chateau burned, they came here to throw stones again and again. It was as if the orangerie were an adulterous woman, crouching in fear, and they destroyed her. How strange that it should be so cold. It was always warm here.

When she was a child, this had been her playhouse, her secret kingdom, with flowers like spears of sunlight, flowers like fans and feathers, like waxy red swords. The stoves ran night and day all winter long, keeping oranges and cyclamens and the ferocious, stubby pineapples alive.

Jean-Paul was the son of Maître Béclard, botanist of the Royal Gardens, who had come with a shipment of orchids and bromeliads and stayed to tend them. Jean-Paul told her the story of every plant in the glasshouse, invincible in his belief she wanted to know.

One day when she was fifteen he had plucked down an orange blossom for her and tucked it into her hair. “That’s one less orange for your dinner, Marguerite.” He had kissed her.

Boots scraped beside her. LeBreton towered over her, perhaps a mile high. He’d come carrying a donkey blanket. He flapped it out and let it fall softly over her shoulders, doing this all in one motion, without touching her. She was circled in it now, like an Arab in his tent.

If he is going to hurt me, what is he waiting for? She did not wish to imagine what complex villainies a man might approach in this leisurely fashion.

He said, “You go right on being afraid of me, if you want to. But stop shivering. Makes me chilly just looking at you.”

“No one would wish you to be uncomfortable.”

“That’s good. That was a bit of a smile. You keep doing that.” And he left her alone.

The servant boy carried in the last of the donkey baskets. His gaze upon her was neither friendly nor unfriendly, merely assessing. It did not surprise her that a man like LeBreton would employ such an unsettling servant.

LeBreton started a fire with dry palm fronds, then laid on small lengths of charred timber. The boy took the canvas off the donkey panniers and lifted out smaller baskets with lids and leather bags, cooking pans and a coffeepot. He set everything out without hesitation, having a pattern to it, as if he’d done this many times. He put water to boil in a black kettle, exactly like the kettle in every cottage in Normandy, but his firewood was table legs and broken curio cabinets.

LeBreton finished his own unpacking and came over to her. He sat beside her, tailor fashion, so close his knee almost touched her. He’d pulled his hat off and left it somewhere so she had a clear view of his scar and his various other brutal features. His dense, weighing regard rested on her. “Let’s give you some coffee before I start asking questions.” Probably he had no expression that did not look menacing.

The boy, Adrian, came up carrying a blue and white china cup full of black coffee. Its handle was broken off and the rim was cracked. It was from the set the upper servants used. Had used. LeBreton wrapped her fingers around it till she had it steady.

“Drink this. Then we’ll talk.” He had the hands of a laborer. Blunt-fingered, calloused, capable, broad of palm. Hands like well-forged steel tools that had seen a lot of use. Hands like a treatise on engineering. “I’m not a villain, Maggie.”

A man like you is anything he chooses to be. “I am Citoyenne Duncan. Or Miss Duncan. Not Maggie.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” He took the corner of her blanket, where it was slipping away off her shoulder, and pulled it higher. “You didn’t jump out of your skin that time. We’re making progress.”

There was no progress. She was exhausted, and she did not wish to spill coffee upon herself. She did not feel it necessary to explain this to him.

The coffee was hot and very sweet. True coffee, from Haiti, not the brew of roots and barley that filled the markets these days. “You do not make me less frightened of you by crowding in upon me like an overgrown bush.”

“Of course not. I do it by showing you how harmless I am. Look over there, Citoyenne Maggie.” Over there were the four donkey baskets. “That’s my stock in trade—Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Lalumière—the approved instruction list from the Committee of Education. Some children’s books with proper sentiments in them . . . ‘ C is for counter-revolutionary. May they all die. D is for duty to France. Let us all try.’ That sort of thing. I got packs of playing cards. Those have fine revolutionary pictures on them. The single pip is a guillotine, which is just going to liven up a game, ain’t it? And I got me some nicely illustrated copies of the Rights of Man, suitable for framing and hanging over the fireplace. You see before you Guillaume LeBreton, seller of fine books.”

There was no slight possibility this man traveled with donkeys and sold books for his living. It was nonsense. This was the wolf who claimed he cobbled shoes. He did not fool her for even the tiniest moment. “That is a respectable trade, certainly.”

“Bringing revolutionary thought to the provinces. That’s my job. When I see the schoolmasters using the old books full of superstition and lies, I haul them out and burn them. The books, not the schoolmasters. That’s my little joke there.”

“It is very amusing.”

“Then I take orders for the approved books, which they’re eager to buy at that point for some reason. With luck, the books are still approved when I get back to Paris.”

“Yours is an uncertain life, citoyen . ”

The fire snapped and shot out sparks. The servant boy went out into the rain and came back with armloads of straw from the stable.

LeBreton shifted, so the light of the fire was strong upon the ruined side of his face. That was deliberate. He was showing her the worst of him so that she would become accustomed. It worked better than it should have. Already she was less afraid of him.

He had been unlovely even before he acquired that scar, a man of blunt eyebrows, emphatic nose, and stern jaw. She decided now that he did not look evil, only hard and filled with grim resolve. He was like one of the stone warriors laid in the vault of an old cathedral, holding the hilt of a stone sword, waiting to be called back into battle at the Apocalypse.

She drank this coffee the sly giant provided. It warmed her. The rainy dusk, beyond the sad, broken windows, seemed brighter. She raised her knees to balance the cup upon and blew on the surface to cool it and made herself take it delicately, in little sips.

They had brought a china cup to her so she would have something civilized to drink her coffee from. It was a small, astute kindness that impressed her deeply. She was seated beside a most perceptive intelligence.

“You’d want tea,” he said. “You being from Scotland.”

“I do not much care for tea. I have never seen Scotland myself. It was my grandfather who was born in Aberdeen.” This was the story of her governess, the true Mistress Duncan, who was sandy and freckled and forty years old and married to a staid banker from Arles.

“But you’re still Scots.”

“One does not stop being a Scot so easily.” He was lying. She was lying. They traded prevarications. Perhaps they would become complacent, each of them thinking they made a fool of the other.