Joanna Bourne: The Forbidden Rose

He did not know she had learned to lie at Versailles, in the old days, when the king was alive. Lying had been an art, formal and elegant as the minuet. The proper lie, the angle of a bow tied under the hat, a message slipped from one hand to another in a crowded corridor. The air had been dense with intrigue. Uncle Arnault had been at the center of most of it. She was no amateur at reading lies.

She took another sip. The coffee was sweetened with white, clean sugar that dissolved completely. Coffee from Haiti. Sugar from Martinique. These luxuries were expensive in Paris, but far cheaper in the port towns where the ships from the islands unloaded.

LeBreton might have innocently delivered books in Dieppe or Le Havre last week. But perhaps he had visited the small fishing villages of the coast, where the smugglers pulled their boats ashore. Perhaps he was one of the men who carried contraband across France—letters from émigrés in England, foreign newspapers, bank funds, messages from spies. He might even be a spy himself, Royalist, Austrian or English. He might be an agent of the Secret Police in Paris.

He could be part of La Flèche.

The servant boy, having made three pallets of his heaps of straw, was toasting bread by the fire. She sat straight and drank coffee, holding her hands elegantly, as she had been trained to do. She was very hungry.

“We’ll eat in a minute,” LeBreton said. “Have you stopped being afraid of me yet? I’m hoping for that.”

“I am surprisingly tenacious. This is good coffee.”

“Better than the wine we have. And we are finally going to feed you, looks like.”

The boy brought bread with cheese melted on it, juggling it from hand to hand because it was hot. He sat on his heels and held it out, balanced on his fingertips.

“If you think she has sense enough to eat slow,” LeBreton was genial as carded wool, “give it to her. You can clean up when she empties her belly out.”

Nothing changed in the boy’s dark face. “You feed her, then. She’s your pet.” He tossed the bread in LeBreton’s general direction and walked off.

They should not show her the bread and take it away. She would have clawed the world apart to get to that bread.

“I keep him around because he’s so fond of the donkeys.” LeBreton picked the bread up and brushed it off. Tore it into parts and laid them along his thigh. He blew on a piece before he handed it over. “Then there’s his honesty. You’d look long and hard to find a lad with his kind of honesty. And that amiability of his.”

She did not stuff bread into her mouth, snatching like an animal. She ate neatly. With restraint. She had been taught so well to be a lady.

When she was done, he took up another piece, ate half, and gave her the rest. “He didn’t think about you needing to eat slow. Now he’s annoyed at himself.”

“One is sincere at that age, and easily offended.” Maybe she burned her mouth. She didn’t feel it.

Another morsel broken between them. Bread for her. Bread for him. They might have been friends sitting at the hearth, toasting bread and tearing off hunks to share back and forth. LeBreton kept talking, but she paid him no attention. “. . . with your mind running round and round like a squirrel in a cage. If I was going to do terrible things to you—which, I point out, I ain’t got around to yet despite these numerous opportunities—there’s not much you could do about it, me being twice as big as you are and strong as an ox. And that’s enough for right now.” He got up and set the rest of the bread on the upturned planter they were using as a table.

He was right. She was still hungry, but she should not eat more.

“You concentrate on keeping that down, just as a favor to Adrian.”

He fed her and pretended to be harmless. He was subtly intelligent. He was a pillar of deception from the long, untidy hair he shook down to hide his face to the worn soles of his boots. Such a man did not wander to her chateau by accident.

Are you one of us? Are you La Flèche?

She offered the most common of all the passwords of La Flèche. “If the wind is right, you can smell roses in the garden.”

“Roses? I saw some as we passed by. Pretty.”

It was not the right answer. She had not expected to feel so disappointed.

“When you finish that, I’ll lay a blanket by the fire and leave you to sleep,” he said.

He was right in this much. If she was to escape, she must sleep first. There would be some chance in the night, when he was less attentive.

He took the cup away from her, because it was empty. “Or you can just lie awake, thinking up all the things I might come do to you that I’m not doing now.”

THE long dim twilight of July was winding to a close when Doyle finished going over the grounds and got back to the orangerie. A drizzle had been coming down, off and on, for a while. Mostly on. He was damp clean through.

From every side of the garden, he’d been looking back toward the light in the orangerie. He couldn’t see the woman sleeping on her pile of straw, but Hawker was there, with his back to the wall, a candle lit beside him, a book in his lap. Alert. Keeping watch. Glancing up at the end of every couple lines, walking a round of the orangerie every ten or fifteen minutes. There was something to be said for recruiting cutthroats from the London rookeries. The King of Thieves, Lazarus, trained his crew well.

When Doyle showed himself outside the windows, Hawker set the book down and came to him. They found an oak tree far enough away that their Frenchwoman wouldn’t hear them talking, close enough they had a clear view of her. And they weren’t getting actively rained on, which was all to the good.

Maggie was edged close to the wall, rolled in her blanket, curled up tight. She’d lived through men burning the chateau and four days of lurking in the woods. He’d wrung the last strength out of her, scaring her. With food in her stomach and being warm, maybe she’d sleep the whole night.

“Now what?” Hawker spat, accurately, hitting an inch to the side of Doyle’s boot. “You bring her in and dry her off and feed her and tuck her in like a lost kitten. She’s de Fleurignac’s daughter. Right?” He waited for confirmation. “Does she know where her father is?”

“Most likely.”

“Fine. Do we ask nicely where the old man is, or do we haul her out and torture her in the small, cool hours before dawn?”

“We let her sleep.”

No way to tell whether the boy was disappointed not to have a chance to apply his skill with sharp implements. “And tomorrow?”

“We see if she’ll lead us to him. He’s probably not in these parts, or he’d have showed up by now.”

“So he’s in Paris.”

“If he is, we’ll take her to Paris. We have to go there anyway to drop off the money.” The donkey baskets were half full of counterfeit assignats, headed for British Service headquarters in Paris. One more yapping pack of nuisance to deal with.

He’d brought a bundle back, under his arm. He tossed it to the boy. “I found this. What do you read in it?”

Slowly, suspiciously, Hawker unrolled the length of white cloth and turned it over, frowning. “A woman’s shift. Blood on the front.” It was marked with big, rusty-brown patches. “Some on the back of the shoulder. On the sleeve.”

“We have ourselves a goodly selection of blood.” It had been a jolt when he caught sight of it, tucked under the bridge, and climbed in to dig it out.

“A night shift. It’s hers. Right length. Right shape to cover those apples.”

“Is it, now?”

An instant of grin from the boy. “I’ve got eyes.” He sobered, fingering the white-on-white embroidery around the neck. “Besides. This . . .”