Heaven in His Arms (33 page)

"In a warehouse not far from here," Andre began, "I have stored a winter's worth of beaver pelts."

A gleam lit the delegate's eyes. He leaned forward and toyed with the empty pewter tankard. "I have heard that you were in partnership with Nicholas Perrot."

"I wintered on the western end of Lake Superior, the same place where Perrot wintered the year before. You do remember the haul of furs he brought to Montreal this time last year?"

"The finest, silkiest, blackest beaver these settlements have ever seen."

"Find a way to free her," he said softly, "and my share of this year's haul is yours."

The tankard clattered against the desk. Monsieur Lelievre stared at him in incredulity. When he spoke again, his voice was hoarse. "You are aware, monsieur, that bribery is a punishable offense."

"Consider it a donation toward the building of Montreal's fortifications. Payable upon the safe return of my wife."

The delegate stood up abruptly. The light from the tallow candles burning in the chandelier above gleamed off his silver buttons. Beneath the edge of his long, curled periwig, his brow creased in deep furrows. "If I could, I would give her to you immediately. Unfortunately, it has already been arranged that this situation will be handled by the Conseil Souverain in Quebec."

Andre's stomach tightened into a knot. The council was the highest authority in New France. Yet he knew any official in this settlement could be bribed. It was just a matter of determining the price. "If you are powerless, then take me to someone who isn't."

"I'm not powerless." Lelievre's brow furrowed more deeply. "This is a delicate situation. Let me think what must be done."

The delegate paced. Andre stood stiffly, curling his hands into fists. He wondered where she was now— if she was within the palisades of this fortress or if she had been transferred elsewhere. He wondered if she was being kept in a small, empty room without windows. He wondered if she was still hungry or still craving the goose liver pate he had scoured the town in order to find. The thought of her imprisoned made him crazy with rage.

Andre wanted to lunge across the room and take the portly delegate in his hands, lift him up, and threaten his life if he didn't bring her to him. But he restrained himself. She was under the king's guard, and even in his fury he couldn't fight a battalion of armed men. This sort of situation had to be fought with pretty words and handfuls of gold—or beaver pelts, which in this settlement was much the same thing. Where was Philippe when he needed him? Only in civilization did battles have to be fought with velvet gloves and silken words. He preferred the laws of the wilderness, where a man could be free with his fists and relied only on his strength and skill with arms to get what he wanted.

"You've been a
coureur de bois
for some time, haven't you, Monsieur Lefebvre?"

Andre glared at the delegate. "What does that have to do with my wife?"

"More than you think."

"I've been trading furs for a lifetime."

"You were also a soldier."

"I fought the Iroquois in '66, alongside the Carig-nan-Saliere regiment."

"So I've heard." The delegate took his tankard and walked across the room to the brandy to pour himself more. "I think there may be something we can do that will convince the Conseil Souverain to release your wife to you."

"What is it?"

"There's a new settlement across the Saint Lawrence River from Montreal," he began. "It's a small area, heavily forested. You can imagine that few settlers want to build there, with nothing shielding them from the Iroquois but hundreds of miles of wilderness. We may be at peace now, but you never know when those demons are going to strike."

His stomach twisted.

"If you agreed to accept a small seigneurie across the river from Montreal, the council may agree to free your wife."

Andre curled his hands over the back of the chair, his fingers digging into the fine tapestry. His blood ran cold in his veins. He knew what the delegate was suggesting. He would free his wife if he could bind Andre in chains.

"You are well born enough to warrant a seigneurie. The land would be yours. All you would be required to do is find settlers to clear it for a yearly fee of some capons and a copper or two. Of course, you'd also be required to live on it, and build a mill and some sort of defense. Your skills as a soldier will be well used. . . ."

"Why would the king wish to waste my skills plowing the earth like a peasant?" he retorted. "I have other skills. I'll go west for the government. Like Talon sent La Salle west. I can explore farther than even the Jesuits."

"Too many men have left the settlements. Our strength and our virility are drained westward every fall, and drunk into oblivion each spring. We need settlers to clear the land, not fur traders and drunkards."

"And if I refuse?"

"It is the only option that the council may accept," Lelievre argued. "I know how much they want a strong man to build on that shore. If you refuse, then your wife will be shipped back to Paris to face punishment."

A drop of hot tallow fell from the chandelier and sizzled on the surface of the rosewood desk.

Andre imagined himself, sickle in hand, watering the rocky Canadian soil with the sweat of his brow, coaxing maize and peas and beans to grow in the weak sunshine. Then he imagined Genevieve languished in some dark prison, dressed in rags, forced to work long hours for bread and potage.

There were many different kinds of prisons. There were many different kinds of hell.

"Tell your council that I will accept any offer." His throat parched. "But only on one condition: that my wife be freed immediately, without trial."

***

Dim blue twilight seeped through the cracks of the western wall of the shed. Genevieve sat upon the packed earthen floor in the small room, her head resting against the decaying log wall. Around her swirled the stench of dried manure and rotting hay. Set back in a yard behind a larger stone house, the shed collected the day's heat and concentrated it within its clay-clogged walls. She sighed as another drop of sweat trickled between her breasts.

She had only been in this shed for a matter of hours. It might as well have been a lifetime. Since the morning, she had aged a hundred years.

He knew everything by now. She could imagine his face as that arrogant official in his neat satins told him the truth. Andre had not married a woman of the petite noblesse. He had married an urchin scooped off the streets of Paris, a common laundress in the notorious Salpetriere, an imposter in a new land, perhaps a prostitute. He would remember all the times she had shocked him—by killing the goose, by swearing, by acting like anything but an aristocrat. He would argue; she knew he would argue and fight against it. But eventually, he would bow to the truth. She had lied to him, deceived him, and she was nothing but a whore.

Pain speared through her, no duller for having already sliced her heart into bleeding ribbons. Over the long months, she had almost forgotten about the deception. She had woven a history for herself, a mottled tapestry of her early life in Normandy with her mother and what she knew of the lives of the bijoux in the Salpetriere. It was close enough to her youth that it didn't seem like a lie anymore, and as time passed, she and Andre spoke less and less of the past and more and more of the future. It was the future that mattered, the future they would build together. The past was gone and dead and over.

Or so she had thought. Marie Duplessis had arrived at her door this morning like a corpse risen from the dead. Genevieve wished Andre had been there, so she could turn to him and tell him the truth—the whole truth—so she could spill out the sordid details of her life and make him understand why she had done what she did. In her heart, she kept telling herself that he loved her for her, not for the name and the breeding of Marie Duplessis. In her heart, she grasped desperately on to the hope that he would come and speak to her, that he would seek her out and hear what she had to say, that he would understand.

But a full day had already passed and the only person who had visited her was a maid with dinner. As she watched the rays of the sun lengthen on the packed earthen floor, Genevieve's dreams dwindled and died an agonizing death. She realized that no man could stomach being proven a fool, certainly not a man as proud as Andre. He would pass off the night on the Lake of the Hurons as a harlot's trick. He would harden his heart. He would discard her like a pacton of ruined pelts.

In the course of a single afternoon, she had lost everything.

No.

Genevieve blinked open her eyes. Staring blindly forward through a haze of tears, she ran her fingers against the grain of her velvet skirts and clutched the rounded swell of her abdomen. She dug her fingers into the cloth. She had not lost everything. She still had one piece of Andre that no one could ever take away from her.

She started as she heard voices outside the shed. It was the voice of the man who stood guard just outside the door, along with a woman's voice— undoubtedly, the servant delivering her supper. Genevieve eased up and wiped the sweat off her brow just as the door opened. A woman entered bearing a tray with a hunk of bread and a steaming bowl of soup. The servant gingerly placed the tray on the floor and pulled back the hood of her cape . . . and once again, Genevieve looked into the eyes of Marie Duplessis.

They faced each other across the room. They had not spoken a word to each other during the trip from the Sly Fox Inn to this house near the Hotel-Dieu.

Marie had cried piteously into her handkerchief, making Genevieve suspect that she was not a willing party to the betrayal. But she was in no mood to listen to a weeping string of apologies.

There were no tears in Marie's eyes now, only splotchy red trails down her cheeks. Marie lifted a finger to her lips, then turned to peer through a crack in the wall. When she turned back, she untied the string on the cape around her throat and thrust the light garment off her shoulders.

"We don't have much time," she whispered, fumbling with the laces of her bodice. "The guard is standing away from the shed now, but he'll return soon and then he'll be able to hear us."

"What in God's name are you doing?"

"I'm righting an old wrong.'' She gestured to Genevieve's clothes. "Come . . . you've done this before."

"Om, I certainly have, and that is what has gotten us in all this trouble."

"They forced me to accuse you. I didn't want to do it." Marie peeled open her bodice and tossed it on the pile with her cloak. "Francois abandoned me. I was alone, with nowhere to go. When I came back to the Salpetriere, they forced me to confess the whole story. If I had known they would ship me to this godforsaken place, I would have stayed on the streets of Paris forever."

Genevieve met Marie's dry blue gaze and saw the pain in the woman's eyes. There was little left of the innocent girl Genevieve had met in the shadows of the Salpetriere almost a year ago. Genevieve wondered exactly what happened between Marie and the Musketeer, and how long it had really taken to change that lovestruck young girl into the hurt, aching woman who stood before her.

"Marie ... we can't do this." Genevieve gestured to her swelling abdomen. "I'm nearly five months pregnant."

"I brought pins to fasten the clothes." Marie slipped her skirts off her hips. "Besides, my cloak will cover you completely. It's twilight, and even if the guard catches a glimpse of your face, he won't know the difference between us. If you want to be with your husband, Genevieve, you'd better start with the laces of your bodice."

"You're wasting your time." Her voice caught in her throat. "My husband doesn't want me."

"In a pig's eye." Marie flushed. "Your husband battled his way through a fort full of soldiers for you. He threatened to rip a man's heart out through his throat. I've never seen such a sight! He was like some sort of wild . . . beast."

Genevieve's blood throbbed wildly in her veins. "He scared the life out of me," Marie continued, crossing the shed and working on Genevieve's laces while the pregnant woman stood numbly in place. "I knew this place would be full of rough, wild—" Marie paused, then concentrated on Genevieve's laces. "I told Monsieur Lelievre to tell your husband the truth—the real truth—but I'm afraid he has filled him with lies." "Lies?"

"They're telling everyone that you kidnapped me and stripped me and beat me so I couldn't cry out until you were gone on the ship to Quebec. They've painted you like some sort of crazed harridan." Marie tugged the last lace out of the eyelets. "They'll do anything not to admit that I, a Duplessis, willingly ruined myself with a Musketeer. They'll do anything not to besmirch the reputation of the king's girls.

They can't stand the thought that we concocted this entire scheme under the nose of Mother Superior of the Salpetriere, under the nose of the king himself."

"Stop, Marie. Stop." Genevieve pushed the girl away. Her bodice gaped open, but she made no attempt to retie it. She realized that Andre had fought his way in to see Monsieur Lelievre before he knew the truth. "You don't understand . . . I'm an imposter. Now my husband knows it. I've been here all afternoon and he hasn't visited me. I don't know ... I don't know if he wants me anymore."

Marie's eyes flickered away. She peered anxiously through the cracks in the shed, searching for the guard. "Your husband didn't look like the kind of man who would give a fig who your parents were."

"Andre thought he married you."

"He didn't break down a door in order to get me back." Marie waved her white hand. "In any case, there's only one way for you to find out for sure. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain if you escape this place."

Hope and fear battled in Genevieve's breast. Did he love her enough to give her the benefit of a doubt? Or did he hate her for her lies? She feared more than anything that she would find hatred, and then there would be no more hope.

"When they discover what we've done," Genevieve murmured, struggling with her waistband, "you'll be punished."

"I've already been punished for my ignorance, for my stupidity.'' Marie helped Genevieve with her skirts. "The truth is, you will be doing me a favor. If we're successful, they'll ship me back to Paris. I would rather spend a lifetime in the Salpetriere than one more day in this wretched, uncivilized place."