Judith Ivory (21 page)

Christina was aghast. Had that whole unnerving afternoon—Richard’s near-beating, the purse thief, Adrien’s show of concern—all been connivance?

The reply was low. “He was too rough.”

“And it didn’t even work—”

“It worked. It’s how I left Rolfeman behind. He’s with her now.”

Thomas laughed. “Yes, Rolfeman. Who fights like the devil because they killed his lover. Rolfeman. Who likes men. You are really predictable on this, Adrien. You’ve not left our best tracker in charge of a lively prisoner, as you’re implying. You’ve left a eunuch in charge of your own one-woman harem.”

There was a long silence in the room. A subtle tension seemed to ooze around the edges of the door. Then Adrien spoke.

“Thomas,” he said gently, “perhaps you should not join us on this one. There’s some bad feeling that—I can’t put my finger on it, but—” Another long pause. “It’s Christina, isn’t it? You want to know when I’ll be through with her. Or do you just want to know how strongly I’d mind if you intervened before I was through?”

“I make it a point never to become fond of women who are fond of you. I don’t compete well.”

“Thomas.”

“Yes.”

“I would mind very much.”

Thomas laughed uncomfortably. “I repeat, there has never been any competition between us. That’s why we’re such good friends. I don’t bother your women.”

“And I’ve never bothered yours.”

“Not intentionally.”

More silence.

It was Adrien who broke it. “Why don’t you go for a
walk or something,” he said. “I could use a few moments to myself. Perhaps you could round up the men who are going over tonight.”

There was another long pause, followed by a heavy sigh; like a man straining to move under an enormous burden of dead weight. “Right,” Thomas said at length. “I’ll be back shortly.”

Water splashed, punctuating an awkward, deliberate change of subject. “A-a-ah! Where am I going to get a soak like this where we’re going?”

Christina had risen. She forced herself from the door. That possessive, overbearing, domineering…Her mind blurred in anger. But she could think clearly enough to realize she wouldn’t confront him here. No, she would go home—his home—and massacre him from a safe distance, with investigations and public revelations he never dreamed possible. That deceiving, treacherous actor! To use her like that, then stake her out like his own private—

Fate decided in favor of immediate confrontation. Four men came rushing at her up the stairs.

“Damn little snip! He’s been eavesdropping! Get him!”

Hands and arms grabbed at her. The cap flopped to the floor. Gold-auburn hair came spilling down precisely at the moment one of the men grabbed her under the arm and around her chest. He let go of the soft breast as if he’d been burned.

“It’s a woman!”

The entire incident took perhaps five seconds, with hardly more noise than another clatter of the bucket. Christina was brought to her feet, hemmed in by four men. She turned around to find Thomas staring at them from the open doorway.

“What the—” Thomas couldn’t say more for several seconds. Finally, all he could manage was to call over his shoulder, “Adrien?”

A noncommittal, guttural “mmm” came from within the room.

More desperately: “Adrien!”

Christina jerked her arms free and pushed past them all into the room. She rounded the door and stopped.

He was sitting in a tin tub of water, shoulders, neck, and arms exposed in every chiseled detail. His head lolled on the edge of the bath, eyes closed, hair damp and mussed. A short black cigar was clamped between his teeth. His face was relaxed, self-satisfied, almost euphoric; the portrait of a man in total control of his past, present, and future.

It gave Christina malicious satisfaction to watch his eyes laze open, then every bit of expression empty from his face. He went ashen, fumbled for words, found none. His cigar dropped to sizzle in his bath. Then, at last, like a raging Poseidon up from a hot steamy sea, he rose. Expression had finally found its way back onto his face: Blind, seething fury. It twisted, then reddened his features; then exploded into speech.

“Where the fuck is Rolfeman? And what the hell is
she
doing here?”

One elegantly muscled arm dripped water on the carpet as his finger slashed out in Christina’s direction.

Christina found herself holding the empty bucket; she pitched it at him as hard as she could.

His reflexes, annoyingly good, caught it at belly-level. He didn’t even look at the woman who’d hurled it.

Christina opened her mouth, preparing to scream at him:
I’ll ruin you! I’m going to tell everyone who’ll bloody listen! I’ll see you decapitated, hung, drawn and quartered!

But she didn’t say anything. She was disoriented. He was not reacting precisely as she would have expected. Oddly, she did not have his attention.

“By God, you get him here!” Adrien was roaring at his subordinates as he shoved a foot into his pants. He gave several more commands sprinkled liberally with
curses. Two more men had appeared at the sound of his angry voice. People began running and leaping around, trying to please him. André, himself, turned up a moment later only to be told rudely to get out. Then, finally, Adrien turned to Christina.

“Just how long were you out there?”

She opened her mouth to speak.

Thomas cut her off. “God preserve us, Adrien. She brought the last bucket of water. I’m sure of it.”

She’d lost his attention again. Adrien had turned and immersed himself in a flow of more orders to more people.

Then this was punctuated by a hiatus, as if everyone in the room had suddenly decided to hold his breath. Samuel Rolfeman walked in.

“Adrien, I’ve lost her—”

Adrien narrowed his eyes, then shifted them pointedly toward Christina. Sam grew quiet.

“You imbecile…” Adrien launched an unbridled stream of reprehension that made his previous cursing sound like a child’s nursery rhyme. In three or four profane sentences he demeaned the man, dismantled his defenses, and reduced him to a limp rag without a shred of dignity.

Adrien was tugging on his boots as the room was jammed further. Eight more men entered.

Christina’s brain seemed to be stagnated. Deeply troubling thoughts started seeping to the surface in disjointed bursts.

The colossal showdown she had mentally lived through a dozen times now—since Adrien’s first deceitful word—was not going to take place.

Adrien’s little band was assembling. There were twice as many as she’d imagined. And not all of them were English. More than half the voices were French.

Spies. Governments.

France. Politics. War.

Being knocked down in the woods.

The old Minister of Foreign Affairs. Adrien’s own peculiar behavior with him.

The English minister’s “madman.” An outlaw of some sorts. It was Adrien. It was that stranger over there pulling on his boots, carrying on half a dozen conversations in a strange mixture of languages.

In English, he was discussing his earldom’s affairs with Thomas. There was the business of straightening out some flooded tenants on Adrien’s coastal estate. Thomas was to handle this and, while he did, establish his own presence there publicly by tomorrow night. This was supposed to appease the English minister’s suspicions that he was involved in the French rescue operations: While Thomas was in Cornwall, the group would be breaking into an abbey on the outskirts of Paris.

In French, the most Christina could make out was that someone named Cabrel was going to join them in France tonight, then get “lost” into French hands tomorrow as part of the abbey rescue for some marquis.

There were other conversations. Even another language—German? Christina couldn’t identify it precisely. People spoke to Adrien in all three languages, bombarding him with questions and comments while he got dressed—the dark sailor again—and answered. He shifted back and forth between the languages—between the conversations—as if they were one.

A madman, Christina bemoaned. He really was mad! But she couldn’t quite make up her mind if the chaos about her was madness or a complicated engineering feat of incomprehensible proportions. Whatever it was, it made her feel small and insignificant beside it. And the man at the heart of the chaos made her feel imbecilic. She shook her head and bit her lip.

Adrien Hunt was either insane or a delicately balanced genius.

In either event, Christina didn’t want to be where she was. She bit her lip harder to keep from crying. Her eyes flooded anyway. Nothing in her experience had ever intimidated her so completely.

Then one small hope arose in the muddle around her. So much was going on. Perhaps no one would notice. She began to creep toward the door. It stood slightly ajar.

She backed slowly to the wall, then inched along for what seemed like eternity, behind tall backs and intense conversation.

Less than a foot from the door, however, a hand—its long slender fingers in possession of a freshly lighted cigar—dropped down to the wall by Christina’s shoulder; an arm barred her way. Then another arm dropped down on her other side to block her retreat. The room went quiet again. Christina looked up.

The madman himself, of course.

Adrien replaced the first barrier with a boot by her hip, as he drew on the cigar. He studied her for several moments. The end of the cigar glowed, then with a flick a shower of ashes dropped to the floor. His eyes met hers for a fraction of a second; then he frowned and dropped his eyes to his own knee.

“You can’t go, Christina,” he said.

She tried anyway to bolt through his leg out the door. She yelled.

“Someone! Help me—”

Her head was rapped hard against the wall. The cigar singed a wisp of hair as his hand smashed over her mouth. She tried to wriggle free, but the heel of his other hand had shifted to her breast bone. The more she struggled, the more pressure he put on her jaw and chest. Tears began to run. Copious. Hot. Flooding down her cheeks, over the hand at her mouth. Her throat constricted horribly.

Their eyes met again. Hers—huge, wet. His—frown
ing, then quickly dropping behind the shelter of his long lashes. He let the pressure of his hands slowly ease as he spoke.

“I’m not proud of myself, Christina. But I’m not playing with you. I’ll hurt you if I have to. Please understand that.” There was a pause. “You may not yell. You may not leave.” The tips of his fingers traced the impressions they had left on her cheek. His eyes flicked up to hers again. He seemed about to say something. Instead, he closed his eyes and expelled a long breath. Then he said with a softness close to regret, “There is no discussion this time. You go to France with us tonight. I don’t dare trust you anywhere else.”

He released her completely. She clutched her chest and put one hand over her mouth, more to stifle a hysterical sob than to hold her bruised mouth.

Adrien’s face suddenly flashed into a smile. White teeth, deep creases, squinting ocean-blue eyes set off in the dark complexion. He exuded all the old magnetism. Christina wanted to retch.

“Don’t look so woebegone, princess,” he cajoled. “Surely there are worse things than the two of us sharing close quarters for a while.” He turned his back to her and began snapping out something in French.

A stocky, muscular man at Christina’s left said an encouraging word to her in English, then poked curiously at the lack of movement beneath her loose shirt.

“What have you done to yourself?”

A hand locked over the one about to probe under the loose garment. “Look if you like. But don’t touch,” Adrien spoke to the investigator.

“I was just—”

His teeth clenched, Adrien shoved the man against the door, slamming it closed with the man’s weight. “No excuses,” he snarled, “You don’t touch her. Do you understand?”

“But I—”

Thomas interceded. He herded the stocky man quickly out the door. Then he shot a glare back, looking troubled and accusing.

The other men in the room looked baffled.

While Adrien stood there, looking angry—much angrier than he had any right to be.

His breathing was slightly ragged, agitated. Finally, he threw a hand back through his hair and rasped, “Get the hell out! All of you! Go on! Not you.” He pointed to Christina.

Silently, they all did as he said. The door clicked shut, and Christina backed against it. Her hand closed over the knob convulsively. She couldn’t catch her breath. The harder she tried, the more light-headed she became. Then she did something she’d never done in her entire life. She passed out cold.

A group of men, seven or eight, scraped off a wagon and crunched into the snow at the outskirts of the city. It was dusk. In the distance, Paris was just starting to twinkle. By the time they had walked into the heart of the city, the snow and ice would be an eerie sparkle in the yellow glow of street lanterns.

Adrien Hunt pulled the collar of his coat up over the back of his neck and wrapped the wool muffler tighter.

A Frenchman called Le Saint, a good four inches taller than Adrien, and at least six stones heavier, thwacked him on the back. Le Saint was one of the newer recruits, four months new, and like many of the new men, not an aristocrat at all.

“Eh, La Chasse, a great run tonight? The Madman is one clever nugger, yes?” The man spoke in loud, scurrilous French. The mild copulatory reference was a genteel statement from Le Saint. The huge man was called Le Saint in the same way he was occasionally referred to as “Monsieur Petit.”

“Great run, right,” Adrien responded.

“Aaaugh! All night you’ve been wearing that face. You sit on a French bayonet?”

“No—ah—” Adrien sneezed. He wiped his face and sniffled. “No. It’s just the weather. The wind was bitter on the water this morning. I haven’t been warm since Thursday.”

Le Saint swore by some reference to the Virgin Mother’s anatomy, then slandered a stranger in Adrien’s mind:

“Your mother’s buttered ass, it’s the cold! You were all smiles when the French boarded this morning. It was good. The Madman is one smart nugger to let you handle any problems like that. You got this long face after they left.”

“They were suspicious.”

“Pah! National guardsmen are suspicious of everyone these days! They eye one
another
with an evil eye.” The man formed a V with his fingers over one eye and laughed loudly as the group walked on. “It worked!” he exclaimed. “The damn plan worked! As smoothly as the third man’s cock in a whore! I love the Madman!” Le Saint shouted at the top of his lungs. He was shushed promptly by the rest of the group. “Whoever he is,” he added more softly.

There was some general agreement among the group. One of the others elbowed Adrien in the ribs as they walked.

“You want things to go too well, La Chasse. You must make allowances for your own temperament. If you were not so conscious of every little detail, the Madman would not have put you in charge. But the truth is, you do well in getting what he wants from a scheme and the men. And there were no mistakes last night or this morning. It was magnifique! A work of art! Let’s celebrate!”

There was loud approval from the group on that.
The other men were all in their usual way after a run: floating in high-spirited exhilaration.

And Adrien was in his usual way: tightly coiled and looking for a way to unwind slowly before he snapped and rained loose parts all over everyone.

He sneezed again and acid from his stomach rose into his throat. His stomach growled from hunger. And burned. Lately it had an irritating habit of doing that from time to time.

The men tramped into the streets of Paris in knock-about good humor. They pushed and shoved one another along, discussing the liquor they were going to consume and the women they were going to bed. Now and then, La Chasse caught a barb about his scoffed-at fidelity to his little “wife”—no one had ever asked if he was actually married to the woman, they just assumed—and his fondness for chocolate when the others drank rum. He tried to take it all in the good-humored way it was intended.

He succeeded, for the most part, because he hardly heard it. He was plunged deep into analyzing the bits of puzzlement that plagued him.

Edward Claybourne was hotter than ever for the Madman’s capture, which made less and less sense. Over the last five months, the “great French reform” had soured on England’s palate. It was coming to be seen for what it was, a wholesale aggression reaching out of France; while, within France, it had become a landmark example of gore and terror. Opinion in England had undergone a massive revision. The almost continual snap and hiss of the guillotine now—along with the memory of the past September when not only aristocrats were butchered but also clergy and ordinary citizens—had sharply jolted the happy English reformer.

The September massacres had jolted the French a
little bit, too. People had suddenly become aware of what they said to whom. Paris was tightly controlled; no one came or went without papers, authorization. A tight, organized surveillance of French citizens had lent a hollow ring to the glorious revolutionary words on every French tongue: Many were swept up in a zealous patriotism. But those who weren’t and wished to be let alone made the proper noise all the same.

The Madman had found himself on the scene last August when there were pandemic arrests. Prisons were crowded beyond capacity. Convents and hostelries were taken over to accommodate the overflow. The grapevine to the Madman had started to filter down a few more than the usual desperate pleas from aristos.

Then, on September 2nd, a horribly late message reached Adrien. One hundred and nineteen priests, who had refused to swear the oath to the Republic against Rome, were butchered in a monastery in the heart of a residential district in Paris. The screams had roused some frightened citizens behind their closed shutters. By the time a band of the Madman’s men arrived for their first nonaristocratic “rescue”—a mere two hours after the message had first reached Adrien’s ears—nothing was left but carnage and debris. Bodies and the remains of bonfires. Charred mockeries of pretended trials and releases, sending every last clergyman onto a saber in the hands of an assassin. Adrien had felt he would never get over the horror of that night.

But that was only the beginning. Over the next five days the French guillotine had chopped constantly. The lists of those condemned and killed ran pages long. During this period the Madman had rescued more people than he had over the last three years put together. He had managed the escapes of thirty-eight clergy, three nobles, fourteen merchants, sixteen laborers, some of their families, plus one tramp who had turned up at
the last minute. The number included women and several children—children!—who had been destined to be part of the continuing anathema.

At the time, it had seemed like a huge effort. Yet there was no containing the bloodlust that ruled those days. Mobs broke into the prisons. More than a thousand people were sabered, axed, shoveled, and spiked to death—never mind the ones lost on the guillotine. Adrien and his friends had witnessed some of the atrocities. Disembowelment. Decapitation. At La Force, the prison where the worst was rumored, acts of open cannibalism were reported.

It had been the worst week of the Madman’s existence. It made the big event of this week—tomorrow—pale in comparison. Tomorrow, only one man was to be guillotined: Louis Capet, the former king of France. It was a final coup from the rising Paris Commune.

Since September, the Commune and the Jacobin political club had slowly drained away power from the moderate Girondists and the elected Assembly. The Assembly now was dissolved in all but name. Disorganization and a preoccupation with rhetoric had reduced this elected body to impotent dogma that was never coupled with praxis. A craving for action, any action for action’s sake, had opened up civil control to the un-elected, the self-declared. If, emerging, there was one man who epitomized this deification of mindless Doing, it was Jean Paul Marat, a diseased, rag-clad fanatic who energized the spirit of mob tyranny.

A street lantern, jutting out from its wall like a long-necked voyeur, spotlighted words that drew Adrien’s attention. Crudely painted beneath the lantern were the words
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.
What had become of these noble ideals? Adrien wondered. How could such lofty goals justify murder and mob rule?

Below these words, written in soft rock on the rough surface, Adrien noticed something more. It was the
name,
Jeanette,
an address, and some obscene phrases describing what Jeanette might do for a few sous. He grimaced. Jeanette’s message seemed to him the less insidious of the two; at least it was more open in its pandering. The revolutionary bywords he condemned, under his breath, as ideological feces, feeding maggots. He turned his head sharply from the wall.

An aloof cynicism toward all politics was becoming bitterly personal. He saw his grand acts to save the genteel nobility as nothing but desperate schemes now, sparing only some tiny proportion of innocent, ordinary men, women, and children. A hopelessness overcame him whenever he thought of a society letting this continue. There had been no great movement to stop this new turn of violence, though the outrages of September had yet to be repeated in the same spectacular manner. But Paris, indeed all of France, turned a deaf ear to her screaming unfortunates. The population, for the most part, were silent accomplices in the crimes of the minority.

It was going to be good to leave, Adrien thought. In a week he would be home in England. Long delayed, Adrien at last had concrete plans for putting an end to his own involvement in all this. He would put his mind to something more productive. Edward Claybourne would have to be satisfied with the Madman’s sudden disappearance and with the Earl of Kewischester’s refusal to take any new part in his crazy plots. He was getting everyone home. England intended to declare war on France within the month.

Adrien had to increase his pace. He had dropped behind the rest. Watching the others ahead, he had to hold back a silly smile that wanted to break through his depression. The Old Man’s “Cabrels” had multiplied like the fabled sorcerer’s brooms. Three of the seven men in front of him were infiltrators, forcing the Madman to take deep cover behind a cloud of only a few trusted
men. The Old Man was delighted that Adrien had worked himself up so high and was sure that any day the Madman would include him in the “trusted.” The smile broke into a grin. Adrien was quite certain that would never happen. But, on one count, he did find the leaving regrettable: Given another few months, he could have had the Claybourne financing providing manpower and carrying the entire operation without even knowing it.

“Ah! There she is!” Le Saint was saying. “Love of my life! Food to my soul! Soothing remedy to the savage beast! Le café!”

Far ahead, beyond a smattering of lifeless, winter-bare trees, a cluster of little lights flickered merrily. Le Café des Petits Feux Blancs. The little group’s frequent haven.

“Hey, sour face! Come with us tonight. It’s a long walk home in the cold. Come have a man’s drink and warm your pole for that little wife of yours.”

Adrien bristled slightly. He liked Le Saint; the man had a kind of peasant-wise intelligence. But Le Saint also offended him at times. He didn’t like his crudeness when it edged onto sacrosanct ground.

“That part of me never needs warming for her.” Adrien managed to laugh. He hid his expression with a downward glance.

“Mention her name and watch his eyes.” Someone made an attempt to do so. Adrien turned his head. “It’s a goddamned crime for a man to be that enamored of his own wife!”

“Ah, but have you seen his wife?”

“Yes. Short and fat. Ugly as a pig!” someone else chaffed.

Adrien responded, half in keeping with the jocosity, half in warning, “I’ll wrap your lying tongue about your neck, you nearsighted bugger.”

“Chris-tin-a,” the second syllable accent coming with
difficulty to the French tongue. “Have you ever heard such a stuck-up name? And English, she is! Enemy of the people!”

“Oh, sweet enemy,” Le Saint said with mock sobriety. “Let me screw England! Let me bring her to her knees. Preferably in front of my open pants!”

Adrien gave way to the urge and clubbed Le Saint on the neck hard enough for the man to yell out and stumble. “Uncivic words. I ought to report you,” Adrien chided. “I ought to flatten you all!”

“I yield,” Le Saint feigned fear, then repentance. “Oh, let us have another brief glimpse of her, and we’ll kiss the ground she walks on!”

“You can kiss my ass.”

The café came up on them.

A garland of small lanterns framed the door in a yellow glow. More lanterns and a host of candles flickered from within. Hence the name, Le Café des Petits Feux Blancs. The Tavern of the Little White Lights. Well, they weren’t exactly white, thought Adrien. But then, it wasn’t strictly a tavern either. Upstairs, above the holiday atmosphere of tables, food, and liquor, a troupe of working girls, in the true spirit of Fraternity, froze, in ribbons and garters and not much else.

Adrien wandered in with the group of men. Welcome heat and the smells of warm bodies, strong drink, and burning oil greeted them. Boisterous music was playing in the room beyond. A sudden surge of laughter nearly drowned that out. Adrien undid his seaman’s coat and unwound the muffler as he followed the men into the café.

Three of the men immediately disappeared upstairs. The rest dragged chairs around one table.

“Colette!” Le Saint yelled. “We need five coffees. Put something in it to warm the bones, eh?” He glanced at La Chasse, then called back, “Make that four coffees and one chocolate for the youngster in the group.”

Adrien made a sour face. A little put out with himself that he felt the need, he called back to Colette to bring the doctored coffee, not chocolate.

“Eh, La Chasse,” Le Saint whispered over to him, “we’re on you too much,
mon ami.
Have your chocolate. It’s just that for every little light in this place, you’ve snapped at someone for not doing things to your satisfaction. We get even a little, yes? You drive very hard, and, no doubt, to the Madman’s liking. But I tell you, if it weren’t for the way you become peculiarly likable in the midst of coaxing a man’s last ounce of blood from him, well—a different man would have mutiny on his hands at asking for so much. I think M. Lillings might lead it himself, after this morning. You nearly ordered him to be content with his lot. If he wants to help in France…well, you ought to think twice. You have maybe less right to second-guess the Madman than you—ah, Colette,” Le Saint’s voice rose distractedly, “my little cabbage, you give me a toss tonight, huh?”