Pam Rosenthal (31 page)

Especially.

Slowly, lovingly, the Duchesse drew out the long
ssss
sound, showing her teeth as she did so. And then she stopped abruptly, leaving the unfinished sentence half-coiled, like a hissing serpent poised to strike. She knew that Marie-Laure had grasped her meaning, and would parse the rest of the sentence with perfect accuracy in her own mind.
He’ll enjoy watching his child thrive at your breast, especially because it will mean less milk, less care, and less attention for his brother’s child.

Brava, Madame.

But in the end it seemed that the Duchesse wasn’t up to the standard of rhetorical subtlety she’d set herself. For she couldn’t resist tacking on a far less artful and really rather banal finale.

“Now go,” she hissed. “You’re boring me.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Marie-Laure stumbled out back through the bedchamber. Her senses were clouded, her steps so disjointed that she nearly knocked the Duc over when she bumped into him at the threshold of the Duchesse’s rooms. She had enough of her wits about her, though, to regret that she hadn’t sent him tumbling onto his bottom.

He’d been hunting. There was a gamy, bloody smell about him; a couple of whining, panting hounds, with loud bells at their collars, trotted along after his muddy boots. She murmured excuses for her clumsiness and gave a shallow curtsy, enduring his small blue eyes and alcohol-laced breath on her breasts, her mouth, and the pulse at her throat.

For a moment he seemed fractious, like a child who’d done his sullen best to behave, but wasn’t sure he was going to be given the reward that had been promised. Then, realizing that she must have just completed an interview with his wife, he smiled with sudden wolfish delight.

“So it’s all settled,” he said. His open mouth and red lips shone with drool.

He reached to grab her, but she swooped into a deeper curtsy, bending her head over his hand to kiss it. The gesture seemed to puzzle and please him. It would be nice, she could see him thinking, to get a little respect once in a while.

One of the hounds had poked an inquisitive wet nose under her skirt. She wished with all her heart that she could kick the filthy beast across the room. But she forced herself to ignore the sniffing and nuzzling, while she continued to press her mouth against the Duc’s puffy, beringed little hand; it was like a fat white maggot, the starched lace cuffs not quite hiding the dirt beneath his fingernails.

Stifling the urge to retch, Marie-Laure peered up at him. He was giggling with pleasure at the sight of her swollen breasts, pushed up and almost out of her too-tight dress. In another moment, she thought, he’d dribble saliva on her.

One of the dogs whined jealously. She felt a tightness at her throat, as though someone had buckled a leather collar around it. Which was, she thought, really quite appropriate to her situation, since the Duc clearly had no intention of treating her as someone with a will or intelligence of her own. He was happiest with dumb animals, anyway. What had the Duchesse called her? Ah yes, a docile little dairy cow, at his beck and call like the dogs.

She thought she might choke. But she found, as she raised her head, that she could speak calmly enough.

“You must excuse me, Monsieur le Duc, for I fear I’m a bit faint, with…with pleasure, and with…with the honor of my new position, and I must…”

She prattled on about how, in her condition, she was often seized by the urge to vomit, particularly when overtaken with such intense sensations as she was feeling at this moment.

Mercifully, he recoiled and let her step away while he stammered a witticism about how she must take good care of herself, for in the future he’d be seeing a great deal more of her, oh yes (his eyes shining), a great deal more indeed.

As she hurried out of the room and down the corridor, she considered for a moment that she didn’t exactly loathe him. She pitied him rather, this lumpish, sad, unlovable boy in his stocky adult body.
It’s not really your fault, Monsieur le Duc
, she thought, trying to wipe the feeling of his puffy hand from her lips.
But if you believe for one instant that I’m going to sacrifice either my child or myself to make up for slights you suffered twenty years ago…well, dream on, Monsieur le Duc. Dream, or do whatever it is you do with a mind you’ve pickled in alcohol.

She regretted that there wouldn’t be time to say goodbye to Louise. Or Robert, Monsieur Colet, or any of the others who’d tried to help her.

But she had to leave
now
. Even if she didn’t have a
sou
. Perhaps, she thought vaguely, she could get her deposit back from Bertrande’s cousins in the village. Or perhaps not.

She didn’t know where she’d go or what she’d do. But she did know that no one was going to imprison her in a cottage with Monsieur Hubert and his simple needs.

So she stepped through the tall, arched doorway, crossed the courtyard and drawbridge, and walked away from the chateau. Away from all her carefully laid plans and hopes.

How easy it was, she thought. How simple just to
go
when you had no idea where you were going. There was a certain exhilarating sense of freedom when you were desperate, a purity of action when no action made sense.

When you were acting from your most elemental instincts for self-preservation. And when the only way to go was
away
.

She wanted to look back just one last time. Absurdly, as she hurried down the steep winding road, she found herself wondering if she’d be able to tell which of the windows belonged to Joseph’s bedchamber. No. She wouldn’t turn her head or even her thoughts in that direction.

Anyway, merely keeping going was difficult enough. The morning sun was rapidly climbing in the sky and her feet wobbled in her clogs above the road’s uneven stones and gravel. The day would only get hotter. Her back hurt and she was already thirsty.

Perhaps, she thought, she should walk a bit more slowly, to conserve energy for the long trek down to the village. But she was afraid to do so—any minute, now, she thought, someone would realize she was gone and come after her.

Oof.
She slipped on a gnarled root and gave her ankle a turn. She waited, panting in the still, bright air, hoping that the pain would subside. Mercifully, it did. But she’d have to be more careful, and keep a sharper eye on the road’s treacherous, uneven surface. And she’d also have to keep a sharp ear out for sounds on the road behind her, sounds of someone—probably Jacques—in pursuit.
If hear him
, she told herself,
I’ll get off the road and hide in the thorny bushes at its edges.

“I won’t go back,” she repeated to herself.
“We
won’t go back,” she corrected herself, “will we, Sophie-or-Alexandre? We’ll continue on until we find a safe place for you to be born, you can trust me on that absolutely.”

She rounded a turn in the road, and the view of a hillside unfolded before her eyes: a field of lavender, a vineyard, and off in the distance, a small flock of sheep. Words from an ancient and familiar lullaby drifted into her mind, “Sleep, baby, sleep…there’s no reason to cry…the lamb doesn’t bleat in his meadow, his eyes are gay, filled with happiness…” Her own eyes stung for a moment, with bitterness and fear, before she hurried on.

But it wasn’t only bitterness and fear that had brought tears to her eyes. It was dust. And it seemed to come from everywhere.

She could hear Jacques now, running thunderously after her from the chateau. But the breeze also seemed to be picking up a little dust from a mule cart that she could hear somewhere down the hill. If, she thought, she could fight Jacques off until the mule cart traveled up to where she was standing, perhaps she could get some help. And in any case her struggle wouldn’t go unwitnessed.

He was advancing on her. She looked around for a bush to hide behind, but she was on a terrible stretch of road here, with only steep hillside on either side of her. She could hear his breath now; she could almost feel a bony hand grasping after her. She pivoted, barely avoiding a ditch, and crossed her arms.

“All right,” he said. “Now, why don’t you come quietly and save me the trouble of dragging you all the way up the hill?”

Her mouth was full of dust. She spat it out at him.

“Stay away from me,” she said. “Stay away unless you want me to set you howling again. Like I did last time you tried to lay a hand on me.”

In truth, she didn’t think she could execute that move anymore. Nor did she have surprise on her side this time. But the memory of the pain she’d caused him made him cautious.

Damn, where was that mule cart she’d thought she’d heard?

He grasped her shoulders, and she tried to position herself to knee him in the groin. But it was an entirely different thing with a big belly in front of her. He laughed, and then yowled as she raked her fingernails across his cheek. And even if she couldn’t get him where it really counted, a wooden clog aimed hard at the shin does at least a little damage.

“Bitch,” he muttered, finally able to immobilize her arms by bending them behind her back, “aristocrat’s whore, and shameless about it too. Well, at least I’ll get to keep the seventy-eight
livres
after I get you up the hill.”

There was nothing to do but scream. Which she did with some creativity, bellowing out epithets she wasn’t even aware she knew. She screamed her hatred for the vicious people who were using her so spitefully; her rage at having her arms painfully bent behind her back; and her fury at being pushed back up the hill, toward the chateau she never wanted to see again.

She screamed so loudly that she quite drowned out the squeaks and rattles of the mule cart as it pulled to a stop behind Jacques. And she was so intent on resisting Jacques’s shoving that for a moment she didn’t hear the droll, familiar voice protesting at his back.

“Hey, let her alone, Jacques, you’re hurting her.”

She turned her head in mid-scream, letting the sound dissolve in her open, astonished mouth.

“
Baptiste?
”

It was most definitely Baptiste, accompanied by a thin, soberly dressed gentleman with deeply rutted cheeks and small, piercing eyes. The thin gentleman was holding up a sheet of heavy white paper, as though it had some sort of magic power.

“Jean-Marie du Plessix, my good fellow”—he bowed coldly to an astonished Jacques—“lawyer in the employ of the Marquise Jeanne de Machery and her husband, the Vicomte d’Auvers-Raimond.”

“Monsieur du Plessix and I were just investigating—”

Baptiste had begun to say something, but Monsieur du Plessix interrupted him.

“…some of the Marquise’s financial holdings in this region,” he said, “and some legal matters in addition. But we were also searching for this young woman, who, with my help, may want to initiate a lawsuit against certain parties, for abduction, by the look of it.”

“I’ve taken the liberty, Mademoiselle,” he said to Marie-Laure, “of drawing up some preliminary papers, if you’d like to take a glance at them.”

Jacques still had Marie-Laure’s hands pinned behind her back, but his grip had loosened, and Marie-Laure jerked herself free, walking over to Monsieur du Plessix to scan the papers he held out to her.

“Thank you, Monsieur,” she murmured, though what she was reading was merely an accounting of the food and wine the lawyer and valet had consumed between Paris and Provence. “Thank you, I’ll review the details with you at my leisure, while we’re—”

“While we’re on our way to Paris,” Baptiste sang out, guiding the mules carefully through a turnaround at the widest part of the road.

He and Monsieur du Plessix helped Marie-Laure into the cart, climbed in after her, and began their rolling, jolting trip down the hill, leaving a gaping Jacques behind them in the dust.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Except for a certain dankness in the air, Joseph had found his couple of months in the Bastille exceedingly tolerable. Even comfortable—well, it was comfortable, he thought, if you had a large cell with a window that faced the ever-changing city streets. And a rich wife to supply you with every conceivable amenity, from rugs, furniture, and tapestries for the stone walls; to books, warm clothing, and cartloads of nourishing and delicate foodstuffs.

He regretted the lack of exercise. A daily walk in the prison yard wasn’t nearly enough to keep his muscles in tone, so he practiced fencing for an hour every morning and afternoon. Of course, he wasn’t allowed a weapon, but he amused himself by holding a quill pen in the hand that thrust and parried. Wasn’t that what writers did, after all? And if he had no opponent except himself? Well, he’d probably always been his own worst enemy anyway.

Of course he felt stifled by the lack of society, the unvarying company of a few guards and fellow prisoners instead of the wide, brilliant circle of acquaintances he’d enjoyed as Jeanne’s husband. And naturally he hated not being able to come and go as he wished.

But with all that duly noted, it astonished him how little changed he felt his life to be. The Hôtel Mélicourt had been rich in creature comfort and convenient to every diversion Paris could offer. But in truth he’d felt imprisoned within it, since the turn of the year especially, without any mail from Marie-Laure to remind him what his life might really be about.

Accommodating to the Bastille had been a challenge and a novelty. Discomforts could be overlooked or circumvented; solitude engendered meditation. It was interesting to observe the system of guards and security, too: there were some inconsistencies, he noted, some gaps in security that might allow a clever prisoner—one who was quick on his feet and good at disguise—to engineer an escape attempt. Someone a bit more desperate than he was. Someone as desperate as he might become, if there wasn’t a break in the case soon.