Traitor to the Crown (18 page)

Everything about Count Cagliostro pointed to the Covenant. Alexander and Bancroft, among others, had filled in details for Proctor. The Egyptian Rites Lodge openly embraced magic symbols. Its goal was immortality for its members. Cagliostro himself claimed to see spirits
and speak to the dead. The count and countess had moved to London just a few years before—when the Covenant was increasing its activity—to start the lodge. But Cagliostro and his wife had recently fled England and had been traveling around the Continent, speaking to royalty’s dead. Rumor had it that they were on their way back to France, or headed for the tsar’s palace in Russia.

Proctor stopped when he considered that. In America, people like him and Deborah still lived in the shadow of the Salem witch trials. Anything tainted by a hint of witchcraft was considered evil. But in Europe, it appeared there were different rules. Or maybe there were different rules for the nobility. Proctor wondered if ordinary men were tolerated as much as counts like Cagliostro.

If the letter was read, Proctor hoped it would help scare up Cagliostro in France. He wanted to go home again.

And that was it. If he tried to write any more, he’d get overwhelmed.

He signed it carefully and deliberately, imagining the way that Deborah might run her fingertips over the signature just to feel connected to him. He had nearly rubbed her name off her letter, the one that he had not burned despite her request.

Even though he had scarcely said anything personal at all, even though he wanted the letter read, so that someone would spread the word to Cagliostro, he resented the thought of someone besides Deborah opening his letter. So when he sealed it, he placed a splinter in the wax with a pinch of gunpowder. It was a trick his mother had done, to keep him out of her medicines when he was
small. Deborah would notice the spell at once and render it harmless. But if anyone besides her opened it, they would get a little surprise.

Lydia waited for him in the hall outside his door. She was wearing a much finer dress—still plain, in what Proctor was beginning to think of as “the American style,” but of excellent fabric and elegantly cut and sewn. It was a gift for her arranged by a friend of Franklin.

She greeted him by staring at his jacket. “When are you going to let me take that and have it cleaned and repaired?”

“Soon,” he said. “I keep thinking that we may have to leave at a moment’s notice.”

“And go where?”

“Wherever we will find the Covenant.” He would climb Franklin’s lightning rod and shout the word from the rooftop if it would help them move forward.

She glanced at the walls. “Perhaps we should continue this during your walk.”

“I was planning to go into town to the post,” he said. He held up his letter. It felt very thin in his hand, and he almost wadded it up, convinced that he should have written more. Or else nothing at all. But he resisted the urge.

It was a short walk into town and Proctor felt silly for having taken the carriage that first day. The clerk at the post office accepted his letter and informed him, after checking, that no other mail had arrived for him.

Lydia was holding the door for Proctor—he was still having a hard time forcing himself to allow that—when a bang sounded from the back room. Lydia jumped, and all the clerks from the counter ran to the back. They were jammed in the door and then shoved out of the way by a jowled man with thick glasses. He was sucking angrily on his thumb. The faint, sharp smell of gunpowder followed him.

Proctor waved to the clerks. “Merci!”

“What was that?” Lydia asked under her breath as they walked out to the street.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Proctor said. “But I imagine that the gunpowder was just for effect, to frighten whoever opened the letter. The splinter works as a sting regardless of the noise.”

Even as he said it, he imagined a variation on the same spell, in which the splinter was coated with a poison. The wrongful letter opener would be—

“It reminds me of Miss Cecily’s work,” Lydia said. “It smacks of delight in the hurt of another.”

Proctor stopped and turned on her. “They’re reading my letter to Deborah.”

“Which you knew they were going to do, and which you wanted them to do, if you included that part about the count and countess—”

“I did,” he said. “That was the whole point, right?”

“That poor scrivener, the one who got hurt by your prank, he doesn’t have anything against you or Deborah or maybe even America. It’s just his job, working for the court. What’s going to happen if they blame him for damaging your letter? He’ll lose his job, his family won’t be able to eat, and they’ll just find somebody else to do it for them.”

“All right, all right.” He surrendered. “I shouldn’t have done it.”

“We are not judged on the basis of what we should have done, but on what we actually do,” Lydia said.

“I admitted my mistake,” he snapped.

He was used to talking to everyone on The Farm as equals, but it was another thing to do it out in public, in a foreign country, where his every move was watched. Lydia’s questioning of him and his motives made him angry. But everything about this place and his situation was making him angry. He spun away from her and looked at the waters of the Seine, muddy and opaque. A
pair of swans sat on an island in the middle. One raised its wings and flapped them menacingly as a boat passed on the river.

“Do you feel up for a longer walk today?” Lydia asked.

“Yes, I’m fine, I’ve fully recovered,” he said. Every day, he had been taking longer and longer walks in the garden and then the neighborhoods of Passy to regain his strength. They had been short walks, limited in part by frequent rains. The weather today was chilly but dry, and the skies were clear. “Shall we go see the gardens at the Palace of Tuileries that everyone keeps telling us about?”

“If you wish,” Lydia said, bowing her head.

He almost snapped at her for it, but then he saw that she was looking sideways out of her eyes at a small group that was watching them. They walked silently along the tree-lined bank. The branches were covered with a frill of green, emerging leaves.

“What I did with the letter may have been wrong,” Proctor whispered after a long while. “But I’m not evil. I’m not trying to kill people.” Even as he said it, he started to think about the men he had killed, from the assassins on The Farm to the battles at Concord and Bunker Hill. Not to mention souls he may have condemned, like Rotenhahn when he was freed from Bootzamon’s shell. But all of those had been necessary. He didn’t do harm unless he had to. Did he? “I want to hear the truth from you,” he said. “Always.”

“It is our first nature to give back what we are used to receiving,” Lydia said. “After a lifetime of constant correction …” She let her sentence trail off unfinished. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid to end up in a situation again like I was with Miss Cecily. Have you made any progress?”

“None since last night. Franklin wants us to stay in Paris a little while longer.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, but he asked me to stay when he found
out I hadn’t written any letters home yet. I begged him to help us find a way into England. And you, any progress?”

She shook her head. “Even the servants have their pecking orders here, and I’m not fine enough to pass among them. To be honest, I’d be happy to go someplace where I belong.”

“I know what you mean about not belonging here. I just want to find the Covenant, crush them, and go home again.”

They stepped aside at the last minute to let pass a group of young French gentlemen in animated conversation. Carriages rattled by them on the street, and a man in servant’s livery cantered by on a horse. When they had gone, Lydia led Proctor across the road, following a stream of other people.

“Have you any better idea how you’ll stop them?” Lydia asked.

He kept hoping it would be obvious to him when the time came. “First I have to find them, don’t I? If Franklin doesn’t help me soon, I’ll go to Alexander or Bancroft and ask them to introduce me to someone who can help us reach England.”

“How soon?”

“It depends on how long it takes to see if my letter had any effect,” he said. The prospect of more weeks of waiting daunted him. The weeks in Paris so far had done nothing—“What’s that?”

“The entrance to the gardens,” Lydia said.

Two huge statues of white marble stood on either side of the street, riders on horse back, with the horses reared above shields and weapons and symbols of war. The horses had wings, so realistically and convincingly carved, from the flare of the nostrils to the tense muscles to the hair of the pinfeathers, that Proctor was convinced at once that the creatures had existed, had been captured in life and turned into stone. One of the riders
was a naked boy, holding a trumpet with a stem so long and delicate it looked like a wind might snap it. The light seemed to be absorbed by the stone, which radiated it back with a cool warmth that made it seem like living skin. Proctor had seen small busts of stone and images carved of wood, but he had never seen anything like these, not even on the churches in Spain. Nothing, not the clothes or language or food, had made him feel more like he was in a foreign country.

“Those wings—who would think to put wings on a horse?” he asked.

“There are more statues,” Lydia said, pointing toward the garden. “It’s what it’s famous for.”

Pools of water formed an axis from the horses to a distant palace, which was wider than any building Proctor had ever seen. It formed a wall at the far end of the gardens, with a domed block directly opposite the entrance. The wings on either side of the entrance rose like the wings on the horses. Between the horses and the palace, on either side of the pools, there were sixty or seventy acres of trees and flower beds, all formally arranged amid carefully designed paths.

“And all this is for the public?” Proctor asked. It was a reflection on the greatness of a nation, if true.

“From what the other servants tell me, it was built for one queen,” she said.

“But I thought the king and queen lived at Versailles,” Proctor said.

“Oh, they don’t live here anymore, although guests might stay here. That’s why it’s open to the public now.”

They walked into the garden, stopping at another group of statues around a pool. One was a giant man, reclining while a dozen tiny children crawled over his figure like a group of men climbing a hill. As they walked from statue to statue, Proctor felt increasing awe and
greater disorientation. He did not recognize any of the images from the Bible stories he knew, and he couldn’t imagine who or what had put these ideas into the heads of the artists. He abhorred the expense of wealth, the indulgence of the nobility in building this garden, and at the same time he was delighted by it, by the order, the vividness, the focus.

A place like this could be a powerful focus for channeling the untapped magic of a city and a nation’s people.

He felt a prickle on the back of his neck at the thought. He turned to say something to Lydia and saw her standing, still as a statue. He touched her arm and she didn’t move. Her eyes stared straight ahead, blind to him. He spun around. All throughout the garden, people had stopped mid-movement. Even the birds had fallen silent. There was only the trickle of water.

Blue, as pale as ice in the moonlight, flashed between the trees.

Proctor ran toward it. His skin was electrified, covered with goose bumps. He rounded a corner and stopped.

There, in the middle of the path, was the most striking woman he had ever seen. Her face was a symmetry of full lips, delicate nose, and large eyes, with skin as pale and perfect as marble, with her lips painted red, her cheeks rose, and one black dot below the corner of her left eye. Her hair was piled atop her head in the French manner, her dress was cut shockingly low, and the fabric was trimmed with lace that sparkled with tiny jewels. Her neck, fingers, wrists, and ears were adorned with jewelry, and every piece carried a charm or spell. He could feel the power of it.

“Bonjour, Monsieur Brown,” she said. “I understand that you have been looking for me.”

“And you are?”

“The Countess Cagliostro,” she said. She glided over
to him, hooking her hand familiarly around his arm. “But you may call me Seraphina. Let us walk and enjoy the garden while we talk.”

“Where is the count?” Proctor said, looking over his shoulder as they strolled past a row of motionless visitors. Even the air was still, as if they had somehow stepped momentarily out of time.

“At the palace in St. Petersburg by now, I hope,” she said. “Although he can be easily distracted and is loath to bypass a single opportunity, so he may have stopped anywhere between here and there. But I thought you were seeking members of the Covenant?”

He tried to pull his arm away, but it felt pinned to her hand. She wasn’t strong enough to hold him. He suspected one of the charms in her bracelet.

She smiled without showing any teeth and tapped him on the wrist. “You wanted to find me, and you have found me. Do not run away or you will not find me again.”

“But I thought—”

“Have you ever seen a charlatan perform, one of those who call themselves magicians?”

He didn’t answer. He felt out of his depth, and out of control, and he was more than a little frightened. He didn’t even know if Lydia was all right.

“Stage conjurors use misdirection to fool their audiences,” the countess continued after his uncomfortable silence. “They perform one action over here with their hands”—she flourished her free hand in the air, and he immediately looked at it—“while they perform the trick with their other hand over here.”

In the hand looped around his arm she held Deborah’s lock of hair, taken from his pocket. In place of the plain gray ribbon that had tied it before, there was now a ribbon of black silk, embroidered with a vine that snaked around its edge. It curved in shapes that seemed to form letters, though Proctor did not recognize the words.

“Interesting,” she said. “If you pull it out by the roots, it will have much more power as a focus. But this woman has talents …”