Why Kings Confess (6 page)

S
ebastian
nudged away a speckled hen that was showing rather too much interest in the shiny toe of one of his Hessians, and walked forward to meet the wheeled chair bearing the uncrowned King of France.

He’d been born Louis Stanislas, fourth in line to the French throne, and given the title Comte de Provence. No one ever expected the plump, self-indulgent Comte de Provence to someday be king. And so he was allowed to go his own way, neglecting his studies, amassing staggering debts, and growing fatter every year. His younger brother, the Comte d’Artois, was slim, dashing, and handsome. But not Provence. Even as a young man, he’d been obese. Now in his late fifties and crippled by gout, he could barely walk without assistance.

“Devlin!” he cried when he was still some feet away. “Don’t run off yet! I want a word with you.”

“Your Majesty,” said Sebastian with an elegant bow.

The Comte de Provence laughed, his plump, rosy-cheeked face still surprisingly youthful and creased with a smile of habitual good cheer. “How very diplomatic of you, young man! And without a moment’s hesitation too. Most people in your position hem and haw in painful indecision. You can almost see the agonized thoughts tumbling one after the other through their heads.
Do I address him as if he were indeed the crowned King of France, rather than an impoverished exile? Should I call him the Comte de Provence?
Or I should follow Napoléon’s lead and refer to him as the Comte d’Isle?
” The Bourbon’s enormous, protuberant belly bounced up and down. “At least I have yet to have anyone address me the way my niece styles Napoléon, as ‘the Criminal’!”

“Does she really?”

“Oh, yes; she has for years.” Twisting awkwardly in his chair, he reached up with noticeable tenderness to touch the right hand of the man pushing him. “Ambrose, if you would be so kind? A walk toward the chapel might afford the most privacy, don’t you agree?”

Ambrose LaChapelle glanced over at Sebastian, a faint, enigmatic smile curling his lips. “Oh, most definitely.”

Sebastian had met LaChapelle before. Born into an aristocratic family in Avignon, he’d fled France as a youth to fight in the counterrevolutionary émigré army led by the Prince de Conde. When the army was disbanded, he’d joined the Comte de Provence in exile, first in Russia, then in Warsaw, where he’d risen quickly in his royal master’s favor. Sebastian had heard that he owed his rapid elevation to his willingness to do anything for his uncrowned king.

Anything.

“Your father and I were good friends in our youth, you know,” Provence said, his voice raised so as to be heard above the squeak of the chair’s wheels and the crunch of the weed-choked gravel beneath their feet. The winter-bared oaks and elms of the neglected park closed in around them, dark and somber in the flat light.

“No, I didn’t know,” said Sebastian.

The Bourbon’s eyes practically disappeared behind his puffy, smiling lids. “Hendon never told you about his salad days in Paris, did he?” He tried to laugh, but it quickly degenerated into a rasping cough. “Golden years, those were. Golden. Horses, jewels, châteaux, carriages, wine . . . We had it all. I once ran up a debt of a million livres, and my brother the King paid it off. Think of that! A million livres. What I wouldn’t give for that kind of money now. We thought those days would never end. But they did.” He cast Sebastian a quick, sideways glance. “I suppose you think we should have seen it coming, and so we should have—so we should! I tell Marie-Thérèse all the time that when two percent of a nation has all the wealth and the other ninety-eight percent of the people pay all the taxes, a bloodbath is inevitable. Inevitable!”

Sebastian had heard that an intense and at times acrimonious disagreement raged within the French royal family. The Comte de Provence favored a limited, parliamentary monarchy and was willing to give numerous concessions to the people of France if they would only allow him to return. But both Marie-Thérèse and Provence’s own younger brother, Charles, Comte d’Artois, were ultraroyalists, stubbornly adhering to their belief in the divine right of kings and insisting upon nothing less than a reimposition of absolute monarchy.

Sebastian said, “In my experience, most people tend to believe even in the face of all evidence to the contrary that things will never change.”

The Bourbon sighed. “True, true. Although I’ve been exiled from France for more than twenty years now. So, God willing,
this
is one state of affairs that will change, and soon. I would not like to die on foreign soil.”

“The news from the Continent sounds encouraging—if you can call the slaughter of half a million men encouraging.”

The Bourbon’s jovial face went slack. “Ghastly, is it not? All those dead men, strewn across Russia.”

The genuine depth of his grief took Sebastian by surprise. He found himself wondering if Marie-Thérèse had ever spared a moment’s sorrow for the war dead of the nation over which she hoped one day to reign as queen. Somehow, he doubted it. She was too busy hugging her own misery and loss to herself.

As if aware of the drift of his thoughts, Provence said, “But you did not come all the way out here to discuss either philosophy or my long-lost youth, did you?”

Sebastian smiled. “No, sir. I wonder, have you ever heard of a young French doctor named Damion Pelletan?”

“Hah.”
Provence slapped the arm of his chair in triumph. “That’s why you’re here, is it? Told you so, Ambrose; didn’t I?”

Sebastian glanced at the courtier, who kept his gaze trained straight ahead, his features composed in an expressionless mask. “So you did know him?”

“Me? No.” Provence nodded toward a small redbrick building half-hidden by a nearby stand of oaks. “Look at that. See it? I’m told that at one time, it was a rectory. Now it is home to a duke, two counts, their wives and children, their aged mothers, and their unwed or widowed sisters and
their
children. There isn’t an outbuilding on the estate that isn’t overflowing—barns, stables, even an old Gothic folly in the gardens. In the main house itself, we’ve had to divide chambers and erect partitions in the gallery. I occupy what was once a small study off the library; Marie-Thérèse has an apartment next to the muniment room, and the exiled King of Sweden is in the chapel. More than two hundred people live here. Think about that! Aristocratic men and women raised in the finest châteaux of France, now sleeping in stalls and chicken coops. Believe me, in such conditions, very little happens at Hartwell House that is not soon known by all.”

The spires of the estate’s neo-Gothic chapel rose before them, delicate and somber in the cold winter light. Provence stared at it for a moment, then said, “What I’m trying to say is that even though she hugs the truth of it to herself, it’s well-known that my niece sees many physicians. Even after all these years of marriage, she still hopes for a child. God knows, this family will never get any heirs from my loins, and nothing is more important to Marie-Thérèse than seeing the House of Bourbon restored to France for all eternity.”

Sebastian said, “She is still relatively young.”

“She is, she is. And there’s no denying her mother took long enough to begin breeding.”

Sebastian kept his gaze on the soaring spires of the chapel before them. It was well-known that Marie Antoinette’s long delay in childbearing was due entirely to her husband the King’s failure to consummate their marriage for seven years. A number of rumors had circulated at the time, although most had eventually been laid to rest.

But the same rumors continued to swirl around the Comte de Provence’s own marriage. Some said his wife repulsed him, while others claimed he preferred his mistresses. And then were those who said that Louis Stanislas’s interest in women had always been tepid and had waned completely in his later years.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” said the uncrowned king, his head tilting back, good-humored pleasure suffusing his plump face as his gaze moved with obvious appreciation over the delicate tracery of the chapel’s arched windows.

But Sebastian was looking instead at the courtier, Ambrose LaChapelle.

The man was a bundle of contradictions. The tales of his courage as a volunteer in the Prince de Conde’s army of counterrevolutionary exiles were legendary. A superb horseman, expert marksman, and skilled swordsman, he had once supported himself as a fencing master.

But there were whispers of another side to the French nobleman. Some said the courtier was known to don women’s clothing and cruise the darkened arcades of Covent Garden and the Exchange, where he was known as “Serena Fox.” And Sebastian found himself thinking about the mysterious, unknown man and woman who had sought out Damion Pelletan on the night of his death.

And about the bloody footprint left by a woman’s shoe on a broken slat in the noisome passage where the physician had met his grisly end.

“I
ain’t ne’er seen nothin’ like them stables,” said Tom, his voice hollow with disgust. “They only got two ridin’ ’orses in there. Two! An’ one of ’em is reserved special fer the Princess. ’Alf the stalls ’ave been turned into rooms and ’ave people livin’ in ’em. There was some old woman kept tryin’ t’sell me a straw ’at she’d made, all the while claimin’ she was the Comtesse de somethin’eranother.”

“She probably was,” said Sebastian, turning his tired team toward the nearby village of Stoke Mandeville, where he intended to make his next change.

“Huh. Queer lot, if ye ask me, even fer foreigners. Most o’ them stableboys is French too. I ne’er seen such a close-mouthed set. Couldn’t get no one t’ give me the time o’ day.”

“Unfortunate, but probably predictable,” said Sebastian.

He couldn’t begin to understand how Marie-Thérèse’s consultation with Dr. Damion Pelletan might possibly have anything to do with the physician’s death. But neither could he get past the haunting coincidence that Pelletan’s murder had fallen on the anniversary of the execution of the last crowned King of France.

Tom said, “I thought this Marie-Thérèse is s’posed to be a princess?”

“She is. The only surviving child of Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI of France.”

“So why’s she called a duchess?”

“Because she’s married to a duke, although at the moment he’s off with Wellington in Spain.”

“’E’s a duke, even though ’e’s the son of a count? And ’is da is a count, but also a prince—the son of a king?”

“I know it’s rather confusing. But that’s the way the French do it. They aren’t quite as tidy about titles and ranks as the English.”

“Makes no sense, if ye ask me,” said Tom. “No wonder they can’t even talk English proper-like.”

The near leader stumbled, and Sebastian steadied his horses. He could see the mossy gray roof of the medieval church of Stoke Mandeville soaring above the treetops in the distance. The road was narrow here, a copse of beech undergrown with hazel closing in around them as he nursed the tired team up the slope. And he felt it again: a sensation of being watched that came on suddenly and intensely.

He swept around a sharp bend to find the roadway blocked by a fallen limb. He reined in hard, the team of grays coming to a snorting standstill. Tom was about to jump down and run to their heads when Sebastian said in a low voice, “Don’t.”

A man stepped from behind a thick stand of brush. He wore greasy canvas trousers and a threadbare brown corduroy coat and had an ugly horse pistol thrust into his waistband. His gaunt face was unshaven, his accent that of the streets of London as he said, “’Avin’ a spot o’ trouble there, yer lordship?” He reached up to grasp the leaders’ reins above their bits. “’Ere, let me ’elp.”

Rather than being calmed by his presence, the grays whinnied and tossed their heads, nostrils flaring.

Sebastian’s hand tightened on his whip. “Stand back.”

“Now, is that any way to respond to my friend’s most generous offer of assistance?” asked a second man, this one mounted astride a showy chestnut that he nudged forward until he came to a halt some five or six feet from the curricle. He held a fine dueling pistol in his left hand; the gleaming wooden grip of its mate showed at his waist. Unlike his companion, this man wore buckskin breeches and an elegant riding coat, and his accent was pure Oxbridge. He had a rough wool scarf wrapped around the lower part of his face, so that all Sebastian could see was his dark eyes, their lashes as thick and long as a young girl’s.

For a moment, his gaze met Sebastian’s. Then the horseman blinked and extended the muzzle of his pistol toward Sebastian’s face.

“Run!”
Sebastian shouted at Tom. Surging to his feet, he sent the lash of his whip snaking out to flick the chestnut on its flanks.

The horse shied badly, its rider lurching in the saddle, the pistol exploding harmlessly into the treetops.

“You bastard,” swore the horseman, dragging his mount back around as he reached for the second pistol.

This time Sebastian’s lash struck the chestnut’s withers. The horse reared up just as its rider squeezed the trigger.

The shot sent Sebastian’s beaver hat tumbling end over end into the lane. “Bloody hell,” Sebastian swore, and jerked his own small double-barreled flintlock from his coat pocket.

The horseman’s eyes widened above the scarf, his hands tightening on his reins as he kicked the chestnut into a plunging gallop that carried him down the hill and around the bend, chevrons of mud flying up from the frenzied horse’s hooves.

With an ugly snarl, the brown-coated ruffian stepped back from Sebastian’s team and pulled the horse pistol from his waistband.

Sebastian thumbed back the hammer on his flintlock and shot him right between the eyes.

The man turned a slow, ungainly pirouette, then fell hard.

“Gor,” whispered Tom, creeping from behind a nearby clump of hazel to stare down at the man’s sprawled, still form. “Is he dead?”

“I told you to run,” said Sebastian as the tiger leapt to calm the now frantic, plunging horses. “You all right?”

“Aye,” said Tom, whispering soothing words that the grays seemed to understand. “Who ye reckon that lot were?”

“I don’t know.” Sebastian jumped down from the curricle’s high seat to drag both the dead assailant and the downed limb from the roadway. He hesitated a moment, then yanked off the dead man’s coat and threw it over his face in case someone with delicate sensibilities should happen to drive past before he made it back with the proper authorities. “But whoever sent them obviously wants me dead.”