Joanna Bourne - The Forbidden Rose

Four men rode down the line of farmers and carters, kicking up dust. They were well dressed and young and rode fine horses.

“Delegates,” the farmer said. “Going to the Convention.” He glanced at Guillaume.

The man in line ahead of them spoke up. “They been out in the villages, enforcing the price controls, I daresay.”

“Likely.” There was a moment’s shared appreciation. “Early at it.”

“Oh, oui.” The farmer’s cart creaked as he shifted his weight. “Working night and day for the good of the common man.”

She knew—everyone in line knew—where the delegates had been. Lovely, expensive women lived in the villages beyond the gates of Paris. The maximum price of the onions and cabbages was set by law. The price of women was not.

The gate opened and the barrière swung up. The delegates rode through with scarcely a pause and no questions asked.

The gate guard looked after them and shrugged. He turned impatiently to the first of the farmers. “Come on, then.”

A rustle spread down the line. Men leaning on cart wheels or against the tail of wagons mounted the seat and took reins. Voices rose, talking to animals. Pointing out, one man to another, that the gate was open. Saying, one woman to another, that finally they could go in. The first cart pulled forward. A farmer with many chickens was admitted to inspection.

“Your papers.” The gate guard held out his hand. The line trickled toward the gate. “Next. Your papers.”

She edged along after Guillaume, keeping her gaze modestly lowered to her knitting. The line was moving almost at walking pace. The guards gave a perfunctory glance at passports. Wagons weren’t even looked at.

“Next. Papers.”

Their turn. They stepped to the barrière. If her description was posted in the guardhouse . . . One vigilant guard would be enough. If anyone looked at her face, at the softness of her hands. She hid them under the knitting wool as much as she could.

The guard did not even glance at their papers. Did not look at her. “Next.” He greeted the farmer behind them. “Jacques. You’re early.”

Guillaume slapped Decorum on the rump. Adrian slipped in behind the donkeys, appearing from nowhere. She had stopped being startled by this.

“Sixteen sous,” he said. “You’d think they never heard of loaded dice in this country.”

“No point talking to you, is there?” Guillaume said.

PARIS HAD CHANGED, EVEN IN THE THREE MONTHS she’d been away. It was more shadowed. More afraid. Darker. Fear seeped from the mortar of the houses, from the cobbles of the streets. It was like coming again to the home of an old grandmother, with each visit finding her a little weaker, a little more mad.

“We’ll stop for coffee,” Guillaume said.

“It is just as well. I would wake up the household and worry them if I arrived at this hour.”

She did not need to eat. She needed twenty more minutes with Guillaume LeBreton. She was hungry for five hundred words from him. For two accidental touches of her hand upon his. For hearing him laugh just once more.

They ate in a café in Rue de Lombard, not far from Les Halles, at the Café des Marchands. Guillaume was known here. Everyone nodded to him as he took a table. They stared at her with some interest. It was a café frequented by market men and women, all of them hungry and in a great hurry. The slices of bread in the basket on the table were of fine flour, better than she had seen in the boulangeries of the best streets. There was something to be said for eating in a café patronized by the violent, well-organized merchants of Les Halles. They could ignore regulations. The coffee, too, spoke to her of stores kept under the counter and sold only to special customers.

Adrian, narrow-eyed, watching everything, took a bowl of milky coffee outside and squatted by the donkeys to defend the carrots from pilferage. It was as if a cat came to a new neighborhood and was not certain he liked it.

Guillaume drank red wine. He took it in quick gulps, without tasting, the way the men around him did, as if he, too, were in a hurry, his mind on a spot in the market and the exchange of copper sous for vegetables. He ate neatly, taking a hard bite of bread and washing wine over his teeth to soften it before he chewed. It was a workingman’s way of eating, crude and efficient. A stoical fueling of the body. He was intensely, alertly aware of her the whole time. She felt him thinking about her even though he did not look at her once.

He said, “Still not hungry?”

She shook her head.

He spoke, very low, “I think you’re safe. There’s no order posted at the barrière. I looked, when we passed the guardhouse. No order for your friends either.”

She had seen the same thing. No arrest order. It was one more question of the many questions she was collecting. She would have liked to ask Guillaume what he thought this meant, but, of course, she could not.

So she was silent. After she’d taken a few more sips, she said, “I like this place. They serve good coffee.”

“I come here when I’m in Paris. If you leave a message with these people, I’ll get it.”

“There will be no occasion. After today, we will not see each other again.”

Soon they would leave this place and go to the Hôtel de Fleurignac. She would become Marguerite de Fleurignac again. She would become immeasurably distant from Guillaume LeBreton, seller of books, rogue and smuggler.

One cannot put the fruit back on the tree. One cannot unbreak the egg. She could not, not ever again for all of eternity, unknow what she knew of his body. Someday, when she was old, she would take this knowledge out as if it were a letter she had treasured. By then, the pain would be thin and crackly, like old paper.

She would be changed as well. She was quite certain old women did not feel this sort of pain. As if the air were knives that cut, going in and out of the throat.

She was not Marguerite de Fleurignac yet. She was still Maggie. She would not be logical.

“We cannot stay here for two hours and not invite curiosity. I have a friend who lives in this quartier, not far from here.” She set her coffee down on the table and looked directly into his eyes. “She will let me use her room. Will you come with me?”

DOYLE LEFT HAWKER GUARDING THE BOTTOM OF the stairs and climbed three narrow flights to a room under the roof. He didn’t have to meet Maggie’s friend to know something about her. He summed her up in a glance around the room—young, on the small side, stylish. The clothes hanging on hooks on the wall belonged to a pretty grisette, a shopgirl, from the fashionable boulevards. She liked bright printed cloth and red ribbons in her caps.

Maggie went to draw the curtains back and open the window. “She is away, my friend Jeanne. She won’t mind us coming here.”

We’re going to make love in her bed. Hope she won’t mind that, either.

It was a clean, crowded, charming room. The window faced east. The ceiling slanted. He’d be banging his head if he wasn’t careful. Sometimes there was no advantage being the size he was.

Carts and wagons clattered early in this quartier, bringing in vegetables. Not a quiet place to live—there’d be that rumble in the background all day—but somebody’d made a nest here. There were homey touches of color and a lavender smell from the bedclothes.

The friend had been gone about a week. Long enough that the room felt deserted. Not time enough for dust to settle on the table or the chest of drawers.

This Jeanne would be part of Maggie’s clandestine goings-on, like the Gypsy and the cooper’s wife in Normandy. They were in La Flèche, the lot of them. He’d stake money on it. Maggie would run something like La Flèche.

“I have been wise.” Maggie held the curtain back. He could see the curve of her cheek, outlined by the light of the sky. “Almost all my life.”

Not so wise. You’re risking your neck every hour you stay in France. But he hadn’t come here so they could be wise together.

The bed was neatly made, piled with blue pillows. The ropes creaked, the straws of the mattress whispered, when he sat down on the blanket to pull his boots free. The rough of his hands snagged on satin when he pushed the pillows to the side of the bed. He could hear his father calling them “peasant paws.”

Maggie didn’t seem to mind.

I’ve kept my hands off you, Maggie de Fleurignac. I am just damned tired of it.

Whatever her father had done, Maggie wasn’t any part of the assassinations in England. His gut said that, and he trusted his gut. And a man couldn’t walk around being tentative and cautious all the time in case the woman he wanted turned out to be murderous.

She was talking to herself or to the air outside, sounding wistful and determined. “Part of me says I do not have so many days left. I would like, just this once, to do what Marguerite wants. What Maggie wants.” He could picture the smile on her. The right side of her mouth hid itself down in the corner when she made that kind of smile. “Do you know . . . I have never made love in an actual bed.”

It was like standing outside a house in the cold, seeing all the warmth in the world inside there. And the door opened to welcome him in.

He said, “Come here,” and she came to him.

WE will make love now, Marguerite thought.

She had brought him to Jeanne’s rooms and climbed the stairs and closed the door behind them, knowing they would do this.