Joanna Bourne - The Forbidden Rose

They did not return to her house directly. Guillaume chose a path of smaller streets. It might have been that he did not want to meet heavy carts and noisy carriages and these alleyways were less traveled. Now she saw this as sly and careful. He was not seen. She was not seen.

Guillaume took a hundred such precautions, because he was a spy. She had not wanted to think of this before.

He was large and comfortable to walk beside. He had decided his role of the moment permitted him to be attentive and take her arm to help her avoid the gutters in the middle of the alley. He was portraying several of the most popular masculine virtues. Two middle-aged women of great respectability nodded at him as they passed. A cat sat on a windowsill, washing. A laundry woman carried flat, white sheets, folded, in her basket. Guillaume kept his arm tightly around her, which she permitted by not thinking too deeply about the significance of it.

Somehow, at last, she was home.

Guillaume frowned down at her. Behind him the sky was the color of thin paper that has been laid on the fire, when the light glows behind it, just before it catches flame. It would be another hot day. “I don’t like to leave you alone here. Come with me. I’ll find somewhere to take you. We can—”

She shook her head. He knew the thousand reasons this was impossible.

“You’re not well.”

“Agnès will put me to bed and bring me warm bricks wrapped in cloth to hug to my stomach and I will not feel so sick. I will drink tisanes and lemonade and be better tomorrow.”

“Go inside, then. God, your eyes are staring out of your face. Go to bed. Let them take care of you.”

As he had upon another occasion, he reached past her and knocked on the door. The difference was, this time he kept his hand on her arm, holding on. “I’ll come back tonight, around at the kitchen. Tell them to let me in when I come.”

“No.” The sun was everywhere, getting brighter. She didn’t feel the warmth. She felt empty and ill and cold, and she was saying good-bye to Guillaume. Again. “You must not come here. Ever.” I will not let you find Papa. And I will not let Victor find you. “My cousin,” she swallowed and her mouth tasted vile, “is malicious. Whatever you are, he is dangerous to you. You must keep away from me. I will come to the café again, in a week or a month. Or someday. I will come and wait for you again. I can promise that much.”

She heard the lock of the door, turning.

Guillaume’s hand still rested on her arm. “It’s not over between us. Think about me. I need that much.”

“I have a hundred terrible things to think about. You are ninety-nine of them.”

“Maggie. No. Look this way again. Look at me.” He took her chin in his hand and edged her face into the sun, into a stinging assault of light. “Open your eyes. Are you using some kind of drops? Belladonna?”

The door opened behind her. “Do not be ridiculous. And let me go. I cannot stay.”

“Maggie. Stay a minute. There’s something wrong here.”

She slipped from his hold and through the door before Janvier had it fully open, leaving behind whatever words Guillaume said to keep her there.

The halls were empty of servants. She stumbled upstairs and around, through the length of the house, to the front windows of the parlor. She threw the curtains back. She would have one last glimpse of Guillaume as he walked away.

He was a spy. He did not give one small damn about her, really. He was using her to find her father. She knew this. She knew this completely. There was no connection between them that did not involve dishonor and lies and stupidities beyond counting.

He stayed at the door for a long minute. She was in time to see him go.

Below, on a street the color of rocks, Guillaume LeBreton walked away from her. Not in a hurry, not slowly. It was as if he had twenty tasks to do this morning and he had finished three and now proceeded on to the next, at which he would also be successful. He said all that with just his steps upon the street. No one created an intelligent and eloquent walk as he did.

She held aside the red brocade curtains of the salon and pressed her face to the glass so she would see him for the longest possible moment.

I am no heartsick girl to weep at the window for what I cannot have. She cried only because she was so tired.

Because she was being foolish about Guillaume, she saw him arrested.

SHE SAW GUILLAUME WALK AWAY FROM HER. IN THE entryway of the last house of the street, a little maidservant was on her hands and knees, scrubbing the steps. Guillaume passed the girl. She raised her head to look after him. She got suddenly to her feet.

Soldiers came around the corner. Five of them, wearing the uniform of the Garde Nationale. City troops. Striding ahead of them was a thin man she recognized instantly. He had taken off the bandage, but his face was marked, red and angry, with the slashing cut she’d given him. This was the Jacobin who’d come to the chateau at Voisemont.

He pointed at Guillaume, and the soldiers surrounded him.

It was like being at a play where the audience was talking loudly and no one could hear the actors. She could only watch. Like the foolish peasant who comes to the city for the first time and goes to the theater, she wanted to spring from her seat and yell, “Get away. Run,” and send the play in a different direction. She wanted to jump onto the stage and save the hero of the story.

Guillaume showed empty hands and puzzlement. Protested. Every gesture portrayed innocence.

The front door of the house slammed opened. Victor was in the street, hurrying. The soldiers stopped to listen. Came to attention. Gestures and instruction from Victor. Yes and yes from the soldiers. Nods.

He is telling them to arrest Guillaume.

Guillaume was prodded roughly, boxed in by the soldiers. At the last minute, he looked back to the house. Toward her. He must have seen her in the window.

He shook his head. No.

He was telling her to stay quiet. Stay inside. Do nothing. That would be the order he gave. And damn him for a fool.

Then the houses on the corner cut him off from view.

Victor reeked of satisfaction. He stood shoulder to shoulder with the Jacobin who had come to Voisemont. They were complicity and familiarity, conversing amiably while they watched Guillaume being marched away. They knew each other. They were accomplices in this and God alone knew what other business.

She knew. Now she knew. Victor sent those men to Voisemont to hurt me. Why? Why?

The door to the parlor opened behind her. Aunt Sophie came in, scolding, filling the room with whine and confusion. With hundreds of pointless words.

Guillaume would be gone in a moment, taken to any of a dozen barracks or prisons. Lost.

I will not let this happen.

She pushed Aunt Sophie aside and went for the back stairs. The cook gaped at her as she ran through the kitchen. She ran across the garden, stumbling on the brick path, pulled up the bar on the gate to the alley and was out.

Victor must not see her. She took the long way, down the alley that led to Rue Martin. They would take Guillaume that way. She ran, as she would have run in the fields at home. Ran, half-blind in the bright sunlight.

Guillaume was there, at the end of the street, surrounded by soldiers.

She collided with someone who stepped into her path. Smaller than she was. Dark hair and a thin, keen, hungry face. A loose, dark coat. A striped waistcoat. Adrian. He grabbed her and held on, his fingers digging into her arms till it hurt. “Stop.” He was unyielding as a post.

“They have Guillaume. I must go—”

“You shut your gob and listen to me. Stop. Stop now.”

“They have taken—”

“I see that, damn you.”

“They are taking him to prison. You don’t understand. He will die.”

“You can’t do a bloody damn thing if they toss you in the cell next door. You were going to run right up there. Be damned if you have the sense God gave cabbages.”

He was speaking in English, with an accent she could barely understand. This wasn’t the sly, sullen, sarcastic boy she’d traveled halfway across France with. What faced her was sharp and brutal and utterly ruthless. He scared her.

She jerked at his hold. “I was not going to accost armed men. I’m not a fool.”

“Good, then. Look at me.” He was speaking French again. He squeezed her arm. Hard. “Look at me, not him. We’re talking to each other, you and me. We’re strolling along, out to buy eggs and feathers and baby goats. We’re going in the same direction, but we don’t see him. We don’t look at them at all. Look at me.”

You are English. “Do not instruct me in caution. We will give them time to move away. Then follow.” I was right, then. Guillaume is an English spy.

Adrian was breathing fast. “That’s better. We follow them. This is my world. I know what to do.”

“And I will tell you that Paris is my world, Adrian. Now come, before they turn a corner and are lost to us.”

Guillaume and his guards had turned the corner and marched onward. But they were not hard to find again, so many men, with such grim purpose. People stopped to stare after them, to point and discuss. At the Church of Saint-Grégoire a carriage waited. They put Guillaume inside. Three gardes accompanied him and the carriage went south.

She watched, hidden behind a corner of a house. “They could take him anywhere. There are prisons all over Paris.”