Joanna Bourne - The Forbidden Rose

You have not one crumb off the loaf of an idea of what she is, do you? He lifted his head. “Nothing to do with me. Told you that.”

“I’m not an idiot, Citoyen LeBreton.” A thin smile appeared. “Did you think I wouldn’t know my cousin had been with a man? You should not have touched a de Fleurignac. It was the worst mistake you ever made.”

It was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Victor finished with his gloves. “I will return in a day or two to tell you I have found her.” He paused and pretended to reconsider. “But no. Of course not. There will be no reason to return. You will be dead.”

“AND THEN?” MADAME STOOD ON THE STAIRS above her. She was dressed severely in black. Her hair was caught up with silver butterflies, on pins. She wore silver rings upon her hands.

Justine made her report concisely, as she had been taught. “He delivered the last of the papers to Tallien and to Vadier.”

“Who are great enemies of Robespierre.”

“C’est sûr.” Madame would find this amusing. “The so-clever Adrian took me with him for the last deliveries. He said if he did not, I would only follow him, and this would save us both a great deal of trouble.”

Madame smiled at her. “And did you discover what is in these papers?”

“Alas, no.” Really, these English were not trivial opponents. “I did not see them. I wheedled and cajoled and the boy was not moved in the least. I think these are matters of great gravity.”

Madame waited, her hand on the railing.

“The Gardener has told me to stay inside for the next days. I am on no account to go about in the city alone. He is afraid there will be riots.”

“Because of these letters. Someone is meddling with grave business indeed. The Gardener is not precisely a fool, so I shall second his orders. Be prudent, Justine. If you hear disorder, take care to be elsewhere.”

It is good to have someone to tell me to be careful. “The boy was hurt, delivering these letters. Attacked by someone. He was not candid about that, either.” She said the last part very quickly. “I have put him into my room for tonight. I hope you do not mind.”

Madame studied the rings upon her hand. They were heavy bands, intricately worked. “I have learned more about this Adrian since we last spoke. He is Hawker the Hand of London, a dangerous playmate for you. He has killed more men than you have hair ribbons.”

She had suspected something of the sort. There was that in his eyes sometimes that spoke of such things. “I do not underestimate him. I am not . . . I do not interest myself in him except for the de Fleurignac matter, you understand. I made a pallet for him upon the floor beside me in case he should develop a fever and need to be watched. Events will be complicated enough without that boy becoming ill.”

Madame coughed delicately. “They have a plan to rescue William Doyle from prison, then?”

“They do not speak of it to me. I will go tomorrow and insert myself into their affairs and tell you what is afoot. It will be interesting to see Marguerite de Fleurignac concocting one of her plans. I have admired them for years and will now see one from beginning to end. It is strange to assist in freeing an English spy from prison. Yet, next week you may send me to see him arrested again.”

“It is amusing beyond measure,” Madame said. “Life is an ever-laden table of delights, is it not?”

“Most certainly.”

Madame walked downward, past her, on the stairs. When they were level, she stopped. The silver butterflies she wore in her hair were on small springs. With every movement they vibrated, as if they were alive. “I do not forget how dangerous this is for you. Do not think for a moment that I do this lightly.”

“I do not mind danger.”

One brush of fingers on her cheek. She is careful never to touch because of what has been done to me. “Are you quite sure I cannot send you and your sister to safety? There is a school in Dresden run by good friends of mine. They have a house on the river . . . No? I am not entirely happy to send a young girl to do this work.”

But Madame’s own daughter was part of their work. Not a small player of the Game, either. Everyone knew she had been ordered to safety abroad and had refused to go. She was given dangerous assignments, even upon the battlefield. And she is younger than me. “I want to be here. To do this. I feel alive when I do this.”

One of the girls of the house had taken up a song. That was Péronette, who had a most lovely voice. Madame looked toward the sound and then back to Justine. “We are much alike, you and I.” She made a shooing motion. “Go tend your young spy. I will tell Babette to look at his wound. Yes, I know you are capable of caring for any injury short of a beheading, but we will indulge Babette by letting her cluck over your handsome boy.”

What was there to say? That lethal, sly boy was not hers, of course, but denial is always unconvincing. So she shook her head and tripped upstairs to see what searches he performed among her belongings.

“Justine.”

She turned back.

“The British Service brought him to Paris, but Adrian Hawkins is not theirs. He has no reason to be loyal to them and some small cause to hate them. Recruit him for France, if you can. He would be most useful to us.”

That would be interesting. “I shall attempt it.”

THIS WAS WHAT HELL HAD BEEN LIKE WHEN IT was first constructed and lay empty, before the demons moved in with their cauldrons of fire and their pitch-forks. Hell would have smelled like wet rocks, Marguerite thought, before it filled with the fumes of sulfur and whatever devils smell like.

They carried candles, bringing five small points of light with them. Of all the uncanny occurrences since she had descended to this place, the strangest rested here in her hand. The candle flame stood upward, only stirring when her breath fell across it. Here, there were no currents of air, no connection to the winds under the heavens.

These were the quarries under Paris. The miles of excavation that had built the city.

The rock around her was damp, full of minerals, without the least trace of life. This was the Kingdom of Darkness. Their candles did not challenge it at all.

“Hold still.” Papa was testy. He was the only one of them who did not carry a candle. He demanded the light of hers so he could study his maps and open the case of the compass and complain. He had nothing good to say about the compass she’d bought for him. “You make the needle jump.”

“I do not make the needle jump. I am not touching it.”

“It is not needed that you touch it. Your animal energies work upon it. If you will hold your breath and not think we will do very much better. The principals involved are quite . . .”

He went on in that vein.

Now she must listen to Papa explain that the human body exerts influence upon the magnetic force. She did not believe it and she did not care. But his voice was company. Nobody else felt like chattering in these looming hollows and narrow passageways. They went forward, six people and five small lights.

The stone underfoot was rough and marked with drag-lines where the quarrymen moved the huge blocks out on sledges. Sometimes they splashed through shallow pools of water, completely clear when they approached, murky white after they had walked through them. As they made their way across the galleries of excavation, pillars emerged before them in the blackness. Pillars that grew like monstrous tree trunks from the stone below to hold the stone roof up. It would take the joined hands of ten men to go around these trunks of stone. The roof was low, arched from pillar to pillar. The light of their candles flickered across it making random pockets of dimness and shadow.

Justine had found boots for her. Men’s boots. What strange and useful things one could come across in a brothel. If she and the others disappeared forever into these caverns, someone would find her ordinary shoes in the cellar of a café near the Sorbonne, neatly together, at the top of the stairs that wound downward into the rock.

She walked beside René Petitot, one of the Gardener’s people. She knew him by reputation, of course. He was Poulet in La Flèche, the chicken, a man of the most reckless exploits. He and a few others were the small band who knew the shy, secret openings to the quarries beneath the city. They led sparrows through the labyrinth of the old and new mines, to come forth in the night in some stoneworker’s yard far beyond the walls of Paris.

Poulet, now that she met him, turned out to be a dandy, a thin man who wore a brown velvet coat and ruffles at his cuffs to explore the quarries below Paris. He said, “Your father thinks he can find one place—one single spot—in the caverns?”

“He’ll find it.” He must find it.

Poulet said, “It’s harder than you think. I can show you a few landmarks. But there’s nothing close to the Rue Tessier and the convent. It’s not easy to know where you are, down here.”

They entered a passage that led between excavations. It was not so wide here. The walls were stone blocks, fixed with mortar, looking exactly like the stone buildings of the city above. That was to be expected. The city of Paris was born here. In this stone.

They went one by one, following Justine’s light in the lead and then Papa’s voice, which was explaining that magnetism came in colors. Was it possible she had misheard that? Jean-Paul came last of them, making certain no one wandered off into the dark. To either side, as they passed, great arched caverns opened like mouths.