Joanna Bourne - The Forbidden Rose

“I do not, though one never knows what adventures await one in life. I will give you warning if I plan to serve you donkey.”

Doyle was going to feed him donkey. He just knew it. “Some folks go eating their way through the animal kingdom without any regard for common sense or decency. They’d dine on griffins and bats if somebody didn’t stop them.”

“I will not serve you bats, either.” She cleaned the table where they’d been eating, brushing crumbs into her hand and walking over to toss them out the window. There wasn’t a scrap of food left. There was good food in Paris, at least in the whorehouses.

It was a well-run house. He’d only seen the back end of it—the kitchen and the stable yard and the stairs up to the attic—but everything looked rich and smelled clean. The girls laughed a lot, even when there weren’t any men around.

Justine was the youngest of the women by a couple years, so it wasn’t that kind of brothel. The kid on the bed, Séverine, would be left alone. Made his stomach heave, what they did with little kids, some places.

“Who takes care of . . .” He waved his hand at the bed but didn’t say the name. The ruckus downstairs wouldn’t wake her. Saying her name might. “. . . the sprat while you’re out gallivanting around the city?”

“You need not concern yourself about Séverine.” Justine unfolded a strip of white silk embroidered with flowers, snapped it briskly, laid it down the center of the table, and stroked it smooth. “We all watch after her.”

You’d kill for the kid, wouldn’t you? Die for her. Cheat, steal, lie, whore yourself. You’d do anything. Lazarus would call that kid your ruling weakness. So now I know.

“You and the whores are raising her.”

“I do not let her see any of what happens in this house. She would not understand anyway. You do not need to reform us.”

“That’s Maggie does that. Not me.”

“Then do not. I have the greatest dislike of being reformed.”

She’d rousted a dozen books off the table so they could eat. Now she set them back standing in a row, pushed up against the wall. She studied the effect. “Séverine is young. She will forget.”

“She won’t.” He could say that, because he knew. “Don’t fool yourself. She sees everything that goes on here. Ask her, if you don’t believe me.”

She kept at her tidying and ignored him.

Her books were substantial, with leather covers, not the cheap bound paper they hawked up and down the streets. They’d been looted from some nob’s library, maybe, when the mob tore it apart. “LeBreton says the revolution heats up the kettle of idealism by burning books under it. He always has something pithy to say.”

“Well, no one will burn these.”

“Where’d you get the books? Steal them?” He liked to think she’d had the initiative, but she probably just bought them. He came over to open one. Lots of writing. He recognized some of the words.

“They are lent to me by a friend. You will be careful with that.”

“My hands are clean.” For God’s sake, she acted like he wasn’t good enough to even touch one.

“I didn’t mean that. It’s just . . . no one comes here. I have lost the knack of hospitality.”

No. Men didn’t come to this narrow broom closet of a room. No sign of it. Whatever Justine did in this house, it wasn’t making the beast with two backs in this room. Interesting to speculate on just what she did do for a living. If Doyle was alive tomorrow, he’d ask him what he thought.

He held the book up, asking permission.

He felt silly, sitting on the froufrou, dainty bit of a chair she had, so he took the book with him and sat with his back to the wall under the window where the light was good.

She’d set him a mat here, last night, on the clear space under the window. He didn’t need watching over for a few scratches on his arm, and he didn’t need it washed and rebandaged this morning. But if a girl offered, he wasn’t going to turn it down. That was what you might call one of the guiding principles of his life.

He’d found out last night that Justine snored. A burring, feminine little snore. Kind of pleasant.

The book he’d picked had small print, but there were pictures. That helped. He couldn’t figure a lot of words. Pictures let him know the general territory he was walking around in.

Halebarde. He put his finger under the text and started working his way along. Arme offensive composée d’un long bâton d’environ cinq piéds, qui a un crochet ou un fer . . . And there was one of those words that didn’t seem to mean anything much. Even if he could figure out how to say it, likely as not he’d never need it.

Justine sat down beside him and took the book away. “You cannot pronounce French at all. You speak as if you came from the smallest hill village of Gascony. I think you are very stupid. And whoever sent you to France is even more stupid. Listen to me.” She read it off, making the words sound Parisian. “This is Diderot. The Encyclopédie. Everything there is to know is in here.”

Now that was interesting. He’d like to know everything there was to know. “Read some more.”

It turned out a halebarde was a stick with an iron hook on the end. Not useful just at the moment, since no one was waving one in his face, but it might come in handy someday. He said the words after her, memorizing and trying to get them right.

She didn’t sound like Daisy, who’d taught him to speak French. From Gascony, Daisy was. He could learn two accents. He’d sort them apart in his head when he was talking.

He put his arm behind Justine’s back so she could lean on him, instead of on the wall, him being softer and warmer than plaster. He wasn’t pushing. She could take him up on the offer or leave it.

After a few minutes, Justine leaned against him and set the book half in her lap, half in his.

They’d got to “halibran,” which was a baby duck and another word he was going to have only moderate use for, when she stopped and looked sideways at him. “Guillaume LeBreton was well when you went to see him?”

“Well enough.” Doyle had got himself beat up in prison, but he was walking around. He’d do. “We didn’t take time to chat.”

They’d had three minutes’ meeting in the open corridor. Time to pass over a ball of twine and tell him to send it down the well. To say the rescue was planned for midnight. That Maggie was waiting for him in the dark. Time to point out that nobody on earth was going to talk Maggie out of doing whatever she set her mind to and they were all just helpless corks bobbing in her wake and Doyle might as well get resigned to it.

Then he’d slipped off to deliver another puzzling communication to the merchant they’d made use of before. More questions about inheritance from a relative he had never heard of, this relative being a figment of the imagination.

“Will this work? Can your LeBreton do this?” Justine asked.

“If he can pick two locks and get to the courtyard and he doesn’t come across something more interesting to do. He said he’s bringing other people out with him.”

“That is unwise.” Justine frowned. “And it makes our part more difficult.”

“Which I am sure is an object of great importance to him. Anyway, I didn’t have time to talk him out of it.”

“You think he will be there, at midnight.”

“I think he has to be.” There was no one else he could say this to, so he said it to her. “He told me his name was read out. They’re coming for him in the morning. If we don’t get him out tonight, he’ll die on the guillotine tomorrow, round about teatime.”

MARGUERITE PUT THREE LAYERS OF GOLD LEAF upon each toenail, stopping in between to knit and read poetry and let everything dry. She heard the voices before the tramp and shuffle of boots because they did not trouble to keep themselves quiet. Then the click and clank of metal they carried also announced their coming.

When she held Jean-Paul’s watch to the candle she saw that it was eleven o’clock. Time had passed more quickly than she had thought.

They were stars in the dark, the men who came with their lanterns, and there were a dozen of them. Two of them hefted huge coils of rope. Others carried lumpy sacks.

“My Marguerite.” Poulet came in front of the others and dropped down to sit cross-legged beside her. “You must put your shoes on or my friends will go mad with desire. You have the most exquisite feet.”

“I am told that,” she said. “It pleases my vanity no end.” His friends were young, all of them. Her own age, or younger. They dressed with great aplomb and style, expensively, in an extravagance of fashion that put large brass buttons upon their coats and spread lapels like wings across their breasts. Two of them wore gold hoops in the left ear, like pirates.

They were not very good at being silent. They had dined well and smelled of wine and some of them were a little tipsy. When she listened to them speak, it was obvious that every one of them had been in these caverns many times before. They came to the quarries for the adventure of it. Because it was forbidden and dangerous.

They were not of La Flèche. They told her their names, carelessly, openly. They made her feel old.

In a while, when they would not be silent, Poulet took them into the next chamber to lay out ropes and rungs and assemble the ladder Jean-Paul had designed for this endeavor. Jean-Paul himself came not many minutes later, with Hawker and three more of these young men, and went off to supervise.

She sat with her back to the wall of the well, waiting and listening.