She wouldn’t be around long enough to worry about that.

“Indeed,” she agreed. Noncommittal replies were always best in dealing with employers. Yes, sir; no, sir; indeed, sir. It came out by rote.

Jaouen clapped his hat onto his head. “Tomorrow morning,” he said. “The children will be expecting you.”

Jean the gatekeeper slammed the door shut behind Jaouen as he swung up into the carriage. The horses’ nostrils flared, their breath steaming in the cold air as the coachman clucked to them, setting them into motion. Through the rapidly misting glass of the window, Jaouen was nothing more than a silhouette, a blurred image in tans and browns.

That was it. She had done it. She had really done it. Blood surged to Laura’s cheeks and fingertips, sending a rush of warmth tingling through her despite the freezing wind gluing her soaking skirts to her legs. Whatever else came of it, the first step was accomplished; she was a member of Jaouen’s household. She was in.

Between the rain and the sound of hooves against the cobbles, Laura could just barely hear her new employer call out his instructions to the coachman.

“To the Abbaye Prison. As fast as you can.”

Laura swallowed hard, turning her face away from a sudden gust of wind that tore at her bonnet strings and snatched away the very breath from her throat.

Oh, she was in all right. Way over her head.

Chapter 2

The carriage rocked abruptly forward and then back as it came to a stop in front of the Prison de l’Abbaye. The stone bulk of the Abbaye squatted sullenly in front of the carriage, the towers set in each side jutting out like a pair of angry elbows. Torches illuminated the entrance, burning greasily against the early dark of a wet winter night.

“So kind of you to finally join us.” A small man in unrelieved black stepped out from under the lee of the portal at the entrance of the Abbaye Prison.

“Us?” André said mildly, taking his time climbing down from the carriage. He’d be damned if he’d hurry for the likes of Gaston Delaroche. “I had no idea this was to be an ensemble event.”

Delaroche positioned himself so that the guttering torches on either side of the entrance cast an eerie glow over the polished silver of his coat buttons, bathing him in an unnatural and unholy light.

Bloody stagy, if you asked André’s opinion, which no one had.

Delaroche liked to claim he had once been the second most feared man in France. André would have put his position at fourth or fifth at best. Voicing that opinion had not endeared André to Delaroche.

“How very . . . unlike you to be tardy, Jaouen.” Delaroche bared a set of unnaturally yellowed teeth. André suspected him of buffing them with tobacco and a side of tea leaves. “It is, I suppose, no surprise that you would be distracted—now that your children are come from Nantes.”

There was no point in asking him how he knew. They were all in the business of knowledge. Any self-respecting senior official in the Ministry of Police employed his own private system of informers, above and apart from those sanctioned by the state. They spent as much time monitoring one another as they did the enemy.

André forced himself to shrug. “A nursery is a nursery, whether in Paris or Nantes. They provide no impediment to my duties.”

Delaroche’s eyes glinted red in the torchlight. “Paris is a far cry from Nantes, my friend. So much more . . . dangerous.”

Rain ran beneath André’s collar from the back of his hat, sending an icy sluice down his spine. André favored Delaroche with a hard stare. “Can any relation of Fouché, however young, be deemed to be in danger? They are not unprotected,” he added pointedly.

Delaroche shrugged, a shrug that made André want to take him by the shoulders and shake him like the little rat that he was. “Even so,” he said.

Even so? Even so? What in all the blazes was that supposed to mean?

André pictured his children, Gabrielle, with her snub nose, her plump child’s cheeks, her hair that was beginning to lose its baby curl and the eyes that looked so uncannily like his own; Pierre-André with Julie’s open, smiling countenance and hair like the gilded angels’ wings in a church fresco, trusting, open, laughing. He pictured them as he had seen them the night before, asleep in bed, their limbs so small beneath the blankets Jeannette had drawn up over them, their faces smooth and vulnerable in sleep. They were so small, his children, so vulnerable, such tempting hostages to fortune.

Why did Père Beniet have to die? And why did he have to die now?

André seethed with the same mingled grief and anger that had wrung through him since the news had arrived from Nantes. Grief at the loss of a man who had been more of a father than his own father had ever been: old M. Beniet, first his tutor, later his father-in-law. Anger at Père Beniet’s leaving them, and leaving them at so inopportune a moment. Not that mortality left any man much room for choice. André knew his anger was illogical, but that didn’t stop him from feeling it. How could his old tutor, who had always been so sage, have misjudged so radically at the last?

A chicken bone. Père Beniet had choked on a chicken bone. A great soul brought low by a fragment of fowl. There were times when the divinity had a positively mordant sense of humor. All his knowledge, all his experience, brought to nothing against a splinter of bone lurking between a dumpling and a cabbage leaf in an innocent-seeming bowl of stew.

If that chicken hadn’t been dead already, André could have cheerfully wrung its neck. Gabrielle and Pierre-André had been safe in Nantes, safe and well cared for, well away from the tangled intrigues of Paris. Well away from men like Gaston Delaroche.

André glanced at Delaroche, at Delaroche who resented his ascent, who wanted Fouché’s confidence for his own. There was no point in saying that Delaroche wouldn’t. Delaroche would. When it came to his position, there was nothing Gaston Delaroche wouldn’t do. Especially now.

“What are you doing here, Delaroche?” André asked flatly.

Delaroche smirked, displaying his yellowed teeth. “Fouché asked me to assist you in this interrogation.”

Had Fouché set Delaroche to spy on him?

No. André dismissed the idea as rapidly as he had considered it. Fouché knew that André was his man, not only by marriage but by the bonds of necessity. Any position or power that André possessed came solely through Fouché. Position and power were terms that Fouché understood, tools he employed to grapple men to him. Loyalty, love, ideals—all those were as grass compared to the powerful motivator of man’s self-interest.

It was far more likely that Delaroche had invited himself along and Fouché had conceded, deeming it an easy way to keep Delaroche out of his own hair.

“Excellent,” André said briskly, clamping his hat under his arm and striding forward ahead of Delaroche into the foyer. The guards stood aside at his approach, recognizing him by sight. “How very considerate of my cousin to provide me with an assistant.”

“With assistance,” Delaroche corrected, trotting along behind him. “Not an assistant.”

“Forgive me,” said André insincerely. “My mistake.”

He deliberately picked up the pace. He could hear the clip-clop of Delaroche’s boot heels as the other man hurried to catch up. He lengthened his stride, nodding to the guards on either side as he hastened up the worn stone stairs to the second floor.

“Interrogation,” Delaroche oozed—or wheezed, although he made a valiant effort to turn the sound sinister, even while scurrying to keep up. “Interrogation is an art. One that takes years of study and dedication to perfect.”

“Or just a small room and a prisoner,” said André heartlessly. “I hope you left your thumbscrews at home.”

Delaroche regarded André with disfavor.

The two men came to a halt before a thick wooden door, the panels relieved only by a small, metal grille. In the cell, a man sat slumped on a cot, his bare head bowed. His hair had been carelessly clubbed back with a ribbon, but chunks stuck out at odd angles, as though it had been accomplished without the aid of a brush.

As the guard unlocked the door, the prisoner sprang up. Hope and fear chased across his haggard face, as though he didn’t know whether to fear to hope or hope to fear. Execution or pardon? The lady or the tiger?

A deputy sidled through in front of them to take his place at a square, sturdy-legged table on which paper, ink, and pens—several of them—had already been arranged. Nothing had been left to chance. Fouché was determined that Querelle would talk and talk now. He had gone to great lengths to ensure that it would be so.

“Good evening, Monsieur Querelle.” André positioned himself in front of Delaroche, effectively blocking the smaller man. He needed no assistance from Delaroche for this; he had played through this script before. He wanted nothing more than to get through it as quickly as possible. “I hear that it is the will of the people that you will not be with us much longer.”

The night before, the prisoner had been hauled out of bed and dragged before a military court specifically convened for that purpose. Still fuddled with sleep, Querelle had been tried and condemned to execution, then shoved back into his cell to contemplate his own imminent demise.

“The will of the people?” Querelle made the mistake of allowing his scorn to show. “What people? That was no real court.”

André couldn’t help but agree. Any court convened at three in the morning and presided over by the First Consul’s brother-in-law, a man more famed for his hair than his wit, could hardly be accounted much of an ornament to the French justice system. However, he didn’t think his employers would thank him for sharing that opinion. The law as he had learned it had no place in the new regime.