Something passed across her face, like a ripple beneath still waters.

Laura set her brush down very carefully on the table. “I had wondered,” she said slowly. “You made such a convincing show.”

“I had to,” André pointed out. “I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“When did it start?” she asked. “And why?”

“Is it important?” He looked at her, perched on the three-legged stool, and thought how odd it was how unremarkable it felt to be here like this, sharing a room and a bed. She wore a loose blouse tucked into a high-waisted skirt—peasant clothing, convenient for travel. Her hair hung in a long braid over one shoulder. With her honey-colored skin and her dark hair, she might have been an Umbrian peasant in an old mural.

Abandoning the stool, she perched on the edge of the pallet, tucking her legs up beneath the wide folds of her skirt. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. It’s your prerogative.”

André remembered another conversation, another night. “I’ve always had mixed feelings about prerogatives.”

“So you’ve told me.”

It was folly, he knew, to confide in her. What did he know of her, after all, other than this? That she had been his governess; that she could teach Latin, literature, and the rudiments of nearly everything else; that her resourcefulness deserted her when it came to the stage; and that she curled an arm beneath one cheek as she slept. All of these things, he knew, but they told him nothing at all.

They did claim that sharing a bed brought out confidences, even though he suspected that this wasn’t quite what they meant.

The urge to confide, after five years of silence, was surprisingly tempting, like water after thirst. He had kept his own counsel for so long. Père Beniet had known part of it, but not all. Jean had been Cadoudal’s creature, just as the coachman had been Fouché’s, both there to keep him in line. As for Daubier, he wasn’t the sort of friend in whom one confided. Even if the stakes hadn’t been what they were, Daubier was more interested in appearances than emotions; his attention tended to wander.

And then there had been Julie. He had tried to tell her, but she hadn’t wanted to hear. She preferred the world as she transmuted it, translated into certitude by paint and canvas, no doubts or gray areas.

André looked at Laura, her dark eyes steady on his, waiting him out without saying a word. He thought of her as he had first seen her—a shadowy figure in gray, waiting, watching, listening. Whatever else she was, she knew how to keep her counsel. And she understood the shades of gray.

André peeled off his glasses, rubbing his eyes with one hand.

“It began four years ago. No,” André corrected himself, frowning at the brown wool of the blanket. “If I’m being honest, it started before that. We were in Paris during the Terror, Julie and I.” He looked up at the woman sitting on the bed next to him. “Were you there too?”

She shook her head wordlessly.

André rolled a bit of lint between his fingers. “Then I can’t tell you what it was. It’s the sort of thing that has to be experienced to be believed. I wish I hadn’t experienced it. It all started off so well. We had a constitution, an assembly, all the things we had been demanding. Feudal privileges abolished, the common humanity of man exalted . . .” He broke off. “You have the idea.”

It was hard, even now, to reassemble the rest. As a student of history, he could follow action A to consequence B, but at the time, event had followed event with incomprehensible rapidity.

“Julie wanted to stay in Paris, to paint. The Revolution opened opportunities for her, opportunities greater than any she had had before.” Her friends had been more radical than his own. Through Jacques-Louis David, she had become close to both Marat and Robespierre. In the meantime, André’s own party, the Girondins, were coming increasingly under attack.

Robespierre had commissioned her to craft a series of murals on the theme of Reason Exalted. Exalted? André had demanded. With their friends being arrested, carted off to one didn’t want to imagine what? Julie had taken umbrage at that. For her, the ideals of the Revolution were still pure and whole. She didn’t see the blood pouring down the Place de Grève or notice the gaps in their dinner parties. She had always had that facility, the facility of ignoring those things that didn’t fit in her compositions. It was part of her charm. At least, it had been.

But there was one thing she hadn’t been able to ignore, although she would have liked to have done. It was at the height of the Terror that she had become pregnant with Gabrielle.

“We moved back to Nantes when Julie was expecting Gabrielle. It seemed safer.”

Laura’s dark eyes followed him. “But it wasn’t,” she guessed.

“No,” he said shortly. Even now, it was hard to bring himself to talk about it. “Have you heard of republican marriage?”

“Vows before a registry office?”

He gave a short, harsh laugh. “If only. The Republican Committee in Nantes came up with a new way of dispatching dissidents they oh-so-euphemistically termed a republican marriage.”

“Yes?” Laura prompted.

André closed his eyes. Even now, he could see it—the winter-blasted bank of the Loire, the bare tree branches, the shivering bodies of the condemned. “They would take a man and a woman,” he said in a monotone, “strip them, bind them together, and fling them into the river. It was January. Cold. They didn’t stand a chance.” His tongue felt dry at the memory. “Sometimes, they would run them through with a sword, from one straight through the other, one blade for both.”

He might not have been on the Committee, but all those unwilling initiates into the “republican marriage” had been, in some part, his doing. All those heads lost on the guillotine. He had fought for the Revolution, lent his voice and his will to bring it about, and in the end, it had brought only death. He had helped unleash forces he had been powerless to control.

André felt Laura’s hand on his arm—just a fleeting touch, a wordless gesture of sympathy. It was enough to bolster him to go on.

He drew a shuddering breath. “I spoke to Jean-Baptiste Carrier, the head of the Tribunal. He said it wasn’t any of my concern. My day was over. What we had done in the Assembly was all well and good, but it wasn’t enough. It was their turn now. And if I questioned too much, well, they might just start to doubt my loyalty as well. My loyalty and my family’s.” He looked at Laura, silent, attentive, her face still in the light of the single lamp. “They were burning books, Laura. Killing men for making the wrong friends. It was madness. He threatened Père Beniet—my father-in-law.”

Laura nodded. “I know.”

“I had intended to try to take up my legal practice and put together a normal life again. But there wasn’t any such thing as normal. It seemed safer to try to work from within. At least, it made me and my family harder to denounce.”

“I still don’t understand how you came to be working for Artois,” said Laura. “I wouldn’t have pegged you as a monarchist.”

André shook himself out of the past. “What was the alternative? None of the reforms we had dreamed of could exist in a world where coup followed coup and the army had the power to unseat the people’s chosen representatives. Monarchy might not be the best of all possible systems, but at least it promised stability and, if done right, the rule of law.”

“But what laws?” Laura asked sensibly. “I should think the value of the system would depend on the laws underlying it.”

“To a point. There’s something to be said for predictability. Even in a flawed system, at least one knows where one stands. Predictability is all.”

“Not all. What if the laws decreed that ten people, chosen in a preordained way, were to be guillotined at ten in the morning every Sunday? It might be predictable, but it wouldn’t be pleasant. Or just,” Laura added, as an afterthought.

André propped himself up on one elbow. “That’s to take the argument to absurdity. It’s as if to argue that because one cat scratched you, all cats should be declawed.”

“No,” said Laura, a glint in her black eyes. “That’s your argument, not mine. You argue that all law is functionally the same. I argue for distinctions among them, between good law and bad law.”

“What if it’s neither good nor bad, but merely normative?” André argued back.

“What if I fling words about for the sake of saying them?”

“Isn’t that what rhetoric is?”

“But is rhetoric conducive to law? Or to reason?”

André grinned up at her, feeling lighter-hearted than he had for some time. “You’re too quick for me.”

Laura’s expression turned wry. “Only off the stage. On it, I can’t seem to tell my right from my left.”

On an impulse, André took her hand. He half-expected her to object, but she didn’t.

He rubbed his thumb along the side of it. “It will get easier, you’ll see. You’ll pick it up.”

For a moment, her hand tightened on his. Then she pulled away, scooting off the edge of the pallet and yanking at the blanket.

“I hope so, or we’re all in trouble,” she said, the flippant tone of her voice at odds with the lines between her brows.

There was nothing he could say, so André did the only thing he could do. He stretched out an arm, making room for her in the bed.

Laura hesitated for a moment and then eased herself down next to him, resting her head in the crook of his arm.

André felt, absurdly, as though he had just won a difficult case in court.

“For warmth,” he said, into her hair.