Hearts Beguiled

by Penelope Williamson

  There was a reaction there, Hachette was sure of it: a slight tightening of the man's full mouth, a quick blink of his orange-pip eyes. Hachette decided that for the moment he had gone far enough. The minister was alerted. Now he would watch to see whom the minister informed in turn. Hachette already had a man in place within the Palais de Justice to do the watching.

  The minister shrugged with apparent nonchalance. "Just that? Gabrielle?"

  Hachette nodded, equally nonchalant.

  The minister made a careful notation on the by now damp piece of paper. "As you say, it probably means nothing." He laid the pen down and slowly stood up. "Well, monsieur, unless you can think of anything else? No?" He began ushering Hachette quickly from the room. "Then be assured I shall have my men question all the pimps in their precincts. We'll keep a lookout for this redheaded whore. And, please, tell your—this Englishman—that Paris very much regrets the incident."

  Hachette had barely completed his departing bow before the door was shut smartly in his face.

  He placed his tricorne on his bewigged head and turned, a slight smile on his face—

  "I beg your pardon, monsieur!"

  The man who had bumped into him stepped to the side, motioning for Hachette to pass. Hachette glanced up briefly into dark, protruding eyes that bulged behind a pair of thick spectacles. He noted, before looking politely away, that a nasty scar puckered one of the man's thin, pale cheeks.

  ❧

  Louvois watched the elegant stranger walk down the hall and turn the corner, then he entered the minister's office without knocking.

  "There's a shipment due in this evening at sunset," he announced to the minister without further preliminaries.

  He went to stand before a map of Paris pasted to the plaster that showed all the main thoroughfares and the surrounding city wall broken by the customs posts, called barriers. "Through the south. The Dijon gate." He tapped the appropriate spot on the map. "Be sure your men are briefed this time. I've already alerted the Department of Customs."

  The minister fluttered nervously around Louvois. "But, of course, of course. Please be assured—"

  Louvois whipped around, pinning the minister with his bulging eyes. "We don't want any more 'mistaken arrests' like we had last month, do we, my friend?"

  The minister wrung his hands. "No, no, monsieur. I will tell my lieutenants. We have received a very important tip about a group of smugglers coming in from the north tonight, eh? All patrols will be diverted there." He forced out a laugh.

  "By the way," said Louvois, his voice sounding so casual that even the minister was fooled, "who was your illustrious visitor?"

  "My illustrious . . . ? Oh, my visitor." The minister's sweating face creased into a wide smile. "This you will like, monsieur. This you will like very much indeed. He is Monsieur Abel Hachette, the man who—"

  "I know, you fool, who Abel Hachette is. That is, I have heard of him, of course. Who in Paris hasn't?"

  "Yes, yes, monsieur." The minister nodded effusively. "But this I'll wager you don't know. Abel Hachette is the man"—he paused dramatically—"the man who can lead us to a fair and elusive whore by the name of Gabrielle." "Gabrielle!"

  A shudder of excitement ripped through Louvois's small frame, causing him to tremble visibly. For a moment the minister feared the man had been stricken ill, and he stepped forward-Only to back away suddenly at the look of madness blazing from Louvois's bulging eyes.

  Chapter 6

  The fanrmer snuck up behind the milkmaid, pinching her on the bottom. The maid shrieked and swung around, clobbering the farmer on the side of the head with her milk bucket. The farmer stood perfectly still for a moment, then crumpled to the ground in a heap.

  The audience laughed and cheered as the curtain descended over the tiny stage. It rose again immediately, and the puppets took their bows.

  Dominique tugged on Gabrielle's skirts. "Maman, I'm thirsty."

  "I know you are, mon chou, " she said, putting a sou into a bucket passed by a girl dressed in a scantier version of the puppet milkmaid's costume. "Simon and Monsieur Max have gone to fetch us all something cool to drink."

  Gabrielle watched the broad back of Maximilien de Saint-Just, and the smaller one that was Simon's, as they pushed their way through the crowd in front of a stall dispensing cider and ale. Whatever Max said to Simon caused the older man to laugh uproariously, so that heads turned in their direction.

  Gabrielle frowned, not sure what to make of this sudden liking the very bourgeois Simon Prion had formed for the very aristocratic Maximilien de Saint-Just. And then there was Agnes, who couldn't stop talking about him. And Dom-

  inique, who gazed up at him with worship in his four-year-old's eyes. The man, she decided irritably, was much too charming to be trusted.

  She looked around for Agnes and saw the girl had staked out a patch of shade beneath one of the few trees that dotted this broad, dusty field known as the Champ de Mars, where the city fairs were traditionally held. Spying Gabrielle and the boy, Agnes cupped her mouth and hallooed, waving them over.

  Gabrielle deposited a string bag heavy with apples, bread, and cheese on the ground next to Agnes. As Dominique squatted beside it, she noticed a suspicious bulge in his pantaloons.

  "Dominique, what do you have in your pockets this time?" she asked, dreading the answer.

  Dominique showed her—three of the small wax statues that were being sold from stands all over the fair. One each of the king and queen, and one of a bespectacled old man who might have been Benjamin Franklin. She heaved a huge sigh, wondering at her son's latest propensity to pick up anything that struck his fancy. "And just where did you acquire these?"

  "Monsieur Max bought them for him," Agnes said.

  "Oh . . ." Smiling with relief, Gabrielle took off her straw hat and fanned her face with it. The noise and smells of the fair assaulted her—screams from a steer-and-dog fight, the cloying odor of carameled peaches and pungent scents of roasted chestnuts and sour wine, and the shriek of fifes, the wail of trumpets, the shrill voice of a boy hawking tickets to the national lottery.

  Agnes motioned with her chin to where Max's dark head stood above the crowd around the ale barrels. "His eyes burn for you today, Gabrielle."

  "Oh, Agnes, for heaven's sake—"

  "And your eyes burn for him."

  "They do not!" Gabrielle exclaimed indignantly. Collecting her blue calico skirts beneath her, she sat down on a patch of scraggly grass beside Agnes. She dug a couple of apples from the bag, tossing one to Dominique and another into the girl's lap, but she could not stop the telltale blush that colored her cheeks. Dieu, if even Agnes noticed, then surely he . . .

  Agnes's teeth crunched loudly into the apple. "I ask myself, Gabrielle, if it's a game you play with me, or with yourself, or if you really are so blind to what is happening. You met this man five days ago and he's been hanging around the pawnshop like an abandoned puppy ever since. The man is so besotted with you he can't bear to let you out of his sight."

  Gabrielle choked back a laugh at the comparison of the arrogant Maximilien de Saint-Just to an abandoned puppy. She watched his tall figure stride toward them, dripping tankards of ale balanced precariously in his hands. She thought perhaps Agnes was a little enamored of the man herself. Or perhaps she was simply intrigued with the hints she had been given of Max's shady past,

  It had happened earlier that afternoon, as they had all set out together for the fair. Simon brought up the rear with Dominique, who not only walked at a tortoise's pace but had a maddening tendency to want to stop and pick up anything lying in the street that caught his fancy. Gabrielle and Agnes walked ahead with Max sandwiched between them. Soon Max and Agnes were bantering in an easy, friendly way, and Gabrielle began to feel strangely grouchy and out-of-sorts. Perhaps it's my monthly curse, she thought. But if so, it was a week early. As they crossed the Pont des Invalides she managed to insinuate herself between Max and the girl, and she immediately began to feel bet
ter.

  "You should be thanking me for bringing the lovely Gabrielle into your life," she heard Agnes say to Max.

  Gabrielle gaped at her, too astonished to be embarrassed. "What, pray tell, did you have to do with it?"

  "I saved your miserable life, that's what I had to do with it. You wouldn't be here in the Palais Royal with Monsieur Simon if it hadn't been for me, and you know it."

  Gabrielle snorted. "What a fabrication!"

  "I'll tell you the story," Agnes said to Max, who had fallen judiciously silent. "It was a cold, rainy winter's day, and I was in the Place Maubert. I was making my living as a street sweeper at the time—"

  "Streetwalker, you mean," Max stated, taking the words out of Gabrielle's mouth.

  Now it was Agnes's mouth that popped open in astonishment. "But I didn't sleep with you, did I? I'm sure I would have remembered. Of course, I had a lot of customers, but there are some men a girl doesn't. . ." She cast an appalled look at Gabrielle. "Oh, mon Dieu ..."

  Max laughed and, reaching across Gabrielle's back, rubbed his hand over the short, wispy spikes of Agnes's hair. "I was never one of your customers, but if you're trying to keep your past a secret, you should wear something over that hair of yours."

  On rare occasions, when public outrage began to get out of hand, the Paris police would round up the multitude of the city's prostitutes (those whose pimps couldn't or wouldn't pay the bribe), shave their heads, and make them sweep the streets for a fortnight. It would be another year at least before Agnes's hair grew out enough not to be noticeable.

  "I bought her a mobcap," Gabrielle said. "She refuses to wear it."

  Agnes stuck her tongue out at the older woman. "It makes my head look like a fat brioche. As I was saying, I was whoring at the time, though in truth I was sweeping the streets, too, because Paul, that whoreson turd of a diseased goat, may a million devils boil him like a black pudding, forgot to pay the bribe. I was sweeping out the gutters in the Place Maubert—and filthy gutters they have there, too—when I saw this poor wretch of a girl with a babe in her arms and her purse poking out her pocket as if she were begging for it to be lifted."

  "I was tired," Gabrielle said, though more to herself. Tired and cold and wet and hungry. And frantic with fear because Dominique had been running a burning fever. He had just turned three then, but she had been carrying him because he was too sick to walk. He had weighed hardly anything, she remembered, and his breaths in her ear had been hot and shallow. They had spent the whole day out in the cold and wet in the Cemetery des Innocents because she had to work in order to buy food, and she had to bring the boy with her, because she didn't dare leave him alone. He had been so very sick and she had been so terribly afraid he was going to die.

  "... and by the most incredible coincidence Monsieur Simon was in the Place Maubert at the same time," Agnes was saying. "Well, perhaps it wasn't so much of a coincidence since it's where he goes to buy chickens for supper. Anyway, it was my bad luck he spotted Gabrielle—he knew her from before, you see, when she came into his shop to pawn her ring. Well, he saw Gabrielle and he shouted, and I-"

  "He shouted because he saw you stealing my purse," Gabrielle said.

  "I proclaimed my innocence."

  "You ran off like the thief you were. And with my purse!"

  "But Monsieur Simon caught me," Agnes went on as if she hadn't been interrupted. "And he began to beat me with his cane. Then Gabrielle came running up—she looked beautiful, too, like an avenging angel, though an angry one—and she snatched the cane away from Monsieur Simon and broke it over his head."

  By now Max was laughing so hard heads turned toward them as they walked by. "P-poor Monsieur Simon," he sputtered when he could catch his breath.

  "But he shouldn't have been beating her," Gabrielle protested. "She was hardly more than a child."

  "The police agreed with you, Monsieur Max," Agnes said smugly. "They were going to arrest her for making Monsieur Simon's head bleed."

  Max cocked a brow at Gabrielle, his eyes sparkling with laughter. "Let me guess," he said. "Simon felt sorry for both of you poor waifs and brought you back to his shop-all three of you, I should say, since presumably the babe in arms was Dominique."

  "He really only wanted Gabrielle and Dominique," Agnes admitted ruefully, "but she made him bring me, too."

  "Then it seems to me it was Gabrielle who saved your hide, not the other way about," Max told Agnes.

  Agnes sniffed, "A lot you know then. Would Simon have even noticed Gabrielle if I hadn't tried to pick her pocket, eh? I ask you."

  Max opened his mouth to point out the fallacies of this argument, then slowly shut it. Gabrielle knew he was remembering the tale she had told him about Simon being her dead husband's uncle. But though he regarded her with a hard, assessing look, he said nothing.

  Agnes heaved a nostalgic sigh. "It's all well and good being virtuous now, but I miss the old life sometimes."

  Gabrielle blew a lock of hair from her eyes and sighed with exasperation. "You don't know when you're well off, girl. Most likely you'd be sweeping out the dungeons of the Salpetriere by now if you'd continued down that particular road."

  "She's right, you know," Max said, using his drawling aristocratic voice. "I don't know what sort of whore you were, but when it comes to picking pockets you're a bloody amateur."

  Agnes harrumphed. "I picked yours, didn't I?"

  "Only because I let you," Max said. "You were as slow and clumsy as a two-toed sloth."

  "And what would you know about—" Agnes's eyes opened wide at the sight of the purse that Max dangled before her eyes. "Hell and damnation! Do you see that, Gabrielle? He picked my purse right out of my bloody pocket and I didn't feel a thing!"

  "I see it. And that's still no reason to curse like a stevedore from the Port-au-Ble."

  "Jesu . . ." Agnes shivered and flexed her fingers before her eyes, no doubt thinking of the whipping post at the Place de la Greve. "I knew I was getting rusty."

  "Well, don't rush out tomorrow and start practicing on all the pockets in the Palais Royal and, no, I won't give you lessons," Max said, having gotten the measure of Agnes.

  Gabrielle had slanted a covert look at Max then, wondering at this new and strange facet to his character. That was no parlor trick he had just shown them. He must have clever and well-trained, well-practiced, fingers to have so impressed Agnes. But though that endearing, devilish smile flirted around his wide mouth, she could read nothing in his hooded eyes. She thought about the mercury seal molds she had seen in his drawer, and the pistol. About the way he could move so swiftly and silently. And about Percival Bonville's drawling voice, saying: He plays at dangerous and nefarious games . . .

  ❧

  "Here you are, Dominique. A cup of good French ale to quench your thirst." Simon handed the boy a pint-sized wooden mug of thin ale which the boy immediately began to gulp down greedily.

  Feeling Agnes's eyes on her, Gabrielle tried to appear indifferent to Max when he put a tankard of ale into her hand. But as he stretched out beside her on the grass, the sleeve of his silk shirt—he was coatless today because of the heat-brushed against her bare arm. She repressed a shiver, telling herself it was merely a chill from the cold tin of the tankard that sweated against her palm.

  Agnes gave Gabrielle a knowing grin as she began to take the food from the string bag.

  "By the headless body of Sir Thomas More," she exclaimed, "we've forgotten a knife to cut the cheese."

  Max bent his leg up and pulled a slender, Italian-style stiletto from his tall black boot. He handed it to an astounded Agnes, hilt first. "Th-thank you," she stammered.

  Gabrielle, too, was so surprised that for once she forgot to admonish Agnes about her cursing. Simon, however, appeared to think there was nothing extraordinary about a man who walked around Paris with a murderous-looking dagger in his boot. Even Dominique was unimpressed.

  Gabrielle met Agnes's eyes and shrugged, wondering if she would ever underst
and men.

  Agnes handed Simon a hunk of bread and cheese, then leaned over to pluck a handbill from the pocket of his vividly striped waistcoat. "What do you have here, Monsieur Simon? More dirty pictures?"

  "It's a pamphlet on the latest scandalous conduct of that Austrian woman," Simon said, softening the usual epithet for the sake of the company. Simon's staunch political sentiments were of a definite republican bent, and any stories that blackened Queen Marie Antoinette's name merely fueled Simon's distaste for the monarchy.

  "It seems she sleeps on black satin sheets and has a room at the Petit Trianon tapestried with diamonds. Diamonds! When there are children starving in the streets of Paris and freezing in peasant huts throughout the land," he added, unmindful that at the moment the country was experiencing an unrelenting heat wave.

  Since Agnes couldn't read, she had given the pamphlet to Max.

  Gabrielle leaned over his shoulder to look at it. It was crudely printed, set in five different fonts of type. "It says she lights her bedroom with two thousand candles every day."

  "I should think the whole bloody place would catch on fire," Max said, and Gabrielle laughed softly, her breath caressing his ear.

  Max stiffened and pulled slightly away from her.

  She studied his dark profile. A muscle twitched in his jaw and sweat trickled from his hairline, but his heavy lids obscured the expression in his eyes. Feeling suddenly bold, she leaned closer, clasping his waist to maintain her balance. She felt the hard muscle that encased his rib cage shiver slightly.

  "What else does it say?" asked Agnes eagerly.

  Gabrielle tried to read the crude pamphlet, but though the air was still, the paper seemed to flutter so much that she couldn't make out the words. She put her hand beneath Max's to steady it, and a lock of her hair brushed against his cheek. She heard a muffled groan.

  "It says . . . mon Dieu," Gabrielle exclaimed softly as she took in the meaning of the printed words. The queen, the pamphlet claimed, had taken the beautiful comtesse de Polignac for her lesbian lover.