Hearts Beguiled

by Penelope Williamson

  "Well!" Agnes huffed, swiping at a tear that had mysteriously appeared on her cheek. "All I can say is you look a mess, the pair of you. I certainly hope you didn't stand up in church and say your vows before God looking like a couple of Marseilles cutpurses.''

  Gabrielle's head tilted back, and her rich, throaty laughter filled the shop. Max felt a tingling in his gut, and a familiar tightening in his loins. She stood barefoot, her dress stained and ripped, her hair in fiery tangles around her face, and to Max's besotted eyes she was the most beautiful creature on earth.

  In a voice full of happiness, Gabrielle began to recount their adventures with the aerostat as she led them all back into the kitchen. Max had started to follow when he felt something tug at the kneeband of his breeches.

  He looked down at Dominique, who stared up at him with anxious eyes. His lower lip trembled slightly, but Max could see he was making a valiant effort not to cry.

  "Why did you marry my maman?" he demanded in a small, choked voice. "I never said you could."

  Max hunkered down beside him, grasping his small shoulders. "I love your maman," he said. "A man marries a woman when he loves her."

  Dominique looked down at his feet. "Does this mean you're my papa now?"

  "Yes ... in a way."

  "My other papa left. He went to heaven."

  Max's chest felt tight. "Yes. I know."

  Slowly Dominique lifted his head, and Max saw a terrible fear in his indigo-blue eyes. "You won't go to heaven now, too, will you?"

  Max's breath left him in a shaky laugh. "I don't think that's at all likely."

  "Good," Dominique said matter-of-factly. He tucked his hand into Max's larger one. "Maman was very angry at us about the rat, wasn't she?"

  "It frightened her."

  He heaved a loud sigh. "Will we have to pick more flowers?"

  "I think you can safely leave the reparations to me this time," Max said, with just a hint of smugness in his voice.

  Dominique's face brightened. "Tiens. Will you help me catch another rat?"

  Chapter 12

  The gypsy caravan entered Paris that night by the Chaillot Road. The guards at the barriere were surly and the gypsies were insulting, and the guards seemed to take a long time to inspect diligently every wagon in the caravan. So long a time that traffic began to back up at the gate and tempers flared. One man, a bourgeois in an elegant landau, said he would complain to the minister of police about the matter. The captain of the guard scowled and made halfhearted apologies; the gypsies' leader was seen to smile.

  The caravan attracted some attention. The wooden wagons were brightly painted, and the gypsies themselves were mostly dressed in vivid silks and bedecked with golden bangles and jeweled scraves. Men, passing by on the street, made ribald comments in laughing, teasing voices, hoping to attract the attention of more than one pair of flashing dark eyes. A group of shopgirls, on their way home from dinner at a cafe, caught the friendly, mocking smile of one of the handsome gypsy men and, giggling, smiled back. One of the girls, sharper than the rest, noticed that the tumbrel the man drove was piled high with stiff blue and gold striped silk, and she wondered what it was. Never would she have guessed that the silk was a deflated balloon and that beneath the balloon was salt.

  The gypsy caravan crossed the magnificent avenue of the Champs-Ely sees. It filed in stately procession down the Rue Saint-Honore, where the rich bourgeoisie had built mansions as grand as any noble's. It wound through the markets of Les Halles that smelled of fish and cheese and stale beer. When it passed the hulking towers of the Bastille, the man who drove the tumbrel raised his tricorne in a cocky salute to the soldiers on duty, and the man who rode beside him, a dark-skinned gypsy with a gold earring in one ear, laughed.

  They turned onto the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine. They passed dye works, tanneries, and breweries, all shuttered and dark, for the working day had ended. An ironworks belched filthy charcoal smoke. Smaller shops, dark as well, crouched among the foundries, their trade signs suspended on gallows above the narrow street, almost touching each other in the middle and forming an arch of creaking, rusty metal overhead.

  Their wagon wheels splashed through stagnant pools choked with dung and entrails, scattering a group of foraging pigs. Candlelight flickered in the grimy, paneless windows of the leaning, sagging tenements. The bells of Saint Marguerite rang out eleven o'clock, but the night air was rent with other sounds as well—babies' cries, drunken songs, screams of rage and pain. It was a hard-living, hard-drinking, hard-wenching neighborhood, this Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and it never slept easy.

  The man who drove the tumbrel knew this for he had grown up on these streets. Most babes born in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine never survived their first year. The tough weeds— those that made it through infancy—were hard to kill after that. Not that death wasn't everywhere. The gallows, the pox, a knife in the gut, waited around every corner, in every dark alley. Maximilien de Saint-Just had done things on these streets that filled him now with shame. But he had learned how not to die.

  It became an addiction, this cheating of death, so that after a while life was insupportably boring if he wasn't living on the edge of it—what Percy Bonville called playing at dangerous games. Max had led his employers to believe he did it for the money and as a result, to keep him doing it, they had paid him well. The truth was that, more than the money, he did it for the sheer bloody excitement of it all. But tonight his heart wasn't in it.

  Tonight his heart was with Gabrielle ... his wife.

  My wife. The words filled him with an incredible joy that he had not known was possible. They also filled him with terror. For the first time in Maximilien de Saint-Just's twenty-eight years he had something more than just his life to lose.

  And already things weren't going well.

  It was his fault. Mostly his fault. They had spent the evening at Simon's pawnshop, drinking wine, laughing, telling stories. Max had filled many nights of his life with revelry— carousing, gambling, whoring—but never had he been happier than at that moment, sitting at the scarred kitchen table with Dominique on his knee, his arm draped around his wife's shoulders, sharing such simple joy. He thought this was what it must feel like to belong to a family, to be loved and needed.

  They were a little tipsy by the time they left the pawnshop and crossed the garden to his apartment. They had left Dominique with Agnes for one more night, until a carpenter could be hired tomorrow to build him a closet bed on the wall near the fireplace in Max's apartment. Tonight Max and Gabrielle went home alone, arms wrapped around each other's waists and laughing over nothing, stopping every few feet to exchange kisses that got hotter and hotter so that by the time they had made it up the stairs to his apartment, he had Gabrielle's breasts in his hands and she had her hands down his breeches.

  From the beginning her passion had surprised him. He had never known a woman who so delighted in sex and who gave so freely in bed as Gabrielle. She brought him pleasure as no other woman ever had, and it wasn't done by artifice or experience. He guessed that her first husband must have died shortly after they were married, and he didn't think there had been many others, if any, since then.

  Martin, the fellow's name was. Max had wormed that much out of Agnes—along with the comforting opinion that this Martin must have been a moonstruck youth who didn't know his yard from a dyemaster's stick. He wondered if the boy really had been a wigmaker's apprentice. The wigmakers Max knew went through life coated head to foot with flour, looking like a mackerel ready for the fry pan. He couldn't envision such a ridiculous figure appealing to his glorious Gabrielle. Still, he hated the thought of this Martin. Not so much that the boy had been in Gabrielle's bed—although to be truthful that did bother him a little. What he hated was the thought that she had loved him, loved him enough to marry him and bear his child. She was the one and only love of his life, and Max wanted to be the same for her.

  There was something else . . . This Martin was part of the secret
that she refused to share with him. The secret that kept him—no matter how deep and strong his love—from completely trusting her.

  The secret that forced him to keep secrets from her.

  And so, once inside the door of his apartment, he had reluctantly pulled away from her. Lighting a taper on the mantel, he had turned, and the sight of her was almost his undoing. She stood before him—her hair a flaming cloud around her face; her eyes glowing purple, warm with desire; her lips swollen and parted, ready to be kissed again—and he didn't know where he found the will not to pick her up and carry her off to his bed.

  "Gabrielle ..." He took a deep breath to steady his voice. "I have to leave for a few hours. Will you wait up for me?"

  The dreamy smile slid off her face. "Leave now? But why?"

  "I have some business to take care of."

  She recoiled as if he'd slapped her. "What business?"

  He didn't answer her. He knew that at this moment his face looked hard and cruel, about as unrelenting as granite. He couldn't help it. It was something you learned early in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine when you were a thief and your mother was a whore. Never allow your feelings to show, for feelings make you weak. Your enemies will use your feelings to destroy you. So will your friends.

  Gabrielle had wrapped her arms around her chest, hugging herself. "You're going back to those gypsies, aren't you? You're going to help them smuggle the salt into the city."

  "Yes."

  "Oh, God ... I didn't marry you only to become a widow again." Her fists clenched and she squeezed her eyes shut. But when she opened them a moment later, they were dry, and he admired her guts—her refusal to cry in front of him.

  "Gabrielle . . ."He reached for her, but she jerked away, turning her back to him. "I swear to you it isn't dangerous. The guards at the barriere have been bribed. The smuggling is being run by someone high in the government. There's no chance of getting caught." He wondered if he should have trusted her enough to tell her even that much, but he couldn't bear the anguish on her face.

  She had turned away from him, but now she whirled back around, and he saw she had gone from being hurt to being angry.

  "Why?" she demanded. "Why must you do this?"

  "It's a favor I owe."

  "To Prado?"

  Max said nothing. He couldn't trust her with knowledge of Abel Hachette and the cabal. Not yet, not until he found out what it was in her past that she wouldn't, or couldn't, tell him.

  Her hot, angry eyes glared at him from beneath flaring brows. "Is that how you support yourself, Max—by smuggling? Is that where the money came from to buy all this?" She waved her hand around the room, encompassing his instruments and books. "Or did it come from picking pockets?"

  That had hurt, but only deep inside him where she would never see it.

  He dropped his voice to a low, dead-level tone. "I'm not asking for your permission or your sanction, Gabrielle. You knew what I was when you married me because I warned you, right from the start . . ." He paused, letting the implication that she had not been so forthcoming with him hang in the air between them.

  Then he felt his lips tighten into the cold smile that came when he was angry. "I'm a bastard, Gabrielle. Remember?"

  She flung her head up and stared back at him steadily, and her words burned him with their bitter sarcasm. "I haven't forgotten. I just didn't think you would spend our marriage trying to prove it."

  After that there had been nothing more to say. He went into his bedroom and changed into a clean pair of chamois breeches and a plain buff coat, then put on his second, older pair of boots which weren't as fine as the ones he'd lost but felt better on his feet. He thought about taking the pistol, decided against it, and took his stiletto instead. He sat on the bed to slip it into his boot.

  He felt the owl watching him in silent condemnation from the perch near the window. He looked up and actually felt his cheeks flush. A man doesn't have to answer to his wife, he defended himself to those censorious, all-knowing eyes. Why should I have to change my whole life just because I'm married? I was perfectly happy with the way things were before she knocked on my door.

  The big bird blinked once, and Max raised his brows. All right then, not perfectly happy. You're supposed to be so smart, what would you do?

  The bird flapped his wings, and Max frowned. That's easy for you to say, my feathered friend, but I haven't got wings. And then he pressed his lips together to stop a burst of laughter. God. Gabrielle already suspected him of being half mad. What would she think if she came in here right now and caught him silently communing with an owl?

  When he went back into the other room, she was still standing where he had left her, and he could see she had been crying. He started for the door, but he couldn't leave it like that. He crossed the room in three strides, crushing her against him before she could even think of getting away. She turned her head to the side, but he grasped her chin, jerking it back around again. His mouth came down hard on her lips, and in his kiss were mixed all the love and anger and frustration that he felt.

  She hadn't kissed him back, but then she hadn't slapped his face, either. He took that as a positive sign.

  ❧

  The gypsy caravan passed the burned-out shell of an abandoned slaughterhouse. The dark-skinned man on the big roan peeled away and the tumbrel followed him, rolling silently on oiled wheels through a crumbling brick arch and into a black cavern that had once been the bleeding and gutting yard.

  The place stank, although it hadn't been used in years. Max remembered it from his childhood, and it had been a ruin even then. But the smells of blood and rotting entrails had seeped into the stones and packed earth long ago and were there to stay. The fire had destroyed the roof, so that the night sky showed dark and shadowy through the fallen timbers overhead. A hot wind had come up and stormclouds shrouded the moon. There was the feel of rain in the air.

  Torchlight flared in back of them, casting their shadows against the far wall. Prado dismounted; Max stayed in the tumbrel and pulled his tricorne forward so that the brim came to just above his eyes.

  A man, flanked on each side by minions carrying torches, came through the arch. "Couldn't you have picked a better place for this?" he said in an aggrieved voice. "It stinks like a butcher's midden in here."

  Prado laughed and said something soothing and apologetic while Max sat in silence and watched the man with shadowed eyes. He was a small man, dressed all in black, with long, snaggy dark hair that hung loosely over his shoulders. The torchlight glazed the lenses of his thick spectacles, obscuring the man's eyes. Max committed the face to memory; it was easy for there was a deep, puckered scar on one cheek, like a brand. The man had never told Prado his name, so Prado called him the Scarred One.

  The Scarred One came over to the tumbrel to look inside. "Whatever in the name of heaven is that?"

  "It's an aerostat," Prado said.

  "A what?"

  "A balloon."

  "And the salt?"

  "It's there."

  The man blinked. He had, Max saw, protruding eyes with thick lids, like those of a turtle, that were grotesquely magnified by the spectacles. His attention fell on Max. "Who's he? You've never brought him with you before."

  Prado's teeth flashed. "My cousin Ludo. He's an ox."

  Max stared down at the man, the vacuous look of the dim-witted on his face.

  The man blinked again, then brought a scented handkerchief to his nose. "Have him unload the stuff then, and make him hurry. Christ, it stinks in here."

  A large black berlin was driven through the arch. With the help of the two minions, Max unloaded the salt from the tumbrel into the carriage. The low voices of Prado and the Scarred One drifted over them while they worked. Max didn't bother trying to listen; Prado would recount the whole conversation to him later.

  The Scarred One insisted that Prado and Max should leave first. It had started to rain, hard enough to turn the narrow street into a gulley of filthy, rushing
water. Max, sitting in the tumbrel with icy water dripping down his neck, wondered why it always rained when he had to follow someone at night.

  He drove the tumbrel for several blocks at a leisurely pace, with Prado walking the roan beside him and humming tunelessly under his breath. When they rounded the comer, a shadow emerged from an alley and leaped on board the tumbrel. Max slid off the other end, running on silent feet back toward the slaughterhouse. When the black berlin emerged from beneath the archway, it acquired an extra and unseen passenger.

  ❧

  Two hours later Max stood in the door to his bedroom, a puddle of water forming around his feet. She was there-lying on her side on the very edge of the bed, her face turned toward the window. Relief overwhelmed him, so intense that tears stung his eyes and he swayed slightly on his feet. He hadn't known how afraid he was of finding her gone.

  The jalousies were open, and wind blew rain into the room, no doubt staining the floor. But the owl's perch was empty, so he didn't go to shut the window. He stood, instead, at the door and listened to her breathing. She was awake. "Gabrielle?" he said softly, and when she didn't answer he undressed in the dark, in silence.

  He got into bed beside her. She didn't move. He lay on his back, looking up at the ceiling. He thought he could, with his practiced touch, make her want him in spite of her anger. But he didn't want to treat her that way—like a mere vessel to be used to slake his own hunger. He wondered if he could win her forgiveness with words, but although he tried several sentences in his mind, none sounded right. So after a moment he closed his eyes and turned onto his stomach, away from her.

  The bed moved beneath him. Then her naked body rubbed against the bare flesh of his buttocks. His manhood grew thick and stiff where it was pressed between his stomach and the mattress. It was all he could do not to roll her over right then and plunge into her, deep and hard, to bury himself in her hot, wet softness. He clenched his teeth, fighting for self-control.