by Leda Swann
Pierre de Tournay looked rather taken aback at the scowl on her face when he entered. “Am I interrupting you in something important?”
Courtney shook her head. Now was as good a time as any to let him in on their secret, she supposed. She would have preferred to have more time to prepare herself to ask him, but time was the one thing they had to waste. “Come in. You are not interrupting anything.”
Miriame beckoned him in with an impish grin. “On the contrary, you may help us solve a question that has been running through our heads for the last half hour. The pair of us could not agree. We will have to look to you for an answer.”
He flung himself down on a sofa and crossed his legs in front of him. “Pour me a glass of wine and I’ll answer you gladly to the best of my ability.”
Miriame poured him a glass of wine and handed it to him with a mocking bow. “Now then, Monsieur de Tournay,” she said, when he had gulped down the first mouthful. “Are you really ready to lead a rebellion against the King of France or were your earlier words to Monsieur Ruthgard here just so much hot air?”
He choked on the mouthful of wine and came up coughing. “I beg your pardon?”
Courtney tried not to gaze at him too covetously. Why did he have to look so desirable even when she was plotting his downfall? The perverseness of her nature meant that the closer she came to taking revenge on him ,the more she desired her object of vengeance. “It is as Jean-Paul says,” she said, indicating Miriame. “The Duc of Orleans is planning a rebellion against his brother the King. We have agreed to join him.”
He looked from one to the other as if expecting them to burst out laughing at the trick they were playing on him. “You are not serious.”
She did not smile. Neither did Miriame. If they had grievously misjudged the strength of his hatred for the King or the hold that his last ties of loyalty might bind him to, they might well both be dead by the morning. They had gambled on a turn of a man’s character and waited with bated breath to see if their play was a lucky one or no. “I have never been more serious in my life.”
He looked stunned. “The Duc is really plotting a rebellion? He is not merely talking into the wind as is his wont?”
Miriame shrugged her shoulders. “This time he has put playacting behind him. He is mustering his troops as we speak. With the gold francs he is throwing around as if they were copper sous, he will have no shortage of ready volunteers.”
“And you have agreed to join him?”
She grinned. “I am looking forward to it. You seem to forget that I am a poor man turned soldier to make the best way in the world that I can. What would I not do for the chance to earn my fortune?”
He turned to Courtney, his face a mask of confusion. “You too have been won over by his gold? I had not thought you to be so mercenary.”
She shook her head. “I have been won over, but not by his gold. He has promised me what I desire far more than money.”
“Power? Lands? Titles?”
She shook her head. “None of those. It matters not what he had promised me – all that matters is that I have joined with him of my own free will and I will fight for him loyally enough.”
He looked horrified at her change of heart. “You would put aside your vows to the King that easily and fight against the man you swore to protect?”
“Have I not heard you swear that you hated the King, that you would run him through with your sword if you were able, despite your vows to him?”
He shook his head. “That is different. I have good cause to hate the King. You have no such excuse for your treachery.”
He had the gall to call her a traitor? To take her to task for her betrayal of the King? His betrayal of her was far, far worse than anything she had ever contemplated, let alone committed. She felt her hands clench into fists at her side as she fought to keep a lid on the anger that threatened to overwhelm her. “I have more cause than you know to hate the King and wish him dead. More cause than you could ever guess at.”
Miriame paced up and down in front of him like a caged tiger, keeping a wary eye on him as she moved. All traces of levity had vanished form her manner now. “So, are you with us or are you not?” Her hand was close to the hilt of her dagger but she made no move to draw it from its sheath.
Pierre looked at her with interest. “If I am not? What then?”
The dagger was in Miriame’s hand and up against Pierre’s throat before Courtney saw her move. “Then, I am afraid to say, you are a dead man. If you are not with us, I cannot afford to let you live.”
Courtney felt her face go white as the blood rushed out of her head. She had seen Miriame’s prowess with a knife once before already – when she had slit the throat of one of her old enemies with as little fuss as if she had been slicing herself a hunk of cheese. She could not let Miriame kill Pierre so quickly and easily. Not after all she had suffered to get her vengeance on him as he deserved. “Do not cut him,” she begged, with all the breath she could muster. “Please. Let him go.”
She had much better have saved her breath. He did not need her pleas. A quick flick of Pierre’s wrist and the knife in Miriame’s hand clattered uselessly to the wooden floor.
Courtney found that she could breathe again.
Miriame looked astonished in her turn to find herself up against the wall with Pierre’s dagger at her own throat. Her eyes flicked to Courtney and then back again to the man who held her captive. She did not move.
Pierre gave a feral grin at her discomforture. “You were saying?”
Miriame pressed her head back against the wall as hard as she could but she could not slide past his grip. She was caught. “I was saying how much I hoped you would join with me and my friend here. I would hate to have to hurt you.”
Pierre growled at her deep in his throat and pressed the knife into her neck so that it dented, but did not quite nick, her skin.
Courtney stepped in between Pierre and Miriame. She had no wish to see anyone’s blood shed that night. “Put down your weapons. Nobody will be slitting anyone else’s throat in my apartments.”
Pierre did not move. “Give me one good reason.”
She would not appeal to his sense of honor or of decency. He was only a man after all, and thus probably had no such senses to be moved. “Bloodstains are too hard to remove from my Persian rugs.”
He gave a shout of laughter and removed his dagger from Miriame’s throat. “You show a commendable respect for your beautiful property, my merchant friend. If you would keep the blood off your rugs, please warn your visitors that I do not appreciate having knives held up to my throat.”
Miriame wasted no time in scooting out from under his elbow. “As little as I like being turned in to the King for plotting against his rule, no doubt.”
“Touché.” He resheathed his dagger and sat back down on the ottoman. “Just as well for you that I have no intention of betraying your plans. Just as well for me, too, I suspect, or I might wake up one morning with your knife sticking out from my ribs.”
Miriame grinned at him. “You do me an injustice. You would not wake up if I knifed you, but rather die peacefully in your sleep.”
“That is a great consolation to me.”
Courtney felt the weight of a thousand boulders slide off her chest at his promise not to betray them. Until he spoke, she had not known how scared she was that they had misjudged his character, that he would turn on them in horror. “You will not turn us in to the King?”
“No. I will not. I owe him no more loyalty and will give him none.”
“You will join us then?”
He hesitated. “I do not rightly know. To actively plot against the man to whom I have sworn an oath of allegiance goes against my nature.”
“An oath of allegiance is not a one way transaction. You swear to give your loyalty to your King and he in return vows that he will deserve it. You have kept your word to King Louis so far, but what of him? Does such a King deserve your loyalty?”
/> He shook his head. “No. He does not. He has commanded me to do things that no King should command his soldiers to do. He has ordered me to cheat and lie and steal.”
Miriame has regained her usual good humor. “He sounds just like my kind of man. I should go introduce my self to him some time.”
He shot her an irritated glance. “So why join a rebellion against him, then, if you admire men of his character so greatly?”
She shrugged. “His brother the Duc pays me better for lying, cheating and stealing. Naturally, if the King were to make me a generous counter offer I would have to consider it seriously. I have my old age to provide for after all, when I get too old to lie, cheat and steal as successfully as I can do now.”
Pierre sneered. “With any luck old age will not bother you - you will be hanged young instead, as you deserve.” He turned to Courtney. “I am surprised at your choice of companion. He seems more fit for keeping company with common pickpockets than with a Musketeer from a respectable merchant family.”
Courtney shrugged. Was he so much better stealing on the orders of the King than Miriame was, stealing to provide for her old age? “We are rebels together. That gives us a common bond. Will you join with us?”
He paced up and down through the chamber, his face showing his conflicting emotions. “I doubt the Duc will be a much better King than his brother. He is not blessed with great wisdom or a great strength of character.”
“Would he be any worse?”
“I do not know. He might be. Sometimes you are wiser to stay with the devil you know than to take a chance of the devil you don’t.”
“If you have the chance to try to do good, should you not take it?” She herself was not at all convinced that the Duc would be better than his brother the King, either, but she needed Pierre to join them. Poetic justice demand that he helped set her father free. She put all her heart and soul into trying to convince him.
He was not yet convinced. “But if the good you try to do causes evil instead, what then?”
“Then at least your conscience is safe, knowing that you had done what you thought right, that you had not gone along with evil because you lacked the courage to try to set it right. It is better to try to do good and fail in the attempt, than to accept evil without trying to right the wrong.”
He thought about her words for a while in silence. Finally he came to a decision. “You are right. I cannot stand by and do nothing and still call myself a man. I will join you and strike a blow for truth and righteousness. My beloved has as little cause to love the King as I do. I will strike at him for her sake.”
A smile spread out over her face. She had succeeded so far with more ease than she had anticipated. “Then come take a seat with me and Jean-Paul. Here is what we are planning to do.”
Chapter 8
Courtney drew her chair in to the table and looked at the diagram that Pierre had drawn for her. Try as she might, she could not make any sense out of the marks and crosses that he had made on the paper. “What is that?” she asked, pointing to one of the marks at random, a wavy line that looped around in circles that somehow seemed central to his explanation, though she couldn’t quite see why.
She would have been better to keep her mouth shut. Pierre tossed his quill down on the table and looked at her in exasperation. “Have you not heard a word that I have been saying in the last hour?”
She had heard every single word, but she had understood nothing. He might as well have been speaking in Spanish. “I was trained as a merchant, not a soldier,” she reminded him. “I look at a wavy line drawn on a piece of paper and I do not see masses of troops fighting a battle. I see naught but a wavy line.”
He sighed as he ran his fingers through his hair. “I will go over it again one more time.” He picked up his quill pen and pointed to the area around the wavy lines. “These represent the lie of the land around the outskirts of Paris. Mostly flat, as you can see, but there are some hills over here,” and he pointed to a set of wavy lines, “and here,” and he pointed to the first set of wavy lines, “that would make a suitable vantage point.
“If we were to land our troops over here,” and he pointed to a piece that Courtney finally understood - it was shaded and labeled sea. “If we land them here, march them this way towards Paris, and take up a stand on these hills, we would be the best placed for the battle that would follow. The King would be hard pressed to come at us without exposing his troops to our archers. We could pick them off at our leisure as they approached.”
Courtney still didn’t understand. “Why do you want to be up on a hill when you are fighting? Wouldn’t the enemy troops be able to see us from miles away?”
Pierre looked at her as if she were half-witted. “Which is easier – to run uphill or to run downhill?”
“To run downhill, I suppose, as long as the slope is not too great.”
“So which way do you think it is easier to fight, uphill or downhill?”
Of course. She had not thought of that. “Oh, I think I am starting to understand.”
He shook his head. “The Duc was a fool to think you would be any use to him in a battle beyond the strength of your sword arm. Heaven help me if you are ever made a general. I shall resign my commission rather than fight under you.”
Her professional pride was hurt. “I can fight as well as any other man when the mood takes me. What else is there to a battle but a man’s skill with sword or musket?”
“Battles are not won just through fighting, they are won through strategy. If we think faster and smarter than our enemy can, we can outmaneuver him and place our men where they will be of most use to us. We could win the battle with far fewer numbers on our side if we are smart about it.”
Such a way of looking at a battle was new to Courtney. She had thought it was nothing more than chopping people to bits before they got a chance to chop you to bits instead. “I shall do the fighting that falls my way then and leave the thinking to you.”
“I am glad of it. That way we both stand half a chance of coming out of this affair alive.”
His reminder of how dangerous their mission was sobered her thinking on the instant. She needed to keep herself safe for her father and for her son. “What of our more immediate plans? How will we get the Duc to England?”
He grinned at her. “You have a point. Here I am building castles in the air and planning the strategy for a battle to end all battles, where we take on Paris itself to win the kingdom for the Duc when there are a thousand smaller battles we must plan for first. If we fail in any of those, we shall have no need of these battle plans.” He drew a clean sheet of paper out from underneath the plan he had just drawn and started again, scratching away with his quill pen. “First things first,” he muttered as he wrote. “The Duc must get to England in safety.”
Courtney groaned at the thought of yet another mad dash across the country on horseback. Last time she had tried such a thing she had fallen off more times than she could count and eventually broken her arm. The memory of the pain still lingered in her mind. “We need to get him there as fast as possible. The King will discover that his brother has gone soon enough, and we shall have to outrun our pursuers all the way to Calais.”
He shook his head. “No, Calais is the last place we should go. That is the first place the King would think to look for us. We must take a different route out of the country.”
“Such as?”
“We are not a million miles away from Spain. We could go south and cross the border into Spain and go from there. The King would not dare to send an armed force into Spain after us. It would be tantamount to declaring war on his powerful neighbor.”
Courtney shook her head. “We need to get there first, and it is a long way to our southern borders. Once we are in Spain, we might be safe from a large force, but not from a small one. He need only send a couple of assassins after us. Then he would have us all dead, and the King of Spain would never know. Besides, even were we to reach Spain i
n safety, the journey by sea to England would be far longer and more dangerous from Spanish shores.”
“Burgundy, maybe. The Duke has no love for the King and might afford us some protection were we to ask.”
Sophie was now in Burgundy serving its Duke in his private army. She would like to see Sophie again. “The Duke might not want to anger his French neighbor, either, by offering us his protection. We should not put too much faith in him. He might just as well turn us over to the King of France as help us on our way to England.”
Pierre twirled the ends of his moustache around his finger. “True, but going north is no answer, either. Holland will not welcome Catholics and none of the petty German princes are much use for anything. That way would afford us no protection.”
“We could travel north towards Holland as if we were to take refuge there and cut eastwards to a French port before we reach the border,” she suggested.
“Ah, you’ve got it,” he said, as he bent his head to his paper and began to scribble away like mad again. “Only we will go south, not north. Spain poses a much greater threat to France than Holland ever could. We will leave enough clues behind us to suggest to anyone who might follow us that we are headed south to Spain to ask for their support, but instead of following the south road all the way to the border, we will cut eastwards towards Brest and take ship from there. That way we shall not delay overmuch on the road, but the King will hesitate to muster a large troop against us to send into enemy territory.”
Heads together, they continued to plan their flight to England. Courtney was surprised how easy it was at a time like this to put aside her hatred of Pierre and work with him towards a common goal. As she wrestled with discovering the safest path for them both, she forgot how she ought to be hating him and working towards his downfall.
She savored each minute they spent in each other’s company, knowing that their time together was limited. If their bold enterprise failed, they would both be hanging in chains from a gibbet at the crossroads to frighten crows or scattered to the four winds in exile from their homeland. If it succeeded, she would free her father, stab Pierre in the back as soon as his usefulness was ended, and flee the country at once. Win or lose, these few days would be the last time she would spend with him. Win or lose, the father of her child would very likely soon be dead – and by her hand.
