Pam Rosenthal

by The Bookseller's Daughter

The peas were cooking beautifully with a bit of bacon on top of the stove, and Marie-Laure was back in front of the tub of greasy dishwater.

  There were no more ink stains to worry about anyway; endless hours of dishwashing had taken care of that. Her hands were red and chapped, with burns here and there from the stove and fireplace. She was no more a bookseller now than he was a smuggler.

  She supposed she should have recognized right off that he wasn’t the sort of person to deliver illegal books. Especially given the evidence of his dueling wound. And the eye patch.

  She’d threaded a large needle with strong thread and handed it to Gilles.

  “Now feed him some brandy,” he said, “so that you can hold him still while I sew him up.”

  Gently, he rolled the smuggler from his side to his back. They’d need a good clear space to work in. A pile of books was in the way. Marie-Laure reached across the man’s face to push them aside. A button on her sleeve caught in his bandanna, pulling the eye patch askew.

  She flinched, expecting a hollow socket. But he opened his eyes just then, both of them equally beautiful. And for a moment she forgot Gilles’s instructions and simply gazed into a pair of fathomless black eyes. Eyes that had locked on to hers for a heart-stopping instant this afternoon in the library.

  “Quickly, Marie-Laure.” Gilles’s voice had been urgent.

  “Oh…yes.” A bit dazed, she took the man’s head into her lap.

  “Drink, Monsieur,” she said, uncorking the brandy and putting the bottle to his lips. “My brother is going to take care of your leg, but it will hurt a little.”

  He smiled up at her, a magical flash of white teeth and finely curved lips punctuated by ironical little lines at his mouth’s edges. The smile was slightly asymmetrical and all the more eloquent for it. Life is amusing, isn’t it, Mademoiselle, the smile seemed to say, its mocking, crooked gallantry tugging at her heart.

  “‘The most compelling of encounters…’” he whispered hoarsely, before putting his mouth to the neck of the bottle.

  He held tightly to Marie-Laure’s hand while he gulped down the brandy. She kept hold of his hand after he passed out, while Gilles cut and sewed, whistling through a broken front tooth and cursing in a comforting monotone. The man’s lips quivered; lines appeared and disappeared at the corners of his mouth. But he’d drunk enough brandy to prevent him from regaining consciousness.

  “He’s got a bump on the head from falling. And he’s chilled and damp and has a bit of fever from the infection. But mostly he’s suffering from loss of blood and lack of food,” Gilles concluded. They were tidying up now, scrubbing up the blood and piling the illegal books behind a false partition in the kitchen wall.

  “Odd about the eye patch,” Gilles said. “But he might have had an inflammation that has recently cleared up.”

  She must have murmured some vague assent.

  “And look at this.” Gilles opened the man’s shirtfront. A small signet ring of silver and onyx hung from his neck on a greasy string.

  “Stole it, I suppose, perhaps at the same time he got the leg wound. Took it off some aristocrat, by the look of it. Well, good for him, anyway.”

  He’d worn the ring this afternoon, on the little finger of the hand that had taken the rattling saucer from her.

  “I think he’ll sleep through the night. He can’t move around easily on that leg, so I don’t think we’re in any danger from him. I’ll stay down here in the shop tonight, though, just to be sure. There are some anatomical drawings I need to look at anyway.

  “And calm down.” Gilles smiled. “You were a perfect assistant and he’ll be fine.”

  Gilles proposed they move him to the spare bed in the kitchen. But that bed was covered with books, in an intricate order Marie-Laure wouldn’t want to reconstruct.

  “What about my bed?” she asked.

  And when Gilles raised his eyebrows and leered suggestively, she slapped him. “And I’ll sleep upstairs in your bed, idiot.”

  Marie-Laure’s bedchamber was really just an alcove off the kitchen, overlooking the patch of garden behind the house. It smelled of rosemary and lavender; she liked sleeping beneath herbs she’d hung from the ceiling beams to dry. She helped Gilles pull off the man’s clothes and clean him up a little before they squeezed him into one of their father’s much-mended nightshirts. It was a quick, businesslike operation; Gilles needed her help but he was hardly going to let her linger and gape at the fellow. She hadn’t had to gape, though. She’d worked calmly and capably while the lines and shadows, angles and volumes of the sleeping man’s body imprinted themselves upon the deepest, most vulnerable spaces at her core.

  He’d been painfully thin and covered with scratches. His long muscles were stark and sinewy, too close to the bruised skin but powerful-looking nonetheless. Her inner eye had followed their lineaments, tracing their elegant diagonals from broad shoulder to narrow waist to…

  She lifted a large, grease-encrusted skillet into the water and scrubbed furiously at it. Bad enough that the dark, heavy sex at his center had troubled the margins of her dreams all these months. She was damned if it would interfere with her waking life.

  She hauled simmering water from the fireplace to the basin, poured it in, and plunged her hands into it. Too hot. Too painful. Good.

  The water cooled. The memory grew bearable.

  Gilles had gone upstairs to see to Papa, leaving her to fuss with quilts and pillows. She’d stared down at her bed for what seemed like hours, finally turning away to gather up some clothes to wear the next day. She fumbled with the garments stored in the chest, taking forever to choose a dress and even longer to find a blue ribbon for tying back her hair. Finding a pair of stockings that didn’t need darning became a major undertaking. Her threadbare stock of aprons and fichus was pathetic, she thought.

  But finally she had no choice but to turn—with infinite slowness—and look at him again.

  The rising moon cast shifting light upon his hands and cheekbones. She wanted to touch him but she was afraid—afraid to wake him, and afraid of what he’d awakened in her. So she simply studied his face as though a schoolmaster had told her to memorize it. She considered how much she liked an aquiline nose on a man, when it was narrow and delicate, with flaring nostrils. She wondered how she’d missed the vulnerable notch at the center of his upper lip. She examined the slight widow’s peak above his high forehead and the tracery of his eyebrows, admiring the graceful arcs dispassionately, as though they were the vaulting of a cathedral.

  His black hair fanned out upon her pillow. Well, it would have fanned out, she thought, if it had been clean. It would gleam and catch the light’s rainbows like a jet-black silk fan, if it were clean and brushed. She imagined washing his hair, drying it gently with a linen towel, brushing it until it crackled with electricity. She’d loop a strand of it around her hand like a skein of black silk embroidery thread.

  Her breath caught in her throat as though she’d been jolted by the imagined electricity of his hair. Her gasp became a moan and then a long shudder, leaving her face hot and her thighs weak and trembling. She fled the room to take care of Gilles and Papa.

  The water in the basin was cold and greasy. Time to empty it and start fresh with hot water from the hearth. Time to forget about him and the naive, impressionable girl who’d stood staring at him—was it only a few months ago? Just a night coach’s ride from here?

  No matter. That girl was no more herself than the heroine of a book she once might have liked to read. In another life. When she’d had books to read. Before he’d blown out the candle and changed everything.

  Chapter Two

  His valet tossed the tea-stained silk stockings onto the back of a chair, atop this afternoon’s coat and breeches. Glancing at their reflection behind him in the mirror, the Vicomte caught sight of his own bemused smile as well.

  Well, of course he was smiling—who wouldn’t smile, he thought, after this afternoon’s encounter in the library? Her
image glowed in his mind’s eye: flushed and tremulous, all freckles and bright hair and round little breasts like quinces.

  Astonishing. How in the world had she come to be serving tea in his father’s chateau?

  Hardly noticing what he was doing, he stepped into the breeches the kneeling valet held out for him. Obedient and absentminded as only someone who’s been bathed and dressed by others all his life can be, he extended his arms, lowered his head for the gauzy linen shirt with intricate tucks at the shoulder.

  But now he shook his head. No, not the pink waistcoat with fussy gold embroidery. The dark red velvet was better, a little soberer.

  “And just brush my hair straight back into its queue, Baptiste. Don’t try to make it curl.”

  He’d been kept (he loathed the word, but had to admit that it was accurate) for the past several months by a woman who liked to see him dressed like an organ-grinder’s monkey. He hadn’t had any choice: she’d paid for the clothes; the only garments he’d owned when he’d arrived at her country house had been those bloody smuggler’s rags.

  On occasion, however, she’d indulged him by costuming him as he preferred, in simpler and darker garments à la mode américaine. Men dressed with refreshing plainness in America—he’d learned there to appreciate a style and set of manners that made few distinctions between statesman and tradesman. Of course, it was one thing to admire, even to affect, a style. He could still revert to type when affronted or threatened: his eyebrows would rise and his lip would curl with the best (well, the worst) of his class. The epitome, he knew, of a spoiled, parasitical French aristocrat. A veritable Baron Roque.

  So he could hardly, he chided himself, afford to feel superior to his benefactor Madame de Rambuteau. She’d played intermediary between him and his family during his sojourn abroad. It had been she who’d written, telling him to come back to France if he wanted to see his father again. Together they’d planned his return in the letters they’d exchanged. He’d found a way to sneak across the border; she’d sent a coach to fetch him in Montpellier.

  She’d enjoyed caring for him while his leg healed and his family sorted out his legal status. His bad condition and ragged clothes had excited her, allowing her a safe bit of rebellion against the memory of a stodgy husband. It had been easy for Joseph to regale her with tales of seedy encounters and narrow escapes. She’d kept her looks, too; it had been easy to make love to her.

  Not, he supposed, that her looks had really mattered. He’d kissed her dimpled little hands and pretended there were ink stains on the fingers; slid his fingers through her long pale hair and imagined it glowed like copper. And when he’d tongued her breasts he could almost taste freckles sprinkled across them like powdered cinnamon.

  Tolerant, worldly, realistic, she must have understood that it wasn’t really her he’d pleasured so dutifully every night and afternoon. But Madame de Rambuteau was wise; she took what life offered and didn’t waste time yearning for the unattainable.

  A quaint version of the unattainable, he supposed. A shopgirl, no, not even that anymore—she was only a servant now. His servant—well, his family’s, anyway. Unattainable only if you followed the idiosyncratic code he’d adopted almost fifteen years ago. The powerful mustn’t exploit the powerless. Terrible things might happen otherwise. Terrible things had happened once.

  But could anything so terrible happen if he touched her glowing cheek or patted her little derriere as she passed?

  Yes, damn it. They could happen and probably would.

  He wouldn’t touch her and that was final.

  No matter how difficult it was going to be. Much more difficult than it had been last December.

  He’d awakened in a panic just before a wintry dawn with absolutely no idea where he was. A year of exile and hiding can do that, he’d thought—a year of sleeping in palaces and hovels, depending on how well his charm and his skill at gaming had served him. He sniffed: rosemary and lavender. And something else, spicy as cinnamon, tart as lemon. A woman. The sheets of her bed smelled like her.

  Memories flooded back: the endless afternoon, the pain, the dizziness, the growing fear that he’d never get back to the inn where he was supposed to wait for Madame de Rambuteau’s coach. Someone had jostled him in the street—someone in a furious hurry had knocked against him yesterday and from then on his leg had hurt like the devil.

  What awful work to be a book porter, he thought; if he ever had to sneak over the border again, he’d certainly find another way. Smuggling was hard and dangerous, even if a month ago it seemed like an opportunity to bring worthy and interesting literature into France.

  Trudging over rocky paths and hiding from border guards had been grim rather than romantic. The fall he’d taken had almost finished him off. But worst of all was facing all those difficult, demanding booksellers yesterday—what had that pushy fellow’s name been? Ah yes, Rigaud, Rigaud who’d wheedled the last copies of Rousseau’s Confessions out of him when he’d been too weak and dizzy to care.

  Still, he’d made it back into France, all in one piece and without his creditors or other enemies knowing. With any luck his family would pay off his creditors and placate any enraged husbands who might still demand satisfaction.

  He leaned back on the lumpy pillows, breathing rosemary and lavender, lemon and cinnamon as he contemplated the last and most difficult bookseller, the girl whose bed smelled so sweet and spicy. His mouth twisted into a lopsided grin as he remembered how furious she’d been to discover that he’d shorted her father’s order. She clearly wasn’t just a shopkeeper, though she’d impressed and rather annoyed him with her competence. She was a reader: she’d even quoted a passage from Monsieur X’s memoir. And had he imagined it, or had her ink-stained fingers lingered for an extra moment over the pages of that particular book?

  Ridiculous to have been so enchanted by those fingers, he thought. But not so ridiculous to have been stirred by eyes like turbulent Paris skies. And by a wide, determined mouth that was clearly capable of passion.

  And then—ah yes—the freckles. Bronze and copper as tiny autumn leaves, they scattered themselves across her glowing cheeks, drifting down her neck and chest like faint clues on a treasure map and disappearing tauntingly into the snowy linen tied across her breasts. When she’d untied the fichu it had been worth all the pain, all the terror of being weak and wounded. If only he’d been a little more clearheaded. If only he could remember whether there were three or four of those freckles on the breast that had been so close to his face when she’d leaned over him and knocked away his silly eyepatch.

  “She’s engaged,” the little bulldog of a brother had announced when he brought him a bowl of bread and coffee in bed.

  “Well, all but engaged, to someone who understands, as we all do, that her head is altogether too full of books and stories, and that she needs looking after.

  “It’s a good deal for everybody. She’ll get to stay in the book trade. She’ll be an asset to Rigaud—I suppose you met him yesterday?”

  The Vicomte must have betrayed some consternation, for the fellow had laughed merrily.

  “No, of course she’s not engaged to old Rigaud—what could you be thinking, old fellow? Her sweetheart is Rigaud’s nephew; my dear friend Augustin has been crazy about her since we were kids. He and Marie-Laure will run Rigaud’s shop when Augustin’s uncle gets too old. It’s a profitable business, unlike this one.”

  A good deal. A profitable business.

  And was she also crazy about the nephew?

  “And if you so much as touch her, my friend,” the brother had added, “I’ll tear your leg back open.”

  He hadn’t touched her. Well, if you didn’t count lying in her lap and squeezing her hand as touching her. He hadn’t touched her as he’d wanted to, in any case.

  And—half a year later—it seemed that she hadn’t married the nephew.

  He’d liked Gilles, who chatted amiably and volubly now that he’d made it clear—man-to-man, so to speak�
��that Marie-Laure was off limits. He’d been amused by the fellow’s directness and impressed by his devotion to his family, his sweetheart Sylvie, his friend Augustin. And his work.

  “Best work in the world. I’ve always wanted to be a physician. I hung around the university’s medical school when I was a kid and did errands, just for the chance to learn bits and pieces here and there. Lucky for me that my father—the best father in the world—figured out a clever way to pay the school fees.”

  Work you love and the best father in the world. And that sister as well. Lucky for you indeed, Gilles Vernet.

  He couldn’t help but feel bitter and jealous after Gilles had clomped off to school. Though you wouldn’t think that Joseph Dupin, Vicomte d’Auvers-Raimond, would have reason to be jealous of a shabby, carrot-haired student.

  They were a family of nobodies, he told himself: middling people of no consequence, history, or property. Banal, petty tradespeople with not a hint of wit or style: they were, quite simply, not his equals.

  And she was the worst of them. Just look at the silly crayon portrait of her hanging by the side of the bed, he thought. The artist couldn’t have been without talent, for he’d gotten the eyes right: that wonderful, changeable blue-gray wouldn’t have been easy to capture. But why had he given her that rosebud of a mouth? And—how dare he not show the freckles? Perhaps the portrait had been conceived to please young Augustin Rigaud, a man for whom the Vicomte felt an unreasoning and absolute dislike.

  “Monsieur Joseph, they tell me that supper will be late. An hour at least.”

  “That’s all right, Baptiste, I’m not hungry. Why don’t you go ask the other servants about a girl called Marie-Laure? Marie-Laure Vernet. Or perhaps Marianne.” His sister-in-law liked to address her servants by names of her own choosing.

  “Find out when she was hired and where she works. And if she’s managed to hide herself from my father.”