"It will only take a word from me," he whispered, smiling into her eyes. "They will tear you apart."
"Try it," she ground out, her smile gracious. "Two can play this game." And kissed him back. "What's it to be, Raouly darling? Your head or mine?"
He laughed at the challenge but as he drew breath to enlighten her, an enterprising student grabbed his ankles and he collapsed backwards with a yell onto a chair of arms and was hoisted shoulder high. Before Fleur could resist, she too found herself jolted, her buttocks bounced between two unequal shoulders. It was electrifying, uncomfortable and horrific. At least her boots, tightly laced, stayed on her feet. Her shoes would have gone long ago. She slapped at a hand groping to souvenir a garter.
"Wait!" she cried.
The edge of fear in her voice reached Raoul. He looked back over his shoulder and for an instant let an exultant, cruel smile curl his lips, but then he relented and bade the fellows carrying him slow down while those carrying the actress caught up. "Don't put your hands up her petticoats, mes amis," he warned, his voice dark. "She's mine, all mine."
One young woman dragged free the laurel wreath that necklaced a nearby banner, and Raoul's bearers lowered him down so the chit might crown him. Fleur Bosanquet flicked him a vindictive look as though he was the Emperor Caligula. Pointedly, he directed her attention back at the cluster of deputies watching them and saw her shudder. But he had his own misgivings about his audience. What price envy?
"Ohhh!" That was from his jiggled consort. Unused to military academies and student blanketings, she shrieked as the young men carrying them zigzagged and whooped, clashing their burdens together. Her merriment was cosmetic. Raoul's palm met hers in a slap of triumph but he held her hand now, keeping them parallel.
They were borne down the street in ancient Roman fashion, and might have ended up ducked in Paris's version of the Tiber had a military detachment not put an end to it, and bade the students carry them soberly back within an escort of pikes to the Panthéon and the waiting deputies. Fleur Bosanquet looked like a settling top about to keel as they stood her down. Not giddy from the euphoria at all, her grin was wobbly, her eyes wide as she looked up at Raoul. Sometimes he forgot she was only nineteen. He read the subtle relief that mirrored his own. She had been afraid. He had won this round. But the game wasn't over.
The cobbles seemed to shift like tide-washed shingle as he landed feet down. A congratulatory hand, Danton's, clapped his shoulder. Raoul repossessed his pretty royalist's hand. On the other side of Fleur, Hérault staked a sullen claim. They were jostled good-naturedly back up to the coffin, which waited like some monstrous Pandora's box, surrounded, it seemed, by half the Convention.
"So who is it in the bloody coffin?" Danton boomed, yanking the symbolic bloodstained sash off the pike and tossing it at Raoul. "Is this yours?"
Trying to ignore the dark red blotches marring the broad stripes of colour, Raoul ran the fabric through his fingers and recognised the familiar snagged thread at one end. Who had stopped a bullet meant for him? Christ! One of the royalists must have...
"Well, man?" Marat, the hack, the great sorter through the city's detritus, was waiting.
The glorious taste of power had ebbed and exhaustion was seeping in to replace it. In a controlled voice that seemed very distant, an automaton called Raoul de Villaret responded. "I am sure this is mine," he said, trying to exert common sense over the emotions rattling to be freed. He would have sold the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles for some solitude to piece the facts together. "Where was I—I mean, he—killed?"
It was Danton who had read the report. "Four of them dined at the England Hotel in Lisieux, including this fellow pretending to be you, so it's likely the attack took place next day. Tinkers discovered your coach abandoned in woodland east of Caen the day after that. The man in your uniform was already dead and there were no papers on the body to identify him. The local authorities assumed it had to be you."
Raoul clawed his good hand through his hair. "We were attacked west of Mantes-la-Jolie, nowhere near Caen. My papers must have got them through all the pass controls."
"How very fascinating," cut in Robespierre, his lawyer's mind sorting the possibilities. "The first attack might be construed as calculated, but two attacks on the same coach... Are we or are we not dealing with mere coincidence?"
"Coincidence!" The scoff came from a Commune official lurking at Marat's shoulder. The printer, Quettehou. "I can give you another coincidence, messieurs. My uncle was also fatally attacked as he travelled to Caen and she was behind it!" He jabbed a finger towards Fleur.
Raoul sensed rather than saw the girl recoil. If she had incited her brother to take his life, let them have her; if she hadn't, he prayed the actress in her would carry her through. The hubbub ceased but she didn't speak. And nothing was making sense. Diable! The ghosts of his fingertips throbbed.
"Citizen Quettehou," the actress answered with a sigh as though the fellow was a young boy who needed sistering. "Your open hatred of me is no secret. It is three months since my husband died yet you've brought no charges against me nor challenged his will, so I can only conclude you have no evidence for these unkind, jealous accusations. Why don't you open the coffin and see if Citizen de Villaret recognises the corpse as the man who shot him?" Oh my God, had she any idea what she was asking?
"In there," she brazenly patted the coffin lid, her sea eyes mesmerising the men, "is the enemy to the Republic who tried to murder the deputy, not here." Her hand splayed her breastbone just above her cleavage. Oh very clever! Every pair of male eyes enjoyed the licence she afforded them. "Give me a knife or chisel..." she purred."Or are you afraid of what you might find?" The shrug, the challenge to their manhood was like holding out a fresh bone to a hungry street cur. Didn't Fleur know the chance of identifying a two-week-old corpse was like throwing a cow over the moon?
"Well, we've definitely fucked up," complained Danton, indicting everybody in his stare. "Being summer, I suppose no one wanted to identify the body." He grabbed the pikestaff from its pot of earth in front of the coffin, ready to wrench off the blade. "Let's have a look, shall we?"
The subtle touch on Raoul's arm was from Fleur, her audacity gone. The fifteen-year-old child was back waiting for him to rescue her. She flashed him a swift glance sideways. Damn resourceful little chameleon! She didn't deserve a scrap of help.
"Got your perfumed handkerchief ready, Boissy?" Danton chortled, relishing the horror in all their faces. His enjoyment was hard to fathom. There was a story that he had been away from home when Mme Danton died in childbirth and returned so wild with grief that he had had her coffin exhumed so that he might take her once more in his arms.
"Wait, Danton!" Raoul snapped and swung round on the tiresome printer. "Do you have the evidence to prove your accusations, Quettehou?"
"Not yet, deVillaret. But I know it. Here!" In a mocking echo of Fleur's gesture, the printer thumped his chest between the scarlet lapels. "Perhaps she intended your death also, Deputy. After all you've been investigating her." The fox eyes sought to immobilise him as though he was some barnyard cockerel uselessly guarding a flighty hen, but Raoul had the measure of his audience.
"Since I was present at the fall of the Bastille, Quettehou, no, I rather doubt it."
For an instant there was puzzlement and then they understood. Ribald laughter pilloried Quettehou's accusation as preposterous. Even Marat grinned impishly; but the printer, excluded by his ignorance, turned an unpleasant, cabbagy red.
"I should remember what happened to the Bastille's governor, if I were you, Deputy," he ground out, and with a condescending, valedictory nod that went some way in restoring his self-esteem, he strode away, his footsteps echoing ominously.
Marat slapped at a fly. "Merde! Hope that's not out of the coffin! So, deVillaret, did he have a name, the cul who took your papers."
"No, we shook hands, exchanged cards, he promised to meet for a beer in Lisieux and then he shot me."The sarcasm w
as reckless but the wound in his thigh was aching. He leaned back against the coffin. "Sorry, Marat, there were four of them, it was dark, they were masked. They shot the other passengers and then me. And it's no good opening this thing." The flat of his palm scuffed across the flag. "Even God wouldn't recognise him now." With that, he thrust himself back on his feet. "Now I'll bid you all adieu—attending one's own funeral plays hell with the nerves."
He was almost out the door when Danton caught up with him. "There was actually something in the fellow's pocket which the tinkers missed. The Caen coroner sent it on to us." He thrust a hand into his coat pocket. "Take it, you'll be wanting to investigate further."
It was Fleur's ring.
Chapter 18
It was some minutes before Raoul could speak to anyone. He sank down on the steps outside, refusing the offer of Armand's company, and buried his head in his hands.
"Here, Deputy." A whiskered sergeant crouched down and urged a flask at him. "Your young woman's round the corner," the older man chuckled. "Looks like she's suffering from morning sickness like my daughter. Due to you, eh, you young dog?"
So Fleur Bosanquet's stomach had turned revolutionary. About the only bit of her that had. Revived by the liquor, Raoul clambered to his feet. Discovering her drooped on the step like a wounded songbird reduced to a sad huddle of feathers, it was hard to think evil of her, to blame her for the pain and death of the last two weeks. The chef was hovering over her like a guardian angel and the grisette with the lank blonde curls sat alongside wringing freckled hands. Raoul did not ask them to leave; they read their orders in his face.
Ill-prepared, Raoul stood for a moment, as if trying to find some kind of equilibrium, before he stepped down and, with his good hand, turned Fleur's tear-splashed face to his. "Tell me, did you commission this?" He thrust out his damaged hand.
"No."The damp lashes did not close against him. "I don't hold with revenge either." His expression was reflected back with no less steel, but the girl made use of weaponry that was hard to resist. "Is it the tumbril for me, Raoul?"
Oh, he could so easily crush her royalist frailty beneath his republican heel. But of all her despicable family, she should be salted and preserved.
"Suppose—" He set a hand beneath her elbow and drew her to her feet."Suppose we were to settle these matters somewhere less public?"
Her humour rose defensively. "At fourteen paces? Your rapier against my honour?"
Raoul knuckled the defiant teardrops from her cheeks. "I was thinking closer than that, but the choice of weapons will suffice."
Exhausted and defeated, she was a signed treaty waiting to be ratified, or was she? Although Raoul permitted himself to look triumphantly down into her clouded eyes, aware of the childlike tendrils of hair curling against her cheeks and lips that trembled and parted for him, he recognised his own susceptibility. Murder might masquerade behind her loveliness. He had always known that.
With the borrowed coat hooked over his shoulder, he steered her towards the Rue Saint-Jacques. He did not speak. If Fleur Bosanquet had cold-bloodedly arranged his death, he would arrange hers.
* * *
"I'm not going in there!" Fleur dug her heels in as she realised he was propelling her towards the Palais de Justice and, worse, the ominous Conciergerie prison. She squinted sideways at the new stone mansions flanking the square, estimating her chance of escape, but not one of the fine front doors was open. Could she evade him among the sacks and bales in Notre Dame? Oh, fine chance! Ahead to her right lay the sprawling, ancient Hôtel Dieu, but de Villaret would know the tricks of the colonnades and passageways better than she, and so would the soldiers he could whistle up in an instant. Damn him!
"Please," she whimpered, hating herself for this sudden deficit of courage, but the hand on her arm only tightened firmer.
"Let us get this done with, shall we?"
Even in workman's clothes de Villaret exuded a sense of a prowling power that did not require a uniform, but it took a moment for the guards at the barrier to recognise his face, wilder and leaner after his ordeal. "Lord save us, Deputy! Gambled away your breeches?"
Fleur knew the way to where he would interrogate her; she dreaded the terror emanating from those walls, the raw emotion spattered like blood upon the stairs.
"Bonjour, Quentin," her captor said cheerfully, as they encountered a man in a puce redingcote advancing on them down the passageway to the squeaky wince of shoe leather. The autocratic face was one any actor would have envied: dramatic eyebrows, a beaked nose and ebony hair sleeking back from a widow's peak. "More work for me, eh, Raoul?" the other man quipped as he passed.
The breath of de Villaret laughter's caressed Fleur's cheek. "Ah, this one's special."
Braking halfway along the upper corridor, the other man spun about. "You're alive, Raoul."
"Very much so. I'll tell you all about it later." He hastened Fleur on, adding, "Fouquier-Tinville, accusateur public. Sorry, I didn't introduce you." Sorry! Oh yes, and there was no such thing as a guillotine. De Villaret would probably hand her over to cher Quentin personally when he had finished wringing her like a dishcloth. No doubt they regularly prearranged prison sentences over the vin ordinaire.
"Any more acquaintances?" she muttered, trying to pull free. "Sanson the executioner? Marie-Antoinette?"
His office was not secured. He arranged Fleur in front of his desk and, striding round to the drawer, removed a key and locked the door."We don't want to be disturbed." The missing weeks had emeried the pity from his face. "Sit down! There!" He indicated the superior wooden-armed seat behind his desk.
"Th-there?"
"Yes." For himself, he dragged a simple chair with a wicker seat out from the corner, and stood poised to straddle it in reverse, then changed his mind and seated himself in conventional manner. "Now, go on, interrogate me!"
"P-pardon?"
"Ma mie, there will be no peace between us until you stop behaving as though I am a blend of Torquemada and Caligula. Go on, interrogate me!"
"Y-you made me believe..." The inkwell was not only within reach but full.
He read her intention and said swiftly, "Yes, I made you believe that you were under arrest, but you were wrong, weren't you? Just like you are wrong in everything else. Now, leave the inkwell alone and proceed! I'm not feeling patient."
Damnable trickster! Greasepaint experience allowed Fleur to ease her features into the sympathetic smile she kept for little furry animals and infants. "You are sure? Your poor hand... Don't you feel—?"
His furious look quelled her. "Part of me feels like pushing up your petticoats and pleasuring you across my desk but I'm sure you'd prefer somewhere softer and with a lover who's not on trial. Stop looking at me like that."
"You still want me?"The words were softly uttered.
"I have been raddled with lust for you ever since we met in Caen and even more so since that night at your house. I'm burning with lust for you, you infuriating harpy. Now clear your mind and let us get this over with."
Clear her mind when those golden eyes of his were staring at her with such an intense mixture of exasperation, fondness and desire? He was right; this poison between them needed to be exhumed and destroyed. But he was clever; she was already weakened by the magnetism that charged the air between them, seduced by the thought of his hands sliding upwards beneath her skirts and the wickedness of him taking her between the quill-pens and the books of law.
"Concentrate, citizeness! I'm a regicide and you're a royalist. Why did you want to kill me, citizeness, or is it an ongoing ambition? What crimes have I perpetrated?"
The actress in her rose to the cue. She imagined herself in the public prosecutor's creaking shoes: "Evidence has been laid against you, Citizen de Villaret. It is alleged that on the day of—"
"Damn it! Fleur, you don't have to do a formal impersonation of Fouquier-Tinville. Cut to the bone."
"A witness saw you last September covered in blood at the scene of my fa
ther's murder in the Rue... Well, never mind, outside L'Abbaye Prison. Prove your innocence, citizen!" The flourish made little impression. "What are you doing?" she protested. "You're not supposed to stand up and move around."
"I'm getting out a map," he replied with irritating maleness, and selecting one from several propped-up rolls, untied the faded tape and anchored it on the desk facing her. It was dated 1787.
"So, citizen," she demanded. "What's this to the point?"
He merely shrugged and scraped his chair up closer.
"Your father's death took place on the second of September last year," he began as though he was the inquisitor; catching himself out he raised an exasperated eyebrow at her. "You are supposed to ask me my movements on that day." But before Fleur could comply, he launched into his defence. "My poor mother had been desperately trying to find me all morning and it was noon when I returned to my office and found her waiting."
"Where had you been?"
"Well, it was the day we had to elect the Paris deputies to the Convention and I was one of the candidates, so I had been down to the electoral assembly at the Jacobin Club to vote, and afterwards I attended a meeting at David's house and—"
"But what has all this got to do with your mother?" She received a glare.
"Because, citoyenne accusateur, my mother wished to inform me that my father had been arrested that morning on suspicion of sheltering an anti-republican priest."
"Had he?"
"Hidden a priest? Yes, probably, although my mother had no knowledge of it. My father never confided such matters to her. Anyway, she was very distressed. She had no idea where he had been taken and she wanted me to find out and pull all the strings I could to get him released. Well, I told her there was nothing I could do until my father came up for trial, except to ensure he was comfortable. The trouble was I could well believe that he had been up to his neck in counterrevolutionary activities. He was an extremely religious man and the Republic's harsh dealings with the Church would have easily turned him into an active enemy.
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