A Refuge Assured

by Jocelyn Green

  © 2018 by Jocelyn Green

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  www.bethanyhouse.com

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan

  www.bakerpublishinggroup.com

  Ebook edition created 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  ISBN 978-1-4934-1369-0

  Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.

  This is a work of historical reconstruction; the appearances of certain historical figures are therefore inevitable. All other characters, however, are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Cover design by Jennifer Parker

  Cover photography by Mike Habermann Photography, LLC

  Author is represented by Credo Communications, LLC.

  To Susie

  For Everything

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  1

  2

  Part Two

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  Part Three

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  Part Four

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  Part Five

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  Discussion Questions

  About the Author

  Books by Jocelyn Green

  Back Ads

  Back Cover

  Thou art my refuge and my portion in the land of the living.

  —Psalm 142:5

  Prologue

  Paris, France

  August 10, 1792

  Propping open the door to her shop, Vivienne Rivard listened to a distant rumble that vibrated the windows and shivered in her chest. A rumble that might have been mistaken for thunder.

  “What do you think, citizeness?” Camille, the wine seller in the shop next door, mopped his brow and nodded toward the noise. The lines framing his chin resembled those of a marionette.

  “The revolutionaries are gathering again. It’s not so different from other times.” Vivienne’s nonchalance rang hollow. Shielding her eyes from the sun, she scanned the rest of the Palais-Royal complex of colonnaded storefronts. On the other side of the central garden, a book printer swept his entryway in the shade of the Roman arcade.

  “Ah, but there is a difference. With the citizen soldiers arriving from the provinces, they’ve grown to twenty thousand.”

  “For the protection of Paris, they said.” Not that she fully believed them. She could hear them singing a new song brought recently by the men of Marseille: To arms, citizens! To arms!

  Slowly, Camille nodded. “To fight the enemies of liberty. Wherever they may be. Have a care, citizeness. Stay inside today.” Taking his own advice, he ducked back inside his shop.

  Turning from the clamor, Vivienne moved about her boutique in a whisper of blue satin, readying for patrons unlikely to come. Sunlight glared upon papered walls and shelves holding ribbons, fans, and bonnets. Everything was trimmed in patriotic red, white, and blue, since all other color combinations were illegal. At the far end of the room, an armoire cabinet housed Alençon and Chantilly lace, expertly crafted by women formerly in Vivienne’s employ. Relics of a different era, the unsold pieces were kept in the shadows, like an aged woman whose charms had faded.

  Crossing to the display window, she looped a basket blooming with bouquets of tricolor cockades over the arm of a life-size fashion doll. A sigh swelled in her chest as she glanced around the shop that had once sold only the finest lace, some of it made by her own hands. Her work had been contracted by the fashionmaker to the queen, which meant Vivienne’s lace adorned Marie Antoinette, the French court, and any woman who could afford to copy them. So high was the demand for lace in Paris that Vivienne had partnered with her aunt in managing a network of lacemakers to supply them. Alençon trim for one gown brought more than six hundred livres. Lace for a mantle brought three hundred or more.

  But no one, save the queen, bought lace anymore, so the shop was forced to sell ribbons and fans to stay open.

  The scent of rose water wafted through the room as Tante Rose emerged from the stairway leading to their second-floor apartment. “Did you manage to get any sleep, Vienne?” Even in this heat, Rose managed to look crisp and stately in her taffeta redingote gown.

  Vivienne smiled and kissed the rouged cheek of the aunt who had raised her. “I slept enough.” Far into the night, hordes had filled the air by singing “La Marseillaise” and shouting, “No more king!”

  As if she, too, could hear the echoes of the haunting refrain, Tante Rose glanced toward the open door and whispered, “What do you suppose it all means? For the king and queen?” She nodded in the direction of the Tuileries Palace, a few blocks to the southwest, where the royal family had been kept ever since a mob of market women had driven them from Versailles three years ago. The war against Prussia and Austria had not been going in France’s favor, and Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were blamed. Treason, the people said. But why would the king and queen betray their own country?

  “I wish I knew.” Vivienne watched a marzipan vendor strolling between the clipped hedges of the garden, but her thoughts were with the queen, her most faithful patron and the scapegoat of France’s every problem. Whore, Paris called her. Madame Deficit. The Austrian. “Surely the National Guard will do their best to protect the king and queen and their children. We can’t have a constitutional monarchy without a monarch, can we?” Vivienne did not point out that not everyone wanted a constitutional monarchy anymore. Or a monarch at all.

  Flies droned in the heavy air. The breeze was an unwelcome puff of humidity that stuck Vivienne’s fichu to her skin.

  “Citizeness?” A little girl stood in the doorway.

  “Lucie!” Vivienne embraced the twelve-year-old child, bussing both her cheeks. “Come in, come in.”

  “Good morning, ma chère!” Tante Rose exclaimed. “How is your family?”

  Lucie bit her lip as she entered the shop, glancing around until she found the armoire behind two green brocade chairs. She crossed the rug and pointed through the glass cabinet door. “My mother made that, didn’t she? Nearly went blind with the working of it.”

  Vivienne clasped her hands in the uneasy pause that followed. She hated the toll lace exacted from the hardest-working women. “The details are very fine. Did you know the other length she made just like it was made into cuffs and a collar for the dauphin, Louis-Charles? Be sure to tell your mother her work was truly fit for a king.”
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  A smile flitted over Lucie’s face. “If you please, I’d hoped to tell her that all her work had been sold. And that—perhaps—you needed more? And just forgot to request it?” Her large eyes pleaded above cheekbones far too sharp. “We could really use the work, you see. I can help. I’m very good.”

  “I have no doubt of that,” Tante Rose murmured. “Sometimes it’s the little fingers that do the best work, yes? Did you know Mademoiselle Vivienne began making lace when she was four years your junior?”

  “Please. Maman is having another baby—her fifth. We need employment.”

  Vivienne’s chest squeezed. Lucie was not asking for charity, but for industry. Her mother, Danielle, was incredibly skilled and unused to idle hands. With a quick glance at Tante Rose, she nodded. “All right, then. An order for you and your mother. I need one and a half ells of Alençon trim for a mantle.” She went to the cash box on the counter and opened it. There wasn’t much left. Still, she counted out the livres the work would have earned in better times and pressed them into Lucie’s palm.

  “But you normally pay for the work upon completion,” the child protested.

  “And this time, in advance. I trust your mother to do a fine job, but there is no rush for it to be done. Make sure she knows, won’t you? No hurry at all.” Lord, sustain them. Sustain us all, she prayed.

  “Merci! Merci!” Pocketing the money, Lucie flew out the door.

  Vivienne met Tante Rose’s gaze. “I know it won’t sell. At least not for a long time.”

  “God will provide for us, Vienne. Just as He is providing for Lucie’s family. Let us be instruments of grace in the lives of others for as long as we’re able.”

  Before Vivienne could respond, a woman stepped inside the shop, and Vienne flinched with recognition.

  “I’m sorry—” The woman took a long stride forward, hand outstretched. “I don’t mean to upset you, I . . . Please, be at ease.”

  But Vivienne was never at ease when this woman was around.

  “Sybille,” Tante Rose breathed, greeting her sister. “Such a surprise.” Though Rose was older by several years, their resemblance was obvious.

  In the pause that followed, gunshots speared the air outside above the roar of a combusting crowd. Recovering her composure, Vivienne looked squarely into Sybille’s familiar green eyes. “Are you here to shop?”

  Sybille shook her head, white gauze trembling on the brim of her bonnet à la citoyenne. At forty-three years of age, she was seventeen years older than Vienne, but her expertly performed toilette gave her a timeless appeal.

  “Then have you some other . . . trouble?” Concern softened Rose’s tone.

  Vivienne sharpened her gaze, alert for signs of affliction, the type common among women of Sybille’s trade. Courtesan, she called herself, but her sins were the same, whether committed with one man or hundreds.

  “There is trouble, I fear, but it isn’t mine.” Sybille fanned herself with bejeweled ostrich feathers. “I know how you pride yourselves on being independent. You’re far more clever than I am, both of you. But if you ever need anything, anything at all, please think of me as a resource. I want to help.” She swallowed. “Things being the way they are, it’s a terrible reversal for you, and the rent on such a place as this . . . If, at any time—oh la! I have rooms,” she finally blurted, along with the address on the rue Poissonnière, northeast of the Palais-Royal. “They’re paid for.”

  Vivienne’s cheeks blazed with heat. “And how often are these rooms—frequented?”

  Rose snatched up a sandalwood fan and worked to cool her beet-red face.

  Sybille’s feathered fan slowed, then flurried again at her slender neck. A raven ribbon of hair curled and bounced near her jawline, the very shade of Vivienne’s own. “Not at all. I am provided for, but I am alone. All alone, as it happens.” Her voice trembled. “Forgive me if I’ve said too much. I meant no offense to either of you.”

  Guilt trickled through Vivienne, unreasonably. She had not asked to be born of Sybille’s illegitimate coupling. Sybille had certainly never pretended to be Vivienne’s mother in any sense of the word other than the biological. She had chosen her path, and it didn’t include her own family. At least not until now.

  “If you find yourselves exhausted, financially or otherwise, or there comes a day when your trade places you in danger—”

  “What kind of danger? Why? We’ve done no wrong.” Behind Rose’s quiet alarm, the din of angry crowds crescendoed outside.

  Sybille shrugged. “Lacemakers are as unfashionable as lace itself. It’s like silk—a sign of aristocracy. And aristocrats are as unpopular as the monarchy right now.”

  Tante Rose slid a glance to Vivienne, brows arched high. She pulled Vienne aside and whispered, “Could Sybille’s offer be God’s provision?”

  Vivienne’s spirit groaned at the notion. “We’ll be fine. It will all be fi—”

  Her words were drowned in an explosion of noise. Cannon fire?

  Vivienne rushed outside, where other shopkeepers streamed from arched doorways to investigate the sound. Heat shimmered in choking waves that smelled of yeast and coffee, of sweat and sulfur and sunbaked earth. Clouds of smoke boiled in the sky. Coldness spread from the center of her chest while perspiration slicked her skin.

  His apron smeared with ink, the book printer pointed and shouted.

  A loose knot of men stomped into the Palais-Royal from the southwest in bloodstained trousers and shirts, red caps pushed back on their brows. “No more king! No more veto!” they yelled. Two of them dragged bodies, swearing and complaining of the weight before they finally stopped. Kneeling, they stripped blue uniform jackets and red breeches from the dead Swiss Guards. Swiss Guards, the protectors of the king. A butcher’s knife bounced light into Vienne’s eyes as it plunged into a corpse.

  She covered her mouth in a soundless scream. More people streamed into the courtyard, and the mob teemed and frothed around her, brandishing sticks and knives, axes and broken bottles. Scraps of uniform with flashing gold buttons. Gobbets of human flesh. Her heart hammered against her corset, urging her to flee, but the citizens of Paris were a living, writhing jail around her.

  Several National Guardsmen rose above the crowd, eyes wide beneath shining brims, mouths open in shouts she could not hear. Would they restore order? Would they stop the carving up of the bodies in the street?

  How tall the Guardsmen were. Giants. But the way their heads bobbed and swayed . . . A chill spiraled up her spine as she met their unblinking stares. The masses streamed past, and then the Guardsmen were directly in front of her.

  No, only their heads. On pikes.

  Strength abandoned her, and she dropped to her knees in the gravel. When she pushed herself up from the ground, her hands came away wet with blood. In horror, she looked around. Crimson streams trickled between the rocks at her feet. Flowed more quickly in the gutters where the dead were trampled.

  A hand roughly seized her arm and propelled her toward the edge of the throng. “What do you mean by coming out here?” Camille hissed. “Paris has gone mad.” He released her with a shove. “Go home. Be safe.”

  But she knew her home—like Paris, like France—would never be safe for her again.

  Chapter One

  Nineteen Months Later

  Paris, France

  8 Germinal, Year II

  She should be numb to this by now, the way skin exposed to cold eventually lost feeling. Instead, the repetition did not dull the pain but increased it, like the lashing of flesh already filleted.

  “Where is Rose? She’s not still vexed because I won’t make lace with her and Grand-mère, is she?” Sybille’s voice lifted weakly from beneath the yellow silk coverlet she had pulled over her disfigured nose. “Why won’t she come to me? I miss her so.”

  Always the same question, until Vivienne feared she would go mad reliving the answer. She sat at the marble dressing table in Sybille’s boudoir, mending a tear in a pillowcase. The n
eedle slipped and pricked her finger, forming a crimson bead on her skin. What was one drop of blood, when the guillotines in the plazas spilled rivers of it?

  “Where is Rose?” Sybille asked again.

  With a sigh, Vivienne laid her sewing in the basket at her feet. “She is dead.”

  Sybille rolled to her side and struggled up on one elbow. “Oh no! My sister! But how did it happen?”

  A hollowness expanded inside Vivienne. “In her sleep. She died in her sleep.” She pushed the lie past her teeth, for it did no good to further burden a woman whose pox had addled her mind as well as her body. Sybille only remembered life before Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had been guillotined while their children remained imprisoned, life before thousands were beheaded for not supporting the revolution. That Tante Rose had been arrested for lacemaking while Vivienne had waited for bread in the convent’s charity line—Sybille would never understand this. That Rose had been guillotined and buried in an unmarked grave—this Vivienne could barely grasp herself. Lucie and her mother, Danielle, had lost their heads as well, for making the lace Vienne had ordered the day the monarchy was overthrown. In her tortured dreams of that day, when she pushed herself up from the gravel in the Palais-Royal courtyard, she knew the blood on her hands belonged to them.

  Sybille’s coverlet slipped from her face. Ulcered lips formed her next question, as usual: “No pain?”

  “No pain.” After all, the guillotine was the humane way to separate heads from bodies, the quickest path from life to death. Or so they said.

  Closing her eyes, Sybille sank back into her pillow, sorrow etched into her features. Trembling fingers sought refuge in the few patches of hair that remained after the mercury treatment that did more harm than good. “Dear Rose. Did you ever meet her? We quarreled some, but I loved her so.”

  Vivienne crossed the worn rug to perch on the edge of her bed. “Oui. I met her.” A smile stole across her face, though deep down, she felt again the prick of being forgotten. It had been a year, maybe longer, since Sybille last understood that Vivienne was the daughter she’d begrudgingly given birth to. Since then, she thought Vienne to be her lady’s maid and nurse, whose name was neither relevant nor important.