“More sans-culottes?” Her voice hoarse with fatigue, she swallowed and wiped her palms against her apron.
“Sans-culottes? Oh, there are plenty of those, as ever. But some of the Americans’ hospitality is waning toward émigrés. It’s the fever. Reasonable or not, they grow resentful all over again, believing that the French brought it on the ships.”
“How resentful?” She licked her dry lips.
“So far it hasn’t gone beyond rude insults. However, we both know where that can lead.” He raised an eyebrow, clearly recalling the Fourth of July parade. “I insist on escorting you home.”
Vivienne fought back a yawn. “A moment, please.” She stepped out of his hold. “I must check on Martine first. It will do her good to hear that Henri is faring so much better.”
“Mademoiselle?”
Vienne turned back to the boy, surprised to hear his voice again. His eyes were still closed.
“My name is Louis.”
She stared at him, waiting for an explanation. “What did you say?” she whispered. But he had slipped back into sleep.
Sebastien inclined his head and cut his voice low. “Did he say his name is Louis-Charles?”
Louis-Charles, the boy king? Was it possible? “That’s not what he said.”
Sebastien stayed right behind her as she threaded between the beds toward Martine. “Louis. He said his name was Louis,” he insisted. “I thought his name was Henri Chastain. Why would he say otherwise?”
Through the fog of sleep deprivation, her mind fished for a way to make sense of it. Rumors were strong that Louis-Charles was not in prison but in hiding. Philadelphia would seem a perfect haven. But Henri’s mother was Martine, not Marie Antoinette. A lady-in-waiting to the queen.
But was it possible that Martine was not his mother at all and had only been charged with his care? Was there more to her hermit-like tendencies than she’d been free to explain?
Vivienne stilled and looked back to where the boy lay, a pale white face in a sea of yellow patients. One thing was sure—he was not delirious with fever.
“What can it mean?” Sebastien pressed.
Vivienne rubbed the heels of her hands over her eyes. “I don’t know.” After all, it could all be coincidental. What were the chances that she’d been living with the exiled king of France all these months? A shock spiraled through her at the notion. “I need to check on Martine.”
He followed. When Vienne arrived at her friend’s bedside, Sebastien was an arm’s length away. Dr. Stevens was already there, stooping to feel the pulse in Martine’s wrist. Straightening, he turned to Vienne. “She is sinking.”
Vienne’s heart slammed in her chest. That couldn’t be right. Henri was recovering, and so must she. “What do you mean? She isn’t . . .”
“There is nothing more I can do for her. She’s as comfortable as she can be. You’re her friend, yes? Say your good-byes sooner rather than later.” He bowed and walked to the next bed.
Vienne lowered herself onto the stool beside Martine. A warm hand on her shoulder told her of Sebastien’s presence, but she did not look away from her friend. She took Martine’s hand. “I’m here, mon amie.”
Her eyelids fluttered. “Henri?”
“He is better, or nearly there. I have no doubt he’ll make a full recovery. He asked about you.” She meant to sound bright, cheerful. It only came across as strained.
“He is a good boy, Vienne. You must take him as your own son now. Protect him.” Martine’s eyes shot open, the whites of them full yellow and fierce.
Sebastien swore under his breath. Vienne did not blame him for being startled.
“Keep him safe,” Martine labored to say. “Or they will kill him.”
A chill shuddered through Vivienne. “What?”
Martine tightened her grip on Vienne’s hand, her untrimmed nails digging into her palm. “Keep him safe. Keep him hidden. It is the only way.”
“Martine—” Vienne faltered. She should not expect an answer she could count on, not now, when the poor woman was at death’s door. Still, she had to ask. “Henri said his name is really Louis. What did he mean?”
“Shh!” Martine’s face twisted in agony. “No one was supposed to know. No one can know. They will kill him if they so much as suspect him to be the king.”
Tears ran down Vienne’s face. Her friend was sliding away from her in body, mind, and spirit. “Who? Where is the danger?”
“The Jacobins, here. The danger is right here.”
Sebastien muttered an oath.
“Promise me!” Martine rasped, yellow eyes wild.
Vienne did, and the dying woman exhaled.
“Stay.” Martine’s breath came in shallow sips, and her grip on Vienne’s hand relaxed. Jaw slackening, her mouth hung slightly open as her lids fluttered closed.
Sebastien knelt on one knee beside Vienne. “She is as gone now as she’ll ever be. I’m taking you home.”
Vivienne shook her head. “My place is with her, until the end. Leave us, please.”
He did.
Whispered prayers formed on Vienne’s lips as tears ran down her cheeks. “Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, receive her. Be her refuge, at last. Be ours.” It was all she could manage.
She and Martine had not divulged the details of their pasts, for sharing the present had been enough. Their friendship had been woven from slender threads, with blank spaces where secrets were kept. It was precious, nonetheless. A piece of lace, gently worked. The empty places were as meaningful as the strands that embraced them.
In the morning, Martine was gone, and it was Vienne who felt unraveled.
Willingly, Vienne paid for a coffin and a plot of ground, and for a priest to speak words over Martine’s ravaged body, though no one else was present save herself, Henri, and Madame Barouche. Everything Vienne had not been able to do for Sybille and Tante Rose, she did for the queen’s lady-in-waiting. Once the priest and Madame took their leave, she knelt at the grave and wept silent tears, not only for the friend underground, but for all of her losses combined. And for Henri, who was an orphan now, as she had been.
She glanced at him as he sat slumped on the earth beside her, rocking himself, clutching Bucephalus, the small stuffed horse he’d brought on the crossing from France. It was always in his hand now, even in sleep. She wondered if he noticed or cared that the velvet on the ears had grown threadbare.
Her heart squeezed to look at the boy, who appeared two summers younger than his actual nine years. She had reduced her hours at the tavern to mornings only, with Madame and Paulette insisting Henri was no trouble while Vienne was absent, but she hated not being there when he woke each day. He barely spoke lately and cried in his sleep. Last night when Vienne had tried to comfort him, he only sobbed more despairingly upon finding her, and not his maman, in the dark.
His pain touched a bruise inside her, a soreness she had learned to protect. Though she had not physically buried her mother until this year, Vienne was younger than Henri when she learned Tante Rose was actually her aunt. That her real mother had never lived with her and never would. The day Vienne had struck the word maman from her vocabulary had felt like a death to her. Lord! She prayed desperately. Fill me with his mother’s love and with Your strength. Make me brave enough for both of us until he can have courage on his own.
Late summer heat made pungent the tang of freshly turned earth and the perfume of the roses laid atop the mound. Vienne inhaled the fragrance forever tied to Tante Rose in her mind. The breeze wafted the smell over her, a vivid reminder that even in the presence of loss, there could be sweetness and beauty and life. Her aunt had been all those things to Vienne. She prayed she could be as much to this forlorn boy beside her.
“How are you, Henri?”
He waited so long to reply that she wondered if he’d heard her. Then, a shrug. “My stomach hurts.” Still holding his horse, he pulled a blade of grass from the ground and chewed on it absently.
“Do you need a doctor
?” she inquired.
“No, merci. I’ve had quite enough of those lately, if you please.”
Worry wormed through Vienne as she looked at him. She knew nothing about raising children, especially boys. “Have you ever heard that keeping secrets can make one sick? If they are big enough, and you hold them long enough. If you ever had secrets hurting you, I would want you to let them out. All right? You can talk to me.” Vivienne was all he had left. If he would confide in anyone, it should be her.
Martine’s last words were stones in the pit of her stomach. Who was this boy left in her charge? What unseen dangers did he summon?
“Did you know,” she tried gently, “you told me your real name is Louis?”
Wind ruffled his blond hair. His troubled eyes revealed that Martine had bequeathed to him her fears. “Did I?” He rubbed his toy against his cheek. “Strange. You know my name is Henri. Don’t you?” The wrinkle in his voice brought a sting to her throat.
“Yes. I know your name. I know you,” Vienne whispered as one singing hymns against the darkness. For in his question she heard echoes of what haunted her most. “I don’t know you.” Sybille’s words scraped her ears. Vivienne kissed Henri’s silken hair, breathed in his smell of soap and grass. “Of course I know you, Henri.”
But she wondered now if she didn’t. If he had barricaded himself behind his fear, intent on hiding who he really was. An ache filled her, for she knew too well the loneliness that lived behind such walls.
A flock of birds undulated against the violet sky, and snatches of a psalm scrolled through Vivienne’s mind. O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me . . . thou understandest my thought afar off. She drew comfort from that, and from the idea that the same God who knew Vienne knew Henri, as well, whatever his name may be. In time, she prayed, Henri would trust her with the secrets he now locked away.
Chapter Thirteen
Asylum, Pennsylvania
September 1794
Shoulders and arms burning from the day’s work, Liam balanced on a ladder leaning against a new house in the settlement. Jethro handed him a flat gray stone, and Liam climbed a few more rungs until he could heave it into place at the top of the chimney. “That was the last!” he called below.
Jethro stirred the mortar in his bucket one final time before climbing the ladder on the opposite side of the chimney with it in tow. Liam fished his trowel from his pocket, scooped it into Jethro’s pail, and applied the mortar between the stones. Metal tools scraped as they worked with practiced efficiency.
Liam climbed onto the roof and perched carefully on the ridgepole to fill the chinks from that side. When every remaining crevice had been filled with mortar, he dropped his trowel to the ground and indulged in the view. A broad smile spread over his face. There, near land he and Jethro had labored to clear this summer, were both Liam’s home and Jethro’s. Forested, rolling hills dwarfed the two-story houses from behind. The tips of the leaves were barely starting to turn, so that the hills were flecked with orange and gold and crimson. He may grow weary of the one-hundred-sixty-mile journey between here and Philadelphia, but he would never tire of living here.
“Jethro, come on up here. You have to see this.”
With a grunt, Jethro climbed up to sit beside him. He let out a low, appreciative whistle. “Now that’s the land I’m most interested in.”
“I feel the same. But we’ll not turn down good work, either, will we?”
“True enough.” Jethro mopped his glistening dark brow with the cuff of his linen sleeve.
“And if the work is plenty, all the better.” The settlement sprouting up so near his land offered plenty of employment for when his own chores were complete, which they were, for now.
The fact that Liam spoke French worked to his advantage here. Most of the people who had flocked to this bend in the Susquehanna were nobles and priests, with a few merchants and artisans. Not one of them knew how to build a house, or fell a tree, or plow a field. Which made them only too eager to hire their American neighbors. Dressed in their laces and silks and buckled red-heeled shoes, they could turn up their noses at Liam as much as they wished, as long as they continued to pay him.
Jethro climbed back down the ladder to solid ground. Before Liam followed suit, he looked in the opposite direction of his land and over the French settlement hugging the river. None of this had been here two years ago, and now two dozen houses lined the broad dirt roads, each home about thirty by eighteen feet, like the one he and Jethro had just finished building. They were four-roomed, two-story structures built of hewn and squared logs from the nearby forests. Separate from the main house were a kitchen house and a dining house, with a cool cellar beneath them. All the houses had papered walls, glass windows, and wooden floors, and the women took pains to beautify their spaces with flowers, Lombardy poplars, and fruit trees. For all the evidence of civilization, Liam far preferred the beauty of the land. His gaze swept back to the hills as he climbed down the ladder.
“Oh la! There you are!”
A voice, sharp as a pickax, turned Liam’s head to find a woman with frizzled blond hair and wide gray eyes addressing Jethro as if she knew him. Her green dress shone in the sun, its enormously wide hem dusting the earth. Liam had glimpsed her once or twice before but hadn’t officially been introduced. Beside her, Father Gilbert, whom Liam had grown to respect in the time since he’d moved to the settlement, laid a hand on her shoulder.
“Father Gilbert.” Liam wiped his hands on a towel and tossed it into a bucket. He knew he smelled ripe enough to offend.
“Greetings, friends. This is Madame Suzanne Arquette. This is her house you’ve built. Magnifique! May we look inside?”
Liam gestured toward the cabin. “Door’s open.”
But Madame Arquette was not so easily distracted. She shook her finger at Jethro. “I’ve been looking all over for you! What does this mean, you sneaking around without so much as a hint as to your whereabouts! Why, it’s enough to make me think you’re of a mind to run away. I’ll rid you of that notion one way or another—”
Liam held up his hand to stop her, grateful that Jethro couldn’t understand her language. “What’s this all about, madame?”
“Oh dear,” said Father Gilbert. He pulled at the flesh beneath his chin. “I do apologize.”
Liam glanced at the woman’s pinched face before responding. “I don’t know who she thinks he is, but Jethro Fortune here is a free man, working for pay, same as any of the rest of us American laborers.”
Madame Arquette clenched her fists. “He is not free. He is my slave. Did you think you could steal him from me? He’s branded with my mark. I’ll show you.”
“What’s going on?” Jethro asked as Father Gilbert held her back.
Liam shook his head. “She’s lost her senses, from what I can tell.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“You must remind her of someone she once knew.” Or owned. But Liam saw no need to say it. “Head on home, our work is done for the day. I’ll clean up here.”
“Let’s see your new house.” Father Gilbert steered Madame Arquette through the door.
Liam followed them. While she was inspecting the wallpaper pattern, he pulled Father Gilbert aside. “Is this going to be a problem?” he whispered, looking pointedly at the woman.
Father Gilbert kept his voice low. “She escaped Saint-Domingue after the slave revolt, and her mind hasn’t worked right since. I don’t know how to help clear it. Her family was killed by her own slaves, you see. She hasn’t yet accepted that. Keeps looking for them to arrive any day. And she doesn’t understand why she no longer has her retinue of servants.”
“We have laws in this state against slavery,” Liam said. “Jethro earned his freedom fighting in our war.”
“Oui, monsieur. I understand. I have no stomach for human bondage, myself. Yet I’m at a loss as to how to reason with a mind that has grown unstable.” He sighed. “Your friend may want to keep his di
stance from her.”
Liam watched Madame Arquette make a face as she surveyed the room. “Noted.”
Her heels tapped across the wood floor. “It isn’t nearly large enough.”
“It is the same size as every house except the Grand Maison, and that was built for the queen.” Father Gilbert’s voice held an astonishing amount of patience.
She threw up her hands. “How on earth am I to host my parties? Where will we dance? No, no. This will never do. It is so—rustic.”
“May I remind you that you are in the woods, madame.” Liam smiled.
“Even if I lived on a desert island, I would require mirrors, chandeliers, and paintings,” she snapped. “If I wanted an ugly house, I would have ordered one.”
Well aware he would win no fight with her, Liam bowed and bade her good night.
Father Gilbert stopped him at the door. “I do apologize,” he said again. “Her temper flares during times of change, and she still has not recovered from the arduous journey from Philadelphia. I don’t suppose she can help it. I keep praying for guidance.”
“I don’t blame you,” Liam assured him. But heaven help her if she ever came after Jethro.
“Aha! I nearly forgot. The other mail carrier brought this back with him a few days ago. It means little to me, but perhaps my American friend may want it.” Smiling, Father Gilbert drew a thrice-folded newspaper from his coat. “It looks to be weeks old, I’m afraid, but I thought you’d enjoy reading the news from Philadelphia.”
Liam gladly accepted the offering. “I would indeed. Thank you.” After bidding the mild-mannered Father good-bye, he stuffed the paper into his trousers pocket, loaded his tools into his wheelbarrow, and made his way over the broad road toward his house.
The wind at his back was scented with apples and woodsmoke, and the walk passed in simple splendor. White and purple clover lined the road, and the sun winked at him from the windows of the houses he passed along the way—many of which he’d built himself. Cicadas droned and crickets clipped at the evening’s quiet. Somewhere, a bullfrog twanged. How his father would have loved to call this land home.
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