by C. S. Harris
Tom broke into a gap-toothed grin. “Of course, gov’nor!”
Still smiling faintly to himself, Sebastian turned toward the manor’s small, somewhat shabby portico. Virtually anyone else driving out from London uninvited to see the daughter of the last crowned King of France would most likely have been curtly rebuffed. But not Sebastian St. Cyr, heir to the powerful Earl of Hendon, Chancellor of the Exchequer. The estrangement between the Earl and his heir might be well-known, but few understood its reasons, and no impoverished European royal was going to risk alienating the member of the cabinet responsible for all economic and financial matters.
As a result, Sebastian waited in the dingy vestibule for only a few minutes before a powdered footman in threadbare livery appeared to escort him back outside and around the far wing of the house to where Marie-Thérèse Charlotte, Daughter of France, waited to receive him at the entrance to a long topiary arcade that stretched toward a silver shimmer of water in the distance. She had been standing with one of her ladies, her gaze on the canal. But at his approach she turned and nodded her dismissal of the footman.
Sebastian had met her before, at various London balls and dinners. On those occasions she had always been every inch the King’s daughter, dressed in velvets and silks and dripping the diamonds and pearls that her mother, Marie Antoinette, had managed to smuggle out of France with friends in the early days of the Revolution. Today she wore a somewhat shabby gown of dark green wool, made high at the neck with only a modest touch of lace at the collar and cuffs; an unfashionable, heavy wool shawl draped her shoulders. But her carriage was eminently regal, her head held high as she moved to greet him.
“Lord Devlin,” she said, her voice oddly high-pitched and scratchy and still noticeably inflected by her native Parisian accent. “How kind of you to call.”
He bowed low over the hand she offered. “Thank you for agreeing to see me on such short notice.”
She inclined her head but did not smile. He had heard that she never smiled.
Although she was still known in the popular imagination as “the Orphan in the Temple,” those days were long in the past. She was thirty-four years old. As a child, she had been blond and blue-eyed, but her hair had long since darkened to a dull brown. She had a tall, sloping forehead, a long nose, protuberant, red-rimmed eyes, and a somewhat receding chin. There was little of her mother’s famous beauty or vivacity about her, although Marie Antoinette’s disastrous haughtiness was very much in evidence.
Turning, she indicated the woman who had until then remained quietly in the background. “This is my dear companion, Lady Giselle Edmondson.”
Lady Giselle was of much the same age as the Princess, but both taller and more delicately built, with hair of the palest blond and an almost elfin face. The daughter of an English earl and his French wife, she had been born in Paris to an idyllic childhood of soft eiderdowns, lavender-scented gardens, and rose-tinged sunrises over the Seine. A devotee of the Enlightenment, the Earl had greeted the first stirrings of revolution with an enthusiasm bordering on delirium. The storming of the Bastille troubled him, but he’d scornfully refused to join the panicked stampede of his fellow aristocrats for the Channel. By the time the gutters flowed with blood and matted blond hair streamed from the heads of noblewomen carried on pikes through the streets, it was too late.
Gathering his young family, he tried to flee on a dark, windswept night. But they made it less than thirty miles before a howling mob surrounded their carriage. As thirteen-year-old Giselle watched with the faces of her younger brother and sister pressed tight against her skirts, the Earl and his wife were dragged from their carriage and torn limb from limb. Then the jeering, red-capped men and snarling women wrenched the children from her arms.
“We’ll raise them as good sansculottes,” they told her.
Sebastian had heard she spent the next three years searching for her little brother and sister. But she never found them. By the time she finally left France in the train of the newly freed Marie-Thérèse, she was just sixteen.
She had never married. But somehow she’d managed to come to terms with the horrors of her past and achieve an enviable measure of serenity. Unlike Marie-Thérèse, she did not clutch her sorrows to her or wear her sufferings as a badge of honor.
“We have met,” she told Sebastian now with a warmth that was utterly lacking in the Princess, “but only once and very briefly, so I doubt you would remember it.”
“The Duchess of Claiborne’s ball, last June,” he said, returning her smile.
She gave a startled peal of laughter. “Good heavens. How can you possibly recall it?”
He remembered because he’d found her life story so hauntingly tragic, and the degree to which she’d managed to overcome its worst effects inspiring. But all he said was, “Reports of my lamentable memory are greatly exaggerated.”
She started to laugh again, then cast an almost apologetic glance toward the Princess and raised a hand to her lips, as if hiding her smile.
“Let us walk,” said the Princess, turning their steps toward the canal in the distance. “Tell me, my lord: How does your wife?”
Sebastian was aware of Lady Giselle falling in several steps behind them. “She is well, thank you,” he said.
“I hear she is with child. Congratulations.”
“Thank you.”
“And married such a short time! Your wife is fortunate indeed.” Her hand fluttered to touch, ever so briefly, her own flat stomach, an unconscious movement that was there and then gone. She had been married something like thirteen years, yet had never conceived. He’d heard it said she remained convinced that God would some day send her a child, a child who would continue the Bourbon line. But time was running out, both for Marie-Thérèse and for her dynasty.
She said, “You do realize that I know why you are here.”
“Do you?”
“You have made the investigation of murder your special interest, have you not? And a Frenchman named Pelletan was murdered on the streets of London two nights ago.”
“You were acquainted with Dr. Damion Pelletan?”
“You are obviously aware of the fact that I was. Otherwise, why are you here?”
When Sebastian remained silent, she said, “He was a physician of some renown in Paris, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know.”
She kept her gaze fixed straight ahead. “I thought it might be worth my while to consult with him.”
“Somehow, I had the impression Dr. Pelletan was not a royalist.”
He watched her mouth tighten. “No,” she said. “He was not. But he was nevertheless an excellent physician.”
Sebastian studied her fiercely proud profile. She was a woman who had been trained from infancy to dissemble, to never show her true thoughts or emotions. Yet there was no disguising the intense anger that smoldered beneath her carefully correct exterior. He said, “I wonder, do you know a man by the name of Harmond Vaundreuil?”
He expected her to deny it. Instead, she curled her lip and said, “Fortunately, I have never personally encountered the man. But I have heard of him, yes. A vulgar parvenu who believes himself the equal of his betters. There are many such in the government of France these days. But by the grace of God, all will soon be dispersed. Once the Bourbons are restored to their rightful position, Vaundreuil and his kind will be like so many roaches, fleeing before the bright light of God’s divine will.”
Sebastian kept his own features carefully bland. “What about a Frenchwoman, Alexandrie Sauvage? Do you know her?”
“Sauvage?” Marie-Thérèse drew up at the end of the allée and pivoted to look him full in the face. “I do not believe so, no,” she said with perfect calm. “And now you must excuse me. I wish to walk on alone. Lady Giselle will accompany you back to the house.” And she turned on her heel and left him there, her head held high, her spine stiff as she strode determinedly away.
“I’m sorry. She is rather . . . tense today,”
said Lady Giselle, coming up beside him.
In Sebastian’s experience, Marie-Thérèse was always tense. But all he said was, “I suspect I’m quite capable of finding my way back to the house without assistance, if you would rather go after her.”
Lady Giselle shook her head. “She meant it when she said she wishes to be alone.”
They turned to walk side by side back down the allée. After a moment, Lady Giselle said, “I know many find the Princess cold and stiff, even aloof. But she truly is an admirable woman, strong and devout. Her days are spent helping her uncle, or visiting establishments for the relief of orphans and the poor.”
“Is that what she did this last Thursday?”
“Last Thursday? Oh, no; Thursday was the twenty-first of January.”
“The date is significant?”
She looked vaguely surprised, then let out her breath in a rush. “Ah, it is because you’re not French; that is why you do not know. Marie-Thérèse’s father, King Louis XVI of France, was guillotined at ten o’clock on the morning of January 21, 1793. Did you know she has the chemise he wore when he was killed? His confessor saved it for her. It is still stained dark with his blood. Every year on the anniversary of his death, she closets herself with the chemise in her room and spends the day in prayer. She does the same on the anniversary of her mother’s murder, as well.”
Twenty years, thought Sebastian. Her parents had been dead for twenty years, and she had yet to put those dark days behind her and learn to embrace the joys of the living. He wondered if Lady Giselle passed the anniversary of her own parents’ deaths closeted in prayer with a bloody relic. Somehow, he doubted it.
Aloud, he said, “She stays in prayer all day?”
“From before dawn until midnight. She does not leave her room, not even for meals. Her uncle always has trays sent up for her, but she never touches them.”
“So she spent Thursday alone?”
They had reached the long eastern facade of the house, its elegant row of recessed, arched windows forming an incongruous backdrop to the tethered goats and flocks of chickens. She pivoted to face him, her eyes narrowed, her head tilting to one side as she regarded him intently. “What precisely are you suggesting, my lord? That the daughter of the martyred King of France gave us all the slip and crept out to murder some insignificant Parisian physician in a London back alley?”
When Sebastian remained silent, she gave a humorless laugh and said, “But since you asked, I will answer your question. No, she did not spend the day alone. Every January twenty-first since her release from prison, I have been at her side, praying with her, and holding her when she weeps. No one has ever seen Marie-Thérèse weep in public, and no one ever will. Just as no one will ever know the torments she bears in private.”
He became aware of the creak-creak of a wheeled chair carrying an enormously obese man toward them from around the side of the house. It was pushed not by a footman, but by a thin, foppishly dressed gentleman with a narrow, delicate face, a halo of chestnut-colored curls, and the steady, relentless gaze of a man who decided long ago to meet the world on his own terms and shrug off the consequences.
Lady Giselle cast a quick glance toward the wheeled chair. Then she gathered her skirts in a clenched fist. “Good day, my lord.”
Sebastian stood on the ragged lawn and watched her long-legged stride scatter the bleating goats and squawking, disgruntled chickens as if she were chased by the squeak of the wheeled chair rolling ever closer.
Chapter 12
Sebastian nudged away a speckled hen that was showing rather too much interest in the shiny toe of one of his Hessians, and walked forward to meet the wheeled chair bearing the uncrowned King of France.
He’d been born Louis Stanislas, fourth in line to the French throne, and given the title Comte de Provence. No one ever expected the plump, self-indulgent Comte de Provence to someday be king. And so he was allowed to go his own way, neglecting his studies, amassing staggering debts, and growing fatter every year. His younger brother, the Comte d’Artois, was slim, dashing, and handsome. But not Provence. Even as a young man, he’d been obese. Now in his late fifties and crippled by gout, he could barely walk without assistance.
“Devlin!” he cried when he was still some feet away. “Don’t run off yet! I want a word with you.”
“Your Majesty,” said Sebastian with an elegant bow.
The Comte de Provence laughed, his plump, rosy-cheeked face still surprisingly youthful and creased with a smile of habitual good cheer. “How very diplomatic of you, young man! And without a moment’s hesitation too. Most people in your position hem and haw in painful indecision. You can almost see the agonized thoughts tumbling one after the other through their heads. Do I address him as if he were indeed the crowned King of France, rather than an impoverished exile? Should I call him the Comte de Provence? Or I should follow Napoléon’s lead and refer to him as the Comte d’Isle?” The Bourbon’s enormous, protuberant belly bounced up and down. “At least I have yet to have anyone address me the way my niece styles Napoléon, as ‘the Criminal’!”
“Does she really?”
“Oh, yes; she has for years.” Twisting awkwardly in his chair, he reached up with noticeable tenderness to touch the right hand of the man pushing him. “Ambrose, if you would be so kind? A walk toward the chapel might afford the most privacy, don’t you agree?”
Ambrose LaChapelle glanced over at Sebastian, a faint, enigmatic smile curling his lips. “Oh, most definitely.”
Sebastian had met LaChapelle before. Born into an aristocratic family in Avignon, he’d fled France as a youth to fight in the counterrevolutionary émigré army led by the Prince de Conde. When the army was disbanded, he’d joined the Comte de Provence in exile, first in Russia, then in Warsaw, where he’d risen quickly in his royal master’s favor. Sebastian had heard that he owed his rapid elevation to his willingness to do anything for his uncrowned king.
Anything.
“Your father and I were good friends in our youth, you know,” Provence said, his voice raised so as to be heard above the squeak of the chair’s wheels and the crunch of the weed-choked gravel beneath their feet. The winter-bared oaks and elms of the neglected park closed in around them, dark and somber in the flat light.
“No, I didn’t know,” said Sebastian.
The Bourbon’s eyes practically disappeared behind his puffy, smiling lids. “Hendon never told you about his salad days in Paris, did he?” He tried to laugh, but it quickly degenerated into a rasping cough. “Golden years, those were. Golden. Horses, jewels, châteaux, carriages, wine . . . We had it all. I once ran up a debt of a million livres, and my brother the King paid it off. Think of that! A million livres. What I wouldn’t give for that kind of money now. We thought those days would never end. But they did.” He cast Sebastian a quick, sideways glance. “I suppose you think we should have seen it coming, and so we should have—so we should! I tell Marie-Thérèse all the time that when two percent of a nation has all the wealth and the other ninety-eight percent of the people pay all the taxes, a bloodbath is inevitable. Inevitable!”
Sebastian had heard that an intense and at times acrimonious disagreement raged within the French royal family. The Comte de Provence favored a limited, parliamentary monarchy and was willing to give numerous concessions to the people of France if they would only allow him to return. But both Marie-Thérèse and Provence’s own younger brother, Charles, Comte d’Artois, were ultraroyalists, stubbornly adhering to their belief in the divine right of kings and insisting upon nothing less than a reimposition of absolute monarchy.
Sebastian said, “In my experience, most people tend to believe even in the face of all evidence to the contrary that things will never change.”
The Bourbon sighed. “True, true. Although I’ve been exiled from France for more than twenty years now. So, God willing, this is one state of affairs that will change, and soon. I would not like to die on foreign soil.”
“The n
ews from the Continent sounds encouraging—if you can call the slaughter of half a million men encouraging.”
The Bourbon’s jovial face went slack. “Ghastly, is it not? All those dead men, strewn across Russia.”
The genuine depth of his grief took Sebastian by surprise. He found himself wondering if Marie-Thérèse had ever spared a moment’s sorrow for the war dead of the nation over which she hoped one day to reign as queen. Somehow, he doubted it. She was too busy hugging her own misery and loss to herself.
As if aware of the drift of his thoughts, Provence said, “But you did not come all the way out here to discuss either philosophy or my long-lost youth, did you?”
Sebastian smiled. “No, sir. I wonder, have you ever heard of a young French doctor named Damion Pelletan?”
“Hah.” Provence slapped the arm of his chair in triumph. “That’s why you’re here, is it? Told you so, Ambrose; didn’t I?”
Sebastian glanced at the courtier, who kept his gaze trained straight ahead, his features composed in an expressionless mask. “So you did know him?”
“Me? No.” Provence nodded toward a small redbrick building half-hidden by a nearby stand of oaks. “Look at that. See it? I’m told that at one time, it was a rectory. Now it is home to a duke, two counts, their wives and children, their aged mothers, and their unwed or widowed sisters and their children. There isn’t an outbuilding on the estate that isn’t overflowing—barns, stables, even an old Gothic folly in the gardens. In the main house itself, we’ve had to divide chambers and erect partitions in the gallery. I occupy what was once a small study off the library; Marie-Thérèse has an apartment next to the muniment room, and the exiled King of Sweden is in the chapel. More than two hundred people live here. Think about that! Aristocratic men and women raised in the finest châteaux of France, now sleeping in stalls and chicken coops. Believe me, in such conditions, very little happens at Hartwell House that is not soon known by all.”
The spires of the estate’s neo-Gothic chapel rose before them, delicate and somber in the cold winter light. Provence stared at it for a moment, then said, “What I’m trying to say is that even though she hugs the truth of it to herself, it’s well-known that my niece sees many physicians. Even after all these years of marriage, she still hopes for a child. God knows, this family will never get any heirs from my loins, and nothing is more important to Marie-Thérèse than seeing the House of Bourbon restored to France for all eternity.”
