The English Heiress

by Roberta Gellis

  “So we could.” Roger pretended to brighten.

  “Very good.” Toulon seemed to be satisfied. “What we plan is this—”

  “No!” Roger interrupted. “I beg you, don’t tell me. I am not a talkative man, but what I don’t know can’t slip from my lips by accident or be torn out by torture. You need my house. I need to know no more than that—neither when nor why. From this night on either Leonie or I will be here at all times. Whenever you need the house, it will be ready.”

  Toulon seemed a trifle disconcerted by Roger’s lack of curiosity, and a little disappointed too. Nonetheless, he saw the good sense in it and shortly took his leave. When he was gone, Roger sat staring at the door, unmoving, while Leonie put away the wine and washed up the glasses. She was humming softly. Unaware of the political consequences of freeing the queen, she felt none of Roger’s complex guilt. Nor did it occur to her that Toulon had been far too willing to impart information to a man he hardly knew.

  Leonie was aware they were in danger. If the plot failed and they were accused with the others, they would die. However, she was far more absorbed in the positive possibilities than the negative ones. Her empathy with the political prisoners was, of course, complete. Leonie was not thinking beyond the horror of her own incarceration and the glee she felt in being able to help release those similarly imprisoned. As for the danger—she smiled at Roger’s back as she closed the cupboard on the dry glasses—Roger would not let anything happen to her.

  Chapter Sixteen

  A week passed without giving Leonie any reason to worry or Roger any reason to stop worrying about the outcome of this venture. They knew they were being watched, although it was done discreetly enough so that their neighbors did not become suspicious of them. It seemed reasonable to Leonie that Toulon should take precautions, and she thought no more of it. It drove Roger near crazy because he was afraid that even an innocent delivery or customer coming in would precipitate disaster. Finally, after a miserable Sunday during which leisure gave Roger far too much time to think, a man came into the shop on Monday with an exquisite antique pocket pistol by Negroni that had its snaphaunce lock broken off. Roger winced at the damage done and began to shake his head.

  “I am Commissioner Lepitre, President of Committee on Passports,” the man said.

  For the moment, his mind being fully occupied with the damage to the gun, Roger did not remember that Toulon had mentioned Lepitre in connection with the plot. “I don’t care if you are the Archangel Michael,” he growled. “I cannot fix that gun. It must have a whole new lock mechanism, and I don’t have one and I don’t know where I can get one. The gun is over a hundred years old.”

  Fear flashed across Lepitre’s face. “Didn’t Commissioner Toulon have a pistol repaired here a few days ago?”

  Then Roger stopped wondering how such damage could have happened. The gun was just an excuse. He touched it gently—another beautiful thing wantonly destroyed and probably all for nothing. “Yes,” he said, “that is true.”

  Your name is Saintaire?” Lepitre asked, now nervous and seeking to be sure without committing himself by prodding Roger into an admission that Toulon had spoken of the plot to him.

  “Yes,” Roger replied impatiently. Then, fearing to be thought either uncooperative or loose-tongued, he temporized by adding, “Very much at your service and the service of your friends, commissioner.”

  Fortunately, he had hit the right note. Lepitre was far more cautious than Toulon and found Roger’s carefulness reassuring. He leaned forward as if to examine the gun and said softly, “All the passports will be brought here at the same time. You and your wife will be expected to leave in the morning, immediately after the other party has gone.” Then much louder, ”I am sure you can find some way to mend it. Keep the gun anyway. Perhaps you will hear of another Negroni and can take the lock from that.”

  After Lepitre was gone, the phrase he had used, all the passports, came back to haunt Roger. He could not put his finger on why it disturbed him. Certainly if there were passports for himself and Leonie and the queen and a companion or two, one could say “all”. But Roger could not convince himself. He began to fear that the plan was not to save only Marie Antoinette but her children and Louis’ sister as well. They would never succeed. He knew it—and the feeling of helplessness, which was worse than actively facing any danger, grew greater.

  It was not even possible for him to hide this new development from Leonie because, a few nights later, Toulon again appeared at the back door, carrying a large box. He did not come in, just passed the box to Roger and told him to conceal what was in it. They had no cellar, and the attic under the roof was bare of accumulated odds and ends. Roger looked at the box.

  “Where the hell does he think I can hide something this size!” he muttered furiously, not realizing that Leonie had heard the knock and was again on the stairs with a pistol in her hand.

  “It can’t be a single thing,” she said, shoving the gun back under her skirt as she came down the stairs. “Open it and we will see how to distribute what is in it.”

  They saw more than how to distribute the clothing, for that was what the box held. They saw the whole plot laid out. There were two suits of men’s clothes of the style customarily worn by the commissioners who were in charge of the prisoners, and two of the special scarves that identified these men. Leonie grabbed those up at once and thrust them to the very bottom of the bag in which she kept the rags for cleaning. For a citizen who was not entitled to one of those scarves, to have one was treason and death. Beneath the suits there were two dresses of sober style and color but excellent cloth and cut—typical gowns of wealthy bourgeois wives. And below those were two different sets of clothes for a boy and girl—the soiled and worn garments that the children of a common laborer would wear and another set that matched in quality the woman’s dresses.

  “Well, thank goodness it is nothing worse,” Leonie said cheerfully. “I will hang the dresses and suits with ours. I doubt anyone will notice that the sizes are wrong. The children’s things I cannot put in the wardrobe, of course. They would be noticed. However, they are small. I think—”

  “Leonie,” Roger said tightly, “don’t you understand what this means? Toulon is trying to get all of them out of the country.”

  “Of course,” Leonie responded.

  “What do you mean, ‘of course’,” Roger snapped, his voice rising.

  Leonie blinked at the fury of his tone, then shrugged. “Naturally the queen would not consent to go without her children and her sister-by-marriage. I would not go without my mother and father and brother. Marie Antoinette may be proud and foolish—but she is not a monster.”

  She was not thinking of her answer, however. She was thinking of the change in Roger’s manner to her this past week. Ever since he had promised Toulon there would always be someone in the house and had begun to go out alone more, he had been different. He was always silent or angry now, and although he did not drop off to sleep immediately as he sometimes had done when he was physically very tired, neither did he offer the tentative touches or kisses with which he customarily initiated their lovemaking.

  The only way Leonie could account for this change was that Roger had met another woman, who being fresh, was more interesting to him. Until now she had not permitted herself to believe it, seeking other reasons for his withdrawal and sharpness. Grief and horror numbed her. He was tired of her, chafing under the pretense of marriage but far too good a man to abandon her. No wonder he was so eager to obtain a passport that he had made himself believe that only the queen was escaping. Of course it would be easier that way, but Leonie’s generous heart had never conceived for a moment the notion that a woman would leave her children to save her own life.

  To say the least, Roger’s experience of spoiled women—and there could be no doubt that Marie had had every least whim satisfied from her infancy to her fall—gave him a different outlook from Leonie’s. The child
ren could not be in any real danger. Even the lunatics who were now in charge of the government would not think of harming them. In fact, they were a valuable form of insurance. As a last resort a puppet monarchy could be set up with the boy as king. The girl was a priceless trading piece, although Salic law forbade a woman to rule in France. Thus, Roger had assumed that Marie Antoinette would seize the chance to regain her own freedom.

  “It would have been far better for us,” he snarled, “had she been a little more sensible, even if that would make her a monster in your eyes.”

  Leonie’s arms tightened on the clothing she held. She was crushed by Roger’s anger, believing that he was not angry about anything she had done or said but annoyed by her very existence. She could only assume that anything she did or said would be hateful to him because he was so bored. It was typical of the breakdown of a love affair, she knew, that the parties grew irritable with each other, then quarreled wildly, then parted. For married couples, the beginning was the same, but because they could not part, the end was worse—hatred.

  Although Roger read the fear in Leonie’s expression accurately, he misinterpreted it completely. He was, of course, aware of having been short-tempered during the past week. His struggle to control the sense of doom that pervaded him had not been made any easier by Leonie’s unnatural, cheery blindness to his mood and had resulted in snappish outbursts. He had not even been able to apologize to her, because when he tried, either rage or fear welled up in him so that he could only go out and walk and walk for hours until he had some control of himself. Now, seeing Leonie’s blanched face, seeing how she clutched what she held to her, as one clings to anything in a moment of terror, Roger realized he had even failed to prevent infecting her with his fear.

  Wildly he tried to think of anything to comfort her, any ray of hope. There was nothing—no gleam of an idea of how they could escape, not flicker of expectation that Toulon’s plot could succeed. The plan to get the woman and children out of the Temple, which Roger had guessed from seeing the clothing, might have had some chance of working. Apparently Lepitre, who controlled the official forms, would provide not only passports but passes to get the queen and Princess Elizabeth out dressed as commissioners. The children would be disguised as the children of some servant and removed separately. Presumably they would all come to Roger’s house, change to inconspicuous clothing and leave Paris.

  It was there the idea fell apart. Obviously it was not possible to send a queen, a princess and two royal children off to fend for themselves. Even if Marie Antoinette had been willing, the minute she opened her mouth she would give the game away. Not only was her accent unmistakable—strongly German even after all these years because no one had ever had the courage to correct her speech—but she would not have the faintest idea of how to ask for a meal or engage a room at an inn. That meant at least one man, perhaps more, as escort and protection.

  The party was already too large for a small, inconspicuous carriage with one horse. It meant a large coach, four or six horses—in these times such a vehicle and its passengers would be minutely examined. They would be caught. However, it was not concern for the escaping prisoners that was turning Roger’s bowels to water. Had he hoped that the escape plan would work, even as far as taking the queen’s party on the road, he would not have feared for Leonie or himself. By the time they were apprehended, he and Leonie would be either safely away or safely hidden.

  Roger’s fear centered on Toulon himself. The man was honest, he was sure, and brave to a fault. What he was not was careful, secretive or sensible. On the very first day, when Toulon had just met him, he had wanted to tell all the details of the plan. Would he not tell others? Might he not even give hints away without even realizing? And Roger knew that he and Leonie would go down with Toulon. It was inevitable. If he blabbed about the plot itself, he would surely expose his accomplices. That would make Roger and Leonie vulnerable in many ways—as conspirators, as the least well known and therefore, the most likely to be betrayers… Because they were watched, they could not escape; because they could not control Toulon, they were doomed.

  To die is bad enough. To live in fear is worse. Leonie had enough of that and Roger had been trying to spare her any more. Now he had exposed it all. He opened his mouth to say everything would be all right, that there was no need to be afraid, but Leonie had turned away and rushed up the stairs, the sound of a strangled sob drifting behind her. There had to be a way to save her. She was only eighteen. She had not even begun her live.

  Think! Roger told himself. You damn fool, stop worrying and think. The mental articulation of the difference between worry and thought seemed to clear his mind like a cool wind sweeping away fog. Of a sudden, it came to him. As long as there was one woman in the house, the watchers were unlikely to know whether that woman was Leonie. He, of course, had to stay because his skill marked him. No other man could take his place. Roger was sure that some of the men who came into the shop came in only to be sure he was still there. But Leonie could be saved. Roger bounded up the stairs with the first smile in days lightening his features.

  “There is nothing to worry about,” he exclaimed, bursting into the bedroom where Leonie was trying to cudgel her brain into conceiving of a hiding place for the children’s clothes, when all she could really think was Roger no longer wanted her. “You do not have to stay here,” he went on with enthusiasm. “I will go tomorrow to see Fouché, and he will arrange for a woman to change places with you.”

  “What?” Leonie gasped. The one thing she had counted on was that Roger would not part from her. As long as she was with him, she believed she had some chance of reawakening his interest in her.

  “It will not be difficult,” Roger went on, seeing in her wide-eyed breathlessness hope rather than horror. “You can meet her somewhere safe—Fouché’s house or, well someplace, and change clothing with her. Then Fouché will give you money and tell you where to live while she will come here. Even if Toulon or Lepitre or one of the men who are watching later realizes you are gone, it will not matter because—”

  “No one will realize I am gone because I will be right here,” Leonie spat, her eyes blazing.

  The initial shock she felt had dissolved into rage. The one thing she had believed was that Roger was an honorable man. She knew honor had nothing to do with love or desire. The best man in the world might fall out of love or lose his desire for a particular woman, but he would not abandon her. When she first heard Roger say she should go, she could not believe her ears. Bored with her, even hating her, she could not believe he would simply throw her out and take his new light of love in her place.

  His explanation had removed her incredulity. He was not simply casting her away. He was behaving, according to his code, in a perfectly honorable manner. He would provide her with money, with a place to live, even with protection. No doubt if she allowed him to finish his explanation, he would have pointed out that as long as they were confined to Paris, there was no need for them to be together. If Toulon’s plot worked and the passport was provided, Roger would get her and take her to England, as he had promised, and place her in the proper hands there.

  Leonie was so furious when she had thought this out that she would have tried to claw out his eyes if she had not realized that he probably did not know she felt differently than he did. She knew that in an attempt to keep Roger from becoming complacent she had never said she loved him, never initiated lovemaking—aside from that first time. She had done her best to arouse doubt in his mind to keep him interested. Apparently all she had succeeded in doing was to convince him she was indifferent.

  The expression of amazement on Roger’s face, the way he stammered, “But Leonie—” was proof to her that her deduction was correct. He did not know she cared for him. He assumed she was as bored with their relationship as he was. Perhaps there was still hope. If only she made the right moves, if only she could get a chance to display her skills as a temptress, perhaps she could
win him back.

  It would not do simply to cry out that she loved him. Even if he believed her, knowledge of her love would not spark his interest. He would be too good to drive her out if he knew, but rather than feeling love in return it was far more likely that he would feel trapped. Love does not grow out of being smothered in the musty miasma of unwanted devotion. Nor would it do to begin to act like a whore. That might waken a temporary interest, but it would end in disaster. Roger would be sickened by the notion that she had pretended innocence all these months. He would turn away all the more swiftly when the faint, corrupt fascination of her devices lost power. Yet she had to make him know she cared.

  “You will be safe,” Roger urged, following his first surprised protest, thinking that she feared separation from his protection.

  “And you will have a chance to indulge yourself with a fresh piece of flesh, no doubt,” Leonie snarled.

  The words were no part of any plan on Leonie’s part. They were wrenched out of her by jealousy, which overcame the knowledge that Roger was trying to give the comfort he believed she wanted. The effect, however, was a revelation. Roger’s mouth dropped open and his blue eyes fairly bulged from his head. In an instant, Leonie saw a way. A woman’s jealousy was flattering to a man. No doubt repeated scenes would be unwelcome, but one would make clear enough her desire for him. He would almost certainly respond, and that would give her both a chance and an excuse to display the abilities she had hidden.

  “What did you say?” he gasped.

  “You heard me well enough,” Leonie shrieked. “Lecher! I am not enough for you. Perhaps I am too delicate. You need a stronger, coarser flavor to stimulate your appetite.”