The Star of Versailles Page 7

  I wish I could be me.

  “I’m sorry,” was all he could manage. “I’m just…”

  “It’s to be expected,” she said, kindly sparing him the search for the words he couldn’t find. “I’ll get you something to eat if you like.”

  “No,” Gaudet replied finally in response to her offer and her hand left his as she stood. “I don’t want to be any trouble—just having me here must put your household in danger.”

  “If I didn’t want any trouble, I wouldn’t be living with Thierry Charron.” Sylvie shrugged, and he thought again how she was almost too perfect to be in this small, provincial room. With her glittering gaze, the perfect symmetry of her features and the arch of her eyebrow, she seemed to have been sculptured from marble by a master craftsman.

  Even her voice was angelic, a perfectly tuned melody escaping her pursed lips as she walked across the room. At the door, she turned to ask brightly, “Shutters open or closed?”

  “Open,” he said a little too quickly, remembering the darkness of his cell. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t you go anywhere, Gaudet.” She executed a perfect curtsey. “Your wish is my command.”

  Left alone once more, Gaudet focused on the fireplace, the minutes ticking past as he waited for the return of his gentle hostess. In fact, when the door opened again it didn’t usher in Sylvie but a small boy, his pale skin streaked with dirt and his clothes obviously having seen far better days. He crept into the room and, seeing that Gaudet was already awake, abandoned any pretense at silence and darted toward the bed as though he was being pursued.

  “Alexandre Gaudet?” The boy’s skinny hand shot out and Gaudet took it in a daze. “Bastien Dupire, assistant to your rescuer.”

  “Morel?” Gaudet pushed himself up against the pillows to address the child. “You know him? Is he safe?”

  “He’s long gone,” Bastien assured him and, though he smiled, there was a shadow on him, too, a slight downturn of the mouth that broke up the brightness in his face. “And he weren’t really Morel—that murdering bastard’s dead and buried.”

  “I don’t—” Gaudet began, unsure of what he wanted to say. “Morel saved my life, what do you mean?”

  Bastien shook his head and rolled his eyes as though Gaudet was stupid not to understand.

  “Well, put it this way,” he said. “In Paris, he was Morel, but he ain’t in Paris no more. He’s a spy—”

  “A spy?” The realization left Gaudet’s lips as a whisper. He stared at Bastien Dupire, hearing the crackle of the fire and feeling, once again, the gentle hands bathing his wounds when all hope had seemed lost.

  “Anyway, you’re not to worry,” Bastien said finally. “He didn’t have to get you, you know, he could’ve left you to it if he’d fancied.”

  “I know.” Gaudet nodded. “I know.”

  “You missing anything?” The question was innocent enough, the child’s voice a sing-song timbre and Gaudet bolted upright as he remembered the cool solidity of the locket in his hand on that last night, the way he had wrapped the chain around his fingers and clung on to it like a rock in the middle of a storm-swept river.

  “Where is it?” Gaudet barked with more urgency than he had intended.

  Bastien’s smile faded as, like a Mesmerist, he drew something from the pocket of his jacket. For a moment, the tiny silver pendant hung in space, suspended from a chain narrow as a spider’s web, then the boy cupped it in his hand and offered it to the playwright.

  “Ma took a liking to it,” he explained, his eyes flashing a challenge. “But I’ve been looking after it for you, reckoned she’d be wearing it otherwise.”

  “Sylvie is your mother?” He held out his palm and saw, too late, the wounds his own fingernails had dug into the flesh, recalling in that instant the sound of the whip slicing through air on its merciless path toward his spine.

  If the boy saw his hesitation then, he gave no indication and, instead, took a step forward until he could drop the locket into Gaudet’s outstretched hand, the chain a delicate shower falling into his clenching fist.

  “Thank you,” Gaudet whispered and the child nodded, watchful and silent as Bastien opened his hand and looked down at this most precious of treasures.

  “You’re lucky I’m honest. That must be worth a bit.”

  Gaudet had forgotten the child was still with him and he raised his gaze, seeing Sylvie in her son’s face, but, if she was beautiful, he was alive with barely concealed mischief, a small smile playing at the corners of his mouth though the joke went unspoken.

  “I’ve seen you before,” Bastien admitted eventually. “Up on the scaffold with Philippe—you were bloody petrified.”

  Gaudet’s shrug appeared more casual than he felt and he replied, “I was.”

  “You’d better be all right, Monsieur Playwright,” Bastien said, his words more grave than Gaudet would have believed possible. “My mother’s all I’ve got and if Tessier follows you here, I’ll give you up in an instant—he’s not getting his hands on her.”

  What happened to childhood?

  Is this what France has come to?

  “I wouldn’t expect any less.”

  “So long as we understand each other.” Bastien nodded, his business concluded. “And don’t forget who it was took care of that necklace for you when I need a favor in return.”

  The darkness in the boy’s face lifted as he dipped to pick up the glass of brandy and emptied it in one swig. He lifted his other hand to refill the glass before he gave his mother’s wink and said, “She’s got the good stuff out for you.”

  With a peal of laughter, he dashed back across the room, almost through the door when Gaudet called after him, “Bastien, wait a moment.”

  “Sir?” The word was polite enough but the tone was annoyed, this child obviously having far more important things to do.

  “Can you get a message to Morel?”

  “If I can, and I’m not saying I can, mind.” He lowered his voice and glanced over his shoulder. “What would you want it to say?”

  What would be appropriate?

  Are there even words strong enough?

  “Just thank you,” Gaudet decided, wishing there was something more. “And tell him that, if he is ever in London, I would very much like to take him to supper.”

  “Sir,” Bastien replied in an exaggerated upper-class accent, swinging his arm round before him as he bowed and trotted from the room. “How could he refuse?”

  The room fell silent. Gaudet slid down on the mattress, trying to find a position that was comfortable for the injuries that mapped his back. The locket grew warm in his hand and, if its presence was unexpectedly comforting, so too did it jar, pricking and nudging at him to be up and out of bed, starting out into Paris in search of Claudine.

  Despite all it must have witnessed, the locket was undamaged when he examined it, its painted face decorated with a vivid red poppy that sprang from the white surface, even beneath the layer of grime. Gaudet rubbed the pad of his thumb over the painting until it was clean once more. He remembered the day that Claudine had been given the locket, her tenth birthday celebrated as though it was a coronation. He, like all good big brothers, had recognized immediately how much this trinket had meant to her and had resolved to hide it and give her a fright. The sound of her hysterical reaction upon waking to find it gone rang in his ears afresh, more than a decade after the thrashing he had received.

  Since then, Gaudet didn’t know if he had ever seen Claudine without the locket clasped around her slender neck, the necklace becoming a part of her. Now, clutching it in his hand, he spoke a silent promise to it, to her, that she and her son would soon be safe. He stroked his thumb across the surface once more before he slipped it over the gold edging and clicked the clasp, the locket springing open at his touch. What Gaudet had hoped to find, he didn’t know, yet he felt a stab of disappointment at the contents, the hopes that rested on this discovery teetering at the edge of devastation.

&
nbsp; His eyes found nothing within, other than the long-since familiar portrait of their mother in her youth, as striking and pampered as she had made her son. Yet when Claudine had written to her brother in London she had promised that, should anything happen, he would find the clue in this locket. Instead, he found nothing.

  But Claudine would not have made such a mistake.

  Unless Tessier found it first, he realized, and it was like a knife to the heart.

  And yet something about it seemed out of kilter. After all, Tessier wanted nothing more than his precious Star of Versailles, the flogging and burning a means to an end. His torture was meant to achieve something beyond pain, and if he already had what he sought, Gaudet had no doubt that he would have followed Philippe into a mass grave, another victim of the guillotine.

  “What have you left for me?” Gaudet asked the empty air, tipping the locket face down into his palm. The small portrait of his mother didn’t move at first and he shook the pendant until it gave way and dropped weightlessly into his hand, followed by a tiny square of folded paper.

  Gaudet’s usually graceful fingers felt clumsy and ungoverned after so long without movement. He fumbled his efforts to unfold the delicate paper, cursing himself as he slipped his thumbnail beneath the corner, finally revealing its secrets.

  And it was good to see that Claudine hadn’t lost her sense of the absurd.

  François wants to see where Uncle André tried to drown Mama. Come and find us.

  Beneath the words, she had drawn a tiny, five-pointed star and he stared at it until tears welled in his eyes. A dash of his hand cleared them away, Gaudet furious with his sister for playing games at a time like this.

  The words, those tiny, perfect letters, meant nothing to Gaudet and he cursed himself for not caring, for forgetting all that she had wanted him to remember.

  I was never one for family and sentiment.

  And now I can’t remember.

  He thought again about Claudine’s dripping wet hair, matted to her face and slick with sand and how his father had shouted, called from a meeting to deal with his errant, apparently murderous son.

  And my God, what a thrashing I received…

  There was an older man who tried to intervene in the punishment, he recalled, but he had only heightened father’s fury.

  Then it began to unravel like wool on a loom and he could see the ships his father had been appraising, could hear the calls of sailors and smell the salt in the air as he had run up and down the gangplanks and made futile attempts to scale the rigging.

  The older man had been the captain of one of these vessels, one of the many his father was sure had been embezzling the cargo before the late Monsieur Gaudet could turn raw product into money. His son had run away after the beating and had had a fancy he would stow away on one of those ships, but he’d been caught and returned for another whipping, of course. His father eventually deciding that there were too many temptations in this particular port, too many opportunities to escape his parental guiding hand.

  I do not miss him, Gaudet thought bitterly, catching the sentiment too late to banish it. Yet as it occurred he knew with a sudden and shocking clarity exactly where he had been when he’d pushed Claudine into the English Channel.

  “Le Havre.”

  As the words left his lips, Gaudet squeezed the locket in his fist and a wave of emotions rippled through his heart. He knew then that his time as a guest in the home of Sylvie Dupire must soon reach its end, that his sister awaited by the sea.

  Soon he would leave for Le Havre and there he would, somehow, find Claudine and François, with a triumphant return to England surely on the near horizon. How he would trace his sister and nephew could wait until later, because, for now, there were plans to be made and farewells to be given to the charming Sylvie, though he would miss the restorative powers of her beauty, if not her consommé.

  The small square of paper disappeared into Gaudet’s clenched fist and he rested it against his chest, letting his head fall back onto the pillow as the fire spat and crackled across the room. Bathed in the sunset, he lay unmoving, breathing in a cool breeze that carried the scent of roasting meat from somewhere nearby. He toyed with the locket, opening and closing it rhythmically, the chain rattling against the bed now and again as it moved.

  “I will come to you,” he promised, wishing that Claudine could hear, had left him something more solid than this. “And find you.”

  With some effort, Gaudet turned onto his side and focused on the fire, his vision filling with the dancing flames in the grate until the tears had dried and there was nothing left but a bubbling mixture of anger and despair that was like a lump in his chest. When he had been in that filthy cell with Vincent Tessier there had been no meaning in anything, no sun or moon, no comfort or respite, yet he had survived somehow, holding on to the thought that nobody else could, would, help Claudine. Now he was free, yet no less a prisoner, helpless and alone, even with the clue she had left him.

  Without giving it a second glance, Gaudet folded the note and returned it to the locket. The catch clicked into place once more and he held on to it like a talisman as he finally let his eyelids fall, every movement exhausting.

  Somewhere in his dreams, he was dimly aware of the door opening and a soft tread upon the boards, the clatter of the manacles jolting him awake with a gasp of remembered pain. Within a moment, the unyielding wall at his back had become the soft mattress, the torturer transformed into Sylvie Dupire and Gaudet realized, with embarrassment, that the sounds that had seemed so terrifying were no more than a spoon rattling in a bowl of steaming soup. His hand instinctively opened with the violence of his start and he heard the locket fall, striking the rug beside the bed with a dull thump.

  “Not feeling so good?” Sylvie perched on the edge of the bed and frowned her sympathy, her head cocked to one side to peer down at the fallen locket. “What’s this?”

  “It’s nothing,” he lied as she stooped, her slender fingers closing around the pendant. It was like watching the world being snatched away, his voice betraying something like panic. “Madame Dupire, I—”

  Sylvie turned her sparkling eyes to him, the fingers that held the locket uncurling, and he watched her gaze flit down appraisingly for no more than a second.

  “Is it ‘Madame’ now?” Her words might have held a challenge but her expression was mischievous and he felt his anxiety dampening when she raised one of those arched eyebrows teasingly. “It’s always ‘Madame’ after they meet my Bastien. I’m not married, Gaudet, I’m—”

  She paused for melodrama and looked over each shoulder before leaning in to him and whispering, “A fallen woman.”

  “Then we shall get along splendidly,” Gaudet replied, his eyes meeting hers. Sylvie put her hand to his, closing his fingers around the locket. “Mademoiselle.”

  “I’ve told you,” her voice low, smile brighter now. “It’s Sylvie.”

  Chapter Nine

  Gaudet watched Charron silently, the burly man working with utmost care as he applied another layer of polish to the small jewelry box he was making, every spare moment spent on the gift for Sylvie. He had a remarkably delicate touch for one so bullish and if he seemed ill at ease in conversation, in the workshop he was a master.

  The physical injuries that Tessier had inflicted were healing well and, weeks since his escape, Gaudet was growing restless in his convalescence. In England, he was used to tailored clothes and evenings at the theater, late nights at Ranelagh or Vauxhall, dancing through the lamps with someone or other on his arm and through all of it, he’d never given this a second thought. As he’d squired actresses and debs, mollies and sailors, even the occasional duke or two, it had never crossed his mind that this could have been happening in the country of his birth, that the land he loved was cracking open at the roots.

  When news had begun to cross the Channel of the problems in France, Claudine had still been at Versailles as lady in waiting to the queen. Of course, there
had never been any real doubt that she would come to England. Why would she not?

  Then came the first letter.

  My loyalty is to my lady and where she goes, I will follow.

  So many letters had followed that, each more horrifying than the last, yet still Claudine had told him not to find her, that Philippe had work in Paris and she was traveling with the royal family, that they would find safety in Austria, that there was still hope.

  I cannot risk a sea voyage, but when the little one is born, we shall come to join you in England.

  Then there had come the dreadful news across the water, stories of arrest and trial and finally, execution.

  My lady is dead, all hope is lost. We have business in Paris. Pray for us, pray for François and with God’s grace, we will be with you before the first snow falls.

  That was when the silence had fallen and he’d pranced merrily into Paris to retrieve his lost sister, little wondering what fate awaited him.

  The night before Gaudet had left England had been riotous and, as he sipped a glass of brandy, he allowed himself a slight smile, remembering the tenor who had perched on his lap at the Theatre Royal and tilted a glass of claret to his lips, his free arm snaked around Gaudet’s neck as the chap had put his mouth to his ear and robbed him of any interest in the drama. As midnight rang out he’d danced in Cavendish Square until the Duke of Devonshire had raised merry hell and there had been a moonlit swim in the Serpentine with someone who may or may not have been engaged to a minor European prince.

  As though he could read Gaudet’s mind, Charron straightened up and looked at him, annoyance clearly fighting a losing battle with loathing before he returned to his work.

  “Is it Sylvie’s birthday?” Gaudet asked lightly, craning to examine the small trinket box that Charron was fashioning from walnut. It was an undoubted work of art and one that Charron seemed as devoted to as he was to the woman and child who shared his home. “Or gift for the sake of a gift?”