The Star of Versailles Read online

“The latter,” Charron said, not glancing at him again.

  Gaudet winced at the craftsman’s exaggerated sigh, half-expecting Charron to be angry. Instead, he seemed resigned to being disrupted and folded his arms, leaning back against the work table.

  “Sylvie’s worked and struggled all her life,” he explained and Gaudet recognized the unspoken sentiment of not that you would understand. “And she’s never lost her spirit, never done anything but the best for Bastien. Now she sorts through rags and lives with a man who harbors fugitives for a few measly livres—she deserves something special, something that hasn’t belonged to someone else.”

  “It’s a nice piece,” Gaudet replied, setting down his glass and clasping his hands together. “At my house in London, I have a lacquered Chinese—”

  “Excuse me,” Charron cut him off and Gaudet frowned, annoyed at his interruption. “This needs concentration.”

  A long sigh escaped Gaudet’s lips and he stood to pace across the workshop to the window, where he rubbed his hand through the grime and peered out into the street at the world passing by.

  “Get away from there!”

  At Charron’s snapped warning, he stepped back, then went forward again to pick up the meagre bits of rouge and powder Sylvie had supplied him with.

  “I am away,” he told Charron haughtily, “to put on my face!”

  At that moment, there came a knock at the door, the sound repeated a moment later, in what seemed to Gaudet a precise pattern of knocks, and had the grumbling Charron moving quickly to answer. Shrinking into the shadows of the staircase, he watched as the man he had known as Morel stepped into the house and the men exchanged low murmurs. Ears straining, Gaudet chanced to descend a couple of steps, yet still he was unable to pick up anything of the conversation until Morel shook his head and gave an exclamation.

  “Well!” Morel declared as Charron departed back to his work. “Well!”

  “Sir,” Gaudet said cheerily, setting the makeup on the stairs before he descended. “I trust I look a little brighter to you today.”

  “You will need to be.” Morel regarded him with narrowed eyes. “For you and I are to take a trip together.”

  “To a tailor, I hope.” Gaudet gestured to the plain breeches and shirt he wore. “And I will go nowhere without my girl.”

  “There is no time for talk of clothes, sir.” There was a pause, a shadow of consternation flickering across Morel’s face. “And nor for whatever lady friend you have cause to think of either.”

  “She is but two years old.” Gaudet’s lower lip quivered at the thought of the beloved little girl. “I cannot leave her here alone.”

  “You—” His companion was clearly having difficulty, closing his eyes briefly as he pinched his nose. “I was not told of this.”

  “I will not go without Papillon,” Gaudet said, folding his arms petulantly. “I would rather die.”

  “That can be arranged…”

  “Charron.” Gaudet bristled. “Summon the tall fellow with the blue eyes. I will not travel without Papillon and my life has been threatened.”

  “Your life is threatened every moment you remain in this city,” Morel pointed out with a long-suffering sigh. “Where is this ‘Papillon’ to be found?”

  “She is with Monsieur Abel on the rue de la Harpe,” Gaudet told him. Seeing a chance for an extra something, he added, “Along with four suits Abel was making alterations to, perhaps you might collect those, too?”

  “Suits?” The eyebrows raised even farther. “You left her with a suit maker?”

  “No.” Gaudet sighed, thinking this gentleman might not be as worthy of a lead role as he had hoped. “I left her with a gentleman who happens to be able to do marvelous things with fabric. He has girls of his own. They are practically cousins.”

  “Then would she not be better off remaining with them? Our journey is likely to be fraught with danger, Monsieur…”

  The thought of it sent a jolt through Gaudet, eyes growing wide as he imagined life without Papillon, never knowing what became of her, let alone how a girl who was virtually a princess would manage in a Parisian backstreet.

  “A girl”—Gaudet blinked away tears at the very thought of it—“should be with her father.”

  “Then what do you propose?” Morel threw up his hands in an almost comical fashion.

  “We shall go tonight after dark and collect my girl.”

  “Just the girl,” came the wary response. “No suits. Nothing else.”

  “If we are there, anyway…” Gaudet sucked in his cheeks, pursing his lips for a moment. “It would be absurd to abandon my suits.”

  “We are going to be fugitives,” his increasingly irritated companion declared. “One suit and your girl.”

  “There are four suits, sir, and I will take them all,” Gaudet decided haughtily. “What name am I to call you by?”

  “Have you never heard of the concept of compromise?” The man he had known as Morel peered at him as if trying to make some sense of the situation. “Of course you haven’t, you’re French.”

  “Are you not French?” Gaudet frowned, peering closer. “Something is afoot here.”

  “I said nothing of the sort,” the man peered back. “No wonder the country is in the state it is.”

  “I am not sure I trust you.” He pouted. “I wish to travel with the one with the blue eyes, I believe he is trustworthy—you are somewhat roguish.”

  Morel’s rolled his hazel eyes, a murmur that might have been a petition to the heavens following a moment later. “The ‘one with the blue eyes’ has charged me with the godforsaken task of getting your derriere and the rest of you safely out of Paris—I like it no more than you, sir, but we shall have to make the best of it.”

  “Then what do I call you?” Gaudet set his hands on his hips. “You are far less amenable when one is not being tortured, sir. If you do not give me a name, I shall call you…chérie.”

  “Bobbins,” came the unimpressed response. “You can call me Bobbins.”

  “You are English!” Gaudet’s eyes widened and he shook his head. “I am not going anywhere with an Englishman with an English name. We will be dead within the week.”

  “Then make it sound French,” the man retorted. “I am your only chance of getting out of here alive, sir, and you’d do well to remember that.”

  “I have many followers in England. It is hardly surprising someone has charged you with rescuing me,” Gaudet said confidently, flattered that one of his many patrons had done so. “Tonight, we collect the suits and my girl, tomorrow we leave to collect my sister…”

  “You have had news of her whereabouts?” The man who was now Bobbins grew serious. “Where is she hiding?”

  “I should have to see the one with the eyes before I could tell you that.”

  At that, Charron turned from his work and said grumpily, “This man is your savior, Gaudet. Your late brother-in-law and sister were as family to me and you may trust Bobbins, or whatever you are calling him, with your life.”

  “There.” Bobbins’ expression was one of relief. “Anything you know, anything at all, you must tell me.”

  “Le Havre,” Gaudet said finally, sure that Charron would not lie. “Where, I do not know, but in Le Havre.”

  “Then we are heading for Le Havre,” Bobbins said firmly, “as soon as our errand here is completed.”

  “I shall go and assemble my things,” Gaudet told this odd Bobbins character, who he remembered being far more chivalrous when he’d been in Tessier’s custody. “And put on a little powder.”

  Chapter Ten

  For three days and nights following the escape of Alexandre Gaudet and the man who called himself Morel, Paris burned. Violence rent the streets and tore through the slums as Vincent Tessier’s men ripped apart the city in their search for something that might lead them to their quarry, but if they found anything, it was misery that already ran deeper than the Seine. Blood coursed from the scaffold in a spreading stain
and the blade grew blunt as, again and again, it slammed home, sending Tessier’s message to the people who cared to listen.

  Take this as your warning.

  We have all grown complacent.

  Yet still he found nothing, even as he smashed his way through the denials and tears of those whose names had been mentioned to him for one reason or another, ripped useless confessions from the lips of sobbing women and broken men and found dead ends and empty words. The peddlers of herbal potions and powders were detained and questioned, their filthy hovels put to the flame, and still there was not as much as a whisper in the wind about Gaudet and the spy, the viper in his home.

  But they must be somewhere and somebody knows something.

  Somebody supplied the opiate, the escape means…

  Somebody gave them shelter.

  Somebody else was involved.

  With Plamondon’s death, he had done nothing more than cut the head off the snake. Its body remained wound around the city, muscles constricting and squeezing all that was right out of the world. Another serpent had already risen to take its place and this one had found its way into his very home, had struck him with its venom and retreated to its nest. Yet they had reckoned without Vincent Tessier. Those who opposed him might be reduced in number and means without their wealthy patron, but he had no doubt that they would grow strong again and every day they enjoyed this victory, their strength increased.

  And mine is diminished.

  He could barely stand to be in the house any longer, still haunted by the memory of that missing floorboard…the knowledge that something had been hidden there all along.

  Right there under his nose

  Or under his feet.

  The moment of clarity came, as they so often did for him, as he made a seemingly inconsequential trip to speak with Robespierre, to try to shore up his suddenly weak position. There, he sat in a covered carriage outside the Pavillon de l’Égalité, summer rain beating a tattoo on the roof and the chatter of voices passing back and forth. On the dog-eared paper in his gloved fingers was written the names of those who had been sold out under interrogation, dozens of them. Some of them had even been willingly, even eagerly, handed over without coercion and all of them were as unremarkable as the next.

  Those are always the innocent ones, of course—a name given freely is the name of an enemy, a vendetta for the settling.

  Those are the chaff, burrs on the wind—these are the names of the innocent.

  The names on the second list, however… Well, those are a different matter.

  When a name is bled out of you, it isn’t the name of a rival or the man who took your wife, it is the truth.

  I know the truth when it lies bleeding before me.

  Tessier had studied the names until he knew them by heart, yet still he returned to the list, reading every word with a frown in the hope that something might, somehow, spring to life before him and declare its guilt. Somewhere among the Marcs, the Pierres, the Bastiens and the Maries, he knew there was the person who would unlock the mystery, no way that one man had planned and executed the rescue of Alexandre Gaudet.

  Or Professor Dee, as his associates refer to him.

  And you will all die for what you have done, every last one of you. Neither this country nor Vincent Tessier will forgive and forget this treachery.

  The scaffold will run with your blood before autumn comes.

  He still sought Morel everywhere—each figure on a street corner was scrutinized and studied, from the beggars with their filthy bundles to the drunkards who blighted the thoroughfares. Yet in his heart Tessier knew that he was hunting a ghost, a memory.

  In so many ways, it is like he never existed at all and like all phantoms, he is vanished with the dawn.

  Yet somebody always knows something.

  Always.

  They had pulled in all the known opiate peddlers and, as one of them breathed her last, she had told them everything, sobbed out a story about a little boy who had come to her for something that could put a burly man to sleep and keep him there for a night.

  ‘Little Bastien,’ she told him through bloodied sobs, ‘his mother keeps house for the cabinetmaker, Charron. He’s a good boy at heart, he wouldn’t mean anything by it.’

  ‘He has his schemes. He’s never done no harm to no one.’

  Now Tessier stood in the gloomy workshop of that same cabinetmaker’s rooms as his men went to work inside, securing the occupants. The night outside had been the coolest of the summer, but at the top of the stairs the air seemed stale and he smelled the aroma of over-boiled vegetables and the stench of dirty rags that had filled his own childhood room.

  That was a long time ago.

  Tessier unballed his fists, the creak of the gloves lulling him into the familiar role of the Butcher of Orléans. He nodded to the guard at the top of the stairs to step aside, closing his hand around the doorknob and taking a final moment to control himself.

  Let them all fear me.

  The kitchen was illuminated by a fire that spluttered weakly in the grate. Before the open window was the pot that must contain the food he could smell outside, a faint steam rising from it into the night. A large man stood beside the window, his wrists bound, and he started forward when Tessier entered and asked the new arrival, “What’s happening? We’ve done nothing!”

  Tessier looked down his nose, seeing nothing he hadn’t seen a thousand times before. He might command respect in his tavern or with his woman, but with his limbs secured, there was nothing to fear from him.

  With their hands bound they are helpless as babes.

  “Where is the boy?” Tessier ignored the man and spoke instead to the guard who stood beside a closed door, two deep scratches still wetting his cheek with fresh blood.

  “Locked in there with his mother,” came the reply and the guard glanced at Charron before adding, “She’s a bloody harpy, that one—did this with her nails, watch yourself.”

  Tessier raised his eyebrows in mock indignation then rapped at the door and called out, “Open the door, woman!”

  “You’ll have to bloody break it down!” Her response was shrill, but where there should be fear there was fury, the futile gesture of a mother protecting her young.

  “Madame,” Tessier said, his own voice soft and steady, as though he were addressing a lunatic. “I wish to talk to your son—you have nothing to fear by sending him out.”

  “Piss off,” she hissed.

  Tessier’s face slackened at the obscenity, his heart slamming in his ribcage. A glance at Thierry Charron swelled his annoyance as the bound man matched his gaze with a sullen stare of his own, bitter amusement growing in his expression.

  “Open. The. Door.”

  “Piss. Off,” she replied.

  He could hear the humor in her voice, feel it like a slap to the face.

  “Break it down,” Tessier instructed the guard, stepping aside to allow him access. “Now.”

  At first, the door held beneath the repeated efforts of the guard to charge it. Tessier grew more agitated with every failed attempt, his temper growing thinner and thinner. The woman within matched each thud and splinter of the wood with catcalls and laughter for what seemed like hours then, miraculously, she called, “He’s going to break his bloody arm. I’ll unlock it, but you’re not taking my Bastien away.”

  “I shall be the judge of that,” Tessier replied as the key turned in the lock and the door began to open slowly, a candle flickering within. He moved quickly then and slammed his hand into the wooden panel, forcing the door open. That elicited a cry of annoyance from the woman as her child hid behind her skirts, clutching at her white nightgown with his thin fingers.

  “Madame,” he said as he stalked into the dimly lit room, “you have led me quite a dance tonight.”

  “And not just tonight,” Sylvie Dupire said with a small smile as she emerged from the shadows, her hands resting on her hips and her next words a whisper. “Isn’t that right, Monsie
ur Vincent Tessier?”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Look at me,” Sylvie said through a smile as she turned and surveyed the bare room where she stood, her hand resting on the damp stone wall as though she might be able to soak up some past memory from it. “Living like a queen at last.”

  The irony of the statement wasn’t lost on Tessier. He smiled at the cold humor of it, his eyes never leaving the woman before him, an angel in her white nightgown, a red shawl thrown over her shoulders. He had seen the Widow Capet within these walls a hundred times but she had never transfixed him as this creature did now, never brought such an air of perfect calm to the rooms that had been her cell.

  “Where’s the young one?” her voice was soft. “The little king.”

  “We are free from the tyranny of kings,” Tessier reminded her. “The child is in his rooms at the Temple.”

  “From the Tuileries to the Temple.” Sylvie shook her head with a rueful smile. “And I thought I’d fallen on hard times.”

  “I found her here on that final morning.” He gestured at the floor where Madame Capet’s cushion had been. In his mind’s eye, he watched her run the rosaries through her fingers, lips moving in silent invocation. “She would pray for hours at the end, they always do.”

  Sylvie nodded once and walked toward him, drawing her shawl around her body before she asked, “Did she kneel to pray?”

  “Always.” Tessier nodded, surprised when Sylvie fell to her knees where Marie Antoinette herself had kneeled, her hands clasped before her breast.

  “Like this?” Her eyes blinked in the gentle glow of the flame when she turned her head to glance up at him, the tip of her tongue darting out to wet her lips. “Was she very pretty?”

  “She was not.”

  Sylvie nodded, her green eyes sparkling in the flickering candlelight that danced on the stone walls of the former queen’s final, miserable, deserved lodgings. Even without the clamor of children that filled their rooms at the Temple, this room still rang with that quiet, sing-song voice reading aloud from the damned missal as though her very soul depended on it. Now, though, it was more silent than he had ever known, the only sound his own breathing.