Hearts Beguiled

by Penelope Williamson

  Gabrielle stifled a sigh. She might as well admit it, if only to herself. One took at him and she had been stricken with love—or with that ridiculous affliction of the heart that passed for love.

  Love. Gabrielle sneered at herself. You'd think she would have learned. Love didn't exist except in novels and the dreams of fools. In real life, he dies and you are left alone and pregnant and hunted—

  She pushed those haunting memories away, rolling over and getting her legs tangled in the bedclothes. Beside her, Agnes mumbled in her sleep and stirred.

  Or even if he doesn't die, she thought, then the years pass and you discover that he is weak or lazy or cruel. You have babies and he takes mistresses. Before long, you turn your back on him in bed at night and you look at his slack, unshaven face in the morning light and wonder what you saw in this man to make your blood run hot and your flesh melt at his touch . . .

  Gabrielle smiled bitterly in the dark. That was the way love ended, no matter how wonderful the beginning. So why, knowing the truth about love, couldn't she stop the pounding of her heart at the memory of those firm lips descending toward hers? Was knowing the truth about love going to ease the sharp, hollow hunger that even now—

  "Agnes?" she whispered, shaking the girl's shoulder.

  Agnes burrowed deeper under the covers. "By the snores of Saint Peter! I'm trying to sleep."

  "Do you think it's true what they say about men, that they cannot go for long without a woman?"

  "Hunh?" Agnes snorted and flopped over onto her back. She waved a hand toward the window and the streets of Paris outside. "Look at all the whores who make a living soothing that particular itch and then tell me what you think."

  "But do you think it's the same the other way around? For a woman. If she's known love once, does she get to . . . ?"

  "Wanting it after she's gone without it for a while? It depends, I suppose, on the woman. On how good her lover was in the first place. If he—oh-ho!" Agnes sat up abruptly, laughing gleefully. "Do you have the itch, Gabrielle?"

  "Don't be ridiculous.''

  "You do, you do!" Agnes crowed. "And what's more, you've found a man to scratch it for you, haven't you? Admit it!"

  "I will not admit any such thing. "Gabrielle pulled the covers up over her head. "Shut up and go to sleep, Agnes."

  "Who is he? Have you done it yet?"

  Gabrielle groaned. She wished fervently she had never started this conversation. "There isn't anyone, I swear it."

  Agnes sighed dolefully. "Poor soul."

  "My soul isn't in the least danger, I assure you."

  "I didn't mean yours. I meant his. You want him, and if you want him then he doesn't stand a chance. May the devil carry me off to hell on the end of a broom if you aren't the strongest person I know, and once you've decided—"

  "Don't curse."

  "May the Virgin Mary preserve us both, I wasn't cursing. I was merely saying that I've never known anyone as determined as you once you set your teeth into something. You stop at nothing to get what you want. Nothing."

  "Go to sleep, Agnes."

  As the girl snuggled beneath the covers, Gabrielle heard muffled chuckles and she grit her teeth on a curse that would have rivaled any of Agnes's.

  The minutes drifted by and she lay in the dark listening to Agnes's rhythmic breathing. Was Agnes right? Was she so determined she would stop at nothing to get what she wanted? She thought of Martin. He had been the one to declare his love first, but once she'd decided she wanted him . . . She had let Martin ruin his life for her. All because she had wanted him. Love—it had ended by destroying them both.

  She pressed her eyes shut, trying to conjure Martin's image, but it was blurred, like a reflection in a muddy pond. The pain of his loss was still there, but it, too, was blurred. It was as if it had happened a long time ago, and to someone else, a woman she had once known intimately but had not seen for a long, long time.

  "Martin." She whispered his name in the dark, but when she shut her eyes it was not his face she saw. It was a pair of smoldering gray eyes and a mocking smile.

  ❧

  At that same moment, ten miles from Paris in the town of Versailles, a small man descended from a black berlin and climbed the steps of an elegant townhouse next door to the royal palace. He had been expected, for the door opened without his having to knock. As he turned to give his hat and cane to a porter in black and gold livery, light from the flambeaux in the great hall flashed off the thick lenses of his spectacles. Unconsciously he touched the puckered scar that disfigured his face.

  "Monsieur Louvois," the porter said, "Monsieur le Duc awaits you in his bedchamber."

  The heels of Louvois's shoes clicked loudly on the marble floor as he walked across the hall toward the stairs. There was no need for anyone to show him the way. He had been the duc de Nevers's procurator, his lawyer, and his most trusted and intimate adviser for over ten years.

  With the assistance of his valet and two servants, the duc de Nevers was getting ready for bed. When Louvois entered the room, he found the duc naked and scratching his genitals. The duc's belly sagged like a half-loaded sack over twig-thin legs. His chest was white and hairless. He was sixty-three and looked every day of it.

  "You're late, Louvois," the duc said.

  Louvois's bulging eyes blinked once behind his spectacles. "Your pardon, monseigneur."

  Privately Louvois thought the duc's naked body resembled a slug that had crawled from beneath some rock. No wonder the duchesse shunned his bed, preferring to shut herself away in the Nevers country estate in Burgundy. But Louvois kept these thoughts off his face and instead gave his master his most respectful attention.

  The duc had just returned from the palace where he had been attending King Louis XVI's coucher. It was a special privilege, this putting of the king to bed. Only nobles whose titles could be traced back four generations were allowed to remove the king's wig, hand him his nightshirt, and empty out the contents of the mother-of-pearl chamber pot. Louvois thought the whole ritual of the coucher degrading—and he would have bartered with the devil to exchange his salvation for the privilege of attending it.

  Such a thing would never be, of course. He could amass a fortune, even buy a title, but he could never acquire two hundred years' worth of the proper ancestors.

  Louvois took the folded nightshirt from the arms of the valet and presented it to the duc. This is my destiny, he thought with a sudden bitterness he could taste. To hand the nightshirt to the man who hands the nightshirt to the king.

  The duc spat out his teeth into the cupped palms of his valet, and Louvois turned his face aside to hide his disgust. The teeth were real, not wooden, pulled out of the mouth of some redcoat slain in battle during the American Revolutionary War and wired back together later. They didn't fit well, causing the duc's gums to bleed, and he had to numb the pain every night with a glass of brandy.

  Crawling into bed, the duc settled between satin sheets. He sipped the brandy while Louvois stood beside the bed and they spoke of the day's business accomplished and the work to be done tomorrow. The duc was closer to Louvois than to any other man, yet it never occurred to him to ask Louvois to sit down or to offer him some of the brandy.

  As the conversation dwindled, Louvois noticed the duc'seyes straying to the portrait of his only son that hung above the mantel. The face in the portrait was asthetically handsome—soft chestnut curls, moody hazel eyes—but it lacked character. It had been painted when the boy was seventeen, the year before he died.

  Louvois knew what the duc would say, for they had had this conversation many times before.

  "Any news?" the duc said.

  "Nothing, monseigneur."

  "Perhaps the child is dead."

  "Perhaps," Louvois acknowledged.

  "He must be dead or you would have found him by now. He could have died at birth and taken the bitch with him.''

  Not her, Louvois thought, fingering the scar on his cheek. It would take more than c
hildbirth to kill that particular bitch.

  "He'll be four now," the duc said. "My grandson ... if he lives."

  "Yes . . . almost four."

  For four years Louvois had been searching for her. Once he'd almost had her. She had been so close he could have reached out of the carriage window and touched her face. But she had taken off, running into the quarter des boucheries, and the stupid lackeys had lost her. He hadn't been discouraged though, not then. For he still believed she couldn't elude him forever. Her looks were too striking. People, men especially, noticed her. And once noticed, she was not forgotten. He had all the Nevers power and wealth at his command. She had nothing. No money, no family, nothing.

  Yet she had eluded him. Oh, she wasn't dead. He was sure of that. She had survived, though he hoped the surviving had not been easy. He hoped she had suffered, was suffering now. He hoped she was out on the streets, selling her body for a few sous to rough men—tanners, cobblers, chimney sweepers-men with filthy hands and foul mouths who would use her cruelly, humble her, break her—

  Louvois felt a sharp pain in his arm. Looking down, he saw he had clenched his fist so tightly he had given himself a cramp.

  Gabrielle ... I will find you yet, he vowed. If it takes years.

  He would find them both. The child he would give to monseigneur, as a gift. But Gabrielle . . . Gabrielle he would keep for himself. He would kill her. But only after he was finished with her.

  Chapter 2

  Agnes sent the hoop rolling with a slight push, and Dominique chased after it, poking at it with a stick. The hoop teetered, wobbled, and fell.

  "No, petit," Agnes said, laughing. "Don't push it so hard. Gently, see. Like this."

  Gabrielle stood beneath the shade of the canvas awning that stretched over the door to the pawnshop and watched her son at play. Agnes's words of the other night came back to her— You stop at nothing to get what you want.

  Sometimes—especially during the dark and terrible months after his birth, when the money from the ring had all been spent—Gabrielle had wondered if she had done the right thing. Not for herself, but for Dominique. She had wanted her son, and so she had stopped at nothing to keep him. But as the duc de Never's grandchild, he could be wearing satin breeches now, not rough pantaloons with patches on the knees. He could be dining on partridges or capon this afternoon, not the stewed mutton that now simmered over the hearth in the kitchen. He could be Monsieur Dominique with a mansion full of servants at his beck and call to gratify his every wish.

  But he would not have her. And when she thought of that, then she knew she had done the right thing after all.

  "Look, Maman!"

  The hoop was rolling smartly now, and Dominique ran beside it, laughing, his thin legs pumping hard. Then he accidentally nudged the hoop with his knee and it clattered to the hard-packed ground. He stared down at the fallen hoop, and his lower lip began to tremble.

  "Don't cry, Dominique," she called out to him. "Pick it up and try again."

  Agnes helped him to get the hoop rolling again and soon he was running, sending it spinning up and down the garden paths, and passersby paused to share in his laughter.

  A customer came to redeem an ivory jewel box pledged last month, and Gabrielle went with him into the coolness of the shop. Simon wasn't there, having slipped off to his favorite cafe that afternoon for a game of chess.

  After the customer left, Gabrielle sat down behind the desk and opened the book she had been reading. It was a fascinating political satire by an English author called Jonathan Swift, about a man named Gulliver who traveled to exotic lands.

  But today the story couldn't hold her attention. The face of Maxirailien de Saint-Just kept appearing on the pages; the printed words spoke to her in his soft, drawling voice. It had been two days since he had almost blown her across the river Seine with his crazy experiments with inflammable air, and she couldn't stop thinking about him.

  She had contemplated and discarded a hundred implausible excuses to seek him out again. But he would never be fooled and she absolutely couldn't, wouldn't make such a fool of herself. Still, this morning she had found herself dressing in her best gown—a violet muslin that matched her eyes, with a ladder of stiff rose bows on the bodice—and strolling by the Cafe" de Foy for no justifiable reason at all except that he might be coming or going at that precise moment, might see her, might pause to talk ... It made her breathless with excitement just to think of it.

  It's a simple infatuation, she thought, giving herself a mental shake. It was hardly to be wondered at—the man was handsome, worldly, and just different enough to be interesting. She had felt this way once before, about a dancing master her maman had hired during one flush summer when she was twelve.

  When she realized she was tracing the letters MAX with her fingernail in the margin of the book, she slammed the cover shut with a snort of self-disgust and pushed away from the desk. This time she didn't have the excuse of being twelve.

  Gabrielle began to wander aimlessly around the shop. The small lap escritoire that Simon had bought from the thieving vicomte de Saint-Romain was displayed on a table in back. Yesterday, while showing it to a potential customer, Gabrielle had found it to be filled with paper and a set of pens and charcoal sticks. She went to get it now, hoping for some other diversion to take her mind off that mad scientist.

  Gabrielle's mother had been a saloniere. Her elegant town-house on the Rue de Grenelle had been visited almost nightly by a coterie of the elite of the literary world. Novelists, poets, philosophes, or free-thinkers—some of the greatest minds of the day—had gathered at Madame Marie-Rose de Vauclair's to read their works aloud and discourse on life, religion, and politics.

  Even as a young child, Gabrielle had been a part of these soirees and sometimes, to amuse her maman's guests, she would take charcoal and paper and draw caricatures lampooning the famous personages at court. A favorite target was the haughty and frivolous queen, Marie Antoinette, whom the philosophes called "the Austrian bitch." Gabrielle would exaggerate the queen's features until her face resembled a greedy weasel's, and everyone would laugh.

  Now she resumed her seat behind Simon's desk, intending to draw the queen going masked and dressed as an angel to a theater where the players were all devils, but her fingers began to sketch a balloon instead. She made it quite large," with a boat-shaped basket swinging by ropes underneath. She added oars and a fanciful sail. Then, with her tongue tucked into her cheek, she drew a man hanging upside down by one foot from the rim of the basket. She exaggerated his aristocratic nose and sharp cheekbones. She laughed softly to herself as she made his eyes wide and filled with comical terror, his mouth open in a huge scream—

  A shadow fell across the paper. Gabrielle's head jerked up. She looked into a pair of sardonic gray eyes and felt the flush of hot color surge slowly up her neck to flood her face.

  Surreptitiously she tried to cover the paper with her hand, but he slipped it out from under her fingers and turned slightly, holding it up to the sunlight streaming from the open door and window.

  A smile flitted across his arrogant mouth. "Not a very good likeness, ma mie. You've made the nose a trifle long, and the chin is much too weak."

  Gabrielle bit her lip to hide a smile. She assumed her haughty look. "An art critic as well as a scientist—there seems to be no end to your accomplishments, Monsieur de Saint-Just—"

  "Max. Please call me Max, ma mie. "

  "Monsieur de Saint-Just. And I am not your lady-love." Although I want to be, God help me.

  "I insist you call me Max." He gave her that maddeningly mocking smile. "After all, we faced death together . . . Gabrielle."

  His silky voice made her name sound like the notes of a song. No one had ever said her name like that before. It gave her a warm feeling.

  Blushing again, she lowered her eyes. She saw that her fingers were wrapped tightly around the charcoal stick. She let it go and lifted her head. "How do you know my name? How did you even fi
nd out where I—" She cut off the words, furious with herself. What had made her automatically assume he was here because of her?

  "I found you by searching for a mysterious Monsieur Prion," he said, drawling the words in the fashion of the king's courtiers at Versailles. "A mysterious Monsieur Prion who turned out, to my considerable disappointment, to be nothing more exotic than a pawnshop owner."

  He walked around, gazing idly at the racks and display cases. He was dressed formally today, in a suit of black velvet with silver lacing. His shirt spilled out in heavy frills at his wrists and throat, enhancing his dark coloring. Oddly, the "dainty elegance of these clothes seemed to emphasize his raw masculinity that had so intrigued her the first time she had seen him.

  "I discovered your name by having a bit of a gossip with the baker's wife," he was saying in his teasing drawl. "Veritable founts of information are bakers' wives. She told me, for instance, that you are widowed with one child, a boy of four. That you are Monsieur Prion's niece by marriage and a blessing to him. And that he needs all the blessings he can get since he seems to have afflicted himself with the care of a foulmouthed urchin by the name of Agnes. Who, if the baker's wife ever has her wish, will be put in the stocks for her impertinence."

  Gabrielle was laughing. She suddenly felt very happy. He had wanted to see her again, wanted to see her badly enough to go to the trouble of finding out her name and where she lived.

  He smiled back at her, with genuine feeling this time, not cruel and not mocking. It eased the harsh lines around his mouth and dimmed for a moment the cynical gleam in his eyes.

  He picked up an ivory fan and unfurled it with long brown fingers, and she noticed that, contrary to fashion, he wore no jewelry, nor adornment of any kind except for the plain silver buckles on his shoes. If it weren't for the patrician bones in his face, he might have been a peasant dressed up in his lord's clothes. Everything about him was a strange mixture of elegance and roughness. She could just as easily picture him brawling with his fists as fighting with a sword.