Afterwards, when Don Carlos slept, Annabel slipped out of bed, donned her shift, and made a cautious pilgrimage to investigate his desk.
Don Carlos was a methodical man, and since he was doing nothing wrong, he had not hidden his notes. Between the single candle she dared light and the cold high moon riding full outside the window, Annabel was able to make out the gist of them.
There wasn’t a great deal. Some odd errors in bookkeeping that might not have been errors, a stableman who thought he might have seen Louis Vasquez leaving the embassy very late one night: suspicious circumstances, but hardly what one might call proof of anything. Except that Louis Vasquez had had oddly close dealings with the Spanish for someone claiming to be the rightful king of France. She returned to Doña Mercedes’s bed and the snoring weight of Don Carlos, and lay unsleeping, thoughtful, waiting until the approach of dawn would make it possible for her to whisper gently in Don Carlos’s ear that she had to leave.
But not quite an hour later, she heard footsteps in the hall. The footsteps of an excessively large number of people for that time of night.
The conclusion to which she leapt might have been wrong, but she did not dare to test it. She elbowed Don Carlos viciously, already scrambling up, diving for Doña Mercedes’s massive wardrobe.
“What?” said Don Carlos as Annabel closed the wardrobe behind her and someone pounded on the door of the outer room. She heard him curse, a startlingly pungent oath for a Spanish don, but he was quick-witted, and he must have feared this eventuality as much as she had. She heard him get up, drag his robe on, stumble, cursing, to the door.
Her Spanish was not very good, but good enough for her to follow the outline of the ensuing exchange. Someone demanded to know the whereabouts of the amante dorée. Don Carlos demanded to know what business it was of theirs. Never you mind that. Where is she? Annabel pressed her fists against her mouth, praying. I sent her home, Don Carlos said and added a particularly unflattering epithet. Coarse laughter; Annabel hated them, silently, fiercely. A further spate of Spanish which she did not understand at all. She heard men moving around Don Carlos’s apartments; she gripped the lip of the wardrobe door as hard as she could, having no other way to hold it closed. Mere moments later, someone tried the door, and she heard him call to Don Carlos, This wardrobe door is stuck. Don Carlos’s reply was something about the embassy carpenter that made them all laugh again. And then, blessedly, they were leaving, grumbling about the high fidgets Don Esteban worked himself into.
Annabel was very, very cold.
The door closed, and she heard Don Carlos returning to the bedroom. She stayed where she was, naked among Doña Mercedes’s gowns. When Don Carlos opened the wardrobe, she did not look up at him.
“I am sorry, Annabella,” he said; she realized distantly that he was apologizing for the vulgar name he had called her, and shook her head. It didn’t signify. He offered his hand.
She took it, only then feeling the throb of her fingertips from holding the wardrobe door so desperately. She forced herself not to scuttle for her shift, but to walk calmly. Inside her head, she was screaming, raging, cursing in French and English. Because she could not doubt that she had been deliberately trapped, and if she had been trapped, there was only one person who could have done it, the person who had sent her to Don Carlos’s bed in the first place: Jules Sevier.
She picked up her shift and said, “Why should anyone wish to disgrace you, Don Carlos?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You cannot imagine this was an accident,” she said with asperity, and felt better for being clothed.
“Don Esteban is—”
“Don Esteban is your spymaster. I know that, even if you do not. Why would he wish you to be caught in bed with . . . ” A man. But she wasn’t one, and wouldn’t say it. “With me?”
Don Carlos’s face had gone gray, ill. She was sorry, but she did not have time for his sensibilities. “Don Carlos, I must be out of the embassy as soon as possible. Please. Tell me who would wish to see you . . . ”
“No one, Annabella. I swear it on my honor. I have no enemies here, nor wish to. I serve His Excellency, and—”
She saw it hit him; his eyes widened and his mouth went slack behind his neat half-imperial. “But it was only a favor for Don Maurice.”
“Don Maurice . . . Monseigneur le Duc?” Her voice squeaked on the last word, but there was only one nobleman she knew of in Nouvelle Orléans whose Christian name was Maurice, and that was the Duc de Plaquemine who held sovereignty over Nouvelle Orléans and the surrounding territory.
Don Carlos shook himself back into his secretarial persona. “Monseigneur de Plaquemine came to me a week ago, after the death of a young traveler, a gentleman of mixed French and Spanish blood named Louis Vasquez.”
“Ah, merde,” Annabel said before she could stop herself, but Don Carlos didn’t seem to notice.
“He said that he had heard rumors that we—Spain—had been involved in the death of Señor Vasquez. He was very much distressed, even when I assured him we had not. So I promised I would . . . ” He swallowed hard. “Investigate.”
And although he had found nothing as of yet, it was painfully obvious that that did not mean there was nothing to find. And that whatever it was, it was more valuable to Jules Sevier than she was.
“Thank you,” she said, struggling into her gown as quickly as she could. “I think, if you abandon your investigations, this sort of thing will not happen again.”
“Abandon my investigations? Then it is true? We connived at the murder of—”
“Of a Bourbon pretender.” And because he had always been gentle with her, she lied, “He must have been a threat to the Spanish throne as well. You did say he was half-Spanish.”
“Yes,” Don Carlos said. He sounded dazed and not entirely convinced, but she had done the best she could.
“I must go.” She did not say good-bye, neither au revoir nor adieu, because she did not want to force either of them to say what they both knew: she would not see Don Carlos again.
Getting out of the Spanish embassy unseen was a challenge, but not beyond her capabilities. A greater obstacle was the question of where she could go once she stood outside its gates. Habit, after a night such as this, dictated that she go to the Sevier townhouse and make her report. But Sevier had sacrificed her like a pawn on a chessboard, and she was not confident that he would be happy to see her. It was possible—for anything was possible in the service of Jules Sevier—that she had not been merely an incidental target in the scheme against Don Carlos.
She could not go home, either, because if Sevier did wish to be rid of her, her house would be watched, and she did not want to bring trouble to Salomé and the servants. She could not go to any of her admirers; even those who could be blackmailed into sheltering her did not deserve the trouble she would bring in her wake.
She needed to gain an audience with the Duc de Plaquemine, but showing up on his doorstep at dawn, with her dress crumpled and her hair hanging down her back like a madwoman’s, was not the way to achieve that.
She thought of taking sanctuary in a church, like the heroine of a romance, but while it was true that she could walk into any church in the city and Sevier would be helpless to drag her out, it was also true that that would solve nothing, gain her nothing. It was not time she needed; it was access.
And she could get that access, she realized, if she had the gall to ask for it.
And if Quentin didn’t have her arrested on sight.
She remembered the address that had been on Quentin’s card and found it without great difficulty. The door of the boarding house was opened by a young woman with skin the same café au lait shade as Salomé’s. She seemed more than a little surprised when Annabel asked for M. Quentin, but said, “Yes, mademoiselle,” and invited her into the front parlor.
The parlor was as shabby as Quentin himself, but with that same air of dignity kept under trying circumstances. She did not have lo
ng to wait before Quentin came in; his coat had every appearance of having been hastily dragged on, and his fingers were covered with ink. She pretended that she did not feel the acceleration of her heartbeat, that her mouth had not suddenly gone dry. She could not have him; these schoolgirl airs were ridiculous and futile.
“Mademoiselle St. Clair. I did not expect to see you . . . ”
Here? Annabel wondered. Again? He sounded wary, but not hostile. Not, as she had feared, disgusted. “M’sieur Quentin, I beg pardon for disturbing you at this hour of the day, but—”
He waved it off. “I am an early riser, mademoiselle. How may I be of service?”
She took a deep breath and plunged without preamble into her story, telling him what the events and discoveries of the night had led her to: “Louis Vasquez was not a Bourbon pretender. He was an adventurer, in the pay of Spain. I don’t know what they hoped to accomplish, but I think he must have double-crossed them. That was why he wanted to go west, and that was why he was killed.”
“Yes,” Quentin said cautiously.
“But Monseigneur le Duc has asked the secretary of the Spanish ambassador to investigate the matter. Don Carlos has found nothing, but tonight—”
“Wait. Why would the Duc de Plaquemine—”
“I don’t know. That’s why I need to speak to him.”
“Which brings you to me because . . . ?”
“Because, m’sieur.” She stopped, swallowed hard. Told him, her voice growing smaller and smaller, about being very nearly discovered in Don Carlos’s bed, about the involvement of Don Esteban Castillo y Blas, about Jules Sevier’s inarguable culpability.
A pause, agonizing in the shabby parlor. And then Quentin began to laugh. “Only you, Mademoiselle St. Clair, could make the entire English embassy your go-between.”
She felt her face heat; she knew she should carry it off with a high hand, smile and murmur something rich with innuendo. But she could not do it. She was tired and afraid, and she wanted Quentin’s arms around her so much she could barely breathe through the pain in her chest. She said, “You are doing me a favor, m’sieur. I assure you I can return it.”
“Enlightened self-interest,” Quentin said and sighed. “It runs in the veins of spies, you know, instead of blood. I will see what I can do.”
The Duc de Plaquemine received the amante dorée in a long echoing colonnade behind the ducal palace. Annabel had managed to pin her hair up, thanks to the generosity of Quentin’s landlady, but she felt small and grubby and very American before the sad-eyed elegance of the Duc.
He listened carefully, asked questions—and answered them, which was a courtesy she had not expected of him. Her understanding had been correct, however sketchy. Louis Vasquez had been hired by Don Esteban—who might or might not have been acting on behalf of Ferdinand VII—to claim the principate of Louisiane. If he had succeeded, which the Duc seemed to feel was unlikely but not impossible, he would have returned Floride, Mexique, and Californie to Spanish hands—“or, at least,” the Duc said sardonically, “to Don Esteban’s hands”—and with the French empire suddenly splintered and its former colonies now allied against it, it was possible that Napoléon IV would not have been able to muster a decisive response. He was not the military man his great predecessor had been.
But Louis Vasquez had had second thoughts. He had come to see the Duc, very privately, told him the truth and begged for his help in leaving Nouvelle Orléans. His plan had been to go to Saint François (which Annabel, in some last ineradicable American corner of her soul, still thought of as San Francisco), but his funds were not sufficient.
“I gave him a letter to the manager of the Banque Impériale in Saint François. In return, he was going to write an open letter, detailing the truth of his presence in Nouvelle Orléans, and give it to the bank manager to send to the newspapers of Nouvelle Orléans and Paris. And then the next night, he was killed.”
“But your letter wasn’t . . . oh.”
“Yes, mademoiselle,” the Duc said sadly. “The Spanish took the letter I had written off the body, which I did not know until this morning, when Monsieur Sevier came to return it to me.”
“Oh,” Annabel said again, uselessly.
“It seems that Don Esteban came to see him on Monday, and they reached an agreement. Don Esteban got rid of Sevier’s embarrassment—Louis Vasquez and my most unfortunate letter—and in return, Sevier got rid of his. I am afraid, mademoiselle, that you were merely a means to an end.”
“But Don Carlos wasn’t going to find anything.”
“Don Esteban did not care to risk it. Don Carlos is well connected, and fiercely loyal to King Ferdinand. He would not have kept silent if he had discovered that Don Esteban was harboring imperial ambitions of his own.”
“Do you think . . . ?”
“I think very little is beyond the reach of Don Esteban Castillo y Blas, though much remains beyond his grasp. But you do not need to worry about Monsieur Sevier any longer. I will speak to him.”
“Thank you, monseigneur.”
“And perhaps, Mademoiselle St. Clair, I may have the honor of dining with you one day soon?”
His protection would not be adequate, not in the long run, but it would give her space to maneuver, to renegotiate a perilous treaty with Sevier. She wished to serve France, and she did not know of another way in which she could do so.
“I would be enchanted, Monseigneur,” she murmured, dropping a curtsey and trying not to shiver. She knew what he was truly asking, just as he did. He knew what she was. Although she did not desire him, his patronage would be even more valuable to her than his protection. She was an amante dorée; although she had never had the arrogance to aim as high as the Duc de Plaquemine, she was not such a fool as to reject a treasure when it fell into her lap.
Desire, after all, was irrelevant.
On a rainy Thursday, a month after the death of Louis Vasquez, Salomé came upstairs and said, “Mademoiselle, that mad Anglais is on the doorstep again.”
“M’sieur Quentin?” Annabel had written him a letter, detailing the truth of the machinations surrounding the unfortunate Louis Vasquez, and had expected never to hear from him again. “What does he want?”
“To speak to you, he says.”
Annabel pinched the bridge of her nose. “I will see him.”
This time before descending to the parlor, she wrapped herself in a thick shawl.
Quentin was standing, shabby and correct, beside the window, and the desire she did not feel for her patrons kindled inside the cage of her ribs. Irrelevant, she told herself, but the word was hollow and false. “Mademoiselle,” he said and bowed. “You look unwell. I trust I am not disturbing you.”
“Not at all, m’sieur.” She had spent the previous night with a patron who was not as courteous as Don Carlos, or Monseigneur le Duc. But the aching brittleness she felt was not illness, nor even anything worth the mention. “Will you be seated?”
“Thank you.”
They sat down, each of them poker-spined and expressionless. Quentin said in English, “With your permission, Miss St. Clair, I would like to tell you a story.”
“A story, sir?” It was hard to speak English, got harder and harder every year.
“Yes. The story of an American. A young man of good if impoverished family, from Boston.”
“There are many such young men.” But her tongue was thick in her mouth, and she gripped her hands together so that they would not betray her.
“This one was named Martin Loftis. He seems to have been a wayward, unhappy boy, the cause of much grief and strife for his parents. But never more so than when he ran away.”
“Did he?”
“At the age of sixteen. His parents succeeded, by the outlay of a great deal of time, expense, and energy, in tracing him as far as St. Louis, but there he apparently disappeared entirely. He has been given up for dead in the city of his birth.”
“Good.” She bit her tongue, appalled at the savagery
in her own voice, appalled at how much wounds ten years gone could still hurt.
“He was a tall young man, even at sixteen. Slender. Blond. Remarkably good-looking, from all accounts.”
“There are many such in Boston.” But her voice wavered, and neither of them was deceived.
Silence, and then Quentin said, “Why do you do it?”
“Because I must,” she said: a useless answer, but the only one she had ever found. “Why have you not betrayed me?”
“Because I could not.” He hesitated, then said, “You are a very beautiful woman, Annabel St. Clair.”
“Thank you, sir.” But it was a compliment, nothing more, untainted by any hint of desire. Or love. Her heart ached, as brittle as her body. The slightest touch would shatter it in a thousand shards around her feet.
But that touch would not come from Quentin. He rose, bowed, reverted to French: “I shall not overstay my welcome when you are so clearly troubled by other matters. But I wished you to know . . . ” Looking at his face, she thought there were many things he would have liked to have said, if there had been words for them. “I shall not tell anyone.”
“Promise?” she said wryly, knowing as well as he did that he could make no such promise and expect to keep it.
And he smiled wryly back. “Spy’s honor. Good day to you, mademoiselle.”
“Good day, m’sieur.”
She stood at the window, watching him go, and did not attempt to call him back. And though he glanced up to meet her eyes, he did not return.
Somewhere Beneath Those Waves Was Her Home
184. Figurehead. Wood. 35” x 18”. American, ca. 1850. Figure of a woman holding a telescope and compass. Ship unknown.
The selkie stands at the window, staring out at the sea. Behind her, in the rumpled bed, the artist snores. She’s had better sex with her own fingers, but it doesn’t matter. He wanted it, and it amuses her to cheat on Byron. In their stalemate—she cannot make him give back her skin, he cannot make her love him—she takes her pleasures where she finds them.
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