Why Kings Confess

by C. S. Harris

  Serena said, “Yet as bad as all that was, it eventually grew worse. Simon and his wife were replaced with new jailors, who starved the boy and refused to empty his slop bucket. The window of his cell was blocked up, depriving the child of both light and air. He grew increasingly ill. With no one to care for him, he was simply left to lie in his own excrement. He eventually lost the ability either to walk or speak.” Serena glanced over at Sebastian. “You’re certain you want to hear this?”

  “Yes.”

  Serena nodded. “We know these things because, after the events of Thermidor, inquiries were made. A representative of the National Convention, a man by the name of Barras, was sent to visit the children in the Temple. He found the Dauphin lying on a filthy cot in a dark, noisome room so foul no one could even enter it. His skin was gray-green, his rags and hair alive with vermin, his stomach bloated from starvation, his half-naked body covered with bruises and welts from his endless beatings.”

  “And his mind?”

  “He was visibly terrified of anyone and everyone who came near him, and completely unable to speak.”

  “So what happened?”

  “At Barras’s insistence, the child was given a new jailor, a man named Laurent, who was ordered to see that the boy was bathed and fed, and his cell cleaned. They say that on occasion Laurent would even carry the boy up to the Tower’s battlements so that he could breathe the fresh air and watch the birds flying in the sky. But it was all too late. The boy was desperately ill. He died.”

  “And how was Marie-Thérèse treated all this time?”

  The question seemed to puzzle the courtier. “She remained in the room she had shared with her mother and aunt before their executions. It was a prison cell, yes, and somewhat shabby. But it was nothing like the hellhole in which her brother was left to rot. The walls were papered, the bed canopied, the mantel of white marble—although the hearth was often cold, and for a time she was forbidden both candles and a tinderbox.”

  “She was not starved or beaten?”

  “She was not well fed, but she was not starved—or beaten.”

  Sebastian was silent, his gaze on the shadows near the stairs, where the bricklayer and his erstwhile dancing partner were locked in a passionate embrace.

  After a moment, Serena said, “You think what happened nearly twenty years ago has something to do with the murder of the French physician?”

  “You don’t?”

  Serena’s tongue flicked out to touch her dry lips. “I have heard—I don’t know that it is true, mind you, but . . .”

  “Yes?” prompted Sebastian.

  “I have heard that one of the doctors who performed the autopsy wrapped the Dauphin’s heart in his handkerchief and took it away with him.”

  “Good God. Why?”

  “It is traditional, in France, to preserve the hearts of the members of the royal family. The bodies of the kings and queens of France were buried in Saint-Denis. But their hearts and other organs were ceremoniously preserved elsewhere, most typically at Val-de-Grâce.”

  Sebastian studied the molly’s delicate features. “What are you suggesting?”

  But Serena only shook her head, her lips pressed firmly together as if some thoughts were too terrible to be spoken aloud.

  • • •

  Sebastian arrived back at Brook Street to find Hero in the library with a stack of books on the table beside her, the black cat curled up asleep on the hearth nearby. She looked up as he paused in the doorway, the golden light from the fire shimmering in her hair and throwing soft shadows across the calm features of her face. She looked so alive, so vibrant and healthy, that he could not believe she might be dead in a matter of days.

  She said, “Stop looking at me like that.”

  He gave a startled huff of laughter. “Like what?”

  “You know what I mean. I take it you saw Gibson?”

  “I did. He says he’ll make some inquiries tomorrow.” He came to place his hands on her shoulders, his thumbs brushing back and forth across the nape of her neck. After a moment, he said, “The Frenchwoman—Alexandrie Sauvage—is an Italian-trained physician now practicing as a midwife. She says there is a way to turn a babe in the womb. It involves applying pressure to the belly. She claims she has done it before.”

  He felt Hero stiffen beneath his hands. “Does Gibson believe it’s possible?”

  “He doesn’t know. And even the woman herself admits that it can be dangerous if not done properly.”

  “Do you trust her?”

  “No.” He dropped his hands to his sides. “I killed someone who was dear to her once.”

  “In Portugal?”

  “Yes.”

  Hero closed the book she’d been reading and set it aside with the others. “Perhaps the babe will turn itself.”

  “Perhaps.” He tilted his head to read the title of the slim volume. “Réflexions Historiques sur Marie Antoinette. What’s all this?”

  “I’ve been reading various accounts of what happened to the royal family during the Terror.”

  “And?”

  “What Lady Giselle told you is true; Marie-Thérèse does indeed have the bloodstained chemise worn by her father at the guillotine. The King’s confessor saved it and gave it to her.”

  “Seems a rather ghoulish thing to do.”

  “It does. Yet I gather she cherishes it. It makes you wonder, does it not, about the time-honored role of the royal confessor?”

  “A delicate position requiring much tact, I should think. Not so difficult when dealing with someone like Louis XVI, who by all accounts was a devout, loving husband and father, and who tried hard to be a just and honest king. But how do you in all sincerity grant absolution to a Louis XIV—or a Richard III? Someone whose actions so obviously and repeatedly violate the dictates of his faith?”

  “I don’t understand how such kings can honestly think they have received absolution. Perhaps they don’t actually believe in their professed religion.”

  “Perhaps. Although I suspect it’s more likely they believe they have a special divine dispensation from above.”

  She looked up at him. “To sin and kill without compunction?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why bother to confess at all?”

  “That I don’t know. I suppose I could always try asking Marie-Thérèse herself.”

  Hero gave a soft laugh. “That would be interesting.”

  He went to hunker beside the cat, which raised its head and looked at Sebastian with an air of bored tolerance. The cat had been with them for four months now but still lacked a name. None of the various suggestions they’d come up with ever seemed to do justice to the cat’s unique combination of arrogance and ennui.

  “I just had an interesting conversation with Ambrose LaChapelle,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  In quiet, measured tones, Sebastian repeated the French courtier’s description of the treatment given the Dauphin in the Temple Prison.

  “I’ve heard some of this before,” she said when he had finished, “but not all of it. That poor child.”

  She watched him scratch the cat behind its ears. Then she said, “There’s something about LaChapelle’s tale that bothers you. What?”

  Sebastian shifted his hand to stroke beneath the cat’s chin, the cat lifting its head and slitting its eyes in rare contentment. “There’s too much in the traditional story of the Orphans in the Temple that simply doesn’t add up.”

  “Such as?”

  “Why subject the boy to such savagely brutal treatment when his sister was allowed to live in comparative comfort in the room just above him?”

  “Once Louis XVI went to the guillotine, his son became the uncrowned King Louis XVII of France—the symbol of everything the revolutionaries hated. Marie-Thérèse, on the other hand, was a girl. A daughter of the King, yes, but under Salic Law she could never inherit the throne.”

  “True. But Spain once observed Salic Law too, and they managed
to get around it. The risk was very real that France might someday do the same. So I don’t think we can say she was no threat to the revolutionaries or the Republic. Yet they let her live.”

  “What else?”

  “I’m bothered by the shifts in the Dauphin’s condition that LaChapelle described taking place. The Simons—the couple who had been the boy’s first jailors—were suddenly removed and replaced with a changing succession of guards. At the same time, his cell’s window was covered, leaving the boy in the dark. Why do that?”

  “To be cruel.”

  “It’s possible. But I can think of another reason.”

  “You mean, so that no one could get a good look at him or recognize him? Good heavens, Sebastian, surely you’re not giving credence to those romantic tales about the Dauphin being spirited away from his prison, with some poor, deaf-mute child left to die in his place?”

  Sebastian rose to his feet. “No; of course not. It’s just . . . Why the devil did they not show the dead Dauphin’s body to his sister? She was right there—not simply in the same prison, but in the same tower, in the room directly above his. Why leave her in doubt? Why allow the whispers to spread and grow? Why not put all possibility of a substitution to rest, once and for all?”

  “How do you know they didn’t show her the dead Dauphin?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  “What if they did show her the child’s body, only she was so horrified by his condition that she blocked the sight from her mind?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that, but you might be right.”

  He went to pour himself a glass of brandy. “I think both the Comte de Provence and Marie-Thérèse were perfectly aware of the fact that Damion Pelletan was the son of the man who treated the Dauphin at the time of his death in the Temple.”

  “Surely you can’t think that’s the reason Pelletan was killed? Who would murder a man for something his father did nearly twenty years ago?”

  “Isn’t that what the revolutionaries did? They killed a ten-year-old boy for the sins of his forefathers.”

  “But . . . Provence is far too fat and crippled to have done something like this.”

  “I’m not suggesting he did it himself. But he could certainly have hired someone. Someone such as the gentleman who tried to kill me outside of Stoke Mandeville.”

  “I can’t believe it of him.”

  “I notice you don’t say the same thing about Marie-Thérèse.”

  She started to say something, then stopped and bit her lip.

  “You can’t, can you?” said Sebastian.

  Hero shook her head. “There is much about Marie-Thérèse that I admire. She survived a terrible ordeal and suffered a brutal succession of heart-wrenching sorrows. That she came through it with anything even vaguely resembling sanity is truly remarkable. But for all that, I still cannot like her. It isn’t just the haughtiness, or the rigidity, or the ostentatious, intolerant piety. Someone once described Marie-Thérèse to me as a consummate performer, and I suspect that she truly is. To my knowledge, no one has ever seen her looking happy, although you also never see her appear anything but calm in public. Yet I’ve been told that in reality she is anything but calm. She has hysterics. She’s been known to faint at the sight of a barred window, and she trembles violently at the beat of a drum or the peal of a church bell. She has never really recovered from what was done to her. And while no one could ever in any way hold that against her, I still—”

  “Don’t trust her?”

  “I wouldn’t trust either her sincerity or her sanity.”

  Sebastian was silent for a moment. Then he said, “LaChapelle told me something else. He said that as part of the autopsy, the boy’s heart was removed.”

  Hero’s gaze met his. “Oh, God,” she whispered. “You think that’s why Damion’s killer stole his heart? In some twisted kind of revenge?”

  “I don’t know. But what are the odds that Philippe-Jean Pelletan would participate in an autopsy that removed the dead Dauphin’s heart, only to have the heart of his own murdered son taken some twenty years later? What are the odds?”

  Chapter 28

  Monday, 25 January

  By morning, the temperature had risen a few degrees above freezing, the thaw turning the snow-filled streets of the city into thickly churned rivers of brown slush. But the wind was still icy cold, with a pervasive, bone-chilling dampness that sent market women scurrying down the footpaths with shawls drawn up over their heads and their shoulders hunched.

  Sebastian turned up the collar of his greatcoat and resisted the urge to stomp his cold feet. He was standing on the pavement outside the French Catholic chapel near Portman Square. The church had no bell tower, under a decree of King George III himself; only a simple Latin cross set back into the facade helped differentiate it from the two stables flanking the plain brick building. But he could hear a rustling from within, and a moment later, as the Anglican church bells of the city began to chime the hour, a small huddle of older men and women, their bodies portly and dressed almost uniformly in black, exited the church’s plain doors and drifted away.

  Sebastian stood with his hands clasped behind his back and waited.

  He’d heard it said that every morning of her life, Marie-Thérèse rose with the dawn, made her own bed, and swept her own room, before devoting the next hour to prayer. It was what she had done each day of the more than three years she’d spent in a lonely prison cell in Paris, and she had never lost the practice. At Hartwell House, she attended daily mass with her own chaplain. But in London she came here, to the French chapel, to pray with her fellow exiles.

  There were some who found the story of a king’s daughter continuing to make her own bed admirable, and in a way it was. But to Sebastian it also spoke of the kind of deep and lingering trauma only too familiar to any man who had ever been to war.

  Somehow, alone in her prison cell in the tower of the Knights Templar’s ancient monastery, Marie-Thérèse had convinced herself that the daily practice of this homely ritual would keep her sane. It had. And so, even though she had now been free for nearly twenty years, she’d never dared to relax her self-imposed regime. It was as if the very act of making her bed and sweeping her room still kept the demons of madness at bay. Perhaps it did.

  The bells of the city had long since tolled into silence. But it was another ten minutes before Marie-Thérèse herself made an appearance, trailed by her long-suffering companion, the Lady Giselle Edmondson.

  “Monsieur le Vicomte,” said the King’s daughter, her half boots making soft, squishy noises in the slushy footpath. “This is unexpected.”

  He swept a gracious bow. “Your uncle told me you had decided to spend a few days in town.”

  “Yes. As much as I enjoy the country, I find that I do miss the theater.” She cast him a speculative sideways glance. “Although I was disappointed to hear that Kat Boleyn is not treading the boards this season. She is always such a joy to watch. Don’t you agree?”

  An observer might have thought the remark entirely innocent—might have believed her ignorant of the fact that the actress Kat Boleyn had for many years been Sebastian’s mistress. But he saw the spiteful gleam in her eyes, and he knew better.

  The jibe was both deliberate and breathtakingly malicious.

  “It is a pity, yes,” he said, keeping his own voice bland with effort. “But understandable, given the circumstances of her late husband’s recent death. One can surely appreciate her need to spend a few months away from the city, recovering from such a loss.”

  “True.” She sucked in her cheeks. “You wouldn’t by chance know where she has gone?”

  “No,” he said baldly.

  He did not, in truth, know where Kat had sought refuge. But wherever it was, he hoped she was finding the peace of mind she so desperately needed.

  A faint frown of disappointment pulled down the corners of the Princess’s lips, then was gone. She smoothed a hand over her peli
sse. “So many murders! The streets of London are very dangerous, are they not?”

  “They certainly can be. I’ve been wondering, did you know that Dr. Damion Pelletan was the son of Philippe-Jean Pelletan, the physician who treated your brother in the Temple Prison?”

  Her lips flattened, and she shook her head determinedly from side to side. “No; I did not.”

  For someone who had spent a lifetime dissembling, she was a terrible liar. He said, “That’s not the real reason you decided to see Pelletan?”

  “You dare?” A vicious snarl twisted her lips and quivered the tense muscles of her face. “You dare to contradict me, daughter of a king of France? Me, a descendant of the sainted Louis himself?”

  Sebastian held her gaze. “Whoever killed Damion Pelletan also removed his heart. Do you have any idea why they would do that?”

  The violence of her reaction both surprised and puzzled him. Her eyes widened, and she gasped, one fist coming up to press against her lips.

  “Madame,” said Lady Giselle, rushing forward to slip an arm around the duchesse’s thick waist and urge her toward the waiting carriage. “Here, let me help you.” She paused only to throw a piercing, furious glare over her shoulder at Sebastian. “You are despicable.”

  A soft clapping of gloved hands echoed in the sudden stillness.

  Sebastian turned to find Ambrose LaChapelle slowly descending the steps from the chapel, his hands raised as if he were applauding a fine performance, the crook of a furled umbrella slung over one forearm.

  “Congratulations,” said the courtier. “She’ll never forgive you for that, you know. You have just broken one of the cardinal rules. One does not contradict a member of the French royal family, no matter how ridiculous or patently false their utterances may be. Fifteen years ago, a certain Madame Senlis ventured within Marie-Thérèse’s hearing to correct the Comte de Provence’s faulty memory of some trivial incident from their youth. Marie-Thérèse has still not forgiven the unfortunate woman—and she never will.”

  “Madame Rancune,” said Sebastian, watching as, in the distance, Lady Giselle tenderly tucked a fur-lined robe around the duchesse.