by C. S. Harris
“Yes. Giselle survived, of course, but no trace has ever been found of the two younger children. The boy—who would have been the fourth earl—was declared dead some years ago.”
“So who holds the title now?”
“A cousin.”
“Since the majority of Bandor’s wealth was safe in England, I assume Giselle’s portion survived the Revolution?”
“Oh, yes. She could have married at any time, had she wished.”
“So why didn’t she?”
Henrietta gave him a long, solemn look. “Really, Sebastian; use your imagination. You know what those days were like—the things that were done to gentlewomen. I hear there was even a child, although fortunately it died shortly after birth.”
“I see,” he said softly. And he thought it probably explained much about both Lady Giselle and Marie-Thérèse.
Henrietta said, “Most of those hanging around the Bourbons are a drain on their resources. But not Giselle. If anything, I suspect she actually helps to support the Princess. They’ve been together ever since Marie-Thérèse was released from prison.”
“What do you think of her?”
Henrietta pushed out an oddly heavy sigh. “Well . . . she’s charming, and pretty, and certainly far more likeable than Marie-Thérèse.”
“But?” prompted Sebastian.
“Let’s just say I would have been very troubled had one of my own sons wished to wed her.”
“Meaning what?”
But Henrietta only shook her head, reluctant to put her implications into words.
• • •
Ambrose LaChapelle was inspecting a tray of imported laces in a small shop on Bond Street when Hero descended from her carriage and bore down upon him.
“Walk up the street with me a ways, monsieur,” she said, smiling. “There’s something I’d like to discuss with you.”
He cast a quick, apprehensive glance at her swollen belly, then looked away. “Can you walk?”
“Of course I can walk. I promise, I’ve no intention of delivering in the middle of Bond Street, so you needn’t look so alarmed.”
He raised his chin and twisted it to one side, as if his neckcloth had suddenly become too tight. “Why me?”
“I’ve just discovered something extraordinary. And in thinking it over, I’ve decided you’re probably the most likely person to be able to explain it to me.”
“I don’t believe I like the sound of that,” said the French courtier.
But Hero simply gave a tight, determined smile and bore him inexorably up the street.
Chapter 49
After leaving his aunt Henrietta’s Mayfair house, Sebastian spent the next several hours in St. Katharine’s, talking to the residents of Cat’s Hole and Hangman’s Court. He was working on a theory that was still missing too many parts to be even remotely feasible, and he was beginning to wonder if he was driven more by his own prejudices and presumptions than anything else.
He finally found a half-blind, gin-soaked ex-soldier who claimed he’d seen a couple of strangers near Hangman’s Court the night Pelletan was killed. But his descriptions were vague, and he said the two men didn’t seem to be together. The soldier also swore that if there’d been a woman there too, he’d have noticed her and remembered her.
Sebastian wasn’t so sure.
He was standing on London Bridge, his elbows on the stone parapet, his gaze on the cold, mist-swirled waters below, when Ambrose LaChapelle walked up to him.
“You’re a hard man to find,” said the Frenchman.
Sebastian shifted his gaze to the man beside him. “I didn’t know you were looking for me.”
Today the courtier wore the polished Hessians, buckskin breeches, and elegant greatcoat of a man about town. Only the soft curls peeping out from beneath the brim of his top hat reminded one of Serena Fox.
Sebastian said, “Last night, you told me you didn’t know who might want to kill you. Change your mind?”
“Let’s just say your wife changed my mind.”
“Lady Devlin?”
LaChapelle stood with his gloved hands clasped behind his back, his gaze on the forest of masts that filled the river below the bridge. After a moment, he said, “How much has Madame Sauvage told you of her brother’s childhood?”
“You mean on the Île de la Cité?”
“No; before that.”
Sebastian studied the courtier’s exquisite, fine-boned face. “I didn’t know there was a ‘before that.’”
The Frenchman nodded, as if Sebastian had only confirmed what he’d already known or at least suspected. “Until the summer of 1795, Philippe-Jean Pelletan had only one child, a girl named Alexandrie. But then one day in early June, he returned to his house on the Île de la Cité bringing with him a small boy. He claimed the lad was his own son—a love child, born of a secret affair some ten years before. He told his curious neighbors that the boy and his mother had been imprisoned during the Terror. The mother died, so Pelletan was now bringing the child home to raise as his own.”
“Are you saying that child was Damion?”
“He was, yes. Needless to say, there were whispers. Philippe-Jean had been a widower for some years. So why had no one ever heard of this boy? Not only that, but the child was quite fair, whereas the elder Pelletan had black hair and dark brown eyes.”
A cold gust of wind blew the mist against Sebastian’s face. He smelled the river and the dankness of the bridge’s ancient wet stones, and the smoke from a hundred thousand coal fires burning unseen in the fog-shrouded city. “What are you suggesting? That Philippe-Jean Pelletan was somehow complicit in a scheme that successfully rescued the Dauphin and substituted a dead or dying child in his place? That Damion Pelletan wasn’t his son at all, but the Lost Dauphin of France? You can’t be serious.”
“Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying I believe it myself. But that doesn’t mean the possibility has not been suggested by others.”
Sometimes a piece of information was like a solitary candle kindled in a dark, empty room, burning bright but useless. Yet there were times when its light made sense of what had until then remained subtly inexplicable or unseen. Sebastian said, “So that’s why both the Comte de Provence and Marie-Thérèse went out of their way to consult with Damion Pelletan. It had nothing to do with their health at all; they wanted to see for themselves how much he resembled the dead Prince. And what was their conclusion?”
The Frenchman shrugged. “In my experience, we tend to find resemblances where we look for them—whether in truth they exist or not. After so many years, who could say with any certainty?”
Sebastian thought about the body he’d seen lying on Gibson’s slab, the high, sloping forehead and prominent nose so much like Marie-Thérèse’s—or a thousand other people’s. If Provence and Marie-Thérèse had gone looking for a resemblance, they would have found it. He said, “How did the Bourbons come to know the details of Damion Pelletan’s childhood?”
“You think we have no contacts in Paris?”
“I’ve no doubt you do—although as I recall, the Comte de Provence would have me believe those ‘contacts’ somehow failed to tell him the purpose of Harmond Vaundreuil’s visit to London.”
LaChapelle simply gave a faint smile and shrugged.
The plash of a wherryman’s oars carried to them through the fog. When it came to powerful motives for murder, Sebastian suspected that preserving one’s position in the line of succession to a throne probably ranked right up there near the top—even when the throne in question was temporarily occupied by a Corsican usurper. The reappearance of the Lost Dauphin would completely overthrow the claims of the current aspirants to the French crown—and Marie-Thérèse’s chances of someday becoming queen.
“Of course,” LaChapelle was saying, “there is no real proof, one way or the other.”
“To your knowledge.”
“To my knowledge,” LaChapelle conceded. “However, given what is at stake, the mere possi
bility might have been enough to put Pelletan’s life in danger.”
Sebastian watched the courtier shift his gaze to the piers at the base of the bridge, where the river churned and swirled in deadly eddies. If the Comte d’Artois had been in London, Sebastian would have suspected him in an instant, for the youngest of the three Bourbon brothers could be as cruel and vicious as he was vain and self-indulgent. But Artois was far away, in Scotland, while if the wheelchair-bound, uncrowned King himself were involved, Sebastian found it difficult to understand why LaChapelle would have believed himself the target of the attack in Birdcage Walk.
Sebastian said, “Why try to kill you? I can understand killing Foucher—and mutilating his body—in the hopes of frightening Vaundreuil into abandoning the peace negotiations. But why you?”
“Perhaps because of what I know—or suspect.”
“Someone told me of a child born to Lady Giselle during the Terror—an infant that did not survive. How did that baby die?”
LaChapelle lifted his gaze to meet Sebastian’s. He was a man who had witnessed life at its most barbaric, who had no illusions about his fellow men or the depths of depravity of which they were capable. Yet Sebastian caught a glimpse of fear in his eyes—the kind of fear instinctive to all men when confronted with evidence of a certain kind of callous inhumanity that bordered on madness.
“She smothered it.”
Chapter 50
Alexandrie Sauvage was hunkered down beside the entrance to Gibson’s surgery when Sebastian walked up to her. She had her head bent, her attention focused on the bandage she was wrapping around a ragged child’s finger. He knew she saw him, for she stiffened. But she didn’t look up, saying to the child, “Next time, Felicity, remember: Geese bite.”
The little girl giggled, thanked her prettily, and ran off to join the gang of urchins waiting for her in the shadows of the Tower.
Alexandrie Sauvage rose slowly to her feet and turned to face him. “Why are you here?”
“We need to talk.”
The wind fluttered the locks of dark red hair framing her face, and she crossed her arms at her chest as if she were cold. She made no move to step into the surgery, but simply stared back at him with wide, unblinking eyes.
He said, “Why didn’t you tell me that Damion was only your half brother?”
“‘Only’? You say that as if our different mothers should make him somehow less important to me. Is that what you’re suggesting?”
“No. I’m suggesting the fact that some people believed him to be the Lost Dauphin of France might have had something to do with his murder. Why the bloody hell didn’t you tell me?”
“Mother of God; why would I bring up some ridiculous, decades-old rumor? Damion was my brother—my half brother, if you will. He was no Bourbon.”
“Are you so certain?”
“Yes!”
“How old were you when your father brought Damion home?”
Her eyes glittered with animosity. “Fourteen.”
“Yet you had never seen him before?”
“No. I did not even know he existed.”
“You didn’t find that odd?”
“Then? Of course. Now?” She shook her head. “No. His mother was a noblewoman. The birth would have been seen as something shameful, something to be hidden. Her parents cut off all contact between her and my father.”
“Did your brother ever talk to you about his mother?”
“Not really. He remembered little of their life before prison. When the trauma of one’s life becomes too great to deal with, the mind sometimes ceases remembering it.”
“Was his ordeal traumatic?”
“He and his mother spent years in prison, without light or proper food, in conditions considerably worse than those endured by Marie-Thérèse. Then his mother was torn from his arms and killed. He never completely recovered from the experience, either physically or mentally. He had dreadful nightmares, and his legs were always weak—it’s why he was never able to serve as a physician in the French army.”
“And why he hated the dark?”
“Yes.”
The implications of that fear and the knowledge of how he had met his death weighed heavily in the silence between them.
Sebastian kept his gaze on her face. “Your father has never said anything to suggest that he might have been involved in an attempt to save the Dauphin from the Temple Prison?”
“Good God, no! How many times must I tell you? Damion was my brother.”
“Did your brother know about the speculation that he might in fact be the Lost Dauphin?”
“Of course he knew. Nothing would make him more furious.”
“Sometimes anger is a product of a refusal to believe the truth.”
“Not in this case.”
She went to stand beside an ancient stone watering trough set in front of the stepped-back facade of the neighboring house. She still had her arms crossed, as if she were hugging herself, and her features had taken on the flatness of those who look into the distant past.
She said, “When my father performed the autopsy on the body of the boy in the Temple, he removed his heart. For nearly twenty years now he has kept that child’s heart in a crystal vase in his study. Why would he do that if he knew the boy was an imposter? If he knew that the real Dauphin was alive and masquerading as his own son?”
“Perhaps he feared that he himself might have been deceived. I doubt the plan of substitution was his own. Knowing that he was simply one player in a much larger plot, he may not have known whom to trust. Whom to believe.”
“And so he took the heart on the off chance the dead boy might indeed have been the real son of Louis XVI? Is that what you’re saying? But if what you’re suggesting is true, then why not tell his own children? Why not tell Damion himself?”
“For your protection, perhaps?” said Sebastian. “The very fact that he kept the child’s heart suggests to me that your father retains some royalist sympathies. Did Damion?”
“Hardly. He despised the Bourbons.”
“As do you.”
“As do I.”
She stared off down the lane, to where the children were now tossing withered cabbage leaves at a pig in an effort to capture its interest. Her face was set in tight, hard lines. But he could see the telltale tic of a muscle along her jawline.
He said, “In a sense, it doesn’t really matter whether your brother was the Lost Dauphin or not. All that matters is that someone believed he was—someone who considered him a potential threat to the current line of succession to the French throne. A threat to be eliminated.”
She brought up one hand to press the fingertips against her lips. “You’re saying that’s why they took his heart? Because they thought he was a Bourbon? What are they planning to do with it? Enshrine it someday in the Val-de-Grâce? As if he were another martyr of the Revolution rather than a man they themselves murdered?”
“I suspect they do consider him a martyr of the Revolution.”
“And the colonel with the French delegation? Why kill him? Why gouge out his eyes?”
“To disguise the true motive behind Damion Pelletan’s death, perhaps? To frighten Vaundreuil into abandoning peace negotiations that might end with Napoléon still on the throne of France? I’m not sure.”
She dropped her hands to her sides. “Who? Which of the Bourbons do you think was behind this?”
“I don’t know.”
She studied his face, her eyes hard and searching. “I don’t believe it.”
When he said nothing, she expelled her breath in a harsh rush. “I keep going over and over that dreadful night in my mind. The bitter, numbing cold. The glitter of the ice. The echo of our footsteps in the stillness. I keep trying to remember something—anything—that might help. But I can’t.”
“You said you thought you heard footsteps behind you, in the lane.”
“Yes.”
“One set of footsteps or two?”
“Only o
ne. Or at least, only one close at hand. There may have been others, farther in the distance.”
“A man’s footsteps, or a woman’s?”
“A man’s. Of that, I am certain. Why do you ask?”
“I found the prints of a woman’s shoe in the alley.”
She shook her head. “If there had been a woman there, I would have known it—I would have felt it.”
Another man might have questioned her assurance, but not Sebastian. As acute as his senses of sight and hearing were, he had learned long ago to rely even more on those senses to which language had as yet given no name.
She said, “Surely you’re not suggesting that Marie-Thérèse of France or one of her ladies stalked my brother through the wretched alleys of St. Katharine’s and thrust a knife into his back?”
Sebastian shook his head. He didn’t believe even Lady Giselle would do her own killing. She would leave the dirty work to men like the dark-eyed assassin who had attacked Sebastian outside Stokes Mandeville, a man Sebastian had once assumed was English but whom he now realized could as easily be a Frenchman who had lived the last twenty-odd years in this country, losing all trace of his native inflections.
Yet he found himself coming back, as always, to that bloody imprint of a woman’s shoe. And he was aware of a conviction that he was still missing something terribly important.
And that time was running out.
Chapter 51
That night, a fierce wind blew in from the north, scattering the dense, choking fog that had smothered the city for days and bringing with it a killing cold.
Sebastian could hear the wind even in his sleep, a low, mournful cadence that joined with a chorus of inconsolable grief. He dreamt of sad-eyed women with flailing arms that reached up to the heavens as they cried out with an anguish borne of empty wombs and empty cradles, even when the blood of their murdered infants stained their own hands. Then the wind became the thunder of the surf beating against a rocky shore, and he was a boy again, standing at the precipice of a sheer cliff face, the sun warm on his face as he stared out to sea. Watching, waiting for a golden-haired, laughing woman who would never, ever return.