The Forbidden Rose

by Bourne, Joanna

  “We make each other stupid.” She resented him. She was also annoyed at her own body.

  He pushed away from her. “Put your clothes on. We have to leave.” Before he stomped off, he said, “We’ll talk later.”

  Seven

  DOYLE DIDN’T MIND THE HEAT HIMSELF, AND GOD knew he didn’t plan to pamper the boy, but he hated to walk a woman through this mud.

  The sky burned empty and pale blue. They went single file across a landscape of hedgerow and long fields. First him with Maggie, then Hawker and the animals. The boy had fallen back a ways owing to the number and quality of his ongoing discussions with the donkeys. Hawker was practicing what was beginning to be an extensive vocabulary of obscenity. He hitched his trousers up with a jerk and swaggered the way the mule boys did, enjoying himself, playing the Game as natural as breathing.

  Maggie pushed the pace. Being determined about it. A woman with somewhere to go and something to do.

  They were following the track that led to the Paris road. Maybe she was just getting well away from Voisemont and the people who knew her. But he thought she had herself a destination. It might be she was leading him straight to de Fleurignac.

  The old man made the list. He knew who was slated to die. I find him. I take the list. And I do not get myself tangled up with his daughter.

  Maggie lifted her face to the little wind that had come up and stood, eyes closed, drinking it in. She was dusty and sweaty. There was a smear of mud across her cheek. Her clothes were kitchen and cowshed wear. All that, and anyone with eyes could see what she was. Aristo.

  Elegant as crystal. I keep thinking she’ll break, and she doesn’t.

  You get to know somebody pretty well, slogging through French mud with them. Maggie was gold and grit. She set her clogs on the ruts and rocks with grim deliberation. He could have pointed her in the direction of China and she’d keep on going, one step after another, till she saw pagodas.

  I don’t want to like de Fleurignac’s daughter. I don’t want to admire her.

  He wasn’t sorry for what he’d do to her father. But he’d regret hurting her, if he had to.

  Mistress Maggie scraped mud off her clogs on an upright rock, being a woman with a liking for lost causes, obviously. Strands of dark brown hair stuck to her forehead and her cheeks. Her clothes stuck, too, holding to the curves of her body. The tops of her breasts were stippled with little beads of sweat. Once in a while a couple of those drops got close and made friends and ran away together down the valley between her tits.

  She’d be salty if he started licking her. Salty and sweet and musky. She’d taste like Maggie—like this particular woman out of all the world—with a sprinkling of dirt. There wasn’t a square inch of her he didn’t want to go over with his tongue.

  If I hadn’t tasted her, I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t be thinking about it. Serves me right.

  They were avoiding the main road. This cart track led to the Rouen highway, if you cut through the fields. Keep on straight and it eventually wound toward the Paris road. They hadn’t met anyone in four miles but a bashful girl with a pair of cows—the cows didn’t take kindly to donkeys—and a dung cart drawn by a horse so old even the army wouldn’t steal it.

  Pear orchards stretched across the hilltops, rows of trees with a few brown cows grazing under them. Dun-colored fields, dotted with haystacks, alternated with the green and yellow-green waves of uncut hay. They’d cut that as soon as they had two dry days in a row.

  The wheat was doing well. They’d get twenty bushels an acre in August and everybody would eat.

  If the fighting in the Vendée didn’t spill over into Normandy . . . If the weather cooperated . . . If they could harvest it with half the men marched off to the army.

  Weedy footpaths ran between fields, up over the horizon and out of sight. Off to the west he could make out the steeple of a church. They walked the long downward slope toward a thin pinewood. It would be cooler there, out of the sun.

  Behind him, Maggie hit a soft spot in the road, gave a little grunt, pulled her sabot out with a suck and a squelch, and started again. He could feel her eyes boring a hole into his back. Thinking and thinking.

  He shouldn’t have kissed her. I don’t chase bobtail when I’m on the job. A thousand times I’ve told some idiot, “Keep it in yer breeches when you’re working.” Now I’m the idiot.

  When he’d run away from home the first time, he’d been, what? Thirteen? He’d hid out in the rookeries and docks of London, doing heavy labor. Even that young, he’d been tall as a grown man. That intrigued women. He’d had offers enough he could have slept in a different bed every night.

  Being a shy lad, he’d turned them down. Mostly.

  Five years later, he’d made the rounds of the Polite World. Turned out the minor son of a major earl got the same offers. It was cleaner women, but the same hot greed. The same curiosity to see if his cock measured up to the rest of him. Some just wanted a toss. Some of them, God help the fools, thought they could marry into the Markham family that way.

  He was already working for the British Service then. He had access to levels of society most agents couldn’t touch. Sometimes that meant he bedded women who played spy games for France. Women with soft bodies and skilled little hands who asked about his father’s work at the War Ministry.

  Copulation got to be a weary exercise when you didn’t like your partner. He’d lost his taste for casual encounters. I don’t poke my staff into every woman who wanders by.

  But Lord, he wanted Maggie. He wanted to run his hands over every inch of her skin. Wanted his mouth on her. He wanted to slurp her down, like she was milk and he was a starving cat.

  The squelch and shuffle stopped. When he looked back, Maggie was bent over, panting, her hands braced on her knees.

  Hell. “We’re far enough from the chateau. We’ll rest down there.” A thin rippling of water gleamed fifty yards ahead. Trees and bushes grew up around a stream. It’d be private, but with a view of the road in both directions. A good spot.

  She shook her head. “I can go farther.”

  Right. “The donkeys can’t. They need water.”

  “Oh.” She straightened, wiping sweat off her upper lip. “Of course. Yes.”

  He wasn’t worried about the donkeys. It takes dedication and ingenuity to kill a donkey, though Hawker was giving it a try. Any fool can founder a high-bred mare. A good horse will run her heart out and die under you.

  That was Maggie. She’d keep on till she fell in her tracks.

  She plodded onward, doing the last fifty yards, scrubbing her hand, open-fingered, on her sleeve. She just absolutely did not like being dirty. “Walking this road is different from traveling by coach. I had known this, of course, in my mind.” She sighed. “Now I know with my feet.”

  “Nothing like experience.”

  “There is no substitute for it, I believe. One can live too deeply in books. They are deceptive.”

  “I’d agree with that.” What he wanted to do was start with her forehead and lick the frown off. Kiss her eyelids. Then he’d just wander down to her mouth. He could take an hour on her face, touring from place to place. She’d be wild for him before he got done with her ears.

  Except he wasn’t going to do anything on that agenda. He was just going to imagine it. In detail.

  Maggie touched from tree trunk to tree trunk on her way down the steep of the road to the water. “I have traveled this countryside all my life,” she said. “I will now carry it in the creases of my skin. This is a different way to know it, and more thorough.”

  The stream looked clean enough. “The boy can water the beasts. You can cool off. Wash some, if you want.”

  “I would like that.”

  Go ahead. Splash water all over you. Get your clothes wet all down you till you got no secrets at all. Let’s drive the man completely out of his head.

  “I will go slightly upstream,” she said, “to avoid the donkeys. I am as fond of donkeys as anyon
e, but—I will be utterly candid—they attempt to bite me. It is the heat, I believe, that makes them irritable.”

  “They always do that. Remarkably even temperament in those animals.”

  “Doubtless. But I would argue that discomfort brings out in them a special avidity for human flesh. Hercules was sent to steal the mares of Diomedes that ate human flesh. Did you know that?”

  “I’ll keep it in mind if anyone tries to sell me one.”

  She knelt by the water. The steam was shallow and only a few feet wide, running over flat rocks, cooling the air. Gracefully, she reached up and stripped her fichu off her shoulders, unwinding it from her in a circle, uncovering white, white skin. The sun percolated through the trees to land in coin shapes all over her. She was lit up in speckled drops that slid over her neck and across the bones of her shoulders. They played peekaboo up and down the mounds of her tits. A man without his splendid self-control would have noticed she showed right down to the nipple when she leaned over.

  She wet the end of the fichu in the stream and washed her face. Hawker arrived, gave one absolutely casual glance in their direction, and took the animals way off downstream to drink.

  “The road’ll be dry this afternoon. We’ll have easier going.” Doyle chose a flat gray boulder and settled down to see what else Maggie would do. Still lots of clothing on this woman.

  He’d pulled his jacket off an hour ago and slung it over Dulce’s back. He was walking around with his shirt open halfway down his chest. That was a fine poetical look for some men. Not him. He had too much unpoetic muscle. He was hairy, too. Even when he wasn’t wearing his scar, there was nothing handsome about him. His father called him “that hairy bog jumper.” They didn’t get along, he and his father.

  No jacket meant he wasn’t carrying anything but the six-inch sticker in his waistcoat and a throwing knife in his boot. He felt a little underdressed. But he had a long view down the road. It was quiet. Only a few frogs spoke up, creaking back in the woods. He’d hear horses before they topped the rise. He’d have time to get Maggie into cover behind those bushes over there.

  She made breathy sighing sounds when she washed. Damn, but that was enticing. A man imagined her sounding like that while he did inventive things.

  He was going to stop imagining.

  She dribbled water here and there, which was something he could watch her do indefinitely. After a while, she sat back on her heels, pressing wet cloth to the back of her neck, and looked at him straight. Assessing. Deciding. “I am not certain where we stand. Am I your prisoner?”

  “God, no.” He got it out fast. He even managed to sound offended. “Walk off if you want to.” He waved at the road uphill. “Go ahead. I’m not stopping you.”

  “I had received a different impression, somehow.” But she didn’t get up to leave. They’d got past the point where he had to chase her down and tackle her. Obviously his sterling character was winning her trust.

  He let himself sound petulant. “I thought I was doing you a favor, taking you with me. Those Jacobins from Paris are ahead somewhere. I figured you didn’t want to meet them alone.”

  She mulled that over a while. “I wish to avoid them.”

  “I don’t like to deal with officials myself. Not these days. Not the bloodthirsty crew that’s ruling Paris.”

  She held the wet cloth to her face. When she lowered it, her eyes were sober. “I do not trust them to deal fairly with one of de Fleurignac’s servants. Especially one who is a foreigner.” The words were lies. The fear underneath was real. “Thank you for hiding me from them.”

  “I was getting out of sight myself. You just got the benefit of it. You have somewhere to go?”

  “I have friends. Not so far. I will go to them.”

  He scratched his chin. It wasn’t easy to keep the right sort of stubble on his chin. It took careful shaving to look this unkempt. “What was in my mind . . . I thought I’d keep an eye on you, as long as we’re walking in the same direction. There’s bad men on the roads. Worse than me.”

  “It is possible,” she agreed, dryly.

  “In these towns, in every direction, they’ve heard about the burning in Voisemont. Everybody you pass is going to be watching for aristos escaped from the chateau. You won’t look like an aristo if you’re with me.” He gestured, taking in Guillaume LeBreton in all his glory. “Nobody would. And nobody bothers a woman traveling with a man my size.”

  A damselfly went flitting over the tall weeds by the water, blue as a sapphire, bright as a jewel flying. Maggie knelt motionless on the moss by the side of the stream, watching it hover. After a while, she said, “I do not see why you would—”

  “Fifty livres.”

  “What?”

  “Fifty livres and I see you to your friend’s house. To the doorstep.” Nothing like asking for money to make a man look honest. Nobody trusted altruism. He stood up, doing it slowly, making sure he looked harmless, and went over to watch water running over the rocks. The damselfly got bored and flew away.

  “I don’t have fifty livres with me.” A flicker of amusement crossed her face. “I don’t have fifty sous.”

  “Then I’ll have to trust you for the money, won’t I?”

  Ah, but she was tempted. One push, and she’d do it. He got down next to her on his haunches. Looked her in the eye. “You’ll do some trusting of your own. You’re afraid of me.”

  Tension buzzed like a swarm of wasps. She didn’t look away. “I am frugal with trust. You will find this natural, considering the men I have met lately.”

  Damn, but I like you. “Does it help if I apologize? I shouldn’t have touched you the way I did. I shouldn’t have kissed you.”

  “It is not important. What happened between us was a . . . a nothing. It was the most insignificant of kisses.”

  “Was it now?”

  “I became involved in it. For one moment only.” She looked down in her lap, to where she was twisting up the linen of the fichu. She had a little blush on her, just across the top of her cheeks. “It was a small mistake.”

  “I’m glad to know you feel that way.”

  “You are pleased to be ironic. But, in truth, it was not your fault. You were under great temptation. I do not boast when I say that. I was naked, after all, and you are a man.”

  “Last time I took an inventory. Yes. You want me to promise it won’t happen again?”

  The taut line of her shoulders loosened a fraction. “It will not. Neither of us wants that. It was surprise between us, as much as anything else. There was a suddenness.”

  It wasn’t surprise. It was damn good lust. Don’t fool yourself. “I don’t make a habit of assaulting women. If you were safe last night, you’re safe today. You can put yourself in my hands for a few miles of road.”

  “That is logical. We are rational people, we two.” She smoothed the wrinkles out of her damp fichu and pulled it over her shoulders, then wrapped it across her breasts. She made a crease here and there and it lay down smooth and perfect. “If you are willing to come with me on the road, I will thank you very much. I will also pay you. I’ve been cowardly, seeing a threat where none existed.”

  “Always glad to turn an honest profit. You’ll need papers. I’ll write some up.” I get to name her. Something pretty . . . No. Something that will annoy her. That’s better. “I got what I need in the baskets. We’ll let them dry on the rock here.”

  “You are a forger.” She smiled at him. “That is a handy skill.”

  Her smile was like being stroked, right on his privates. All that sensible talk, and his cock was still stupid as a barn owl.

  Eight

  AN HOUR ONWARD, THEY CROSSED THE CREST OF a hill. Marguerite looked into the countryside beyond. Gypsies had stopped by the road in the straggly trees that marked a trickle of stream between two fields. Three wagons with canvas tops made a rough triangle surrounding a small campfire. In the fields above, women and girls picked blackberries in the bushes that fingered away fro
m the stream, their skirts and scarves vivid as poppies.

  She wiped sweat off her face. This was Crow’s family. His kumpania.

  She’d recruited Shandor—called the Crow—into La Flèche years ago, almost at the beginning. He was head-man of a large group, a practical man, cautious to a fault, shrewd in keeping his people inconspicuous and safe. He was endlessly protective of the sparrows he carried.

  Today he was not following orders.

  Guillaume LeBreton, walking beside her, pushed one finger on the brim of his hat, tilting it so the men down below would see his face. Now they wouldn’t be surprised by the scar when he came closer. He didn’t slow down, approaching the Gypsies. He didn’t hurry himself either. Everyone on both sides was given ample opportunity to assess and study each other to their heart’s content.

  Shandor had chosen a private spot to lie in wait for her. No farmhouse overlooked them. The road that led off to Paris was a mile ahead, out of sight. How she was going to discuss the business of La Flèche when she was encumbered by Citoyen LeBreton and his inquisitive hobgoblin of a servant, she did not know.

  “We come upon the Children of the Road. The Egyptians. Engaged in harmless pursuits.” LeBreton had hidden himself behind the facade of the big, good-natured countryman. His eyes, however, were hard and calculating. “Or not so harmless. There is something just one hair out of place about this. They’re nervous. Look at the men lounging around beside that wagon. That’s the one I’d search first, if I was wearing a uniform.”

  It was as well he was not a gendarme. She would not wish to transport sparrows past a man as discerning as Guillaume LeBreton.

  So she spoke with great lightness. “They have stopped to pick blackberries. Perhaps hazelnuts, too, though it is early for that, even in a very hot year, which this has been. There are profusions of berries, anyway.”