The Forbidden Rose

by Bourne, Joanna

  “Say that. I need to hear that.” His fingers were at the buttons of her jacket. Buttons that opened as if they melted. He slid the jacket away. Her breasts, covered by her shifts, ached and anticipated. A single pull, and the bows of her stays came undone. The thin ribbon slipped from the holes. And her stays were gone, too.

  “I want this. Want you.” Did I tie the lacing so loosely this morning because I hoped he would do this?

  He skimmed the neckline of her shift down, uncovering her breasts. Setting her skin free so he could touch it.

  She whispered, “Yes,” and he poured over her like night falling, smooth and powerful. Enclosing everything. Shutting out the world.

  She was in a space filled only with him. His hair fell like a caress on her face. His mouth touched warm and soft on her forehead and her eyebrows. He worked his way in kisses across her eyes. Over her cheekbones. His breath was hot in the curve of her ear. The sound was like the sea on rocks.

  The universe wheeled around her and she was the center of it all. She and Guillaume, at the still center. He lifted her from the floor and pressed her to him. Then down to the table.

  However carefully he held her, his was the advance of a male animal upon the female. She was mate, she was pleasure, she was the woman he wanted. He desired her with all the single-minded determination that was Guillaume. All his huge, immediate physicality. All his strength.

  But he worshipped also. He exhaled pleasure, deep in his throat, when he kissed the skin of her shoulder. He nudged her chin to the side so he could taste her ear. Pressed her face against his shirt so he could lift her hair and lean to tongue down the back of her neck, little bone by little bone. It was as if every inch of her body was his estate and he would know every furrow of it. Every hill. Every valley. As if no part of her was overlooked or unimportant.

  It was magic, to be worshipped. Exciting beyond all experience to know how much he wanted her. Her body was ready for him, more than ready for him, when he loosened the band of his trousers and undid the buttons and lifted her to the edge of the table. He raised her close to him, guiding himself into her, until they fit. Until they were together and joined.

  She gripped his shirt at the shoulders where it fell downward in a great sweep. Held on. She breathed deeply, deeply and fast. Fire within her. Guillaume within her.

  They were both on the knife edge of pleasure. So close. He was making it last for her. Giving them minute after minute to be like this, locked as one. Every iota of their bodies prickled and hummed together.

  “Good?” he whispered. They poised, so ready that even that brushing of his breath across her ear set off shocks.

  “Very good.” Vibrations from her own voice buzzed and tugged at her. She was dizzy with wanting him. So filled with wanting it pushed at her skin.

  His hands cupped her bottom, held her close to him, rocking slightly. It was not a gentle hold that cradled her. He had hands like the sinews of trees.

  His shirt was open to the level of his heart. She set her mouth upon him, not licking or kissing, just putting her mouth to his skin and the hair of his chest, breathing him in, feeling the texture of him with the inside of her mouth. When she closed her teeth down on the tendons of his neck, holding on, he swelled and throbbed inside her. The power within him wound more tensely.

  She wrapped her legs around him. Pushed herself even tighter to him. Crossed her ankles around him so she held him within her, deep in her. Her arms, too, she wrapped wholly around him to clasp together at his back. She held every inch of him as close as she could.

  “Mon coeur. Mon âme.” She said words into his flesh, into his skin, against the great expanse of his chest, to his heart. Said them to the beating center of his life. “Je t’aime, Guillaume.”

  He said, softly, “My name is William. Marry me.”

  She was breathing shallowly, in fast, quick pants. Sharp peaks had begun inside her, hitting like drumbeats. He proposes at a time like this.

  He stroked hair back from her face. “I’m English. Good English family. English, Irish, French, mongrel. But all good family. The scar’s not real. I can take it off. I—”

  “Yes.” She bit him again, on his chest, and held on.

  He rumbled something out. Some word. Some claim. Thrust into her triumphantly. Thrust into her again and again.

  She held him with her legs through the long trembling moments of heat and surging power. It was like being part of an earthquake. She moved upon him. Stroked herself with him. Waves of pleasure flowed from him, into her.

  He is mine.

  He threw his head back. His whole body stiffened. He pulled her to him and he cried out and came within her.

  And held her while she pulsed around him. Held her while dark red pleasure pulsed behind her eyelids. While she shuddered in every part of her body, he wrapped her to him, enclosed, safe, and warm.

  It could not last forever. Slowly she let go of pleasure. Let it slip away from her.

  Guillaume laid her back upon the table. He smoothed her skirt down, but didn’t do a thing about covering her breasts. He lay beside her on the broad table, leaning on his elbow, his hand on the curve of her breast. He looked, if she might put it so bluntly, pleased with himself.

  He ran his thumb across her nipple and she jerked everywhere. She tightened and thrilled inside as if she had not just barely relaxed from passion. It was embarrassing.

  “You are light in the darkness, Maggie. I’m holding you to what you said. We’re getting married.” He stood up, buttoning his trousers fast, then took her hands and pulled her to her feet.

  She was not fully coherent. There were no words in her and very few thoughts.

  “Let’s get you dressed some. Damn, but I hate covering you up.” He found her stays where he’d dropped them on the floor. Swift, skilled, matter-of-fact, he pulled them around her and began lacing up. “If it was anything less than keeping you alive, we’d do that again. Fact is, we’d do it half a dozen times, getting more and more inventive. No. You just stand there. I’ll do the finding clothing part.”

  “I would like to make love again. Can we not?”

  “No. Other arm now. Good.” He pulled the jacket up and began buttoning.

  “This scrambling into clothing is very undignified. I am not in the mood to be active just at the moment. I would much prefer to lie back and stretch like a satisfied animal. Purring, perhaps. In fact, I would like to—”

  “You have any objections to marrying me?”

  “There is no need—”

  “There is every damn need, woman. What we’re talking about is whether you’re going to do it.” He tied a fast, lop-sided bow in the drawstring at the neck of her shift. “There. Neat as a magpie.” He flipped the fichu around her neck and tucked the ends down her front with a grand impersonality. She had not been so efficiently or quickly dressed since she was a child. “Your cap’s run away somewhere.”

  She didn’t remember losing it. And her mind . . . And her mind. “My cap is under the table. You have had a little practice in helping ladies dress. I find that attractive in a man. It argues a certain thoroughness.”

  “Oh, I’m thorough. That’s what I’m scared of. I’ll get that for you. And that’s the last of it. Damn, but you’re fine.”

  “I am what the cat drags in.” She combed her hair with her fingers, making it lie down neat. She was barely done when he fished out her cap and dropped it on her head.

  “You are the most beautiful woman on earth. We’re going downstairs now and getting married. I think I can manage it.”

  “Now? At this moment?”

  “At this moment.” His face was sober, utterly. “I have money. Enough to keep you. I’m not just . . .” He gestured to his clothes. Himself. “I’m not just this. My family’s not the equal of the de Fleurignacs. But—”

  “I know what you are. You are the son of some house of great respectability that has not the least idea what to do with you. The de Fleurignac who rode to
the Crusades was exactly a man like you. He besieged any number of cities with great success and carried a sword as tall as I am. He also wrote poetry. I am not entirely an idiot, Guillaume.”

  “I didn’t fool you for a minute, did I?”

  “Not so many minutes. And we will speak of marriage at some time in the future when your life is in less danger.”

  “We’re not going to talk about it. I want you gone from here before Victor arrives. What possessed you to put yourself right in his path?”

  “I am not in his path. It will be a miracle, a black and unlikely miracle, if he locates you before this afternoon.”

  “You shouldn’t have taken the chance.” Guillaume was not angry, precisely, but he was in a mood that did not lend itself to rational discussion. He stopped before opening the door. “Why did you come here, Maggie? You know better.”

  “I am planning to rescue you. This will take some work on both our parts. The first—”

  “God’s frogs.” He stomped out.

  “I do not yet know how I will do it, but I am very good at such things. It has been my work for years, this rescuing of people.”

  “You’re not rescuing anybody. You’re leaving Paris.” He got to where Adrian sat cross-legged at the top of the stairs. “He’ll take you to London.” Guillaume scowled as he pushed past and headed down. “Hawker, you get her out of here, you understand me? Out of this damned deathtrap of a city. Out of France. Put her in a sack and carry her if you have to.”

  “Understood.” He scrambled nimbly to the side, just in case. He was a boy who had dodged many informative blows in his time. “Now?”

  “In a minute. First I have to marry her.”

  “Fine with me.” The boy followed them down the stairs.

  Thirty-eight

  “I HAVE SAID I WILL MARRY YOU.” SHE WOULD HAVE preferred to stay in the room upstairs and make love, but it was not prudent. She could be as prudent as any number of Guillaume LeBretons. “You will admit there are minor difficulties.”

  “That’s not going to stop us.”

  The cloister was square, open to the sky, the carved stone arches and columns beautiful. It lay at the heart of the old convent, between the chapel on one side and the refectory and dormitories on the other. A well stood in the center with a roof over it. Two men were taking turns lowering a bucket, yard by yard into the well, and winding the windlass to bring it up again, full.

  The chain shrieked. The bucket clanked and clattered. The men splashed across the courtyard to spill pails of water into a long trough on the shadowed side. A dozen girls and women had rolled their sleeves back to wash clothing. It was an agreement that the garden was left to the women in the morning, Guillaume told her. It was the men’s turn in the evening.

  Guillaume intruded into this world of women and laid claim to a corner of this courtyard. He cordoned an invisible barrier around them by sheer force of will. In ten minutes, he had gathered a crippled priest, a cheerful middle-aged nun, the stiff, acerbic Marquise de Barillon, who remembered her, with disapproval, from Versailles, and Adrian.

  It very much looked as if she was getting married. Almost immediately. She was willing, but she had not quite prepared for this in her mind.

  Thirty feet away, women worked in line at the long trough, chatting to one another, as the women might in any village washerie. Here was a nun, elbow to elbow with a prostitute. A brown countrywoman splashed suds next to the soft, pink descendent of seven generations of nobility. They washed their clothing. They washed themselves. An old woman combed her long gray hair out over her back to dry. The courage of women expressed itself in these hundreds of small braveries. It was wholly admirable.

  She would need small braveries of her own. It was not that she had not thought about marriage. But she had expected to be dutiful about it and somewhat resigned, as was proper for a woman of her class. She had not expected to marry the man she wanted. In prison.

  She could not even contemplate the unlikelihood of marrying an English spy.

  Père Jérôme read the service. She would be no less married if he gabbled out nonsense syllables by rote, but it was comforting to have this madness done by a scholarly priest who understood the words he spoke.

  She had confessed to him ten minutes ago, standing beside the pear tree in the corner where they would not be overheard. It had been a hurried but sincere confession of her attempt to murder the Jacobin who attacked her at the chateau and the matter of making love to Guillaume. With two mortal sins to lift from her conscience, she had not added the details of her uncharitable thoughts toward her aunt, and the telling of many lies, and other small faults. Her brain had run perfectly dry and she could not even remember them.

  The priest was not as shocked as she had expected. But then, he had come to her fresh from confessing Guillaume.

  Latin whispered in the thick air. The low stone walls and the bushes and trees everywhere were spread with linen, drying. The sun fell blinding white, giving the cloister the look of an etching. There were no degrees of shade, no soft compromise, only a stark confrontation of opposites, black shadow and bright light, one against the other, with no mediation between them. July, in Paris, had been like that.

  The planted beds on the four sides of the courtyard were abundant with flowers. Someone, perhaps a succession of these women, had been watering them right along.

  She had always thought there would be a procession to the church and a silk canopy over her head. They would dance afterward and everyone would eat a great deal and become silly from the wine. She would be wearing a much prettier dress. The priest did not speak the whole Mass, only the consecration of the bread and wine. It was as if they stood on a battlefield and he performed the most necessary things.

  When Death reached out, ready to close his fist, one saw what was necessary and important. Marguerite de Fleurignac could indeed marry Guillaume. She would choose. This is what I want.

  The women at their washing looked and then looked away with only quick glances back. They did not allow themselves to show curiosity about the ceremony going on across the cloister, though certainly they would talk about it at length, later.

  Guillaume stood beside her, patient and serious. The sun slid over his great brutal strength. The scar was counterfeit, he said, but it seemed part of him. She would miss it. She had not seen him as marred for a long time. The line on his cheek was part of him, as if a lightning bolt slashed a tree, marking it but not making it less. She would someday see him without it, and he would be altogether different. Yet another Guillaume for her to know.

  She knelt to take the small tearing off of dark bread from the hands of the priest. Guillaume did the same. Then, coming forward, the marquise and the nun.

  The wine was sour stuff. The cheap glass was accidentally elegant in its simplicity. It was their wedding, so the priest gave wine as well as bread. When she had drunk, and Guillaume also, the priest wiped the lip of the glass with a white cloth and finished what was left of the wine to the dregs, making a face when he did so, but conscientious. His cuffs were deeply frayed. He had been in prison long enough to become shabby.

  Father Jérôme set the cup down and lay folded cloth across it. “Another forbidden Mass in Paris. I like spitting in Robespierre’s eye. We may be interrupted at any moment, so I will spare you my homily on the sacred nature of marriage. It is somewhat boring.”

  He opened his breviary so Guillaume could lay a gold ring upon the open pages.

  “To the marriage, then. Guillaume, vis accípere Marguerite hic præséntem in tuam—”

  Guillaume interrupted. “William. I am William Doyle Vaudreuil Markham.”

  That is his true name, so our marriage will be valid. If anyone reports this, he condemns himself utterly. He does not hesitate.

  Father Jérôme nodded. Truly, nothing surprised him. “William, vis accípere Marguerite . . .”

  Guillaume said, “Volo.” I do.

  “Marguerite, do you take William
. . .”

  It was her turn to decide and agree and become. Behind her, Adrian and the nun and Madame la Marquise de Barillon stood quietly.

  I should make Guillaume worry, just the smallest amount. He deserves it.

  But she did not. “Volo.”

  “. . . faithful to her in all things as a man should be faithful to his wife, according to the command of God?”

  Guillaume made his response, serious and grave, not taking his eyes off the priest.

  He is not what I expected. Not what I have dreamed of. In a dozen ways, he is more powerful than any man I have known.

  At Versailles, she had lived among the great men of France, the brilliant, influential men who ruled half the world. Men of privilege and ancient title, of wit and dashing charm. Guillaume was the warrior who enters the king’s hall in black armor and throws down his gauntlet. Beside Guillaume, the men of the court looked like vicious children, playing corrupt games.

  He had become distant and strange to her, even while he took the ring from the priest’s hand and slid it on her finger. Guillaume married her with her mother’s ring, the wedding band of her grandmother, which he had extorted from her. Guillaume, who was William Doyle and other names she could not recall. Who was a spy. Who was English. Who must be dissuaded from menacing Papa. Who must be rescued from this prison and from death.

  She was married. Somewhere between one word and the next, it had happened. She changed her name. Her nation. She was becoming English in this very moment. It swept across her, inch by inch. It was like being transformed to a tree or a statue of gold or a red deer by some careless spell.

  When she glanced up, Guillaume was laughing at her silently, with every obscure and sneaky particle of himself. Perhaps he knew what she was thinking. She was wedding a mountain of slyness.

  I do not know how to not love him. He was breath to her lungs, the fire of her nerves, the light of her eyes.

  Father Jérôme said, “Dóminus vobíscum.”

  I will not let Guillaume die. I will get him out of this dreadful place. All that I have been, all that I have done for these five years in La Flèche leads me to this moment. I will pluck him away from this prison.