Amé gave her the paper.
“Be sure you ask the Apothecary to make the herbs up in separate packets.”
Rene took the paper rather nervously and turned it over several times. It was obvious that she could not read. Then, clutching the buckles tightly in her hands, she hurried out of the house.
When she had gone, Amé sat listening to the wailing baby. Little Jean had no intention of going to sleep this time and nothing Amé could do would quieten him.
He was hungry and ill and was determined that everyone should know it. Indeed there was no other way in which he could protest at the condition he found himself in.
While she soothed and rocked him, Amé’s brain was busy with the information she had received.
So it was the Duc de Chartres who had had her kidnapped! She might have guessed that this type of thing would have been his revenge for the way that the Duke had outwitted him.
He was a dangerous man to have as an enemy for it was obvious that his vindictiveness knew no bounds. She thought of the lampoon that she had just read and felt suddenly sick. A man who could subscribe to such perfidy about the Queen was a man who would stick at nothing.
Amé knew fear in that moment such as she had never known before. What Fate lay in store for her? It was then she yearned for the Duke with a yearning that seemed to burn her whole being, as if with fire.
She thought of his strength and bravery when they had been confronted in the wood by Hermann Gloeber. She thought of how they had escaped from the Château and of how at the inn the Duke had outwitted the Priests who had been sent to search for her.
Always he had been there to save her until now.
And now she was alone and without him. She covered her face in her hands. What did the future hold? She must be brave whatever it might be, because the Duke would expect it of her. Yet she could not believe there was not some way of escape or that the Duke would not come to save her.
She remembered the words that Count Axel de Fersen had quoted last night,
“Faith, love and hope,
These three united for ever.”
They were all there in her own heart. Her Faith in God, her love for the Duke and her hope of happiness. How could they fail her now?
She wondered if this was a punishment for having run away from the Convent or for having disobeyed the command of the Cardinal. Then, as she thought this, she knew that whatever happened to her now, she would always for the rest of her life be eternally grateful for having met the Duke and known such wonderful love.
If she must die today or if she must spend the rest of her days in prison, whatever might happen, nothing could take from her this love that consumed her whole being.
It was a love pure and Holy in its very conception. It was utterly unselfish and undemanding. She asked nothing for herself only that she might love and serve the man she had given her heart to that first moment of their meeting.
“Thank you, God, thank you. Je vous remercie!” Amé whispered.
As she prayed, her soul was caught up into the ecstasy of perfect concentration, the essence of prayer, so that she forgot where she was, forgot the dirt and cold, the crying child and her fettered leg. Where her spirit carried her there was only light, the peace which passeth all understanding and the Love of which all other love is a part.
She was brought back to earth by Renée, who came running in through the door, her pale cheeks flushed, her dark eyes shining with excitement.
Two hundred francs!” she announced in an awed voice. “I got two hundred francs for them buckles!”
“I am so glad,” Amé replied. “Did you buy the medicines?”
“Yes, I got ’em all and a chicken too. The man let me ’ave it cheap as it wasn’t very fat.”
“Good, set it on to cook and bring the medicines here to me so that I may mix them. I shall want hot water and two or three bowls.”
It was a long and laborious business to make Renée understand that the bowls must be clean and the water really boiling. However, finally Amé succeeded and, having insisted on a clean spoon, she then fed the mixture to little Jean herself.
It was sweetened with orangeflower water and he sucked it up greedily, ceasing his crying from the first drop that touched his lips.
“See, ’e’s enjoyin’ it!” Renée exclaimed delightedly. “He’s never ’ad a food like it before.”
“It isn’t a food,” Amé said sternly. “You must only give it to him when he is ill. He must never have it at any other time. Do you understand?”
As Amé had anticipated, Jean fell asleep after he had taken a dozen spoonfuls of the medicine. He slept peacefully and Renée declared again and again that it was nothing short of a miracle.
“When he wakes, it will be the chicken broth he wants,” Amé told her and tried to instruct her how to cook the chicken properly and to simmer the bones until all the goodness was out of them. It was the most difficult thing she had ever done for tied to the wall she could only give instructions and she had never seen anyone so dirty and feckless as Renée.
And yet, like all French women, she had the natural art of cooking. When she bought the chicken, she had not forgotten an onion, a pinch of garlic and a few tiny mushrooms.
“If only we could have a meal like this every day of the week!” Renée commented as she crouched over the fire. “But what can you buy with a sou but a piece of bread?”
“You must keep what money you have left for food for little Jean,” Amé impressed on her. “Don’t spend it on anything else. I should not tell your husband you have the money. It belongs to Jean. I gave my buckles to him and not to you.”
She did not wish to incite Renée to be deceitful and yet she guessed that François was the type of man who would spend as little on his home as possible. It was obvious from the conversation she had overheard with the man who had helped to kidnap her that François had money in his pocket and yet he had gone out for the day, leaving his wife with nothing but a crust of bread.
Little Jean woke up, took some broth and fell asleep again. His skin was cooler for, as Amé had known would happen, the herbs were cleansing the poison from his blood.
“No one would have thought that an aristo like you would have known about babies,” Renée said.
“Not all aristocrats are bad or stupid,” Amé replied. “Some of them are very fine people. If it was not for them, France would not be the great nation she is today.”
“But we, the French people, are starving,” Renée argued.
It was hopeless to try to convince her of anything else, she knew only what she herself suffered, she saw only her own privations and the one person whom she believed would help was the Duc de Chartres.
It was growing dark when François returned home. Jean was asleep and Renée had carried him upstairs to the bed of straw and rags where she and her husband slept.
Amé had refused to eat anything but a piece of bread and she had drunk a little of the wine that François had left on the table at breakfast, more because she was frightened of the dirty water, which was carried in from a pump in the street, than because she liked the taste of it.
For her husband’s supper Renée had bought bread and a piece of sausage from a shop that she explained was only a few doors away.
“I must have somethin’ for ’im or ’e will be angry,” she told Amé, “but he shan’t eat the chicken, which belongs to little Jean. That shall be kept for the mornin’.”
François had, however, obviously already dined when he came home. He had had a lot to drink too and, although he was not drunk, it had made him flushed and voluble.
“Take that rubbish away,” he said, thrusting the sausage on one side. “I’ve work to do tonight. See what I carry? They’re clever, are they not?”
He drew a big pile of lampoons from his pocket and slapped them down on the table. Then he threw one to Amé. She had no desire to look at it and yet she felt it would be churlish to refuse.
But as
she held it in her hand, staring at what she saw, she felt the blood rise in her cheeks and her heart begin to beat suffocatingly.
Still wet from the printing press, the central figure in the picture was a crude caricature of herself draped in a Union Jack. Obscene, vicious and utterly degrading, there was no mistaking the other people depicted around her. It was easy to recognise the Queen, the Cardinal, the Duke, the King of Sweden and Count Axel de Fersen.
Furiously and with all her strength, Amé, after one second’s stupefied silence, crumpled the lampoon into a ball and flung it on to the floor.
“How dare people print such lies!” she cried, springing to her feet. “It is wrong, wicked and untrue. Look at me, do you believe I would do such things, do you?”
She defied François as he towered above her and he would not meet the blazing indignation in her eyes.
“Who cares?” he said, shrugging his shoulders.
“You should be ashamed, a man like you, with a wife and child, to carry round such filth,” Amé stormed. “Have you no decency and no self-respect that you must earn money in such a fashion?”
“Listen to ’er,” François said to Renée, cocking his thumb over his shoulder. “Aristos always ’ave a lot to say when anybody ’urts ’em. She’ll squall tonight!”
“What do you mean?” Renée asked.
“Only that she’s finished. I’ve got my orders.”
He made a gesture with his hand and suddenly Amé’s anger left her and she felt very cold.
“What orders?” Renée asked.
“That she goes into the river. And do you know what she’s got to ’old in ’er ’and when I puts ’er there?”
“Do you mean that you’ve got to drown ’er?” Renée asked.
“I said I’ve got to put ’er into the river, didn’t I?” François replied. “If she’s dead before she goes in, that isn’t drownin’.”
“I told you the last time I’d have no more of it,” Renée cried.
“Who cares what you say?” he asked but affably.
The wine was now making him voluble.
“Well, I don’ ’old with murder and you knows it,” Renée retorted sulkily. “One day you’ll go too far and you’ll find yourself taken to the guillotine, you see if I’m not right.”
“They’ve got to catch me first,” François boasted. “That’s why, when they wants somethin’ doin’, they sends for me. Suicide, she’s got to look like when they picks ’er up, suicide. And do you know why? It’s a joke, that’s what it is.”
“What is?” Renée asked.
“She’ll ’ave committed suicide because of that lampoon. ‘Poor lady,’ they’ll say, she was so upset by what she read she goes and throws herself into the river’. Throws herself! Isn’t that the funniest thing you’ve ’eard in a long time?”
François threw himself back in his chair and his coarse laughter echoed and re-echoed around the room.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Hugo, breakfasting at his usual hour of seven o’clock, rose to his feet as Isabella came into the room. She looked pale and there were dark circles under her eyes.
“How could I sleep?” she answered the unspoken question in his eyes. “I have lain awake, wondering what could have possibly happened to that unfortunate child and, when I rang for my maid, she told me that you were downstairs and that Sebastian had not been home all night. Where can he be?”
“I haven’t the vaguest idea,” Hugo answered. “But will you not sit down and have something to eat?”
Isabella shuddered.
“I should choke if I tried to swallow a mouthful, but you can give me a cup of coffee if it pleases you.”
Hugo rang the bell and commanded a footman to bring fresh coffee. Isabella moved restlessly towards the window, her soft muslin wrapper flowing around her body.
Hugo watched her, but she was unaware of the yearning in his eyes.
Walking round the room, she touched a bowl of flowers, straightened a picture, picked up a book and put it down again. Her thoughts obviously were elsewhere.
“Come and sit down,” Hugo pleaded with her at last.
She obeyed him, cupping her chin in her hands and looking at him with so much unhappiness in her face that he longed to find words to comfort her.
A footman came in with a silver pot of coffee on a tray heaped with breakfast delicacies, rolls warm from the oven, pats of yellow butter, a bowl of tiny red fraises des bois, which had been picked in the woods at dawn, and a dish of mushrooms.
Isabella accepted the coffee, but refused everything else.
When the footman had left the room, she asked,
“Where can Sebastian be? You don’t think anything has happened to him too?”
“No, of course not,” Hugo answered. “He went out late last night to see the Cardinal. He tried to obtain an audience with him earlier, but His Eminence was dining with friends so at midnight Sebastian decided to go to The Palace and await his return.”
“He did not believe the Ambassador then?”
“He thought that the Ambassador was speaking the truth when he claimed that the Cardinal knew nothing and yet there is always a chance that he was mistaken. But where else can we begin to search?”
“Where indeed? Oh dear, it is all such a sorry tangle and I keep worrying over Amé. She is too sweet and too gentle to be allowed out alone in the world even if one was not afraid of much more sinister things.”
“You can do no good by worrying. I hate to see you looking so pale and tired.”
“I know that I look monstrously ugly,” Isabella exclaimed, “but there is no need to tell me so.”
“You look very lovely,” Hugo replied, his voice suddenly deep.
Isabella looked up at him in surprise.
“Why, Hugo, I really believe that is the first real compliment you have ever paid me. For once I heard no criticism in your voice.”
“There are usually enough people telling you how beautiful you are without my adding to their number,” Hugo answered a little stiffly.
A faint smile touched Isabella’s lips.
“Lud! I believe at last I am beginning to make an impression on you and Heaven knows I have tried hard enough.”
“I wish I could credit that,” Hugo countered.
“I assure you it is truth. I am vain enough to resent that anyone whom I see as much as I see you should be so stiff and disagreeable to me.”
“In other words you expect every man you meet to be your abject slave,” Hugo alleged with an edge to his voice.
“Now you are being horrible again,” Isabella pouted and then suddenly there were tears in her eyes. “How can you be so brutal at a moment like this when I am so distressed about Amé? I have spent a night of misery that is enough to give me wrinkles and grey hair years before my time.”
Her tears and the passion in her voice seemed for a while to paralyse Hugo. He stared at her as if he could not believe his own sight and then suddenly his lips moved as though a very torrent of words was about to break through them.
But before he could speak and before he could do more than mutter Isabella’s name, the door opened and the Duke came into the room.
Isabella let out a cry and sprang to her feet.
“Sebastian, here you are at last. Where have you been? What have you learnt? Have you found Amé?”
Her questions followed swiftly one upon the other.
The Duke merely shook his head and, crossing the room, sat down at the table. In the pale sunlight coming in through the window he looked tired and weary. His coat and breeches were creased and his high boots were caked with mud. As Hugo glanced down at them in surprise, the Duke said drily,
“You must forgive my appearance. I have walked a long way during the night.”
“Walked?” Isabella exclaimed.
“Yes, walked. I had no idea that the slums of Paris were quite so unsavoury or that the hovels round the quays could be deemed fit to hold human beings.”
The Duke sighed.
“It is a story of failure,” he said, “but let me first have something to eat and drink.”
Hugo jumped to his feet.
“You must forgive me, Sebastian,” he apologised. “I was so intent on what you were saying that I was forgetting to look after you. Will you have wine or coffee?”
“Wine, please,” the Duke replied. “And I have already ordered myself something to eat from the servants who let me into the house. I am hungry, I must admit, for it must be nearly fifteen years since I walked so far!”
“But why did you walk?” Isabella demanded. “Could you not have driven?”
“In the places I have been to a coach and four would have been stoned,” he replied. “I have been amongst the rabble of Paris, Isabella, and I have learned such things from them as make me fear not only for the Throne and the King and Queen but for every Nobleman or ‘aristo’ as they will call them in the length and breadth of France.”
“And did you really expect to find Amé in such places?” Isabella enquired.
“I thought it as likely as anywhere else,” the Duke answered.
“Then you no longer suspect the Cardinal.”
The Duke shook his head.
“No, I believed him when he told me that he knew nothing about Amé. I can generally tell when a man is lying and I am certain that the Cardinal was telling the truth when he gave me his word as a gentleman and his vow as a Priest that he knew nothing whatsoever about Amé’s disappearance.”
“Was he pleasant to you?” Isabella asked curiously.
“Actually he received me with dignity and a degree of friendliness that did him considerable credit,” the Duke answered. “At first we both avoided any mention of what had occurred the other night and then, just as I was leaving, the Cardinal said to me, ‘I hope your Ward will be restored to you speedily and safely. I have thought of what she said to me the other night and I have wondered to myself if she was not able to see deeper beneath the surface than is granted to other people’.”
Love Me Forever Page 20