Hearts Beguiled (11 page)

❧

Gabrielle brought the strawberry, dripping with clotted cream, to her mouth. She tilted her head back, sticking out a pink tongue to lick the cream. Then her lips enveloped the plump fruit, sucking it off the stem.

Max looked quickly away, bringing his knee up to hide the sudden, uncomfortable swelling in his breeches. He pressed hard against the scratchy bark of the peach tree at his back and reached with a trembling hand for the glass of champagne on the ground beside him. He tossed it back in two swallows, and the golden effervescent liquid burned down his throat.

"What's the matter?"

Max looked into a pair of eyes that were as purple as a field of heather. "Nothing," he said, knowing he sounded like a sulky little boy.

A smile played about her lips, stained red from the berries, and looking just as luscious. He knew how those lips would taste, sweet and full as they moved beneath his. He knew, God, how he knew—

"You were scowling," she said.

"I was just . . . thinking."

"What about?"

"You. Who are you, Gabrielle?"

Her eyes flickered away; faint color stained her cheeks.

She sat cross-legged on the blanket next to him. Bracing himself on one arm, he leaned forward. He cupped her chin in his hand and turned her head, tilting up her face. Sunlight filtered through the leafy bower overhead, dappling shadows on her skin. She was so fair he could see the blue veins pulsing in her forehead, and her hair was a flame, beckoning him. He wanted her, wanted her . . .

He lowered his head. She exhaled sharply, and he felt her breath, sweet and fruity, against his lips.

"Gabrielle ..."

She turned away from him. "Not here."

"Come to my rooms tonight."

"No!" She jumped up and began to shove the picnic things into the wicker basket. "We should be going back now. It's getting late."

Max clenched his jaw to keep from cursing out loud. Had the woman been sent by the gods for the sole purpose of making him pay for his many sins? Never had he wanted anything the way he wanted Gabrielle Prion—or whoever in hell she really was. She was like one of those swamp fevers he'd come across in Le Mississippi, infecting the blood and driving the poor afflicted completely insane. He couldn't seem to stay away from her, yet to be near her was to put himself in a state of tormented agony. The only antidote for the fever was to get her into his bed, except that a part of him already knew that with this particular woman once was not going to be enough. He doubted there were enough hours left in all eternity for him to slake the hunger he felt for Gabrielle . . . Gabrielle . . . Gabrielle . . .

Damn you to hell and back, Gabrielle.

Max stood up, glancing toward a nearby hillock where Dominique played at an imaginary game of knights slaying dragons, and felt the bite of a bitter envy. Not of the boy, but of the man who had fathered him. Until now, it had never mattered to Max whether the women he took had lovers before him. Yet he couldn't bear the thought that Gabrielle, his Gabrielle, had known pleasure in another man's arms.

Especially when she had yet to know pleasure in his.

He bent over and with a savage gesture snatched the blanket off the ground.

Dominique came trotting up, breathing heavily, his face flushed. His pockets bulged, dragging his pantaloons down around his hips.

Gabrielle sighed at the sight of her impossible offspring. "Oh, Dominique . . . what have you got in your pockets now?"

"More rocks," he said. "For my collection. And this." He put something long and smooth into her hand.

She stared at it, perplexed. It appeared to be three thin pieces of white ivory strung together with a piece of wire—

Gabrielle shrieked and flung it away from her. "Jesu and all his saints!"

Max was instantly at her side. "What's the matter?"

She pointed at the repulsive object where it lay in the grass. "It's a . . . a finger. "

Max stooped over and picked it up. He looked at Dominique, who gazed back up at him with round, innocent eyes. "Have you been plucking bits and pieces off Old Bones?" he said, trying to sound stern and failing.

Gabrielle heard the repressed laughter in Max's voice. "It isn't funny!"

Max raised his brows at Dominique. The boy giggled and then Max started to laugh.

Gabrielle looked from one to the other. "Why, you . . . you men. You're all alike!" She whipped around on her heel and stalked up the lawns toward the academy buildings.

Max and the boy looked at each other and shrugged.

"Maman is very angry with us," Dominique said.

"I fear so."

"Do you think she'll whip us when we get home?"

Max's lips twitched. "No. But it couldn't hurt to make some sort of reparation."

"What's a reprashun?"

"That's when you have to buy something pretty and expensive to get back into a woman's good graces."

Dominique frowned. "But I haven't any money."

"No? Well, then we shall have to improvise."

Max took the boy's hand and led him to a well-tended bed of daffodils and snapdragons. While Max kept an eye out for the groundskeeper, Dominique picked a peace offering.

"I don't understand why she got so angry," the boy said. "It was only a few old bones."

Max shared a sigh with Gabrielle's son as they pondered the mystery that was woman.

❧

A woman was also the topic under discussion in the cramped and stuffy office of the minister of police deep within the cavernous Palais de Justice.

Abel Hachette sat on a creaking chair, pretending indifference to the sweat that trickled down his pale cheeks. The minister of the Paris police was not bothering to pretend. He sat behind his desk across from Hachette, mopping his brow with a sopping, ragged handkerchief.

"Merde, but it's hot today," the minister said.

Hachette acknowledged that it was, indeed, rather warm. It was the third time the minister had mentioned the weather. They had been carefully skirting the real reason for Hachette's visit for a half hour now, like a pair of wolves around a staked-out hen, hungry but still too cautious to plunge in for the attack and risk springing the trap.

The minister cleared his throat. "You say this friend of yours—"

"I wouldn't precisely call him a friend. More of a business acquaintance. But he's an Englishman, a visitor to our country. I thought it would hardly do for—"

"Quite, quite. I see your point. It is fort mauvais to have visitors, particularly Englishmen, fleeced by our local harlots, eh?" The minister smiled and winked.

When Hachette neither smiled nor winked back, the minister sobered and straightened behind his desk, drawing a piece of paper toward him. He reached for his pen.

The paper stuck to his sweaty palm and he growled an oath under his breath. "You say this Englishman met, uh, the young mademoiselle in a cafe on the Rue de Rivoli and took her back to his lodgings where he, uh, consummated the arranged transaction. Afterward, he claims, the mademoiselle went through his pockets while he, uh, rested."

Hachette nodded. "Yes. Stole all his money and a valuable gold watch and fob."

"Cleaned him out in more ways than one, eh?" The minister started to guffaw, but stopped at the look on Hachette's face. "Yes, well . . . There are a lot of whores in Paris, monsieur."

"But not so many who are beautiful, with red-gold hair and violet eyes."

The minister nibbled on the end of his pen. "Red-gold hair . . . Still, Paris is a big city. Is there anything else you can tell me about the wench? Her, uh, name perhaps?" His eyes, unable to meet Hachette's, flickered to the window, streaked with grime and partially hidden behind a splintering crate crammed with records.

Hachette watched the minister's face. "It probably means nothing, but she asked him to call her Gabrielle."

There was a reaction there, Hachette was sure of it: a slight tightening of the man's full mouth, a quick blink of his orange-pip eyes. Hachette decided that for the moment he had gone far enough. The minister was alerted. Now he would watch to see whom the minister informed in turn. Hachette already had a man in place within the Palais de Justice to do the watching.

The minister shrugged with apparent nonchalance. "Just that? Gabrielle?"

Hachette nodded, equally nonchalant.

The minister made a careful notation on the by now damp piece of paper. "As you say, it probably means nothing." He laid the pen down and slowly stood up. "Well, monsieur, unless you can think of anything else? No?" He began ushering Hachette quickly from the room. "Then be assured I shall have my men question all the pimps in their precincts. We'll keep a lookout for this redheaded whore. And, please, tell your—this Englishman—that Paris very much regrets the incident."

Hachette had barely completed his departing bow before the door was shut smartly in his face.

He placed his tricorne on his bewigged head and turned, a slight smile on his face—

"I beg your pardon, monsieur!"

The man who had bumped into him stepped to the side, motioning for Hachette to pass. Hachette glanced up briefly into dark, protruding eyes that bulged behind a pair of thick spectacles. He noted, before looking politely away, that a nasty scar puckered one of the man's thin, pale cheeks.

❧

Louvois watched the elegant stranger walk down the hall and turn the corner, then he entered the minister's office without knocking.

"There's a shipment due in this evening at sunset," he announced to the minister without further preliminaries.

He went to stand before a map of Paris pasted to the plaster that showed all the main thoroughfares and the surrounding city wall broken by the customs posts, called barriers. "Through the south. The Dijon gate." He tapped the appropriate spot on the map. "Be sure your men are briefed this time. I've already alerted the Department of Customs."

The minister fluttered nervously around Louvois. "But, of course, of course. Please be assured—"

Louvois whipped around, pinning the minister with his bulging eyes. "We don't want any more 'mistaken arrests' like we had last month, do we, my friend?"

The minister wrung his hands. "No, no, monsieur. I will tell my lieutenants. We have received a very important tip about a group of smugglers coming in from the north tonight, eh? All patrols will be diverted there." He forced out a laugh.

"By the way," said Louvois, his voice sounding so casual that even the minister was fooled, "who was your illustrious visitor?"

"My illustrious . . . ? Oh, my visitor." The minister's sweating face creased into a wide smile. "This you will like, monsieur. This you will like very much indeed. He is Monsieur Abel Hachette, the man who—"

"I know, you fool, who Abel Hachette is. That is, I have heard of him, of course. Who in Paris hasn't?"

"Yes, yes, monsieur." The minister nodded effusively. "But this I'll wager you don't know. Abel Hachette is the man"—he paused dramatically—"the man who can lead us to a fair and elusive whore by the name of Gabrielle." "Gabrielle!"

A shudder of excitement ripped through Louvois's small frame, causing him to tremble visibly. For a moment the minister feared the man had been stricken ill, and he stepped forward-Only to back away suddenly at the look of madness blazing from Louvois's bulging eyes.

T
he fanrmer snuck up behind the milkmaid, pinching her on the bottom. The maid shrieked and swung around, clobbering the farmer on the side of the head with her milk bucket. The farmer stood perfectly still for a moment, then crumpled to the ground in a heap.

The audience laughed and cheered as the curtain descended over the tiny stage. It rose again immediately, and the puppets took their bows.

Dominique tugged on Gabrielle's skirts. "Maman, I'm thirsty."

"I know you are, mon chou, " she said, putting a sou into a bucket passed by a girl dressed in a scantier version of the puppet milkmaid's costume. "Simon and Monsieur Max have gone to fetch us all something cool to drink."

Gabrielle watched the broad back of Maximilien de Saint-Just, and the smaller one that was Simon's, as they pushed their way through the crowd in front of a stall dispensing cider and ale. Whatever Max said to Simon caused the older man to laugh uproariously, so that heads turned in their direction.

Gabrielle frowned, not sure what to make of this sudden liking the very bourgeois Simon Prion had formed for the very aristocratic Maximilien de Saint-Just. And then there was Agnes, who couldn't stop talking about him. And Dom-

inique, who gazed up at him with worship in his four-year-old's eyes. The man, she decided irritably, was much too charming to be trusted.

She looked around for Agnes and saw the girl had staked out a patch of shade beneath one of the few trees that dotted this broad, dusty field known as the Champ de Mars, where the city fairs were traditionally held. Spying Gabrielle and the boy, Agnes cupped her mouth and hallooed, waving them over.

Gabrielle deposited a string bag heavy with apples, bread, and cheese on the ground next to Agnes. As Dominique squatted beside it, she noticed a suspicious bulge in his pantaloons.

"Dominique, what do you have in your pockets this time?" she asked, dreading the answer.

Dominique showed her—three of the small wax statues that were being sold from stands all over the fair. One each of the king and queen, and one of a bespectacled old man who might have been Benjamin Franklin. She heaved a huge sigh, wondering at her son's latest propensity to pick up anything that struck his fancy. "And just where did you acquire these?"

"Monsieur Max bought them for him," Agnes said.

"Oh . . ." Smiling with relief, Gabrielle took off her straw hat and fanned her face with it. The noise and smells of the fair assaulted her—screams from a steer-and-dog fight, the cloying odor of carameled peaches and pungent scents of roasted chestnuts and sour wine, and the shriek of fifes, the wail of trumpets, the shrill voice of a boy hawking tickets to the national lottery.

Agnes motioned with her chin to where Max's dark head stood above the crowd around the ale barrels. "His eyes burn for you today, Gabrielle."

"Oh, Agnes, for heaven's sake—"

"And your eyes burn for him."

"They do not!" Gabrielle exclaimed indignantly. Collecting her blue calico skirts beneath her, she sat down on a patch of scraggly grass beside Agnes. She dug a couple of apples from the bag, tossing one to Dominique and another into the girl's lap, but she could not stop the telltale blush that colored her cheeks. Dieu, if even Agnes noticed, then surely he . . .

Agnes's teeth crunched loudly into the apple. "I ask myself, Gabrielle, if it's a game you play with me, or with yourself, or if you really are so blind to what is happening. You met this man five days ago and he's been hanging around the pawnshop like an abandoned puppy ever since. The man is so besotted with you he can't bear to let you out of his sight."

Gabrielle choked back a laugh at the comparison of the arrogant Maximilien de Saint-Just to an abandoned puppy. She watched his tall figure stride toward them, dripping tankards of ale balanced precariously in his hands. She thought perhaps Agnes was a little enamored of the man herself. Or perhaps she was simply intrigued with the hints she had been given of Max's shady past,

It had happened earlier that afternoon, as they had all set out together for the fair. Simon brought up the rear with Dominique, who not only walked at a tortoise's pace but had a maddening tendency to want to stop and pick up anything lying in the street that caught his fancy. Gabrielle and Agnes walked ahead with Max sandwiched between them. Soon Max and Agnes were bantering in an easy, friendly way, and Gabrielle began to feel strangely grouchy and out-of-sorts. Perhaps it's my monthly curse, she thought. But if so, it was a week early. As they crossed the Pont des Invalides she managed to insinuate herself between Max and the girl, and she immediately began to feel better.

"You should be thanking me for bringing the lovely Gabrielle into your life," she heard Agnes say to Max.

Gabrielle gaped at her, too astonished to be embarrassed. "What, pray tell, did you have to do with it?"

"I saved your miserable life, that's what I had to do with it. You wouldn't be here in the Palais Royal with Monsieur Simon if it hadn't been for me, and you know it."

Gabrielle snorted. "What a fabrication!"

"I'll tell you the story," Agnes said to Max, who had fallen judiciously silent. "It was a cold, rainy winter's day, and I was in the Place Maubert. I was making my living as a street sweeper at the time—"

"Streetwalker, you mean," Max stated, taking the words out of Gabrielle's mouth.

Now it was Agnes's mouth that popped open in astonishment. "But I didn't sleep with you, did I? I'm sure I would have remembered. Of course, I had a lot of customers, but there are some men a girl doesn't. . ." She cast an appalled look at Gabrielle. "Oh, mon Dieu ..."

Max laughed and, reaching across Gabrielle's back, rubbed his hand over the short, wispy spikes of Agnes's hair. "I was never one of your customers, but if you're trying to keep your past a secret, you should wear something over that hair of yours."

On rare occasions, when public outrage began to get out of hand, the Paris police would round up the multitude of the city's prostitutes (those whose pimps couldn't or wouldn't pay the bribe), shave their heads, and make them sweep the streets for a fortnight. It would be another year at least before Agnes's hair grew out enough not to be noticeable.

"I bought her a mobcap," Gabrielle said. "She refuses to wear it."

Agnes stuck her tongue out at the older woman. "It makes my head look like a fat brioche. As I was saying, I was whoring at the time, though in truth I was sweeping the streets, too, because Paul, that whoreson turd of a diseased goat, may a million devils boil him like a black pudding, forgot to pay the bribe. I was sweeping out the gutters in the Place Maubert—and filthy gutters they have there, too—when I saw this poor wretch of a girl with a babe in her arms and her purse poking out her pocket as if she were begging for it to be lifted."

"I was tired," Gabrielle said, though more to herself. Tired and cold and wet and hungry. And frantic with fear because Dominique had been running a burning fever. He had just turned three then, but she had been carrying him because he was too sick to walk. He had weighed hardly anything, she remembered, and his breaths in her ear had been hot and shallow. They had spent the whole day out in the cold and wet in the Cemetery des Innocents because she had to work in order to buy food, and she had to bring the boy with her, because she didn't dare leave him alone. He had been so very sick and she had been so terribly afraid he was going to die.

"... and by the most incredible coincidence Monsieur Simon was in the Place Maubert at the same time," Agnes was saying. "Well, perhaps it wasn't so much of a coincidence since it's where he goes to buy chickens for supper. Anyway, it was my bad luck he spotted Gabrielle—he knew her from before, you see, when she came into his shop to pawn her ring. Well, he saw Gabrielle and he shouted, and I-"

"He shouted because he saw you stealing my purse," Gabrielle said.

"I proclaimed my innocence."

"You ran off like the thief you were. And with my purse!"

"But Monsieur Simon caught me," Agnes went on as if she hadn't been interrupted. "And he began to beat me with his cane. Then Gabrielle came running up—she looked beautiful, too, like an avenging angel, though an angry one—and she snatched the cane away from Monsieur Simon and broke it over his head."

By now Max was laughing so hard heads turned toward them as they walked by. "P-poor Monsieur Simon," he sputtered when he could catch his breath.

"But he shouldn't have been beating her," Gabrielle protested. "She was hardly more than a child."

"The police agreed with you, Monsieur Max," Agnes said smugly. "They were going to arrest her for making Monsieur Simon's head bleed."

Max cocked a brow at Gabrielle, his eyes sparkling with laughter. "Let me guess," he said. "Simon felt sorry for both of you poor waifs and brought you back to his shop-all three of you, I should say, since presumably the babe in arms was Dominique."

"He really only wanted Gabrielle and Dominique," Agnes admitted ruefully, "but she made him bring me, too."

"Then it seems to me it was Gabrielle who saved your hide, not the other way about," Max told Agnes.

Agnes sniffed, "A lot you know then. Would Simon have even noticed Gabrielle if I hadn't tried to pick her pocket, eh? I ask you."

Max opened his mouth to point out the fallacies of this argument, then slowly shut it. Gabrielle knew he was remembering the tale she had told him about Simon being her dead husband's uncle. But though he regarded her with a hard, assessing look, he said nothing.

Agnes heaved a nostalgic sigh. "It's all well and good being virtuous now, but I miss the old life sometimes."

Gabrielle blew a lock of hair from her eyes and sighed with exasperation. "You don't know when you're well off, girl. Most likely you'd be sweeping out the dungeons of the Salpetriere by now if you'd continued down that particular road."

"She's right, you know," Max said, using his drawling aristocratic voice. "I don't know what sort of whore you were, but when it comes to picking pockets you're a bloody amateur."

Agnes harrumphed. "I picked yours, didn't I?"

"Only because I let you," Max said. "You were as slow and clumsy as a two-toed sloth."

"And what would you know about—" Agnes's eyes opened wide at the sight of the purse that Max dangled before her eyes. "Hell and damnation! Do you see that, Gabrielle? He picked my purse right out of my bloody pocket and I didn't feel a thing!"

"I see it. And that's still no reason to curse like a stevedore from the Port-au-Ble."

"Jesu . . ." Agnes shivered and flexed her fingers before her eyes, no doubt thinking of the whipping post at the Place de la Greve. "I knew I was getting rusty."

"Well, don't rush out tomorrow and start practicing on all the pockets in the Palais Royal and, no, I won't give you lessons," Max said, having gotten the measure of Agnes.

Gabrielle had slanted a covert look at Max then, wondering at this new and strange facet to his character. That was no parlor trick he had just shown them. He must have clever and well-trained, well-practiced, fingers to have so impressed Agnes. But though that endearing, devilish smile flirted around his wide mouth, she could read nothing in his hooded eyes. She thought about the mercury seal molds she had seen in his drawer, and the pistol. About the way he could move so swiftly and silently. And about Percival Bonville's drawling voice, saying: He plays at dangerous and nefarious games . . .