"What happened to you?" I asked, helping him down.
"Tell you something"-he frowned-"it"s b.l.o.o.d.y lucky that young lad hates the stink of cheese." He said it with an incline of the head toward Jacques.
"Whatever do you mean?"
"Because it was while he was waiting for me outside the fromagerie that something odd happened. Or should I say, he saw something very odd. A young boy hanging around."
We were halfway back to the lodge, where I planned to make Mr. Weatherall a coffee and let him tell me all about it, but now I stopped.
"I beg your pardon?"
"I"m telling you, a little rapscallion, just hanging around."
This rapscallion, it turned out, had indeed been hanging around. Fancy that, I"d said, a young rapscallion hanging around a town square, but Mr. Weatherall had admonished me with a peevish growl.
"Not just any rapscallion, but an especially nosy one. He approached young Jacques when Jacques was waiting outside. This boy"s asking him questions, questions like, had he seen a man on crutches enter the fromagerie that morning? Jacques is a good lad and he told the boy he hadn"t seen a man on crutches at all that day but that he"d keep an eye for him.
"Great, says the rascal, I"ll be around, won"t be far. Might even be a little coin in it for you if you tell me something useful. This little squirt"s no older than ten, Jacques reckons. Where do you suppose he"s getting the kind of money he needs to pay an informant?"
I shrugged.
"From whoever is paying him, that"s who. The kid"s working for the same Templars who plotted against us, or my name"s not Freddie Weatherall. They want to find the drop, Elise. They"re looking for you, and if they think they"ve located the drop, they"ll be monitoring it from now on."
"Did you speak to the boy?"
"Absolutely not. What do you think I am, some kind of b.l.o.o.d.y idiot? Soon as Jacques came into the shop and told me what happened we left by the back entrance and took the long route home, making sure we weren"t followed."
"And were you?"
He shook his head. "But it"s only a matter of time."
"How do you know?" I argued. "There are so many "ifs." If the rapscallion was working for the Templars and not just looking to rob you or beg for money or just kick one of your crutches away for the fun of it; if he"s seen enough activity to alert their suspicions; if they decide the drop is ours."
"I think they have," he said quietly.
"How can you know?"
"Because of this." He frowned, reached into his jacket and pa.s.sed me the letter.
ii Mademoiselle Grand Master, I remain loyal to you and your father. We must meet in order that I can tell you the truth about the matter of your father"s death and events since. Write to me at once.
Lafreniere My heart thudded. "I must respond," I said quickly.
He shook his head in exasperation. "You"ll do no such b.l.o.o.d.y thing," he snapped. "It"s a trap. It"s a way of drawing us out. They"ll be waiting for us to reply to this. If this is a letter from Lafreniere, then pigs might fly. It"s a trap. And if we reply we"ll be walking right into it."
"If we reply from here, yes."
He shook his head. "You ain"t leaving."
"I have to know," I said, waving the letter.
He scratched his head, trying to think. "You"re not going anywhere by yourself."
I gave a short laugh. "Well, who else can accompany me? You?"
And then stopped myself as his head dropped.
"Oh G.o.d," I said, quietly. "Oh G.o.d, I"m so sorry, Mr. Weatherall. I didn"t mean . . ."
He was shaking his head sadly. "No, no, you"re right, darlin", you"re right. I"m a protector who can"t protect."
I came to him, knelt by his chair and put my arms around him.
There was a long pause, silence in the front room of the lodge save for Mr. Weatherall"s occasional snuffles.
"I don"t want you to go," he said at last.
"I have to," I replied.
"You can"t fight them, Elise," he said, pushing tears from his eyes with angry palms. "They"re too strong now, too powerful. You can"t go up against them alone."
I held him. "I can"t keep running either. You know as well as I do that if they"ve found our drop, then they"ll reason we"re in the vicinity. They"ll draw a circle on a map with the drop at its center and begin to search. And the Maison Royale, where Elise de la Serre finished her education, is as good a place as any to start the search.
"You know as well as I do that we"ll have to leave here, you and I. We have to go somewhere else, where we"ll make fruitless attempts to rally support and wait for our drop to be discovered before we have to move again. Leaving is not a choice."
He shook his head. "No, Elise. I can think of something. So just you listen here, I"m your adviser, and I advise you that you stay here while we formulate a response to this latest unwelcome development. How does that sound? Does that sound enough like an adviser to advise the idea right out of your head?"
I hated the taste of the lie on my lips when I promised to stay. I wonder if he knew that while the household slept I would creep away.
Indeed, as soon as the ink is dry on this entry, I"ll put the journal into my satchel and creep out. It will break his heart. For that I"m so sorry, Mr. Weatherall.
27 MARCH 1791.
i As I crossed silently to the front door on my way out of the lodge, a ghost flitted across the hallway.
I cleared my throat and the ghost stopped, turned and put a hand to her mouth. It was Helene, caught in the act of returning from Jacques"s room to her own.
"I"m sorry I startled you," I whispered.
"Oh, mademoiselle."
"Is all that creeping around really necessary?"
She colored. "I couldn"t have Mr. Weatherall knowing."
I opened my mouth to argue but stopped, turned to the door instead. "Well, good-bye for a while."
"Where are you going, mademoiselle?"
"Paris. There"s something I have to do."
"And you were leaving in the middle of the night, without saying good-bye?"
"I have to, it"s . . . Mr. Weatherall. He doesn"t want . . ."
She scampered across the boards on her tiptoes, came to me and drew my face to hers, kissing me hard on both cheeks. "Please be careful, Elise. Please come back to us."
It"s funny. I embark on a journey supposedly to avenge my family but really the lodge is my family. For a second I considered staying. Wasn"t it better to live in exile with those I loved than die in pursuit of revenge?
But no. There was a ball of hate in my gut and I needed to get rid of it.
"I will," I told Helene. "Thank you, Helene. You know . . . You know I think so much of you."
"I do." She smiled, and I turned and left.
ii What I felt as I rode away from the lodge wasn"t happiness, exactly. It was the exhilaration of action and sense of purpose as I spurred Scratch on to Chteaufort.
First, I had a job to do, and arriving in the early hours, I found board and a tavern that was still open, and in there I told anyone who was curious enough to ask that my name was Elise de la Serre, and that I had been living in Versailles but was now bound for Paris.
The next morning I left, and came to Paris, crossing the Pont Marie to the le Saint-Louis and going . . . home? Sort of. My villa, at least.
What would it look like? I couldn"t even recall whether I"d been a diligent caretaker the last time I was there. Arriving, I had my answer. No, I hadn"t been a diligent caretaker, just a thirsty one, judging by the many wine bottles lying about the place. I suppressed a shiver, thinking of the dark hours I had spent in this house.
I left the remnants of the past as they were. Next I wrote to Monsieur Lafreniere, a letter in which I asked him to meet at L"Htel Voysin in two days" time. When I"d hand-delivered it to the address he"d given me, I returned to the le Saint-Louis, where I set trip wires, just in case they came to look for me here, and settled in the housekeeper"s study to wait.
29 MARCH 1791.
i I made my way to L"Htel Voysin in Le Marais, where I had asked to meet Lafreniere. Who would turn up? That was the question. Lafreniere the friend, Lafreniere the traitor? Or somebody else altogether? And if this was a trap, had I walked into it? Or had I done the only possible thing I could if I wanted to avoid a lifetime of hiding from men who wanted me dead?
The courtyard of the L"Htel Voysin was dusky gray. The building rose on every side and had once been grand, in looks as aristocratic as those who frequented it, but just as the aristocrats had been laid low by the Revolution-and each day were stripped of further ent.i.tlements by the a.s.sembly-so Voysin, too, seemed cowed by the events of the last two years: the windows in which lights would have burned were blacked out, some broken and boarded up. The grounds, which once would have been clipped and tended to by cap-doffing gardeners, had been deserted and left to go to ruin so that ivy climbed the walls unchecked, tendrils of it feeling their way toward the blank first-floor windows. Meanwhile, weeds grew between the cobbles and flagstones of the deserted courtyard, which as I entered echoed to the sound of my boots on stone.
I fought a sense of disquiet, seeing all of those darkened windows looking down on this once-bustling courtyard. Any one of them could have provided a hiding place for an a.s.sailant.
"h.e.l.lo?" I called. "h.e.l.lo, Monsieur Lafreniere?"
I held my breath, thinking, This isn"t right. This isn"t right at all. Thinking that I was an idiot to arrange to meet here, and that wondering if it might be a trap was hardly the same as being prepared to meet one.
Mr. Weatherall was right. Of course he was, and I"d known it all along myself.
It was a trap.
From behind me I heard a sound and turned to see a man emerge from the shadows.
I squinted, flexing my fingers, ready.
"Who are you?" I called.
He darted forward, and I realized it wasn"t Lafreniere at the same time as I saw moonlight flash along a blade he brought from his waist.
And maybe I would have cleared my sheath in time. After all, I was fast.
And maybe I wouldn"t have cleared my sheath in time. After all, he was fast too.
Either way, it didn"t matter. The question was decided by the blade of a third party, a figure who seemingly came from nowhere. I saw what I knew was a hidden blade cut across the darkness and my would-be killer fell, and standing behind him was Arno.
For a second, I could only stand and gawk, because this wasn"t Arno as I"d ever seen him before. Not only was he wearing a.s.sa.s.sins" robes and a hidden blade, but the boy was gone. In his place, a man.
It took me a moment to recover, and then, just as it struck me that they would never send a lone killer for me, that there would be others, I saw the man looming behind Arno, and all those months of target practice at the lodge counted as I snapped off a shot over his shoulder, gave the killer a third eye and sent him crashing dead to the stone of the courtyard.
ii Reloading, I said, "What"s going on? Where is Monsieur Lafreniere?"
"He"s dead," said Arno.
He said it in a tone of voice I didn"t quite care for, as though there was a lot more to that story than he was letting on, and I looked sharply at him. "What?"
But before Arno could answer there was the sound of a ricochet and a musket ball slapped into a wall nearby, showering us in stone chips. There were snipers in the windows above us.
Arno reached for me, and the part of me that still hated him wanted to wrench away from him, tell him I could manage by myself, thanks, but the words of Mr. Weatherall flashed through my head, the knowledge that whatever else, Arno was here for me, which after all was all that really mattered. And I let him take me.
"I"ll explain later," he was calling. "Go!"
And as another volley of musket fire rained down upon us from the windows above, we made a dash for the courtyard gates and hurried out into the grounds.
Ahead of us was the maze, overgrown and untended, but still very much a maze. Arno"s robes spread as he ran, his hood dropped back and I gazed upon handsome features, transported back to happier times, before the secrets had threatened to overwhelm us.
"Do you remember that summer at Versailles when we were ten?" I called as we ran.
"I remember getting lost in that d.a.m.n hedge maze for six hours while you ate my share of the dessert," he replied.
"Then you"d better keep up this time," I called, and despite everything I couldn"t help but hear the note of joy in my voice. Only Arno could do this to me. Only Arno could bring this light into my life. And I think if ever there was a moment when I truly "forgave" him-in my heart and in my head-then that was it.
iii By now we had reached the middle of the maze. Our prize was another killer waiting for us. He readied himself, looking nervously from one to another, and I felt happy for him that he would go to the grave thinking that I had joined with the a.s.sa.s.sins. He could meet his maker floating on a cloud of righteousness. In my tale he was the bad man. In his, he was the hero.
I stepped back and let Arno face the duel, taking the opportunity to admire his swordplay. All those years I was learning my own skills, his greatest discipline was our governor"s algebra tests. Of the two I was by far the more experienced swordsman.
But he had caught up; he"d caught up fast.
He saw my impressed look and flicked me a smile that would have melted my heart if it needed melting.
We made our way out of the maze and onto the Boulevard, which teemed with people. One thing I"d noticed about the immediate aftermath of the Revolution was that people celebrated more than ever; they lived each day like it was their last.
So it was that the street was alive with actors, tumblers, jugglers and puppeteers all around, and the thoroughfare thick with visitors, some already drunk, some well on their way to being drunk. Most of them with broad smiles plastered across happy faces. I saw plenty of beards and moustaches glistening with ale and wine-men wore them now, to show their support for the Revolution-as well as the distinctive red "liberty caps."
Which was why the three men coming toward us stuck out like a sore thumb. By my side, Arno felt me tense, about to reach for my sword, but stayed my hand with a gentle grip on my forearm. Anybody else would have lost a finger or two for doing that. Arno I was prepared to forgive.
"Meet me tomorrow for coffee. I"ll explain everything then."
30 MARCH 1791.