Chapter 34
Thirty-Four
“The fellows came out of nowhere, I tell you. Completely blindsided me. Don’t even remember hitting the ground, though my suit was completely covered in muck. Can’t complain though, since muck is what saved me. Not like poor Allard.”
“I hear they left him nothing but his shirt and small clothes.”
“I hear he’s got a lump on the back of his head the size of cobblestone. And when they found him, he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there.”
“Just how much wine did you two drink?”
“Bottles or glasses? Who counts?” Andre de Saint-Just responded.
The conversation between Andre de Saint-Just and her guards reached Marguerite before her lawyer swept into the cell on a wave of laughter.
As the cell door clanged shut behind him, he doffed his bicorne, which was indeed smeared with mud, and then lifted his head to reveal a spectacular bruise on the left side of his face.
Her painter’s eye detected shades of ultramarine, yellow ochre, and Alizarin crimson with its hint of purple.
She lifted a hand to her jaw in sympathetic pain.
“You should see the other fellow,” he said, eyes twinkling as he caught sight of the gesture. He lowered his voice conspiratorially, adding, “not a mark on him.”
She nearly laughed. But in this place, the sound would not come. Marguerite rose to greet him, hand outstretched as if they were meeting in a salon and not a cell.
Setting down a large traveling desk, he took it and kissed it. Then he cocked his bruised chin in the direction of her bed, and said softly, “Forgive the impropriety, citizeness, but might we sit together? I’ve some matters I’d like to discuss with you.”
She nodded cautiously, spreading her less than crisp red and white striped skirts about her as she took a seat on the end of her bed.
As de Saint-Just took a seat beside her and opened his desk, she slanted a look at him.
Despite his bruise, he was attractive, with his dark curls and bright blue eyes.
And yet, unlike Marcus, his nearness aroused nothing more in her than trepidation and hope.
If she’d thought her response to Marcus had been a knee-jerk reaction to a man’s touch after going so long without, she’d been mistaken.
“You’ll see that I have several testimonials to your good character, including a neighbor who has written in detail about your participation in several marches and acts of community service.” Andre set his black bicorne beside her pillow, then began pulling out papers.
She willed herself to focus as he described his efforts to find people who would testify to her good character, her patriotic behavior.
But as he continued to speak, she began to worry.
Was this really the plan? It didn’t seem any different from what other prisoners had tried. “Do you think this will work?”
“But of course, Citizeness Rouvroy, you must have faith in the justice of the courts.”
“I see.” But she didn’t, not after she’d seen how the court operated. How could he? Was she making a mistake? Trusting too easily? Had Marcus and Andre already been paid a respectable sum up front? Were they simply going through the motions of a rescue?
Would they shrug and say they’d done the best that they could after she was dead? She stopped listening. Focused her eyes on the soiled straw beside Marisol’s bed to keep from crying. Something was moving there. Was it a spider?
Spiders were repulsive, but preferable to the flies. Spiders, at least, ate flies.
She nearly jumped when she felt Saint-Just slip something beneath her skirt. She turned, mouth opened to reprimand him for his impertinence, when she saw that it was a bundle, not his hands.
“Trousers and a stock,” he murmured, eyes still fixed on the papers on his desk. “Slip them under your pillow. Then into your mattress after I leave.”
Hope came flooding back. She glanced over at the cell door, checking to see if the guards were standing by it, then at the beds closest to hers. Four stood empty. Four of her cellmates’ names had been called that morning.
She tried not to imagine their faces, waxen masks in a basket, encircled by flies.
“Keep the hat,” he murmured, waving an arm, and, as if by accident, wedging it into a space between the headboard and the wall. “Marcus will bring you a jacket when he delivers his miniatures this afternoon.”
She lifted her gaze from the straw to the empty mattress. Marisol’s had been one of the names called. She’d been so excited at the prospect of a miniature. Just like the grand ladies of the court, she’d said.
Marguerite thought of the sketch she’d glimpsed over Marcus’s shoulder. Marisol would have liked it. He’d restored the youth and health that prison had robbed her of and that the guillotine had just ensured would never be restored.
“Citizeness Rouvroy?”
Swallowing back a wave of sick, she turned to look at Andre.
“We’re still working on how to bring in the boots,” he murmured.
Unable to speak, she listened, focusing her attention completely on him. She studied the bruise on his cheek. The guards had said the other man involved in the attack had been a soldier who’d been stripped down to his shirt and small clothes.
She was wearing the small clothes Marcus had brought her under her gown. The man’s shirt she’d styled with a bodice. Afraid the guards might find them, she’d struggled into the unfamiliar garments in the early hours of the morning when she was certain everyone was asleep. Before roll call.
She wanted to ask for details of what Marcus and Andre were planning, but there was no telling who might be listening, in the bed adjacent to her, just outside the door, or through a drainpipe. The prison was full of spies, eager to exchange information for the slim chance of freedom.
On her first day in the prison, a woman in the courtyard had pointed out a man lingering by the gate separating the men’s section from theirs.
“Fouquier-Tinville’s lapdog,” she’d hissed.
“Reports everything everyone says and does in the hopes of saving his wretched skin. Makes things up when there’s nothing to report. Avoid him if you can.”
“When?” was all she dared ask Andre.
“Soon.”
Her eyes slid past the empty beds, past the books, the clothes, the needlework their occupants had left behind. Her nearest cellmates were knitting stockings, discussing what food they would eat when—if—they were set free. “Might you be more specific?”
He shook his head. “Still some details to work out.”
“Could you work faster?”
“We’ve bought you some time. Had your name removed from the registry. We are working as fast as we can. But there are a lot of bits and pieces to put into place. No one’s done anything like this…from here…before.”
“So the guards repeatedly tell us.”
Andre turned to look at her, blue eyes as intense as the center of a flame. “No one’s ever done it, yet.”
Marcus’s words.
There was the sound of boot soles against the stone floors, followed by the jangle of keys as the guard began unlocking the cell door. “Time’s up, citizen,” he said, swinging it open.
Andre gathered up the papers spread on his lap desk, opened the leather-covered lid, put them inside, closed it and folded the desk.
Tucking it under his arm, he stood. Lifting her hand, he brushed it with his lips.
He said softly, as if he’d read her mind, “Marcus has sworn to bring you back safely. He’s a man of his word, madame. ”
She thanked him politely; she’d learned politesse before she was out of leading strings. Watched as he walked out of the cell, out of this place, out into the sunshine of the Parisian streets. Leaving her behind. To wait.
Marguerite wanted to scream, to pummel the ancient stone walls and rattle the bars with her fury and frustration.
Wait: She was beginning to hate the very sound of the word.