Chapter 35
Thirty-Five
“Back again, citizen?” the guard at the gate of the Conciergerie asked.
“Business is brisk,” Marcus nodded meaningfully at the family members and friends who waited below the prison windows in the hopes of glimpsing the face of a loved one.
“Isn’t it, though?” the guard agreed, his eyes briefly following the direction of Marcus’s gaze. Then he stretched out his hand. “Papers?” After a quick perusal of Marcus’s forged documents, he swung the gate open.
Inside the prison, Marcus encountered more gates and guards ordering him to show his papers, inspecting his clothing, and peering inside his box of artist’s supplies and the leather artist’s tube with varying degrees of attention. None managed to discover the box’s false bottom.
As he continued through the prison, he mentally reviewed the number and placement of guards and gates, the twists and turns of each hallway and stairwell. He’d committed them to memory upon his first visit, but the practice was a helpful way of identifying any changes.
The guard assigned to escort Marcus, as he distributed painted miniatures and made new sketches, had a nose that put him in mind of a hungry parrot. Parrot Nose, too, had inspected his art box, rummaging through the pastels and chalk, unwrapping some of the miniatures, and finding no contraband.
Marcus stifled a yawn, flexing his fingers to ease the cramps from an evening’s worth of forgery.
After examining Allard’s documents, he’d spent several hours practicing the different handwriting on them.
When he was certain he’d achieved a natural facsimile of each, he used careful drops of a solution created by David to remove the ‘All’ from all instances where the name ‘Allard’ appeared, replacing it with ‘Bern’ so that now he had a complete set for Marguerite’s new identity as Simon Bernard.
That Marguerite and Allard shared the same eye and hair color made altering the documents even simpler.
“What’s this?” Parrot nose hadn’t failed to notice the bottle of wine in the leather artist’s tube.
“Special order for Captain Laurent,” Marcus nodded in the direction of the captain’s office. Despite the Revolution’s claims that all men were created equal, he doubted any private would dare pilfer alcohol meant for a superior officer, particularly one who was a notoriously ill-tempered drunk.
The guard pulled the bottle out of the tube, peered inside and made a clucking noise.
Marcus was also gambling that the sight of another bottle neck would convince him that the tube held nothing more than a series of bottles.
In fact, it was nothing more than a neck, set atop Allard’s tightly rolled jacket and breeches.
“That for Laurent, as well?”
“Protecting the liberty, equality, and fraternity is thirsty work.”
With a snort of disgust, the guard shoved the bottle in his hand back into the tube.
Marcus smothered his sigh of relief with a cough.
At the next gate, his escort waved away an effort to search Marcus’s art box and the tube, saying “They’ve been thoroughly searched, I haven’t got all day. Let us through.”
The gate’s two guards, not wanting to cede too much of their authority, insisted Marcus remove his shoes, inspecting the interior of each, but avoiding the heels, which he’d smeared with an extra coating of street muck.
The left one contained the bit of a key David had made according to drawings and a lucky opportunity to imprint the shape in a piece of soft wax.
When, at last, they reached Captain Laurent’s office, Marcus made a show of asking his escort to wait. “The special delivery,” he said, hefting tube and box straps over his shoulder and spreading his hands with an apologetic smile.
The guard’s lips flattened in a disapproving line, but he stepped aside as Marcus ducked inside. The ruddy-faced captain with the bushy eyebrows was seated at a small wooden table. “Tisset, Tisset, my friend, you’re back again,” he said, gesturing for Marcus to sit.
“Just wanted to drop off a token of my appreciation for your assistance the other afternoon.” Marcus kept his back to the door, as he opened the case in the event that the guard noticed he only withdrew one bottle.
“So very good of you,” Laurent said, reaching for it. “The missus was most grateful for the miniature. You’ll join me for a glass?”
“Alas, I still have work to do,” he said, striving for a suitably regretful tone.
“You’re a busy man, Tisset.”
“Thanks to you and your men.”
“Just serving the Republic,” Laurent laughed. “You’ll join me later, then?”
“But of course.” He pulled an assignat out of his pocket and slid it surreptitiously across the stained wooden table. “You will help me again…”
“But of course, I’m a patriot and a lover…” He slipped the note into the pocket of his waistcoat, then picked up the bottle and waved it at Marcus. “Until this evening, then.”
“Until this evening,” Marcus agreed. Back under the disapproving eye of his parrot-nosed escort, he reflected that timing would be critical for his plan.
Everything hinged on how long it would take for him to get Marguerite out of her cell, through the gates and into the coach that Andre and David would be driving along a pre-planned route.
At the thought of the coach, Marcus wondered what misstep had connected him to the skirmish in Rouen. Then he banished the thought; he needed to focus on one problem at a time.
“Citizen Descombes?” he called as they reached a familiar row of cells.
A haggard-looking man, his blond hair hanging in greasy tangles, pressed his face between the bars.
“Your wife asked me to deliver this.” Marcus opened his artist’s box and pulled out a fabric-wrapped miniature.
He lifted an edge to make sure it was the correct one—a round-faced woman with wide-set blue eyes and a snub nose.
The painter who transformed his sketches into miniatures had an over-fondness for pink tint and white highlights, but overall, it was a fair likeness.
He placed it in the man’s outstretched hand.
Descombes studied it for several long moments after he unwrapped it, his mouth working. “Can you get a message to her?”
“I can try,” Marcus said, wishing he had time for this small kindness.
“Tell her to have a good life. And to forget me.”
But would it be a kindness? The lady had been distraught when he’d sketched her and when he’d shown her the miniature. Marcus doubted she’d have much success following either of her husband’s instructions.
“Keep moving, Tisset,” his escort ordered.
Stepping through the last wicket separating him and Marguerite de Rouvroy, Marcus began silently counting cell doors.
Five, four…
He opened his artist’s box, checking for the miniature of the hairdresser. There was the packet, the wrapping marked with her initials: MAA.
Three, two…
“Here we are.”
One.
“You have a visitor, citizenesses,” Parrot Nose announced, unlocking the cell door and swinging it open.
Adjusting the strap of his art box on his shoulder, Marcus stepped inside, his body thrumming with the taut-spring excitement he always felt before battle. Things were falling into place. He was prepared.
For everything, except Marguerite de Rouvroy leaping to her feet, rushing towards him and flinging her arms around his neck.
The impact of her body knocked the breath from his lungs, though somewhere in his spinning brain he knew she hadn’t hit him that hard. He had a fleeting impression of tendrils of hair against his cheek, soft breasts against his chest, and lips against his mouth.
His next impression was far from fleeting.
He’d kissed her before because it was necessary.
He hadn’t thought then, he’d just acted.
Now, unprepared, unguarded, he couldn’t think at all.
One moment the ground beneath his feet was solid, the next moment it was utterly, crashingly, gone.
Desire roared through him. He reached for her. He wanted more.
Marguerite de Rouvroy broke the kiss.
“Disgusting,” a voice at the far end of the cell clucked disapprovingly. “We may be in prison, but some of us still remember what it means to comport oneself as a lady.”
“Some of us never learned and never gave a rat’s ass about being a ‘lady,’” another voice, also at the far end of the cell, crowed cheerfully.
Marcus, his head spinning, searched for the source of the cheerful voice, grateful for the distraction—any distraction—from the waves of want.
A thin young woman with long black hair dressed in a low-cut scarlet gown winked at him and said, “I usually charge for what she’s offering, but for a fine-looking citizen like you... ”
“Disgusting,” the voice behind him repeated. Marcus turned to see a solidly built woman with a black twisted bun seated on the edge of the bed across from Marguerite’s. The bed, he realized with a start, that, on his last visit, had been occupied by an elderly noblewoman.
“I brought a miniature for Citizeness Auginot,” he said, glancing over at the bed across from Marguerite. It was empty.
“She’s gone,” Marguerite said.
“To the courtyard?” he asked, hoping he misunderstood. He held out the carefully wrapped miniature.
“They came for her this morning,” Marguerite said slipping her arms from around his neck and stepping back. She closed his fingers around the package. “Did you think she’d wait for you?”
There was something about the way she said the word wait.
As if it was an accusation. He tightened his grip around the miniature, feeling the gilt edges dig into his flesh.
He shoved the package into his pocket. Marisol hadn’t been his responsibility.
He couldn’t save them all. He was trying his damnedest to save her.
“Come, my love,” she said, taking hold of his wrist and leading him to the bed. “Sit.”
There was something about Marguerite de Rouvroy, not just the way she looked—but the way she looked at him, that rattled the sealed compartments of his heart. He needed to compose himself.