I finished my consommé and considered pleading indisposition. I did not like watching my mother groom Adrien’s replacement in his own dining room. But before I could excuse myself, the Comte arrived.
Neither the Marquis nor my mother seemed discomfited at his appearance. The Comte, though he was the only one among us not dressed for a day at the court of Versailles, did not appear surprised to see the Marquis. He sat, unfolded his napkin in his lap, and addressed him.
“So, you are going to England,” he said.
The Marquis looked up abruptly and glanced nervously at the servants in the doorway.
“You needn’t look so anxious,” said Adrien. “It isn’t illegal to cross the channel.”
“Not yet,” said the Marquis, leaning forward over the fine bone china. “But you know as well as I do it will be soon enough.”
The Comte took a sip of his wine, his gaze steady.
“Ah, don’t look at me that way, Adrien,” said the Marquis. “There’s nothing we can do here, you know that. But in England, there are many like us speaking to men of influence. Planning. Gathering strength.”
My vague dislike of the Marquis sharpened.
“That is just what the National Convention says the émigrés do,” I said. “Plan and influence the enemies of France. They call that treason.”
And it had always seemed a rather hysterical accusation to me, until the Marquis had so calmly confessed to it. My mother shot me a freezing glare, which I ignored. The Marquis looked at me in surprise.
“True treason is to strip the king of his power to rule!” he exclaimed.
“But how would the English help the king?” I couldn’t help myself. I had to provoke him. “Louis supports the National Convention.”
The Marquis stared at me, his mouth agape and his face reddening.
“King Louis is a prisoner in all but name! What choice does he have but to wear a tricolor cockade and say whatever the rabble wish him to?”
The rabble. A vile way to talk about his own people, who were starving and desperate. Talking to enough aristocrats like this Marquis could make me a revolutionary more than Will ever had.
“So you would stir up the English to do—what—invade? Your own country?”
“Est-que c’est vrai?” asked the Marquis, turning to my mother in astonishment. “Is your daughter a Jacobin?”
“Certainly not, Phillipe,” said my mother. Her own color rose as well, and a bead of sweat quivered on her forehead like a tiny, molten jewel. Her eyes were strangely glassy. “This is not her talking at all, but a worthless boy I employed as my apprentice for a time, before I realized he was a snake and a liar. He filled her head with this nonsense, and I have not yet shaken it out.”
Adrien cleared his throat, cutting me off before I could retort.
“I have thought of leaving, naturally,” he said. “Marguerite and I have discussed it. But she refuses to return to England.”
“Ah, but you are a British citizen, are you not?” said the Marquis, turning to my mother. “And your daughter?”
“We are,” said my mother.
“Then why?”
“England had its chance with me,” she said, lifting her chin. Her eyes cleared with the defiance, and she looked more like herself. “I will not give it another.”
The servants brought the fish course, sole in sizzling beurre blanc. My mother must have ordered the dinner to suit the Marquis’s tastes. So much butter gave the Comte indigestion. I looked at her to confirm my suspicion, and found her looking into the corner with an expression of fear that made me glance there as well. There was nothing there.
“But Marguerite, ma chère,” said the Marquis. “Surely it is better to swallow one’s pride and return home to England than to die here in France?”
“Die?” I asked with disdain. “Who is going to kill us? The National Convention does not care what we do.”
“Oh, but they will,” said the Marquis. “Once Britain declares war, they will care a great deal about British subjects within French borders. Especially such a skilled one as your mother.” I wanted to scoff again; indeed, I opened my mouth to do so. But as I did I caught the Comte’s eye, and saw he was not scoffing. His taut, worried look stilled my tongue, as his fears about the violence of the Jacobins had often stilled my enthusiasm for them.
The Marquis went on. “And think, Marguerite, once we are at war, the revolutionaries will come for you, force you to make armor and weapons for them. You hate such work.”
My mother had made her reputation with alchemical armor for the French king before the National Convention had taken away any of his responsibilities. It didn’t seem such a terrible thing to me to make more of the same for him now. But I had never minded that quotidian work, however much more thrilling it was to pursue alchemy’s highest prize—the Philosopher’s Stone. Mother, on the other hand, had only ever seen metallurgic contracts as a means to an end. When unending life and limitless wealth beckoned, who could blame her?
“Perhaps, but the English would do the same, the moment I set foot on their shores,” said my mother. The Marquis opened his mouth to argue, but my mother cut him off. “No, my dear Phillipe, I will not go.”
And with that proclamation, my theory of her purpose for the Marquis collapsed. She could not be grooming him to be her next patron if she refused to go to England with him. Unless she simply planned to make him convince
