The Forbidden Rose

I will not let this happen.

She pushed Aunt Sophie aside and went for the back stairs. The cook gaped at her as she ran through the kitchen. She ran across the garden, stumbling on the brick path, pulled up the bar on the gate to the alley and was out.

Victor must not see her. She took the long way, down the alley that led to Rue Martin. They would take Guillaume that way. She ran, as she would have run in the fields at home. Ran, half-blind in the bright sunlight.

Guillaume was there, at the end of the street, surrounded by soldiers.

She collided with someone who stepped into her path. Smaller than she was. Dark hair and a thin, keen, hungry face. A loose, dark coat. A striped waistcoat. Adrian. He grabbed her and held on, his fingers digging into her arms till it hurt. “Stop.” He was unyielding as a post.

“They have Guillaume. I must go—”

“You shut your gob and listen to me. Stop. Stop now.”

“They have taken—”

“I see that, damn you.”

“They are taking him to prison. You don’t understand. He will die.”

“You can’t do a bloody damn thing if they toss you in the cell next door. You were going to run right up there. Be damned if you have the sense God gave cabbages.”

He was speaking in English, with an accent she could barely understand. This wasn’t the sly, sullen, sarcastic boy she’d traveled halfway across France with. What faced her was sharp and brutal and utterly ruthless. He scared her.

She jerked at his hold. “I was not going to accost armed men. I’m not a fool.”

“Good, then. Look at me.” He was speaking French again. He squeezed her arm. Hard. “Look at me, not him. We’re talking to each other, you and me. We’re strolling along, out to buy eggs and feathers and baby goats. We’re going in the same direction, but we don’t see him. We don’t look at them at all. Look at me.”

You are English. “Do not instruct me in caution. We will give them time to move away. Then follow.” I was right, then. Guillaume is an English spy.

Adrian was breathing fast. “That’s better. We follow them. This is my world. I know what to do.”

“And I will tell you that Paris is my world, Adrian. Now come, before they turn a corner and are lost to us.”

Guillaume and his guards had turned the corner and marched onward. But they were not hard to find again, so many men, with such grim purpose. People stopped to stare after them, to point and discuss. At the Church of Saint-Grégoire a carriage waited. They put Guillaume inside. Three gardes accompanied him and the carriage went south.

She watched, hidden behind a corner of a house. “They could take him anywhere. There are prisons all over Paris.”

“Then we stick close. Keep up, or I swear I’ll leave you behind.” He gave her a single, impatient look.

She did more than keep up. She knew this city, as Adrian did not. Knew when the carriage turned toward the Pont Neuf. They slipped through the slow traffic of the quay and crossed the bridge ahead of it.

At the Conciergerie Prison, the carriage stopped outside the gate. One garde descended. He returned in only a minute and the carriage started off again. They had been turned away. There was not room for even one more prisoner at that great stronghold.

Then deeper into the oldest parts of Paris. A long way. She knew the Sorbonne and the Section Sainte- Geneviève as one knows the tiles of one’s kitchen. She took small streets in the labyrinth, making guesses how the carriage would turn. A coach could go no faster than walking pace here, and the driver wore a Phrygian cap, bright red, visible for a quarter mile.

The carriage stopped again. On Rue Tessier. This time the man returned nodding and satisfied. They were admitted. She had a glimpse of Guillaume, in the middle of gardes, every path of escape blocked, hurried along, into the prison.

She left Adrian outside the prison gate and staggered away, out of sight, around the corner. In the alleyway she put a hand on the wall to hold herself up and was sick once more. Her heart beat so hard, it shook her whole body.

“They took him inside.” Adrian came back to report, limping and tight lipped.

She was shaking. Whether it was fear, or running so fast across Paris, or being so sick, she could not say.

The boy said, “The carriage left. The men from the Garde went with it.”

She pressed the heels of her hands hard into her belly. “I must . . . I must go into the prison and tell them it is a mistake. Convince them.”

“You try to go in there, I’ll hurt you.”

“You don’t understand.” Her head was filled with a roaring darkness where she could not think or remember or make herself speak. “If I wait till he is charged and the papers are filed at the Tribunal, there will be no way out for him. For an hour, now, there may be something I can do. I will talk to them—”

Adrian put himself in front of her, inches away, grim and unboylike. “What is that place?”

“A prison. Once a convent. Now it is a prison. Wait. Don’t speak for a minute. I must think.”

She breathed deep, trying to set aside the fear and the sickness. Victor had done this. The accusation had already been filed, the arrest order prepared last night. It was too late to bribe and reason and plead.

“You’re sick as a dog, ain’t you?” the boy said. “Your eyes look funny. All dark. You eat opium?”

“No. Of course not. Let me think.”

It had been too late before she drank coffee this morning. Before Guillaume escorted her home. Before Victor walked into the streets to instruct the gardes. The soldiers had been lying in wait. Victor expected Guillaume to come to her house, sooner or later, and had set his trap and waited.

“You pregnant?”

“What? No. It is—” Another pang hit her stomach. “I ate something that does not agree with me. Anyone might do that.” She staggered when she pushed herself away from the wall. “This is the Convent of Saint- Barthélémy. They are using such houses now for prisoners, since we have no more nuns and a plentitude of prisoners.”

She went to the end of the alley to see this prison where Guillaume had been taken. Where he would be held until Victor had him killed.

This was a very old convent, built like a fortress. A long, blank stone wall faced the street. Over it, she could see the roof of the church and a chapel window of red and blue glass that had escaped destruction. Spikes topped the wall. A man with a long gun patrolled the streets.

“No matter how many die, the prisons are always full. There is a dreadful mathematics to this.” Her eyes hurt with the light so that she could not see clearly. Inside her, though, everything was dark and cold. “Guillaume’s name is already on the rolls of the Tribunal.”

“Don’t faint. I’ll hit you if you faint. And don’t cry.”

“I am not crying.” She closed her eyes. “Though I may be sick again. Very possibly.”

“You do that and I’m gonna walk off and leave you. I swear it. Damn it to hell and back. That old bitch is going to fry me like a kipper. She’ll never believe I didn’t do this on purpose.”

What old bitch? But it did not matter. “This is my fault. Victor did this.”

“I saw. Cod-swallowing bugger.” The boy’s face was blank and terrifying in the inhuman stillness that had settled there. “But Doyle’s the one who stepped in it. He shouldn’t have gone anywhere near your house. You want to blame somebody, blame Doyle.”

“I will. I will also get him out of there.” Now I know his name. He is Doyle. Doyle. “I must go somewhere and sit down. We cannot stay here.”

They must go to one of the safe places of La Flèche. The wheels of her brain refused to turn, like a broken clockwork that stopped and stuck and would not start again. What is close by? What is empty? She had never permitted herself to know all the safehouses in Paris. She already carried the key to too many lives in her head.

Behind them, a voice said, “You are wise to leave here.”