Pam Rosenthal Read online

  Dedication

  To Michael Rosenthal and Ellie Ely

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Provence, August 1783

  Six years before the French Revolution

  The rule at the chateau was never to hire a pretty servant. And yet there was no denying that the copper-haired girl serving tea in the library this afternoon was pretty. Clumsy too: if she continued rattling that Sèvres cup and saucer she was going to spatter hot tea all over the Vicomte’s impeccable white stockings.

  Bored with each other’s company, the family of the Duc de Carency Auvers-Raimond directed keen eyes in the girl’s direction. Sèvres was shockingly expensive; a servant who broke a piece could expect to be punished—even, or especially, a servant as pretty as this one. The cup rattled more loudly. The family waited in dreamy stillness for the shivering crash of china on the parquet floor.

  But none came; only a few faint beige drops of tea marred the Vicomte’s shins, for at the last possible moment, he’d put out a long, deft hand and rescued the cup from imminent destruction.

  “Thank you, Marianne,” he murmured.

  She managed a curtsy, lowering her eyes from his and blushing beneath the freckles scattered over her cheeks.

  Teatime finally over, she made her way back to the kitchen. A narrow escape; catastrophe barely averted. No broken china to sweep up, and—more importantly—no punishment to anticipate. The Comtesse Amélie had only glared at her. Ah well, a glare was nothing. What one had to look out for was the Comtesse’s scowl, the Gorgon-face that meant a thrashing was in order.

  She wouldn’t be hurt and she wouldn’t be fired. No servant would be fired today; there was too much work to do. All right, she told herself, she should be glad of the work then. Because her job was the main thing, wasn’t it? Her job, her salary—surely these things were more important than the fact that he had clearly forgotten he’d ever seen her before.

  Yes, of course. He was of no importance whatsoever.

  Though it rather pained her to admit that she’d recognized him the instant she’d entered the room. The set of his shoulders, the dark gleam of his eyes: she’d known him immediately. No wonder she’d stopped breathing properly; of course she’d rattled the china.

  And, she warned herself, if she continued thinking of him so…so physically, she was still in danger of dropping things—this time the whole damn tray. She hurried into the kitchen, laid down the delicate tea things, and tucked her thick curls into a cap, to protect them against soot and grease.

  Be honest, she thought. Admit the whole truth and be done with it. She winced; the appalling, humiliating fact of the matter was that since last December she hadn’t let a day go by without thinking of him.

  Thank you, Marianne.

  And thank you, Monsieur le Vicomte. Even if you don’t remember that my name is Marie-Laure and not Marianne.

  She pinned a stained apron to the front of her dress. One couldn’t expect an aristocrat to know a servant’s proper name.

  Heaps of work awaited her in the scullery. A mountain of pots to wash, a bushel of onions to peel and chop. Plenty of distraction from her troublesome thoughts. She took a heavy knife and sliced off the tip of an onion. Predictably, her eyes filled with tears. Well, of course, she scolded herself. What else could one expect, from such a strong onion?

  There would be a banquet. A chandelier of Bohemian crystal had been installed in the mirrored dining room; tomorrow evening thirty guests would feast under its light in celebration of the Vicomte’s visit.

  He’d arrived only this morning, together with his mother the Duchesse. No one among the chateau’s army of servants knew what had brought about the sudden family reunion.

  “The Duc’s illness could have taken a turn for the worse,” Jacques, the Duc’s valet, had speculated that morning at breakfast. “The doctors looked graver than usual, last time they visited.”

  “Perhaps they’re selling off some property,” someone else suggested. “That will usually bring a family out of hiding, to clamor for their share. Or perhaps it’s time to find a wife for the Vicomte Monsieur Joseph.”

  It would have to be a matter of some import, everyone agreed, to pry the Duchesse away from the convent that had been her home for the last few years.

  “Of course, the Duc was always a wretched husband, even when he had his wits about him.” Nicolas, the chateau’s general manager, prided himself on his knowledge of the family’s history. “Joked in public that the Duchesse was a prune in bed. Had a list of mistresses as long as your arm, and you couldn’t keep him away from the maids and village girls.” Which was why, now that the old man was too enfeebled to have a say in things, his daughter-in-law tried not to hire pretty servants.

  But even Nicolas hadn’t known Monsieur Joseph’s whereabouts these past few years. There were rumors of duels, prison, exile, even a sojourn in America.

  “America?” Marie-Laure was an enthusiastic supporter of the recent revolution in the English colonies. How wonderful, she thought, if Monsieur Joseph had joined the Marquis de Lafayette in the fight for American independence. How worthy. And how utterly improbable that a member of this nasty, spoiled family would do any such thing.

  The group in the kitchen would have been pleased to gossip the morning away but Nicolas hustled them off to work. And so all Marie-Laure had learned of the Duc’s younger son was that he’d been his father’s favorite and hadn’t visited in more than a decade.

  But I know something that Nicolas doesn’t, she thought, putting aside the last onion and moving over to skim the foam from the veal stock. I know what he was doing last winter. He was smuggling forbidden books into France. And cheating booksellers. Well, at least he cheated me and Papa.

  Of course, last winter she hadn’t known who he really was. But she’d suspected he wasn’t what he seemed. She’d liked that about him.

  The sights and smells of the busy kitchen dissolved into the steam rising from the stockpot. She was in a shabby, beloved room—with books, books everywhere.

  Home.

  Home had been the seaside city of Montpellier, beyond the Rhone to the west. She could hear a wind howling outside and boys hawking the latest scandal sheet through the streets. The boys shrieked like seagulls.

  Read it and shudder! Read it and weep!

  Horrible! Incroyable!

  The Baron Roque murdered over his solitary luncheon, blood in the crème brûlée, the killer still at large!

  She remembered thinking, that day in Montpellier, that she wouldn’t weep for the Baron, a gross, self-important man whose footmen had carried him everywhere in an ornate litter. She’d hated the way he’d leered down her dress whenever he visited the shop, thrusting his bulk between her and the bookshelves, so she’d have to brush against him as she passed. But she might sigh just a bit for the loss of a customer. There had been few enough of them lately, and that afternoon the spiteful wind—the mistral, it was called—seemed to have blown away every customer from the Vernets’ bookshop.

  She’d urged Papa to stay upstairs in bed: his weak heart and swampy lungs had been making him cough. And even without any sales or customers, she’d been busy climbing up and down the ladder, rearranging the overcrowded shelves. She’d piled and sorted the books, category by category, onto the spare bed in the kitchen.

  It’s going to storm outside, she thought. For at dusk she’d lit another candle, and now a sharp wind had blown it out, plunging the shop into darkness.

  But it wasn’t a storm. It was the tall figure who’d banged open the door and whose broad shoulders obscured the twilit sky behind him.

  “Vernet?” he demanded, as she fumbled to relight the candle. His voice was raspy. “I have business wi
th Vernet.”

  Odd that she hadn’t been frightened of him. He’d been dirty and desperate-looking in the flickering candlelight, swathed in a ragged cloak with a greasy bandanna holding an eye patch in place. His visible eye had glittered feverishly above hollow, unshaven cheeks and haughty cheekbones. But perhaps she’d simply been too pleased to be frightened: as he took off the heavy pack he’d worn under his cloak she could see that it contained books.

  New books! Winemakers must feel like this when they taste the first Beaujolais of the season.

  And not just any books—by the look of him, he was carrying books smuggled from Switzerland. The French censors had banned just about everything even mildly disrespectful of the status quo, from philosophy to smutty anecdotes of court life at Versailles. Any bookseller who wanted to keep up with the march of ideas had to depend on illegal consignments from foreign publishers.

  Too bad Papa wasn’t here to smell the new ink, and leather bindings as the books were unpacked.

  “But he needs his sleep,” she told the smuggler, “and so I’ll sign for them, Monsieur.”

  “And I’m to depend on the accounting and ciphering abilities of a girl.” He sneered, and she felt herself gathering up every bit of her five-feet-and-almost-half-an-inch in haughty response.

  “You are.” She nodded curtly as she drew the curtains and locked the door. Trading in smuggled books was illegal, even if everybody did it. She needed to be careful. If only he weren’t so tall, she thought. If only that one visible eye weren’t so black and luminous. Was he really sneering, she wondered, or was that a sort of grin?

  “And a girl,” he added (perhaps it was a grin), “with ink-stained fingers.”

  She didn’t know whether to laugh or scowl or blush, as this ragged, half-starved fellow fastidiously wrinkled his nose (not a bad nose, actually) at the lingering stains she’d gathered from writing in the ledger and in her journal. Confused by how to respond, she compromised by shrugging her shoulders.

  “Well, Monsieur, of course you know that ‘the most compelling of encounters is with a woman’s provocative imperfections.’”

  He gaped and she wondered what in the world had made her say that. The ornate phrase came from her favorite novel, A Libertine Education by a pseudonymous Monsieur X. But this fellow probably couldn’t read much beyond the titles on the books in his pack.

  She’d always found it rude when people flaunted their reading, and now she’d done it herself. Well, he’d unsettled her by the suddenness of his arrival, the intensity of his presence. The small, cluttered room didn’t seem to contain enough oxygen for the two people occupying its space.

  She caught her breath.

  “Please sit here, Monsieur.”

  She dragged her father’s armchair toward the desk. Perhaps he’d seem less overwhelming if she wasn’t peering up at him.

  She sat on a stool and cleared a space for the new books, dipping her pen into the inkstand while he reached into the pack to pull out the first volumes. His chair rattled; Papa usually propped up its broken leg with a volume of English plays. But Marie-Laure was too impatient to bother with details.

  Briskly, she began checking off the titles he pulled out of the pack, new ones and reorders, with Monsieur X’s book among them. She glanced with pleasure at the marbled endpapers of one new edition and had to restrain herself from stroking the heavy cream pages of another. What quick, elegant hands he has, she thought absentmindedly.

  But surely there must be more copies of Anecdotes of Madame du Barry in his pack.

  “Just two copies?” She frowned. “But we wanted six. Word has been spreading, and we’ve taken four orders for it already.”

  He shrugged.

  “And that’s all, Mademoiselle,” he announced, leaning back, coughing and stretching and scratching his neck. Marie-Laure thought belatedly of the lice setting up housekeeping in the chair’s torn upholstery. And then, as what he had said began to sink in, she forgot about the lice completely.

  “That’s all? But that can’t be all. What about Monsieur Rousseau’s Confessions?”

  Customers had been demanding it for months.

  He slouched back into the chair, shrinking down into his cloak, his bony knees in their uncouth trousers poking forward. The toe of his left shoe was held together with a rag.

  “Short print run,” he muttered. “Sorry.”

  She didn’t believe him. And a sickening certainty rose inside of her, like a bad taste, all the way up from her belly.

  “You came here last, of course?” she asked softly.

  “Of course not,” he snapped. “Different fellow covers the route to Nîmes.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she replied a bit more loudly now, and with exaggerated, condescending patience. “I meant, of course, that you came here to my father’s shop after you went to all the other bookshops in Montpellier.

  “And I’d wager ten livres,” she continued, “that Monsieur Rigaud has gotten everything he ordered. And maybe even a little more.”

  She knew she had him by the guilty look that crept over his face.

  Rigaud. Marie-Laure could hear his suave, insinuating voice. “Take it from me, my boy, Vernet won’t care about the Rousseau. He’s eccentric, you know, a bit of a specialist.” He’d probably slipped him a few extra sous, too.

  The smuggler raised himself weakly in the armchair. He winced, and she was glad of it. She hoped she’d made him as guilty and uncomfortable as possible.

  “You can always complain,” he muttered, “to the directors in Switzerland.”

  “We will,” Marie-Laure said grimly. The Societé typographique de Neuchâtel accounted for their shipments of illegal books as meticulously as they did their legal ones.

  And that should have been the end of it. She should have signed for the truncated shipment and sent him on his way.

  But instead she heard her voice rising.

  “We’ll complain to them, but right now I’m complaining to you.”

  Worse and worse. As though his presence somehow shined a bright light on worries and frustrations she usually suppressed.

  “Well, you can see, can’t you, what any idiot can see? That we’re poor, that my father has a weak heart, that we’re always in danger of losing customers to that predator Rigaud.”

  She couldn’t seem to stop.

  “And that I wanted terribly to read the Rousseau and now who knows when I’ll be able to.”

  She looked him full in the face, at least the part that wasn’t obscured by the eye patch and bandanna, and the cloak muffling him up to the jaw. He looked squarely back at her out of his good eye. Well, it was really a series of looks in quick succession—guilty, angry, amused. For a confusing split second he even looked distinctly lustful, before his features let go of something, like a carnival figure removing a gaudy mask to reveal the wan face beneath. She paused, frozen in bewilderment, while his eye rolled back in his head and he collapsed in a dead faint, tipping over the shaky chair and scattering books onto the floor with a crash.

  The peas, Marie-Laure!

  She blinked. How long had she been lost in her memories?

  “You’ll need to shell them quickly.” Robert, her young colleague in the scullery, tugged at her arm.

  Of course. The Duc’s family had to eat tonight as well as feast at tomorrow night’s banquet. Robert had been turning a row of ducks on a spit in the fireplace.

  Once her fingers began popping the peas out of their shells it was easy to return to that winter day in Montpellier.

  Was he dead? she’d wondered. Not that she’d cared a whit for his safety. But the police would be out, investigating the Baron’s murder. She shuddered, imagining a police inspector finding a dead smuggler on their floor.

  His visible eyelid fluttered: no, not dead, thank heaven. She bent over him. Blood seeped through his filthy cloak, staining her apron. She pulled the cloak away. His trouser leg was soaked. He was bleeding, she thought guiltily, all the tim
e I was shouting at him.

  The front door rattled; had she forgotten to lock it? No, it was only Gilles. She listened gratefully to the sound of her brother’s key turning in the lock.

  Gilles wouldn’t finish medical school for another year, but he’d always had a doctor’s personality—confident, observant, eager to take command and send everybody scurrying to do his bidding.

  “Light the lamp, Marie-Laure, for God’s sake.” Her bossy brother chased her away from the man’s side and took her place. “Are there any clean rags? Water heating on the hearth? Bring your sewing basket. And what’s left of the brandy.”

  The lamplight shined on Gilles’s carroty hair and cast deep shadows in the hollows of the smuggler’s cheeks. Marie-Laure heard cloth ripping; first the rags and then the bloody trousers. She watched Gilles’s clean, economical motions and listened to his running commentary.

  “A wound to the thigh, near the artery. I might need a tourniquet.” None of the rags were long enough. He glanced about for something to tie around the top of the thigh to stop the bleeding. “Your fichu,” he said. The long linen scarf was crossed in front of the low square neckline of Marie-Laure’s dress and tied at the back of her waist. She undid it while Gilles continued to poke and prod, mopping up blood as he went.

  “Better, better, not so bad as it looked at first,” he murmured. “Not the artery anyway, but there is some infection that I’ll have to clear out before I sew him up.” He took out his small, sharp knife.

  “Odd,” he said now, almost to himself. “It looks exactly like a dueling wound.”

  There were really two wounds, he explained. And the more recent one—perhaps from a fall on a rocky path through the forest—had caused the older one to reopen. The older one looked like a dueling wound, though of course it couldn’t be. Gilles supposed it was the result of a knife fight somewhere, perhaps a brawl at an inn. But certainly not a duel; only aristocrats made ceremonies out of their brawls.