Chapter 11

Geneva, Switzerland

September 1686

The fire in the bedchamber was nearly out and rain was falling again beyond the window. Lightning lit the room and Lucie stirred and whimpered. Pernelle went quickly to part the curtains and murmur reassurance.

“Only lightning, birdling. God’s lightning. Nothing to fear.”

Lucie cuddled onto her side and sank again into sleep. Shaking her head, Pernelle went to the window. Lightning was another thing over which she and her mother-in-law had clashed. A few days ago, she’d walked in on Mme Bayle telling Lucie that demons made lightning. She’d told the woman roundly not to fill Lucie’s head with such nonsense and had taken her away to the kitchen for a piece of Annette’s pastry.

She watched another lightning flash outline the roofs of Geneva. She sighed, telling herself it was time to put memories away and make peace with this place she’d risked everything to reach. She could not return to France. That would be walking into the dragon’s mouth. Even if she were willing to do that, she would never risk it for Lucie.

Well, morning came as early here as it did in Paris, and that meant she must go to sleep.

She closed the shutters, banked what was left of the fire, undressed down to her shift, and climbed shivering into bed beside Lucie. Gathering her daughter’s warm little body close, she prayed for a quiet night and safety from evil dreams, added a prayer for Charles, and slept. But even in her sleep, she was dimly aware of the lightning flickering between the shutters, and perhaps it was the lightning that kept memories flashing in her mind, like momentary dreams.

She saw Charles coming to himself at dawn in the beggars’ Louvre and herself giving him sips of wine to drink and asking what on earth he was doing in Paris. Saw him holding tight to her hand and explaining how he’d been sent north to teach there at the Jesuit school. Saw herself demanding to know why a Jesuit had been out at night getting himself shot, saw him telling her that he’d seen something he shouldn’t have and had been shot at for his trouble. Saw his familiar half grin when she said that was only half an answer. Saw them riding together across Paris, as people stared openmouthed at the young Jesuit with a woman riding behind him. Saw Charles giving her into the care of a baker’s wife at the Jesuit college door, the baker’s wife dressing her as a boy and sending her fleeing into the college when the police came looking for an escaped Huguenot. Saw Charles passing her off as a boy hired to help in the understage during the college’s summer ballet production.

A shutter slammed somewhere in the house and Pernelle sat up in bed, wide awake, her breath coming short. The only sound was the wind outside. She lay down again, turned over, and tried for sleep, but now she was seeing waking pictures in her mind. After the ballet there had been chaos, but Charles had seen how to open the road to Geneva for her. And then there had been the rest of that night. She turned her face into Mme Bayle’s thick goosedown pillow, smothering the beginning of tears, stifling her body’s longing. Refusing to take out the memory of that night and look at it more closely, because things so piercing sweet and full of grief could be borne only if they were kept—and treasured—in the dark of the heart.

Before dawn on that night’s morning, she and Charles had slipped out to the college’s postern door. The cloaked figure waiting there had led her down the rue St. Jacques to the Seine, and onto the Petit Pont. On the bridge, the figure stopped at a tall narrow house with an apothecary’s sign and knocked. The apothecary opened the door, and as they followed him through the house to his workshop, Pernelle saw that he was a dwarf. In his workshop, he moved a clutch of barrels aside and opened the trapdoor under them. Then he held a lantern over a yawning square of river-loud darkness so that she could see the boat waiting beneath. Go with God, the cloaked figure had said softly. The dwarf had nodded, murmuring words she couldn’t understand, and the two of them had lowered her through the trap. A man in the boat caught her, and when she looked up, the trapdoor was already closed. The boatman hid her under a hooped canvas shelter and took the oars. When he had the boat free of the bridge, he caught a rope thrown from the bank and made it fast at the prow. A sturdy white horse on the towpath began towing the boat upstream, east toward Geneva and the sunrise. Toward Lucie, if God was kind. And toward the loneliness of freedom.