Chapter Eleven

Genevieve sucked in a breath but her lungs would not fill. The air in the clearing had thickened and solidified, and the river mist that swirled around them anchored her to the ground more firmly than irons.

He couldn’t know.

He couldn’t.

The laundresses of the Salpêtrière used to laugh about how many times they’d sold their virginity. In the courtyard, under guard, they would while away the afternoon scrubbing linens as they cackled about those adventures. Genevieve had listened as they described how they faked each encounter, how they would wince and tighten when the man forced himself into them, how they’d cry out and prick a finger with a pin hidden in their hair, then, as soon as the man withdrew, they clutched their privates to cover themselves with blood.

She had two sharp pins buried in the roll of her hair. She’d been wearing them from the beginning, but she’d forgotten about them in the rush of André’s lovemaking. She hadn’t wanted to think about tricks and lies, not any more. Could he really tell she was not a virgin just by the touch of his fingers?

“Julien?” he snapped. “Or was it someone else in the camp?”

Shame flooded through her, shame and frustration and something else, a strange, sinking disappointment. Before, he’d wanted her enough to lay her on the hard ground under the open sky, but now when he discovered she wasn’t the virginal aristocrat he’d expected, he rose up in disgust.

“Don’t murder the boy.” She tugged up her chemise to cover her breasts. “He hasn’t touched me.”

“Another, then. More than one?”

Shock stole her breath. She suppose once one’s virginity was gone, there was no way to know whether a woman had lain with one man or a hundred—whether a woman had seen a moment’s misfortune, or had been happily a street whore.

She fumbled for the loose ties of her bodice, bending her head so he wouldn’t see how deeply his remark hurt. “There has been only one.”

“Of course. Who?”

“You don’t know him.” She flinched at the venom in his words. “It happened before I met you.”

A muscle flexed in his cheek. His nostrils flared and he looked at her in silence, expecting more, expecting some explanation, an explanation she didn’t dare give him in full, not with the way he was looking at her. She told herself he was not this cold–blooded. Moments ago, he had wanted to sink into her body. Men rarely denied their own lust. If he didn’t care about the answer, he would have had her a hundred different ways and then asked questions later. There was something more to his restraint, some undercurrent she didn’t understand.

She suspected it had something to do with the mysterious Rose–Marie.

“Before,” she stuttered, “you asked me who I was.”

“I did.”

“I’ll tell you the truth.” She concentrated on threading the laces of her bodice through the eyelets. “If you’ve the mind to listen.”

He hunkered down, looking in all his deerskin like some stoic, fair–skinned native. The mouth that had traced circles around her nipples was now a cold, slashed, white line. She gave herself a mental shake. What was she doing, searching for some gentleness in his posture? What had happened to her these past weeks? She had lived in the dirty underbelly of Paris. She understood the cruelty of humans and the heartlessness of the world, she knew the power of a man's lusts. She wasn’t a fool. She’d long figured out that André was looking for a way to abandon her in the wilderness like a leaky canoe. Probably at Allumette Island, some place a few days ahead where the men mentioned there was a Jesuit outpost and a native village.

She was a stone–headed dullard to believe there was anything more to his lusty embraces than the need to deceive her until the moment he left her behind.

“Speak, woman.”

His voice echoed in the trees. The muscles of her neck tightened, and the last of the urge to tell him the truth fled. If he knew that she was an imposter rather than the woebegone Marie Duplessis, then he could return to Montreal and hand her back to the authorities without compunction. If she told him that truth, she’d be handing him legal standing to abandon her, just like he’d intended from the start.

Half–truths, then. She’d give him reality wrapped in lies.

“My mother,” she said, “was murdered when I was thirteen years old.”

His eyes glittered, but he hid any deeper feeling behind the white knuckles of his knitted fingers.

“She’d been murdered by the man who kept her—a horrible man by the name of Baron de Carrouges. My mother committed the sin of falling in love with my music teacher. They were planning to run away. The baron put a bloody end to that.”

Her thoughts raced, trying to weave the Duplessis name into the tale in a way that wouldn’t trip her up.

“It wasn’t the first time my mother found herself in such a situation,” she said. “When she was sixteen, she fell in love with an Alsacean nobleman.” Details, she told herself. True details would support the later lies. “When my mother found out she was pregnant with me, her father went looking for the seducer, but the Alsacean nobleman was nowhere to be found—”

“I’m not interested in your mother’s lost virginity,” he said sharply, “or hearing the oldest story ever told.”

She swallowed what little she knew about the rest of the tale. The truth was that her grandfather had been gleeful to find his daughter pregnant by a nobleman. Her grandfather, a wealthy bourgeoisie, had been hoping to snag a noble title for his daughter by any means. But the Alsacean nobleman her mother fell in love with didn’t exist. He was a lowly actor, Genevieve supposed, tutored and funded by the Baron de Carrouges, who hated any bourgeois who dared to reach above his station. The baron wanted her lovely young mother for his own, so when her mother was ruined, the baron was there to catch her. He fulfilled his lusts and executed a perfect vengeance all at the same time.

She forged ahead. “After my mother’s death, I escaped to Paris and searched for the Duplessis family. I thought my grandfather—who I’d never met—might take in his thirteen–year–old bastard granddaughter.” No use telling André that she’d escaped from the Baron de Carrouges’s house before the murderer could force her to take her mother’s place. No use telling André that it was her mother’s family—the Lalandes—that she’d searched for in Paris, in vain. “The Duplessis were not happy to find a tattered girl on their doorstep, a girl claiming to be their illegitimate daughter. So they sent me off to the Salpêtrière. The poor nobleman’s version of a convent, no better than a prison.”

She waited for him to say something, anything, but his stony face revealed nothing but fury.

“I ran away before they could imprison me there.” Now a heat crept up her cheeks, for she would have to tell the ugly part. “I tossed away my silks and stole a broadcloth skirt and bodice from some laundress. I told myself there’d be work in Paris for a woman who could read and write and do sums and sew as well as myself.” Genevieve remembered when she’d first passed through the gates of Paris. She’d never seen so many people, so much activity. The narrow, twisting streets reeked of the stench of yesterday's fish or the odor of human sewage. Water raced down the center gutters, and with it ran the guts of slaughtered animals and the refuse of tanneries, blacksmiths, starchmakers, candlemakers, and whatever other trade resided along the route. “I adapted as well as I could. When I got hungry, I stole my supper from Les Halles. It was so crowded, so busy, nobody noticed me in the marketplace. I slept beneath the bridges of the Seine with beggars and waifs and thieves of all kinds, and every day I looked for work. For a while, I found work among the dressmakers of Saint–Denis. I shared a room—” dingy, rat–infested “—with three other girls. But when the court left the Louvre for Vincennes or Saint–Germain or the hunting lodge at Versailles, there was less work, so the shop owner let me go.” Genevieve looked down at her hands, found them sticky with pine needles. She picked them off, one by one. “One of the girls taught me to pick pockets. One of them would attract attention by tugging on her bodice. While he was distracted, I’d slice off the heavy pouch that hung beneath his doublet. Then we’d disappear into the labyrinth of the streets.”

She could feel his gaze on the top of her head. She could hear his breathing, still labored. The heat that crept up her chest had now reached her cheeks and she could feel it rising all the way up to her hairline.

“The court spent more and more time in Versailles,” she said, “and less in Paris, so many dressmakers were out of work. Soon I found myself living in the Cour des Miracles. They call it that because—”

“—because there,” he interrupted, his voice tight, “all the cripples and invalids who begged during the day found their sight, their health, and their lost limbs in the evening.”

“You know it.”

“I know it.”

He probably visited it, she thought, scrubbing at the pad of her thumb, where lay a stubborn streak of pine sap. He probably took his ease in one of the whores who lived there. Maybe someone she knew.

“By then,” she said, “I was no longer thirteen years old. The girls I roomed with, one by one, found other ways to pay the rent. The men of the Cour des Miracles began to give me presents, to pay attention.”

She’d begun to wonder if she should have stayed in Carrouges and done what Nanette had wanted her to do. A bed was a bed, after all, and clean linens and a single partner were preferable to bare lice–infested, straw–filled mattresses and the whole disease–infested population of Paris.

You were born to be a whore, Genevieve.

Then her chin jerked up. Nanette had been wrong. They’d all been wrong. Her mother had her weaknesses, yes, her mother put too much trust in the affections of men. But in the end, her mother had been a victim of circumstances beyond her control. In Paris, it had been the same for Genevieve.

Pride rose up in her, the same pride that had urged her to run away from the only home she’d ever known rather than live the life her mother had bequeathed to her. She would not bow to some preordained fate. She would make her own luck.

She reached into a pocket in her skirts, a special pocket she’d sewn there herself. She tugged on what she’d secreted there a long time ago. She curled her hands over it and pulled it out—ripping the stitches. Then she tossed it at André’s feet.

“Sixty–two livres,” she said. Paid to a butcher with legs like tree trunks, a monstrous man who pressed her down on a dirty pallet, lifted her skirt, and took her with much pain and no kindness. “That’s the going price for a young woman’s virginity in the back alleys of Paris.”

Something flickered across André’s face, an expression she couldn’t read. He looked at the pouch like it was a dead, quivering thing.

“Two days after my deflowering,” she said, shaking with shame and anger, “the lieutenant of police under the king’s orders marched into the Cour des Miracles with armed men. He arrested nearly everyone.” She heard a bark of a laugh, was surprised to realize it was her own. “So the king saved me from further depravation. Once the authorities found out I was a Duplessis, they hustled me off—back—” she corrected “—to the Salpêtrière.”

She hated the prickling at the back of her eyes, the treacherous threat of tears. She watched him and waited for him to show his disgust—but he kept staring at the little leather pouch.

In the distance came the sound of Tiny yelling for the men to rise, calling out the start of the day.

“I did what I had to do.” She stood up and swiped the leather pouch from under his perusal. “And I survived.”

She swept her skirts away so they wouldn’t touch her husband as she strode back to the camp.