Chapter 45
Friday, 10 March
Hendon’s plans to leave Paris by noon proved optimistic. Both Kitty Wellington and Amanda were still packing hours after the scheduled departure time, so it was closer to six before the long line of carriages, carts, baggage wagons, and armed escort was ready to roll.
Hero’s abigail, Molly, had opted to return to London and was anxious to get away. But Tom and Jules Calhoun, Sebastian’s valet, were both vaguely insulted by the suggestion that they might wish to abandon their employer in the wilds of a foreign land.
“Ye ain’t gonna make us go, is ye, gov’nor?” the tiger had demanded when Sebastian offered them the opportunity.
“No. But I don’t want either of you to feel as if you are obligated in any way to stay.”
The boy sucked in a quick, high breath. “I ain’t afeared of Boney!”
Jules Calhoun’s eyes crinkled with his slow smile. “I’ll be staying as well, my lord . . . unless you’d prefer I go to help Claire with the two little lads.”
“I think Molly and Claire between them should be more than capable of handling the children,” said Sebastian.
“Good,” said Calhoun. “Because I must admit it would go sorely against the grain with me to leave.”
And so there were only the women and two children to load into the fourth waiting carriage. The sun was already low in the sky, and Hendon sighed as he pulled out his pocket watch and squinted down at the time.
“You’ll be lucky to get twenty miles before you have to stop for the night,” said Sebastian, watching him. “Are you sure you don’t want to wait and leave in the morning?”
Hendon closed his watch with a snap and tucked it away. “Quite certain.”
“Grandpapa is taking you for another ride on the big ship,” Hero told Simon, lifting him up in her arms.
The little boy’s eyes shone with excitement. “I like da ship!”
“Thank God neither of them suffers from seasickness,” said Hendon under his breath.
Sebastian gave a soft laugh. Then his gaze fell on Patrick, his small hand fisted tight in Claire’s skirts, his face solemn. He seemed to have come through his recent ordeal little the worse for wear, but he hadn’t taken the news of this impending separation well.
“We’ll catch up with you soon,” Sebastian told Knox’s son, hunkering down beside him. “I promise.”
Patrick blinked and looked away, his lips pressing tightly together. “Me mum promised me, too. Only she ain’t never come back, has she?”
Sebastian felt his throat thicken as he reached out to ruffle the little boy’s hair. “Except this time you’re not going alone, lad. You’ve got Simon, Claire, and Hendon with you. And you’re going home to Brook Street, remember?”
The boy’s chin trembled, but he managed to drudge up a game smile.
As Sebastian straightened, Hendon said gruffly, “If you haven’t sorted this out in another ten days—and if against all odds Bonaparte is still on the march—you should leave anyway. You can always come back later when things are more settled.”
There was a defensive tone to his voice, as if he expected his words to put up Sebastian’s back. But Sebastian wasn’t inclined to argue. Molly was already in the carriage, and he was watching Hero lift Simon up to the abigail’s waiting arms. Hero was putting on a cheerful face for the boys’ sake, but he knew by the stiff set of her shoulders and the brittle glitter in her eyes just how much this brief separation was going to cost her.
“I’ve already decided I’m giving it one more week,” Sebastian said quietly as the bells of Notre Dame began to chime the hour, the low bongs echoing solemnly across the slate rooftops of the ancient island. It cut him to the quick to say it, but he knew it was right. “We can’t stay here forever.”
That night they went for a walk around the island, the lights of Paris glimmering on the dark waters of the Seine beside them, the air cold and clear and scented with the smell of wet stone and burning charcoal and the river. They could hear the water lapping at the base of the stone embankment, the faint strains of a violin, the sound of distant voices and children’s laughter. Their own children’s departure was like an ache that lay heavily on both their hearts, lending a new sense of urgency to a search that had already loomed as the most important endeavor of Sebastian’s life.
After a time, Hero said, “I keep thinking that if we could understand the part Sophie played in Napoléon’s escape from Elba, we might be able to understand why she was killed.”
It was something that had been haunting Sebastian for days, and he felt the weight of all its implications as he gazed across the choppy black waters of the Seine to the Place de Grève, the vast open square in front of the ancient building known as the Hôtel de Ville that housed Paris’s city government. Before the Revolution this had been Paris’s traditional site for executions, and when the guillotine was removed from the Place de la Révolution, it was eventually erected there. It was still there, standing silent and ominous in the darkness, and it occurred to Sebastian, looking at it now, that it was difficult to walk anywhere in this city without being reminded of the turmoil, bloodshed, and terror of France’s last twenty-six years. It tore at his gut to think that Sophie might have played a part in the desperate, dangerous scheme that could easily cause it all to start up again.
He had to force himself to say, “Given that the Allies open and read all of Napoléon’s correspondence, I think we can safely assume she was carrying a message.”
“From McClellan to Napoléon, you mean?”
“It seems likely, doesn’t it?” Madame Dion had confirmed Hortense’s contention that Sophie was originally expected to return to Paris much earlier.
“So what was the message?”
“Well, if I were Napoléon and I were plotting my return, I think I’d contact my most faithful generals and ask for their support.”
Hero looked over at him. “You’re saying McClellan and the others must have known Napoléon was planning to escape from Elba?”
“The ones Napoléon thought he could trust, yes.”
“You think that’s why Sophie went to see him? To deliver McClellan’s reply and pledge his support?”
“I think she went to deliver McClellan’s reply. But I’m not convinced we can assume that means McClellan intends to support Napoléon. Just because McClellan and the others didn’t betray the Emperor’s plans doesn’t mean they agreed to join his cause.”
He knew he was doing it again, grasping at possible excuses, trying to convince himself that his mother hadn’t done what he was so terribly afraid she had. And he knew from the set of Hero’s profile that she understood exactly the emotions that were driving his thinking.
She was silent for a moment, glancing up at a weathered plaque fixed high on the wall beside them, which still read “quai Napoléon.” The Bourbon functionaries who were so busy chiseling bees off buildings, tearing down statues of the Emperor, and changing every offending place-name had obviously missed this one.
“Even if that’s true,” said Hero, “I think she might also have carried a message from Napoléon to Hortense, perhaps giving her the exact date he planned to leave Elba. Why else would Hortense have shown up at the rue du Champs du Repos within hours of Sophie’s arrival back in Paris?”
Why indeed? thought Sebastian with a heavy heart.
“What I can’t figure out,” Hero was saying, “is why Sophie stopped at Malmaison on her way back to Paris. At first I was thinking she must have gone there to get the talisman, but that makes no sense. It wouldn’t still have been there.”
“No, it wouldn’t,” he said.
They had reached the narrow stretch of water that separated the Île de la Cité from the Île Saint-Louis, the other, smaller island that lay just upstream. There had been a bridge here once, but a recent storm carried it away and the Bourbons hadn’t bothered to replace it.
“My guess is that Joséphine sent the talisman to Napoléon when she realized she was dying. She knew he’d never won a campaign after he divorced her and lost the talisman, and she thought having it might help him, should he ever decide to attempt to regain his throne.”
“That makes sense,” said Hero as they turned to walk along the nave of the cathedral. Even at this hour the square before it was crowded, the air ringing with voices and laughter and the joyous trill of an accordion. “Except why would Sophie have brought the talisman’s case back to Paris with her?”
“Perhaps it was intended as a signal to whomever she was meant to give it. Only she never managed to deliver it.”
“That doesn’t explain her stop at Malmaison.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
Hero linked her hand through the crook of his arm. “What if her meeting with Sanson wasn’t as innocent as he would have you believe? What if, once she changed her mind about going to the Place Dauphine, she sent Sanson a message asking him to meet her at the Vert-Galant? Did you ever ask him about the talisman case?”
Sebastian shook his head. “It hadn’t been found yet when I spoke to him.” He was silent for a time, his thoughts on the past as they wound their way through the narrow old streets that lay beyond the square. “What I’d like to know is where she went between the time she left the inn and when she was attacked on the Pont Neuf. I’d also like to know what the bloody hell she was doing out on that bridge. If she was coming to see us, why didn’t she have the fiacre driver take her into the Place Dauphine, to the door of the house?”
“Is it possible she was stabbed someplace else and brought to the bridge by her killer? If he thought she was dead, he could have meant to dispose of her body by throwing it into the Seine.”
“And simply missed the river, you mean?” He thought about it, then said, “I doubt it. There are much less public places from which to quietly slip a body into the river. I think she was attacked on the bridge, although I’ll be damned if I can figure out what she was doing there.”
Their walk had now brought them full circle, back around to the Pont Neuf, and they crossed the bridge’s roadway to step up on the platform that had once supported the statue of Henri IV.
Eight days, thought Sebastian as he stared out over the shadowy tangle of overgrown shrubs and trees that thrust like the prow of a ship into the silently flowing black waters of the river. It had been eight days since he’d found her here, and he felt no closer to unmasking her killer now than he had been then.
“It’s an odd place for a woman to be walking alone,” said Hero, turning to gaze across the bridge.
The breeze coming up off the water was growing colder, and Sebastian put his arm around her shoulders to draw her in closer to the warmth of his body. “It is.”
He was aware of the lamplit carriages and carts rumbling across the bridge beside them, of the laughter and voices spilling from the café on the corner of the quai de l’Horloge, and the tall, familiar figure of a man who stood by himself near the darkened entrance to the Place Dauphine.
“Bloody hell,” whispered Sebastian as the man started across the road toward them.
“Why? Who is it?” said Hero, following his gaze.
“Someone who must sincerely regret having missed the joys of the Spanish Inquisition.” Raising his voice, Sebastian said, “Bonsoir, Monsieur de Teulet.”
Marie-Thérèse’s gaunt, austere huissier du cabinet stepped up onto the platform, the golden light from the oil lamp that dangled from the post beside them limning his pale face and somber clothes. “Bonsoir, monsieur le vicomte.” He bowed to Hero. “And madame. A chilly evening for a walk.”
“Not too chilly,” she said.
A tight smile twitched the Chevalier’s face as he turned back to Sebastian. “I understand your father, the Earl of Hendon, left Paris today, along with your sister and the wife of the British Ambassador.”
“Yes,” said Sebastian.
“And your children went with them.”
“Yes.”
“And yet here you are.”
Sebastian glanced up as the breeze swayed the lantern above them, casting a macabre pattern of light and shadow across the platform. “Why should we leave, when the King assures us that Napoléon will never reach Paris?”
“Oh, Napoléon will be stopped long before he reaches Paris. Never fear that. And then the time of retribution will begin.”
“Retribution against whom?”
“All those who should have been dealt with a year ago. The antimonarchists. The atheists and secularists. Their accomplices and sympathizers.”
“A new Terror, in other words.”
“Except a just and godly one this time.”
“Yes, of course.”
“The final result will be glorious, but some might find things a bit”—de Teulet paused as if searching for the right word—“uncomfortable for a time. You would be wise to follow your father and children to London. Soon.”
“Is that a threat?”
“A threat? Now, why would I threaten you?” The Chevalier touched his hand to his hat and bowed again to Hero. “Madame,” he said, and turned to walk away.
“It was a threat, wasn’t it?” she said quietly as the Frenchman continued on across the bridge.
Sebastian watched de Teulet climb into a carriage waiting on the far side of the bridge, in the Place des Trois-Maries. As the green-and-gold-liveried driver turned his horses toward the Tuileries Palace, the crest of the Duchesse d’Angoulême was plainly visible on the coach’s panel. Marie-Thérèse might have left Paris, but for some reason, her faithful minion had remained.
“It was a threat,” said Sebastian.