Page 14 of Souvenir Heart

The comte, a man who’d spent his life at court working to advance his schemes, must have noticed the change in Marcus’s expression, because he moved suddenly, gripping both of Marcus’s hands in his. “Swear.”

“Pardon?”

“Swear,” the comte repeated.

“I have already committed to the task.”

“On your honor. As a gentleman.”

This man, who’d chosen to leave his daughter behind, who only now, at the last moment, seemed to regret that choice, was questioning his honor? Marcus struggled to contain his rising fury. “Do you think I am a coward?“

“Swear you’ll bring her back to me,” the comte persisted, his words no longer a request, but a minister’s demand.

The mare beside him stomped her hoof and shook her head, rattling the bit. Dinsmore reached an arm through the coach’s window, slapping the side and calling, “We must be off.” Marcus knew he was thinking of the tides, the ship waiting offshore. They needed to be on their way. He needed to be on his. “I’ve said I will do my best to bring your daughter back. Why do you insist on an oath?

“Why do you insist on refusing to give me one?”

There was something off about the situation, the comte’s insistence. If there was more time, Marcus would have thought it through more carefully. But there wasn’t. So, he swore.

Nine

Marguerite imagined they’d take her to prison in a cart, but instead, they’d marched her downstairs, where a cab hitched to a sway-backed team was waiting. Three of her guards squeezed inside with her, the greasy-haired boy and the man with dirty-fingernails seating themselves across from her, the stubble-faced man beside her. The men’s knees and thighs were pressed uncomfortably, and she suspected, deliberately close to hers. They were toying with her, like boys with a fly before they ripped off its wings.

She sat stiffly upright, her bundle of clothes, money, and candles clutched tightly against her chest. Tucked inside her chemise, her identity papers, including her certificate of good citizenship and an official letter certifying she hadn’t left Paris in nearly three years, rustled against her skin.

I do hope she’s packed something suitable for a rendezvous with Madame La Guillotine. The echo of the stubble-faced man’s words in her head made it spin; she thought she might vomit. She swallowed hard against the rising bile. She would not.

They’d left the front door of her apartment gaping open. They hadn’t sealed it with the official stamps and notices of the Committee of Public Safety, advertising that evidence of a crime had been found there. Marguerite took a deep breath, her lungs filling with the stale odors of the cab and her companions’ sweaty excitement. No evidence of a crime had been found in her apartment, because she hadn’t committed any.

They were going to release her soon. They had to.

Not only was her Girondist husband dead, but at the time of his death in December, Gerard hadn’t even been her husband. He’d granted her a divorce four months earlier, after the massacres in the Paris prisons in September. “As a precaution,” he’d said.

She knew he’d done it largely to divorce himself from unwelcome ties to her father; ironic, since her father’s position had been the reason he’d married her in the first place. That their thirteen-year marriage of convenience was no longer convenient for Gerard had caused her no pain.

Quite the reverse. It had given her access to the money and property she’d brought into the marriage and to the money she planned to earn after it. She’d transferred the bulk of it to a secret account in Geneva. Indeed, the divorce papers, folded among the others in her chemise, had seemed like a promise of freedom.

Freedom. A snort escaped her. So incongruous, given her current situation. All her efforts to hide her ambitions from Gerard and her father.

Independence. Hysterical giggles rose in her throat, like bubbles in a glass of champagne; escaping her as she thought of the meager six months of independence she’d enjoyed.

“You find this situation funny?” the stubble-faced man beside her demanded.

Marguerite ducked her head, struggling to control the nearly overwhelming onslaught of giggles. “No, citizen.”

“Because we have all the evidence we need to bring you to justice.” The man’s body seemed to swell with righteous indignation, his shoulder, arm, and thigh pressing even closer to hers.

Justice? What justice? She’d been three months from achieving her dream of exhibiting at the Louvre. She took a deep breath of noxious air, pushing down hard against the bubbling bloom of hysteria in her chest.

Turning her head away from the gray-stubbled man, she stared out past him, through the cab’s windows. She would not ask what evidence they had. Demand to know where they were taking her. She would not let them see her fear.

She caught a glimpse of the blocky towers of the Church of Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles. They were heading down the Rue St. Denis, towards the Île de la Cité. She offered up a desperate prayer they wouldn’t cross the Pont au Change, wouldn’t round the corner of Quai d’Horloge, where the Conciergerie, once a royal palace, now one of Paris’s most notorious prisons, squatted beside the Seine like a malevolent toad.

“We didn’t even need to search your apartment.” The stubble-faced man rested a hand on her thigh, laughing as he patted it. “It’s not as if any of my men, besides Jacques here,” he nodded at the greasy-haired boy, “can read.”

She thought of the papers scattered on the floor. Her books with their splayed spines. The art book open to that ridiculous verse scrawled in the margin.

He squeezed her thigh. “But they do so enjoy chasing aristocratic rats out of their holes…”