Page 37 of Souvenir Heart

“This letter to my mother…”

The guards ignored them, striking up a conversation about what they’d brought for lunch.

They reached Marguerite’s cell. One guard pulled a ring of keys from his belt, unlocked the door and swung it open, while the other untied her hands and shoved her forward.

“In you go.”

She stumbled forward, not because of her gown, or because there was a wicket frame to step over, but because the weight on her shoulders, her heart, seemed almost more than she could bear.

The cell door clanged shut behind her.

The woman in the bed across from hers, a sparrow of a creature, with ornately arranged blonde curls, sat up. Marisol Auginot was a former court hairdresser who’d helped her with her toilette that morning. “How did it…”Marisol began, extending one small hand, then clapping it over her mouth, as she caught sight of the expression on Marguerite’s face.

Reaching her own bed, the narrow confines of freedom left to her, Marguerite sat, turning her body away from the view of her cellmates. She slid her fingers under her sleeve, fishing out the cylinder of paper Marcus had given to her. Turning it in her hands, she saw it was tied with what appeared to be a black queue ribbon; the fine silken fabric whispering against her skin as she unknotted it.

Heart pounding, she unrolled the thing. What had he given her? Secret instructions for a rescue? A pencil tumbled out. It had been tucked inside not one, but several sheets of sketch paper.

She smoothed them out with mounting excitement. There was nothing on them. He’d given her blank sketch paper.

Marguerite frowned. Sat back. Then leaned forward again. Fanned the sheets out on the ragged wool blanket covering her bed, turning them this way and that, scanning them for any sign of writing.

Nothing.

She ran her fingers down the pages, feeling for indentations, impressions of words.

Nothing.

Brought them to her nose and sniffed; she’d heard there was such a thing as invisible ink, though she had no idea what it smelled like or how to go about revealing it.

Nothing. At least nothing strong enough to be detected over the odors of unwashed bodies and unemptied waste buckets.

She stared at the papers, her heart now beating as slowly and heavily as if it had been dipped in lead.

He’d given her ordinary drawing paper and a pencil.

The pencil. An ember of hope flared. She picked it up, inspecting the wood encasing the graphite, running her finger along it.

Nothing.

Her hands began to shake. Was he trying to entrap her? Encouraging her to draw Danton as a dog? Robespierre as a rat? Or was this some kind of cruel joke? The graphite stick tumbled from her fingers.

He’d said he’d seen her father. Shown her the miniature and that drawing. Marcus might have gotten the miniature from her father, but the drawing? Marguerite frowned at the memory. It was all wrong. She’d never seen her father beg.

Had Marcus and his team really come to rescue her? Or were they government spies looking for her father?

Twenty-Seven

The Conciergerie, with its square clock tower on one end, two round towers on the other, and a hodgepodge of structures in between, was a testament to the centuries of floods, fires, and reconstruction that the former royal-palace-turned-prison had withstood. The structure was massive and imposing.

But not, Marcus told himself, inescapable. All he had to do was figure out how.

It hadn’t taken him more than a few strolls around the high, thick walls, with their barred and boarded up windows, and guards at every gate, to determine that they wouldn’t be able to break in—at least not in the usual ways. He’d come up with the beginnings of a plan. Complicated, yes, and dangerous, but not impossible. That is, if the lady would just send for them. Three days had passed since their meeting in the courthouse, and there had been no word. Nothing.

And so, now he was sitting before an easel outside the prison gate with Andre playing the role of his current model. Marcus glanced up from his sketch at the ornate blue and gold clock set into one of the towers. Even if it hadn’t been smashed by revolutionaries, he knew exactly how much time remained.

Not that they’d spent the last three days wasting it.

Andre and David had paid a clerk to obscure Marguerite’s name in the prison register which would, at least temporarily, delay her return to court for trial and sentencing. Marcus, meanwhile, had set up his easel outside the prison as a means of studying the timing and methods of the changing of the guards and the flow of traffic through its arched gates. Sitting there also was proving an effective method of advertising his work as painter-for-hire of ‘consolation portraits’ to the people gathered beneath the prison’s windows in the hopes of glimpsing an imprisoned loved one.