Page 41 of Souvenir Heart

A hungry, almost painful envy ran through her. What would it be like to desire so passionately? To touch and be touched with abandon?

Marguerite turned back to her scrubbing, focusing the soap on a stubborn stain on the stocking’s toe. She would not give in to self-pity, to wondering what might have been. She would not spend her remaining days, as some of the women in the cell did, lying in bed weeping or staring at nothing.

She would keep looking for a way out. While it was too dangerous to commit to paper, (was that why Marcus had given it to her, along with the pencil?) in her head, she drew and redrew the layout of her cell, the gates and wickets between her and the prison’s exits. She memorized the comings and goings of the guards, the things they said, the actions they took as they locked and unlocked the wickets. Searched for places, where, if she escaped from her cell, she could hide in the shadows.

She rinsed the stocking, wrung it out, and spread it on the sun-warmed lip of the fountain beside the fichu. She thought about the morning roll call. Was it possible she could find a way to go unnoticed? To pretend not to hear, or understand when her name was called?

She’d seen it done. The guards had simply taken another person. What did they care who died as long as they’d done their jobs filling the tumbrils? And the man who evaded his death sentence existed in an odd sort of prison limbo. Eventually the mistake would be revealed.

She picked up the stocking’s mate and sighed; as desperate as she was, she knew she couldn’t live with another woman’s death on her conscience.

Besides, she’d need papers to get out of the prison.

She should send for Marcus Tisset and Andre de Saint-Just.

Rescue or trap? The question repeated in time to her scrubbing. Trap or rescue?

It was unnerving the way the two men had appeared at her trial. Like a real-life deus ex machina.

And yet, the odds of escaping the guillotine if she didn’t send for them were bad. Even if it was a trap, some byzantine government plan to capture her father, things couldn’t get much worse.

She stared at nothing, inadvertently catching the eye of the elderly possible-vicomtesse. The lady was sitting on a bench near the wall, idly waving a silk fan decorated with roses, garlands, and a dancing couple in court dress. She considered the woman, her painted face like a wrinkled vellum manuscript, her hair piled high and powdered by Marisol. The lady dipped her head in a polite, yet graceful greeting that recalled a more civilized time and place.

Had it only been three years since that world had disappeared?

The maybe-vicomtesse was pretending nothing had changed, while Marguerite was waiting for some miraculous change.

Waiting.

If she’d learned anything from her arrest, it was that not making a decision didn’t keep bad things from happening.

It just left her with fewer choices.

Twenty-Nine

“Tisset,” called a ruddy-faced officer with eyebrows that looked as if they’d been arranged by nesting birds. He leaned out of the doorway of his office in the Conciergerie. “Heard you were here. Have you got my miniature?”

“Captain Laurent,” Marcus said, acknowledging the man’s greeting. He patted the art box strapped over his shoulder. “Finished it last night.”

“Come. Show me.” Laurent beckoned. “Your other customers can wait.”

Marcus glanced over at the guard who’d been assigned to escort him, a grizzled man missing part of the index finger on his right hand. The guard shrugged.

Marcus stepped into the captain’s office, a windowless room which he suspected had once been a closet used to store weapons. It was furnished with a small table and three ladder back chairs—one chair set behind the table in which Laurent seated himself. Against the wall behind him, hung a large wooden shelf filled with an array of bottles, jars, lanterns—and, of greatest interest to Marcus, keys.

Laurent gestured for Marcus be seated, while he attempted to clear a space on the table. He pushed aside a tricorne hat, a spill of playing cards, a pamphlet with lurid drawings of Marie Antoinette, and three glasses with red wine sediment dried to their bottoms.

Once there was sufficient room, Marcus set down his art box. Opening it, he made a show of searching through the paper-wrapped packets of miniatures, though he knew exactly where Laurent’s was—second from the bottom.

At the same time, he made a mental note of the size and shape of each key hanging from the shelf. He handed the captain a packet marked with his initials. As he’d anticipated, the man was immediately absorbed in unwrapping and examining the piece.

Marcus used this distraction to stroll over to the shelf, hefting the bottles as if curious about their contents, but in fact, memorizing the dimensions of each key. It would have been tempting to steal one if he’d had known which unlocked Marguerite’s cell.

Laurent glanced over his shoulder, then cocked his chin at the dirty wine glasses. “You will join me for a drink?”

Wanting more time to study the keys, Marcus feigned hesitation. “Tempting…but, I mustn’t leave my escort or my customers waiting. A man must earn his daily bread, no? Perhaps…later?”

“Later,” Laurent agreed, pocketing the miniature. He made no effort to withdraw payment from said pocket.