No Sweeter Heaven: The Pascal Trilogy - Book 2 (33 page)

“I really can’t see why it’s any concern of yours,” Jean-Jacques said sulkily. “You’re only here on my sufferance.”

“I am here,” Pascal said, his eyes snapping dangerously, “because I choose to be,
Monsieur le Due.
I have much to report to you. Perhaps you will change your mind about your vineyards by the time I have finished.”

“I will not,” Jean-Jacques said with extreme annoyance, “but if the only way to get rid of you is to hear you out, then get on with it.”

Pascal picked up the first ledger, glancing over at Passy. He looked back at Jean-Jacques. “It will take some time to go through all the figures,” he said, then waited.

Jean-Jacques took the bait. “Oh, very well. There’s no point in your staying to be put to sleep as well, Maurice. I’ll find you later.” Jean-Jacques waved toward the door. “If you see Violette, tell her that I haven’t forgotten her.”

Passy gave Pascal one last sharp look, then left without a word.

Jean-Jacques waited until he’d heard the door close. “Really, how you think you can speak—”

Pascal cut Jean-Jacques off abruptly. “Be still,” he said curtly. “And pull yourself together—you’re a dissipated wreck. You will listen to me now, Jean-Jacques, and I will not hear a word out of you until I’m finished.” He tossed the ledger back onto the desk and looked down at him. “What you did to your sister when you returned home was unforgivable. What you did in putting this land up as a gambling stake was also unforgivable. But you are the duke. I imagine you feel invincible at the moment.”

Jean-Jacques glared at him, his hands shaking violently on the other side of the desk. “You are quite right—/
am the duke.
You will not speak to me in such a way.”

“Ah, but I will,” Pascal said softly. “I will, because I refuse to watch you throw away generations of trust, of work, of devotion to the land and to the people. Have you any regard for the people entrusted to you, Jean-Jacques? Any at all?”

“Naturally,” he said, fiddling with his glass.

“Well, then, prove it. Pay your bills.” Pascal slapped open the ledgers. “It’s all written out. All you need do is check my final figures and add them up for yourself. You can add, I assume?”

Jean-Jacques looked ready to go for his throat. “Yes,” he said, his voice cold as steel, “I can add, damn you.”

“Then do it. I’ll wait.”

“If it weren’t for my sister,” Jean-Jacques muttered, taking a pile of blank bank drafts from the drawer.

“If it weren’t for your sister,” Pascal said bitingly, “I’d have slammed you against the wall and throttled you.” He took a deep breath. “But because I care for your sister, and because deep inside her she still cares for you in some small measure, I’ll keep my hands to myself.”

“You impudent scoundrel,” Jean-Jacques spat. “What do you mean by saying that you care for my sister after the way you’ve treated her? I was sickened—sickened, do you hear me?—by what you have brought her to. I mistook her for a beggar, for God’s sake.”

“You wasted no time in making that clear to her,” Pascal said, trying to keep a grip on himself. “You haven’t the first idea about your sister, have you? I doubt you ever have had, just like the rest of her miserable family. It’s a damned shame, Jean-Jacques. Lily’s a remarkable woman. Ask the villagers if you’re not inclined to take my word for it.”

Jean-Jacques stared at him, his mouth hanging open. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone and fallen in love with her?” He pounded a hand on his desk. “Unbelievable! So that’s what this is about?”

“No. What this is about is paying your bills and honoring your commitments. If you withdraw your financial support now, there will be no harvest. There will be no one to weed or trim. There will be no one to pick the grapes, nor to crush them, nor to barrel them. Your crop will rot on the vine, Jean-Jacques.”

He put both hands on the desk and leaned over them, his face only inches away from Jean-Jacques. “And you will rot with it, my friend. You’re well on your way. Your precious Comte de Passy will see to the rest of it. Opiated wine and sexual diversions, social and political games—that’s only the beginning. He’ll weave you into his net and get precisely what he pleases from you, and he’ll squeeze you dry in the process.”

Jean-Jacques shrank back in his chair. “How—how dare you?” he stammered.

“I dare because I know, and someone needs to warn you. I know what he’s capable of. God, I’ve
seen
what he’s capable of.” Pascal drew a shaky breath, remembering that dreadful day in every last detail.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jean-Jacques said. “How would you know anything?” His mouth twisted. “You are no one, and yet you presume to speak of your betters like this?”

Pascal ignored the jibe. He straightened and pushed a hand through his hair, wishing he didn’t have to get involved, knowing he had no choice, not if he was to save Saint-Simon from Jean-Jacques’s idiocy.

“I don’t presume anything,” he said. “I once had to care for someone your friend had taken his pleasure with. He nearly died. He was only fifteen, a stable boy.”

Jean-Jacques paled. “No … I don’t believe it. Passy’s not like that—he’s all over the women. I’ve seen for myself, all of it.”

“No doubt you have,” Pascal said with disgust. “Passy thrives on perversion. He also doesn’t limit himself to one sex.”

“P-perhaps you had better tell me just what you mean,” Jean-Jacques said, thoroughly shaken.

Pascal released a heavy breath. “It was a bad morning. I didn’t know which was likely to kill Julien first, the internal injuries or the loss of blood. Fortunately, he survived, although he’d been robbed of the rest of his childhood and his innocence, and for a time, his sanity.”

“The boy accused Passy of being his attacker?”

Pascal lifted a shoulder. “Not exactly.”

“Aha!” Jean-Jacques said triumphantly. “I knew it!”

“He didn’t say anything,” Pascal replied tightly, “because Passy had taken precautions against that. Along with Julien’s innocence Passy removed a good portion of the boy’s tongue—after he’d used it to his service, of course. A knife can serve a double purpose.” Pascal looked away. “In this case it did.”

Jean-Jacques looked as if he might be sick at any moment. “No,” he groaned. “Oh, God. No.”

“Oh, yes. It didn’t occur to Passy that Julien might be able to read or write. That, Jean-Jacques, is your friend. A charming man, wouldn’t you say?”

“My … my God,” Jean-Jacques said, his mouth white and strained. “But where—when did this happen? What proof?”

“It happened in England. In Devon. Ask Passy if he’s ever been to Haddington Hall. Five years ago the French met the English there to discuss trade routes to the Far East.”

“What were you doing there? Perhaps you were a stable boy as well?” Jean-Jacques said snidely.

Pascal looked at him coolly. “No. I was there as an advisor to my adoptive father. I’d recently returned from Asia, having researched those routes for him.”

“Oh,” Jean-Jacques said uncertainly.

“The last evening Passy was in an argumentative mood, frustrated because he hadn’t had his way as completely as he would have liked.” Pascal rubbed his forehead, then sighed, dropping his hand. “I remember thinking that he looked dangerous. He left abruptly after dinner, saying that he was going to bed.”

“B-but he didn’t?”

“No. At least not immediately. He went to the stables, a reasonable distance from the house, and with the noise of the music and the conversation to cover him, he didn’t have to worry about the screams of a defenseless young boy being heard.”

Jean-Jacques swallowed hard. “You—you were summoned from the house? Why?”

Pascal sat down in the chair opposite. “Because the groom who found Julien the next morning was employed by my father. He knew I could help.” He stared down at his hands.

He would never forget his first sight of Julien—sobbing in the deep woods where Passy had left him, his body folded up against itself, stiff with shock and pain. His poor mutilated mouth was filled with blood, and most of the lower half of his body was covered in the same as his life slowly ebbed away. It had been a horrible, heart-wrenching sight.

“I spent half the morning trying to stop the bleeding,” he said dully, “and the other half stitching Julien up. All he could do was make dreadful guttural sobbing sounds. Of course, he never spoke again.”

“This happened in England, you say?” Jean-Jacques leapt at the first straw he could find. “Well, that says everything.

You can’t practice medicine in England—not without a license. You’d be thrown into jail.”

“I do have a license,” Pascal said impatiently, “and for that very reason. I don’t advertise it, since I don’t take money for my work—not that kind of work anyway.”

“What? Why not? You complain of being poor,” Jean-Jacques said, desperately trying to ignore what he’d just been told as if it hadn’t been spoken.

“I complain of no such thing. What difference does it make to you, Jean-Jacques, how I earn my way? When it comes to that, surely you must realize that the salary I have asked of you is absurd, given what I’ve just told you?”

The color rose in Jean-Jacques’s cheeks. “Then why do you work here at all?”

“As I said, because I choose to.”

“Then you are a fraud. You led my sister and myself to believe you were a gardener, and now you call yourself a physician?”

“I have a degree in medicine,” Pascal said tightly. “I call myself a botanist. I have a degree in that, too, Jean-Jacques, if you want to nit-pick.”

“Why should I believe anything you say?” Jean-Jacques said stubbornly.

Pascal gave himself a moment, carefully feeling his way along an entirely new understanding of the man before him. It wasn’t easy—it required the last of his patience. But then Lily hadn’t been easy in the beginning either. There was Lily’s father, he reminded himself, counting to ten. Father Mallet, that brought him to at least twenty. Then there was the mysterious mother, the one who had walked out on her children. That was worth another five seconds of counting.

“I’ve told you the truth about everything, including Passy,” he said, when his temper was finally back under control.

“You have no proof,” Jean-Jacques insisted.

“Julien was clear as day about everything that happened,” Pascal replied.

“What happened to him then? Where is he now? Can you produce him?”

“I have no intention of producing him. I kept him by my side for a year while he went through the worst of his suffering, and then I took him to a monastery I’d been told of and left him there to finish his healing.” He thought of the day that he’d handed Julien over to Dom Benetard, who had taken the boy under his wing and kept him firmly tucked there until Julien had been strong enough to manage on his own. “Julien will remain at St. Christophe for the rest of his life,” he continued, “having recently taken vows. You may inquire of the abbot, if you do not wish to believe me.”

Jean-Jacques sat frozen behind his desk. “Why didn’t Passy recognize you, then?” he persisted. “Maurice prides himself on never forgetting a face.”

“There were many, many people at Haddington. I was no one important, only an aide to my father—whom Passy would remember. He is the Earl of Raven, and not an easy man to forget.”

Jean-Jacques stared at him as if he’d just grown another head. “The—the Earl of Raven?”

“Yes. He would also tell you that I speak the truth about Passy. Now the question is,” Pascal said reflectively, “what is it that Passy wants from you?”

“But—but he doesn’t want anything,” Jean-Jacques said, attempting to recover his equilibrium. “We are friends.”

“The Comte de Passy doesn’t have friends, he has puppets. I wouldn’t put it past him to have set up this gambling coup of yours. But why?” Pascal paced the room, thinking hard.

Jean-Jacques shook his head, little beads of sweat forming on his brow. “No. I cannot believe it.”

Pascal looked up. “Why not, Jean-Jacques? Why not get at the truth? I could probably act out the entire scenario for you. It was he who approached you about the gambling, wasn’t it?”

He nodded uncertainly.

Pascal smiled with satisfaction. “Yes. As I thought. He took you to his private club, where the stakes are nothing less than enormous.”

“But how do you know all this?” Jean-Jacques asked in disbelief.

“It’s a usual ploy. He probably heard about your plight from one of the banks he controls. Then he arranged for you to win more money than you ever hoped for.”

“How could one arrange such a thing?” Jean-Jacques asked. “I won it fairly, and not without some frightening losses in the beginning.”

“Of course,” Pascal said. “It would be idiotic to have it look any different. Was it your idea to gamble the estate or his?”

“His,” Jean-Jacques admitted, looking more frightened by the moment. “He said it was the only way, that no bank would touch Saint-Simon because it had been losing money for so long. It was true, too—I couldn’t get a loan anywhere. He said that I might as well take the risk, and either win a fortune or have the worry off my hands for good.”

Pascal nodded. “Thank you for being honest, at least. But again, the question is, Why would he bother? What do you have to offer him? He has estates and money enough of his own. You have no political connections, have you?”

Jean-Jacques frowned impatiently. “As I told you, it is a simple matter of friendship. I cannot see why you must find intrigue in every corner.”

“Can’t you?” Pascal shrugged. “Well, that’s probably because you don’t know as much about your friend as I do. After what happened to Julien, I made it my business to find out about him, and my father helped. He has a number of useful connections in the British government.”

“Lord Raven,” Jean-Jacques said, clearing his throat.

“Yes, that’s right,” Pascal said, privately amused by the turnaround in Jean-Jacques’s attitude. It was amazing what a little name-dropping could do—a practice he had always abhorred, but had just deliberately employed. It looked as if he was growing more human by the minute. “Anyway, we discovered that Passy had been watched by the British government for years.”