Prisoner of the Flames (Leisure Historical Romance) (4 page)

“Ahhh,” she breathed. There was great relief in the sound.

“What are you called, lass?”

“My name is Violette Cherier, and I am in your debt, my lord. Those men…they were quite rowdy, and would, I fear, have had their way with me if you had not intervened.”

“I think they were a mite too drunk for that,” he said. “If you were sighted, you would have seen it.”

“You have saved my coins. What of my flowers? Have they ruined them?”

“Some still remain,” he said, frowning toward the scant few that hadn’t been trampled. Stooping, he retrieved what was left of the blooms and placed them back into the cart somewhat clumsily. “You will have to sell them quickly,” he informed her. “All the water has been spilt…unless you tell me where to fetch more?”

“I will fetch more water, my lord. I have detained you long enough. I know seigneur de Montaigne. He is known and loved in the vendors’ quarter, as he is everywhere in Paris. His chalet lies on the western fringes of the city. If you had but turned to your right when you stepped off the bridge, and not become involved with me, you would have nearly reached it by now.”

Robert was following her directions with his eyes, when all at once the two gendarmes who had been watching him since he left the docks, took hold of him from behind. Resisting, he cried out in protest as they shackled him in irons, groped the doublet beneath his cloak for his coin purse, and relieved him of the sword and dinner knife sheathed at his side. One of them opened the purse and probed its contents, stirring the coins. Juggling it in his hand, he assessed its weight, discarded the letter of introduction Aengus had given him, which floated to the ground, then tightened the thong cord again, and thrust it beneath his own belt.

When the other grabbed hold of his helmet, Robert fought back with a well-aimed foot that found the man’s
genitals beneath his codpiece, doubling him over. Loosing a string of blasphemous oaths, the other reached around to remove the device himself, while the first man recovered himself.

“Please!” Violette cried. “This man is a foreign noble, come seeking seigneur de Montaigne. He has done nothing wrong. He has papers. He…he saved me from rowdies who laid hands upon me and upturned my cart!”

“Keep silent, wench!” barked the gendarme who still had the power of speech. “He’s done something now. He’s attacked an officer of the French police, papers or no, and he goes to the Bastille, your foreign noble.”

“She speaks truth.” Robert thundered. “Do not remove the helm.
Do not
, I say!”

But the injured gendarme was on his feet at last, and between them they yanked it off his head.

“Mon
Dieu!”
cried the first, reeling away from the sight.
“Plague!”

The other let Robert go, meanwhile wiping his hands on his tunic, and Violette rushed forward, kicking air until she found the man’s shins, at which point she gave them a healthy drubbing with the toe of her shoe.

“Jean-Claude Geneaux, you lout! I know your voice,” she accused, “and you also, Henri Flammonde. Where were you when those drunkards were accosting me? I will report you! This man has done nothing.”

The one called Henri, still soothing his genitals, pulled her off Jean-Claude, shoving her aside roughly, and she fell to the cobblestone street beside her flower cart.

“Garboneaux can deal with this,” said Jean-Claude, slapping the helm back in place on Robert’s head. “Bring him, and be quick!”

“No!” Violette shrilled.

“Keep still, unless you want to join him,” Henri warned her.

“I have no plague, you fools,” Robert insisted. “I have been burned, and the scars redden when confined for long periods. The helm spares such as you the sight and me embarrassment for it. If you will but loose these accursed irons, I will show you my credentials.”

But they paid him no mind, nor did they heed the girl’s cries as they hauled him quickly away.

Violette heaved a weary sigh as the sound of their voices grew distant. She had the gendarmes’ terror of plague, and their panic to be shot of it to thank that she hadn’t been hauled off with him. She was certain she had bruised Jean-Claude’s shins severely. Scrabbling up to a kneeling position, she began to grope the cobblestones for her straw hat, which had been lost in the struggle; only her lawn cap remained, tied neatly in place under her chin, with her long hair hanging down in back. Not finding the hat nearby, she extended her search, spreading her arms in wider circles, and her hand brushed a crumpled piece of parchment on the cobblestones that had come to rest against the wheel of her cart. Fingering it carefully, she felt the sealing wax, and her heart leapt—the laird’s credentials? Could it be?

She jumped to her feet, her first thought being that she go at once to the jail with it. She had taken only two steps in that direction—for she knew most of the city by heart—when she hesitated. The gendarmes were as much a danger to her now as the drunken pair she had encountered earlier. They had arrested many a vendor for far less than she had just done. Who was to say that they wouldn’t tear the laird’s papers up, and throw her into prison herself? Did she dare chance it after telling them she knew who they were? The blindness that had always been her shield in the past would not help her now.

No. She spun around, slipped the parchment into the
pocket concealed beneath her apron, and set out in a different direction.

The two gendarmes dragged Robert before Captain Phileppe Garboneaux of the Paris police, jailor at the small, dank castle prison. It reminded him of the makeshift prison keeps at home. Due to the dubious nature of the situation—the officers were convinced they were dealing with plague and feared a panic—they took the laird below to a cubicle deep in the bowels of the foul-smelling prison to be examined by the jailor well out of the other guards’ view.

Flares in sconces along the passageways they passed through perfumed the lower regions with the putrid odor of rancid oil. It hung heavy on air fouled with mildew, and, when they reached the cell, it stank with the lingering stench of the body odor, excrement, stale urine, and vomit left there by its last inhabitant.

Robert had ceased his struggling. Still shackled, he lay in a urine-soaked pile of dung-matted straw where they had flung him. Wise enough to realize that he could not escape, he decided to reason with these men who had curtailed his mission before it had even begun.

Jean-Claude and Henri backed quickly away, but the jailor stood his ground scrutinizing, him arms akimbo, a formidable-looking baton in one of the fists he had braced on his hips.

“What’s he done, then?” he growled toward the officers behind.

“I have done naught but come to the aid of a poor blind child who had been set upon by drunkards in the square,” Robert put in before either of the gendarmes could answer. “They had overturned her cart and spilled—”

“Hold your tongue!” the jailor snarled, smacking his baton hard to the side of Robert’s helmet, cutting him short. “Nobody’s asked you!”

Robert groaned. The impact of the blow was doubled, amplified by the clang of the truncheon reverberating inside the helmet, and blood began to run from his ear.

The jailor reached for the helmet.

“Don’t touch him, Captain, it’s
plague
, I tell you!” Jean-Claude spoke up. “Don’t go too near. He kicked Henri here hard enough to deaden his balls.”

“Trying to defend myself,” Robert groaned. “They had no business laying hands on me. I had done nothing, and I have no plague. Is this how you treat all foreigners who sojourn in your land—gendarmes ambushing them from behind, whilst they are doing their job for them?
They
should have gone to the girl’s aid. They saw it all—they followed me from the docks. They would have let those cup-shotten roaring boys take her down.”

Another blow all but rendered him senseless, then the jailer lifted the helmet and thrust a torch close to his face. Robert shrank from the fetid stench of the oil, from the sudden light in that dark place, and from the heat of the flames as Garboneaux conducted his examination.

“Umm,” the jailor grunted, grimacing as he took a step back. “Addle-wits! This is no plague here so far as I can tell. These scars are old.” He slapped the helmet back in place, then tethered Robert’s ankle to a leg iron chained to the floor, and swaggered out to join the others waiting in the passageway. “Nasty sight,” he opined. “Leave him awhile. We’ll show this insolent Scot how we treat foreigners who assault gendarmes in Paris, eh?”

The heavy door slammed shut on Robert, taking the light with it, and he slid the helmet off and laid his head back in the moldy fouled straw. Blood from his ear ran down his neck, and his head ached, the reverberation of the blows still rumbling around in his brain. His head was reeling, and his last thoughts before vertigo finally rendered him unconscious were of the little blind flower vendor, Violette Cherier,
as he had last seen her lying prostrate on the street where the gendarmes had flung her. He recalled the long honey-colored hair spread like a fan over the cobblestones, spilling from beneath her white cap, and her sightless eyes, so thickly wreathed with lashes, staring into nothingness. Praying that she would not face a similar fate for attempting to champion him, he succumbed to the pain and the dark hopelessness that overwhelmed him.

M
ichel seigneur de Montaigne had already left for a court
audience at the Louvre when Violette reached the château. She had started out bravely on her own, but soon realized that, though she had traveled the route many times before, she had never attempted it on her own; there had always been another vendor with her, and that had been some time ago. She soon realized that she had taken on too much in her blindness, and had it not been for a dairy cart passing her by on the way to fetch more butter to market, and the dairyman agreeing to deposit her at Montaigne’s château on his way past, she might never have reached it. That, however, was the reason she arrived too late to deliver Robert’s credentials to the magistrate before he left for his court appointment.

A bondservant answered her knock. Hearing her tale, he brought the steward, who informed her of Montaigne’s absence and promptly closed the door in her face. She wasn’t surprised. The situation in Paris was critical then, and Montaigne was a public figure. The servants would have been instructed to admit no one, least of all a toil-worn, blind flower vendor, much the worse for wear due to her ordeal with the drunkards and misuse at the hands of the gendarmes.

She sat down on the step, smoothed out her hair and skirt, and straightened her cap. She couldn’t go back on her own, even if she wanted to, which she didn’t. Montaigne would return eventually…unless he stayed on at court. Her heart leapt at that possibility, and she crossed herself and said a quick prayer against it. But blindness had heightened
her other senses, and as the day wore on, she began to fear that prayer was in vain. When dark clouds began rolling in after the sun reached its zenith, she could not see them, but the constant gray she did see grew steadily darker, the way it always did at night, and the sun no longer warmed her face. The wind changed direction sharply and grew stronger blowing in off the Seine. She filled her lungs and licked her lips, tasting salt. The bird music changed, too. The sweet voices of lapwing, sparrow, and mourning dove were suddenly drowned out by the harsh, rasping cries of gull, tern, cormorant, and plover seeking shelter inland from the approaching storm. This far inland in autumn, it would be a ripper.

Reading the weather thus was vital to her livelihood. Setting up shop in the square with a storm brewing would be a costly mistake—especially now, when so few good days were left before winter. She thought of her cart by the bridge, praying that one of the other vendors had collected it for her. But that couldn’t be helped. She was where she had to be, doing what she must do. What was right to do…unless she should have followed her first instinct and gone straight to the jail.

She shuddered. It had grown suddenly colder, and the gusts stronger still. Twice now, she had taken her apron back from the wind, and all her labor making herself presentable earlier had gone for naught at the mercy of the gusts. She was tired and cold and her belly churned wanting food. Did she dare knock at the door again? No. What would be the use? They wouldn’t admit her, but there might be an overhang, an arbor, or some attachment that she might seek shelter beneath, for the rain was imminent, and, judging from the sound of the waterfowl clucking about her, this was to be no mere brief shower.

Groping her way along the steps to the façade of the house, she felt for such a shelter, but found none. She
couldn’t see the roof above, of course, but the rain had begun, and flattening herself against the building did not spare her a drenching, suggesting that the residence was sheer-faced. And she felt her way along the rough brick wall until she found the door, recessed enough to spare her somewhat. There she stayed until the gray world she lived in grew deeper still as night fell, and she was just about to knock at the door again and beg that someone lead her to the stable, where at least she might wait out of the weather, when a voice close beside her made her lurch violently. She had not heard him approach above the racket of the wind and rain.

It was Montaigne.

“Violette?” he breathed. “So it is! What are you doing here? You are drenched to the skin, child.”

“I have a letter that I believe is addressed to you, seigneur,” she cried. “Your steward would not admit me, and I…could not leave it you see, because they have taken him to…prison, and you would have no way to know it!” Sobbing in relief, she leaned against the strong arm he had wrapped around her as he ushered her inside out of the weather.

“What’s this?” he said. “Taken whom to prison, Violette?”

“The Scottish laird,” she wailed.

“Child, you are soaked to the skin,” he observed. “And I’ve no idea what you are talking about. Come sit by the chimney and warm yourself. I shall have my steward bring ale and a blanket to warm you, then you will tell me calmly what all this is about, eh?”