Time for Eternity (19 page)

Still, Françoise was in a dither by the time Avignon returned with two cloaks, not knowing whether what she was about to do would free her or condemn her. Avignon had dressed for evening in black satin breeches with small silver buckles at the knees and shoes that sported large silver Artois buckles. His stockings were black as well and his tightly fitted, skirted coat was black brocade. Only his white waistcoat, embroidered with black clocks of all things, broke his silhouette, that and the white foaming lace at his throat and wrists. He swung one cape round her shoulders as she stood to greet him. It was black silk with a rosy lining just heavy enough to keep the night chill off in a moving carriage. On him it was probably three -quarter length, on her, it swirled about her heels, just off the ground.

“Do try not to shred it,” he said as he tied the silken cord at her neck. His knuckles brushed the notch in her throat where her heart beat. “I remind you that I want it back.”

She never knew when he was serious about being rude, or whether it was all some kind of game to him. He was really quite a mystery, and in spite of the fact that she had discovered how he made his living, she didn ’t think smuggling was the only secret he kept.

As in a dream, she followed him. She was going to Versailles, with all that might mean. He handed her down the steps of number sixteen and into a shining black carriage drawn by four snorting horses. He nodded to the coachman, a capable-looking man who held the reins of the demanding team as though they had been part of his hands since birth. Pierre bustled out from the doorway with a large basket that smelled wonderful. He shoved it up to the coachman. “Only I, Pierre Dufond, could have contrived on a moment’s notice to provide such a repast a full hour before dinner was to be delivered.”

“But you contrived?” Avignon asked, as though he were in doubt.

Pierre drew himself up. “How not? I am Pierre Dufond.”

“Ah, yes. I remember now. That is why I hired you. I have only the best, you know.” Avignon acted as though he were sharing a secret. He swung up into the carriage and closed the door with the crest on it. Only Avignon dared have a carriage that still sported a crest.

Pierre fairly beamed as they pulled away.

Françoise scooted over the red velvet squabs of the seat to look out the carriage window. She was very conscious of Avignon’s body sprawled out on the opposite bench, his long legs crossed at the ankles. She could hardly see his face in the shadows of the coach. The driver was wending his way skillfully through the crowded city streets.

“What do you find so interesting?” The baritone was even more seductive in the dark.

“Paris. I didn’t get about much,” she said. “Madame needed me to attend to her.”

“You were allowed days off, weren’t you?”

“Not really. A companion is a companion all the time. Sometimes I went to pick up small items for Madame at Savoirs, or we went together to choose a book. But it wasn’t safe to be out alone. That meant taking Robert away from his other work. ”

Françoise felt her eyes fill and turned back to gaze out at the busy cacophony. “My ignorance of Paris made my search for Madame difficult.”

“Well, there can’t have been much of interest in the bookstalls for you,” he said, effectively changing the subject. “All tracts and philosophy these days. How boring.”

She managed a smile. “Sometimes we longed for a good novel or even a batch of poetry that wasn’t filled with homilies. Thank goodness for the English.”

“Hmmm. So you read English?”

“Yes. And German and Italian, of course. Lady Toumoult thought languages essential to a woman of the world. ” She could practically feel his doubtful smile. “Well, I might not be so much of the world as you are, but I’m not
ignorant.”
She was going to do something about her ignorance and her innocence tonight. Rebellion coursed through her. Frightening. Exciting.

“I have copies of some of Mr. Fielding’s novels in my library. You might enjoy them, though they’ve caused a bit of a scandal.

I’m afraid I don’t have Richardson’s
Clarissa,
if that style is more to your taste, but I have Rousseau’s
Julie.
It is much the same.”

“Not my style,” she said firmly. “Neither heroine takes the slightest action to avert her fate. They always just slide into a decline and die. I mean, you have to
do
something. You can’t just wish things were different.”

That sentiment resonated inside her in a way she couldn’t explain, like a violin string vibrating in sympathy with a cello. “Even if it’s difficult.”

“Yes.”

That word was weighted somehow, fraught with as much emotion as he ever let himself display. Suddenly, she thought that a carriage ride to Versailles with the duc held many possibilities. She resolved to embrace them, regardless of consequences. She was not going to become Lady Toumoult, no matter how dear her aunt had been to her.

They talked about Rousseau and Voltaire and how the Revolution had twisted their ideas into zealotry. Henri was surprised.

They discussed the line between individualism and the needs of society. She was intelligent. Her opinions were surprisingly sophisticated for one who’d seen so little of the world.

In short, Henri found her an enigma. He couldn’t think of the last time he didn’t know instantly who someone was and what they would say next. That was the curse of living as long as he had. Especially fascinating were those times when she seemed to surprise herself by what she said. He’d first noticed it that afternoon when she had obviously never had brandy burning down her throat and yet correctly guessed that it was twenty-year-old Rémy. Where did she get that knowledge of spirits if she’d never actually drunk any?

They clattered up to the back gates of Versailles, the ones that gave entrance to the park. He wanted her first view of the palace to be from the park, not through the village across the court in front of the stables where all was obscured by that crowd of government buildings. Two guards stood just outside the old stone gatehouse, dressed not in the red and blue of the revolutionary guard, but in plain brown and gray coats. Locals pressed into service and glad for the job. Henri leaned out the carriage window.

“My good man, are we too late for a tour?” His query was greeted by a guffaw that was quickly swallowed when he let the light from their lantern glint over the gold in his hand.

“Just in time.” The older of the two men grinned. His coat was buttoned over a swelling belly. There was a coin for each, probably more than they made in six months. The guards caught the largesse he flipped to them in midair.

The younger one, his hair like errant straw, scrambled for the gate. “Just this way, Citizen.” The wrought-iron gates topped with spikes made of fleur-de-lis creaked open. Henri sighed. They were rusted. What had Versailles come to? But it didn’t matter. The girl had never been. And everyone should go to Versailles once in her life.

The coach rolled smoothly down the graveled drive through the winding park. The girl slid over the seat to crane her neck out the window on his side.

“I can’t see very much,” she said. “But those gardens look very inviting.”

“They are in the English style, less formal, full of meandering paths used for trysts, formerly by members of the court, and now by the citizenry that comes to picnic here.”

“Is that a village?” she asked in astonishment. “How very quaint.”

“Of sorts. The late queen had a hamlet built so that she could play at being a milkmaid.”

She looked at him with big eyes. “How sad that she needed to escape her real life.”

“We all want to escape our real life.” But there was never any escape.

“Is that the palace?” He could hear the excitement in her voice. She was on the wrong side for it to be the palace. He peered out. “Good God, no. That is one of the smaller palaces Louis XV built for trysting with Madame de Pompadour.”

She turned to him. Her smile was mischievous. “A smaller palace. A nice distinction I shall strive to remember.”

They turned left on the Avenue de Trianon, which allowed a plain view of the grand canal and its terminus in a gigantic fountain surrounding a statue of Apollo. They could hear the water flowing even over the crunch of the gravel under the wheels. What would she think of that?

“Oh, my.” Her tone was reverent, astonished. He would hear that a lot tonight. It should portend frightening boredom. But he wasn’t sure he would be bored. How odd. He wanted to be the one to show her what she had longed to see. He wanted to see it through her eyes as a wonder of the world, and not the den of silly iniquity and excess it had always been in his experience. Now, where would he take her to eat Pierre’s picnic? The formal gardens? It was warm enough tonight. But a heaviness in the air and some electric sense of anticipation said they might get wet.

“Where is the Grotto of Apollo?” she asked suddenly.

“The Bassin d’Apollon is that big fountain at the end of the Grand Canal. I didn’t know there was a grotto. Who told you about it?”

“N-no one. I mean … I don’t know who told me.” She looked profoundly disturbed at that. “It has three statues that were displaced when a building was torn down. They put them in … in a man-made cave of some sort.” She looked a bit appalled at what she’d said.

“Well, I’m sure we can explore if you’re up to it. You had a late night last night.”

“Oh, I slept into the afternoon today, really.” She looked up at him, examining his face. “I’m starting to keep your hours.”

“Depraved indeed,” he murmured.

“I wonder.” She sat back in the squabs of the upholstered bench. “I think you’re sensitive to sunlight. That’s why you keep the house dark all the time. I definitely saw you squinting when you came into my room as though even the late afternoon sun were painful.”

Too bright by half. “Guilty as charged.”

She frowned. “Is it a medical condition?”

“Yes.” He glanced out the window of the coach. “And if you are any more inquisitive about my illnesses, you will miss the palace entirely.”

She craned forward. “Oh …
My!

“Precisely.”

They swept up the center drive. The façade was so long it faded into the night. Faint light glowed in the rooms behind the great portico but most of the gigantic palace was dark and cold. The ornate symmetry of the last century looked … hard. At least she would probably think it so.

Henri stepped out of the coach almost before it had stopped rolling. He handed the girl down and reached for the basket Philippe lowered. “Take the carriage round to the stables and get yourself some dinner in the village. We won ’t need you until a couple of hours before dawn.”

“Very good, your grace.” The carriage rolled away.

“Well, where would you like to have our dinner? We could explore the park and look for your grotto. ” If indeed there was a grotto.

The question was answered by several large drops of rain, rapidly multiplying into a downpour. He grabbed her hand and they ran to the grand portico. She was laughing. Laughing at something so simple as rain. He couldn’t help but smile.

“Oh, dear, all your finery wet.” She giggled as the rain thundered down in a curtain just beyond the grand marble columns of the portico.

He took off his tricorn and shook the drops from it. The silk of his breeches would be ruined, unless you liked watered silk.

“You’re not exactly dry yourself.” As a matter of fact, her pale rosy-orange dress was almost transparent over her breasts where her cloak, flapping as they ran, had allowed it to get soaked. He could clearly see her nipples, just at the edge of her décolletage.

He cleared his throat and tried to ignore his wakening interest. The last thing he wanted to do was to frighten her with a cockstand.

Though he might not have much choice about that. “Let’s see if we can get someone to let us in.”

It was an excuse to turn away, concealing his rising interest. He was about to rap the great ceremonial knocker when the door swung open on hinges that creaked. He remembered when these doors had been better tended and when the place had blazed with light, when the crush of courtly bodies had made passage impossible. Those days were gone. Perhaps just as well.

The dour man who opened the door must have been eighty. Wisps of white hair wafted round his head like pulled Egyptian cotton. He peered out at them from rheumy eyes, holding high a candelabrum.

“What do you want?”

“To give ourselves a tour, with your permission,” Henri said, polite this time. This was a remnant of the old guard, beleaguered as he might be in these troubled times.

The man’s gaze roved over them, sharpened, then he bowed. “Please forgive my lack of manners, your grace. There is so little use for them these days.” He opened the door wide. Henri hadn’t expected to be recognized. Was it the electric feel of his Companion that stamped him?

“And you are?”

“Brendal, your grace, the last permanent remnant of the palace.”

“You have a hard but important job, Brendal. My sympathy and my gratitude. ” Henri looked around. He hadn’t been to Versailles in ages. It had been too silly and too dangerous a place when the unbalanced king and his overmatched queen had been in residence. The entrance hall was much the same, if bare of furniture. “Have they stripped the place?”

“Not all of it,” the caretaker said, his mouth a grim line.

The girl was staring about her with big eyes. As well she might. The huge, dim hall was really just a grand foyer, but the carved ceiling was twenty feet above them and the chandelier that hung in the darkness was a good ten feet in diameter. The paintings, the gilt wood carving everywhere, the marble expanse of floor, even the echo of emptiness spoke of a grandeur lost, or never realized.

The building might be grand, but the people who used to reside here were not.

“I’d like to show my young guest about with your permission. We’ve brought a picnic dinner. I’m sure there is enough to share.”

“Your grace is kind, but my
chère
wife made a nice pullet for dinner. A tour perhaps?”