“Lord Devlin,” she said, her voice oddly high-pitched and scratchy and still noticeably inflected by her native Parisian accent. “How kind of you to call.”
He bowed low over the hand she offered. “Thank you for agreeing to see me on such short notice.”
She inclined her head but did not smile. He had heard that she never smiled.
Although she was still known in the popular imagination as “the Orphan in the Temple,” those days were long in the past. She was thirty-four years old. As a child, she had been blond and blue-eyed, but her hair had long since darkened to a dull brown. She had a tall, sloping forehead, a long nose, protuberant, red-rimmed eyes, and a somewhat receding chin. There was little of her mother’s famous beauty or vivacity about her, although Marie Antoinette’s disastrous haughtiness was very much in evidence.
Turning, she indicated the woman who had until then remained quietly in the background. “This is my dear companion, Lady Giselle Edmondson.”
Lady Giselle was of much the same age as the Princess, but both taller and more delicately built, with hair of the palest blond and an almost elfin face. The daughter of an English earl and his French wife, she had been born in Paris to an idyllic childhood of soft eiderdowns, lavender-scented gardens, and rose-tinged sunrises over the Seine. A devotee of the Enlightenment, the Earl had greeted the first stirrings of revolution with an enthusiasm bordering on delirium. The storming of the Bastille troubled him, but he’d scornfully refused to join the panicked stampede of his fellow aristocrats for the Channel. By the time the gutters flowed with blood and matted blond hair streamed from the heads of noblewomen carried on pikes through the streets, it was too late.
Gathering his young family, he tried to flee on a dark, windswept night. But they made it less than thirty miles before a howling mob surrounded their carriage. As thirteen-year-old Giselle watched with the faces of her younger brother and sister pressed tight against her skirts, the Earl and his wife were dragged from their carriage and torn limb from limb. Then the jeering, red-capped men and snarling women wrenched the children from her arms.
“We’ll raise them as good sansculottes,” they told her.
Sebastian had heard she spent the next three years searching for her little brother and sister. But she never found them. By the time she finally left France in the train of the newly freed Marie-Therese, she was just sixteen.
She had never married. But somehow she’d managed to come to terms with the horrors of her past and achieve an enviable measure of serenity. Unlike Marie-Therese, she did not clutch her sorrows to her or wear her sufferings as a badge of honor.
“We have met,” she told Sebastian now with a warmth that was utterly lacking in the Princess, “but only once and very briefly, so I doubt you would remember it.”
“The Duchess of Claiborne’s ball, last June,” he said, returning her smile.
She gave a startled peal of laughter. “Good heavens. How can you possibly recall it?”
He remembered because he’d found her life story so hauntingly tragic, and the degree to which she’d managed to overcome its worst effects inspiring. But all he said was, “Reports of my lamentable memory are greatly exaggerated.”
She started to laugh again, then cast an almost apologetic glance toward the Princess and raised a hand to her lips, as if hiding her smile.
“Let us walk,” said the Princess, turning their steps toward the canal in the distance. “Tell me, my lord: How does your wife?”
Sebastian was aware of Lady Giselle falling in several steps behind them. “She is well, thank you,” he said.
“I hear she is with child. Congratulations.”
“Thank you.”
“And married such a short time! Your wife is fortunate indeed.” Her hand fluttered to touch, ever so briefly, her own flat stomach, an unconscious movement that was there and then gone. She had been married something like thirteen years, yet had never conceived. He’d heard it said she remained convinced that God would some day send her a child, a child who would continue the Bourbon line. But time was running out, both for Marie-Therese and for her dynasty.
She said, “You do realize that I know why you are here.”
“Do you?”
“You have made the investigation of murder your special interest, have you not? And a Frenchman named Pelletan was murdered on the streets of London two nights ago.”
“You were acquainted with Dr. Damion Pelletan?”
“You are obviously aware of the fact that I was. Otherwise, why are you here?”
When Sebastian remained silent, she said, “He was a physician of some renown in Paris, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know.”
She kept her gaze fixed straight ahead. “I thought it might be worth my while to consult with him.”
“Somehow, I had the impression Dr. Pelletan was not a royalist.”
He watched her mouth tighten. “No,” she said. “He was not. But he was nevertheless an excellent physician.”
Sebastian studied her fiercely proud profile. She was a woman who had been trained from infancy to dissemble, to never show her true thoughts or emotions. Yet there was no disguising the intense anger that smoldered beneath her carefully correct exterior. He said, “I wonder, do you know a man by the name of Harmond Vaundreuil?”
He expected her to deny it. Instead, she curled her lip and said, “Fortunately, I have never personally encountered the man. But I have heard of him, yes. A vulgar parvenu who believes himself the equal of his betters. There are many such in the government of France these days. But by the grace of God, all will soon be dispersed. Once the Bourbons are restored to their rightful position, Vaundreuil and his kind will be like so many roaches, fleeing before the bright light of God’s divine will.”
Sebastian kept his own features carefully bland. “What about a Frenchwoman, Alexandrie Sauvage? Do you know her?”
“Sauvage?” Marie-Therese drew up at the end of the allee and pivoted to look him full in the face. “I do not believe so, no,” she said with perfect calm. “And now you must excuse me. I wish to walk on alone. Lady Giselle will accompany you back to the house.” And she turned on her heel and left him there, her head held high, her spine stiff as she strode determinedly away.
“I’m sorry. She is rather. . tense today,” said Lady Giselle, coming up beside him.
In Sebastian’s experience, Marie-Therese was always tense. But all he said was, “I suspect I’m quite capable of finding my way back to the house without assistance, if you would rather go after her.”
Lady Giselle shook her head. “She meant it when she said she wishes to be alone.”
They turned to walk side by side back down the allee. After a moment, Lady Giselle said, “I know many find the Princess cold and stiff, even aloof. But she truly is an admirable woman, strong and devout. Her days are spent helping her uncle, or visiting establishments for the relief of orphans and the poor.”
“Is that what she did this last Thursday?”
“Last Thursday? Oh, no; Thursday was the twenty-first of January.”
“The date is significant?”
She looked vaguely surprised, then let out her breath in a rush. “Ah, it is because you’re not French; that is why you do not know. Marie-Therese’s father, King Louis XVI of France, was guillotined at ten o’clock on the morning of January 21, 1793. Did you know she has the chemise he wore when he was killed? His confessor saved it for her. It is still stained dark with his blood. Every year on the anniversary of his death, she closets herself with the chemise in her room and spends the day in prayer. She does the same on the anniversary of her mother’s murder, as well.”