Twenty years, thought Sebastian. Her parents had been dead for twenty years, and she had yet to put those dark days behind her and learn to embrace the joys of the living. He wondered if Lady Giselle passed the anniversary of her own parents’ deaths closeted in prayer with a bloody relic. Somehow, he doubted it.
Aloud, he said, “She stays in prayer all day?”
“From before dawn until midnight. She does not leave her room, not even for meals. Her uncle always has trays sent up for her, but she never touches them.”
“So she spent Thursday alone?”
They had reached the long eastern facade of the house, its elegant row of recessed, arched windows forming an incongruous backdrop to the tethered goats and flocks of chickens. She pivoted to face him, her eyes narrowed, her head tilting to one side as she regarded him intently. “What precisely are you suggesting, my lord? That the daughter of the martyred King of France gave us all the slip and crept out to murder some insignificant Parisian physician in a London back alley?”
When Sebastian remained silent, she gave a humorless laugh and said, “But since you asked, I will answer your question. No, she did not spend the day alone. Every January twenty-first since her release from prison, I have been at her side, praying with her, and holding her when she weeps. No one has ever seen Marie-Therese weep in public, and no one ever will. Just as no one will ever know the torments she bears in private.”
He became aware of the creak-creak of a wheeled chair carrying an enormously obese man toward them from around the side of the house. It was pushed not by a footman, but by a thin, foppishly dressed gentleman with a narrow, delicate face, a halo of chestnut-colored curls, and the steady, relentless gaze of a man who decided long ago to meet the world on his own terms and shrug off the consequences.
Lady Giselle cast a quick glance toward the wheeled chair. Then she gathered her skirts in a clenched fist. “Good day, my lord.”
Sebastian stood on the ragged lawn and watched her long-legged stride scatter the bleating goats and squawking, disgruntled chickens as if she were chased by the squeak of the wheeled chair rolling ever closer.
Chapter 12
Sebastian nudged away a speckled hen that was showing rather too much interest in the shiny toe of one of his Hessians, and walked forward to meet the wheeled chair bearing the uncrowned King of France.
He’d been born Louis Stanislas, fourth in line to the French throne, and given the title Comte de Provence. No one ever expected the plump, self-indulgent Comte de Provence to someday be king. And so he was allowed to go his own way, neglecting his studies, amassing staggering debts, and growing fatter every year. His younger brother, the Comte d’Artois, was slim, dashing, and handsome. But not Provence. Even as a young man, he’d been obese. Now in his late fifties and crippled by gout, he could barely walk without assistance.
“Devlin!” he cried when he was still some feet away. “Don’t run off yet! I want a word with you.”
“Your Majesty,” said Sebastian with an elegant bow.
The Comte de Provence laughed, his plump, rosy-cheeked face still surprisingly youthful and creased with a smile of habitual good cheer. “How very diplomatic of you, young man! And without a moment’s hesitation too. Most people in your position hem and haw in painful indecision. You can almost see the agonized thoughts tumbling one after the other through their heads. Do I address him as if he were indeed the crowned King of France, rather than an impoverished exile? Should I call him the Comte de Provence? Or I should follow Napoleon’s lead and refer to him as the Comte d’Isle?” The Bourbon’s enormous, protuberant belly bounced up and down. “At least I have yet to have anyone address me the way my niece styles Napoleon, as ‘the Criminal’!”
“Does she really?”
“Oh, yes; she has for years.” Twisting awkwardly in his chair, he reached up with noticeable tenderness to touch the right hand of the man pushing him. “Ambrose, if you would be so kind? A walk toward the chapel might afford the most privacy, don’t you agree?”
Ambrose LaChapelle glanced over at Sebastian, a faint, enigmatic smile curling his lips. “Oh, most definitely.”
Sebastian had met LaChapelle before. Born into an aristocratic family in Avignon, he’d fled France as a youth to fight in the counterrevolutionary emigre army led by the Prince de Conde. When the army was disbanded, he’d joined the Comte de Provence in exile, first in Russia, then in Warsaw, where he’d risen quickly in his royal master’s favor. Sebastian had heard that he owed his rapid elevation to his willingness to do anything for his uncrowned king.
Anything.
“Your father and I were good friends in our youth, you know,” Provence said, his voice raised so as to be heard above the squeak of the chair’s wheels and the crunch of the weed-choked gravel beneath their feet. The winter-bared oaks and elms of the neglected park closed in around them, dark and somber in the flat light.
“No, I didn’t know,” said Sebastian.
The Bourbon’s eyes practically disappeared behind his puffy, smiling lids. “Hendon never told you about his salad days in Paris, did he?” He tried to laugh, but it quickly degenerated into a rasping cough. “Golden years, those were. Golden. Horses, jewels, chateaux, carriages, wine. . We had it all. I once ran up a debt of a million livres, and my brother the King paid it off. Think of that! A million livres. What I wouldn’t give for that kind of money now. We thought those days would never end. But they did.” He cast Sebastian a quick, sideways glance. “I suppose you think we should have seen it coming, and so we should have-so we should! I tell Marie-Therese all the time that when two percent of a nation has all the wealth and the other ninety-eight percent of the people pay all the taxes, a bloodbath is inevitable. Inevitable!”
Sebastian had heard that an intense and at times acrimonious disagreement raged within the French royal family. The Comte de Provence favored a limited, parliamentary monarchy and was willing to give numerous concessions to the people of France if they would only allow him to return. But both Marie-Therese and Provence’s own younger brother, Charles, Comte d’Artois, were ultraroyalists, stubbornly adhering to their belief in the divine right of kings and insisting upon nothing less than a reimposition of absolute monarchy.
Sebastian said, “In my experience, most people tend to believe even in the face of all evidence to the contrary that things will never change.”
The Bourbon sighed. “True, true. Although I’ve been exiled from France for more than twenty years now. So, God willing, this is one state of affairs that will change, and soon. I would not like to die on foreign soil.”
“The news from the Continent sounds encouraging-if you can call the slaughter of half a million men encouraging.”
The Bourbon’s jovial face went slack. “Ghastly, is it not? All those dead men, strewn across Russia.”
The genuine depth of his grief took Sebastian by surprise. He found himself wondering if Marie-Therese had ever spared a moment’s sorrow for the war dead of the nation over which she hoped one day to reign as queen. Somehow, he doubted it. She was too busy hugging her own misery and loss to herself.
As if aware of the drift of his thoughts, Provence said, “But you did not come all the way out here to discuss either philosophy or my long-lost youth, did you?”
Sebastian smiled. “No, sir. I wonder, have you ever heard of a young French doctor named Damion Pelletan?”
“Hah.” Provence slapped the arm of his chair in triumph. “That’s why you’re here, is it? Told you so, Ambrose; didn’t I?”