Gibson said, “You think she holds a grudge against you?”
Sebastian looked over at him. The wind blew the snow against the windowpane, like a soft whisper from a long-vanished past. “What do you think?”
Gibson went to throw more coal on the fire. Then he simply stood there, one hand braced against the mantel, his gaze on the fire before him.
After a moment, Sebastian said, “I’ve discovered something that may or may not be relevant. Damion Pelletan’s father was one of the doctors who performed the autopsy on the little Dauphin when he died in the Temple. He also treated the boy before his death.”
Gibson turned to stare at him. “You can’t be serious.”
“The Comte de Provence himself confirmed it.”
Gibson shook his head. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Neither do I. Particularly when you consider that Damion Pelletan was murdered on the anniversary of Louis XVI’s death.”
Gibson pushed away from the fireplace. “How much do you know about the death of the last Dauphin?”
“I’m not sure how much anyone knows about those days. But there’s a courtier who is close to Provence-a man by the name of Ambrose LaChapelle. I think he knows considerably more than he’s letting on. About a lot of things.”
“Do you think you can convince him to talk?”
Sebastian finished his wine and set the glass aside. “I don’t know. But I intend to try.”
Chapter 26
After Devlin left, Gibson went to stand in the doorway to the inner chamber.
Alexandrie Sauvage lay, still dressed, atop the bed. She had her head tipped back, her eyes closed. He could see what the effort of rising even for those few moments had cost her in every fragile line of her being.
He said, “That was not wise.”
She turned her face to look at him. “I am getting better.”
“You won’t if you keep pulling stunts like this one.”
A ghost of a smile touched her lips. She had a full, generous mouth, gently curved in a way that made a man long to rub the pad of his thumb along its soft lines.
She said, “He hadn’t told you? About Portugal, I mean.”
“No.”
Her slim throat worked as she swallowed. “And does it alter your opinion of me, to know that I once took a lover?”
“Why should it? I’ve had a few lovers myself, you know.” He’d never had a wife, though, and no woman at all since he lost his leg. But he didn’t see any reason to tell her that.
“That’s different.”
“I don’t know why it should be.”
“You know why. Our society expects-no, demands-very different conduct from women and men.”
He said, “What happened to you, after your lover was killed?”
He thought for a moment she wasn’t going to answer him, and if he could have unsaid the question, he would have. It was too personal, too much a betrayal of his interest in her, and he knew by the pinched look around her eyes that those days had been bleak.
She said, “I took up with a British captain-Miles Sauvage. He-how do you English say it? Ah, yes; I remember. He made an honest woman of me. It’s a curious expression, don’t you agree? An ‘honest woman’ is a very different creature from an ‘honest man’ and has nothing to do with the truth or lack thereof. Just as a woman’s honor is a very different thing from a man’s. It’s as if when it comes to women, all possible virtues-honesty, honor, even virtue itself-are reduced simply to whom we allow between our legs.”
When he said nothing, she gave a crooked smile. “Now I have shocked you.”
He shook his head. “I don’t shock as easily as you may think. Although that was your intent, was it not? To shock me?”
She tilted her head, her gaze on his face. And he knew he’d read her right. But he was unprepared for her next assault.
She said, “I wonder, does your good friend Viscount Devlin know of your taste for opium?”
Gibson sucked in a quick breath. “He knows I take laudanum from time to time. He was with me when they cut off what was left of my leg-held me down while the surgeon went at me with his saw.”
“How long ago now?”
“Four-five years.”
In Gibson’s experience, four out of five men who lost an arm or a leg-or a hand, or a foot-suffered intermittent pain that seemed to come from their missing limb. The fact that the limb was no longer there didn’t make the pain any less “real”-or any less agonizing. Sometimes it felt like an intense, crippling cramp; at other times it was as sharp and stabbing as a knife blade thrust deep into long-vanished flesh. It could go on and on, then suddenly disappear-only to start up again without warning a few minutes or a few days later. For many men, the pains came less frequently with the passage of time until they eventually vanished altogether, usually after a few months.
But for some, the pains never went away. He’d known men to take their own lives, simply to get away from the pain.
He said, “The laudanum helps me focus on. . other things.”
“Yes. But it takes more and more every year, does it not?” She paused, then said gently, “You know where this will end.”
“I can control it.”
“How? By walking the stews of London when the urge to lose yourself entirely in a poppy-hued mist threatens to become overwhelming?”
“How did you-” He broke off.
“How did I know that’s why you were in St. Katharine’s the night you found me? Call it a good guess. How do I know you’ve taken laudanum tonight? It’s quite dark in here, yet your pupils are little more than pinpricks.”
“I can control it,” he said again.
“If you truly believe that, you are a fool.”
He felt hot color stain his cheeks, but whether it was from anger or shame he couldn’t have said.
He carefully straightened his spine. “I will leave you to rest,” he said and limped from the room, shutting the door carefully behind him.
At various times during the evening he was tempted to rejoin the argument. There were two small chambers at the front of his house, one leading to the other and both overlooking the street. He had given her the inner room, and he could see the glow of her candle beneath the door, hear by her occasional cough that she was still awake. But he resisted, as much because he suspected he would lose any argument on the subject as from the knowledge that the last thing she needed in her condition was a heated dispute with a delusional opium eater.
He stood in the darkened outer chamber, his gaze on the snowy street beyond the cold-frosted window. A few stray flakes still drifted down, but for now the snow appeared to have ended, leaving the street ankle deep in a soft white layer of fluff. The sky above was dark and starless, the moon hidden behind the thick clouds pressing down on the city, the roofs of the ancient stone houses of Tower Hill shrouded thick with snow and dripping icicles that glimmered in the lantern of a passing carriage.
For a brief instant, the lantern light played over the harsh features of a man who stood in the shadows of a doorway opposite. Then the carriage rattled past, and the man disappeared again into darkness.
Gibson was aware of the door opening behind him, of Alexandrie Sauvage coming to stand beside him. She wore only her shift, with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders for warmth.
She said, “I couldn’t sleep. It was wrong of me to taunt you the way I did. It is difficult enough to resist the allure of opium when the pain for which it was prescribed has ended. But when the pain persists. .”
“You weren’t wrong.”
She gave him a crooked smile that caught treacherously at his chest. “Not in what I said, no. But for the way in which I said it, I owe you an apology. You saved my life, and I repaid you abominably.”
“Ach, many’s the time I’ve been called a fool-and worse. It’s not as if-”
He broke off as a faint red glow, like tobacco burning in the bowl of a clay pipe, showed from out of the darkness. For perhaps the thousandth time in his life, Gibson found himself wishing he possessed Devlin’s unnatural ability to see in the dark.