It had come to the Paris house two weeks earlier, Magnus explained. Unsure what to do with it, the servants had dithered and conferred, but at length, he had decided that it must be brought to my attention.
“The master being gone,” he repeated. This time I paid attention to what he was saying.
“Gone?” I said. The note was crumpled and stained from its journey, light as a leaf in my hand. “You mean Jamie left before this note arrived?” I could make no sense of this; this must be Murtagh’s note giving the name and sailing date of the ship that would bear Charles Stuart’s port from Lisbon. Jamie could not have left for Spain before receiving the information.
As though to verify this, I broke the seal and unfolded the note. It was addressed to me, because Jamie had thought there was less chance of my mail being intercepted than his. From Lisbon, dated nearly a month before, the letter boasted no signature, but didn’t need one.
“The Scalamandre sails from Lisbon on the 18th of July” was all the note said. I was surprised to see what a small, neat hand Murtagh wrote; somehow I had been expecting a formless scrawl.
I looked up from the paper to see Magnus and Louise exchanging a very odd kind of look.
“What is it?” I said abruptly. “Where’s Jamie?” I had put down his absence from L’Hôpital des Anges after the miscarriage to his guilt at the knowledge that his reckless action had killed our child, had killed Frank, and had nearly cost me my life. At that point, I didn’t care; I didn’t want to see him, either. Now I began to think of another, more sinister explanation for his absence.
It was Louise who spoke at last, squaring her plump shoulders to the task.
“He’s in the Bastille,” she said, taking a deep breath. “For dueling.”
My knees felt watery, and I sat down on the nearest available surface.
“Why in hell didn’t you tell me?” I wasn’t sure what I felt at this news; shock, or horror – fear? or a small sense of satisfaction?
“I – I didn’t want to upset you, chérie,” Louise stammered, taken aback at my apparent distress. “You were so weak… and there was nothing you could do, after all. And you didn’t ask,” she pointed out.
“But what… how… how long is the sentence?” I demanded. Whatever my initial emotion, it was superseded by a sudden rush of urgency. Murtagh’s note had arrived at the Rue Tremoulins two weeks ago. Jamie should have left upon its receipt – but he hadn’t.
Louise was summoning servants and ordering wine and ammoniac spirits and burnt feathers, all at once; I must look rather alarming.
“It is a contravention of the King’s order,” she said, pausing in her flutter. “He will remain in prison at the King’s pleasure.”
“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I muttered, wishing I had something stronger to say.
“It is fortunate that le petit James did not kill his opponent,” Louise hastened to add. “In that case, the penalty would have been much more… eek!” She twitched her striped skirts aside just in time to avoid the cascade of chocolate and biscuits as I knocked over the newly arrived refreshments. The tray clanged to the floor unregarded as I stared down at her. My hands were clasped tightly against my ribs, the right protectively curled over the gold ring on my left hand. The thin metal seemed to burn against my skin.
“He isn’t dead, then?” I asked, like one in a dream. “Captain Randall… he’s alive?”
“Why, yes,” she said, peering curiously up at me. “You did not know? He is badly wounded, but it is said that he recovers. Are you quite well, Claire? You look…” But the rest of what she was saying was lost in the roaring that filled my ears.
“You did too much, too soon,” Louise said severely, pulling back the curtains. “I said so, didn’t I?”
“I imagine so,” I said. I sat up and swung my legs out of bed, checking cautiously for any residual signs of faintness. No swimming of head, ringing of ears, double vision, or inclination to fall on the floor. Vital signs all right.
“I need my yellow gown, and then would you send for the carriage, Louise?” I asked.
Louise looked at me in horror. “You are not meaning to go out? Nonsense! Monsieur Clouseau is coming to attend you! I have sent a messenger to fetch him here at once!”
The news that Monsieur Clouseau, a prominent society physician, was coming from Paris to examine me, would have been sufficient grounds to get me on my feet, had I needed them.
The eighteenth of July was ten days away. With a fast horse, good weather, and a disregard for bodily comfort, the journey from Paris to Orvieto could be made in six. That left me four days to contrive Jamie’s release from the Bastille; no time to fiddle about with Monsieur Clouseau.
“Hmm,” I said, looking round the room thoughtfully. “Well, call the maid to dress me, at any rate. I don’t want Monsieur Clouseau to find me in my shift.”
Though she still looked suspicious, this sounded plausible; most ladies of the Court would rise from a deathbed in order to make sure they were dressed appropriately for the occasion.
“All right,” she agreed, turning to go. “But you stay in bed until Yvonne arrives, you hear?”
The yellow gown was one of my best, a loose, graceful thing made in the modish sacque style, with a wide rolled collar, full sleeves, and a beaded closure down the front. Powdered, combed, stockinged, and perfumed at last, I surveyed the pair of shoes Yvonne had laid out for me to step into. I turned my head this way and that, frowning appraisingly.
“Mm, no,” I said at last. “I don’t think so. I’ll wear the others, the ones with the red morocco heels, instead.”
The maid looked dubiously at my dress, as though mentally assessing the effect of red morocco with yellow moiré silk, but obediently turned to rummage in the foot of the huge armoire.
Tiptoeing silently up behind her in my stockinged feet, I shoved her headfirst into the armoire, and slammed the door on the heaving, shrieking mass beneath the pile of fallen dresses within. Turning the key in the door, I dropped it neatly into my pocket, mentally shaking hands with myself. Neat job, Beauchamp, I thought. All this political intrigue is teaching you things they never dreamt of in nursing school, no doubt about it.
“Don’t worry,” I told the shaking armoire soothingly. “Someone will be along to let you out soon, I imagine. And you can tell La Princesse that you didn’t let me go anywhere.”
A despairing wail from inside the armoire seemed to be mentioning Monsieur Clouseau’s name.
“Tell him to have a look at the monkey,” I called over my shoulder, “It’s got mange.”
The success of my encounter with Yvonne buoyed my mood. Once ensconced in the carriage, rattling back toward Paris, though, my spirits sank appreciably.
While I was no longer quite so angry at Jamie, I still did not wish to see him. My feelings were in complete turmoil, and I had no intention of examining them closely; it hurt too much. Grief was there, and a horrible sense of failure, and over all, the sense of betrayal; his and mine. He should never have gone to the Bois de Boulogne; I should never have gone after him.
But we both did as our natures and our feelings dictated, and together we had – perhaps – caused the death of our child. I had no wish to meet my partner in the crime, still less to expose my grief to him, to match my guilt with his. I fled from anything that reminded me of the dripping morning in the Bois; certainly I fled from any memory of Jamie, caught as I had last seen him, rising from the body of his victim, face glowing with the vengeance that would shortly claim his own family.
I could not think of it even in passing, without a terrible clenching in my stomach, that brought back the ghost of the pain of premature labor. I pressed my fists into the blue velvet of the carriage seat, raising myself to ease the imagined pressure on my back.