Jean Marc gently pressed her cheek into the curve of his shoulder. “I should never have taken you there. Dupree could have killed you.”
“You couldn’t have stopped me. She was my mother and I couldn’t let her steal from the queen. The queen was the only person at Versailles who was kind to me. She was all I had during those years. I…think I must love her, Jean Marc.” She laughed shakily. “I’ve never admitted I loved anyone before. I was always too frightened.”
“Frightened?”
“Love hurts…” She wished the wind would stop its howling. The sound made her feel hollow inside. “I don’t want to love her. Isn’t it queer you can love someone who doesn’t really love you? You’d think life would be more fair than to let that happen. And it’s all my fault. Even as a little girl I knew I shouldn’t love a butterfly.”
“Sometimes you can’t help loving the wrong people.”
She scarcely heard him. “And you said a butterfly shouldn’t be allowed to rule the greatest country in Europe. Well, she’s not ruling it now, is she?” The tears were running down her cheeks again and she impatiently wiped them on his shirt. “I don’t know why I’m crying. I suppose I keep getting my mother and the queen mixed up in my thoughts. It’s foolish to weep. There’s no reason. I couldn’t expect the queen to love me, and my mother didn’t even like me. Don’t you see how stupid I’m being?”
Jean Marc didn’t answer, he merely held her and gently stroked her curls until she finally drifted off to sleep.
Dupree heard a scurrying among the rocks, and panic shook him wide awake. The roaches. The roaches would get him.
He turned over on the rock and then screamed with agony.
Bone jutted out of his shoulder, gleaming white in the moonlight.
Blood gushed from the wound in his side.
He was dying.
He heard the scurrying again.
No, he couldn’t die. If he was still, they’d be all over him. In his mouth, in his hair…
He wadded the tail of his shirt and stuck it in the wound.
Pain again.
He opened his mouth and howled.
Agony shot through his face, something was smashed in his jaw.
He began to crawl toward the softer earth beneath the trees, away from the roaches beneath the rocks.
His left leg was broken; dragging it over the rough ground made him dizzy with pain.
He couldn’t stop.
He reached the trees and lay whimpering with anger and pain. Why had his mother done this to him when he had wanted only to please her?
No, it wasn’t his mother this time. It was the others.
He heard the scurrying again. Were they really there or was it his imagination? It didn’t matter. He couldn’t take the chance. He started to inch up the hill. Light. He had to get to the light. They wouldn’t follow him into the light.
He couldn’t die there in the darkness.
He knew well the creatures of the night.
If he lay still, they would seek him out and devour him.
NINETEEN
Ithought we were going back to Cannes, Jean Marc.” Juliette’s hands closed on the rail as she gazed at the tall, round turrets of the splendid château set like a jewel on the island off theBonne Chance’s bow. “I told Catherine we’d come back to Vasaro before we went to Paris. Why are we here at the Ile du Lion?”
Jean Marc turned to watch the sailors lower the longboat into the turbulent sea. “There are things I must have packed and taken away from here. The furnishings, the journals, my father’s paintings.”
