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“Oh, my God! Help!”
“You might pray to the Goddess of Reason, but doubtless she gave up on me long ago.”
He’d lifted her around the waist and carried her back to his chamber. Her back was pressed up against his chest, and for a moment the scent of her—so clean and feminine—made him want to turn her around and kiss her rather than lock her up. But sanity prevailed and he closed one of the cuffs around her wrist, locking it into place. Too late he wondered if she could pick the lock. He wouldn’t be able to leave her alone long enough to have the chance.
“Why, in God’s name, do you have fetters?” she screeched, shaking her head wildly when he pulled her toward the bedpost.
“An opera singer I knew was in a production of Mozart’sDie Entführung aus dem Serail.When the play opens, the ladies are taken by pirates and sold to the pasha, and the three slaves were portrayed in fetters. Stop fighting me. You cannot win.” He made a last heroic effort and dragged her close enough to the post that he was able to secure the other cuff around it. “There.” He dusted his hands. “As I was saying, this opera singer brought these with her when she left the theater one night. She was rather naughty, that one, and—”
Somehow she managed to cover her ears with her hands. “I do not want to hear this.”
“Fair enough. I need another glass of wine. Are you certain you do not wish to join me?”
“I want nothing from you!” she spat out.
He poured himself another glass, eyeing her from across the room. There were worse things than having a beautiful woman cuffed to one’s bed. And she was even more beautiful now, in her dishabille, than she had been when she’d first opened the door and he’d been all but dumbstruck.
Of course, she hated him. That made their present circumstances rather less exciting. He’d never taken advantage of a woman, and as much as he’d missed women these last months, he had no intention of forcing himself on the Englishwoman.
He might, however, persuade her to hate him less. With that in mind, he poured her a glass of wine and walked near her.
“I do not want it,” she said through clenched teeth.
“Duly noted. I will just place it within reach in case you become thirsty.”
“And where are you going?”
“I told you. I need a bath.” And he strode out of the bedchamber.
Laurent, like most things in this newly liberated Paris, had not thought his plans through. Before, when he’d wanted a bath, servants had fetched the water, heated it, then carried it to the tub in his bedchamber. Now he had no servants, no fire to heat the water, and no desire to carry heavy buckets up the stairs. So while he would have liked a bath, he’d washed the stench of the prison from his body the night before, and now he settled for scrubbing his face, chest, legs, and arms with ice-cold water from the well in the courtyard.
It was far from the luxury he’d been used to, but after La Force, Laurent had a new definition of luxury. He looked up at the sky, now a pewter gray. Soon stars would appear, and he would be free to look up at them all night if he so chose. No one would call his name and shove him into a tumbrel in the morning. No bloodthirsty mob would attempt to catch him and stick his head on a pike. No one would make him eat that disgusting broth the guards in La Force called stew.
Tonight, freedom meant he would actually go hungry, but he would do it as a free man. God, but he’d hated prison. The rank odor of the full latrine pails, the foul smell of unwashed bodies in the heat of summer, the impossibility of sleeping in a cell with seventeen other men. He’d paid for a bed and a scratchy blanket, but after the four beds in the cell had been sold for fifty-six assignats a week, the guards gave the floor to those unable to pay.
But now he was free. It might not last. It almost certainly would not last, but by God, he would appreciate it. He looked around his little garden and breathed in the fragrant air. It smelled of dirt and grass, and faintly like baked bread and coffee. He had probably imagined the last two, his mind remembering when he’d taken his breakfast out here when the weather was mild.
He hadn’t ever appreciated that luxury. He hadn’t appreciated anything at all. He’d realized it as soon as he stepped into the salon just inside the building. There was a room he’d had comfortably furnished and yet he had never so much as sat in one of the chairs or stood at one of the windows. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d eaten at the dining table in the room adjoining the salon.
He had other houses with other tables. He didn’t need that one. He hadn’t needed three-fourths of what he’d had, and yet it had never been enough. If coats and art and jeweled shoe buckles could have made a man happy, he would have never ceased smiling.
But he hadn’t been happy, and he’d spent countless nights in La Force, lying awake, listening to the snores of the men around him and wishing he could have another chance. One more chance to stand at his windows, sit in his chairs, and look—really look—at his art.
One more chance for his life to have meaning and purpose. He’d known immediately what that purpose was. He had to save the royal family. It was too late for the king and now too late for the queen, but he could save the children, the heirs of the Bourbon dynasty. Unlike so many others, they’d done nothing to deserve their imprisonment, save being born to a king and a queen.
And Laurent was in a unique position to save them too. He’d been inside the Temple many, many times. He knew it well, had played there as a child. It was as familiar to him as his nursery.
That was why the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel had rescued him from La Force. This Pimpernel was a clever man not only to find Laurent in the Paris prisons, which were near to bursting at the moment, but to realize Laurent would have spent time in the Temple.
God knew it was nothing he had ever boasted about, but anyone who knew his family history might have deduced the fact. And Laurent would have helped the Pimpernel too, if they had been willing to rescue more than just the dauphin. Louis Charles was just a little boy. Of all the crimes of the Convention—and there were many—imprisoning that child was the worst. But Laurent would never agree to free Louis Charles and leave his sister. He would free her or die trying. A surge of restlessness rose within him. It was a feeling he’d had ever since he’d walked out of La Force. He wanted to go to the Templenow. He wanted to take the dauphin and the princess out this minute. He hated that in this new world order he could not simply give orders and do as he wished. He must scheme and plan and wait.
Laurent made his way to the wrought-iron table and sat in one of the chairs, his damp shirt clinging to his skin and making him shiver in the evening air. He regretted that Mademoiselle Blake was involved in this, especially since she almost certainly had no say in who the Pimpernel would or would not rescue. But Laurent didn’t have time to argue with the League, and she had the skills he needed. If she died...Well, what was one more sin on his conscience?
And yet his chest tightened at the thought. Apparently, his time in prison had endowed him with a conscience. He pushed the discomfort away and rose, leaving the dark courtyard to the stars.
Inside, he made his way down to the kitchens and found coal, dried fruit, several artichokes, and containers of preserved vegetables that must have come from his estate in Lyon. He put them all in a basket and carried it back to his bedchamber, stopping on the way to take a brazier from a storage closet.
“Did you miss me?” he asked when he pushed the door open.
