“Come along, children,” said the governess. “Jeannette will get you out of your outdoor things and then you can have a story.”

In a shot, Pierre-André was away, scrambling up the stairs. “Jeannette! Jeannette!”

“Gently!” the governess called after him, and, for a wonder, Pierre-André actually checked his vociferous progress. For about two seconds.

Gabrielle looked to her new governess. Without a word, the governess took a book off the pile in her arms and handed it to her. Quietly, Gabrielle followed her brother up the stairs.

“Sir,” the governess said, and dipped a curtsy as she turned to go.

The obeisance didn’t suit her. The pretence of humility sat uncomfortably with her, like a garland of flowers draped across steel. There was something akin to armor about the stern gray of her dress. It fit snugly against her back, emphasizing the resolute line of her spine.

It bothered him that she felt the need to curtsy. It needled him deep in his republican entrails.

“If you would, Mademoiselle—” What was her name again? Worse and worse that she was a member of his household and he couldn’t even remember her name, just her position, as though she were a piece of furniture, something fungible, designed for his service.

It had been something to do with gray. Gray like her dress and the confining stone of the Abbaye. Gris. Yes, Griscogne, that was it.

“Mademoiselle Griscogne?”

The governess paused on the second step. She turned back to him, her face carefully expressionless. André wondered what she was really thinking. Nothing complimentary, he suspected.

“Yes, sir?”

“Tell Jeannette to send down a coffee and a headache powder to my study. I know she has them,” he said.

“I shall do my best to extract them from her, sir,” Laura said.

The faint outlines of a smile altered the tired lines of her employer’s face. “Without thumbscrews, if you please,” he said, and turned to go.

Laura paused, one hand on the banister. She thought that was a joke. She hoped that was a joke. With one who worked for Fouché, one couldn’t be quite sure. Thumbscrews might be a requisite part of the job description.

For a moment, there, she had thought he intended to use them on her.

That had either gone very well, or very badly. She wasn’t quite sure, but she did know she could use a headache powder of her own. Her ears were ringing, either from the prolonged exposure to cold or to Jaouen; either one would have the same effect. She seemed to have forgotten to breathe for the duration of most of that interview.

But he hadn’t sacked her. Whatever else had happened, he hadn’t sacked her.

This was, however, shaping up to be the oddest relationship she had ever had with an employer, and that included the viscountess who believed she was the reincarnation of Cleopatra. Laura’s employer had spent most of her time draped across a sphinx in the salon trailing diaphanous draperies, but she had left Laura to do what she would with the children, who were named, appropriately enough, Mark and Anthony.

Laura watched discreetly as Jaouen walked briskly through a door at the far end of the hall. Even as visibly tired as he was, his movements vibrated with purpose. His study must lie that way, and in it whatever papers he had brought back from the Abbaye. By tomorrow, those precious papers would already be back at the Prefecture, out of her reach. She needed those papers and she needed them now, before Jaouen took them away with him again.

Jaouen had just given her the perfect excuse.

Laura paused on the threshold of the schoolroom as the germ of an idea began to form.

Jeannette, misinterpreting Laura’s hesitation, jerked her head to the left, to a door all but concealed in the paneling. “I put your bag in there.”

“Thank you,” said Laura, and went where the nursery maid had indicated.

It must have been a dressing room in a more affluent time, back before the two large chambers next to it had been requisitioned as nursery room and schoolroom respectively. A fanciful, if faded, scene of elaborate birdcages, brightly colored birds, and lush foliage covered the walls, attesting to the taste of the last Comtesse de Bac. The dressing table was still in place, its ornate, gilt-framed mirror propped over a table topped in delicately veined marble, as was a grand armoire with curving ornaments on top, but a narrow bed had been shoved into one corner of the room, made up with sheets, a blanket, and one very flat pillow.

Laura stood in front of her new bed in her new room and pondered her options. The idea was risky, but it might just work.

Opening the armoire, Laura reached for her carpetbag.

Yes, there it was, among a jumble of similar remedies: a small twist of white powder. It was always best to keep dangerous items out in the open, among similar objects, or at least so the Pink Carnation said. The sleeping draught had been designed to look like an innocent packet of headache powder, just as the powerful emetics next to it had been disguised as bottles of stomach tonic.

Dosing Jaouen with an emetic that would have him clutching his stomach and writhing would certainly part him from his papers, but just might cause some suspicion. Maiming one’s employer was generally not a wise way to go, especially when one’s employer had daily access to sophisticated instruments of torture. But there was nothing at all out of the ordinary about an already exhausted man succumbing to sleep within a reasonable interval after taking a headache powder. The powder, her tutors in Sussex had told her, generally took about half an hour to take effect. One packet should put a man to sleep for at least a few hours.

Laura hoped she wouldn’t need that long.

With hands that were surprisingly steady, Laura tucked the packet away into her left sleeve. The fabric pressed it snugly against her wrist. There were benefits to unfashionable attire.

In the brightly lit schoolroom, Pierre-André was occupied building a castle out of blocks under the supervision of Jeannette, who was furiously knitting away.

“Pardon me,” said Laura. “Do you have any headache powders?”

Jeannette’s needles clacked together with manic speed. “One day with them and you’re already calling for headache powders?” Her tone clearly expressed what she thought of effete Paris governesses who couldn’t even handle two darling angel children for one day without taking to their beds.

“Not for me,” said Laura. “For Monsieur Jaouen.”

She almost added “your employer,” but held her tongue. She needed Jeannette right now, even if Jeannette didn’t know it, and it would be easier not to antagonize her.

Clack, clack, clack went the needles. Jeannette gave her a narrow-eyed look. “And why would you be bringing headache powders to the master?”

“Because,” said Laura, “he appeared to have a headache.”

This irrefutable logic was wasted on Jeannette. Adding one and one, Jeannette arrived at forty-two. Stabbing at the wool, she said warningly, “If you’re thinking of wriggling your way into the master’s affections . . .”

Laura laughed at the sheer absurdity of it. “Can you imagine me as the wriggling kind?” If seduction were what the mission called for, she would still be back in London, listening to talentless adolescents plunking out Italian airs on the pianoforte.

She conjured up Jaouen’s unshaven, hard-featured face, his thoughts and feelings guarded by more than just a pair of glasses. One might as well attempt to seduce a block of granite. Even if she were the seducing kind, which she most decidedly was not.

“I assure you, I do not, er, wriggle.”

“Where are you from?” demanded the nurse. Laura recognized the abrupt question for what it was, a grudging olive branch and, in its own way, an apology.

“I was raised mostly in Paris.” Both policy and politeness demanded that she answer, but Laura could feel the paper with the drug scratching against her wrist, urging haste.

“But what about your people?” Jeannette prodded.

Laura twitched her sleeve down further over her wrist. “My father was from the Auvergne.”

Exactly what he had been was another story entirely. He liked to claim that he was the illegitimate offspring of a noble family of that region, but Laura suspected that was nothing but a fairy story, part of the legend he had built around himself until he himself believed it. From what Laura had managed to glean, her father was, in fact, the unromantic offspring of legally wed petit bourgeois with a small legal practice somewhere in the Auvergne.

“Southerners.” The nurse’s Breton accent thickened as she said it with the northerner’s contempt for those lazy, immoral souls down south.

Laura couldn’t resist needling her just a bit. “My mother was Italian.”

Her mother really had been the illegitimate offspring of a noble family, the daughter of a Venetian aristocrat and a professional courtesan. She had been everything Laura’s father had wanted to be.

“That accounts for your looks, then.”

Laura didn’t bother to explain that her mother had been Northern Italian, fair-skinned and blue-eyed. Her dark looks were entirely the legacy of her French father. “Or lack of them?”

There was nothing like a bit of self-deprecation to soften up a crusty old servant. “Now, now,” said Jeannette, her voice and joints cracking as she laid aside her knitting and heaved herself up by the arms of the chair, “I didn’t say that. I’ll get you your headache powder. It’s a kind thought,” she added grudgingly.

“The children will be happier if their father is happier,” Laura said piously. No need to tell her that Jaouen had requested it.

“Paris is no place to be happy,” said Jeannette darkly, motioning Laura to follow her as she creaked her way across the nursery. “He’s not been happy since he came to Paris, and the children can sense it, poor lambs. He would have done better to stay with them at home and not come gadding about these fancy foreign places.”

Hiring fancy governesses. “How long has he been in Paris now?”

Jeannette clicked her tongue against the back of her teeth. “On to four years now. Or was it five? Miss Julie died in ninety-nine, and he didn’t stay long after.”

From the choice of address, Laura assumed it was a fairly safe guess that Jeannette had been with Mme. Jaouen before her marriage—most likely Mme. Jaouen’s own childhood nurse. The story made a compelling picture: the grieving widower fleeing the gravesite, traveling halfway across the country rather than be faced with the daily reminder of his loss.

Torturing Royalists probably did make for an excellent diversion from grief, Laura told herself caustically. She had no special sympathy for the old regime, but she did have rather an objection to the breaking and grinding of limbs.

Laura said what she was expected to say. “He must have loved her very much.”

“Everyone loved Miss Julie,” said Miss Julie’s old nurse. “Here’s your headache powder.”

“Thank you.” Laura took the small packet of white powder in a steady hand. She could feel the other packet, the hidden one, pressing against her left wrist. “I’ll take it down to Monsieur Jaouen right away.”

“You’ll want to give it to him with coffee,” Jeannette called after her. “He likes his coffee.”

“Thank you,” said Laura again, and, with a purposeful tread, went in search of the kitchens to fix some coffee.

Chapter 6

Laura balanced her tray on one hip as she knocked on the door of André Jaouen’s study.

“Yes?” called an impatient voice from beyond the panel.

Not exactly “come in,” but Laura chose to take it as such. Grappling for the door handle, she managed to turn it without losing her perilous grip on her tray. The door lurched open four inches as the crockery clattered.

The study was as sparsely furnished as the rest of the house, boasting only a desk and a cheap set of bookshelves, crammed with a disorderly collection of volumes of varying height and girth, all with cracked spines and blurred bindings that testified to their having been read again and again. Whatever expensive art had once decked the walls was long gone. The only decorations in the room were a crayon drawing of two children and a framed broadside of The Declaration of the Rights of Man, browning and cracked beneath its protective glass.

Laura could hear the scratch of Jaouen’s pen as she pushed her way into the room. He was writing busily, an untidy sheaf of papers fanned out to one side as he wrote industriously on another, his short-cropped head bowed. He had a cowlick in the back, like Pierre-André’s.