Pam Rosenthal (2 page)

“Short print run,” he muttered. “Sorry.”

She didn’t believe him. And a sickening certainty rose inside of her, like a bad taste, all the way up from her belly.

“You came here last, of course?” she asked softly.

“Of course not,” he snapped. “Different fellow covers the route to Nîmes.”

“Don’t be stupid,” she replied a bit more loudly now, and with exaggerated, condescending patience. “I meant, of course, that you came here to my father’s shop after you went to all the other bookshops in Montpellier.

“And I’d wager ten
livres
,” she continued, “that Monsieur Rigaud has gotten everything
he
ordered. And maybe even a little more.”

She knew she had him by the guilty look that crept over his face.

Rigaud. Marie-Laure could hear his suave, insinuating voice. “Take it from me, my boy, Vernet won’t care about the Rousseau. He’s eccentric, you know, a bit of a specialist.” He’d probably slipped him a few extra
sous
, too.

The smuggler raised himself weakly in the armchair. He winced, and she was glad of it. She hoped she’d made him as guilty and uncomfortable as possible.

“You can always complain,” he muttered, “to the directors in Switzerland.”

“We will,” Marie-Laure said grimly. The
Societé typographique de Neuchâtel
accounted for their shipments of illegal books as meticulously as they did their legal ones.

And that should have been the end of it. She should have signed for the truncated shipment and sent him on his way.

But instead she heard her voice rising.

“We’ll complain to them, but right now I’m complaining to
you
.”

Worse and worse. As though his presence somehow shined a bright light on worries and frustrations she usually suppressed.

“Well, you can see, can’t you, what any idiot can see? That we’re poor, that my father has a weak heart, that we’re always in danger of losing customers to that predator Rigaud.”

She couldn’t seem to stop.

“And that
I
wanted terribly to read the Rousseau and now who knows when I’ll be able to.”

She looked him full in the face, at least the part that wasn’t obscured by the eye patch and bandanna, and the cloak muffling him up to the jaw. He looked squarely back at her out of his good eye. Well, it was really a series of looks in quick succession—guilty, angry, amused. For a confusing split second he even looked distinctly lustful, before his features let go of something, like a carnival figure removing a gaudy mask to reveal the wan face beneath. She paused, frozen in bewilderment, while his eye rolled back in his head and he collapsed in a dead faint, tipping over the shaky chair and scattering books onto the floor with a crash.

The peas, Marie-Laure!

She blinked. How long had she been lost in her memories?

“You’ll need to shell them quickly.” Robert, her young colleague in the scullery, tugged at her arm.

Of course. The Duc’s family had to eat tonight as well as feast at tomorrow night’s banquet. Robert had been turning a row of ducks on a spit in the fireplace.

Once her fingers began popping the peas out of their shells it was easy to return to that winter day in Montpellier.

Was he dead? she’d wondered. Not that she’d cared a whit for his safety. But the police would be out, investigating the Baron’s murder. She shuddered, imagining a police inspector finding a dead smuggler on their floor.

His visible eyelid fluttered: no, not dead, thank heaven. She bent over him. Blood seeped through his filthy cloak, staining her apron. She pulled the cloak away. His trouser leg was soaked. He was bleeding, she thought guiltily, all the time I was shouting at him.

The front door rattled; had she forgotten to lock it? No, it was only Gilles. She listened gratefully to the sound of her brother’s key turning in the lock.

Gilles wouldn’t finish medical school for another year, but he’d always had a doctor’s personality—confident, observant, eager to take command and send everybody scurrying to do his bidding.

“Light the lamp, Marie-Laure, for God’s sake.” Her bossy brother chased her away from the man’s side and took her place. “Are there any clean rags? Water heating on the hearth? Bring your sewing basket. And what’s left of the brandy.”

The lamplight shined on Gilles’s carroty hair and cast deep shadows in the hollows of the smuggler’s cheeks. Marie-Laure heard cloth ripping; first the rags and then the bloody trousers. She watched Gilles’s clean, economical motions and listened to his running commentary.

“A wound to the thigh, near the artery. I might need a tourniquet.” None of the rags were long enough. He glanced about for something to tie around the top of the thigh to stop the bleeding. “Your fichu,” he said. The long linen scarf was crossed in front of the low square neckline of Marie-Laure’s dress and tied at the back of her waist. She undid it while Gilles continued to poke and prod, mopping up blood as he went.

“Better, better, not so bad as it looked at first,” he murmured. “Not the artery anyway, but there is some infection that I’ll have to clear out before I sew him up.” He took out his small, sharp knife.

“Odd,” he said now, almost to himself. “It looks exactly like a dueling wound.”

There were really two wounds, he explained. And the more recent one—perhaps from a fall on a rocky path through the forest—had caused the older one to reopen. The older one looked like a dueling wound, though of course it couldn’t be. Gilles supposed it was the result of a knife fight somewhere, perhaps a brawl at an inn. But certainly not a duel; only aristocrats made ceremonies out of their brawls.

The peas were cooking beautifully with a bit of bacon on top of the stove, and Marie-Laure was back in front of the tub of greasy dishwater.

There were no more ink stains to worry about anyway; endless hours of dishwashing had taken care of that. Her hands were red and chapped, with burns here and there from the stove and fireplace. She was no more a bookseller now than he was a smuggler.

She supposed she should have recognized right off that he wasn’t the sort of person to deliver illegal books. Especially given the evidence of his dueling wound. And the eye patch.

She’d threaded a large needle with strong thread and handed it to Gilles.

“Now feed him some brandy,” he said, “so that you can hold him still while I sew him up.”

Gently, he rolled the smuggler from his side to his back. They’d need a good clear space to work in. A pile of books was in the way. Marie-Laure reached across the man’s face to push them aside. A button on her sleeve caught in his bandanna, pulling the eye patch askew.

She flinched, expecting a hollow socket. But he opened his eyes just then, both of them equally beautiful. And for a moment she forgot Gilles’s instructions and simply gazed into a pair of fathomless black eyes. Eyes that had locked on to hers for a heart-stopping instant this afternoon in the library.

“Quickly, Marie-Laure.” Gilles’s voice had been urgent.

“Oh…yes.” A bit dazed, she took the man’s head into her lap.

“Drink, Monsieur,” she said, uncorking the brandy and putting the bottle to his lips. “My brother is going to take care of your leg, but it will hurt a little.”

He smiled up at her, a magical flash of white teeth and finely curved lips punctuated by ironical little lines at his mouth’s edges. The smile was slightly asymmetrical and all the more eloquent for it.
Life is amusing, isn’t it, Mademoiselle
, the smile seemed to say, its mocking, crooked gallantry tugging at her heart.

“‘The most compelling of encounters…’” he whispered hoarsely, before putting his mouth to the neck of the bottle.

He held tightly to Marie-Laure’s hand while he gulped down the brandy. She kept hold of his hand after he passed out, while Gilles cut and sewed, whistling through a broken front tooth and cursing in a comforting monotone. The man’s lips quivered; lines appeared and disappeared at the corners of his mouth. But he’d drunk enough brandy to prevent him from regaining consciousness.

“He’s got a bump on the head from falling. And he’s chilled and damp and has a bit of fever from the infection. But mostly he’s suffering from loss of blood and lack of food,” Gilles concluded. They were tidying up now, scrubbing up the blood and piling the illegal books behind a false partition in the kitchen wall.

“Odd about the eye patch,” Gilles said. “But he might have had an inflammation that has recently cleared up.”

She must have murmured some vague assent.

“And look at this.” Gilles opened the man’s shirtfront. A small signet ring of silver and onyx hung from his neck on a greasy string.

“Stole it, I suppose, perhaps at the same time he got the leg wound. Took it off some aristocrat, by the look of it. Well, good for him, anyway.”

He’d worn the ring this afternoon, on the little finger of the hand that had taken the rattling saucer from her.

“I think he’ll sleep through the night. He can’t move around easily on that leg, so I don’t think we’re in any danger from him. I’ll stay down here in the shop tonight, though, just to be sure. There are some anatomical drawings I need to look at anyway.

“And calm down.” Gilles smiled. “You were a perfect assistant and he’ll be fine.”

Gilles proposed they move him to the spare bed in the kitchen. But that bed was covered with books, in an intricate order Marie-Laure wouldn’t want to reconstruct.

“What about my bed?” she asked.

And when Gilles raised his eyebrows and leered suggestively, she slapped him. “And
I’ll
sleep upstairs in
your
bed, idiot.”

Marie-Laure’s bedchamber was really just an alcove off the kitchen, overlooking the patch of garden behind the house. It smelled of rosemary and lavender; she liked sleeping beneath herbs she’d hung from the ceiling beams to dry. She helped Gilles pull off the man’s clothes and clean him up a little before they squeezed him into one of their father’s much-mended nightshirts. It was a quick, businesslike operation; Gilles needed her help but he was hardly going to let her linger and gape at the fellow. She hadn’t had to gape, though. She’d worked calmly and capably while the lines and shadows, angles and volumes of the sleeping man’s body imprinted themselves upon the deepest, most vulnerable spaces at her core.

He’d been painfully thin and covered with scratches. His long muscles were stark and sinewy, too close to the bruised skin but powerful-looking nonetheless. Her inner eye had followed their lineaments, tracing their elegant diagonals from broad shoulder to narrow waist to…

She lifted a large, grease-encrusted skillet into the water and scrubbed furiously at it. Bad enough that the dark, heavy sex at his center had troubled the margins of her dreams all these months. She was damned if it would interfere with her waking life.

She hauled simmering water from the fireplace to the basin, poured it in, and plunged her hands into it. Too hot. Too painful. Good.

The water cooled. The memory grew bearable.

Gilles had gone upstairs to see to Papa, leaving her to fuss with quilts and pillows. She’d stared down at her bed for what seemed like hours, finally turning away to gather up some clothes to wear the next day. She fumbled with the garments stored in the chest, taking forever to choose a dress and even longer to find a blue ribbon for tying back her hair. Finding a pair of stockings that didn’t need darning became a major undertaking. Her threadbare stock of aprons and fichus was pathetic, she thought.

But finally she had no choice but to turn—with infinite slowness—and look at him again.

The rising moon cast shifting light upon his hands and cheekbones. She wanted to touch him but she was afraid—afraid to wake him, and afraid of what he’d awakened in her. So she simply studied his face as though a schoolmaster had told her to memorize it. She considered how much she liked an aquiline nose on a man, when it was narrow and delicate, with flaring nostrils. She wondered how she’d missed the vulnerable notch at the center of his upper lip. She examined the slight widow’s peak above his high forehead and the tracery of his eyebrows, admiring the graceful arcs dispassionately, as though they were the vaulting of a cathedral.

His black hair fanned out upon her pillow. Well, it would have fanned out, she thought, if it had been clean. It would gleam and catch the light’s rainbows like a jet-black silk fan, if it were clean and brushed. She imagined washing his hair, drying it gently with a linen towel, brushing it until it crackled with electricity. She’d loop a strand of it around her hand like a skein of black silk embroidery thread.

Her breath caught in her throat as though she’d been jolted by the imagined electricity of his hair. Her gasp became a moan and then a long shudder, leaving her face hot and her thighs weak and trembling. She fled the room to take care of Gilles and Papa.

The water in the basin was cold and greasy. Time to empty it and start fresh with hot water from the hearth. Time to forget about him and the naive, impressionable girl who’d stood staring at him—was it only a few months ago? Just a night coach’s ride from here?