Why Kings Confess

Chapter 50

Alexandrie Sauvage was hunkered down beside the entrance to Gibson’s surgery when Sebastian walked up to her. She had her head bent, her attention focused on the bandage she was wrapping around a ragged child’s finger. He knew she saw him, for she stiffened. But she didn’t look up, saying to the child, “Next time, Felicity, remember: Geese bite.”

The little girl giggled, thanked her prettily, and ran off to join the gang of urchins waiting for her in the shadows of the Tower.

Alexandrie Sauvage rose slowly to her feet and turned to face him. “Why are you here?”

“We need to talk.”

The wind fluttered the locks of dark red hair framing her face, and she crossed her arms at her chest as if she were cold. She made no move to step into the surgery, but simply stared back at him with wide, unblinking eyes.

He said, “Why didn’t you tell me that Damion was only your half brother?”

“‘Only’? You say that as if our different mothers should make him somehow less important to me. Is that what you’re suggesting?”

“No. I’m suggesting the fact that some people believed him to be the Lost Dauphin of France might have had something to do with his murder. Why the bloody hell didn’t you tell me?”

“Mother of God; why would I bring up some ridiculous, decades-old rumor? Damion was my brother-my half brother, if you will. He was no Bourbon.”

“Are you so certain?”

“Yes!”

“How old were you when your father brought Damion home?”

Her eyes glittered with animosity. “Fourteen.”

“Yet you had never seen him before?”

“No. I did not even know he existed.”

“You didn’t find that odd?”

“Then? Of course. Now?” She shook her head. “No. His mother was a noblewoman. The birth would have been seen as something shameful, something to be hidden. Her parents cut off all contact between her and my father.”

“Did your brother ever talk to you about his mother?”

“Not really. He remembered little of their life before prison. When the trauma of one’s life becomes too great to deal with, the mind sometimes ceases remembering it.”

“Was his ordeal traumatic?”

“He and his mother spent years in prison, without light or proper food, in conditions considerably worse than those endured by Marie-Therese. Then his mother was torn from his arms and killed. He never completely recovered from the experience, either physically or mentally. He had dreadful nightmares, and his legs were always weak-it’s why he was never able to serve as a physician in the French army.”

“And why he hated the dark?”

“Yes.”

The implications of that fear and the knowledge of how he had met his death weighed heavily in the silence between them.

Sebastian kept his gaze on her face. “Your father has never said anything to suggest that he might have been involved in an attempt to save the Dauphin from the Temple Prison?”

“Good God, no! How many times must I tell you? Damion was my brother.”

“Did your brother know about the speculation that he might in fact be the Lost Dauphin?”

“Of course he knew. Nothing would make him more furious.”

“Sometimes anger is a product of a refusal to believe the truth.”

“Not in this case.”

She went to stand beside an ancient stone watering trough set in front of the stepped-back facade of the neighboring house. She still had her arms crossed, as if she were hugging herself, and her features had taken on the flatness of those who look into the distant past.

She said, “When my father performed the autopsy on the body of the boy in the Temple, he removed his heart. For nearly twenty years now he has kept that child’s heart in a crystal vase in his study. Why would he do that if he knew the boy was an imposter? If he knew that the real Dauphin was alive and masquerading as his own son?”

“Perhaps he feared that he himself might have been deceived. I doubt the plan of substitution was his own. Knowing that he was simply one player in a much larger plot, he may not have known whom to trust. Whom to believe.”

“And so he took the heart on the off chance the dead boy might indeed have been the real son of Louis XVI? Is that what you’re saying? But if what you’re suggesting is true, then why not tell his own children? Why not tell Damion himself?”

“For your protection, perhaps?” said Sebastian. “The very fact that he kept the child’s heart suggests to me that your father retains some royalist sympathies. Did Damion?”

“Hardly. He despised the Bourbons.”

“As do you.”

“As do I.”

She stared off down the lane, to where the children were now tossing withered cabbage leaves at a pig in an effort to capture its interest. Her face was set in tight, hard lines. But he could see the telltale tic of a muscle along her jawline.

He said, “In a sense, it doesn’t really matter whether your brother was the Lost Dauphin or not. All that matters is that someone believed he was-someone who considered him a potential threat to the current line of succession to the French throne. A threat to be eliminated.”

She brought up one hand to press the fingertips against her lips. “You’re saying that’s why they took his heart? Because they thought he was a Bourbon? What are they planning to do with it? Enshrine it someday in the Val-de-Grace? As if he were another martyr of the Revolution rather than a man they themselves murdered?”

“I suspect they do consider him a martyr of the Revolution.”

“And the colonel with the French delegation? Why kill him? Why gouge out his eyes?”

“To disguise the true motive behind Damion Pelletan’s death, perhaps? To frighten Vaundreuil into abandoning peace negotiations that might end with Napoleon still on the throne of France? I’m not sure.”

She dropped her hands to her sides. “Who? Which of the Bourbons do you think was behind this?”

“I don’t know.”

She studied his face, her eyes hard and searching. “I don’t believe it.”

When he said nothing, she expelled her breath in a harsh rush. “I keep going over and over that dreadful night in my mind. The bitter, numbing cold. The glitter of the ice. The echo of our footsteps in the stillness. I keep trying to remember something-anything-that might help. But I can’t.”

“You said you thought you heard footsteps behind you, in the lane.”

“Yes.”

“One set of footsteps or two?”

“Only one. Or at least, only one close at hand. There may have been others, farther in the distance.”

“A man’s footsteps, or a woman’s?”

“A man’s. Of that, I am certain. Why do you ask?”

“I found the prints of a woman’s shoe in the alley.”

She shook her head. “If there had been a woman there, I would have known it-I would have felt it.”

Another man might have questioned her assurance, but not Sebastian. As acute as his senses of sight and hearing were, he had learned long ago to rely even more on those senses to which language had as yet given no name.

She said, “Surely you’re not suggesting that Marie-Therese of France or one of her ladies stalked my brother through the wretched alleys of St. Katharine’s and thrust a knife into his back?”

Sebastian shook his head. He didn’t believe even Lady Giselle would do her own killing. She would leave the dirty work to men like the dark-eyed assassin who had attacked Sebastian outside Stokes Mandeville, a man Sebastian had once assumed was English but whom he now realized could as easily be a Frenchman who had lived the last twenty-odd years in this country, losing all trace of his native inflections.

Yet he found himself coming back, as always, to that bloody imprint of a woman’s shoe. And he was aware of a conviction that he was still missing something terribly important.

And that time was running out.