When he saw her, he rose to his feet, simple as a peasant in trousers and his shirt. “This is a surprise.” He took up his jacket as he walked by, and closed a hand around her arm and drew her away, thunderously silent, out of the open room where the men slept. “We can’t talk here.”
In the corridor outside, he pushed brusquely past the men and women gathered in their twos and threes and brought her to narrow stairs that led upward.
He wanted privacy and was taking her off to it, forcefully. In privacy, she could hold on to him. Just hold him. That was not possible in the midst of these bored, curious, and doomed people.
She said, “Were you hurt?” and when he did not answer, “We are of one mind here. A touch and a nod will tell me where to go with you. It is not necessary to drag me as if I were a sullen child.”
His face was unrevealing, as always, and she did not have leisure to tease out signs of what he might be feeling. His muscles and the hold on her arm said he was angry. That was not entirely a surprise. He would be angry she had come here even while he was glad to see her. She was filled with joy, only to touch him, and with her own fear and anger. They were both in the grip of such conflicting emotions, it was amazing they did not fly apart like poorly wrapped parcels.
Men and women sat on the lower stairs, since there were no chairs anywhere. Guillaume glared them aside or pushed past. It was a long climb to an upper hall, dim and bare, lit by one small, high window at the end. Three men had taken the floor at the top of the stairs, casting dice. Two wore the clothing of the poor. The third, a velvet coat and knee breeches, much wrinkled.
“Out.” Guillaume’s tone would have dislodged hungry lions feasting upon an antelope. It had no difficulty removing three dice players from the hall.
He took her halfway down the hall before he halted and let her go. He stood, frowning at her.
“I will not stay long,” she said. “We have only a few minutes together.” He knew this. She was just telling him that she understood as well. “There is no need to glare at me that way.”
“Tell me you’re out of that house.”
“My own house? Yes. Entirely. I have retreated and left it to Cousin Victor. It is very cowardly of me, but I do not have time to deal with him if I am to get you out of this place.”
She laid her hand on his arm. For an instant, he held still, as if he waited while he changed inside, or made some decision, or lost some battle he held with himself.
He reached out to touch her. To take a strand of her hair that had fallen loose. He held it as if it were his first touch of any woman.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he said.
Thirty-seven
VOICES IN THE HALL BELOW BROKE THE SMALL quiet spell they had woven between them.
Guillaume stepped away from her. Marguerite did not catch what he said. She did not think she was meant to. He reached into the jacket slung across his arm, into the pocket that was sewed on the inside, and took out the long pipe he carried with him at all times and, upon rare occasion, smoked.
He took the bowl of the pipe in the flat of his hand. Suddenly, sharply, he knocked it against the wall. It shattered. Fragments of gray-white clay flew everywhere. Among the bits of broken clay in his hand lay thin, dark shafts of metal. He tapped off the last of the clay, peeled bits of white from the small steel rods, and scraped the bent ends clean with his thumbnail.
“And we have lock picks.” Adrian appeared behind them, sudden as a small djinn loose from its bottle. “All with no ingenuity from me.” He glanced at the lock on the door. “I don’t know why I’m risking my neck getting you out of here. You can walk out on your own.”
“Guard the stairs,” Guillaume grunted. “Neither of you should be here.” He scattered the mess of clay chips with his boot, skidding them from one end of the hall to the other. He crouched and poked the first of his metal sticks into the door lock. Then inserted another, exactly beside it.
“I am impressed with your cleverness,” she said.
“I’m just a keg and a half of clever.” He rotated the picks delicately, pulling and pushing them in the lock, large, rough hands doing the deft work so naturally.
“I could do that.” Adrian watched with polite interest.
“Watch the stairs.” Guillaume did not look up from twisting and jiggling picks. The tiny scrape of metal on metal emerged, like the sound of steel mice.
“I could do that faster.”
The lock snicked. Guillaume pushed the door open. He stepped through and pulled her in and closed Adrian’s interested face outside.
Guillaume stood looking at her, breathing heavily. “This is a linen closet,” she told him. Sometimes one babbles of the obvious when there are too many important things to say and one does not know where to begin.
“I know. I talked to one of the nuns. Three of them are locked up downstairs.”
This room was lit by a pair of small, barred windows, high above her head. They had not encouraged the nuns to gaze out upon the city, had they? A low, solid table ran down the center of the room. The shelves on both sides were stacked with neat supplies of sheets and pillowcases and towels. “This will go to the army, I suppose, when someone remembers it. That is why it has not been despoiled. It is surprising, really, the way in which—”
His hand fell upon her, no heavier than a shaft of sunlight. Like sunlight, falling suddenly in the eyes, it shocked her. Could anything be more loud than his plans for her? He turned her and his touch stayed on her, heavy and slow and full of intention.
He took up her fichu and pulled it away from her breasts. The knot she had made in it disappeared in a weak fashion, as if it had not been there at all. “Chipper as a squirrel, ain’t you?”
“I am generally cheerful in the mornings.”
He was vast and beautiful. He could have been one of the first men on earth, the men who lay with goddesses in the morning of the world.
If Greek goddesses could see him like this, they would want him. “It is part of one’s nature, whether one will be lively soon after awakening. The learned speak of the humors of the body. I do not know myself.” She met his eyes steadily. She wanted to be unclothed by him. Slowly. Wanted him to continue in this deliberate way he had begun.
“Humors. That’d be it.” With his fingertips, he enjoyed her hair. It fell into his hands, came loose, wrapped him where he held it. He would get to her clothes eventually. They had very little time, but he was going to make excellent use of it.
“I had a cat once,” she told him, “who was mad as Caligula. Each day at dawn it woke me, attacking my feet under the covers. It had much of the humor of Mercury . . .” Her fichu fell in a swirl to the floor. Her composure was lost with it. She was hot and unsettled inside and not sure what to do, except talk, which was not right either, but she could not seem to make herself stop. “I was speaking of Mercury. Much of the humor of Mercury in my cat. Did you know Mercury is the god of both thieves and travelers? That is why one is so often robbed when one travels.”
“Is that so?” He could have been one of the stone dolmens of the countryside, given life. He was as hard and solid as such stones. Adamant. Determined. In the light from those windows, golden dust motes swirled around his head, circling him as if they had volition and enjoyed him.
His palms lay on the top of her breasts, where her skin was bare. He was . . . not uncertain—nothing he had done since she had first seen him had ever held uncertainty—but holding himself in check. The tendons and bones of his hands spoke of a tension beyond description. He waited, as horses wait, quivering at the starting gate, plucked by anticipation, filled with controlled strength.