A Refuge Assured Read online

  Sybille wailed openly now, like a child. “My sister!” She sobbed with fresh grief, exposing the gaps in her mouth where several teeth had fallen out.

  Vivienne pressed her lips together, bracing herself against the tide of sorrow. She had heard that it was possible to die of a broken heart. If that was true, how much longer could Sybille survive a heart that broke every day, with the same ripping force as if it were the first time? Vivienne’s desire to steel herself was pierced by pity, yet again.

  If she left Sybille, the former courtesan would not comprehend that her daughter had abandoned her, as Sybille had abandoned Vivienne to be raised by Rose. But Sybille would understand that she was alone, and despite everything, that was not something Vivienne could countenance.

  Tears gathering beneath her chin, Vivienne gathered Sybille’s failing forty-five-year-old body into her arms and rocked the bewildered child trapped within. What could cheer her? How could Vivienne ease her pain?

  With a shudder, Sybille’s sobbing faded almost all at once. “What . . .” She shook her head, clearly having forgotten why she was crying. It happened often. “I am sick to death of this place! Come, dress me in my green-striped polonaise, the one that matches my eyes. Where is my hairdresser? I want to be with my friends. Are they calling for me?”

  Moving to the window, Vivienne drew back the drapes, and the room filled with the colorless sunlight particular to late March—or Germinal, as the new government now called it. She budged open the sash, and wind swept over her, damp and raw. It smelled of the Seine River several blocks away. Muted voices of fishermen mingled with those of the market women along the quays.

  Sybille’s rose above them. “Do you see my friends there?”

  Leaning on the windowsill, Vivienne peered down at the slush-slick street, still dotted with islands of unmelted snow. From the north, a black horse pulled a tumbrel carrying six more victims for the “national razor,” hair shorn to their necks. Around the wooden cart marched a crowd of sans-culottes, named for wearing revolutionary trousers rather than aristocratic breeches. Red caps waving in the air, their cheers ricocheted between the buildings, just as they had during Rose’s transport. Several young ladies had joined the dark parade, laughing, their hair cropped as short as the soon-to-be-executed, and wearing bloodred ribbons tied at their necks in the style à la victime. Everyone but the condemned wore cockades—it was now illegal to be seen without one.

  “Well?” Sybille pressed. “Are they calling to come up, or shall I meet them below?”

  “They aren’t there.”

  A pout. “They hate me, I know it. I’ve been forgotten.”

  Vienne spared one more glance at the street below and found her errand boy, Thomas, grinning up at her. She held up one finger, signaling she’d meet him at her door soon.

  “I’ll be back in a moment, Sybille. Thomas is here with some food.” Vivienne tucked the coverlet back up under the sick woman’s chin before gliding out of the boudoir and into the receiving salon.

  Brushing past the sofa, Vivienne skirted an ivory game table and opened the door from the apartment to the hallway. Wind rushed through from the window left open in the boudoir, swinging the wrought-iron birdcage that hung in the corner, long since empty of the songbird it once held.

  “Bonjour,” Thomas mouthed, theatrically tiptoeing through the hallway, demonstrating that he remembered his vow of discretion.

  Vivienne waved him inside and shut the door behind him.

  “A nice harvest for you today.” Beaming, he produced wrinkled apples from his bulging pockets along with a paper-wrapped wedge of cheese. The baguette in his arms he presented to her as if it were a ceremonial sword.

  Stifling a laugh, Vivienne dropped into a deep curtsy and accepted the offering, then set the food on the turquoise-paneled commode. “Merci, citizen.” She pressed a few sous into his palm, adding a tip to the agreed-upon wage for his errand.

  “Don’t you ever get out yourself?” Thomas asked. “Seems like, with the weather turning to spring, you ought to like a bit of fresh air.”

  “I like being here,” she told him. With lacemakers still in danger all over the city, she could not risk being caught, for Sybille’s sake. Vivienne swept the salon with a glance. It was her sanctuary and her prison, both. It was her entire world, when outside these walls, all of Europe, it seemed, was at war with France.

  Thomas nodded, and his red woolen cap slipped forward over one eye. He shoved it back in place over his unkempt brown hair. “I’d like it here, too. Lucky you found it first.” Likely he assumed Vivienne had improved her station by moving in as soon as the aristocratic owners fled for their lives. But Sybille had never been an aristocrat—she had only served them, first as a fourteen-year-old girl in the opera chorus, and soon after as a courtesan. The fancy furnishings, financed by former lovers, did not change the fact that she’d always been an outsider.

  Stepping on the heels of his shoes, Thomas peeled them off and left them near the door. One stocking hung halfway off his foot as he crossed to the globe by the sofa and spun it with one finger.

  If only time could move as quickly, Vivienne mused. If only the revolutions of the earth would end the revolution’s Reign of Terror. But terror, declared a man named Robespierre, was the order of the day, a virtue of the new French Republic. And so his Committee of Public Safety worked with neighborhood surveillance groups to execute France’s own people. But she smiled for Thomas, rather than give voice to such thoughts. For who was to say he would not accept a sum of money for reporting her dislike for the government?

  The corner of a muddied envelope peeked from Thomas’s back trouser pocket. She hardly believed he was receiving mail.

  “Thomas, do you have something else for me or Sybille? A letter, perhaps?”

  He wheeled around. “Right. I forgot.” Mouth screwing to one side, he fished out the envelope, shrugging as he handed it over. “I found it downstairs. Must have fallen from the postman’s bag.”

  She slid her thumb beneath the flap of the envelope. “Unsealed?” She eyed him and his bonnet rouge—a political symbol worn by revolutionaries. Did Thomas lean more toward their camp than she realized? “Do you know your letters, mon ami?”

  With a smile she could not read, he trotted back to his shoes and stepped into them. “Au revoir, citizeness. I’m off to watch the beheadings.” With a salute, he turned and let himself out of the apartment, whistling the tune to “La Marseillaise” as he marched away.

  Vivienne closed the door. Locked it. Lowered herself onto the damask sofa, the globe beside her slowing to a halt. The envelope was addressed to Sybille in round, curving letters. Feminine. She removed the letter within.

  Come with me to America, she read. Meet me in Le Havre. I have found a way for us to escape what our dear country has become. It is not too late, but waste no time in coming.

  After naming a pension where she would wait in the coastal city, the missive was signed with a single initial: A. Sybille’s friend Adele, perhaps.

  Vivienne brought the paper to her nose and closed her eyes, inhaling deeply. Faintly, she thought she smelled the sea, and longing swelled in her chest. She read the letter once more. Escape. The word leapt off the page, and her heart beat as if to be free of the bars that caged it.

  The clock on the mantel ticked moments away as Vivienne stared at the globe beside her. There was France. There was Paris, a mere finger’s width from the Normandy coast. And there was the Atlantic Ocean. Her finger traced its curve, stopping on the east coast of America. It’s not too late. Wasn’t it? Whoever wrote this letter could not have known how far Sybille’s disease had progressed. Too far for hope, the doctor had said.

  And whoever may have seen this knows we have reason to escape.

  Thomas’s parting grin came back to her. He was so eager to see heads roll. Had he read the letter? Would he betray them for coin or bread, a new set of clothes? For the thrill of sending another victim under the blade?

/>   Forsaking the food still on the commode, Vivienne returned to Sybille’s bedside, letter in hand. She was so thin, she barely altered the terrain of the coverlet that draped her form. Kneeling, Vivienne lifted the lid of the empty chamber pot beneath the bed and dropped the missive right onto the painted likeness of Benjamin Franklin. She replaced the lid and rose.

  “Who are you?” Sybille’s foul breath soured the air between them.

  Vivienne bristled, though she knew the mercurial moods were part of the pox at this stage. There would be no discussing the invitation, and there would be no fleeing to Le Havre. She would pass her days and nights here, between these few walls that all but closed in on her. She would not discard her mother. She would pray, though France had banished God to worship Reason instead.

  “I am Vivienne.”

  “Why are you here? Are you a thief, taking my valuables?” It was not the first time Sybille had mistrusted her.

  “Nothing of the sort. I’m taking care of you. Do you want something? We have apples, cheese—”

  “I don’t want you! I want my sister, Rose!” Sybille wailed. “Where is she? I need my family, not a stranger! Oh!” She clutched at her chest, wincing, grunting. Sweat glittered on her sallow brow.

  “Sybille!” Vivienne dropped to her knees beside the bed and gripped her shoulders.

  “I am—dying,” Sybille rasped. “Alone.”

  “No,” Vivienne said fiercely. “You are not alone, Sybille. You must know this. I am here with you, I have never left you. You are not alone.”

  Eyes glazing, Sybille’s head jerked to one side. “But I don’t—know you.” She exhaled the words.

  They were her last.

  Grief touched Vivienne with the flutter of a moth’s wing, and she swatted it away before its presence grew large and sharp enough to slow her down. After she had wrapped Sybille’s body in muslin and summoned the wagoner who collected and buried the dead, a fury rushed in to fill the hollows of her heart and life, a white-hot combustion of hurt and anger and fear. Vivienne had stayed with Sybille, nursed her, wept with her, and in the end, none of that had mattered. Sybille was as alone as she felt herself to be. Vivienne was alone in truth.

  At least until Thomas returned with any citizen who would arrest her on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety, for she was convinced now that he would. Dread turned innocent noises ominous. Pigeons flapping away from the windowsill echoed the frantic beating of her heart. The slam of a door became the fall of a guillotine’s blade in her mind. Now that the only life at stake was her own, she would do what Sybille could not. She would leave the Paris she loved—and the Paris she hated—for a place and future she could not conceive.

  Luggage in hand, she studied her reflection in the salon’s floor-to-ceiling mirror. Sewn into the hem of her gown was the profit she’d saved from selling Sybille’s antique furniture months ago. Her underskirt concealed the valuable lace she’d sewn into her petticoats, the pieces she had managed to save from the shop after Rose’s death. Her cheekbones angled prominently beneath green eyes that stared back with startling intensity. It was the image of Sybille in younger, healthier years, the wanton mother who rejected Vivienne in the beginning and denied her in the end. Vienne could still hear her whisper, “I don’t know you.” No matter how far she went, she could never leave that behind.

  But leave she must, with no further delay.

  Outside, her heels clicked over cobbled streets, and the scurry of rats amplified in her ears. On the next street over, a tumbrel clattered by with a roar. The fragrance of cigars and wine floated from cafés, mingling with the stench of refuse in the gutter. An old playbill skittered into her path for a performance of The Marriage of Figaro.

  Clear the way, Vivienne prayed as she stamped the soiled paper with her heel. Please help. The portmanteau she carried was larger than a valise but small enough that by carrying it behind her wide skirts, it may not attract much attention. What madness was this, she wondered, that the size of one’s luggage could be the difference between life and death? For the trunks of fleeing aristocrats had marked them for the guillotines, sure enough.

  Alarm dogged her steps. Every puff of wind raised the hair on her neck as if it were the breath of someone following her. She kept her head down as she hurried past blocks of many-storied buildings and into the market as it was breaking up for the day.

  “Please,” she said to a woman loading her unsold cabbages. Vivienne had purchased produce from her before. “May I ride with you just past the gates? I’m to catch the water coach outside the city.”

  The woman eyed her. “Haven’t seen you these past many months.”

  “I’ve been caring for my mother. She recently passed. Please, I’ll be no trouble.”

  With a jerk of her chin, the market woman grunted. “Get in. Your bag at your feet, for I’ll not be charged with concealment.”

  Vivienne nodded, her speech buried in hopes and dread. Climbing into the wagon, she sat up front, as if she had nothing to fear at all. Skinny mules pulled them through the city at a pace that stretched Vivienne’s overwrought nerves tighter still. When they passed through plazas where the guillotines were raised, Vienne bridled her revulsion. Recoiling at the revolution’s methods would be enough to guarantee her arrest.

  Time slipped beneath her like sheets of ice on the Seine. While Paris passed by on either side of the wagon, she held tight to her bench and focused only on the mules before her, as if any diversion in her attention could cause the entire venture to break apart.

  “Nearly there.” The woman’s words lashed through Vivienne. Her heart pounded with such force that she feared it would give her away.

  Four market carts waited before them at Paris’s west barricade. Citizen soldiers working for the Committee of Public Safety searched the carts before allowing them through the gates to their farms outside the city. It was great sport, she had heard, for the sergeants to find aristocrats in disguise and send them, at the last moment, to the Tribunal, which would ultimately call for their heads.

  Vivienne tried to control her shaking. The guards numbered twice what she had expected. Some sat on casks, drinking to make the job more amusing. Laughter pelted her ears, from soldiers and wagoners alike. Up ahead, a scuffle. Jubilant shouts. A soldier kicked a barrel onto its side, then rolled it from a wagon to the ground. Out from his hiding place tumbled a man in women’s clothing, cheeks caked with rouge.

  “Two ruses at once, and neither good enough!” shouted a guard, pouncing on his prey. The man would lose his head tomorrow, while women knitted and gossiped as they watched.

  God. It was all Vivienne could pray. Why had she packed a portmanteau? Was it too late to kick it from the wagon? Too late to rip the lace from between her petticoats and throw it all in the Seine? Fear stole her wits. Too late, too late. The words thundered in her ears with her pulse.

  A sergeant approached the wagon.

  “Relax,” the market woman beside Vienne whispered.

  Vienne nodded.

  And suddenly, the soldier was right beside her. “Vivienne Rivard?”

  Her name on his lips sliced right through her. “Félix,” she gasped. She was exposed. He knew her. He knew she’d made lace, and most likely believed that a crime. “Please,” she whispered. “Let me go.”

  Félix looked past her, nodding a greeting to the market woman, then turned once more to Vivienne. Scarcely could she believe that this man had ever promised his enduring love to her. But that was years ago. And they had not parted well.

  His eyes glinted as he regarded her. Desperately, Vivienne scrolled through her memories of him, searching for tenderness and decency. When they were children, Félix had dried her tears when she’d torn her dress climbing—and falling from—a tree. Another day, poor though he was, he gave her his last coin so she could make a wish and throw it in a fountain. When they were older, they had crouched beneath the windows of the opera house, listening to Mozart’s music in the shadows of a sum
mer night. He had said he loved her, with words and kisses that had stolen her very breath.

  It didn’t last.

  Félix had changed, even before the revolution began. The hunger and intensity with which he viewed Vivienne, she realized, was how he saw the world. With eagerness sharp as a blade, ever convinced that his way was right.

  “Out.”

  She gripped the hand he offered and held on even when both feet were on the ground. “Please,” she said again. “Have mercy.” God in heaven . . .

  The cabbage woman stood on the other side of the mules, watching Félix lift and shove at her wooden crates of vegetables in a routine search. Returning to the bench at the front, he glanced at the portmanteau no longer obscured by Vivienne’s skirts. His gaze swung to hers.

  “Where are you going, citizeness?” But his voice was quiet enough that he didn’t attract attention. “Without your aunt?”

  Vivienne’s mouth went dry. “She was arrested already and killed,” she managed.

  Something twitched over Félix’s face, something that might have been sympathy or regret, if such emotions still lived in him. She prayed they did. She prayed he remembered that he’d been fond of Tante Rose. That he had once adored Vivienne, or seemed to.

  Aching for a father’s affection, she had wrapped herself in Félix’s instead, and he’d been more than willing to fill the gaps in her heart. “It’s all right, ma belle,” he’d whispered in her ear. “You don’t need a father when you have me. I will love you and protect you forever.” The irony stabbed. Now it was Félix who might send her to her death.

  “I’m sorry.” His words puffed white in the bitter cold, a ghost of his former sensitivity.

  Vivienne’s hood slipped back in a gust of wind. With trembling fingers, she pulled it back into place and fisted the fabric beneath her chin. “For what?”

  He glanced at a soldier searching a wagon of unsold onions. As he stepped toward Vienne, the hard line of his jaw tensed. “For everything. The loss of your aunt. The pain I caused you.”