Prologue

September 1, 1792

rue du Four

Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris

“M adeleine? Madeleine!”

Papa was yelling up the stairs, crazed, in a rush.

Vivi’s mama put a hand to her forehead. “Oh, he must not scream,” she moaned to the three girls. “The servants will hear and run for those brutes in the tribunal!”

But Papa kept shouting for Mama.

Vivi glanced at her older sister, Diane, who shook her head at her. They both knew Vivi’s mama was the only person who could ever calm their father.

“Madeleine! Ma chou chou! ” Papa called her to him. Then, of a sudden, he stood—his arms wide and his hands to the frame—and paused in the doorway.

Mama threw down the gown she was folding and ran toward him. A hand to his cheek, she whispered. “ Monsieur , be quiet, please. You will awaken all in the house.”

Vivi winced. Her mother was right. They had to leave soon and without notice.

“Keep packing,” Diane urged Vivi on a whisper. Her next older half-sister, who was the practical one among the three girls, had already packed her treasured gowns. Di was careful about so much, especially demanding green gowns to enhance her beautiful copper hair and hazel eyes. “We must have all we can carry, and you cannot allow anything to deter you.”

“Ba. All this is froufrou ,” said their oldest sister Charmaine with a flourish of her hands at her clothes piling up in her own large valise. “The only things we need are gold and our jewels.”

Vivi cringed at Charmaine’s impertinence.

Diane scoffed. “Char, this is your role! Tragedienne! ”

Charmaine gave herself airs as a lady to be saved by a handsome prince. “Better than you, ma poule !” she shot back, and spun to their father. “Where are the diamonds? Where did you pack them? We must know!”

Their father glared at his oldest child with distaste at her insolence. His stare was not a new expression to bestow on the fifteen-year-old. “You need to know only how to pack, cherie . Do it.”

Diane raised a brow at Charmaine. “And stop whining.”

Charmaine snapped shut the top of her tiny gold étui in which she always carried her perfume. “Whine? I am the practical one here. Even Madeleine will not admit—” Charmaine was never respectful to Vivi’s mama, always addressing her by her given name.

“Charmaine,” seethed their father, “you try me too often.”

Diane clamped a hand on Charmaine’s wrist. “Fill your valise.”

“You brought these fiends on us, Di, with your visits up the street to the neighborhood committee.” Charmaine had followed Diane to the Section meetings at the crossroads of rue du Four. The members of the Bonnet-Rouge neighborhood section yesterday threatened many in the local area with arrest. Diane had run home and told her father.

The vicomte was a liberal and had supported much of the government reforms…until the past year. He had brought them all to Paris two days ago from the country to get his money and the family heirlooms, but after Diane had told him about the Section’s threat, he had decided immediately to send the family out of Paris.

Charmaine took out her fears on criticizing Diane. “You fancy yourself a sans-culotte , silly girl.”

“And you?” Diane replied. “You were out in the ruelle near the kitchen trying to steal the scullery maid’s beau!”

“Stop this, girls!” Vivi’s mother scolded them.

“No!” Charmaine threw her fanciest fan into her valise and whirled on Diane again. “You’re a princess of the blood. Such a child. You haven’t even had your monthly flux yet!”

“I am old enough to listen and learn the right from wrong of politics,” Diane shot back. “Whereas you wouldn’t know a Jacobin from a Royalist.”

“Thank God, I say.”

“Girls! Girls!” Their father cut his arms through the air. “Stop! We must go now.”

“ Papa ,” Charmaine whined. “I have not finished packing.”

“Unless you wish to wear that gown to the guillotine, girl, you will shove it in your case and run downstairs now!”

Charmaine stamped one foot on the floor. “You are horrid, Papa.”

“I will be a worse tyrant than Robespierre unless you do as you are told!”

Charmaine fumed.

Papa scoffed, then turned on his heel, taking Vivi’s mother, his mistress, by the elbow toward the hall. “Now listen to me, Madeleine. Do as I say…”

“He’s not coming with us,” Charmaine hissed as she sent a glower of hatred toward the door. “I heard him last night. He’s scampering off to Brussels.”

Diane cursed beneath her breath, a usual sign of her frustration with Charmaine’s intolerance for everyone and everything. “He wants us to split up so it is difficult for the committee mobs to track us. Stop being an imbecile, and finish packing!”

“An imbecile?” Charmaine snorted. “Just wait. You will see how right I am!”

“ Mes amis! ” Another person ran up the stairs. The three girls turned to see their young male house guest appear on the threshold.

The tall, lean, dashing Tate Cantrell was everything a girl could want in a suitor. He had the clean, sculpted looks of an artist’s finest work. With a square jaw, arched cheekbones, and wide, flaring eyebrows, he was a handsome creature. Even his coloring was superb, all wavy, rich caramel hair and blue-green eyes that shone like Chinese jade in sunlight and mellowed to turquoise in the shadows of evening.

Vivi adored him. Diane did, too. Charmaine had claimed him as her own the first night he appeared at their chateau. Even the maids giggled and preened in his presence. To his credit and his discretion, because he was so very upstanding, he did not flirt with any of the three sisters nor any of the household staff.

“Are you ready?” asked the breathless Tate, leaning one hand to the doorframe. He had arrived at their country home in Neufchateau to visit them last autumn. He had escaped home and his terrible father in England, only to come to France and be caught in a war and a revolution that named him an enemy and blocked him from returning home. Instead, he remained with the family of the Vicomte de Neufchateau in the eastern department and had become, over the months, their friend. To Charmaine, the young Viscount Carrington, with his large blue-green eyes and a wealth of golden-red hair, was the one she intended to seduce and marry.

“Let him carry me away to freedom on his estate,” Charmaine often boasted to Diane and Vivi. “He will love me. And soon.”

Vivi thought that could be true. Charmaine was lithe, elegant, very beautiful, with hair the color of glistening moonlight and eyes of sapphire blue. Plus, she was older than Vivi by two years and possessed that asset most men talked about. Breasts.

“A second more, Tate!” Diane bounced away to open a bureau drawer and pull out her diary. Then she dropped it into her damask reticule and buttoned the finely crocheted flap. “Now I’m ready!”

He marched to the bed and grabbed Charmaine’s and Vivi’s bags, then reached for Diane’s. “I’ll carry those down.”

“You will not!” Diane batted his hand away from hers.

Vivi called to her little dog, Beau, and scooped him up in her arms. With a hand to the dog’s wicker bed, she took the circular stairs beside Tate. “I’m glad you’ve come, Tate. You’ll calm Mama. She’s nervous about leaving Papa to go by himself.”

At the bottom of the stairs, Tate and she glanced at each other and the sight of her mother and father embracing in the small salon.

Tate took Vivi’s arm and pulled her around to him. “I’ll try to calm her. I will go as far with all of you as the Barrière d’Enfer . Another coach arrives for all to change into. None of you will be noticed.”

“But what do you do?”

“Tomorrow I leave Paris by a different route.”

Vivi shook her head. “No! Come with us!”

He flinched. “I cannot. Someone in the Bonnet-Rouge has learned I am related.”

“The scullery maid?” she ventured.

“Perhaps. I have it from a friend that the local police want me. I refuse to be caught.” He smiled.

Terrified for him, Vivi grabbed his arm. She had often chided him that he was more than their great friend and English nobleman—he was a British spy. Tonight it came back to haunt her as a sad jest—and a deadly idea. “How will you go?”

“Best you do not know, ma petite .”

She clutched him nearer. “I fear for you!”

“Get in the carriage,” he whispered, and dropped a kiss to her hair. “I’ll see you all safe to the road south to the Loire.”

Then he faced the salon where her mother and father held each other and wept. “I’ll get your mother,” he said with sorrow.

Vivi swallowed her fears for all of them and followed her sisters to their waiting fiacre. Papa’s majordom had hired a carriage to take them away from the city. Their own traveling coach, sumptuous and marked with the family écusson , was gone. After King Louis was guillotined in January, Papa had ordered it broken up, the fittings sold to metal workers and the wood burned. He did not want them going about so easily identified.

Charmaine took her time getting inside, hemming and hawing about the narrowness of the cab.

Diane huffed. “Move along, sister.”

Her mother climbed inside.

Vivi paused.

Across the street on the corner stood a public carriage, a fiacre of shabby paint and worn fittings. The nag looked ill and tired. At this hour of the night, it stood alone in the alley, save for their own carriage and two stray cats.

But in the window was the face of a man Vivi had seen before. Yes, she had seen him in the ruelle with the maid—and once with Charmaine. When she spied him, he sank backward into the shadows of the cab.

But Vivi had seen enough. Remembered more. He was a very young, handsome fellow with glistening black hair and bright eyes. Blue or hazel, she could not tell. He had facial contours so sharp one would say they were cut by glass. His only warm characteristic was his sun-kissed Provencale complexion. He was the same man she and Tate had seen speaking with the family’s scullery maid. The one they had overheard early this morning at the kitchen door talking to the maid about when they might meet for a rendezvous. Odd, too, it was, because the maid was far from pretty and the fellow was a delicious-looking devil.

Vivi’s little dog, Beau, yipped at the carriage. He always picked up her distress. She ran a hand over his furry little head.

“Come now, Vivi.” Tate came up to her and followed her line of vision. “Is that—?”

“ Oui , the one with our maid.”

Tate cursed beneath his breath. A hand to her elbow, he said, “Ignore him. Get in. Now. We must leave.”

With a challenging lift of her chin, she gave their observer one last hard look—and got in.

Tate took a moment to speak to their driver. She heard his deep bass giving instructions to stop at the customs barrière south of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. “I will disembark there. You will drive on through the night to Chartres but only on the back roads, just as you were instructed before. D’accord? ”

Vivi heard the driver agree, and in a moment, Tate climbed in and sat down beside her. Across from them, Diane swallowed tears. Vivi’s mother appeared like a statue of marble. Charmaine sat atop her reticule filled with whatever she thought to keep from anyone.

Vivi sniffed. If Charmaine were not her half-sister—and the oldest legitimate one, at that—Vivi would tell her exactly what she thought of her ill-mannered ways. Charmaine was fifteen and should by now know better than to treat all as if she were a princess royal. Their blood might have some Bourbon in it, but it was drops. Charmaine acted as if it flowed pure and blue. And none of it, in any quantity, could save them from the wrath of Robespierre and the bloodthirsty heathens in the local Bonnet-Rouge. It was what condemned them.

Their coachman lashed the horses to a trot and headed past the ruined Saint-Germain-des-Prés Abbaye where so many had been brought to trial lately. Even in the country in Neufchateau, many had warned Papa not to come to Paris. They don’t like aristocrats in the city , many of his friends remarked. The guillotine was employed far too often. Men and women were sent to death within minutes of appearing before twelve judges. Gossip said the accused were given little time to defend themselves. But Papa had not listened. He needed to go to Paris, he said, for those things he had hidden there.

Vivi wondered if those items were as valuable as all their lives. But she could not be so bold as to ask, and Papa would not be so willing as to tell her or anyone what those items were.

The coach picked up speed.

All grew quiet inside.

But the driver had challenges. The mobs were out in force tonight. Darkness gave them courage. Becoming ghouls of the night, they were poor folk who ran amok. They yelled about bread and salt, brandishing their fists and their knives. A few even had pistols.

Their coachman shifted down alleys and went on with dizzying speeds. He reined his horses to a stop with speed far too often, then turned away from barricades, roadblocks piled high with old furniture, crates, and barrels.

Their driver had slowed, turning once, then twice down different, narrower roads.

“He goes north again,” Vivi’s mother rasped. “He should not.”

Tate spoke up. “He’s expert, madame .”

“Is anyone able,” asked Charmaine with disgust, “to outrun a mob?”

Tate had opened his mouth to answer when a roar of shouts rose to their ears.

The five of them stared out their windows.

“Dear God.” Vivi’s mother caught her throat.

A crush of peasants thronged toward them. The driver slowed. Vivi watched, horror stricken. Their man had to stop. He could not simply run them to ground. But she heard him shouting to back off, back off as he lashed his whip at them.

But a few men grabbed at the door, threw bottles at the frame. One cracked a window, then another. Glass splintered into the cab in a shower of sparkling drops.

“Oh, oh!” Mama yelled. “I…I am cut!”

Shards of glass stood straight up out of the backs of her hands.

“Cover yourselves!” Tate shouted as he wrenched off his frock coat and hung it over one window.

Vivi tucked Beau to one side and worked off her shawl. Like Tate, she tried to hang it over the window near her.

Then the door was flung open. All inside gasped.

A man reached inside, his grubby hands big as dinner plates, grabbing and snatching. Catching Mama’s gown.

She yanked it away and hit him with her leather portfolio. But he kept snatching. “The green gown. I want the green girl!”

Vivi caught Diane’s eye. Her sister blinked. Tonight, she had worn her best green gown.

Tate hauled himself up and kicked the fellow in the chest. The man fell backward.

The coach started and stopped in fits. The mob kept up the pace. Yelling and screaming, they rocked the carriage—and it idled.

The door flayed wide, banging against the side of the coach, open and closed. Open and closed.

The same man Tate had kicked reached in again. This time he went straight for Diane.

“Get the door,” Charmaine shouted at Tate as she shrank away from the man who wanted only their sister.

“Fool,” Diane spat at her, and stood to help Tate capture the swinging door.

But two women reached in, pushed him with a great yell, and he fell backward. Splayed on the floor, arms and legs flailing, he tried to turn to get up.

Diane cursed at the women, then reached out to grab the door handle—

But they each grabbed an arm and took her!

“Noooo!” Vivi yelled.

Her mother screamed. Tate scrambled to his knees. To his feet. Braced on the frame, he stuck out his head—and leapt from the cab.

Door wide open, Beau barked and, in one huge jump for so tiny a dog, followed Tate.

Vivi gaped at the loss of all three.

Their driver lashed the horses. But it took a second, or perhaps it was an eternity, to get the animals to move once more.

The sounds of the mob retreated, yelling in whoops of delight.

The coach picked up speed. The carriage door banged closed.

“No, no,” Vivi complained, clutching the hand pull above. She pushed at the door with her feet, jamming them against the wood. She had to get out, help Tate get Diane and Beau.

Her mother curled into a ball and wailed. Charmaine sat, her eyes big as wheels, staring at Vivi.

The coach careened around one corner and down a dark street. Inside the three slid on the benches and careened into each other.

“Help me, help me, help me,” Vivi kept calling to them, working the handle of the door. But the other two women were crying, stunned. And try as Vivi might, the carriage door was locked. Stuck.

Tears scalded her cheeks.

Minutes or centuries later, the coach slowed. All three women braced themselves on the seat.

“Where are we?” Mama whispered.

But staring at the street marked by half-timbered old houses, Vivi knew they must be in the outskirts.

The carriage rattled back and forth to a stop. Vivi banged on the box. Sticking her head near the broken window, she shouted up to their man, “Where are we?”

“ Barrière d’Enfer, mademoiselle. ”

The post road to the south. “You wait?” she asked him, fearing this answer, fearing others might come for those who remained in the carriage.

“ Oui. The rendezvous, mademoiselle. Monsieur le Comte arranged for the change of carriages. I am to wait.”

Her father had told the man to stop here. Yes, but now… Would Tate come? Would he be able to rescue Diane and Beau?

Vivi checked her mother’s gaze. The woman rocked back and forth, moaning. She knew only her fright.

Charmaine’s expression was blank.

They could give no advice. No help. No admonishment to their coachman to drive on or return.

Was it simply best to wait, as her father had planned? Vivi did trust him. She did.

But was the driver telling the truth?

A new fright sent arrows of agony through her.

Was Tate strong enough, wily enough to escape the throngs? Did he have coins on him to hire a carriage to come here? Could he find Diane? Wrest her free? And bring Beau too?

Vivi huddled into her cloak. She would not cry. Would not!

The night grew longer, colder. The wind picked up and buffeted their carriage. Mama sat rigid as stone. Charmaine sneered and complained.

Would Tate find them here? Could he? If he was even still alive. What could one man do against a heinous mob?

Vivi clutched herself more closely. She was cold and hungry. She had to pee.

Had they brought a bourdalou?

She winced. Along with so much else, a porcelain pot to pee in had seemed unimportant, even irrelevant when one’s life was in danger from a mad mob.

She reached inside her pelisse and checked the time. Most precious to her was the large watch pinned to her bodice. Her grandfather’s watch was a sacred piece because he had given it to her days before he died. He pinned it on her dress himself, his palsied hands shaking. “To be noted on days you are happy.”

And note the hour I am terrified, too. She shook it all away. Think. Think!

She leaned out the broken window, careful not to be caught or cut on the glass. “How long did the vicomte say to wait?”

“Until I can no longer, mademoiselle.”

Vivi swallowed her need to scream at him to whip the horses to a trot. To return the way they’d come and find Tate with Diane and Beau in tow.

But she heard no screaming mobs. Saw no one around the corners. Ahead of them were the two white stone buildings of the Barrière d’Enfer . No one was about, which meant the tax collectors had abandoned it, perhaps because they anticipated the mob’s arrival. Maybe Papa knew they would run if there was trouble, and he had chosen this site for their driver to wait for the change of carriage because it was not only identifiable but safe.

“We should go,” Charmaine said.

Vivi’s mother slowly turned to peer at the girl. In Mama’s deadly regard was her answer to Charmaine’s statement.

“He’s not coming, Madeleine!” Charmaine was so irreverent. “They’ve got Papa, I bet. Tate and Diane, too.”

And Beau.

Charmaine fumed now, crossing her arms. “I do not want to go to prison!”

Vivi’s mother narrowed her gaze on the girl. “Be quiet.”

“I don’t—”

“Shut up!”

Charmaine blanched, but soon recovered. “You are fools to think you’ll survive this if we wait.”

Madeleine de Massé, the woman who had been wed to one man and, when a widow, was taken by that man’s older brother as his mistress, clamped one hand over her niece’s and dug her fingernails into the girl’s flesh.

Charmaine flinched.

But Mama did not let go. “If you wish to leave us, Charmaine, do.”

Charmaine opened her mouth.

But Mama flung her hand away toward the door. “Go,” she said through gritted teeth, “and be done.”

Charmaine settled into the squabs. For the first time since they were very small, Vivi watched Charmaine slowly shed tears. Not many. Not for long. And as she came to the end of her little show of despair, their coachman shouted.

Alarmed, Vivi saw another hired coach approach, and it came at dizzying speed. The coachman lashed the reins and the horses scrambled to a stop. The carriage moved forward, parallel to their own.

Commotion inside the cab sounded like someone disembarking.

Suddenly, Tate appeared at their door, peering in their broken window.

With a shout of triumph, he pulled and yanked and finally opened the door and climbed in. Winded, his clothes ripped and filthy, his cheek bloody, he fell onto the bench beside Vivi and handed her the little dog. Beau whimpered and snuggled into Vivi’s cloak.

She leaned over to Tate, her hand to his brow. “Diane?”

“No.” He gulped. The tracks of his tears on his bruised cheeks told her of his own despair. “No. I…I could not. They had her. Gendarmes. Too many of them. And they took her to the tribunal.”

“At this hour?” In the eerie moonlight, Charmaine went pale.

He only stared back at her, his eyes glazed. Then he turned his head toward the squabs and swiped at his face with his knuckles. Presently, he calmed.

Vivi took his hand. She knew how honorable he was, and believed he had done all he could to recapture her sister. If he said he could not take back Diane, then it was so.

At length, she drew away and noticed the cuts on his temple and cheeks. “I have ointment,” she told him. “In my trunk. What else hurts?”

His left hand lay limp and swollen in his lap. He glanced down. “This.”

Vivi gasped. He should have told her before this. What to do? What to do? She unwrapped the scarf around her neck. “Your hand. Is it broken?”

“I don’t know. Hurts like hell,” he murmured, his grimace full of pain.

“Charmaine has laudanum in her reticule in one of her étui. Charmaine?”

The girl pulled away. “It is a small dose. I will need it for my headaches.”

Vivi glared at her. Was there anything in this world more heinous Charmaine could do than to deprive a friend of succor? In disgust, Vivi said, “Very well. I have my medicines in the boot. We can stop.”

“No, we cannot!” Tate shook his head. “We drive on lest they follow. We do not stop, Vivi. We never stop.”