Chapter Four

T ate sat with Kane, Lord Ashley, after dinner at Monsieur Jean Lenoir’s house in rue Saint Denis. The merchant financier was one Tate had cultivated to put fair prices on a few French goods to go to Britain. But Lenoir’s second, less publicized, job was the one Tate found more interesting. That was to aid the French army in supplying itself. Others did the same as Lenoir, but it was vital to cultivate them all.

So Tate was here with Kane tonight because he’d been invited and because it added to his social status. Lenoir kept a fashionable house and his chef was renowned. Guests came for the cuisine—and to meet Lenoir’s associates. Few mentioned that the regular entertainment was Lenoir’s wife at the piano or their daughter’s singing—and with good reason. One did not disparage one’s host or his family.

But Tate and Kane had accepted the invitation to dinner, ever happy to pick up nibbles of news about army supplies or troop movements. Tonight, the four military officers in attendance were delightfully inebriated, but as yet, no crumbs of intelligence had fallen from their mouths.

“Too bad,” muttered Tate to his old Eton pal as they took chairs in one corner alone. “I could have stayed home and tended to my knitting.”

Tate’s “knitting” being calculating the value of a recent purchase of surplus French barley to go to Britain. The French crop had been very good this year, and the British needed grain desperately.

“What of your other pursuit?” Kane asked him.

“No word on our famous friend yet,” Tate said. Scarlett had suggested a covert objective for Tate when she assigned him to Paris. He was to search for a school chum of his, Kane’s, and Ram’s who had gone missing a few years ago after visiting Verdun. They all suspected he had been sent to a French prison for counterfeiting, but Scarlett needed to know if he was still alive. “I have begun a plan, but nothing firm yet.”

“And the other problem, you noticed three weeks ago at the theater when you were with me and Ram?”

Tate blew an exasperated breath. Kane knew about his past involvement with the Massé family. Tate had shared little of his desire for Vivienne. But every other fact of Viv’s impersonation of her older sister Charmaine, Tate had told his friend. Yet about the newest—the ugly rumor that Viv was called to an assignation with Bonaparte—Tate had said nothing. In truth, he was furious when the rumor was confirmed over and over by stories in the morning libelles . All of them began with the line that a few nights ago, Bonaparte had summoned the “Divine Massé” to his chambers.

“I follow her each day.” So does another.

Tate had begun his watch that very day after he’d ridden with her along the Seine. She went few places. To a modiste twice. To a chapelier , a hatter, once. She continued her riding three mornings a week to the stables from which she hired the same mare and the same gruff and burly groom. Tate knew it must be a deprivation for her to ride so infrequently. But he concluded the reason was that when she took to the stage five nights a week, she was quite exhausted and preferred to sleep when she could.

“Still not talking to you?” Kane asked.

“I stay well away. But I watch, and I have hired more men to spell me. I hope for news about the other sister. I’ve done my best.” Done my best was code among them for having sent an encrypted message to the offices of Hawthorne & Company. “But I have no clarification.” Scarlett had not replied to him with any information on the whereabouts of Charmaine de Massé. Tate did not fault Scarlett for tardiness or failure. Kane and Ramsey had warned they expected that Fouché read all their correspondence to and from London. Scarlett would respond to Tate only via private courier when and if she had any useful information.

“Well then.” Kane savored a sip of his Armagnac. “Do you know that she was invited to the Tuileries after dark?”

“I do.” Tate’s jaw twitched with anger.

Kane pursed his lips. “May I suggest a change of scenery?”

“Your house?”

“Much more intriguing than my library.” Kane’s ice-gray eyes glimmered as he lifted his glass to drain it.

“That’s hard to imagine.” Tate had a special fondness for his own library. And come to think of it, so did Viv. It was where she’d learned so much Shakespeare by heart and performed so well at Christmastime that Charmaine had taken it up to imitate Viv. Charmaine had left Cantrell Manor in Norfolk and used her knowledge to earn her living on the stage.

“Others begin to leave here,” Kane said, bringing him back to their discussion. “We can follow, then we’ll discover new horizons…and pretend we’ve never seen them.”

“Ah.” Tate laughed, catching a note of the scandalous in his friend’s baritone. “As a happily married man whose wife is enceinte , should you even admit you know of this scenery?”

“Trust is a necessary commodity of marriage,” said Kane with the arch of a black brow. “Besides, this house we must visit.”

“Do we have any official reason to accept?”

Kane leaned forward. “I am often invited. The host is related to a banking family, and I have a large purchase from him I’d like to conclude.”

“More barley?” Tate asked.

“Lyon silk.”

Tate was impressed. He knew one man who handled most of Lyon’s Paris stock. “Is it Montagne you speak of?” One of Paris’s old guard, returned now in the seemingly liberal atmosphere of the Consulate, and yet, by all accounts, even more licentious than he had been before.

“It is. I think we must go, you and I.”

“I hope the music is better.”

“More than that, Tate—my majordom Corsini tells me that two nights ago when the Théatre de la Ga?té was dark, the leading lady was invited to Montagne’s.”

Tate ground his teeth. “Did she go?”

“No, she wrote and told him she would come tonight.”

“Hell.” Tate shot to his feet. “Time we bid our host here good night.”

*

Tate sat in Kane’s carriage as it sped toward the infamous man’s house. He tapped his fingers on his knee, silently fuming about Viv’s recent social activities. The horses could not carry them to ?le Saint-Louis in the middle of the Seine quickly enough. It was one thing for her to suddenly become notorious. Invited to Bonaparte’s suite in the Tuileries after a performance for an assignation, she insulted the first consul after he kept her waiting so long that she rebelled and left. That was an act that lifted her up as independent and endangered her with those in government. Other men would try to conquer her. She would be invited to more parties, other rendezvous, other bacchanals, so that men could test her mettle. This particular salon that Kane took him to was one of those where a young lady of discreet upbringing should never be found.

Tate cursed silently. Viv would leave that house with him tonight. She must. She would not be mauled by such disreputable rogues. If he had to, he’d haul her out over his shoulder.

Why she went irritated him. He knew only one reason why she should go to this man’s house. The fellow was a relation of the banking family who had purchased her family home after they fled and Robespierre lost power. Certainly, buying it back seemed an unimportant goal, given all the years she’d been away. She hadn’t even gone to look at the house on her morning rides. So what she did here, other than acquaint herself with more and more of the beau monde , was a mystery.

Still being a social butterfly might be a means to some end. What could she want?

God knew that Paris offered every pleasure a man—or woman—of means and imagination could want. Since the Bourbons had settled the religious wars between Catholics and Huguenots, improved the bridges and the streets, and encouraged the strolling vaudevillians and street plays, the capital city was home to every titillation one could imagine. In every corner of the city, one could find any vice on offer.

Gambling, dice, wresting, and racing were the milder entertainments. Gypsy fortune tellers roamed with men who claimed to be magicians. All peddled tobacco and snuff or hallucinogens. Just as ubiquitous were prostitutes catering to all tastes, genders, calibers, and prices. Children, cross dressers, even kidnapped virgins were available for an evening or weeks. Sale of opium or any other toxic substance in all their forms was a street trade. Everything could be had for a price.

With the end of the Terror, Parisians had taken up a natural fear of the extremes of human depravity. Nowadays, most Parisians tempered their appetites and turned to milder pleasures. In place of the lawlessness that had permeated the city, and much of the countryside too, people worked hard for their bread. Grain was expensive. The poor starved just as they had before anyone marched for lower taxes and more salt for their cellars. The fine gentlemen of the Directory had tried to institute some sense of order into society. Alas, when kindly persuasion did not work, and the directors called upon their three strongest leaders to form a new government, it was their new leader, their first consul, who called for even stricter order.

Bonaparte imbued his Minister of Police Fouché with the need for more men on his force. The consul ordered more and more newspapers shut down, street minstrels swept off the corners. Increased patrolling of the streets, especially at night—and more lamp lights to hinder thieves. Those with bigger ambitions to rob homes and businesses were discouraged by the patrols.

Yet for those who could afford it, and those whose reputations were oblivious to it, licentious entertainments were available. A man or woman just had to know where it was offered in just the right quantities. Often such diversions came from the those highest in Society.

Kane’s carriage idled in front of the blazing sconces set aside the doors of Monsieur Cyprien Montagne’s large and gracious house. Commissioned by the Jarre-Montagne family during LouisXIV’s childhood, Montagne House was a h?tel particulier of great fame. Situated at the tip of the ?le Saint-Louis, the manse of creamy Parisian dressed stone commanded a view up and down the Seine. The courtyard and gardens had been designed by Le N?tre, the famous landscape artist who’d finished Versailles, the Tuileries, and Vaux le Vicomte. Most in Paris revered Montagne House as a national treasure, and no one had broken into it during the troubles. The grand dame stood as she had, glorious and intact, for more than a hundred and fifty years.

“Shall we?” Kane asked, straightening his frock coat, as eager as Tate to go inside.

“Have you been here before?” Tate was surprised Kane had accepted the invitation of the owner. Kane, very careful of his reputation, was head of the British envoys in Paris and acted as if he were the equal to the official British ambassador, Charles Whitworth. Kane’s current role as head of Scarlett Hawthorne’s agents was his secret one. To come here to Montagne House was off the mark for Kane, but in Paris, it had always been true that a man could go anywhere at any time—and even brag about it. Kane never would discuss coming here, but if good relations came of it, he valued it.

The owner of the house, Cyprien Montagne, was one of the last remaining members of a famous banking family who had dealt with the last king. The current owner had outlived that shame. Now Cyprien, no longer a banker himself, was a returned émigré, invited by Josephine and approved by Fouché. But he was a silver-haired roué of fifty years of age. A confirmed bachelor, he was known in his youth and now for abducting young girls from the countryside and selling them to anyone, male or female, who crossed his palm with the right number of coins, which he demanded be only gold ones.

Kane considered the elaborately molded iron front door with a grimace of distaste. They waited for the groom to open the carriage door. “Before I was married, yes, I was here. Once. Everyone should know of it, especially those in our line of work. Have you heard of the infamous Cyprien?”

Tate’s left eye twitched. “I’ve met him before. In ninety-seven. I was a green boy of twenty-three. The master and his two mistresses did a tableau. One I have not forgotten.”

“Word is the man has reformed.”

Tate barked in disbelief. “Why? Does he tie only one mistress to his bed these days?”

“You always surprise me at who you know in this town.”

“A bigger shock, isn’t it, that I know nothing about one of whom I should know everything?” Tate grumbled.

“Let’s go in and see if we can change that.”

When Kane’s coachman swung open the door, Tate was first out.