“Useful?” Cassie accepted the vial with enthusiasm. Kiri came from a long line of Hindu women who were perfumers, and she created marvelous scents. “I thought perfumes were for allure and frivolity.”
“Take a sniff and see what you think,” her friend said mysteriously.
Cassie obediently unstoppered the vial, closed her eyes, and sniffed. Then again. “It smells … a little musty, in a clean sort of way, if that makes sense. Earthy and … very still? Tired? Not exactly unpleasant, but nothing like your floral and spice perfumes.”
“If you caught this scent in passing, what would you think of?”
“An old woman,” Cassie said instantly.
“Perfect!” Kiri said gleefully. “Scent is powerful. Dab on a bit of Antiqua when you wish to be unnoticed or underestimated. People will think of you as old and feeble without knowing why.”
“That’s brilliant!” Cassie sniffed again. “I detect a hint of lavender, but I don’t recognize anything else.”
“I included oils I don’t use often, and when I do, they’re usually disguised by pleasanter fragrances,” Kiri explained.
“When I’m in France, I often travel around in a pony cart as a peddler of ladies’ sundries. Ribbons and lace and the like. I make myself look plain and dull and forgettable, and this will add to the effect. Thank you, Kiri.” Cassie stoppered the vial. “Would you have time to make more before I leave?”
Kiri pulled out two more vials. “Once I thought the scent worked, I made a larger batch.” She chuckled. “I put some of this on and crept up on Mackenzie and he didn’t recognize me until I caught his attention by doing something highly improper.”
Cassie laughed. “If you could creep up on Mackenzie unobserved, this scent should make me invisible.”
Kiri pursed her lips. “If you’re going to be traveling as a peddler, I have a remedy that might be a good item for you to carry.”
“Perfumes that aren’t quite up to your standards but are still lovely? That would be wonderful,” Cassie said.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Kiri said, “but it’s a good idea. I have a number that aren’t quite what I wanted, but pleasant and too full of expensive ingredients to throw out. You’re welcome to them. But what I had in mind was thieves’ oil.”
“What on earth is that, and why would any honest country housewife want any?”
Kiri grinned. “I found it when researching ancient European scents. The story goes that during the Black Death, some thieves were caught robbing the dying and dead. In return for their lives, they offered the formula that allowed them to commit their crimes without catching the disease. There are different recipes, but they’re usually based on an herb vinegar infused with other herbs like lemon and clove and rosemary. Herbal vinegars are traditional remedies, so that’s a good start.”
“Fascinating,” Cassie said. “Does it work?”
“I have no idea. Perhaps it might prevent someone from coming down with more usual ailments like coughs and colds. Since I’m usually healthy, I don’t know if the thieves’ oil is making a difference. The version I settled on is pungent but not unpleasant, and it smells like it ought to do some good. Perfect for a peddler who won’t be around if it doesn’t work.”
“I’d love to have some,” Cassie said. “I’ll use it myself. Traveling through the French countryside with a pony cart in the dead of winter is a recipe for catching colds. I’ll let you know if the thieves’ oil keeps me healthy.”
“I’ll send some tomorrow, along with my surplus perfumes.” Kiri foraged in her bag again and produced an exquisite bottle of scarlet glass with a delicately twisted stopper. “One last thing. For when you return to England and can be yourself again.”
Warily Cassie opened the bottle and placed a drop on her wrist. One sniff and she became still as stone. The fragrance was an exquisite layering of lilac and roses, frankincense and moonlight, vanished sunshine and lost dreams. And underneath, the shadows of darkest night. It caught at her heart with painful intensity.
“Now that I know you better, I decided to create a personal perfume,” Kiri explained. “What do you think?”
“It’s superb.” Cassie reinserted the stopper with rather more force than necessary. “But I’m not sure when I’ll have occasion to wear anything like this.”
“You hate it,” her friend said sadly. “I thought you might.”
Cassie gazed at the lovely little bottle resting on her palm. “I don’t hate it. I … just don’t want to wear this much truth.”
“Perhaps someday you will.”
“Perhaps.” But Cassie doubted that.
Chapter 4
Castle Durand, Summer 1803
Once he realized Durand didn’t want him dead, Grey fought at every opportunity. Resistance didn’t get him killed, though he acquired numerous bruises and lacerations.
If he’d known what lay ahead, he might have tried harder to get killed.
Durand’s men were well trained and brutally efficient. As soon as Grey was captured, one of the guards appropriated his finely tailored garments, gave him coarse peasant clothing and shoes, and ordered him to put them on.
After Grey dressed, he was shackled, gagged, blindfolded, and tossed into a smelly cart. Foul straw was thrown over him. He struggled frantically for breath as the cart began rumbling over the cobbled Parisian streets. When he fell into agonized unconsciousness, he was sure he would never wake again.
But he did. When he recovered his senses, he learned that he could breathe if he didn’t move too much or allow panic to flood his mind.
As cobblestones became roads and then rutted rural lanes, he thought he would go mad from terror and anguish. Grey had always loved sunshine and bright lights and good company. Now he could not see, could not speak, could not even howl with despair.
He lost track of how long he rattled around the cart. Several days, but it was devilish hard to tell how much time passed when he was in constant darkness.
Morning and evening, he was fed and watered and allowed to relieve himself. His body was so stiff from its bindings that he could barely walk. Chilling spring rain sometimes fell, but his damnable good health spared him from lung fever.
At last the nightmare ended. The cart clattered into a stone courtyard, the ropes securing his ankles were unshackled, and he was marched into a building.
Being blindfolded sharpened his senses. He recognized that the building was large and old and mostly stone. A castle, perhaps. He stumbled down narrow stairs with uneven stone treads that supported that theory.
The guards he had come to know through their scent and voices were joined by another man with a guttural voice, strange footsteps, and a sour smell of garlic. A door squealed and Grey was shoved through. He barely managed to avoid crashing to the stone floor.
The gag and blindfold were jerked off. He flinched backward from the torchlight, which stung his eyes after days in darkness. The guards who had brought Grey there stood silently in the doorway while a broad man with cruel features and a wooden peg leg stood directly in front of him. The man leaned on a cane that had leather streamers falling from the brass head.
“I am Gaspard, your jailer,” the man said, menace in his guttural voice. He spoke the French of Paris’s worst stews. “Durand orders me to keep you alive.” He gave an ugly smirk. “I fear you will not find the accommodations what you are used to, my little goddam lordling.”
Grey had to strain to understand. He’d learned the French of the well born when he was a boy, but he hadn’t been taught the coarse dialects of the poor and the provinces. That was changing rapidly. He wondered if he would ever hear English spoken again.
He remembered that the French had called the English “goddams” since at least the time of Joan of Arc. The name came from the constant profanity of the soldiers of the English army. Resigning himself to being a goddam, he said, “If you wish to keep me
alive, food and water would be helpful.”
Gaspard gave a bark of laughter. “In the morning, boy. I have other concerns now.” He glanced at the guards. “Take off the goddam’s coat and shirt.”
The two guards silently moved forward and obeyed. Grey was too cramped and bruised to fight well, and he couldn’t prevent them from stripping off his ragged, oversized coat and shirt. He’d never felt so helpless in his life.
There was worse to come. While the two guards immobilized him, Gaspard began whipping Grey’s back. Dimly Grey realized that the leather streamers on the cane were the lashes of a whip and the cane itself was the handle.
After a dozen or two agonizing blows, Grey sagged to the floor between the guards. “Let him fall,” Gaspard said contemptuously. “Remove the shackles. They aren’t needed. There is no way the goddam will escape this cell.”
Grey lay on the floor, barely aware of a key unlocking his wrist manacles. The guards rose and followed Gaspard as the jailer limped from the cell, his wooden leg tapping ominously. They took the torch with them.
After the heavy door was closed and locked, Grey was left in darkness. Even the sliver of light at the bottom of the door disappeared as his jailers walked away.
Grey felt panic rising at the thought of being trapped in darkness until he died screaming. What did the French call the ultimate prison, a oubliette? But that was a pit, wasn’t it, with the prisoner at the bottom of a deep shaft? The name meant forgotten, for prisoners were forgotten and left to die.
He had the mad thought that the guillotine might be better. At least death took place in open air and was quick, if ugly.
But he wasn’t dead yet. Now that he was free of gag, blindfold, and chains, he could breathe and move freely. As for the darkness—it hadn’t destroyed him on the endless journey to this place, and he wouldn’t let it destroy him just yet.
He pushed himself up on his knees and fumbled for his shirt and coat, which had been dropped nearby. The heavy fabric inflicted a fresh wave of pain on his lacerated back, but he needed protection against the biting chill.
Then he listened. Absolute silence except for the faint sound of trickling water somewhere quite close. Given the dampness around him, that was unsurprising.
What had he seen of his cell before Gaspard left? Stone walls, stone floor, damp and solid. The room wasn’t huge, but it wasn’t tiny, either. Perhaps eight paces square, with a very high ceiling. There was something in a corner to his left. A pallet, perhaps?
Swaying, he got to his feet, then moved to his left with his arms outstretched to prevent collision. He still managed to sideswipe a wall by coming at it from an angle, but a few more bruises made no difference.
He stumbled on something soft. Kneeling, he explored by touch and found a pallet of straw and a pair of coarse blankets. Luxury compared to what he’d endured since his capture.
Standing, he skimmed one hand along the wall so he could discover the dimensions of his cell. Down the side wall to the back, opposite the door. He turned and moved along the back wall. About what he estimated as the midpoint of the wall, he stumbled on a rocky obstacle and fell heavily.
More bruises, damned painful ones, but nothing broken, he decided after he recovered his breath and tested the new injuries. He explored with his hands and identified two irregular blocks of stone.
One was chair height, so he hauled himself up and sat, though he couldn’t lean against the wall because of his injured back. As the throbbing in his knees faded, he realized he had never properly appreciated the convenience of chairs before.
The second block of stone was about a foot and a half away, roughly rectangular, and around table height. He felt positively civilized.
After the pain diminished, he resumed his exploration, moving even more slowly. At the far corner, he felt a film of water seeping down the stones. It wasn’t a lot, but perhaps enough to keep him from dying of thirst if other drink wasn’t offered.
There were no more stone blocks. The only other feature he located was the massive wooden door and its frame. He circled again even more slowly. This time in the back corner where the moisture dripped down, he sensed the movement of air. He knelt and found a hole about the size of two fists. The water dripped down into it and there was a faint scent of human waste.
So this is where prisoners relieved themselves. It could have been worse. He used the facilities, then made his way back to the pallet, and wrapped himself in the blankets, lying on his side to protect his back.
Despite his exhaustion, he found himself staring into the darkness wondering what lay ahead. Durand’s comment that it no longer mattered what the English thought suggested that the war was about to resume after a year of truce.
Grey wasn’t surprised to know that. He’d seen suggestions that the French were using the truce to regroup for another round of conquest. Since he had joined the rush of Britons to Paris when the truce began, his friend Kirkland had asked him to keep his eyes open and pass on what he saw.
Grey had used that as an excuse to seduce a married woman, and that action had brought him here. Not that Camille had required much seduction. Looking back, he wasn’t sure who had seduced whom.
Dear God, what would become of him? Might Durand offer him for ransom? His parents would pay anything to get him back. But Durand wanted him to suffer. That could mean being imprisoned forever here in the darkness.
Not forever. Until he died. How long would it be until he’d be praying for death? The knowledge that he was likely to die here in the darkness, alone and unmourned, made his heart hammer with panic. Grimly he fought the fear.
Breaking down shouldn’t matter since no one was here to sneer at his weakness. But it mattered to him. Everything in his life had come easily, and even when caught in mischief, he’d suffered few consequences. Until now. Resigning himself to living in darkness, he wrestled his demons until fear faded and he slept like the dead.
The next morning he awoke to find light entering his cell from a horizontal slit window near the high ceiling of the cell.
For that beautiful sight, he wept.
Chapter 5
France, 1813
In the late afternoon sun, the village of St. Just du Sarthe looked much like any other village in northern France, apart from the medieval castle rising above. As Cassie drove her cart over the hill opposite the castle, she paused to study her goal.
Locating Durand’s family seat hadn’t been difficult. She’d been fortunate that dry, cold weather had saved her from becoming bogged down in snow or mud. She’d moved at a leisurely speed, stopping in villages to sell her ribbons and buttons and bits of lace, along with Kiri’s perfumes and a few remedies.
She’d bought as well as sold, acquiring items of clothing or handicrafts that could be sold elsewhere. In short, she’d behaved exactly as a peddler should.
Snapping the reins over the back of her sturdy pony, she made her way into the village. It was large enough to have a small tavern, La Liberté. Cassie halted there, hoping to find both hot food and information inside.
The taproom was empty except for three ancient men sipping wine together in one corner. A robust woman of middle years was busy behind the bar, but she glanced up with interest when Cassie entered. A female stranger traveling alone wouldn’t be common here, and Cassie was moving with the deliberation of an older woman.
“Bonjour, madame,” Cassie said. “I am Madame Renard and I hope I may find some hot food and a room for the night.”
“You’ve come to the right place.” The woman chuckled. “The only place. I’m Madame Leroux, the landlady, and I’ve a plain room and some hearty mutton stew and fresh bread if you’re interested.”
“That and a glass of red wine will suit me well.” Cassie guessed that the landlady would be a good source of information. “I’ll settle my pony in your stable first.”
Madame Leroux nodded. “The food will be rea
dy when you return.”
The pony was as happy to be indoors and fed as Cassie was. She returned to the taproom and settled into a chair by the fire, grateful for the warmth.
She was removing her cloak when the landlady emerged from the kitchen with a tray containing stew, bread, cheese, and wine. Cassie said, “I thank you, madame. Will you join me in a glass of wine? I’m a traveler in ladies’ notions, and I’m sure you will know if there might be local interest in my goods.”
“Merci.” Madame Leroux poured a glass of wine and settled comfortably on the other side of the fire. Expression curious, she asked, “Isn’t it dangerous to travel alone?”
Besides moving slowly, Cassie had grayed her hair and was wearing the Antiquity scent, so she must seem worrisomely fragile. “I’m careful, and I’ve not had trouble.”
“What do you sell?”
Cassie listed her wares between mouthfuls of the excellent stew. When she finished, the landlady said, “Our weekly village market is tomorrow. In midwinter, new goods will be welcome. I think you will find it worth your while.”
Cassie sipped at her wine. “What about the castle above the town? Might I find customers there? I have some truly fine perfumes blended by a Hindu princess.”
The other woman smiled appreciatively. “An intriguing description, but Castle Durand is a quiet place. The master visits very seldom, and his wife even less. There are never guests unless you count a prisoner or two in the dungeon, and I doubt they have the coin to buy.”
“A dungeon?” Cassie looked properly shocked. “In modern France?”
“Men with power don’t give it up easily,” the landlady said cynically. “The Durands have been lords of the castle forever. They’re called the Wolves of Durand. The last Durand got chopped for being an aristo, but there’s a Durand cousin up there now, not much different from the last one apart from calling himself Citoyen instead of Monsieur le Comte. ’Tis said this Durand has an English lord locked in the dungeon, but I have my doubts. Where would he find an English lord?”