Read Chapter 23: The Paris Safe House

The Rue de la Licorne stank of fish and river mud. Marguerite pressed herself against the damp stone wall of a shuttered chandler’s shop, the key biting into her palm through her glove. Dr. Beaumont stood beside her, his dark traveling cloak pulled tight against the evening chill, his physician’s satchel slung over one shoulder like a soldier’s kit.

“Number fourteen,” she murmured. “Three doors down. The Baron said the watch would shift at the Vespers bell.”

Beaumont’s jaw tightened. He had not questioned her when she’d found him in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, merely taken one look at her mud-spattered riding habit and her face, and asked, “Who needs a physician?” She’d told him the truth, or enough of it, as they threaded through the evening streets toward the river.

“You should have let me go alone,” she said now.

“And let you pick a lock with your hairpins and a prayer? I’ve opened more doors in my life than you have years.” He gave her a thin smile. “Besides, the Duchesse would have my license if I let her maid be gutted in an alley while she awaited questioning at Versailles.”

The Vespers bell tolled from the Sainte-Chapelle, its bronze voice rolling across the water. Two figures in shabby coats shifted on their stools at the corner, then shuffled away toward the bridge lights.

“Now,” Beaumont said.

They crossed the street in a burst of movement. Number fourteen was a narrow house of blackened timber, its upper stories leaning into the one beside it like drunken courtiers. Marguerite fitted the key—heavy, iron, its teeth worn from use—into the lock. It turned with a groan that seemed far too loud.

The door opened onto a stairwell that smelled of dust and old tallow. No servant appeared, no dog barked. Marguerite let out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding.

“Second floor,” she said. “The Baron said the ledgers are in a back room under a loose floorboard.”

They climbed. The stairs creaked beneath them, each step a small betrayal. On the second landing, Beaumont held up his lantern, and she saw three doors: two closed, one slightly ajar, revealing a sliver of dark room beyond.

The key turned in the first lock they tried. The door swung inward.

It was a counting room, small and neat, dominated by a walnut desk and a high iron-bound chest. The walls were bare except for a single crucifix and a shelf of ledgers bound in calfskin. Dust motes swirled in Beaumont’s lantern light, undisturbed by recent footsteps.

“Search the floor,” Marguerite said, already on her knees before the desk.

She ran her hands over the boards until her fingers caught on a slight give near the hearth. A board lifted easily—too easily, as if it had been pried up many times. Beneath it lay a leather portfolio, cracked with age, tied with a red ribbon that had faded to pink.

Her hands shook as she untied it. Inside: not one ledger, but three, each page dense with handwriting. She laid them on the desk and turned the lantern closer.

Columns of names. Dates. Amounts in livres. Beside each purchase, a notation in a coded hand she could not decipher—but the names were clear.

“Jean de Castries. Four vials of D’Argent’s composition.” Marguerite’s finger moved down the page. “Marie-Anne de Tresmes. Two bottles of ‘the quiet sleep.’ Sixty liters of distilled belladonna to the Comtesse de Duras.”

Beaumont leaned over her shoulder, his face grim. “This is worse than we thought. This isn’t a court scandal—it’s a marketplace.”

“Copy it,” Marguerite said. She pulled a sheet of blank paper from her sleeve. “We use the Baron’s ink. Every name. Every date. And the addresses if they’re here.”

They worked in silence, Beaumont reading and Marguerite writing in her small, precise hand. Her fingers cramped by the second page, but she did not stop. Names flowed across the sheet—nobles she knew by sight from the queen’s drawing room, merchants, a bishop, an actress from the Comédie-Française.

Halfway down the third ledger, her hand froze.

The writing was not in the same even clerk’s hand as the rest. This entry was scrawled, as if made in haste. The date was eight weeks past. The name was written in full block capitals, as if the purchase was notable even to the poison merchant.

> ARMAND DE MONTFORT. Three vials. No. 7 of the mercury compound. Delivery by agent, Rue de la Feuillade.

The ink blurred before her eyes. Marguerite blinked hard.

Armand. The brother who swore he would die for his sister. The brother whose residence was searched after the fire. The brother whose gambling debts were whispered to be enormous.

The brother who was expected at Versailles tonight.

“Marguerite.” Beaumont’s voice was low, urgent. “Someone’s coming.”

She heard it then: footsteps on the stairs. Not one pair. Three, maybe four, boots hammering the wood in clumsy unison.

Beaumont blew out the lantern. “The window.”

She shoved the copied pages into her bodice and swept the original ledgers back into the portfolio, then shoved it beneath the floorboard. Her hands found the key in her pocket as she rose.

The window faced the river. Beaumont threw it open, and cold night air flooded in. A narrow ledge ran below it, no wider than her foot, dropping to the water twenty feet down.

“Can you swim?” he asked.

“Does it matter?”

A shoulder slammed against the door below. Then another.

Beaumont went first, swinging out onto the ledge with a grace that surprised her. He reached back for her hand. “Now.”

She climbed onto the sill. The wind tore at her skirts. Below, the Seine was a black sheet stitched with the reflection of distant torchlight. The door splintered with a crack.

“The key,” she gasped. “In my pocket—I cannot—the climb—I’ll lose it.”

“Throw it!” Beaumont caught it in his free hand and shoved it into his own coat. “Now jump.”

She jumped. The fall was short—Beaumont caught her and they crashed together onto a fishing boat moored below, the deck slamming into her ribs. Pain lanced through her side.

Above them, a man’s silhouette appeared in the window. He raised a pistol.

Beaumont shoved her down behind the gunwale as the shot cracked. Splinters exploded above their heads. Then he had the oars in his hands and was pulling hard into the current, the boat leaping toward the dark arch of a bridge.

Marguerite pressed her hand to her bleeding palm—a splinter had sliced it open—and felt for the paper in her bodice. The pages were still there.

The boat slid into darkness beneath the Pont Neuf. Footsteps hammered on the quay above, but the current carried them onward, swift and silent.

When they emerged on the far side of the bridge, drifting toward the shadowed bank at the edge of the Louvre, the shouting had faded to nothing.

Beaumont shipped the oars, breathing hard. “The key—I still have it. We can return after—what is it?”

Marguerite had drawn out the copied pages. She held them to the faint moonlight, her finger circling the unambiguously damning line.

“Look,” she said. “He bought vials numbered seven. The same batch that killed the Comtesse’s last maid—the same dosage that was poisoning the Duchesse. And the delivery point: Rue de la Feuillade. Three houses from the Montfort townhouse.”

Beaumont read over her shoulder.

“Armand had them brought to his own door,” she said. “It’s him. Not the Baron. Not the Comtesse. The Duchesse’s own brother.”

She flipped to the back of the last page, where Marguerite had hastily scratched the final column before they’d fled. A single notation in the same scrawled hand:

> Settlement for Lord Marchmont. Payment: one brother’s goodwill and the marriage contract of the Lady Martine. Fulfilled.

The marriage contract of Lady Martine—the Duchesse’s younger sister, a girl Marguerite had helped dress for her betrothal ball to a minor English baron. A betrothal Armand had railed against, claiming it would bankrupt the family through dowry costs.

“He was selling more than poison,” Marguerite whispered. “He was selling his own sister to buy his silence.”

The boat bumped gently against the stone quay. Neither of them moved.

The Duchesse was under interrogation at Versailles. The man who was poisoning her—who had orchestrated the slow, quiet murder of her health while she smiled at his dinners and danced at his birthday celebrations—was expected at her side tonight.

And Armand did not yet know the Comtesse was arrested.

Marguerite shoved the pages deeper into her bodice, stood, and held out her hand to Beaumont.

“We’re going back,” she said. “Before he realizes the Comtesse has already been taken, before he decides his gambling debts are no longer worth his conscience—we are going back to Versailles, and we are going to show the Duchesse what her brother truly is.”