Read Chapter 26: The Mastermind's Strategy

The Inn of the Three Kings smelled of tallow and spilled wine, but Marguerite had stopped noticing. She sat at a corner table with her back to the wall, the copied ledger pages spread between her fingers like a hand of cursed cards. Outside, the first gray light of dawn was bleeding through the shutters, and somewhere beyond the city walls, the Duchesse was either safe or arrested. Marguerite had paid a stable boy two hours ago to ride toward Amiens with a message—the rendezvous held, dawn Mass, Sisters of Saint Claire.

A knock at the door made her hand dart to the knife at her belt. But the knock was a pattern—three short, two long. Dr. Beaumont.

He slid inside, his coat wet with river mist, and took the seat across from her without greeting. His face was pale beneath its usual flush, and his eyes had that look they got when he had news he did not want to carry.

"Say it," Marguerite said.

"The Comtesse spoke last night." He pulled a folded broadsheet from his coat, creased and damp. "From her cell at the Bastille. She has recanted—not her crimes, but her accusation against you and the Duchesse."

Marguerite's fingers stilled on the paper. "She named someone else."

"She claims she was paid." Beaumont unfolded the sheet and laid it flat, his forefinger tapping a passage. "Not in coin. In pardon. A promise that her children would be spared the confiscation of their titles and lands. A promise made by a third party who wished the Duchesse dead. To take her estate. Her fortune."

"Her husband is dead. Her brother is disgraced. There is no one—" Marguerite stopped. The breath caught in her chest like a stitch.

The broadsheet's words swam before her. *The Comtesse says her patron curried favor through a family connection. A woman close to the Duchesse de Montfort by blood.*

"By blood," Marguerite whispered.

Beaumont's jaw tightened. "The Comtesse did not name her directly. You know how these things go—she wants the King to commute her sentence to exile in exchange for the full name. But she described enough. A mother estranged from her daughter. A marriage that was made against the mother's wishes. A will that favored the brother until he ruined himself."

Marguerite closed her eyes. She could see it now, the shape of it, the way the pieces had never quite fit. The Comtesse had known too much about the Duchesse's habits—her sleeping draughts, her headaches, the times she walked alone in the gardens. Information the Comtesse had bought from the Baron, yes. But the Baron had sold what he could observe. What the servants knew. What was whispered.

Who would know that the Duchesse's mother had threatened to cut her off entirely if she married Philippe de Montfort?

Marguerite had heard the story only once, from the Duchesse's own lips, late at night when the court was asleep. Her mother had wanted her to marry a Spanish grandee. The Duchesse had refused. Her mother had written to her once after the wedding—a single page of cold fury—and then gone silent for fifteen years.

But not entirely silent. There had been letters, forwarded through solicitors. Requests for money. Demands dressed as pleas. The Duchesse paid them without comment, but she paid. And her mother knew she would inherit if anything happened.

And if the Comtesse had been approached by the Duchesse's own mother—

"There is no proof," Marguerite said, but her voice sounded thin even to her.

"Proof is not what the mobs are crying for." Beaumont leaned forward. "The broadsheets are already spinning it. The Duchesse is still named as an enemy of the crown, but now there is a second narrative. Patricide. Matricide, seen from the other direction—a mother who killed her daughter for inheritance. They love it. It sells."

"This is how the Comtesse saves herself," Marguerite said. "She turns the King's attention away from the ring and toward a scandal that serves him. A noble house self-destructing. The King gets to be merciful to her children and still look righteous."

"And the true mastermind walks free."

Marguerite looked at the door. The sisters would be rising soon for lauds. If the Duchesse was not there by dawn—

"I have to tell her." Marguerite stood, shoving the ledger pages back into her bodice. "She has to hear this from me before some guard at the gate hands her a broadsheet."

"Marguerite." Beaumont caught her arm. "If her mother is behind this—the woman who raised her, who taught her to walk and speak and pray—what do you think this will do to her?"

"Nothing good." Marguerite pulled free. "But lies fester when they are left in the dark. She deserves the truth from someone who loves her."

She was at the door when Beaumont's voice stopped her.

"And if the truth is what her mother wanted her to know all along? What if this is not an accusation to be fought, but a leash to drag her back into the family fold?"

Marguerite turned. The doctor's face was grim.

"The Comtesse does not act without orders," he said. "Someone is directing her testimony. Someone who knows the King's mind. Who profits in every direction—whether the Duchesse is taken or cleared."

Marguerite stood in the doorway, the cold morning air rushing past her. The pieces clicked into a shape she did not want to see.

"You think her mother is not the killer," she said slowly. "You think she is the instrument. And someone is using her to break the Duchesse so completely that she will crawl back to whatever protection remains."

Beaumont said nothing, but his silence was an answer.

"The safe house," Marguerite said. "The ledgers. We still have the only real proof in Paris. If I can get the Duchesse to Amiens, and we can retrieve the originals before the King's men find them—"

"Then we need to move." Beaumont was already reaching for his coat. "Now."

But Marguerite's hand had slipped, almost without her permission, into her pocket. Her mother's letter was there, unopened, grown softer at the edges from all the nights she had carried it. She felt the folded paper against her fingers and thought, for the first time, of a mother who wrote only to ask for money. And of the other woman—the one whose mother had written her a single angry page and then gone silent.

She did not open the letter. She drew her hand out empty.

"Lead the way," she said, and stepped into the gray morning.