Read Chapter 29: The Negotiation

The bells of Saint-Sulpice were still tolling compline when Marguerite slipped through the service door of the minister’s hôtel particulier on the Rue de Varenne. She had traded her lady’s maid’s gown for the sober bombazine of a clerk’s widow, and Beaumont waited in the shadow of a carriage house three streets away, ready to spirit her off should her gamble fail.

The secretary, Claude Perrault, kept his own chamber above the stables—a small mercy. His master, a minister of the King’s council, would not wander there at this hour. Marguerite had watched the house for two days, noting the comings and goings, the way Perrault left by the rear gate at dusk, the way the minister’s wife lingered too long by the garden window when he departed.

She knocked twice, sharp and quick. The door cracked open, revealing a man in his shirtsleeves, a glass of brandy in hand. His face slackened when he saw her.

“Madame?” he said, wary. “The house is closed to callers.”

“I am not a caller,” Marguerite said, and stepped past him before he could shut the door. The room was small but comfortable—a desk stacked with correspondence, a bed neatly made, a portrait of a woman in a silver frame on the mantel. Not his wife. Perrault was unmarried. The portrait was of the minister’s wife.

Perrault closed the door, his jaw tight. “I do not know you.”

“No,” Marguerite agreed. She turned to face him, keeping her voice low and even. “But I know you, Monsieur Perrault. I know that you meet the Minister’s wife every Thursday at the glove shop on the Quai des Orfèvres. I know the alias you use for correspondence—M. Blanchard. And I know that you keep her letters beneath the loose floorboard beside your bed.”

Perrault’s face drained of color. His hand tightened on his glass. “That is a grave accusation.”

“It is not an accusation,” Marguerite said. “It is a certainty. I have seen one of the letters. Enough to know her handwriting, and yours.”

He set the glass down with a clatter. “What do you want? Money? I have little. You see my chamber—I am a servant, like yourself.”

“I am not here for what you have,” she said. “I am here for what you can obtain. Fifty gold livres, within two days. Your master keeps a strongbox in his study. I know he does—I know its key hangs on a chain he wears even at table. You will have access to it when you prepare his correspondence for the morning.”

Perrault stared at her. A long silence stretched between them. Then he laughed, short and bitter. “You would have me steal from my master.”

“You have already stolen from him,” Marguerite said softly. “What is gold compared to his honor?”

His face twisted. For a moment she thought he would strike her. But he was a man who had built his life on secrecy, on careful silences. He was not a man of violence.

“If I refuse?” he asked.

“Then the minister receives an anonymous letter by dawn, and you receive the street. The wife—what happens to her matters little to you, I imagine. You will find another post. She will not find another husband.”

Perrault closed his eyes. He reached for his glass, drained it, and set it down again. “Two days,” he said. “Fifty livres. And then you are gone from my life, and I never see your face again.”

“You have my word.”

“The word of a blackmailer.” He snorted. “I will meet you at the fountain in the Place Royale, tomorrow, an hour before midnight. Bring nothing. Say nothing to anyone.”

Marguerite nodded. She turned toward the door, then paused. Her hand rested on the latch, and she felt the weight of what she had just done settle in her chest like a stone.

“I am sorry,” she said, without looking back. “I have no other way.”

She left before he could answer.

Outside, the night air was cool against her face. She walked quickly, her skirts whispering over the cobbles, until she found Beaumont in the shadows of the carriage house. He stepped out as she approached, his expression unreadable.

“Well?” he said.

“Tomorrow night. The Place Royale. He will have the gold.”

Beaumont studied her for a long moment. “You are not pleased.”

“It is not a thing to be pleased about,” she said. “He is a fool in love, and I have made myself his devil.”

“You have done what necessity demands,” Beaumont said. “Forty years a physician, and I have learned that virtue is a luxury of the well-fed. You have eaten too little of late to afford it.”

Marguerite almost smiled. “You are a philosopher, Dr. Beaumont.”

“No. Only a tired man with a pair of good boots and an eye for the truth.” He offered his arm. “Come. We have one more day to survive before the meeting.”

They returned to their rented room—a narrow garret above a baker’s shop near the Pont Neuf, the smell of bread mingling with the sour reek of tallow. Marguerite did not sleep. She sat by the window, watching the moon rise over the rooftops, and thought of the Duchesse alone in her convent cell at Amiens, of the Comtesse waiting in a condemned cell for the poison that would end her life, and of the ledger hidden in the apothecary’s false book, waiting for gold that did not yet exist.

Her mother’s letter rustled in her pocket. She had not opened it. She had not dared.

Tomorrow night would begin the undoing of lives, and she could not afford to weep for her own.

The Place Royale was quiet at the appointed hour. The great houses loomed dark and indifferent, their windows shuttered, and the fountain whispered its thin lament into the darkness. Perrault came to her with a physician’s satchel in hand—an odd image, and she realized he had chosen it to disguise his errand if he were seen.

He opened the satchel and showed her the gold. Fifty livres, neat and gleaming in the moonlight.

“You have it,” he said. “Your name. I would know it before I hand this over.”

“Marguerite,” she said. “Just Marguerite.”

He handed her the satchel. “Then keep yourself alive, Just Marguerite. The Court is not kind to those who learn its secrets.”

He turned and walked into the darkness before she could thank him.

The apothecary’s son was waiting at Saint-Germain-des-Prés as he had promised, leaning against the pillared porch of the church with the false gardening book tucked beneath his arm. He took the satchel, weighed it in his hand, and opened the clasp. He counted the coins with the practiced efficiency of a man who had learned to trust no one.

“It is all there,” he said, and handed her the book. “Tell no one where you got this.”

“I have bought many things in my life,” Marguerite said. “This is the first that might drown me.”

He laughed, low and mirthless, and vanished into the church’s shadow.

Beaumont met her back at the room. She laid the book on the scarred wooden table and lit a candle, its flame trembling in the draft from the window. She turned the pages slowly, her fingers tracing the entries—dates, names, payments in neat, coded hand.

And then she found it.

A single line, halfway down a page, entered in the same careful script as the others but marked with a small, almost invisible flourish—a star, barely pressed into the paper.

*Madame de S. — one remedy, for a daughter to be put to bed.*

Beaumont leaned over her shoulder, reading the words. His brow furrowed.

“Put to bed,” he murmured. “It is an expression I have not heard in forty years. It was used in the old days, before the Chambre Ardente, by the midwives of the Palais Royal. It did not mean sleep.”

Marguerite looked up at him.

“It meant death,” he said. “A gentle poison, slow and quiet. Something to end the burden of a daughter who had become inconvenient.”

Madame de S.

The Duchesse's mother. Madame de Soissons.

Marguerite set the book down. Her hands were steady, but her heart had turned to ice.

The Duchesse had not invented her mother’s enmity. It was real. It had been paid for in gold, and now it sat before her in ink, damning not only the elder woman but all who had touched the chain of its purchase—herself, Beaumont, the Duchesse, everyone who had sought the truth.

“We must go to Amiens,” she said quietly. “The Duchesse must see this. She must know who her mother is.”

“She will not believe it,” said Beaumont, already reaching for his coat.

“No,” Marguerite agreed. “But I will make her believe it—or she will not survive the night.”