Read Chapter 38: The Cost of Loyalty

The first thing Marguerite registered was the smell of vinegar and rosemary, sharp enough to cut through the fog of unconsciousness. The second was pain—a hot, throbbing ache in her shoulder that pulsed with every heartbeat, radiating down her arm and up into her jaw.

She tried to move, and a firm hand pressed her back down.

“Do not,” Dr. Beaumont said quietly, “be a fool.”

Marguerite blinked against the dim light. She lay on a narrow bed in a modest room, whitewashed walls and a single window through which the late afternoon sun slanted. Bookshelves lined one wall, crammed with leather-bound volumes and glass jars of dried herbs. A desk sat beneath the window, scattered with papers and a brass scale.

Beaumont’s home. She had never been here before.

“The Duchesse,” she managed, her voice a dry rasp. “Did they—did she get away?”

“She did.” Beaumont bent over her shoulder, and she felt the sting of something cool and sharp against her skin. “Captain Lefèvre rode hard for the border. They crossed into Savoy before dawn. A messenger reached me two hours ago with word of their safe arrival.”

Relief flooded through her, so powerful it brought tears to her eyes. She blinked them back.

“And the assassin?”

“Gone. He fled when I fired.” Beaumont’s jaw tightened. “His horse was found abandoned a mile outside the palace gates. He will not trouble the Duchesse again, not unless he wishes to cross the Alps on foot.”

Marguerite tried to laugh, but the motion pulled at her wound and she gasped instead. Beaumont’s hand steadied her shoulder, his touch gentle despite the authority in his grip.

“Lie still, Marguerite. The blade cut deeper than I first thought. The wound has soured.”

“Soured?”

“Infected.” He straightened, wiping his hands on a cloth. His coat was gone, his sleeves rolled to the elbow, and she saw dark smears of dried blood on his forearms. Her blood. “You lost consciousness in the gravel. I carried you here through the servants’ passages. No one saw us—I made certain of it.”

She should have felt shame at that, at being carried like a sack of grain through the hidden arteries of Versailles. But all she felt was gratitude, and a strange, floating lightness that she suspected came from fever rather than sentiment.

“You saved my life again,” she said.

“I would prefer not to make a habit of it.” He sat on the stool beside the bed, his face drawn with exhaustion. “The wound is clean now, but I need to cauterize the edges. The infection is fresh and shallow. If we burn it out now, it will not spread.”

Marguerite stared at him. “You mean to burn me.”

“I mean to save you.” He held up a thin iron rod, its tip glowing faintly orange from the small brazier he had set on the desk. “I will give you brandy first. Enough to dull the pain. But you will feel it.”

She looked at the rod, then at his face. His eyes were steady, unwavering. He did not look away from her, did not flinch at what he was about to do.

“Will it leave a scar?”

“Yes.”

“Then it will match the ones I cannot see.” She held out her hand. “Give me the brandy.”

He poured a measure into a tin cup and helped her drink. The liquor burned down her throat, harsh and sweet, and she coughed. He did not press her for more, merely waited until her breathing steadied.

“I will count to three,” he said. “Bite down on this.”

He folded a leather strap and placed it between her teeth. She gripped the edges of the bed with her good hand, the other pressed flat against her stomach.

“One.”

She closed her eyes.

“Two.”

The rod touched her flesh.

Marguerite screamed into the leather, her back arching off the mattress. The pain was white-hot, blinding, a sun exploding inside her shoulder. She smelled her own burning skin, acrid and terrible, and then the rod lifted and she collapsed back onto the bed, panting, tears streaming down her cheeks.

Beaumont dropped the rod into a basin of water, where it hissed and steamed. He pressed a clean bandage against the wound, his hands swift and sure.

“It is done,” he said. “The infection is burned out. You will recover, but you must rest. No moving, no lifting, no sneaking through palace corridors for at least a fortnight.”

Marguerite laughed weakly, the sound more a wheeze than a laugh. “You think I will ever sneak through a palace corridor again?”

“I think you will do whatever you wish, as you always have.” He finished binding the wound and sat back, wiping his brow with his forearm. “But I would prefer it if, for the next few days at least, you remained in this bed and let me play physician.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Then I will sit on you until you stop squirming.”

She laughed again, and this time it hurt less. The brandy was working, warming her veins, softening the edges of the world. She looked at him—really looked at him—and saw the exhaustion carved into his face, the shadows beneath his eyes, the way his hands trembled slightly as he set the basin aside.

“You have not slept,” she said.

“I have not.”

“Since when?”

He paused. “Since you fell.”

Something shifted in her chest, a warmth that had nothing to do with the brandy. She tried to make sense of it, to file it away under some label she understood—gratitude, affection, the loyalty of a friend—but it refused to fit.

“You carried me through the dark,” she murmured, her voice slurring slightly. “Again.”

“You made it easy. You weigh almost nothing. You should eat more.”

“I eat plenty. I just have a fast gait.”

“A fast gait is not a meal, Marguerite.”

She wanted to argue, but her eyes were growing heavy. The pain in her shoulder had dulled to a deep, thrumming ache, and the brandy was pulling her down into a warm, soft darkness.

“Rest,” Beaumont said. “I will be here when you wake.”

She wanted to ask him why. Why he had not simply left her on the gravel with the other secrets of the court. Why he kept saving her, kept pulling her back from the edge of the abyss she had spent months staring into.

But the darkness was already rising, and she let it take her.

---

She woke to the sound of rain.

It pattered against the window in a steady rhythm, a gentle percussion that filled the room with a soft, gray light. Her shoulder throbbed, but the sharp edge of pain had dulled to something bearable.

She was propped against pillows, a light blanket drawn to her chin. Her dress was gone, replaced by a loose linen shift that felt unfamiliar and clean. Someone had washed her—had tended to her with more care than she had ever known.

A folded paper lay on the bedside table, weighted by a small velvet pouch.

Marguerite reached for it with her good hand, wincing as the motion pulled at her bandages. She unfolded the note.

*Marguerite,*

*I owe you more than gratitude. I owe you my life, and my happiness, and every sunrise I will ever watch with Armand by my side. Words cannot repay what you did that night. Take this as a token, and know that wherever I am, I am thinking of you.*

*Your friend, always,*

*Éloise*

Marguerite opened the velvet pouch and let the contents fall into her palm.

A diamond. Not a small one—a stone the size of her thumbnail, set in a simple silver band, catching the gray light and scattering it into rainbows across the ceiling.

She stared at it for a long moment, feeling the weight of it in her hand.

The Duchesse had given her a fortune. A fortune that could buy her a house, a future, a life beyond service. A fortune that said, without words, *you are free now. You are free to choose.*

Marguerite closed her fingers around the ring and pressed it to her chest.

---

The days blurred together after that.

Beaumont came and went, tending to other patients in the mornings and returning to her in the afternoons. He changed her bandages, checked the wound for signs of returning infection, and forced her to drink bitter tonics that tasted of bark and regret.

“This is terrible,” she said one afternoon, grimacing at the cup he had pressed into her hands.

“It is good for you.”

“So is prayer, but I do not need to drink it.”

A ghost of a smile crossed his face, the first she had seen since she woke. “Drink, Marguerite.”

She drank, and he sat beside her, reading from a medical text while she watched the rain streak down the window. The silence between them was comfortable, easy, like a well-worn coat.

On the third day, she asked the question that had been building in her mind.

“Why did you ask me to marry you?”

Beaumont looked up from his book, his expression unchanging. “Because I love you.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the only answer I have.” He set the book aside and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his gaze steady on hers. “I have spent my life in the service of others, Marguerite. I have watched people die in my arms and I have watched people live. I have seen what love does to them—how it makes them brave, how it makes them foolish, how it makes them capable of impossible things.”

He paused. “I asked you to marry me because, when I imagine my life without you in it, I find I have no interest in living it.”

The words settled in her chest like stones dropping into still water. She felt the ripples spread outward, touching parts of herself she had kept locked away for years.

“I am a lady’s maid,” she said.

“You are a sharp-eyed, brave-hearted woman who saved her mistress from assassination and her court from a poisoner. The title is incidental.” He smiled then, a real smile, warm and crooked. “Besides, you have never been any good at being a servant. You question everything. You remember everything. You refuse to be ignored.”

“Those are defects of character.”

“They are the reasons I love you.”

She looked down at the diamond ring still on the bedside table. She had put it there that morning, unable to wear it, unwilling to pocket it. The Duchesse had given her freedom. The doctor had given her a future.

Both were terrifying. Both were hers.

“I do not know who I am,” Marguerite said quietly. “I have spent my whole life being someone else’s. The Duchesse’s maid. The court’s shadow. The buyer of poison, the keeper of secrets. I do not know what is left when all of that is stripped away.”

Beaumont reached across the space between them and took her hand. His palm was warm and calloused, the hand of a man who had held scalpels and pistols and grieving widows.

“I do not need you to know who you are,” he said. “I only need you to let me find out with you.”

Marguerite looked at their joined hands. Her fingers were pale against his, the scars on her knuckles faintly visible in the afternoon light. She had spent so long holding secrets, holding tensions, holding the weight of other people’s lives. She had never once been held herself.

“There is a letter,” she said. “From my mother. It has been beneath my stays for weeks, and I have never dared to read it. I was afraid that if I opened it, I would find nothing—that she had nothing to say to me, that I had been deluding myself all these years.”

“And now?”

She swallowed. “Now I think I might be ready to read it. If you will stay with me while I do.”

Beaumont squeezed her hand. “I am not going anywhere.”

Marguerite reached beneath the pillow—the shift she wore was not her own, but the letter had been carefully pressed and folded and placed there by hands she trusted. She pulled it out, the paper wrinkled and stained with a rust-colored blot she recognized as her own blood.

She broke the seal.

The paper was old, the ink faded. The handwriting was careful and neat, the hand of a woman who had learned to write letters for her employers before she ever learned to write her own name.

*My dearest Marguerite,*

*If you are reading this, I have gone to the Lord, and I want you to know that I am proud of you. I know you have chosen a hard path—service, silence, invisibility. I know you have given your life to others, as I gave mine to the families who took me in. I want you to know that this was not the destiny I wished for you. I always hoped you would find a way to be seen.*

*But I have watched you grow from a girl who asked too many questions into a woman who refuses to stop looking. You see what others miss. You remember what others forget. You care for those who cannot care for themselves.*

*This is not a flaw, my darling. It is a gift.*

*Do not waste it on people who do not deserve it. Save your sharp eyes and your brave heart for those who will love you for them. And when you find them, do not be afraid to be seen.*

*I am sorry I could not give you more. I am sorry I could not stay. I am so proud of you, Marguerite.*

*Your loving mother,* *Isabelle*

Marguerite read the letter three times. On the first pass, she wept. On the second, she laughed—a wet, broken sound that startled her. On the third, she folded it carefully and pressed it to her lips.

Beaumont did not speak. He simply sat with her, his hand still wrapped around hers, until the tears stopped and her breathing steadied.

“She wanted me to be seen,” Marguerite whispered. “She thought it was a gift.”

“It is.” Beaumont brushed his thumb across her knuckles. “You have just never been allowed to use it for yourself.”

She looked at him—at the lines around his eyes, the small scar on his chin, the way the light caught the silver in his hair. She thought of the diamond ring on the bedside table, and of the mother who had written her one final letter, and of the Duchesse riding toward Savoy with love in her heart.

“I am tired of being invisible,” Marguerite said.

“Then be seen.” Beaumont lifted her hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “I will be here, watching.”

Marguerite laughed, and this time it came out clear and true.

“You are impossible.”

“I am patient.” He smiled. “And I have been waiting for a very long time to watch you choose yourself.”

She reached for the diamond ring, turned it in her fingers, and felt its weight—the weight of a future she had never allowed herself to imagine. Freedom. Love. A path of her own choosing.

She looked at Beaumont.

“Ask me again,” she said. “The question you asked before. Ask me again.”

Beaumont’s breath caught. He knelt beside the bed, his eyes never leaving hers, and took both her hands in his.

“Marguerite, will you marry me?”

She smiled. “Yes.”