Read Chapter 4: A Dinner with Secrets

The great hall swallowed candlelight the way the sea swallows a stone—greedily, utterly—leaving only pools of gold trembling at the table’s center. Marguerite stood two paces behind the Duchesse’s chair, her hands clasped beneath her apron, her eyes sweeping the assembled nobility with the practiced invisibility of a servant who had learned that no one ever looked at the help twice.

The Duc de Montfort carved his roast pheasant with theatrical precision. The Duchesse smiled until her cheeks must have ached, nodding at the Maréchal de Rochefort’s interminable story about a hunting accident in the Loire. Course followed course. Wine followed wine. And Marguerite watched the Comtesse de Vaudreuil the way a cat watches a bird it cannot yet reach.

The Comtesse was seated three places down from the Duchesse’s brother, Armand de Saint-Père. She had not spoken to him once during the soup. Nor the fish. But when the roasted swan arrived—re-gilded feathers, sugared beak, absurd and magnificent—she leaned across the table’s corner with a smile like a knife sliding home.

“Armand, dear heart,” she murmured, low enough that only the table’s nearest could hear. “I wonder if you’ve forgotten our little discussion.”

Marguerite did not turn her head. She moved her eyes, nothing else.

Armand was young—younger than his sister by a decade, with the same chestnut hair but none of her steadiness. His fingers twitched against his wine glass. “I have not forgotten, Comtesse.”

“Good.” The Comtesse’s smile did not waver. “I should hate to see you... compromised.”

She reached across the corner of the table as if to straighten his napkin, but her fingers caught the edge of his coat pocket instead. The fabric shifted. Something inside glinted—a small glass vial catching the candlelight for one heartbeat before Armand’s hand slapped over it with terrible, guilty speed.

The Duchesse turned, frowning. “Armand, are you unwell?”

“Perfectly well, sister.” His voice cracked. He reached for his wine and drank deeply.

The Comtesse de Vaudreuil had already turned back to the gentleman on her left, her fan unfurling with a rustle of painted silk. She did not look at Armand again for the rest of the meal.

Marguerite’s heart hammered beneath her stays.

The vial. It was the shape of the one she now carried in her mother’s locket—the shape of the one she’d found in the grove. Bitter-almond death in a thumb’s length of glass.

---

The dinner lasted two more hours, an eternity of forced laughter and clinking silver. When the last plate was cleared and the Duchesse retired with her ladies, Marguerite slipped away.

She found Armand’s valet in the servants’ corridor, polishing boots that were already gleaming.

He was young—younger even than Armand—with a pockmarked face and nervous hands. He looked up when Marguerite approached, recognized her livery, and offered a cautious nod.

“Monsieur,” she said, pitching her voice low. “I’ve come about your master.”

The valet’s hands stilled on the boot. “What about him?”

“His debts.”

The word hung between them. The valet’s face went carefully blank—the expression of a man who has learned that safety lies in saying nothing.

“I don’t know what you mean, mademoiselle.”

“I saw the vial,” Marguerite said. “In his pocket. At dinner tonight.”

The valet set down the brush. His eyes darted to the corridor’s door, then back, then to the floor. “You saw nothing.”

“I saw enough.”

“Mademoiselle, with respect—” He swallowed. “You should see nothing. You should hear nothing. Your mistress may be the Duchesse, but my master’s affairs are not yours, and I’ll thank you to keep it that way.”

Marguerite stepped closer. She was not tall, but she made herself a blade. “Your master is in trouble. The kind of trouble that ends with him dead in a ditch or poisoned in his bed. I’ve seen the Comtesse de Brionne hand that same poison to a pharmacist’s boy. I’ve smelled it in an innocent tisane meant for my mistress. And now your master carries it in his pocket like a love note.”

The valet’s face went white.

For a moment, she thought he would break. His lips parted. His hands trembled around the brush. But he looked down at the boot in his lap, and something closed behind his eyes like a door slamming shut in a storm.

“My master’s affairs are not mine,” he repeated, and his voice was steadier now. Too steady. “Nor are they yours. Whatever you think you saw, you would be wise to forget it.”

Marguerite felt her jaw tighten. “Is he in debt to the Comtesse?”

“I told you. I know nothing.”

“To someone else, then. Is the vial payment for a debt, and not a weapon at all?”

The valet’s silence was louder than any confession.

She tried another angle. “Who does he owe? The Marquis de Brissac? The Comte de Rochechouart?”

At the name Brissac, the valet flinched—a tiny twitch of his shoulder, barely visible. But it was enough.

“You should go,” he said, standing abruptly. “If anyone sees you speaking with me, they’ll think we’re conspiring. And I have no wish to end the night in a Bastille cell.”

“Your master will end in a coffin,” Marguerite said, “if you stay silent.”

The valet looked at her, and for one moment his mask slipped enough to show her the true terror underneath. “My master is not the one who needs saving, mademoiselle.”

He gathered his polishing rags and slipped past her into the corridor’s shadows, leaving her alone with a sentence that twisted in her chest like a blade.

---

She returned to the Duchesse’s chambers to find her mistress sitting before her mirror, brushing her own hair—a gesture of intimacy that had become rare and precious since the poisoning.

“There you are, Marguerite.” The Duchesse did not turn. “I wondered if you’d taken ill as well. The Comtesse de Brionne’s little gift sits in my belly like a serpent. I should have thrown the tisane at her head and saved us both the trouble.”

Marguerite crossed to the dressing table and took the brush from her mistress’s hand with gentle care. “You’ve taken Dr. Beaumont’s remedy?”

“Every morning and every night, as promised.” The Duchesse met her eyes in the mirror, and her expression was uncharacteristically serious. “Is there something you’re not telling me, Marguerite?”

The lie formed on her lips. Died there.

“Your brother,” Marguerite said instead, “was speaking with the Comtesse de Vaudreuil tonight.”

The Duchesse’s brow furrowed. “The Comtesse? They’re barely acquainted. She’s a horrid gossip and her father lost his head over some card debt before I was born. Why would Armand speak with her?”

“I don’t know. But she said something about him being “compromised.” And I saw something in his pocket.”

The Duchesse’s hands tightened in her lap. “What kind of something?”

“A vial.”

Silence stretched between them like a thread pulled to breaking.

Then the Duchesse stood, her voice cold and hard. “My brother is a gambler. He always has been. But he would not—” She stopped, pressed a hand to her lips. “Marguerite, if he is involved with these poisoners, if he has been drawn into that world...”

“The Comtesse de Vaudreuil may be no better than the Comtesse de Brionne,” Marguerite said. “Perhaps they work for the same man.”

The Duchesse turned. Her face had lost its plastered court smile and now showed a haggard woman beneath the paint, aged ten years in the space of one conversation. “Three nights ago, Armand asked me for money. A considerable sum. I refused, thinking it was another gambling debt he’d chalk up to youthful folly. He left angry. I haven’t seen him since.”

“He was at dinner tonight.”

“At dinner he may smile at me, Marguerite. But I no longer know my brother. And if you ask me—” Her voice caught. “I’m no longer certain he wouldn’t spend that money to have me killed, if the alternative was his own corpse.”

The words landed like stones in a still pond.

Marguerite thought of the vial glinting in Armand’s pocket. Thought of the valet’s terror. Thought of the Comtesse de Vaudreuil’s knife-blade smile.

“He said something,” Marguerite murmured, half to herself. “At the table, the Comtesse said she would hate to see him compromised.”

The Duchesse’s eyes went distant. “Compromised,” she repeated. “Yes. That word says much.” She gripped Marguerite’s wrist. “You have to find out what my brother has become. Before the Queen’s soirée—before whatever plan the Comtesse de Brionne is weaving reaches its end.”

Marguerite looked down at her mistress’s pale fingers clamped around her arm.

Two nights until the soirée. One brother who carried poison in his pocket. And a valet who had said his master was not the one who needed saving.

She felt the weight of her mother’s locket against her breast, and she nodded.