Read Chapter 8: A Brother's Silence

The knock came three times, quick and light, like a bird pecking at a window. Élodie looked up from her mending—a torn hem on one of the queen's lesser-used morning gowns—and frowned. Visitors to her small room were rare, and visitors who knocked with such urgency were rarer still.

She set the gown aside and crossed to the door. When she opened it, a boy of perhaps twelve stood in the corridor, cap in hand, cheeks flushed from running.

"Mademoiselle Marchand?" he gasped.

"I am she."

He thrust a folded letter at her. "From the army post. They said it was urgent, and I was told to find you directly."

Élodie's blood went cold. The army post. Luc. Her brother had not written in months, and now a messenger had sought her out specifically. She fumbled in her pocket for a coin—she had almost none left—but the boy was already turning away.

"No payment needed," he said over his shoulder. "The captain said it was a matter of life or death."

The door clicked shut. Élodie stared at the letter in her trembling hands. The seal was cracked, the paper warped as if it had been rained upon or worse. She recognized Luc's handwriting on the outside—looping and careless, the hand of a boy who had never learned to sit still long enough for proper penmanship.

She broke the seal and unfolded the page.

*My dear Élodie,*

*Forgive me for the silence. I know you must have written a dozen times, and each letter I meant to answer grew heavier in my pack until I could no longer carry them. But I am writing now because I fear I may not get another chance.*

*We marched on the border three weeks ago. The fighting was worse than they told us. I survived, though my shoulder bears a scar that will ache in winter.* He would laugh at that, she thought, remembering how he had always made light of his pains as a child. *But something else has happened, and I cannot be certain the post will carry this letter safely.*

*There is a man I have come to know, an officer in my regiment. He speaks too freely of the court, of favors owed and debts unpaid. He told me things, Élodie. Things about the king's brother and certain arrangements that should not be spoken of aloud. I did not ask to know them. But now that I do, I find that my feet have been removed from the ground, and I am being sent south where the fighting is worse, where the officers who speak of these matters are sent to remain.*

*I do not know if I will come home. If this letter reaches you, know that I am proud of you—you always believed I would be a soldier, and I proved you right, even if it kills me.*

*Take care of Mother's thimble. And remember what she always told us: the truth will sew itself, one way or another.*

*Your brother, Luc*

Élodie read the letter twice, then a third time, and with each reading the words carved deeper into her chest. She pressed the paper to her lips, then folded it carefully, deliberately, and tucked it into the bodice of her dress where she kept her precious thimble.

She stood there for a long moment, breathing. Then she made a decision.

She had to find Liselotte.

The queen's chambers were quiet as Élodie slipped through the back corridor. She knew Liselotte would be attending to the evening routine—folding, pressing, preparing for tomorrow. The older seamstress kept her own schedule, and her own counsel, and she had been the closest thing to a friend Élodie had found at court.

It took twenty minutes of weaving through the servants' passageways before Élodie saw the familiar silver-blonde head bent over a length of velvet at the far end of a narrow workroom. Liselotte looked up at the sound of footsteps, and something in Élodie's face must have betrayed her, because the woman's needle paused mid-stitch.

"What has happened?" Liselotte asked, setting the fabric aside.

Élodie crossed the room, pulled out the letter, and placed it in Liselotte's hands. She watched as the older woman read, her eyes moving across the page, her expression shifting from curiosity to concern to a carefully controlled blankness.

When Liselotte looked up again, her voice was softer than Élodie had ever heard it. "Your brother."

"Yes."

"He is in danger."

"He is already in danger. He is being sent toward it."

Liselotte folded the letter and returned it to Élodie, her fingers lingering on the paper for a moment. "He speaks of an officer who knew too much. Of the king's brother. Do you know which brother he means?"

"The Comte d'Artois is the only one with power enough to matter." Élodie heard her own voice as if from far away. "And I have been told that his name is dangerous."

"It is."

"Then my brother is already dead." The words came out flat, without the emotion she felt rising in her chest. She had learned, in the weeks since arriving at Versailles, that emotion was a luxury she could not afford.

Liselotte was quiet for a long moment. Then she reached out and took Élodie's hands in her own—warm, calloused hands covered in tiny needle marks, the hands of a woman who had spent her life sewing more than garments.

"I have a cousin," Liselotte said slowly, "who works in the Ministry of War. He is a clerk, nothing more, nothing less. But clerks hear things, Élodie. They read correspondence. They file orders."

"You would ask him about Luc?"

"I would ask him about a soldier of a certain description who may have been reassigned south. I would do it discreetly, and he would answer discreetly, and it would cost nothing but a favor I can spare."

Élodie's throat tightened. "Why would you do this for me? We barely know each other."

Liselotte smiled, and there was something old in her eyes, something that held knowledge Élodie did not yet possess. "Because I knew your grandmother, Élodie. Not well—I was young, new to court—but I remember her. She was good to me when I had nothing and no one. And you have her hands, her way with a seam, her stubbornness, if you will forgive the observation."

"You never told me—"

"Because there are things I do not speak of until the time is right. But this is not a matter of the past. This is a matter of your brother, who is alive, perhaps, and who deserves a chance to remain so." Liselotte squeezed her hands. "I will write to my cousin tonight. But you must do something for me in return."

"Anything."

Liselotte's face grew serious. "You must tell me the truth about what you are carrying. Not the letter from your brother—the other one. The one a certain cavalry officer gave you in the garden."

Élodie's breath caught. "How did you—"

"I have eyes. And a memory. And when you walked in just now, you kept your left hand pressed to your chest, as if guarding something. I have seen that gesture before, and it always means a secret."

Standing in the quiet workroom, surrounded by bolts of silk and half-finished gowns, Élodie felt the two letters pressing against her heart like twin weights. One carried her brother's fear. The other carried a stranger's plea—and, potentially, a treasonous accusation against the Comte d'Artois, whose name appeared now in her brother's letter and in the folded note she had not yet dared to read.

"If I tell you," she said slowly, "it may put you in danger as well."

Liselotte laughed—a short, dry sound. "My dear girl, I have worked in the queen's wardrobe for nineteen years. I have been in danger since the day I arrived. The only question is which threat will find me first."

She looked at Élodie with unexpected gentleness.

"And I have learned one thing in all those years. A threat shared is a threat halved. A secret kept alone will consume you. So. Tell me."

Élodie's hand moved to her bodice, hesitated, and then withdrew, empty. The soldier's letter was a weight she had carried alone for days, trying to decide what it meant, who to trust, whether delivering it would save her or destroy her.

"I cannot tell you what is in it," she said finally. "Because I have not read it myself. I only know what Captain de Rohan told me—that his brother is imprisoned, falsely accused, and that the letter contains proof of his innocence."

"And you believe him?"

"I believe he was desperate. I believe his brother may be innocent or guilty, and I have no way to know which." She looked at her hands, from which her grandmother's skills and her mother's burdens had both descended. "But I know that the Comte d'Artois's name is involved. And now my brother's letter speaks of the same name, in the same breath, in connection with arrangements that should not be spoken of aloud."

The silence between them stretched.

Liselotte was the first to break it. "Do you see what this means?"

"That I am caught between two impossible things?"

"That there is one thread connecting them." Liselotte's voice was quiet, urgent. "The Comte d'Artois has enemies now—the queen's circle, the reformists, the officers who resent his influence. And there are those who would use any instrument, any rumor, any letter to bring him down. You may hold one of those instruments in your dress this very moment."

Élodie felt the weight of the captain's letter like a stone against her breastbone.

"I do not know who seeks to use me," she said. "I only know that I have a brother who may be dying in a war that serves someone's ambition, and a captain who believes his brother is dying in a prison built on a lie. And I am standing in a palace where both those deaths might be ordered by the same man."

Liselotte nodded slowly. "Then we must be very careful indeed."

She moved to her desk, took out a sheet of paper, and dipped a quill in ink. "I will write to my cousin tonight. He will inquire about a soldier of Luc's description. In the meantime"—she paused, her pen hovering over the page—"you must decide what you intend to do with the captain's letter. And you must decide before someone decides for you."

Élodie stood in the golden lamplight of the workroom, her brother's letter against her heart, the stranger's letter waiting in shadow, and felt the thin silk thread of her life at Versailles begin to pull taut.

"Someone will," she said quietly, "if I do not find the answer first."