Read Chapter 22: The Sibling's Vow

Marguerite’s cell smelled of tallow and dried rosemary, and she had not offered either of them a seat.

James stood with his back to the door, arms crossed, jaw set. Élise leaned against the cold stone wall by the window, her hand pressed to the bandage at her side, trying not to look as weak as she felt. The candle between them guttered, casting long shadows across Marguerite’s face—a face that wore the habit of peace but carried the tension of a drawn bowstring.

“You ask me to abandon vows I have kept for four years,” Marguerite said, her voice low and steady, a nun’s cadence but a soldier’s timber. “You ask me to walk out of this convent into a France that would hang me for what I know.”

“I ask you to come home,” James said.

“Home.” Marguerite laughed, a hollow sound. “Home died at Quatre Bras. Home is a grave in Belgium with a stone that bears our family name and nothing else.”

Élise watched the exchange with a strange ache in her chest. This was not a stranger’s argument. It was the same fight she had rehearsed in her own mind a hundred times, standing over an empty bed where her brother had slept before the war took him.

“Your brother died serving France,” Élise said softly.

Marguerite’s eyes snapped to her. “My brother died serving *England*. A different standard, mademoiselle.”

“And yet you mourn him the same way I mourn mine.”

The silence that followed was thick enough to drink. Marguerite studied Élise with new attention, her gaze dropping to the wounded side, the torn dress, the locket now hanging safely beneath the fabric.

“The nurse,” Marguerite said. “The one my brother dragged through a tunnel and halfway across France. I thought you were his prisoner. Now I see you are something else.”

“I am his ally,” Élise said. “For now.”

“For now,” Marguerite repeated. “How honest. And what do you want from me, mademoiselle?”

“The truth about the papers. The truth about why my father was killed. The truth about what my brother—” She stopped. Swallowed. “My brother Pierre may still be alive because of what you know.”

Marguerite’s face went pale. She gripped the edge of the small wooden table, knuckles whitening.

“Pierre,” she whispered. Not a question. A name she had carried with her.

James frowned. “Marguerite, what is this?”

Marguerite turned her back to them, facing the crucifix on the wall. For a long moment, no one spoke. When she turned around, her eyes were wet.

“Your brother,” she said, looking at Élise, “was in love with me.”

The words hit Élise like cold water. “What?”

“He was a quartermaster in Napoleon’s army. A mapmaker’s son, but he had a talent for languages, for reading men. He was assigned to handle negotiations outside Paris in the winter of ’14. I was—” She stopped. “I was not always a nun.”

James stepped forward. “You never told me any of this.”

“You never asked what I did before I took the veil, James. You assumed I had been praying since childhood while you were off fighting your glorious wars.”

James recoiled as if struck. Élise knew the gesture. It was the same look she wore when someone described her brother as a faceless soldier in Napoleon’s ranks, a number on a casualty report.

“Pierre and I met at the Château Laurent,” Marguerite continued. “He was there to survey the grounds. I was there to visit my aunt, who served the family. We met in the kitchens. We met in the gardens. We met in the library when no one else was awake.” Her voice trembled. “He was good, Élise. He was gentle. And he was caught.”

“Caught by whom?” Élise demanded.

“By the same men who killed your father,” Marguerite said. “Men who serve no flag but their own. They used Pierre to find your father’s maps. When your father refused to reveal the locations of the hidden routes, they killed him. And when Pierre fought back, they took him.”

Élise felt the floor shift beneath her. “You know where he is.”

“I know where he *was*.”

“Then the papers,” James said, pressing. “The ones Mary took. They connect to this?”

Marguerite turned to her brother, and for the first time, her resolve cracked. “Mary did not take those papers, James. She was *given* them. By me.”

James’s face went rigid. “You gave our brother’s war documents to his widow? To a woman who vanished without a word?”

“Because there are lists in those papers,” Marguerite said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Lists of collaborators. French officials who sold secrets to the coalition. English bankers who funded both sides. Names that, if made public, would destabilize the peace these men are so desperate to preserve. They want those papers destroyed, James. They want the names buried.”

“And you want them published,” Élise said slowly, understanding dawning.

Marguerite met her gaze. “I want the men who murdered your father and took your brother to face what they have done. I want the war to end—truly end—not with a peace that protects the guilty.”

“If you publish those papers,” James said, “it will start a new conflict. Arguably worse.”

“Then you are no different from them,” Marguerite said, her voice sharp as a blade. “You would let the guilty walk free to keep your comfortable peace.”

The silence was unbearable. Élise felt the wound in her side throb, felt the weight of everything they had not said to each other pressing down like a winter fog.

“Pierre,” Élise said quietly, “was my mother’s favorite. When Napoleon conscripted him, she said he would come home a hero. He wrote to her every week. Regular as sunrise. And then the letters stopped.” She looked at Marguerite, and the older woman flinched under the weight of her gaze. “You loved him. You say you loved him. So tell me, sister—where is my brother? Where is your beloved?”

Marguerite’s hands trembled. For a long moment, she said nothing.

Then she moved to the small cabinet in the corner of the cell, unlocked it with a brass key she wore at her waist, and withdrew a folded map. She laid it on the table between them, unfurling it with hands that shook.

It was the same map. The one Whitmore carried. The one with Émile Delacroix’s annotations. The circles around the Château Laurent.

But Marguerite traced her finger to a mark beside a river bend south of the château, a small cross Élise had not noticed before.

“This was the last location Pierre and I agreed upon,” Marguerite said. “If he was ever taken, he was to leave a sign here. I received this map two months ago, from a merchant who said it came from a prisoner exchange.”

Élise’s heart hammered. “He is in that region?”

“He *was*,” Marguerite said. “I had planned to go myself, but.”

“But what?”

Marguerite looked at James, then at Élise. In the candlelight, she looked older than her years. Tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

“Because I received this map the same day a man came to the convent gates asking after a nurse and an English officer,” Marguerite said. “He wore French royalist colors but spoke with a Prussian accent. He described you both well enough to make my blood cold.” Her voice dropped. “They know you are coming here. They know about the locket. And they know about Pierre.”

James swore under his breath and began pacing. Élise felt her stomach turn.

“You said the trap was for us,” she managed. “You said you were protecting the convent.”

“I was,” Marguerite said. “I am. But if they find the papers, they will have no need for Pierre’s testimony. They will kill him tonight.” She looked at her brother. “I stayed to protect the secret. But staying may kill the only man I have ever loved.”

James stopped pacing. He looked at Marguerite, and for the first time, Élise saw him as not a soldier or a captain or a man hiding behind a false name—but a brother, desperate not to lose another sister.

“Sister Marguerite,” James said, “tell me where those papers are. Now. Before you lose him too.”

Marguerite’s jaw tightened. “And if I do, James? What will you do with them?”

“What would you have me do?”

Marguerite stared at him for a long moment. Then she reached into her habit and withdrew a small silver cross on a chain. She pressed it into her brother’s palm.

“I will take you to the papers tonight,” she said quietly. “But you must promise me, on this cross, that you will see them to England. That you will not let them be destroyed.”

James looked at the cross in his hand, then at his sister’s face. Slowly, deliberately, he closed his hand and nodded.

“You have my word.”

Marguerite turned to Élise. “And you, mademoiselle. You asked to know your brother’s fate. Are you prepared to learn it?”

Élise stood, her side burning, her heart racing faster than it had at the tunnel entrance.

“I came all the way from Waterloo,” she said, straightening to her full height. “I think I can face the rest of the road.”

A ghost of a smile crossed Marguerite’s lips. She turned and blew out the candle, plunging them into near-darkness.

“We leave within the hour,” she said, her voice suddenly hard and purposeful. “The convent has a second passage. But once we step outside these walls, we are no longer protected. Be ready for anything.”

She moved past them, robes brushing the floor, her hand resting on the doorframe for just a moment before she glanced over her shoulder.

“And James,” she added quietly, “if you get my papers to England, I will finally tell you how our brother died. The way no one else will.”

She left before he could answer. James stood frozen, the silver cross still pressing into his palm.

Behind him, Élise pressed her hand to the wound at her side and drew a ragged breath. The pain was dull and warm, but she had no time for pain. Her brother was out there, held by men who had already killed her father. His life hung on papers she had not seen, carried by a woman who had loved him and lost him. And now they were walking into the night’s dark to find both.

She followed Marguerite into the corridor, leaving the dead candle behind them.