The Forbidden Rose by Joanna Bourne

Author:Joanna Bourne [Bourne, Joanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Romance, General, Man-Woman Relationships, Love Stories, Historical, Historical Fiction, France, Espionage, Historical Romance, France - History - Revolution; 1789-1799, Spy Stories
ISBN: 9780425235614
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 2009-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Twenty-seven

HAWKER PRACTICED THE ART OF BEING INCONSPICUOUS, something with which he was already moderately familiar. It was the soft belly of the night. The time for good pickings. There was dark in the corners if you were in the mood to lurk. If you didn’t want to skulk, you could blend into the folks coming home from the cafés and the theater. Poor men walked the streets because their rooms were too hot to sleep in. Rich men, because they were looking for a woman. Anyone could be on the stroll this hour of the evening.

Back home in London, his mates would be working, breaking into a shop or lifting merchandise off some boat tied up in the Thames where the officers were careless-like.He leaned up against a doorway, pretending to shake a pebble out of his boot. The house he had his eye on was fifty feet down Rue Honoré. Rue Saint-Honoré, they’d called it a few years back before everything in Paris got itself de-saintified.

Five men passed, each of them with something more important to do than notice him.

If he was in London right now, he’d be with Beets and Rory and Sticker and the others. When the night’s job was done they’d stop at a cookshop in St. Giles for sausages before they headed back to the padding ken to hand the goods over to Lazarus. Or if they were empty-handed, they’d end up in a tavern, drinking themselves fuddled and making up excuses.

He was still working. Still robbing houses. This time he was doing it for the British Service. Life was a funny old dame.

They put streetlamps all up and down here. Some of the householders even hung a lantern by the front door. He’d have to walk through all that bloody illumination to get where he was going.

This here . . . this was Robespierre’s house.

The most powerful man in France—as close to being the king as made no difference—lived in a nothing-special house, tucked up over a woodshop. If you wanted to see Robespierre, well . . . probably you trotted yourself around those piles of lumber and knocked on the door.

“He is one of the people.” That’s what the woman hawking newspapers said when he brought up the question of who the house belonged to. “He is ours, our Robespierre, little citoyen. He lives as we do, without bribes or favorites. He is The Incorruptible. You do well to come and see what he is.”

No guards, no three hundred men in fancy uniforms riding on horses, no big iron gates closing everybody out. No crown jewels. Seemed like the French had it right somehow.

He shrugged, doing it loose in his shoulders. Practicing. It felt natural, almost, to jerk his chin up a notch, to say no. Turn his hand over to say yes. He was picking up the knack of it. Learning to look French. Why not? Maybe it’d been a Frenchman who’d fathered him.

There was more to it than shrugs. Clothes, for instance.

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