Heaven in His Arms Read online

  Prologue

  Paris, July 1670

  This was her only chance.

  Genevieve Lalande clutched a bundle close to her chest. She straightened against the wall and merged her silhouette with the shadows. The dampness of the stone seeped through her thin woolen dress and chilled her skin, already clammy from fear and anticipation. She dug her fingers into the bundle. She had come this far. All that was left was to pass the guard at the end of the hallway, and she would be free.

  The distraction had already begun. A slip of a girl emerged from one of the doorways that pocked the hall. With a flash of white legs, the sylph raced toward the dozing female guard and seized her arm. The guard started from her nap, staring at the wild-haired creature with glazed eyes. The young girl, a deaf-mute, pointed frantically toward her room. Cursing, the stocky woman hefted herself out of her seat, grasped a sputtering candle, and lumbered after the thin wraith.

  As the guard disappeared into the chamber, Genevieve launched herself through the hall, her bare feet swift and soundless, her gaze fixed on the dull gleam of the high oak doors, one of the last remaining barriers to freedom. She would have only a few moments before the guard realized that the young woman’s unspoken fears were imaginary—the crazed ravings of a simpleton, the sleep-befogged guard would think—and then the old laywoman would shrug them off and return to her dozing.

  The brass handle chilled Genevieve’s hand. She eased the door open to prevent the hinges from squeaking. When it was cracked enough, she slipped through and edged it closed behind her.

  She leaned for a moment against the outside wall, sucking in the humid night air as she waited for her heart to stop pounding in her ears. As the soft breeze filtered around the building and cooled her skin, Genevieve listened for pursuers. Shifting her bundle, she murmured a prayer of eternal gratitude to the deaf-mute who had aided her in her plans. Then she put it behind her. She had no time to waste—she was already late. If she didn’t hurry, her second accomplice would lose courage and destroy all their well-made plans.

  Peering around the corner of the building, she scanned the enormous courtyard of the Salpetriere. The night was clear but moonless. Bits of smooth, flat gravel scattered the meager starlight, making the courtyard glitter as if it were covered with frost. There was no sign of her accomplice, but she didn’t expect to find her waiting like a lost child in the middle of the open courtyard. She glanced at the debris scattered at the opposite end, where the church of Saint Louis was being built between the two long buildings of the Salpetriere. There was no better place to hide and wait but among the hewn stones, the piled earth, and the skeletal wooden scaffolding on the site. She was certain she’d find her accomplice there.

  Genevieve turned the corner and clung to the walls as she worked her way toward the site. Sharp chips of gravel bit into the callused pads of her feet. A night breeze swept through the open courtyard, heavy with the ripe stench of rotting refuse that rose from the nearby Seine River. She glanced up at the rows of windows in the opposite building, winking at her like a thousand eyes, then stumbled and bit back a curse as she kicked an abandoned pick. The tool clattered loudly on the gravel. Her bare toe smarted. She squeezed her eyes shut until the pain passed. Then she limped on until she reached the shadows of the scaffolding.

  She shifted the weight of the bundle to her other arm, tensely awaiting the appearance of someone from the darkness. Her accomplice must have heard her stumbling in the dark—the clatter of the pick against the gravel had been loud enough to wake the dead. As the minutes passed and no one emerged, Genevieve worked her way through the debris and began to search. She followed the curve of the church, its wooden dome just beginning to take shape high above the masonry, then circled each pile of stones and peered around the tumbled stacks of wood and earth.

  Marie Suzanne Duplessis was not there.

  Genevieve clutched a support of the wooden scaffolding. A splinter pierced her skin. Marie should have been here by now. The last note Genevieve had sent her was specific: Tonight was the night they were to meet in this courtyard to complete the plans they had made over the last three weeks. She and Marie had been passing notes back and forth through the same system without fail for too long for there to be a sudden mix-up.

  Somewhere in Paris, beyond the walls of the institution, churchbells rang. Genevieve counted each discordant resonance and scanned the courtyard. Come, Marie. Come. She hugged her bundle more tightly, stepped over a pile of wood, and edged along the shadows of the construction. She startled a bevy of sleeping birds into an anxious fluttering of wings. A slow stream of silt filtered down from the higher scaffolding, dusting her shoulder. The sleeping birds settled, and she continued her careful course to the other side of the unfinished church.

  Amid the fading clangor of the churchbells, a figure emerged from one of the buildings. Genevieve pressed back against the masonry. If one of the guards saw her, all would be lost. But as she watched the figure enter the courtyard, she knew it was no guard. It was a woman, a young woman by the quick pace of her walk, an anxious woman by the way her head pivoted back and forth, by the way her hands darted out of her cloak and curled into its neckline. As the woman headed toward the debris around the church, Genevieve knew it could be no other than Marie.

  Genevieve intercepted her near a pile of bricks.

  “Marie?”

  The young woman stopped short and pulled back the edge of her scarf, revealing a pale, drawn face. She peered in Genevieve’s direction as she stepped into the starlight.

  “You are Genevieve?”

  ” Oui . Come into the shadows.”

  Genevieve scrutinized the woman as she approached. She had never seen her as close before today. She noticed with relief that they were of the same height. Of all characteristics, height would have been the most difficult to disguise.

  “Thank God you are here … I feared you would leave.” Marie loosened her headrail and pulled the scarf off her hair. “The gouvernante on my floor would not fall asleep, and I was forced to check three doors before T found one unlocked.”

  Refined speech, Genevieve thought, shifting her bundle under one arm. Well, she could mimic that well enough. “You need not have feared. I would have stayed until dawn.”

  Marie peered at her face in the darkness. “I have never seen you before.”

  “Nor I you.” Genevieve didn’t bother to explain that she was housed in a separate building, isolated from women like Marie. Marie was a bijoux, a jewel of the Salpetriere, an orphaned daughter of the petty nobility, pampered and educated and protected from those like herself. “There are hundreds of other women in the Salpetriere.”

  “You write with such a fine hand,” Marie murmured, glancing at Genevieve’s common russet wool skirts, “that I thought you might be one of the noblewomen.”

  Genevieve’s lips tightened. In another time, in another world, she might have been worthy of being called a bijoux. But that was long ago and best left forgotten. She gestured to Marie’s skirts. “Is that what you planned to wear tomorrow?”

  “Yes.” Marie parted her cloak to show a glimpse of a dark blue traveling dress. “I’ve packed a small case and left it by my bed. In it, you’ll find what you need to disguise yourself, several other dresses, and a few gold louis. This is all I can give you for what you are doing for me.”

  “You should have kept the money,” Genevieve argued. Such foolish, innocent generosity. “You’ll need it more than I will.”

  “I couldn’t. I owe you a debt greater than gold.” Marie twisted her headrail in her hands. “You do know what you’re doing, don’t you? I couldn’t live with myself—no matter how happy I’d be to escape my fate—if I misled you.”

  Genevieve
dumped her bundle on a pile of bricks. “I’m the one who suggested this plan.”

  “I’m going to be sent away,” Marie continued, ignoring Genevieve’s words.’ ‘King Louis XIV himself has dowered me. He has paid my passage to some horrible place called Quebec”—her breath hitched in her throat—“and he intends to marry me off to some coarse, rough-handed settler …”

  “I know you’re a king’s girl.” Genevieve snatched the mangled headrail from the other girl’s hands, then shook it out to judge its fit. Every year since Genevieve had arrived in the Salpetriere, dozens of girls of all social classes had been dowered by the king and sent off to the Caribbean islands or to the northern settlements of New France, to marry and settle in the colonies. “I chose you because you’re being sent away from this place.”

  “Haven’t you heard the rumors? Don’t you know anything about … Quebec?” Marie’s smooth white hands, bereft of the headrail, knotted and twisted and pulled at each other. “The forests are filled with red-skinned savages. The winters are long and frigid, and there’s so much snow that it tops the rooftops.” Her voice wavered. “And the voyage—over the sea— halfway across the world, in storms and sickness …”

  Genevieve expertly snapped the headrail smooth. “Have you changed your mind?”

  “Oh, no, no!” Marie clutched her hands to her breast. “It’s just .. . why are you doing this? Why would you take my place and go to that dreadful colony and leave all this behind?”

  Genevieve glared at the two long buildings of the Salpetriere and thought, I’d rather sell my soul to Lucifer than spend another year in this wretched place.

  She bit her tongue to repress the retort. Marie wouldn’t understand. She and Marie both lived in this “charity house,” but they lived in entirely different worlds. Marie lived in the Salpetriere of King Louis XIV; the charity house that succored aging servants with no pensions, old married couples of good birth, and the younger daughters of impoverished petty nobility; the charity house staffed with religious women and headed by a benign Mother Superior. Genevieve lived in a place ruled by brutal guards, a place peopled by orphans and waifs and beggars and whores taken forcefully off the streets of Paris. Since the day she herself had been captured, three years ago, she’d found no charity in this house—only an eternity of hunger and drudgery.

  A hundred times, as she scrubbed and rung and batted linens by the Seine, she had considered escaping by racing toward the nearby gates of Paris and losing her pursuers in the maze of streets she knew so well. But she was also aware of what awaited her in those streets … those streets she knew too well. Nothing had changed. She was the same girl the police had seized from the courtyards of Paris all those years ago, except that she was three years older and wise enough to know the fate of a nineteen-year-old left alone without means in the streets of Paris.

  And now, this Marie Suzanne Duplessis offered an escape far, far better. Marie offered her a new life— her life. But Genevieve knew that trying to explain her reasons to this bijoux would be like trying to teach a blind man to see. Marie had never tasted a stolen apple. She had never raced through the streets of Paris after cutting a nobleman’s purse, fearing hunger more than the threat of capture and punishment by whipping. Marie would never understand the forces of utter desperation.

  “I’m .. . I’m surprised Mother Superior didn’t recommend you to the king himself,” Marie continued when Genevieve did not answer. “I’ve been told she’s having difficulty finding enough girls of… of modest birth to fill the king’s ship to Quebec.”

  “I’ll make a better marriage disguised as a Duplessis than as a Lalande,” Genevieve argued, folding the headrail and laying it upon her bundle. “Because of your birth, you’ll be put aside for the wealthiest men in the colony.”

  “I see.” Marie cast her gaze down. “I didn’t think of that.”

  You wouldn’t, would you? You with your good birth and your sheltered upbringing and your ignorance of the harshness of the world. Genevieve wondered whether she’d have grown up with the same wide-eyed innocence, if the world had been kinder, all those years ago.

  “But of course, it makes perfect sense. How very sage of you.” Marie’s hands fluttered white in the starlight and she released a nervous laugh. “I almost didn’t dare believe….. When I found your first note among my laundered shifts, I was sure someone was playing a trick on me. None of the girls want to go to this dreadful place. The halls echo with their sobbing, as if tomorrow they’ll all be executed in the square.”

  Fools. Fools who don’t know their own good fortune. “You will do this, then?”

  “Yes. Yes.” Her face lit with joy. “I received a note this morning. Francois is waiting for me, just inside the gates of Paris.”

  So that was his name, Genevieve thought, the name of the French Musketeer Marie loved enough to risk everything to marry—even the displeasure of the king. For this woman’s sake, Genevieve dearly hoped he wasn’t like the other strutting, shifty-eyed Musketeers she had known in her younger days. In their blue coats and gold or silver braid, they had terrorized the city, taking whatever women pleased them and pulling their swords at the slightest provocation.

  “Then we mustn’t delay any longer.” Genevieve nodded to Marie’s cloak. “Take off your clothes.”

  The young woman started. “Here?”

  “Quickly.”

  Marie glanced up at the skeletal scaffolding of the church and crossed herself. “What am I to wear? I can’t escape in your clothing.”

  Genevieve waved at her bundle. “You’ll wear the clothing of a gouvernante—a black wool skirt, a white coif, and a black mantle. Dressed as a governess, you can leave the Salpetriere without being stopped.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Hurry.”

  Genevieve unlaced her bodice, tugged it off, then slipped out of her coarse russet wool skirt. The night was warm and balmy, and the breeze toyed with her tattered shift as she stuffed her old clothes beneath a pile of bricks. She scrutinized the girl more closely as Marie fumbled with her laces. Marie’s tresses were long and chestnut-colored. Genevieve’s own hair was a mass of copper, a gift, her mother had once told her, from the father she had never known. Marie’s skin was smooth, while Genevieve had a sprinkling of freckles across her nose. Problems, she thought, but nothing that couldn’t be overcome by brushing the roots of her hair with a lead comb, covering the rest of it with an ample headrail, and patting her face thick with powder.

  “Tell me about your family.” Genevieve snatched Marie’s bodice and thrust her arms through the Sleeves, “I’ll need to know their names, ages, and everything about them that’s important.”

  As Marie struggled out of her skirt and petticoat and reached for the bundle of clothing, she told Genevieve about her past. Her mother had died in childbirth when Marie was only a few years old. Later, impoverished by the civil wars of the Fronde, which had flared through France, she and her father had lived on the charity of distant relatives until her father died, leaving Marie to the mercy of an unscrupulous second cousin. He refused to dower her or pay to put her in a convent, so she was sent to the Salpetriere. Genevieve dispassionately noted all the names and dates as she slipped on Marie’s discarded petticoat and skirt. She would need to know as much as she could remember; the rest she would have to make up as she went along.

  But her mind wandered from Marie’s hushed, trembling monologue as Genevieve ran her hands over the brushed broadcloth of the blue traveling dress. It had been a long time since she had worn clothes so fine, and the feel of the soft cloth against her skin brought a rush of memories of a better time.… She blocked them out. The past was the past—it was the future that mattered now.

  Genevieve set her mind to fitting into Marie’s bodice. Marie was small-boned, but despite the meager rations of the Salpetriere, Genevieve was generously formed. It took both of their efforts to lace the tightly boned bodice closed over Genevieve’s bosom.

  “Th
ere’s another girl in the building who will be going with you tomorrow,” Marie said as she secured the last knot. “Her name is Cecile.”

  “She knows, yes?”

  “Yes. She will await you tonight and take you to my bed.”

  “Good.” Genevieve smoothed her fingers down her boned form, then arranged the crumpled headrail over her hair. She twirled before Marie. “Well?”

  “You’ve the carriage of a noblewoman.” Marie plucked at her plain black robes, hesitating. Her voice quivered with hushed bewilderment. “Perhaps … perhaps this shall all work out as you planned.”

  It will, Marie Suzanne Duplessis. I swear on all that you hold holy, it will.

  “You’ll be leaving at dawn tomorrow for Le Havre,” Marie continued. “Cecile will help shield you from Mother Superior as you board the carriage.”

  “Mother Superior will never notice. I’ll be crying like an onion seller into my—your—handkerchief. Will we be traveling in a public carriage?”

  “Oh, no!” A fluttering white hand emerged from the black sleeve to rest on her throat. “It will be sent by the king, of course.”

  “Who else will be in it?”

  “Some guards will ride outside to see that we are protected until we reach the ship. You know there will be other girls following from the Salpetriere?”

  “Yes.”

  “What if someone recognizes you?” Genevieve leaned over to force her feet into Marie’s boots. “None of the women who live in my section of the Salpetriere were chosen. Once I’m out of Paris, I don’t have to worry about being recognized.”

  Marie hesitated. She slipped her foot nervously in and out of Genevieve’s common wooden shoes.

  “There’s no need for you to wait any longer.” Genevieve glanced up from where she struggled to lace Marie’s tiny boots over her much larger feet. “Go. Your Musketeer is waiting.”

  Marie turned on one heel, then as Genevieve straightened, she suddenly whirled and embraced her, swift and hard. “If I could give you a bag of gold, I would,” Marie said fervently, seizing Genevieve’s hand. “I will never forget you for the sacrifice you’ve made for me… . Oh!”