to look forward to. And while she’d never admit it, she’d acquired a taste for adventuring. I knew I’d found a keeper when the woman began our relationship by taking a shot at me. Pretty, brave, smart as Franklin, and just as corrective.
“We can practice, but you’re not to impregnate me until our conspiracy has succeeded. The last thing I need is to be heavy with child.”
I shrugged. Practicing was good enough for me.
“Then we’re allied,” said Catherine. “I will play your governess, and we will live, all of us, under one roof.”
CHAPTER 4
We crept toward Paris like the spies we were, taking boggy back roads and sleeping on floors and in stables. There’s a good toll road that speeds travelers from Calais to the capital in twenty-four hours, each of the privately maintained sections between tollgates called a stage and its vehicles stagecoaches, a briskly modern word like cabriolet. But this technological progress did us no good because our lack of proper papers and rough-looking escorts would raise questions.
“The telegraph will send word of our skirmish,” Butron warned. This insidious invention relayed messages by moving fifteen-foot-long paddles on spaced towers in the same way a navy uses signal flags. It seems invasive to me that authorities can waggle information at a hundred miles an hour, speeding up life yet again, but such are modern times. Careers uncertain, privacy under assault, and police proliferating as the nineteenth-century dawns: how grim the future! So we moved cautiously on horseback from one safe house to another.
Harry rode in front of me, hugging my saddle pommel and asking questions about the color of the sky or why horse droppings look different than ours. Astiza mounted sidesaddle at the insistence of Comtesse Catherine, who announced she would prove herself useful by training us to function in society once restoration occurred. I wondered at how swiftly she had migrated from treating me as inferior to treating the pair of us as useful companions who could be trained, but maybe word of the arrests in Paris and the loss of her money had convinced her to be more companionable and expedient. Or, maybe she was warming to my charm.
“Swing the legs from one side of the horse to the other each hour to sustain the symmetry of the derriere,” our aristocrat advised my wife. “Don’t look backward because twisting your shoulders upsets the set of the cloak behind your saddle. Kid gloves to keep the palms smooth, and creams against the weather. I have egg white to lighten, or a paste of strawberries and fat for blush.”
“You both look fine the way you are,” I ventured.
“It is not a man’s opinion women value, Monsieur Gage. Do not get involved in subjects you know nothing about.”
“You have a point,” I said agreeably. “‘Eat to please thyself, but dress to please others,’ my mentor Benjamin Franklin used to say.”
“A proper lady eats to please others, too, with restraint and delicacy.”
“You believe it’s by style that one succeeds in Paris?” Astiza asked. Most people are confused by new information, but my wife absorbs it.
“It’s by style that one succeeds anywhere. Presentation implies competence, and manners fortify beauty. A moment’s wit can equal a year’s labor. Correct fashion can wring salvation from scandal.”
Catherine’s confidence made us tolerate her pomposity. It’s human instinct to abide those who think they know what they’re doing, no matter how optimistic their opinion of themselves.
Except for their shared beauty—Catherine’s pale glow a complement to Astiza’s warmer honey—I could scarcely conceive of two more different women. The comtesse was obsessed with position and power, Astiza with revelation and truth. Our “governess” was born to be a courtesan, my wife a priestess. Any partnership wasn’t natural, and yet they seemed to get on. The comtesse seemed relieved that Astiza’s presence ended any flirtation on my part, and in fact warmed to me in her presence, regarding marriage as proof I wasn’t entirely oafish. My wife recognized that Catherine had expertise in her own vapid way. Our countess was a window to the superficialities of the elite.
“I apologize for bringing her,” I initially whispered to Astiza as we clopped along. “She’s somewhat imperious and probably unrealistic about getting her lands and titles back.”
“How much do we know about her?”
“She’s an heiress with a hatred of the revolution and its inheritor, Bonaparte. Catherine is mysterious, but in London she knew table place settings and spring fashion. We thought she could enlist other royalists and seduce a key informant or