Saving Céleste
Please note this is Book 3 of the Beyond My Control series, make sure you read Books 1 and 2 first.
The note she sent him held nothing beyond what the matter required. I have need of an intelligence only you possess, on a matter that admits no delay. Name your hour, and I shall come to you within it.
His answer reached her inside the hour, which told her, before she had even broken the seal, how little persuading he intended to require. Now suits me perfectly, he had written, the hand as unhurried as the man himself. I have been expecting something of the kind.
She rolled her eyes, folded the note along its own crease, and drew on her gloves finger by finger while her maid waited by the door, already dressed for going out before she had properly decided to go.
He kept to the smaller of the two reading rooms at the club, the one he occupied when he wished to be found by certain people and overlooked by everyone else, and he rose the instant she crossed the threshold, unfolding himself from the chair with the same economy of movement that had, by more than one account she had heard secondhand and believed entirely, undone women in considerably less time than it took him to cross a room.
He was dressed as he was always dressed: dark superfine cut close through the shoulder, a cravat tied with a precision that looked effortless and was not, nothing about him offered up for admiration and everything about him admired regardless.
Pale eyes that missed a great deal more than they ever troubled to reveal found her before she had gone three steps into the room, and the corner of his mouth admitted what his greeting did not: that he had known, from the moment her note reached him, precisely what sort of afternoon this would prove to be.
They were alone together in the room now, and the room itself could not help but recall to her the last time they had been confined so entirely to a single space: the carriage, the narrow seat and the narrower distance between them once the door had shut, his hand at her throat lifting the signet into the lamplight.
They had said nothing of it since. Neither of them had forgotten a moment of it. Neither of them, this afternoon, meant to be the one who said so first.
“Tell me,” he said, and the two words held no interrogation in them at all, only patience.
She told him plainly: that Céleste’s family had begun entertaining a marriage offer from a man named Sevran, a man Isabelle knew scarcely at all beyond his reputation for prudence and his standing at court, and that something in the swiftness of the arrangement, the eagerness with which it had been pressed upon a family not accustomed to such attention, had set her instincts working before her reasoning had caught up to them.
She wanted him looked into before the contract went any further. He listened attentively, offering her nothing to read in his face, his glass forgotten and entirely still in his hand, and when she came at last to the end of it the quiet he left behind had the texture of calculation completing itself rather than of a man still deciding what to think.
“Sevran,” he said, and set the glass down untouched, as though even the ritual of drinking were an indulgence he had chosen to forgo for the length of what he meant to tell her. “Twelve years he has held the contracts for military supply, and in all that span the quantities delivered have never once matched the quantities invoiced, nor the material paid for. It is the only honest work the man does, keeping that fraud accounted so cleanly that the men set to audit it are either deceived by it entirely or paid well enough to remain so.”
He crossed to the window, and the grey Paris afternoon lit one side of his face and left the other in a shadow she had learned by now not to mistake for anything so simple as a mood.
“He keeps a mistress. Hélène de Vauclair, four years his, and cleverer than he deserves. She has kept his correspondence for most of that time, which means she holds the true contracts, the ones his auditors are never shown. She believes that once his position is secure enough to bear a wife of consequence, that wife will be her.”
He turned from the window to face her fully, and something in his stillness sharpened.
“Six months past, Sevran wrote to the Duc de Morlaix, who alone controls the granting of the Intendant’s post, and petitioned for it outright. Versailles will not hand a man that office while his household reeks of scandal, and Sevran knows it as well as any man at court. In that letter, in his own hand, he declares his intention to marry a daughter of good family, unencumbered.”
He let the phrase settle before he went on. “As you know, it means Céleste. Morlaix’s decision on the post is expected within the month, and her family, I am given to understand, hopes to have the marriage settled by very near the same date. He requires the wife to make the appointment plausible, and the appointment to make the wife’s family agreeable to the match. Each depends on the other, and both depend on Vauclair suspecting nothing at all until the contract is signed.” A pause. “She does not know the letter exists.”
“When she sees it—” Isabelle began.
“She will bring us everything.” The words came without ornament, flat as a man reciting a certainty rather than voicing a hope. “Four years of proof that Sevran has been stealing from the Crown’s own army since before she ever cared for him. She will want him ruined, and she will not much mind by whose hand it happens.”
He turned back to the window. “We bring what she gives us to Morlaix before the month is out. No man hands the Intendancy to a fraud, and no family delivers a daughter into a scandal already breaking around her bridegroom. Sevran loses the post, and inside the same week, he loses Céleste.”
Something moved through her at that, sudden and entirely physical. He had known. Of course he had known, had likely known before her note ever reached him, had perhaps begun the accounting himself the moment some rumor of the match first crossed his path, and had simply waited, with that maddening patience of his, for her to arrive at the door he had already opened.
Her breath went short, and she made no effort at all to correct it. Heat climbed through her in a single slow wave, entirely at odds with the composure she was attempting, with some difficulty, to keep arranged on her face, her pulse beating hard enough at her throat that she wondered, distantly, whether he could see it from where he stood.
It was the twelve years of contracts recalled without a single note in front of him, the mistress’s name produced as easily as her own, the letter’s very phrasing delivered from memory as though he had read it that morning rather than heard tell of it months past, that did this to her, every single time, and she had long since abandoned any pretense, even to herself, that she found it anything other than unbearable.
“The letter itself is at Versailles,” she said.
“The Duchesse de Morlaix keeps her husband’s correspondence in order whenever he is called away from it, and this week, on business he trusts to no courier, he is away from it entirely.” He delivered it in the mild tone a man might use to remark on the likelihood of rain. “I shall have the letter within a day of our arrival.”
“And Vauclair herself.”
He fell silent in a way that had nothing to do with listening, a stillness that belonged instead to a man who had already reasoned his way to a private conclusion and found, upon arriving there, that he disliked the view.
“I cannot bring it to her myself,” he said at last. “She despises me, and with cause. I seduced a close friend of hers two years past, and left the friendship in worse ruin than the affair itself. If I enter a room she occupies, she leaves it inside a minute.”
Isabelle looked at him a long moment, and he did not look back. His gaze had gone to the window, to the grey light doing nothing in particular to the street below, and the stillness in him now was not the stillness of listening, nor of a conclusion already reasoned through, but something nearer to waiting, though for what she could not yet have said.
“Someone she will not see coming,” she said. “Someone genuinely warm, because a woman who has spent four years reading a man’s every falsehood for a living will know artifice the instant it opens its mouth. Someone whose feeling for Céleste runs real.” She turned the thought over once more before she let it settle. “Belmanoir.”
