The Fire (30 page)

Gaelen March

aa c ee g h l m n r

This was a game we’d played when I was small – name anagrams. But practiced though I might be, I was no match for my uncle. The moment he’d unscrambled the anagram in writing for me, I looked up at him in horror.

It read:
Charlemagne
.

‘Not very tactful, is it?’ Nim said with a grimace. ‘Giving away your hand and your likely agenda, along with your calling card.’

I couldn’t believe it! Galen March had not only moved up my list of suspicious figures in this Game – he’d just landed smack on top!

But Nim hadn’t quite finished. ‘Naturally, given the medieval saga that your Basque employer spun for you yesterday, this would suggest to us some connection between him and your new neighbor,’ he said, studying my sheet of notes in more detail. ‘And speaking of Monsieur Boujaron, the sooner you learn what he has to tell you, the better. From these observations you’ve written here, I suspect that whatever he knows may prove quite important. Since I failed to inquire, will he be coming by here for his postponed meeting with you tonight?’

‘I forgot to tell you,’ I said, ‘now that our morning appointment was deferred, I don’t know if I’ll even see him today. Rodo normally cooks on the dinner shift and I work the fires on the graveyard shift after he’s left for the night. That’s why he wanted to be sure I was available tonight. I should phone and find out when we can reschedule our talk.’

But when I glanced around, I noticed that the living room phone seemed to have vanished from its place, as well. I went over and grabbed my shoulder bag from the table where I’d left it, and I rummaged around until I found my cell phone to call Rodo. But before I’d even flipped the cover open to power it on, Nim crossed the room and snatched it from my hand.

‘Where did you get this?’ he snapped. ‘How long have you had it?’

I stared at him. ‘A few years, I guess,’ I said, confused. ‘Rodo insists on having us all at his beck and call.’

But Nim had put his finger to my lips. Now he went to retrieve the yellow pad and scribbled something. He handed both the pad and pencil to me with a sharp look. Then he studied my phone that he still held in his palm.

‘Write your answers
,’ his scrawl read. ‘
Has anyone recently handled this phone but yourself?’

I started to shake my head, when in horror I recalled exactly who
had,
and I cursed myself.
‘The Secret Service,’
I wrote.
‘Last night.’

And they’d held on to it for hours – enough time to plant a bomb or anything else, I thought.

‘Have I taught you nothing, all these years?’ Nim muttered beneath his breath when he saw my message. Then he scribbled again,
‘Did you use it at all, after it was returned?’

I was once again about to reply in the negative, when I realized that I had.

‘Only once, to phone Rodo,’
I wrote, and handed back the pad.

Nim put his hand briefly over his eyes and shook his head. Then he wrote on the pad again. This time it took so long that I was on tenterhooks. But when I actually read it, my breakfast did a swift toss in my stomach and threatened to land in my throat.

‘
Then you’ve activated it, too,’
Nim had written.
‘When they
seized it, they got every phone number, message, or code. All now in their possession. If you’ve turned it on even once since then, they’ve overheard all that we’ve said in this room, too.’

Good God, how could this be happening?

I was about to write more, but Nim grabbed my arm and ushered me to the kitchen sink, where he tore all our notes into shreds, including my earlier observations, lit a match, and burned them. He washed the ashes down through the garbage disposal.

‘You can phone Boujaron in a moment,’ he said aloud. Without a word, we left the phone on the table and went downstairs and outside.

‘It’s too late now,’ my uncle told me. ‘I’m not sure what they’ve heard, but we can’t let on that
we
know they’ve learned anything. At this moment, we must take everything of value out of your place with us, and get to someplace where we can’t be overheard. Only then can we try to reassess the situation sanely.’

Why hadn’t I thought of that phone first thing this morning, the moment he’d told me why he’d removed the others? Whatever we’d said on the bridge last night might be safe, maybe even our breakfast chat, which was in another room. But what had we said this morning, in the vicinity of the cell phone? I felt my hysteria rising.

‘Oh,’ I said with tears in my eyes, ‘I’m so sorry, Uncle Slava. It’s all my fault.’

Nim put one arm around me, drew me to him, and kissed my hair as he had when I was tiny. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said softly. ‘But I’m afraid this does alter our timetable a bit.’

‘Our timetable?’ I said, looking up at him, his face blurry.

‘It means,’ he said, ‘that no matter what amount of time we
thought
we had to find your mother, we now haven’t any.’

Dark conspiracies, secret societies, midnight meetings of desperate men, impossible plots – these were the order of the day…

– Duff Cooper,
Talleyrand

Valençay, The Loire Valley

June 8, 1823

Only in France can one know the full horror of provincial life.

– Talleyrand

Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, prince de Bénévent, sat in the small pony cart wedged between the two little children who were dressed in their linen gardening tunics and big straw hats. They were following the servants and Talleyrand’s recently returned chef, Carême, who went before them through the herb and vegetable gardens with baskets and cutting shears, letting the children help select the fresh produce and flowers for this evening’s dinner and table decorations as they did each
morning. For Talleyrand it was customary never to dine with fewer than sixteen at the table.

As Carême pointed his scissors at various bushes and vines, nasturtiums and purple rhubarb and small artichokes and bunches of fragrant bay leaves and small colorful squashes toppled into the servants’ baskets. Talleyrand smiled as the children clapped their small hands.

Maurice’s gratitude knew no bounds for the fact that Carême had agreed to come to Valençay, and for a number of reasons. It was only coincidence, however, that today was Carême’s birthday. He’d told the children that he was preparing a special surprise for dessert tonight, for himself as well as for them – a pièce montée, one of those architecturally designed constructions of moulded and spun sugar for which he’d first become internationally famous.

Antonin Carême was today the most celebrated chef in Europe, made even more famous with the publication, last autumn, of his book
Maître d’Hôtel Français,
more than a cookbook in its scholarly erudition, for in it he compared both ancient and modern cuisines and explained the importance of foods in various cultures as connected with each of the four seasons. He drew many of his examples from the twelve years of early experience he’d garnered as chef in Talleyrand’s kitchens, both in Paris and especially here at Valençay, where he’d prepared, with Talleyrand’s intimate involvement, a separate menu for each day of each and every year.

Having served in the intervening years as master chef to other luminaries – including the Prince of Wales at Brighton; Lord Charles Stewart, the British ambassador at Vienna; and Alexander I, tsar of Russia – Carême had now returned, at Talleyrand’s insistent request, to spend these few summer months recuperating at Valençay while his new employers finished renovating their palace in Paris. Then, despite the
serious lung ailment from which all chefs of his era suffered, he would assume his tasks as master chef to the only people who could afford his full-time employment – James and Betty de Rothschild.

This morning’s jaunt through the twenty-five acres of kitchen gardens with Carême and the children was just a pretext, of course, though morning outings like this had long been a favorite custom here at Valençay.

But this morning was special in many ways, for one, because Maurice Talleyrand, at nearly seventy, dearly loved spending time like this with his nephews’ children, two-year-old Charles-Angélique, Charlotte’s child by his nephew Alexandre, and Edmond and Dorothée’s daughter Pauline – little ‘Minette’ – who was nearly three and whom he called his guardian angel.

Maurice had no legitimate children of his own. Charlotte herself, mother of little Charles-Angélique, was the beloved adopted daughter of ‘unknown parentage’ whom Maurice had mysteriously brought back, nearly twenty years ago, from his annual trip to the spa at Bourbon-l’Archambault, and whom he and Madame Talleyrand had subsequently raised, treating her as their own and spoiling her as best they could. They dressed Charlotte in fancy costumes, Spanish, Polish, Neapolitan, gypsy attire, and threw fancy
bals d’enfants
that were all the talk of Paris, where the children learned to dance boleros, mazurkas, and tarantellas.

But in these twenty years, how everything had changed – Maurice himself most of all. In those years of royalty, revolution, negotiation, diplomacy, and flight, he’d served so many governments: the French parliament under Louis XVI, the Directory, the Consulate and the Empire under Napoleon. He’d even served as Regent of France himself, until the restoration of Louis XVIII.

Meanwhile, the Game itself had had as many fluctuations
of fortune. Maurice’s erstwhile wife, the Princesse de Talleyrand, the former Catherine Noel Worlée Grand – the White Queen – was by now long gone. Nearly eight years ago, at a time when Talleyrand himself had been taken by surprise, stranded at the Congress of Vienna with other heads of state, all believing they were dividing up Europe, Napoleon had escaped from Elba and returned in triumph to Paris to rule for his infamous Hundred Days. Catherine herself had fled from Paris to London with her Spanish lover. Maurice now paid her a stipend never to return closer than twenty kilometers to Paris.

The Game was over, and with Maurice’s help the Black Team had captured the preponderance of pieces. Napoleon was deposed and dead. And the Bourbons – a family, as Maurice said, that had learned nothing and forgotten nothing – was now restored to power under Louis XVIII, a king who was himself seduced and ruled by the Ultras, that party of sinister men who wished to turn back the clock and revoke the constitution of France and all that the Revolution had stood for.

And now Maurice himself was put out to pasture, too – paid off with the meaningless title ‘High Chancellor’ and a stipend, but removed from politics, living here a two days’ journey from Paris, at his palatial forty-thousand-acre estate in the Loire Valley, a gift, so many years ago, of the emperor Napoleon.

Put to pasture, perhaps – but not alone. Dorothée de Courland, the former Duchess of Dino and one of the richest women in Europe, whom he’d married to his nephew Edmond when she was just sixteen, had remained Maurice’s life companion ever since Vienna. Except, of course, for her brief public reconciliation with Edmond only months before Pauline was born.

But Maurice had come here to the kitchen gardens with
the children this morning for another, more important, reason: desperation. He sat in the pony cart between the two children – his natural daughter Pauline, ‘Minette,’ by his beloved ‘Petite Marmousin,’ Dorothée, the Duchess of Dino. And little Charles-Angélique, the child of his other natural daughter, Charlotte. And he experienced an emotion that he felt hard-pressed to describe, even within the confines of his own mind.

He’d felt it for days now, as if something frightening were about to happen, something life-altering, something strange: a feeling that was neither joy nor bitterness, a feeling more like a sense of loss.

And yet, it might prove to be exactly the opposite.

Maurice had felt passion in the arms of many women, including his wife. And he felt a caring, almost avuncular love for Pauline’s mother, Dorothée, now thirty, who’d shared his life and his bed these past eight years. But the sense of loss Maurice felt, as he knew very well, was for the one woman he’d ever deeply loved: Charlotte’s mother.

Mireille.

He’d had to conceal from his darling Charlotte her mother’s very existence, due to the dangers ever present – even now that this round of the Game was over. He had only the vaguest sense of what it might have meant if Mireille had stayed, if she’d abandoned that mission that had so consumed her. If she’d forgotten all about the Montglane Ser-vice, and that bloody, horrible, life-destroying Game. What might his life have been like, if only she’d remained beside him? If they’d married? If they’d raised their two children together?

Their
two
children. There. It was out at last.

That was why Maurice had insisted, this morning, upon taking little Charles-Angélique and Minette for a drive in their pony cart to look at the plants and flowers. An ordinary outing with one’s family – something Maurice had never
experienced, even when he himself had been a child. He wondered what it would feel like if these children were
their
children – his and Mireille’s.

He’d only felt an inkling of it once – that single night, twenty years ago now, when Mireille had met him in the steamy baths at Bourbon-l’Archambault. That night of radiant joy for Maurice, when he’d seen their two children together for the very first time.

That night, twenty years ago, when Mireille had agreed at last to give over little Charlotte to Maurice, so the child might be raised by her natural father.

That night, twenty years ago, when Mireille had departed with their ten-year-old son, a boy whom Maurice had come to believe he would never see again on this earth.

But that belief had now been irrevocably dispelled, just two nights ago, when he’d received that letter by midnight post.

Maurice reached into his blouse and extracted the paper – a letter dated three days ago, from Paris.

Sire:

I must see you on a matter of extreme importance to us both.

I have just learned that you are not in residence at Paris.

I shall come to you at Valençay in three days’ time.

Yours obediently, Charlot

Here at Valençay, the lavish house with its many domes was built into the back of the hill so that the kitchens, instead of being dungeons, were flooded with light and looked out upon the rose gardens, the billowing branches laden with pastel petals.

Maurice Talleyrand sat there in a garden chair, just out-of-doors, where he could enjoy the scent of the roses and
still observe the process under way inside. Though he’d seen Carême perform this magic so often in the past, he could almost describe it blindfolded. It had always been his favorite.

Maurice himself had spent many hours with many chefs in many kitchens. One of his greatest pleasures had always rested upon the planning and enjoyment of a meal, especially in his profession. For Maurice considered a well-planned meal the greatest lubricant to successful and well-oiled diplomacy. At the Congress of Vienna, his only message to his new master, Louis XVIII, back in Paris, had been, ‘Here, we have more need of casseroles than of instructions.’ And Carême had provided them all.

But tonight’s meal, as Maurice well understood, might prove the most difficult and delicately balanced of his own long and distinguished career. Tonight – for the first time in nearly twenty years – he would see his son. He and Charlot, no longer a boy, would have many critical questions to ask, many things to reveal to each other.

But the only one who might have
all
the answers to even the most vital of their questions, as Maurice knew, was the man he himself had insisted upon bringing here to Valençay, the very moment he’d received that letter: A man who’d been close to Maurice’s heart, had earned his trust, and knew many of those secrets. A man who, as a child, had been rejected by his own family yet gone on to stellar success – just as Maurice had, on both counts. A man who’d carried out Maurice’s missions behind the scenes these many years throughout the courts of Europe. A man who’d been closest to being Maurice’s son – in spirit, if not in flesh.

This was the man who was now entertaining the kitchen staff in the cuisine just beyond these windows, while preparing what they’d planned for the children’s dinner.

He was the only one living, except Maurice himself, who knew the entire story.

It was the famous chef, Marie-Antoine, ‘Antonin,’ Carême.

The copper pot of melted sugar bubbled on the stove. Carême swirled it gently before the attentive eyes of the children and the kitchen staff of more than thirty, all riveted by the aura of the great maître d’hôtel, the master chef. With the aid of only young Kimberly, his apprentice from Brighton, Carême proceeded. He sprinkled a bit of tartar into the boiling molten sugar, and the bubbles grew large and porous, as if made of glass.

It was nearly ready.

Then the maître did something that always astonished those who were unfamiliar with the art of the pâtissier. He plunged his bare hand into a nearby bowl of ice water that had been prepared for the occasion, then quickly plunged the hand into the volcanic sugar, then back once more into the ice water. The children squealed in horror, and many among the crowd of scullions gasped.

Then he took his sharp knife as well, plunged it into the molten sugar, then into the ice water, and it cracked from the knife. ‘
Bien!’
Carême announced to his astonished audience. ‘We are ready to spin!’

For more than an hour, the group watched in silence as the maître, with young Kimberly quickly handing him his implements, performed the work of a skilled surgeon, a master stonemason, and an architect all in one.

Scalding sugar flew from the copper spout to the waiting mould. It swirled around the inside of the mould, which had been precoated with fragrant nut-oil so that it would later release its cooled form. Then, when all the various moulds had been filled and the requisite shapes created, the master – using the spinning forks he’d designed himself – threw
sparkling ribbons of sugar into the air like a Venetian glassblower, twisted them into the plaited ropes called
cheveux d’anges,
angels’ hair, and cut them into long, columnar pieces.

Talleyrand watched through the windows from the rose garden. When Carême had finished the most difficult and dangerous part of the process, from which he must not be distracted, and the pieces were all hardened like rock crystal, Maurice entered the kitchen and took a seat near the children.

He knew so well, after Carême’s years in his service, that the garrulous chef would not be able to resist this large audience for much longer, pontificating upon his skills and knowledge, despite the strain this exercise had already taken upon his clearly fragile health. And Maurice wanted to hear what he would say.