TIED WITH A BOW

PARIS, FRANCE, DECEMBER 1792

The angel came down in the long gallery of the Conciergerie prison, the notorious antechamber to the guillotine.

Stone walls could not keep him out. Stench and darkness offered no deterrent. He was a child of the air, elemental, immortal, one of the First Creation. As long as he did not materialize completely, he could go anywhere.

Cold seeped through the blocked grates and up from the flagstones along with the miasma of human misery. The corridor was alive with sighs and sobs and vermin. In the bloody wake of revolution, the prisons of Paris were filled to bursting with the ci-devant aristocracy and their suspected sympathizers. Few had the money or influence to secure the comforts of a private incarceration, a bed, food, firewood, perhaps a chamber pot. Cells intended for one or two prisoners held four, six, a dozen men, women, and children, packed together on the filthy straw like so many bottles of wine.

In the stone blocks adjoining the exercise yard, some poor soul had scratched BIENVENUE EN ENFER. Welcome to Hell.

But this was not Hell. There were still those here who called on God in their distress. So the angel had come, drawn by a dying mother’s prayer to provide . . .

Not escape, the angel acknowledged. He felt the brush of some unusual emotion, threatening his angelic detachment. Frustration, perhaps.

The children of air were forbidden from interfering directly in worldly affairs. With rare exceptions, humans must work out their own fate, their own salvation. But the angel could offer comfort to ease the woman’s soul from this life to the next.

His frustration—if that’s what it was—deepened. Tonight, solace did not seem enough.

He flexed his shoulders at the admission, feeling a prickle between his shoulder blades. He was an angel of God. Comfort was his stock in trade. It must suffice.

A woman’s hoarse Latin slipped through the bars to hang like frost in the air. “Sancta Maria, Mater Domini nostri, ora pro nobis pec-catoribus.” Holy Mary, Mother of our Lord, pray for us sinners. “Nunc et in hora . . .” A cough. “Et in hora . . .”

More coughing, deep, wracking.

“Lie quiet, Maman.” A girl’s voice, sweet and clear and welcome as water in this dirty hole, speaking the King’s French. “You must save your breath.”

The angel followed the voice through the square iron grate into the cell. Two women—a woman and a girl, rather—huddled on the straw inside. The girl knelt on the brutally cold floor, supporting her mother’s shoulders, trying to ease her breathing.

The child was very pretty, the angel observed dispassionately, with a delicate nose, a heart-shaped faced blunted by a firm, rounded chin, and eyes as blue as an October sky. But it was the mother who had called him here. Citoyenne Solange Blanchard, former Comtesse de Brissac, convent bred and barely thirty.

“Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae,” the comtesse whispered. Now and at the hour of our death.

“Maman, you must rest,” the girl scolded gently. “You need your strength.”

The angel could have told the girl that no amount of rest would make any difference. The infection in the comtesse’s lungs had attacked her already weakened system.

But the girl’s tenderness moved him anyway.

He spread his power over the dying woman like wings, extending over her the peace of the presence of God.

Solange opened her eyes in the darkness, focusing on his face. “An angel,” she whispered. “Come to save us.”

He was hardly surprised that she could see him. She was very near death. “I cannot,” he told her gently.

Must not.

“Save her,” the woman insisted. Her daughter, thirteen-year-old Aimée. “When I am gone, she will be alone.”

The girl chafed her mother’s hands. “Maman, you must not upset yourself.” Doubtless the child believed the comtesse was talking to herself, out of her mind with fever and grief.

The whole country was mad. After centuries of privilege, the Old Regime was paying for its sins of pride and abuse of power. In three short years, the comtesse had been stripped of everything: lands, tithes, and titles. The life of her husband. Their son.

These humans went too far in redressing old wrongs. They had no concept of Heavenly justice, no understanding of divine mercy.

Comfort, the angel reminded himself.

“Your family will be reunited soon,” he assured Solange.

She would be dead by morning. And her daughter would follow, executed within the week, sacrificed to nationalist fervor and bloodlust.

Underneath the familiar flowering of compassion, anger stirred, like a worm at the heart of a rose.

Solange wet her dry lips. “One day. Not yet. You must . . .” Another cough rattled the comtesse’s frail frame. She met the angel’s gaze, the light of faith or determination in her eyes. “You will save her.”

Such faith should be rewarded.

Shouldn’t it?

“I will.” The words falling from his lips caught him by surprise.

He was an angel, bound to discern the will of God, to protect, and to obey. He regarded the dark sweep of the child’s lashes, the sheltering curve of her shoulders.

What if the charge to protect, the call to obey, pulled him in different directions?

He would be punished for his disobedience, of course. Not for the first time. Michael, leader of the Heavenly host, took a dim view of insubordination. But perhaps Gabriel would intercede for him. It was almost Christmas, after all. The season of miracles. There was some precedent for his intervention in human affairs.

“You promise,” Solange insisted.

Recklessness seized him. “I swear.”

The girl glanced up, almost as if she heard him. Those clear blue eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”

The angel jolted. She saw him? Was she that pure? That innocent? Or was she like her mother, close enough to death to feel the brush of his wings?

“The answer to our prayers,” Solange said.

“Can he get us out of here?” Aimée asked, direct as a child, pragmatic as any of her countrywomen.

“Of a surety he can save you,” Solange said. “You must go with him.”

The girl raised her head. He had no idea what she could make out in the dark. She should not have been able to see him at all.

“You will have to help my mother. She cannot stand.”

The angel held Solange’s gaze for a long moment.

“I do not go with you, mignonne,” the comtesse said softly.

Aimée stuck out her rounded chin. “Then we will not go.”

“My dear . . .” The comtesse coughed. “You have no choice.”

“I won’t leave you.” The girl’s voice rose, provoking glances and whispers from her fellow prisoners.

But the cell’s other inhabitants were too respectful of her grief, too fearful of fever or sunk in their own despair to intervene.

“I cannot remove her against her will,” the angel said.

“You promised to save her,” Solange said.

Irritation flickered through him, crackled like ozone in the air. Frustration with her, with himself, with the sins of men and the limitations of angels. “She does not wish to be rescued.”

Intervention was one thing. He might be forgiven for granting a dying mother’s prayer. But violating a human being’s free will was another, far more serious offense.

He looked at the girl, her springy dark curls, her clear, wide eyes, the jut of that childlike chin. She was old enough to make her own decisions.

His chest tightened. And far too young to die. Her goodness shone in this mortal Hell like a star.

Solange continued as if he had not spoken. “I have family in England. A cousin.” Her voice, her strength, flared and faded like a sullen fire. “Héloïse married an Englishman. Basing. Sir Walter Basing. You will . . . take my Aimée to them?”

“No,” the girl said fiercely. Her cheeks were flushed, her shoulders rigid. “It is my life. My choice.”

Stubborn. He would need to silence her to get her past the prison guards.

He did not look forward to taking solid form, to descending into the flesh and the stink and the pain of human existence to lug her through the barricades. He dare not save them all.

But the girl would live. She would be safe in England. He would be damned before he’d let this child’s light be extinguished.

His lip curled. He might be damned, anyway.

He breathed on the girl, catching her slight body as she slumped.

They didn’t have much time.

The straw rustled and prickled. Pailleux, the guards called the poorest prisoners, after the paille, hay, they slept on.

Aimée squeezed her eyes shut, burrowing back to sleep, reluctant to exchange the comfort of her dreams for vermin-infested straw. Soft, dark, velvet dreams of being carried in hard, strong arms while the stars wheeled and pulsed overhead. Dreams of being safe, protected, warm.

Hay tickled her arms, poked through the shabby protection of her shawl. She sighed. It was no use. She lay still, waiting for the stench of the prison to assail her nostrils, but she smelled only sweet cut grass and the richness of cows. Earthy smells, homey smells, like the stables of Brissac.

She frowned and opened her eyes.

A man stood in the window of the hayloft. Her heart bumped. A very large man, his broad shoulders made broader by a cape, silhouetted against the starry sky. His profile was silver, outlined by the moon.

Except . . . Her gaze slid past him to the spangled sky. There was no moon.

Fear skittered inside her like a rat. “Where am I?”

He turned at once at the sound of her voice. She could not see his expression, only the bulk of him against the sky, but she remembered his face, beautifully severe in the darkness of the dungeon. “Do not be afraid. You are safe now.”

Which was no answer at all.

Her head felt stuffed with rags, her chest hollow. She raised herself cautiously on the straw.

“Maman?” Her voice cracked shamefully on the word.

Silence.

“Your mother entrusted you to my care,” he said at last.

Which meant . . .

Which could only mean . . .

Her mind splintered, and her heart, shattering like a thin sheet of ice over a puddle, the bright shards of her former life melting into nothingness. Her body was cold, cold. Her throat burned. She swallowed, pulling her shawl tighter around her.

“I will see you reach your family,” he said.

Her family was dead. Maman was . . .

A scream built and built inside her head, a wild, discordant squawk of rage and grief like a peacock’s cry. She felt it swell her lungs, climb in her throat, press against her teeth. But all that emerged was a whisper. “No. Take me back.”

He shook his head. “Too late for that. For both of us.”

Her lips were numb. “I do not understand.”

“The tide turns in a few hours. Our boat goes with it.”

“A boat,” she repeated. Her hands were shaking. She hid them in her shawl.

He nodded. “To England.”

Impossible. She was no student of geography, but Paris was many miles from the coast. She had not slept long enough to make such a journey.

Her dream rushed in on her, the swirling stars, the cool night flowing and parting around them like a river, the road a silver ribbon unspooling between the hills below. The texture of his shirt againt her cheek. The strength of his arms.

She shoved the memory aside.

And England . . .

Loss blanketed her, heavy, wet, cold. Her head was a roaring snowstorm, her stomach a lump of ice.

“You tear me away from everything I know.” Everything loved and familiar. “You will rip me apart.”

“I saved you.” His voice was deep. Implacable.

“You are killing me,” she said passionately.

She wanted to die.

“I offer you life,” he said at last, softly. “In accordance with your mother’s last prayer. What you make of it is up to you.”

Almost, she was ashamed.

A door creaked in the silence. Her breath stopped. Sounds drifted from the stable below that were not made by cows or mice. The scrape of a boot. A jingle of harness.

Cold sweat snaked down her spine. Had they been followed? Maman was gone, Papa and little Philippe, dead. In her guilt and grief, she longed to join them. But the will to live was not so easily extinguished.

She did not want, after all, to be discovered.

“Stay,” her rescuer commanded.

He flowed past her and climbed—jumped—floated down the ladder. His cape billowed from his shoulders as he dropped silently to the floor.

Aimée sat frozen in her nest of hay, her heart beating like a rabbit’s. Snatches of conversation rose through the trapdoor.

“. . . into Portsmouth . . .”

“. . . look the other way . . .”

“. . . pay for passage . . .” In her rescuer’s deep voice.

“We don’t need your money.” She could barely make out the langue d’oil of northern France, spoken with a distinctly British accent. “These little trips pay for themselves.”

“If you sell her,” her rescuer said, clear and cold, “I will destroy you.”

“We don’t traffic in children.” Equal disdain in the speaker’s voice.

She crept closer to the trapdoor, trying to get a glimpse of the men below. They were barely more than shapes in the dark: her tall rescuer in his broad-shouldered cloak; a burly fellow in an oversized coat and battered hat; a younger man, slim as a steel blade.

“Your girl isn’t the first aristocrat we’ve smuggled across the Channel,” the burly man continued.

“You’re one of us,” the younger man said. “You should know that.”

One of what? Aimée wondered. Smugglers? English?

A light flickered. Not a flare like a match, not the honest yellow glow of lamplight, but a slow growing silver light, cupped like a ball in her rescuer’s hand. The eerie light illuminated his face, cold, pale, and perfect as the statue of Apollo in the chateau gardens. Wide, clear brow. Long, straight nose. Firm, unsmiling mouth. His fair hair fell, unpowdered and untamed, to his shoulders.

She quivered deep inside with fear and an instinct she did not recognize.

“But I am not like you,” he said softly.

“Not yet, maybe,” the younger man said. He, too, was beautiful, with a lean, clever face and a handkerchief knotted around his throat.

“Just a matter of time now,” the older man agreed. “Lucky for you we found you.”

“You came for the girl.”

“We were looking for you both.” The burly fellow swept off his hat to scratch under it. “Lord Amherst’s orders. You’re under his protection now.”

“I do not serve your earthly lord. Or require his protection.”

The boy shot him a look from thick-lashed eyes. “You won’t feel so high-and-mighty after they toss you out of Heaven.”

The large man cleared his throat. “Amherst will take you in. Assuming you make it to England.”

Aimée frowned. But he was taking her to England. He had said so.

“Damon Carleton, Earl of Amherst,” the burly man repeated. He replaced his hat carefully on his head. “Try not to forget.”

“I believe my hearing and my memory extend that far,” her rescuer said dryly.

“You’d better hope so. When you lose your powers, your memory goes, too. You come down to earth as a child. A little older, if you’re lucky.”

“So I will be . . . human.” His voice was flat, strained of emotion.

Aimée blinked. Of course he was human. What else could he be?

An angel come to save us, Maman had said.

Ah, no. Aimée’s mind whirled. Phrases floated up in the dark, muffled and indistinct, like voices in a blizzard.

“. . . gone before morning.”

“. . . find her relatives. Basing, you say?”

“. . . I can feel . . . not much time.”

“It’s all right, lad. We’ll get her where she needs to go.”

They were talking about her, she realized dully. It was her future they were deciding, these strange men with their shabby clothes and English accents.

Her pride stung. Her throat burned. She was young and dazed with grief but not spiritless or stupid.

She erupted from her nest in a flurry of skirts and resolution. Bits of hay scattered on the men below.

“I do not go with anyone until I know who you are,” she announced.

What you are, she thought, and shivered.

They looked up, startled.

She had a brief glimpse of their faces, the young one, lean and sardonic, the older man’s, broad and shrewd, before the light winked out.

But her rescuer . . .

Aimée forced air into her lungs. Her tall, handsome rescuer was already gone.