Hearts Beguiled Read Online Free PDF Page B

the dirt."
    "I, uh, tripped on a loose stone."
    Gabrielle glanced uneasily out the window, trying to quell an impulse to rush after her son. She knew it wasn't good for the boy to have her hovering over him constantly. Besides, Dominique looked no different than any other little boy. Nobody could possibly guess . . . Certainly he was safer in Simon's company thin hers. He could be Simon's grandson.
    She realized that Agnes had spoken. "I'm sorry?"
    "I said let's have a look at Monsieur Simon's dirty picture while he's gone." She stared expectantly at Gabrielle, as if she was suddenly going to produce the engraving out of her pocket. "Well, where is it?"
    Gabrielle started guiltily. "What? Oh. I never got it. Simon must have sent me to the wrong apartment."
    Before long, Simon and Dominique returned, minus the bundle of old clothes, but Dominique now sported a strange felt hat with a dirty, broken plume stuck through the band. The hat's floppy brim fell to the bridge of the boy's nose, and the drooping plume curled over one eye. Agnes and Gabrielle both burst out laughing at the sight of him.
    Simon met Gabrielle's brimming eyes and shrugged. "Once he saw the thing, he had to have it."
    "A donkey was wearing it, Maman," Dominique proclaimed. "But the nice man said we could have it for a livre—"
    Gabrielle snatched the hat off her son's head, ignoring his yowl of protest. "Jesu and all his saints! It's probably full of ticks and lice!" Holding it with the tips of her fingers, she handed it to Agnes. "Go take it into the kitchen, Agnes, and roast it over the fire. Perhaps you can smoke the pests out."
    "Where did you put the, er, uh . . . you know?" Simon asked, once Agnes and the boy had left the front of the shop.
    Gabrielle pushed the damp hair off her flushed forehead. "Simon, you wretch, you are so absentminded. You sent me to the wrong apartment. It was very embarrassing. Thanks to you, I made an utter fool—"
    "The apartment above the Cafe de Foy?"
    Gabrielle nodded.
    "The vicomte de Sainte-Romain, he wasn't there?"
    "No. Instead I found this arrogant scientist who blows up things and throws people about and then tries to kiss—"
    But Simon had rushed out of the shop.
    He came back half an hour later, mumbling to himself, his face red. The vicomte de Saint-Romain had been gone for two weeks, leaving behind only a pile of gambling debts.
    "Five hundred livres!" Simon moaned, pulling at his hair. "I should have taken that engraving with me the day I bought it, but I had my arms full with an escritoire and a heavy marble chess set. Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, five hundred livres . . . 'I'm off to Versailles immediately to see the king,' he says, 'but come back in two weeks and I'll give you the engraving then.' Bah! What a fool I was to trust him simply because of his noble manners and connections. Those cursed aristocrats. I tell you, Gabrielle, they think nothing of stealing from the rest of us. It's as if we aren't human so it doesn't count. He must have left the day after I bought the engraving. Cleared the apartment out down to the bare walls. Someone else is already renting there. Mon Dieu, five hundred livres." Simon sighed.
    "Did you speak to him?" Gabrielle asked, trying to sound casual. "The man who lives there now? Perhaps he knows where this thieving vicomte has gone."
    "Speak to whom? Oh, you mean the man who blows up things. No, no, he wasn't there. I spoke with Sophie Restonne. She confirmed what I'd already feared. That scoundrel Saint-Romain. I'll never see that engraving, or my five hundred livres, again."
    Later that night, after she had tucked Dominique into his trundle bed in their tiny room above the shop and then crawled between the sheets next to Agnes, Gabrielle allowed herself to think about Aim—Monsieur Maximilien de Saint-Just.
    He was an aristocrat, for he had said his brother was a vicomte. She'd heard of a comte de Saint-Just, who was probably his father—a marechal in the French army and