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certainly.”
    “Bringing revolutionary thought to the provinces. That’s my job. When I see the schoolmasters using the old books full of superstition and lies, I haul them out and burn them. The books, not the schoolmasters. That’s my little joke there.”
    “It is very amusing.”
    “Then I take orders for the approved books, which they’re eager to buy at that point for some reason. With luck, the books are still approved when I get back to Paris.”
    “Yours is an uncertain life, citoyen . ”
    The fire snapped and shot out sparks. The servant boy went out into the rain and came back with armloads of straw from the stable.
    LeBreton shifted, so the light of the fire was strong upon the ruined side of his face. That was deliberate. He was showing her the worst of him so that she would become accustomed. It worked better than it should have. Already she was less afraid of him.
    He had been unlovely even before he acquired that scar, a man of blunt eyebrows, emphatic nose, and stern jaw. She decided now that he did not look evil, only hard and filled with grim resolve. He was like one of the stone warriors laid in the vault of an old cathedral, holding the hilt of a stone sword, waiting to be called back into battle at the Apocalypse.
    She drank this coffee the sly giant provided. It warmed her. The rainy dusk, beyond the sad, broken windows, seemed brighter. She raised her knees to balance the cup upon and blew on the surface to cool it and made herself take it delicately, in little sips.
    They had brought a china cup to her so she would have something civilized to drink her coffee from. It was a small, astute kindness that impressed her deeply. She was seated beside a most perceptive intelligence.
    “You’d want tea,” he said. “You being from Scotland.”
    “I do not much care for tea. I have never seen Scotland myself. It was my grandfather who was born in Aberdeen.” This was the story of her governess, the true Mistress Duncan, who was sandy and freckled and forty years old and married to a staid banker from Arles.
    “But you’re still Scots.”
    “One does not stop being a Scot so easily.” He was lying. She was lying. They traded prevarications. Perhaps they would become complacent, each of them thinking they made a fool of the other.
    He did not know she had learned to lie at Versailles, in the old days, when the king was alive. Lying had been an art, formal and elegant as the minuet. The proper lie, the angle of a bow tied under the hat, a message slipped from one hand to another in a crowded corridor. The air had been dense with intrigue. Uncle Arnault had been at the center of most of it. She was no amateur at reading lies.
    She took another sip. The coffee was sweetened with white, clean sugar that dissolved completely. Coffee from Haiti. Sugar from Martinique. These luxuries were expensive in Paris, but far cheaper in the port towns where the ships from the islands unloaded.
    LeBreton might have innocently delivered books in Dieppe or Le Havre last week. But perhaps he had visited the small fishing villages of the coast, where the smugglers pulled their boats ashore. Perhaps he was one of the men who carried contraband across France—letters from émigrés in England, foreign newspapers, bank funds, messages from spies. He might even be a spy himself, Royalist, Austrian or English. He might be an agent of the Secret Police in Paris.
    He could be part of La Flèche.
    The servant boy, having made three pallets of his heaps of straw, was toasting bread by the fire. She sat straight and drank coffee, holding her hands elegantly, as she had been trained to do. She was very hungry.
    “We’ll eat in a minute,” LeBreton said. “Have you stopped being afraid of me yet? I’m hoping for that.”
    “I am surprisingly tenacious. This is good coffee.”
    “Better than the wine we have. And we are finally going to feed you, looks like.”
    The boy brought bread with cheese melted on it, juggling it