“There’s a line?” she said. “I hadn’t noticed.” With that she shoved him down into a chair and mounted him, her skirt hiked up around her waist. His hands instinctively grabbed her flushed, naked buttocks. Oh, God! She bit his neck as if ready to consume him. He bared his teeth, and with a single buck threw her off onto the floor, where he straddled her and ripped the bodice of her gown down, revealing her bounteous breasts. She lay, heaving and grinning with pleasure.

Then he stopped, his hands hovering over her.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I…I’ve never been with a woman before.”

Beatrice laughed. “My stars! You have so much to learn!” She yanked his trousers down and off and threw them aside. He stood, snatched her up, and slammed her against the wall, chains and manacles rattling. Beatrice threw open her legs so he could enter her and he did, over and over again as she writhed and wailed against the wall.

Neither noticed Laurene open the door, stare in horror, and pull the door shut again.

They sat in the quiet darkness of Henriette’s bedroom, Henriette on her pillows, Louis beside her. Candlelight caressed the bed and their faces.

“When we last spoke,” Louis said, “I was not as gracious as I could have been. Do you remember when, as children, we used to go down by the stream in summer?”

“I remember.”

“The path led over a ditch, past the farm with the dog that barked, then through the spinney which we thought was haunted.”

“Yes.”

Louis went silent. Henriette waited, uncertain of his mood, his thoughts. He seemed to be confronting fears before her eyes.

“Why do you remember this, Sire?” she asked.

Louis smiled at her, and she felt again that he was her lover, her friend. “I’ve always thought I was running toward the stream. Now, I think perhaps I was not running towards it at all. I was running away.” He looked away, then back. “When I’m with you, I run away. To be with you, I run to our past, and ignore what is right in front of me.” He gently placed his hand on her belly and kissed her forehead. “I will not run away any more.”

Then he stood and left her. She watched, heartbroken and astonished that he would leave her yet again.

As Masson sat, passed out in a chair in his kitchen, a cloaked figure climbed in through the window, opened the box marked “XIV”, and placed a blue bottle in with the other bottles. Then the figure went back out the window into the night even as Masson shuddered and snored in his sleep.

Fabien leaned over his desk with his magnifying glass, daylight replacing candlelight, studying the cipher. Laurene stood beside him with her arms crossed.

“I saw Beatrice enter the whorehouse in town,” she said accusingly. “She spoke to the apothecary there and ordered two bottles of arsenic.”