Marie Antoinette lay on her hard pallet, with her hands folded under her cheek, her eyes glassy and staring at nothing.
Sant’Angelo would hardly have recognized her. He remembered so well the shy, sweet, and bewildered girl who had first arrived at court twenty-three years before … and, of course, the gay, beautiful woman that she had become, known for her finery and sophistication.
What he saw now was a haunted shadow of her former self, with wild, uncombed hair and a face that seemed an utter stranger to anything but sadness.
But had she truly aged? He drew a stool close to the bed, but even then he could not be sure. It was only a few years ago that the Pope had sent her the true Medusa, and the haggard expression she wore now could be nothing more than the natural countenance of a woman who had had everything in the world taken from her and was about to lose her own life, too.
“Your Majesty,” he whispered, knowing that there was not a second to waste.
“I do not want you,” Antoinette said, never bothering to raise her eyes past his black cassock.
“Look at me,” he said. “I pray you, look at me.”
Wearily, as if obeying yet another of her persecutors’ commands, she raised her blue-gray eyes, then, after a second or two, understood that it was her old friend, the marquis, lurking under the brim of the priest’s hat.
“How did you—”
“You must do exactly what I tell you to do,” he said.
“You cannot give communion.”
“I can do better than that.”
She looked at him without any expression at all, as if perhaps unsure that he was really there at all.
“We can make our escape, if you will only believe me and do exactly as I say.”
“My dear friend,” she said resignedly, “it is over for me. I am only concerned now that you have placed yourself in such danger.” She struggled to sit upright, and he held her by one delicate elbow until she had managed it.
Reaching under his collar, as if merely to remove the purple stole, he withdrew the hidden garland and held it low, between his knees, where it would be concealed by the breviary.
“I cannot ask you to understand this, but I can beg you to believe it. This wreath, placed upon your head, will render you invisible.”
“Oh, now you sound like our old friend Count Cagliostro,” she said, dismissing his words with a sad smile.
“His powers paled compared to mine,” Sant’Angelo said. “Don’t you remember that night at the Trianon?”
“Yes, of course I do,” she said absently, “please take no offense. But even if I could escape, as you say,” and she spoke, as if trying to reason calmly with a madman, “I would not do so. Not so long as my children were held here, too.”
The marquis had assumed she would say as much. “But they are merely children,” he tried to assure her. “They won’t be harmed.”
“Are you so sure?”
The marquis was not sure at all; the present barbarity knew no bounds. “But we can find a way to rescue them, too. For now, however, it’s you, the queen, that these savages want.”
“And if my death will satisfy them, then my children may be spared.”
“Once you are safely away,” Sant’Angelo urged, “there will be chaos and delay, endless recriminations and denunciations. They’ll have Hébert’s head on a pike, for one. And then I will come back—I promise you—and spirit your children to a safe hiding place, too.”
Placing a cold and frail hand on top of his own, she said, “It is enough that you have come to see me off. They have refused to let me say good-bye to anyone, or to receive any friend or family member.”
“But if you will just let me put the wreath on your head, and keep you close behind me, I swear you will be able to walk out of here under their very noses.”
“You don’t think they would notice my absence?” she said, dryly.
“I will create such confusion that I’ll have them believing a flight of angels just carried you off to Heaven.”
“And where will we go instead?”
“I will take you to my house, where a carriage is already waiting. We can be at my chateau by dusk, and from there—”
But the look on her face told him not to continue. No doubt she was remembering the last escape plan, when her carriage had been delayed at the town of Varennes and the king had been recognized; the royal family was escorted back to the Tuileries in disgrace. Ever since that fateful night—June 21, 1791—their captivity had been complete; the family had been systematically separated and imprisoned in one place after another, each one more dreadful than the one before.
“I thank you,” she said, “but now I only wish for all of this to come to an end. I wish to be with my husband, and in the arms of God.” Bending her head, as if to make the present charade, for his sake, more convincing, she touched the breviary in his hand and murmured a prayer.