Page 1 of The Dueling Duchess

Prologue

Paris, 1794

“Manon Cecile Tremblay Blanchet!” Michel Blanchet hissed.

Cecile always knew she was in trouble when her father used her entire name.

“I’m hurrying, Papa,” she protested.

“You must hurry faster!” he whispered, his grip on Cecile’s arm painful as he pulled her along.

Cecile knew better than to complain or argue. It had been months since either she or her father had gone out on the streets of Paris in broad daylight. Not since her father’s patron—the Duc de La Fontaine—had left one night to meet a man about smuggling them all out of France but had never come back.

Her father had heard nothing about the duke’s fate until yesterday, when he’d received a message from the aged aristocrat himself. It seemed the duke had been arrested and thrown into the infamous La Force Prison.

As much as Cecile loved the duke—he was like a grandfather to her—she wished that her father could have found some other way to see the old man.

And she wished that way didn’t involve her going with him.

“He is dying,” her father said when she’d asked why they needed to go to the terrifying prison. “He kept us alive all these years, so going to him when he asks to see us is the least we can do. We will be safe; the guards have been paid well to allow both us and the priest to visit. We will be under the protection of God.”

Cecile was only fourteen, but even she knew that God had forsaken both the church and its priests—at least in France. Only a few weeks ago she’d read about the slaughter of unarmed priests and nuns by state-sanctioned killers.

But even the minions of the state were no longer safe in France; the beast was eating itself; only last month the loathed and feared Robespierre had himself gone to Madame Guillotine.

Cecile wasn’t sure her father was telling the truth; it felt as if all she’d ever known was violence and death. Could there really be a country where it was safe to walk down the street without fearing arrest?

“Watch where you are going!” Her father’s angry voice cut into her thoughts.

Cecile glanced up and saw that she had almost walked into three gendarmes while she’d been gathering wool.

“I’m sorry, Papa,” she whispered, peering from beneath her lashes to see if her behavior had drawn unwanted attention. But the three men merely continued on their way, laughing raucously and paying no attention to the crowds of people who cringed away from them.

Up ahead La Force Prison loomed like a monster sprouted from the ground itself. If walking down a street in daylight was terrifying, then entering the most infamous prison in France—now that the Bastille was nothing but a tumble of stones—was even more horrific.

“Keep your eyes down, Daughter,” her father murmured. “And remember that you cannot speak.”

She nodded sharply and schooled her features into a slack expression, twitching her shoulders under the ugly lump her father had attached to her shoulder with sticking plaster. It had been their neighbor, Madame Dubois, who’d taught her father how to apply theatrical face paint and disguises, and the two of them had worked on Cecile until she didn’t even recognize herself when she looked in the mirror.

They’d even changed her hair, rubbing so much charcoal dust into her almost black curls that the glossy locks had turned a dry and brittle gray brown.

She looked like an old, hunched-over woman, and when she allowed her jaw to hang open, the teeth that Madame Dubois had blackened made her look witless.

Cecile shuffled beside her father as he went through layer after layer of prison authorities, the dull clink of coins sounding with each transaction. New France might have scoured society of the exploitative presence of the aristocracy and church, but myriad levels of bureaucracy had sprung up like rampant weeds to take their place.

Finally, they made it through to the prison itself.

Just as Cecile was about to follow her father and their escort into one of the narrow, grim corridors that led to the cells, a guard grabbed her arm.

“The old lady stays here.”

Cecile felt as if her heart had blocked her throat, allowing only a whimper to escape.

“I paid for her entry, too,” her father insisted.

“Not me, you didn’t.”

Cecile didn’t look up, but she could hear the smug leer in his voice.