Free Why Kings Confess by C. S. Harris

impoverished exile? Should I call him the Comte de Provence?
Or I should follow Napoléon’s lead and refer to him as the Comte d’Isle?
” The Bourbon’s enormous, protuberant belly bounced up and down. “At least I have yet to have anyone address me the way my niece styles Napoléon, as ‘the Criminal’!”
    “Does she really?”
    “Oh, yes; she has for years.” Twisting awkwardly in his chair, he reached up with noticeable tenderness to touch the right hand of the man pushing him. “Ambrose, if you would be so kind? A walk toward the chapel might afford the most privacy, don’t you agree?”
    Ambrose LaChapelle glanced over at Sebastian, a faint, enigmatic smile curling his lips. “Oh, most definitely.”
    Sebastian had met LaChapelle before. Born into an aristocratic family in Avignon, he’d fled France as a youth to fight in the counterrevolutionary émigré army led by the Prince de Conde. When the army was disbanded, he’d joined the Comte de Provence in exile, first in Russia, then in Warsaw, where he’d risen quickly in his royal master’s favor. Sebastian had heard that he owed his rapid elevation to his willingness to do anything for his uncrowned king.
    Anything.
    “Your father and I were good friends in our youth, you know,” Provence said, his voice raised so as to be heard above the squeak of the chair’s wheels and the crunch of the weed-choked gravel beneath their feet. The winter-bared oaks and elms of the neglected park closed in around them, dark and somber in the flat light.
    “No, I didn’t know,” said Sebastian.
    The Bourbon’s eyes practically disappeared behind his puffy, smiling lids. “Hendon never told you about his salad days in Paris, did he?” He tried to laugh, but it quickly degenerated into a rasping cough. “Golden years, those were. Golden. Horses, jewels, châteaux, carriages, wine . . . We had it all. I once ran up a debt of a million livres, and my brother the King paid it off. Think of that! A million livres. What I wouldn’t give for that kind of money now. We thought those days would never end. But they did.” He cast Sebastian a quick, sideways glance. “I suppose you think we should have seen it coming, and so we should have—so we should! I tell Marie-Thérèse all the time that when two percent of a nation has all the wealth and the other ninety-eight percent of the people pay all the taxes, a bloodbath is inevitable. Inevitable!”
    Sebastian had heard that an intense and at times acrimonious disagreement raged within the French royal family. The Comte de Provence favored a limited, parliamentary monarchy and was willing to give numerous concessions to the people of France if they would only allow him to return. But both Marie-Thérèse and Provence’s own younger brother, Charles, Comte d’Artois, were ultraroyalists, stubbornly adhering to their belief in the divine right of kings and insisting upon nothing less than a reimposition of absolute monarchy.
    Sebastian said, “In my experience, most people tend to believe even in the face of all evidence to the contrary that things will never change.”
    The Bourbon sighed. “True, true. Although I’ve been exiled from France for more than twenty years now. So, God willing,
this
is one state of affairs that will change, and soon. I would not like to die on foreign soil.”
    “The news from the Continent sounds encouraging—if you can call the slaughter of half a million men encouraging.”
    The Bourbon’s jovial face went slack. “Ghastly, is it not? All those dead men, strewn across Russia.”
    The genuine depth of his grief took Sebastian by surprise. He found himself wondering if Marie-Thérèse had ever spared a moment’s sorrow for the war dead of the nation over which she hoped one day to reign as queen. Somehow, he doubted it. She was too busy hugging her own misery and loss to herself.
    As if aware of the drift of his thoughts, Provence said, “But you did not come all the way out