Onslow handed her a small bag of gold, which she locked in a drawer. “You will drink,” she continued, pouring out two glasses of wine. “Your health, skulking spy, and damnation to Louis XV. and all his crew of my fascinating sex!”
“To your trade and mine, ma mignonne, to yourself and—to the damnation of Louis XV.!” He drained his glass, refilled it, and drained it again. “You are a witch,” he cried, tapping the roll. “How do you do it?”
“Come this way and I will show you.”
She opened the side door, revealing a small room lit by a single candle. On the bed lay a man bound hand and foot, and gagged. One boot was off, showing whence the despatch had been taken. “A confidential messenger of the King whose damnation you have just drunk,” she explained, with careless calm, “and like all secret agents the prey of his passions. He went from my supper table—or rather I carried him—like that. There will be a pother in Versailles to-morrow or next day. It is not only at the palace, you see, that a beautiful woman can ruin a kingdom.”
She slammed the door behind her and admired herself in the mirror, while George Onslow’s glowing eyes gloated on the superb picture that the mirror and she made under the blazing candles.
“You are a wonderful woman,” he said softly.
“I am not a woman, I am only a number.”
“As I think I told you when I saw you last in London.”
She wheeled suddenly. “And because you were such a fool as to show you had discovered it,” she retorted, “I could send you to-night, or any night, to be broken on the executioner’s wheel. Exactly.”
“It baffles me why you do it,” he muttered, ignoring the remark.