Lyon by Elizabeth Amber Page B

the identity of the woman you lay with tonight under the bridge? And also if you would be so kind, can you tell me if you are able to supply orgasms to women without touching them? Mademoiselle Juliette wishes to know.
    Absurd!
    Looking east, her eyes located a familiar building—the Hospice des Enfants Trouvés—The Hospital of Found Children. Its spires pricked heavenward like great thorns, prodding her with painful memories. She let the thin curtain fall closed to obscure them and stood very still, almost afraid to breathe.
    â€œ Je ne suis pas folle,” she whispered unsteadily. “I am not insane. I am not.”
    It had been three years since most of the magic had left her.
    Three years since she’d last transformed in the way her body had attempted to just moments ago.
    Three years since she’d been accused of murder and lost the person most dear to her in this world.
    Her gaze went to the second floorboard from the wall beside her bed. On legs that were still unsure, she went to kneel there. Darting a look at the door, she reassured herself it was shut. There was no privacy lock, so she turned her back toward it and listened for footsteps.
    Pushing on one end of the wooden slat raised its other end revealing a leather pouch secreted below. She pulled it out, opened it, and lifted a strand of olive-shaped beads from among the coins within.
    Raising one bent knee, she draped the necklace over it so its ends dangled on either side, then ran her fingers over each bone bead. There were precisely seventeen of them, strung on a long silken cord, which had looped her neck until she was sixteen years of age. When Valmont had bade her to put aside such things.
    Her fingers found the thick pewter and iron medal tied at one end of the cord. A picture of Saint Vincent de Paul was engraved on one side and the flip side bore identifying information in the form of two numbers: 1804 and 8900.
    In the year 1804, she’d been the 8,900th child abandoned at the Hospice des Enfants Trouvés. Though it was less than an hour’s walking distance from here, she’d visited only once, during the first week she’d returned to Paris a year ago. It had been more painful than expected and she’d avoided it since. But every day it haunted her from where it stood in the distant shadow of the Cathédral Notre Dame.
    That she was illegitimate was a virtual certainty. That her mother had never planned to come back to the hospital for her was as well. She’d left no notes or identifying tokens as had been tucked in the blankets of some of the other abandoned children. She had no way of knowing if her mother had done the deed alone, but she’d always assumed her father had not accompanied her, since that was the usual story with orphans.
    Upon her arrival at the foundling hospital, the only known facts of her origins had been faithfully entered into the large recording book, the Registre d’Admission. Sex: female. Age: one day. Name: Juliette. There were also notations that included a brief description of her clothing and blanket. And she’d learned the actual day of her birth, something she hadn’t known. She would be nineteen next month.
    It seemed that sometime in the wee hours of December 20, 1804, she’d been birthed, bathed, and wrapped in blankets of fine wool before being deposited upon the hospital’s infamous “tour.” This stone wheel lay flat on its side, serving as a rotating turntable set in an aperture in the building’s exterior wall. A wooden box, which acted as a makeshift cradle, rested upon the half of the wheel that was exposed outside the wall. It would have been a simple matter for her mother to stealthily and anonymously place her there, inside the box.
    Had her mother wept as she turned the wheel? Had she watched until the cradle—and her baby within it—had been entirely re-situated on the inside of the hospital? Before leaving, she