Excerpt of Velvet Is the Night by Elizabeth Thornton

Versailles, 1773

The fight was over in a matter of minutes. The palace guards put a stop to it, but only when it became evident that the melee was no boyish prank but a contest which was as deadly as any duel fought on the field of honor.

Adam was dragged from the other boy, then he darted away before the guards were aware that he was an outsider, a boy on the periphery of court life. In his best suit of clothes, he had been taken by the guards for one of their own, or a page attached to one of the great noblemen who was present at the king's masquerade that evening. The other boys had known better. They were used to seeing Adam come and go as he pleased. No one was his master. Adam Dillon waited on no man unless it suited him, and the other boys hated him for it.

He'd been expecting trouble, but when it came he'd been taken off-guard. It wasn't the pages who had ganged up on him. The attack, a verbal one, had come from Philippe Duhet, the young heir to the Comte de Blaise. Duhet was older than Adam by a year or two, but in many a fight, Adam had outmatched boys of far superior weight and build. Adam was no coward. He also had the advantage of experience. In Paris, among his own kind, Adam's reputation as a fighter went unchallenged.

Whore, Duhet had called Adana's mother, and for some few seconds, surprise rootect Aoam to me spot. He had no quarrel with young Duhet: Their paths seldom crossed. The only rime they had exchanged a few words was when Adam had delivered a note to the boy's father in the fashionable Rue St. Mederic. Yet, on reflection, Adam had to admit to a vague uneasiness whenever he had found Duhet's eyes trailing him of late. He had shrugged it off as a figment of his imagination. As far as he was aware, he had done nothing to earn the boy's hostility. He was coming to see that he was in error. From the snickers and catcalls of the pages, it seemed that he and Duhet must be sworn enemies.

In the next breath, Duhet had flung the word bastard in his teeth, and Adam had launched himself at the bigger boy. In the fray, he had taken a black eye, but Duhet had not had everything his own way. Adam had bloodied the young aristocrat’s nose. An icy blast of March air stung his cheeks, and Adam turned up his coat collar and bent his thin shoulders into the wind, his swift steps taking him farther away from the palace environs to the less elegant quarter of Versailles where his mother had taken up lodgings.

Versailles. The town was too staid for Adam's liking. Paris was his milieu. The capital was dirtier, noisier, more crowded. In Paris, he had friends, boys like himself who knew how to earn a living by their wits, boys who skirted the law and stopped short, barely, of embracing a life of crime. For the most part, they were the sons of "actresses" or kept women who had fallen on hard times. The succession of men who passed through their young lives were shadowy figures and temporary at best. When the word "father" came to Adam's mind, his first thought was of Mother Church.

Ducking into the doorway of an elegant town house, Adam felt in the pocket of his breeches and withdrew his night's earnings. The gold ducat glinted wickedly in the light of an overhead lantern. He bit down on it and grunted in satisfaction. The ducat was real. He grinned, thinking that it was the easiest money he had ever made in his young life. He had earned it by acting as courier for the elderly Maquis de Narvenne and the young Madame Caron, the wife of one of the town's foremost citizens, Caron the church warden. Versailles, Adam was thinking, had one point in its favor. It was where the aristocrats hung out. An aristocrat bent on pleasure was easily parted from his money.

One day, when he reached manhood, he thought he might like to be an aristocrat. From what he had observed, they had a soft life. The pages always had plenty to fill their stomachs; their masters wore fine clothes; they rode in gilt carriages; they lived in elegant chateaux; they pursued a life of ease and pleasure. An aristocrat's life might be quite the thing, thought Adam idly.

With a surreptitious look over his shoulder, he carefully eased the ducat under the top of his silk stocking, knowing full well that the coins in his pockets would be confiscated by his mother the moment he walked in the door. Every sous, every livre was needed to pay off their mounting pile of debts, so his mother avowed. Adam did not doubt it. Everything in Versailles was more expensive. Even so, he knew of his mother s fondness for cheap cognac. A ducat would put food on the table for some weeks to come, if they were careful. He wasn't sure how much brandy it would buy, nor did he care.

As he entered the courtyard of the Chasse Royale, his eyes unerringly found his mother's room in the unheated garrets of the inn. A candle flickered at the window, the signal that his mother was entertaining company and must not be disturbed.