"What is she about to say?" the man who loved her asked himself, while knowing full well that whatever she might say would not be aught that could harm him, though fearing at the same time that she might say something which would sacrifice her while shielding him. "What story, what scheme has she devised?"
"The she-cat, the tigress!" Van den Enden groaned inwardly. "She will save him and herself--curse her!--by sacrificing me. Yet, how? How?"
But still there was another prisoner who heard those words--Fleur de Mai. But he said nothing to himself and indulged in no speculation as to what the woman might be about to state. He was doomed, he knew: nothing could save him. There was for him but one hope left in this world; the hope that since, vagabond as he was, he was the off-shoot of an honourable family, he might perish by the axe and not the wheel, or that still deeper degradation, the rope.
"You acknowledge that there was a plot?" La Reynie exclaimed, echoing the President's question.
"I have said," Emérance replied. "Yet no plot against France or the King."
"He," her eyes turned softly towards her lover and then re-turned swiftly toward the Judges, "wanted money. His charges and expenses were great, as you all know. No need to say more of that. As for myself, I was poor, horribly, bitterly poor, almost at starvation's door, for the reason I have but now told you. That one," her eyes looking from underneath their lids at Van den Enden, "would do aught for money; would betray, steal, murder for the money he always wanted. La Truaumont--well! he is dead. Of him I will but say that he was ambitious. He had been a good soldier yet, like many another soldier as good as he, he had been forgotten, passed over, set aside. We all wanted money. The others--that assassin, or would be assassin, there," looking at Fleur de Mai, "was but a hireling, a varlet, to any who could pay him."
"It was my mind, mine alone," she continued, "which conceived the plot. Mine," and Emérance smote her breast as she spoke, as though to force conviction into the minds of those who heard her. "Mine! Spain hates the King, France, you, I, all of us in whose veins French blood runs--you well know why. So, too, does Holland, for baser, meaner reasons; she hates us because she goes down before us as autumn leaves go down before the storm. Because her Stadtholder, William, can do naught against France. Therefore, since France could not be conquered, defeated, humiliated in the field, other ways were thought of. Shot and steel were useless. It remained to try gold."