Which meant Frankenstein and friends must be likewise. They left the preacher and his assistants hurriedly packing up their portable pulpit.
‘Do not despair, brothers!’ the preacher roared as he worked. ‘We shall overcome! God will chastise Pharaoh and permit ye into the Promised Land! God shall feed His flock!’
‘With crumbs of comfort…’ thought Frankenstein dismissively, once they’d fled far enough. ‘Stale crumbs.’ Then he realised with a far from delicious shock that his family stood responsible for the terrible hunger they’d just witnessed. Hunger so gnawing that sufferers were willing to feed off crumbs from the Christian banquet they were barred from.
Julius was furious with himself for his lack of sensitivity (or something). What had he become? What still worse creature might he become given time? It was the Frankenstein family curse: first making monsters, then making monsters of themselves. That ancestral legacy followed him everywhere like a cloud; a big black cloud cancelling every holiday from care.
Anger (like all energy) cannot be destroyed, merely diverted. This particular fiery bolt ricocheted off towards Lady Lovelace. Julius permitted himself a scoff at Ada’s expense, resuming their last serious exchange as though the Duck Island nonsense had never been.
‘So, you plan—no, intend—to conquer the deities of chance, do you? ‘Just as soon as’ is it, madam? Really? And when might that be? And how?’
Anger aside, up till then they had remained arm-in-arm for cover’s sake. Now Ada dared to disengage and turned to face him. Frankenstein ‘ahemed’ and gestured she should remember who—and what—she was.
To no avail. There Lady Lovelace stood, hands on scarlet silken hips, regarding him as though he were the king—nay, emperor—of idiots.
‘‘When’?’ she shot back. ‘When? Well, when you’ve got me my spark back, of course.’
Chapter 7: DEAD MAN WALKING
‘Is there anything else you can tell me? The slightest scrap?’
France’s Minister of Police had aquatic eyes, cold and watery as a fish. They blinked behind their rimless glasses when no reply came.
A interrogator brandishing pliers stepped up but the Minster waved him away. That was not the best way with this prisoner: different dogs itched in different places.
The Minister cleared his throat: polite, almost apologetic, about his persistence in probing.
‘It is a matter of some import. Consider this: you are in no fit state to judge what is relevant or not. Moreover, this is a issue for consideration by someone imbued with civic virtue, someone with humanity’s best interests at heart: in short a citizen of the glorious French Republic—which you, of course, no longer are…’
Touché! The doomed man awoke from reverie and lifted his head. He looked up at the Minister through a curtain of matted hair.
‘There you are wrong, monsieur,’ he said, in gasps. ‘Wrong! No matter what your tribunal says, I shall be a citizen until my dying breath!’
He had been harshly treated, both before and after condemnation. His half-healed wound had re-opened, patterning his prison shirt with blood. Only the trial itself (a rushed five minute fiasco) had not presented opportunities for mental and physical violence against him. Now, contesting the verdict of the sacred State took what little reserves the prisoner had left. His chains barely shifted.
‘Alas,’ said the Minister, consulting his pocket watch, ‘that ‘breath’ you refer to is mere hours away. Meanwhile, I implore you to ponder, to review recent events: is there not some residual snippet? Some last service to render to the Republic?’
Actually, any such service would not be his absolute last. Not from some perspectives. The flow of bodies from Madame Guillotine was too bounteous to commit to the grave. In short order this man must rise again as a ‘New-Citizen’—or Lazaran as enemy nations disparaged them. With permanent semblance of a red ribbon round his neck, he would take his place amongst myriad others, whether it be as a foot-soldier or undead ploughboy.
Let the Church and other reactionaries protest as they will, The Minister could not see anything wrong in it. Nature recycled all that it created, and the Convention sensibly emulated Nature. It was both virtuous and instructive that former enemies of the State might make good for their life’s misdeeds in the only after-life the State believed in.
More thorough-going than his masters, Minister of Police Joseph Fouché believed in nothing: not a single thing. Through a varied past as priest, then politician, then revolutionary, terrorist, Bonapartist, Royalist and now servant of the Convention, no cobweb of belief had ever bound him. He loved his wife and children and thought that quite enough idealism for one lifetime.
Being blessed with such remarkable freedom of action proved the launch-pad of a glittering career. Fouché saw but didn’t share the strings controlling those afflicted with ‘values.’ That enabled him to make them dance to his tune.
Like here, for instance. If this condemned wretch were not a believer, indeed, a fanatic, he would be beyond recall. The blade that would part him from life was being oiled for action even as they spoke. He had nothing left to lose and more torture would only spoil him as a spectacle for the Place de la Guillotine mob. So, in one—highly technical—sense he should be safe from harm.
Yet that same fanatic spirit which had made him suitable to be sent to England en mission meant he was still reachable. Though facing the just penalty for having failed, binding ties to an earthly cause meant use could be made of him yet.
The man was thinking. Not of matters more fitting to his predicament, but of ephemeral things, sole concerns of the world he was about to leave behind. Light returned to his eyes. Fouché leant low.
‘There may be one thing…,’ said the prisoner, dredging deep for one last reprise of his life-role as elite soldier of the State.
‘Good, good…,’ anticipated Fouché, taking out a dainty gold-clad notepad. He twisted its matching pencil till lead appeared and stood poised to record.
‘It was when we were reconnoitring. A man-servant told me an alehouse tale. He was bitter; angry: loyal to an aristo family displaced from their château. Yes! I recalclass="underline" it seemed just black bile at the time, but not I’m not so sure. It was he who also gave me the drugged wine and dead-boys plot—and that all came true, didn’t it…’
‘Permit me to be the judge of that…,’ Fouché whispered into his ear, scribbling away at the same time. He was more aroused than the marital bed ever made him.
The prisoner obediently trotted back from interpretation to reportage.
‘This English lackey said the Arch-Traitor was distracted for days. ‘Smooth as a plate, normally, but not no more’: those were his actual words, I swear. He was a serf, a lickspittle of counter-revolution, and so I did not attach weight to his views. Was I at fault? ‘Facts yes, opinion no’: that is what we were taught at the ecole privé…’
The Republic-wide chain of state schools for France’s teeming war orphans raised dependable but inflexible products: a combination that could be both strength and weakness. The Convention’s best minds had wrestled with that conundrum in vain.
‘Nevertheless,’ Fouché hushed him, ‘on this occasion, I should like to hear the vile wretch’s opinion.’
The prisoner revisited recent days: from miraculous survival and escape, to return to inevitable death. He recounted from memory:
‘The man overheard the Arch-Traitor talking to himself, when he believed himself alone.’