Adrian pulled the damp red sleeve down to cover the bandage she’d put on him. He didn’t look up from doing that while he said to Jean-Paul, “If you don’t keep your hand off Doyle’s woman, I’ll take that knife back and gut you with it.” He sounded perfectly friendly.
Jean-Paul, who should have known not to take this threat seriously, nonetheless removed his hand from her back. “What did you do with the body? Can it be traced here?”
Adrian did up the button on his sleeve, left-handed. “I didn’t kill anybody. I ran like a rabbit, is what I did. I have papers to deliver.” He lifted his coat from the floorboards, showing the slashed and bloody sleeve. “I can’t do it wearing this.”
“What papers?” Jean-Paul returned from pouring the basin of bloody water very carefully out the window, along the ivy and bricks. “What does Cadmus have to do with this? Marguerite?”
It took several minutes to explain.
“. . . drafts of the speech that Robespierre will deliver to the Convention, tomorrow or the next day. All of Paris is waiting for this speech, wondering who Robespierre will condemn next. Most especially, his enemies want to know this. Guillaume . . .” Even in prison, he is dangerous. “Guillaume has made copies of these papers and added a name or two that perhaps Robespierre did not exactly mention. He sends these to . . . How many?”
Adrian said, “Twenty copies. I’ve got six more to deliver. Who’s Cadmus?”
“He is in a story. The hero, Cadmus—I will tell you frankly this seems an unwise thing to do—Cadmus sowed the earth with the teeth of a dragon. From this seed, warriors sprang up.”
Adrian was patient, waiting for her to get to the point.
“Always before, Robespierre attacked his enemies one or two at a time, without warning. That is his plan again. But this time, there will be twenty men in fear of their lives. Those are the dragon teeth you carry. That is the battle Guillaume arranges.”
Jean-Paul let out a slow whistle. “I can imagine the names. They’ll see a draft in Robespierre’s hand. They’ll be desperate. If they work together . . .”
“Robespierre will fall. The Terror will end.”
But it will be too late to save Guillaume. He knows this. However many he saves, he will not save himself.
“It just might work.” Jean-Paul was a man of swift action, when it was needed. He pulled his coat off. Tossed it to Adrian. “Wear this. It’ll cover that shirt so the blood doesn’t show. I’ll send Justine to help you find the last six men.”
“I don’t need her.” The coat was too large, but a young messenger boy might buy such a garment in the market for used clothing. “This’ll do till I can get something that fits.”
“You are welcome.” Jean-Paul spoke ironically, but his eyes glowed. “Go. Deliver the papers. Change the course of history while I sit in my shirtsleeves and scrub your blood from the floor.” He knelt to be level with Séverine. “I will return this one inside, to her house. And I will collect this toy from her.” He took the knife and passed it to Adrian. “If your history is anything to go by, you’ll need it again.”
Adrian made the knife disappear. “I could have stayed in London if I’d wanted a pack of people trying to kill me. Didn’t have to come to Paris for that.” He grinned, and he was gone in an instant. A mere creak on the stairs. Utterly silent in the shed below.
Her Guillaume sowed dragons’ teeth today. They would see what came of it.
She stood in the middle of the broken and discarded furniture of the loft, feeling helpless. Useless. Guillaume was trapped behind guards and walls and she could not get him out. She couldn’t even visit the prison again. Victor would have set watch by now.
She would have gone into Hades, itself, like Orpheus seeking his Eurydice. There was nowhere she would not have gone to find Guillaume. No journey to the underworld she would not undertake.
Jean-Paul picked Séverine up, promising her that the boy with the cut arm would be perfectly safe. And yes, he would come back soon.
No journey to . . .
The large map of Paris was still spread across her pillow. She took it up, knowing it would not tell her what she needed to know. There was a map that did. “Wait.”
Jean-Paul turned back.
“There is a way.”
Jean-Paul looked from the map to her. “What? What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking about building stones and magnetism. About history and washing clothes.” She let the map go. “I never expected to say these words, but I need my father.”
Forty
DOYLE MUTTERED, “I CAN’T TELL YOU WHAT I DON’T know, you bleating goat.”
The guard grinned behind Victor’s back. But a nod from Victor, and the same guard slammed Doyle against the wall, making sure it hurt.
“Where is she?” Victor demanded.
“Don’t know. Don’t give a damn.” He’d cut his lip, kissing the wall. He couldn’t pick that one pain out of the pack, but he tasted blood.
That was the wrong answer. Victor motioned. The guard hit him against the wall again. They’d been doing this a while. There just aren’t any good ways to chat with a man who plans to kill you.
Victor said, “Where is she?”
“If your cousin run off, she didn’t run with me.”
“You have chosen a bad moment to be amusing, citoyen. Guard, bring him in here.”
It looked like they were going to skip right past bribes and threats and persuasion and go directly to breaking bones.
The guardroom had one door into the prison. Locked. One door, closed but not locked, leading out to the street. One door leading from the guardroom to a front courtyard the size of a handkerchief. There was a little window that let you see into that courtyard.
The guards made themselves comfortable here. Empty wine bottles lined up in ranks on the shelf over the chimney. Dirty cups scattered the hearth. Uniform jackets hung on the backs of chairs. The table was cluttered with cudgels and manacles and old newspapers. They’d leaned their guns up in the corner. Four standard infantry muskets, in only moderately good condition, loaded, muzzles crossed.
Victor wore a black coat and breeches with white knee stockings. Likely he’d come straight from the Convention. In this company he was a pale, smooth-curried spittle of a man. A well-bred lapdog. Next to the sans-culottes guards, he looked flimsy as thin paper.
“Secure him.” Victor pointed.
They’d tied his wrists behind him when they hauled him out of the cells. That was one more disadvantage to walking around, the size he was—all this mistrust on the part of the authorities. The guards cleared off the biggest chair and manhandled him down. They left his hands trussed up at his back, coiled rope around his chest, and pulled it tight, being rough but impersonal. They didn’t waste malice on somebody who’d be dead in a handful of days.
There was slack in the ropes. The chair wasn’t solid as rock. Give him half an hour to himself and he’d get loose. Unfortunately, Victor had plans for his next half hour.
“It is done.” A bushy mustache walked into his line of sight, hauling a grizzled guard along with it.
“Leave him with me,” Victor said.
“We have no orders to give a prisoner into your charge.” That one was a soldier. A veteran of the colonial wars, he’d guess. Wasted on prison duty.
“I said go.”
“It is a bad precedent. Without orders—”
“I am from the Committee of Public Safety, a friend of Robespierre. That is the only order you need.”
It got quiet. One man whispered to the next. Laid a warning hand on the sleeve. The senior guard hesitated, then nodded, and the men jostled out, silent. The door didn’t click behind the last man.
They’d left the door open a crack. Done that on purpose. There’d be a man left picking his teeth in the hall, innocent-like, keeping an ear on events. They all reported to somebody. The Secret Police. The royalists. The military. There were no secrets in Paris.