Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [150]
“What?” I ask it. It blinks at me, then launches itself at the window, and it’s gone.
Like I should be. Benôit only gave me an hour. I’ve got to get back to the cellar before he calls the guard.
I take a gold coin out of the box and stuff everything else wherever I can. In my jacket pockets. Down my boots. Into my underwear. Then I tear a strip of fabric from the ragged curtains, wind it around the box, and knot it. I’ve had my lunch money stolen on the streets of Brooklyn more times than I can count. Jewelry and an iPod, too. I know a thug when I see one, and Benôit’s a thug.
I tuck the box under my arm and start running. Out of Alex’s room, down staircases and hallways, back through the kitchen, through the hidden door, and into the Foy’s cellar.
Benôit’s waiting for me. “Where have you been?” he hisses, standing between me and the way out.
I put a gold coin in his palm. His piggy eyes widen, then rove over me, taking in the soot on my face and my clothes.
“Give me the rest,” he says.
“The rest of what?”
“The rest of the gold. And whatever else you’ve got in that box.”
“There’s nothing in this box. Only papers.”
He snatches it.
“Give it back!” I yell, pretending to grab for it. He shoves me aside, then steps away from me, blocking me with his back. Just as I hoped. I dart by him as he fumbles with the knot in the fabric and run up the steps. In the kitchen, the chef is still yelling. A man cleaning a fish gives me a look, but I’m out the door before he can say a word.
I don’t attract any notice in the streets anymore. Probably because I’m now as dirty and smelly as everyone else. I slow to a walk and risk a glance back at the Foy. No one’s following me.
I look up over the restaurant, at the Palais’s highest windows. Benôit will be up there tonight, I’m sure, poking a stick up every chimney in the place.
But the treasure will be gone. And the little sparrow, too.
And I’ll be under the colonnade. Waiting for Fauvel.
79
I wish my cell phone worked. Right now. I wouldn’t call 911 to come rescue me from the eighteenth century. As much as I want to. I’d call Nathan.
“Nathan, you won’t believe this,” I’d say, “but I’m in the eighteenth century. Listening to Handel being played on eighteenth-century instruments by eighteenth-century hands in eighteenth-century rooms. And it’s amazing, Nathan. It gets inside of you, just like Alex said it did, and changes the beat of your heart.”
And then I’d hold up the phone so he could hear it. This sound. This music. And he’d have tears in his eyes, listening to it. I know he would. Because I do.
Amadé brought me here. We’re at a house in St-Germain. At a Victims’ Ball. It’s a paying gig. He’s playing and he brought me along to fill in for another guitar player who’s sick. I wore an old shirt and suit of his and tied my hair back in a ponytail. He powdered my face and hair and told the others I was a friend of his from the country.
“The host, LeBon, likes Lully and Bach, and you play them well,” he said.
I’m sitting still now, my guitar across my lap, while the other musicians rock the hornpipe from the second suite of Water Music. The strings are a wall of sound. The horns are blowing the roof off the place. The drum’s way too loud and the harpsichordist is pounding the hell out of his keys. It’s incredible.
The final notes rise and fade now and they’re even more beautiful to me as they do because I know I’ll never hear them again. There’s no way to catch them, to hold them. Nothing can bring them back.
The musicians finish. The audience applauds. Someone calls for a minuet and we—a small orchestra of about twenty—oblige. I get to play on this one. Men and women face each other across the room. They bow and curtsy. There’s no sober Republican dress code here. Women are wearing bright silk gowns and men are in colorful embroidered coats.
“Here, they can wear all the things they hid in the attic while Robespierre was in power,” Amadé told me when we arrived.
It’s a trippy