Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [36]
Because underneath it is Truman’s face. Looking up at me.
18
“It’s the drugs,” I whisper. “I took too many pills again. I’m seeing things.”
I close my eyes tight. But when I open them again, he’s still here.
A few seconds later, when my heart stops trying to crash through my ribs, I see that it’s not Truman’s face at all—it’s another boy’s. But still, I know it somehow. It’s painted on a small oval of ivory, framed in gold. The boy’s eyes are blue, his hair is blond and curling like Truman’s, but his features are different, more delicate. He’s wearing an old-fashioned lace-collar shirt and a gray jacket.
Next to it, pressed down into the velvet lining, is a little muslin sack tied with a blue ribbon. I pick it up, press it to my nose—cloves. There’s a book, too—small and leather-bound with no title. I open it. The pages are stiff, brown at the edges, and covered with writing. The first one has a date on it—20 April 1795. That’s over two hundred years ago. Which is kind of mind-blowing.
Can this book possibly be that old? I start reading. It’s slow going. The French is old-fashioned and the writing is wild and scrawly.
20 April 1795
History is fiction.
Robespierre said that and he should know. For the last three years, he has written it.
It is my turn now.
These pages you now hold in your hands are no fiction. They are a truthful account of these bitter, bloody days. I write them in haste and in hope—hope that by reading what is contained within them, the world will learn the truth. Because the truth will make you free.
Robespierre did not say that. Jesus did. And lest you think me a fool, I am well aware what became of him.
If you have found this account, then I am lost. And this last role I have played, that of Green Man, over.
But he still lives. In fear and misery—yet he does live. Plots are hatched to free him, but they fail.
Do what I could not. Get this account out of Paris. Get it to London, to a Fleet Street man there who can print it and put it about. Once the world knows the truth, he will be free.
Only make haste. Please, please make haste.
They keep him in the Tower, in a cold, dark room with one window, small and high. The guards are cruel. There is no stove to warm him. No privy. His filth piles up in a corner. He has no playthings. No books. Nothing but rats. What food he is given, he puts in a corner, to draw them off. He does not know his mother is dead and writes these words with a stone on his wall—Mama, please …
You know of whom I speak. The prisoner in the Tower. Yes, he.
Do not close these pages. Read on, I beg you. Once you were brave. Once you were kind. You can be so again.
My name is Alexandrine Paradis.
I am seventeen years of age.
I will not last much longer.
I stop reading.
The writer mentions Robespierre and a prisoner in a tower.
That Robespierre? That prisoner?
“Can’t be,” I say. “No way.”
I pick up the miniature of the boy. I look at his face, at his solemn blue eyes, and I realize where I’ve seen him before—in G’s stack of photographs, the ones he and Dad were looking at the night we arrived. There was one of the son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, mixed in with the photos of the heart in the glass urn.
What happened to those photos? Where did they go? I think back to that dinner—Lili got mad at G and scooped them all off the table. Where did she put them? I start hunting, still clutching the tiny portrait. The photos aren’t on the dining table. They aren’t in the kitchen. They aren’t on top of the coffee table. And they aren’t on any of the bookshelves. Maybe they’re not here at all. Maybe they’re in Dad’s briefcase. Maybe G took them to Belgium. I keep looking and nearly pounce when I finally