Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [55]
I look down at the two-hundred-year-old priceless historical artifact in my ungloved hands. Good thing Yves Bonnard doesn’t know I have it. He’d have me shot.
I open the diary and flip through the first few entries, rereading the page where I stopped—where the queen asked Alexandrine to be a companion to Louis-Charles—then take up with the next entry.
26 April 1795
Go away! Kill yourself, you bloody fool, but don’t kill me! They suspect me! They are watching my house!
That is how Fauvel, firemaster at the National, greeted me this morning.
But we’re not at your house, Fauvel, are we? I said to him. We are here, taking coffee at the Café Foy. Two citizens exchanging pleasantries on a lovely spring morning. What could be more innocent?
As I spoke, I dipped my hand into my coat pocket and drew out a heavy gold ring inlaid with diamonds. One of Orléans’. My fingers grazed Fauvel’s wrist as I placed it in his sweaty hand. I felt his pulse leap.
I need twenty rockets, I tell him.
It’s too much! The gunpowder will be missed! Do you not know the danger you put me in? he hissed.
I put my hand out for the ring.
Tomorrow, he said.
Tonight, I said.
He swore at me, but pocketed the ring. Have you more of these? he asked.
I have more of everything. A gold clock. A diamond picture frame. A sapphire big as a pigeon’s egg.
Lies, all of it. I have mostly circus jewelry left, a few more rings, six gold coins. He must not find that out, though. I need him to believe I’m worth more alive than dead. I must have rockets from him.
Where do I leave them? Fauvel asked.
At the Church of St-Roch. In the Valois crypt, I said.
It’s the safest place. From there I can take them underground and hide them in the catacombs. Fauvel, who hurls lightning bolts onto the stage, who makes demons appear in a flash of light, may go about the streets with powder and rockets and fear nothing, for they are the tools of his trade, but I cannot.
Until tonight, then, he said.
I bade him good day, popped a clove into my mouth, then picked up the newspaper he had left behind, hoping, as ever, to read something about the orphan in the tower—that General Barras has taken pity on him, that he will go free soon. But there was nothing.
The Green Man has struck again, a headline shouted. A deputy was quoted as saying that the Green Man is an Austrian bent on revenge for the queen’s death. A housewife said she was certain it was Lucifer himself throwing hellfire, while a member of the Academy asserted that the fiery explosions came from a surfeit of bilious humors in the moon.
The moon has gas. How Louis-Charles would laugh at that, I thought. Nothing is funnier to small boys than a fart. I will tell him this one day. Soon. I will hold his hands in mine and say—
He will not answer you. He speaks no more. He cannot. There are no words for what he has suffered. But it will not be long until he walks free again. With us.
I looked up and saw a woman sitting where Fauvel had sat, blood down the front of her dress. I knew her. She was the Princesse de Lamballe. Killed because she cried for the king. The dogs of September tore her to pieces.
I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, she was gone. They terrified me once, the princess and the others like her, but I am used to them now.
I turned back to my paper and learned that the Assembly is outraged anew by the Green Man’s activities. And then I saw this: Bonaparte has raised the price upon my head. He’s offering two hundred francs for me now.
I am flattered. Judas sold Jesus for a good deal less. And one day, quite soon, Fauvel will