Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [78]
The honking’s getting louder. The guy behind Virgil leans out of his window and curses at him. Virgil flips him off. So the guy starts swearing. At me. I don’t want to be standing on a curb in the middle of Paris, shouting over horns and getting cursed out. I want to be somewhere else. Somewhere quiet and safe. With Virgil. I want to close my eyes and hear his voice, soft and low.
He’s looking at me, too. And his eyes seem to say that he wants the same thing. Or maybe it’s just that I so much want them to.
“Call me,” he says. “Tonight, okay?” I nod. He makes a fist, holds it out. I bump it. Jules waves. And they’re gone.
“Thanks,” I say to the kid as I get back in line. It hasn’t moved much. I tuck the CD into my bag, try to slow my heart down, and start to read again.
38
8 May 1795
I stole. Food, mostly. Or things I could trade for food. I stole like a raven. It was the fall of 1790. My mother was sick again. We had no money.
I stole potatoes off a peddler’s cart. Sausages from a market stall. I filched fans and snuffboxes from the shop counters and café tables where unmindful owners had left them. I took gloves from hectic ladies, cut purses from drunks. I snatched small dogs and returned them for reward money. I cut off horses’ tails and sold them to wig makers.
I was half-dead with hunger one night, else I might have left it alone—a purse, small and brown, bulging like a dead rat.
I was on my way home from the Palais, props in my satchel, not a sou in my pocket, when I spotted it. Its owner was disputing with a waiter. He had set it upon his table and turned his back upon it. It would be nothing to sweep it off as I passed.
I looked about. The Palais guards were nowhere to be seen. I moved slowly, content for once to be only what I was—a poor street player, a ragamuffin at whom no one looks twice. As I passed the table, I slid the purse off it. It was in my palm, wondrous heavy, then down the front of my shirt.
A few seconds later, I was halfway down the colonnade. I was nearly on the street when they grabbed me. One tore my satchel from my arms. Another shoved me into a wall. My head smacked hard against the stones. Fireworks exploded inside it.
I tried to run but was caught and slammed back into the wall. One of the guards pinned me to it by my throat. Another ripped open my shirt and grabbed the purse. Not a boy at all, this one, he said, leering at me. I kicked at him, but he only laughed. I couldn’t breathe. My lungs were bursting. The fireworks inside my head were fading. All was turning black.
And then I heard a new voice. His voice.
Enough.
The guard let go. I fell to my knees, gasping for air.
Come with me, sparrow.
I looked up. There was a man standing in front of me. He wore his black hair bound. A gold ring hung from one ear. His eyes were the color of midnight.
And if I will not? I said, trying to keep the fear from my voice.
Then you can go with them—he nodded at the guards—to the Ste-Pélagie.
The Ste-Pélagie, the worst prison in Paris. I looked at the guard, the one who’d ripped my shirt. From the way he leered at me, I knew there would be a detour first. Four of them in some filthy alley.
I heard my grandmother’s voice then, in my head. I used to wander when I was a child. Down one street and up the next. To the river. Sometimes past the city gates. To the fields. The woods.
One day you’ll go walking with the devil, my girl, she told me, and you won’t come back at all.
Still on my knees, I reached for my satchel.
Leave it. You won’t need it anymore, Orléans said.
And I knew that day had come.
10 May 1795
He took me to his rooms.
Rooms? They were a palace made small. Like the inside of a djinn’s lamp. Everywhere there was gilt and mirror glass, crystal and silver, all of it reflecting the light of a hundred candles. Myrrh wafted in the air. Music played from far off.
He threw his cloak at