Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [80]
Though I was terrified, I remembered the knife. The one I’d stolen. I pulled it from my sleeve, whirled round in my chair, and pressed it to his throat.
Slowly, carefully, he pushed my hand away and took the knife. Then he pulled me out of my chair and hit me. The blow was staggering. His white duke’s hands were as strong as a tanner’s. I stumbled backward and fell. He hauled me up and dragged me to a mirrored wall. He still had the knife. It glinted silver.
I closed my eyes, so afraid I could not even scream. The Palais whores all said he was a man of dark tastes, and I knew it would not go easy for me. I felt his hands in my hair, a sharp tug. Something had come loose. Fallen away. Something was lost. My life.
I opened my eyes. There was no blood. No wound. It was not my throat he’d cut, but my hair. My brown curls, once halfway down my back, now barely grazed my shoulders. He tore a piece of lace from his cuff and tied them back in a pony’s tail.
Next, his fingers worked what buttons remained on my waistcoat. He opened it and pushed it off my shoulders. Then he tore my shirt apart and pulled it off me. My patched and filthy britches were the last thing to go. He bade me step out of them and kicked them into a corner.
I stood naked in the mirror, helpless, waiting to feel his rough hands on me. Instead I felt the shock of cold water. I gasped, blinking it out of my eyes. More dripped from my hair, my chin, my shoulders. I saw him put a silver water jug back on the table. He picked up a napkin and rubbed my face and neck with it until the cloth was black with grime.
When he finished, he opened a cabinet, took a narrow length of linen from it, and bound it around my chest, flattening my small breasts. Next he handed me a shirt of white cambric. Wool stockings. Nankin britches. A blue waistcoat with silver buttons.
He poured himself more wine as I dressed, and when I finished, he walked round me, taking in the transformation.
He smiled, dipped his thumb in his wine, pressed it to my forehead, and made the sign of the cross. In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, he said mockingly.
And then I understood. And the understanding frightened me more than anything that had come before it.
I was not to die that night. That would have been a mercy.
I was to be reborn.
39
“Excuse me, please.”
I look up into a pair of midnight-dark eyes. For a few seconds, I panic. I don’t know where I am. Or who I am.
“The line … she moves,” says a man with an Italian accent.
“Oh, yeah. She does. Sorry,” I say.
The EverReadies are ten feet ahead of me. I put the diary in my bag and catch up with them. I can’t stop thinking about the last few entries. Why did Orléans change Alex into a boy? What did he have her do that made her think dying would have been a mercy in comparison?
I’m going to have to wait to find out because I’m only a few feet away from the catacombs’ entrance now. A sign by the door tells me the price of admission, and that there’s a lot of walking involved, and that the catacombs are not for small children or those of a nervous disposition.
I pay the unsmiling cashier, walk past the guard, and head to the mouth of a steep and spiraling stone staircase. Down I go, into a cold, damp half-light. A guy ahead of me makes a joke about Dante’s Inferno and says we’re heading into the first ring of hell. Somebody else says, “No, that’s the Louvre.” Everyone laughs. Too loudly.
We keep descending, down eighty-odd steps, and come out in a room, a kind of gallery, full of informational displays. I walk around, reading the history. Turns out there are miles of abandoned tunnels under Paris—and not, like, seven or eight, but 186.
People mined gypsum and limestone under the city from the time of the Romans to the nineteenth century, leaving a huge network of tunnels and rooms. All that mining turned the bedrock into Swiss cheese and that’s why there are no skyscrapers in central Paris—the remaining rock can’t support their weight. Most of the tunnels are unstable and dangerous