The Bastille Spy

by C. S. Quinn

  ‘I’ve an idea to save us both,’ says Jemmy, ‘but you’re not going to like it.’

  ‘Because?’ I’m looking at the door, knife in hand.

  ‘You’ll need to take your clothes off.’

  CHAPTER 53

  ROBESPIERRE IS CAREFULLY CROSSING A ‘T’ WHEN HIS door is flung open noisily, causing him to smudge the ink. He looks up, deeply annoyed, then his expression softens.

  A heavily drunk Georges Danton sways in the doorway. His dark coat hangs unbuttoned untidily over his broad stomach. Robespierre’s old friend wears a smile so wide it threatens to split his great pockmarked head.

  ‘Georges,’ Robespierre stands. ‘Come take a chair before you fall.’

  ‘Maximilien!’ Danton crosses the squeaking floorboards and crushes Robespierre in a bear hug, kissing him heartily on both cheeks. ‘What a day it is for France! That rogue Foulon is lynched by a crowd demanding justice!’

  Danton’s scarred face is alive with joy and strong drink. The tavern smell pours off him.

  He sits on a hard stool opposite Robespierre’s desk, great legs splayed. The seat emits a gunshot crack beneath Danton’s bulk and Robespierre winces.

  ‘Do you have wine?’ Danton scratches under his lawyer’s wig, a functional rather than decorative item acquired in the second-hand market outside Les Halles.

  Silently, Robespierre removes a decanter and two small glasses from under his desk and pours Danton and himself a modest measure of pinkish-red liquid.

  Danton takes it gratefully, the tiny vessel like a toy in his huge hand.

  ‘So!’ Danton slaps his broad thighs. ‘Tell me this grand scheme of yours. From what I hear you are becoming a dangerous fellow, Max. Not the pale little runt I knew at law school.’

  Robespierre stands, feeling very small, as he always does around Danton.

  ‘I can trust you?’ he confirms.

  ‘How can you ask me such a thing?’ Danton rises to his feet. ‘Come, we are friends, are we not? If a man like you can be said to have friends. We have known each other many years.’

  Robespierre notes that Danton has not answered directly.

  ‘Madame Roland has revealed to me where the King is hiding the weapons.’

  There is a pause. Danton’s small blue eyes widen.

  ‘Mon Dieu, she has not! You sneaky cat! I can scarce believe it.’ Danton roars with laughter and knocks back his wine in one. ‘I commend you heartily, old friend. No other man could have done it. Pretending you thought Madame Roland as intelligent as a man was inspired.’

  ‘It was no pretence.’ Robespierre frowns. ‘Our new France must be one of true equals.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Danton waves a chubby hand. ‘Of course you would say such things. You are not encumbered with the usual drives. For myself, I will have a few kept women and I’m sure they shall not mind!’ He winks and helps himself to more wine.

  ‘Well now, we must then disagree,’ suggests Danton. ‘You want a fresh start, no King at all. But I say such a thing cannot be done. Slowly, slowly, you cook the goose. We shall follow the English way.’ He holds up his meaty hands. ‘I know, I know, you loathe the English. But a King with the correct checks and balances is how it will be. Louis is a reasonable enough fellow to go along with such things. He is no Sun King to have us tortured to death in the Bastille.’

  Robespierre raises a glass. ‘To liberty and equality,’ he says.

  ‘And brotherhood! Do not forget the most important part.’

  Robespierre smiles thinly. ‘Of course.’ He drinks.

  ‘Holy saints, Max, I’d forgotten about your wine. Try spending more than a centime a bottle, it might even take that vinegary look off your face. The nobles don’t get it all wrong, you know.’ Danton puckers his mouth. ‘You should live a little, Max. When was the last time you got tight with drink?’

  Robespierre considers the question. ‘Les Innocents Graveyard,’ he admits.

  Danton widens his eyes. ‘When we were law students, clearing those graves for centimes?’ Danton crosses himself. ‘I still shudder when I pass the fountain at Les Halles. All those poor souls dug up, moved without prayer or headstone. Bones pulled out and wheeled away in carts, as if they were no more than turnips.’

  Robespierre does not share how his grave-digging days had put pictures into his head he couldn’t shake. His mother’s body, clutching the cold baby. Dirty soil hitting dead faces.

  ‘There were a great deal of candles in Versailles that year,’ he says instead, ‘made from corpse wax.’

  ‘Ha ha! So there were! I had forgotten we did that.’ Danton grins at the memory. ‘Made a pretty penny selling candles and soap from those fatty grave deposits, didn’t we?’ Danton becomes serious. ‘Well, out with it. Where does your pet aristo say we shall find these weapons?’

  Robespierre leans back, savouring the moment.

  ‘L’Hôpital des Invalides.’

  CHAPTER 54

  AS THE MEN ENTER THE ATTIC ROOM, THE FIRST THING they see is Jemmy’s naked back. He is embracing me with a conviction I think excessive, breaking away only when the men take hold of his shoulder.

  He turns, acting alarmed and then relieved. I grab up the bedsheet to cover myself.

  ‘I thought you were the mistress,’ says Jemmy with a grin. ‘Come to claim the revolution at last, have you, boys? Good luck to you.’

  The men stop in confusion. From underneath Jemmy I can see them considering my uncovered shoulders. We didn’t have time to unclothe entirely. Below the threadbare bed sheets is all the evidence of our fine clothing the men need to rip us to shreds.

  ‘You’re English,’ says one man.

  ‘That I am,’ says Jemmy, his accent twanging as he speaks in French. ‘We’ve got our Republic and wish you God speed of yours. The only thing I love more than liberty is my girl here. This is her room. And you’re in the wrong part of the house, citizens. As you can see, we’re occupied.’

  With the door open we can all hear the most awful noises drifting up from the main room. People are screaming, but it’s not the screams of fear any more. There are dreadful thumps of flesh on flesh. Brutal killing sounds. I hear furniture overturned and shrieks as people are dragged out of hiding places.

  ‘And you’re wasting time in the top of the house,’ continues Jemmy in a confidential tone. ‘There are wine cellars.’

  The men’s faces light up.

  ‘Filled with France’s finest,’ says Jemmy. ‘Enough for ten barrels each,’ he pauses for effect, ‘unless your comrades have found them already.’

  ‘Wine!’ The men are gruff and exhilarated now.

  ‘Best we search the cellar,’ growls one. ‘Be sure no fine folk hide themselves there.’

  One turns to me.

  ‘Give us one last look, sweetheart,’ he says. ‘I ain’t never seen anything like you afore.’

  ‘Leave off, Victor,’ says another man. ‘It’s equality now. Robespierre says it.’

  A little ripple goes through the group, as though the name alone sparks terror in this rough band of opportunist freedom fighters.

  They retreat, the door banging shut behind them.

  ‘You didn’t have to be quite so convincing,’ I complain, wriggling out from under him.

  ‘Believe me,’ says Jemmy, glancing to the door as I begin pulling up my clothing, ‘I can be a great deal more convincing than that. Surely I haven’t offended your honour?’

  ‘Only my dignity,’ I say, fitting my dress back into place.

  We stand and move to the door.

  ‘With luck they’ll all head for the wine cellars,’ says Jemmy. ‘Now they’ve finished with the guests.’

  I nod in agreement. Though the horror of what happened in the room below is milling around us, an unspoken atrocity. I push my knife back into my dress.

  ‘That blade,’ says Jemmy, watching me holster it. ‘If your mother was a slave and you were born in Virginia, how did she manage to keep it?’

&nbs
p; ‘It was given to my father,’ I say, ‘to trick him into thinking my mother was dead.’

  ‘Can I touch it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where did you train?’

  ‘Sicily,’ I admit. There’s no point lying, I decide. He’s cleverer than I gave him credit for.

  ‘Expensive business, Sicilian Assassins’ Academy,’ muses Jemmy. ‘Your pappy pay for your tutorage in knife skills, did he?’ This idea seems to amuse him hugely.

  ‘Yes. But he didn’t know what he was paying for.’ This is only half true. Atherton arranged it, but I suspect my father knew.

  ‘Did you become expert in a particular fighting style?’ asks Jemmy. ‘Stiletto blades? Fencing?’

  I smile at his naivety. ‘My speciality was staying alive.’

  Jemmy laughs. This is the first time I’ve admitted my strange shadow-world training to anyone but Atherton. It makes me feel strangely close to Jemmy.

  ‘I’ve killed a few men,’ says Jemmy thoughtfully. ‘You’re always smaller after, less of a person. I wouldn’t wish that on a woman.’

  I feel the sharp little nugget of self-disgust I always carry digging in below my ribs.

  ‘What I’d like to know,’ he adds, looking me up and down and moving to the door, ‘is where you hide your pistol.’

  ‘I don’t shoot a pistol.’

  ‘What?’ he hisses, eyes flicking to the unseen danger beyond. ‘Don’t tease me. Every lady in London has one.’

  ‘As you have cleverly discerned,’ I whisper back, ‘I work in secret for the English army. Do you know how many of our men were killed by their own pistols last year?’

  He shrugs. Puts an ear to the door.

  ‘One hundred and twenty-six,’ I say. ‘One hundred and twenty-six burned by their own powder, blasted by backfiring guns.’

  Jemmy raises his eyebrows. ‘There are always a few fools.’

  ‘If you believe the reports,’ I say, calling to mind Atherton’s neat crabbed script and the crossed-out names, ‘you might think we recruit a very large number of fools for service. Or,’ I lean across and tap the head of his pistol, ‘you’re so enamoured with the feel of that thing stashed against your thigh, that you’re blind to the reality it’s more likely to kill you than an armed attacker. Pistols misfire more often than not and it’s impossible to do more than aim in the direction of a target.’

  ‘So you don’t carry a pistol.’ Jemmy doesn’t bother to hide his disappointment.

  ‘Oh, I sometimes carry one. They can be a useful distraction from the knife.’

  He opens the door. ‘We’ll see how your knife works out against whoever’s still down there. Come on.’

  We begin to go back down the stairs when Jemmy holds up a warning hand. He peers around the corner, then flattens himself back against the wall.

  ‘Lot of armed men down there,’ he whispers, drawing a gun from his belt. ‘Still sure about that knife of yours?’

  A voice drifts up on to the stairwell, low and gravelly.

  In walks a man I have never seen before, except, perhaps, in nightmares. He’s a horrifying sight. One eye is ringed with ferociously burned skin, shiny pink wheals clustered around a blood-red iris. His left hand and lower arm, too, are metal, but like no prosthetic I’ve ever seen. The replacement limb is silverwork with bony fingers, like a ghoulish skeleton.

  ‘L’Hôpital des Invalides,’ he is saying. ‘Enough weapons for every man in Paris to hold a gun in his hand. The raid will take place at dawn.’

  ‘Shit.’ Jemmy’s face falls. ‘That’s Oliver Janssen. Looks as though he’s doing more than musketeering.’

  I’m soaking in this information, deciding what it means, when I realize Jemmy stands rigid beside me. I turn to see soldiers emerge from either end of the corridor. Too many, all pointing guns.

  One of them calls down the stairwell.

  Janssen looks up and the temperature in the room seems to drop a few degrees as I take in the King’s infamous torturer. He looks every inch a terror, his red eye hard and merciless.

  ‘Come down, Monsieur Avery, and bring the girl with you. You’re quite surrounded.’

  CHAPTER 55

  I LET JANSSEN’S GUARDS LEAD ME BACK THROUGH THE MAIN room, where the masquerade was being held less than an hour ago.

  The floor is strewn with the evidence of a bloody battle: broken objects, scattered food, upended furniture, and everywhere the ominous stench of death and terror. A black mask lies in a pool of blood, its feathered plume bent and dirtied.

  ‘The mob can be brutal,’ observes Janssen.

  His single brown eye flicks to my face, trying to discern what I’ll make of it all.

  ‘You are a musketeer?’ I say, absorbing his uniform. He sports the signature red tabard with a stark white cross at the front and back, roll-top boots and a belt-full of weaponry. ‘Yet you fight with the rebellion?’

  ‘I’m still a musketeer,’ grunts Janssen. ‘I swore an oath for life to protect the King. But a King is no King who disbands his musketeers.’

  ‘If you mean to serve his successor,’ I say, ‘you must be certain the Society of Friends shares your view. Some rebels want no King at all.’

  Janssen makes no reply to this but I sense just the slightest unease in his face, as though something has just occurred to him.

  I log that he has silently confirmed the Society of Friends instruct him.

  We walk through to a smaller room, what was Teresa’s salon. I’m thinking of the thick pile of documents I read on the French monarchy, the various rebel factions. I’m piecing things together.

  There’s a desk and chair, but Janssen doesn’t sit, only paces back and forth. After a moment, he looks up, his burning red eye trained on me.

  ‘So, mademoiselle,’ he says, ‘I must demand to know what you and the pirate do in France?’

  ‘You have no right to do so,’ I say coldly. ‘I am a free woman according to the laws of your country. Is it your usual practice to hold foreigners against their will?’

  I’m wondering where Jemmy is. Men took him in a different direction to me.

  Janssen removes his broad-rimmed hat and places it on the desk. Beneath it, his hair is long, in straggling curls. Black mixed with grey.

  ‘Foreign spies are rife. I only ask for your help in protecting France from her enemies.’

  ‘In which case, tell me, how does a Dutchman become a French King’s guard?’

  The head tilts in a strange little movement. ‘I am from Fontenay.’

  I cycle through my studies of French wars.

  ‘You were born Dutch,’ I deduce, ‘and the French besieged and won your town. Saint’s blood,’ I add, making the calculation, ‘Fontenay’s fall was brutal. You could have been no older than five. Is that how you came by your injuries?’

  Janssen raises a metal hand to his damaged face.

  ‘The wounds I sustained as a boy in Fontenay, you cannot see,’ he says. ‘Those you can are from an exploding cannon,’ he explains, his good eye meeting mine. ‘A battle against the English.’ He pauses, to let this inference sink in. ‘It reduced my ability to fire a musket. But gave me ... other talents His Majesty found useful.’

  My eyes dwindle on the evil-looking metal hand. I feel a wave of pity for him. I have read about the monstrous things done to children in the French acquisition of Dutch lands. One day they were Dutch, the next French, with some terrible starving scenes in between to ensure any lingering patriots saw reason.

  ‘I did not bring you here to exchange stories of my awful boyhood,’ he says. ‘I brought you here to give you a warning from the Society of Friends.’

  He curls and uncurls his metal hand. I look at it for a long moment, facts slotting into place.

  ‘Your society is rather too free with their warnings,’ I say. ‘Gaspard de Mayenne, for example. It was you who killed him, was it not?’

  I look for some reaction but there is none.

  ‘I assume your instructio
ns were to stage the body so as to be significant to a particular rebel faction.’ It’s a guess but I’m hoping to bait him. ‘Perhaps your new masters did not think you important enough to share this detail with. Or did you fail to follow exact orders, Monsieur Janssen?’

  ‘I followed my orders ...’ begins Janssen, anger mounting. He stops, checking himself. But not before I’ve inferred a great deal.

  ‘The Society work for France. As does your pirate friend.’ Janssen watches my face. I feel a flicker of unease.

  ‘Anything else?’ I say, not willing to let Janssen see this information has unsettled me.

  ‘You are not welcome here,’ says Janssen. ‘You may soon find aristocrats of any kind are in danger.’

  ‘And you hope, in return, for a new strong King who will restore his musketeers?’

  Janssen looks at me. ‘Our new country will have no place for weakness or for enemy foreigners. You must go from France, Mademoiselle Morgan.’

  ‘That I cannot do.’ I look into his single eye. ‘I have business in the Bastille.’

  ‘You will leave and not return,’ he says, ‘but before you do, you will tell me the identity of the English spy. The Pimpernel.’

  I say nothing.

  He frowns. ‘Did you hear that Foulon was first lynched by the mob, but didn’t die by hanging?’ He leans forward suddenly. ‘The rope broke. Several times.’ He waits a moment for this image to sink in. ‘So the people dragged the half-dead Foulon to a butcher’s shop. They hacked off his head with a rusty knife. Stuck it on a pike. Then they found his son-in-law driving his carriage and made him kiss the dead lips.’

  He’s looking at me intently, hoping, I think, that I will flinch.

  ‘If you think you can make me talk, you are mistaken.’

  He looks at me.

  ‘You imagine yourself resistant to pain?’ he says. ‘You forget there is more than one kind. Everyone can be broken. It’s only a matter of using the correct technique.’

  Before I understand what I’m seeing, Janssen vanishes and returns promptly, dragging with him a frightened-looking woman. It’s Teresa Roland.