by C. S. Quinn
Before long we’ve got close to the flag posts over the courtyard. It’s screened by a haze of smoke, but we can hear the boom of cannon fire.
‘Not far,’ pants Jemmy.
Now we’re nearer, the deafening gunfire gives way to another awful noise. People are screaming, I realize, my stomach tightening.
It’s then I see the huge double doors barring the way to the Bastille. They’re crushed tight with terrified people.
My heart sinks. I see immediately that the lock is too large and old to be picked.
CHAPTER 91
DE LAUNAY WATCHES THE CROWD POUR INTO THE courtyard. He is surprised by how many people there are, how many women and children.
There is no way back now. Show mercy and the people would raid enough munitions for an army. The King would execute him as a traitor. Lose the battle and it would be his head on a pike.
The only thing left is to defend the Bastille.
Still, he hasn’t been prepared for just how effective the courtyard is. De Launay had expected the people would beat a hasty retreat just as soon as they understood the deadly trap at the end of the second drawbridge. But the design forms a kind of funnel, creating an instant bottleneck. With so many people pouring through, the crush on the narrow entryway makes it impossible to turn and flee.
It is God’s will, de Launay tells himself. Better there are no survivors to spread word of what had happened here. The next thing you know, you’re pulled through the streets with hay in your mouth, thrashed with nettles.
Unfortunately, his indecision thus far has ramifications. The hired Swiss guard have lost respect for him. And, to de Launay’s amazement, are showing a worrying sympathy for the French peasants. They seem woefully reluctant to do their duty.
‘They are unarmed civilians,’ a guard is telling him. ‘They could be deterred with musket. We do not need to blow them apart with cannon fire.’
‘That one,’ de Launay extends a shuddering finger, ‘he fired a gun.’
‘That’s Lanac Baudin,’ says a guard, ‘he runs the tobacco stall in St Antoine.’
The other guards shuffle uneasily. They’re all pipe smokers.
‘Two weeks in Paris and you think you’re native?’ says de Launay. ‘Do not fool yourselves for a moment that that mob will not rip you to shreds with their bare hands.’
No one replies.
‘You’re hired mercenaries,’ rages de Launay. ‘Do what you’re paid to do. Load those cannons.’
Reluctantly the guards man their stations. The first cannon is lit. As it explodes into the crowd, several men avert their eyes.
A cannonball rips straight through the jaw of a young boy and smashes apart the chest of a woman standing behind him. Left and right people are being felled. Peppery blasts of shot are taking people down, one by one.
The joy of the rebellion has evaporated. They are being slaughtered. People try to escape and find they cannot. Panic surges. There’s no way out.
CHAPTER 92
I SWING MY GAZE BACK TO THE DRAWBRIDGE.
Eager freedom fighters are surging towards the Bastille, with no idea of the deadly bottleneck that awaits them.
In the courtyard, people can’t go back. They’re trapped by the masses pushing them forward.
I see Jemmy’s horrified expression.
We’re on the part of the prison wall above the courtyard now. Close enough to see through the smoke. I make out a large square space, overlooked on all sides by defensive musket-holes and cannons. To the far end is a set of imposing double doors: the way into the mighty Bastille herself. But the wooden entrance is locked tight shut against the small army at the gates.
The courtyard is a deep enough drop to break a limb. For a moment I can’t quite process what is happening. A greyish smoke obscures a thick crowd of people, packed tightly into the space. There are screams. They’re being killed, I realize. Mercilessly. Women and children, too.
‘It’s a fortress design,’ I say, my mouth turned down as I take in the carnage, ‘let just enough of your enemy inside as you can slaughter at once.’
All below us is a bloodbath. I have seen worse things than most people, but even my heart breaks at the decimation of this unarmed populace.
I’ve made it to the final flag, just over the entrance to the courtyard. I can see the heavy double doors beneath me. It’s even clearer to me now that there’s no way to unlock them. The thick ancient mechanism defies modern lock-picks. The only way through is with a key, a cannon or a battering ram. And the protestors have none of these.
Hope is winging away.
I spot Danton’s hulking form in the crowd. He looks up and sees me.
‘We’re dying down here, Attica!’ he cries. ‘If there’s anything you can do, do it now.’
I open my mouth to shout back, but there’s nothing to say.
Danton is bellowing fruitlessly in the direction of the blasting cannons.
‘You Swiss who fire on us!’ he shouts. ‘We know you are not blind to our cause! We French are slaves to a tyrant. Cease your attack!’
I watch impotently as the French people, with their leafy cockades, are massacred. Another cannon booms and then another. I feel the post shift beneath my feet and I lose my balance. Jemmy lands next to me and stops my fall.
‘Look at me,’ he advises, fixing me with his green eyes, ‘not at them. There’s nothing you can do for them by dying.’
‘Hey!’ A sound from above makes me look up.
A man in Swiss uniform is leaning from the window over my head.
‘We’ve been seen,’ I tell Jemmy, reaching for my knife.
‘Wait,’ says Jemmy. ‘Look.’
I look up again. The Swiss guard has something in his hand.
It’s a key. ‘Those Swiss are not such bastards after all,’ says Jemmy. ‘I’d say he’s offering you the means to unlock the courtyard door.’
I look again to be sure my eyes don’t deceive me. But it’s true: the guard is holding a thick key. I watch in amazement as he waves it then throws it down.
I catch mutely, my eyes wide, standing precariously on the flag post. Hope blooms. I heft the great key.
Jemmy looks at the courtyard then draws his sword.
‘Shall I show you a pirate trick to get down fast?’ he offers, lowering himself to his knees above the royal crested fabric.
‘The one involving a knife and a sail? I’m obliged to you, but most knife tricks I know.’ I plunge my blade into the flag and streak down, leaving two sliced sections of fabric waving in my wake.
I hear Jemmy come down the same way on the closest flag to mine. Together we land in the mass of terrified people, crushed at Bastille’s thick doors.
Quickly, I tuck myself in amongst them and push the huge key into the mighty lock.
Beside me, people are hammering fruitlessly against the door and pleading for mercy. A surge from behind crushes all in tightly.
Gritting my teeth, I turn the over-sized key. The massive doors creak slowly inwards. Then everyone is helping, pushing through the entrance to the unbreakable bastion, pouring inside.
As people realize what is happening, a cry of unbridled joy goes up. No one can quite believe it.
The Bastille, that looming impenetrable reminder of the King’s ultimate power, is open to a thousand armed Frenchmen.
The ancient symbol of tyranny is theirs.
Jemmy arrives at my side as the shout is taken up and the people pour forward, away from the boom of the cannon fire.
‘Long live France!’
‘The Bastille has fallen!’
CHAPTER 93
GRACE KNOWS SHE CAN’T POSSIBLY BE BROUGHT ANY further underground. She is led to a dark corridor.
They approach a room filled with equipment that Grace understands only too well. She has been campaigning to stop its use in prisons. But nothing prepares her for seeing it. Thumbscrews and pincers are jumbled on a blood-streaked table, with manacles, pliers and a pointed lit
tle hammer.
There’s a rack and a chair with leather restraints. Grace sees a single tooth lying on the stone floor. The sheer indifference of it, the casual scruffiness of the room, makes her feel sick to her stomach.
She pauses, but to her surprise the gaoler leads her past the open door.
Relief and trepidation play at her in equal measure. The dungeon comes to a dead end. Nothing but wall. For a moment, Grace thinks the gaoler has lost his way. He kneels and Grace frowns in confusion. The gaoler is busying himself with something at floor level. She tries to see, but it’s dark.
In the flickering torchlight, Grace sees a circular metal grille in the floor.
Perhaps a drain of some kind, she decides, it is damp down here, after all.
The gaoler lifts the iron grating from the ground. Under it is a hole, the width of a man. Grace can’t see how deep it is but it looks to go a long way.
The gaoler stands and pushes her forward. The gap yawns beneath her. She instinctively draws back, worried she will slip and fall into the shaft. A stagnant sewage-like smell wafts up. It’s an old well, she tells herself, stomach fluttering, wondering why the gaoler is showing it to her.
‘In there,’ he instructs. ‘Get inside.’
Grace’s world implodes. The black depths seem to reach up to grab her.
‘You can’t mean ...’ She is stammering.
‘It’s an oubliette,’ says the gaoler. ‘Get in.’
He has moved his candle over it now. She can see it is shaped like an upside-down sugarloaf. A narrow cone, drawing to a point at the bottom. Something deep inside moves. Grace takes a step back.
‘Better you get in than I push you,’ says the gaoler, as if it’s all the same to him. ‘Nasty place to be with a broken leg. You cannot stand easily,’ he adds, watching her face to see the effect his words have.
Grace sits, feeling humiliation and fear wash over her. She dangles her legs into the abyss then levers herself down. It’s still quite a drop and she can’t see where to land. She falls awkwardly, twisting her foot in the wedge-shaped bottom.
There’s no room in the pinched depths. Grace slides uncomfortably, pressing her ankles against the hard base. She comes to rest on pointed toes, one leg tight at the cold wall. She tilts her head up. The gaoler’s face is a long way away.
Panic pushes away any semblance of dignity.
‘The prison will be attacked,’ says Grace, her voice high-pitched and frantic. ‘You mustn’t leave me here too long. I will be forgotten.’
The gaoler laughs.
‘I thought you spoke French,’ he says, replacing the iron grating. Grace is plunged into blackness. The slits in her metal roofing project strange shadows. The gaoler’s candle burns far away then vanishes. She feels something slimy move over her feet and jerks in panic.
Grace hears a door clang and then nothing. Such a profound nothing, it slides icy fingers through her soul.
She remembers the meaning of the French word.
Oubliette: a place for forgetting.
CHAPTER 94
JEMMY AND I ENTER THE BASTILLE CAUTIOUSLY, AS PEOPLE rush past us on either side, waving muskets and calling for gunpowder.
We both stop simultaneously, taking in the vast interior.
‘I suppose we might have expected it would be large,’ says Jemmy.
My eyes are roving the tall walls dotted with small barred windows. The corridor stretching out before us is broad and seemingly endless. The flickering candles along the dark passages wink off into the black.
‘A castle,’ I say; ‘it was built as a castle.’ But I’ve never seen anything like this.
People are streaming past us, but the earlier mood of jubilance has vanished completely. They’re not protestors any longer. The crowd have been trapped and tricked. They’ve seen their brothers murdered. There’s a fury to them.
‘Where are the prisoners?’ asks a familiar voice.
We turn to see Danton, slick with sweat and flushed with victory. He holds a musket as a club, hefting it by the barrel.
‘Perhaps it’s true,’ I say, looking along the deserted corridors, ‘the Bastille is only for aristocrats and contains but a handful.’
‘Or the governor is battening down the hatches,’ says Jemmy, ‘preventing his inmates escaping. In the case of attack, you take your valuables below deck.’ He smiles grimly. ‘If I were captain here, it’s what I’d do.’ His eyes meet mine. ‘There’s a dungeon.’
‘An infamous dungeon!’ declares Danton. ‘Men rot for thirty years, iron masks on their faces, in the dreaded depths. If I could rally the people, perhaps we could find the gunpowder and blast our way down. Free those poor souls in the name of justice and liberty.’ He sighs, watching people pelt past in all directions. ‘There is no leading them now,’ he says. ‘The courtyard broke our cohesion. This rabble will do little more than make a mess.’
We’re silent for a moment, thinking of the two hundred barrels of munitions hidden somewhere in the prison. None of us will say it out loud, but there is no way to remove it without an army. And these beaten-down peasants are anything but.
‘Will the King’s guards come to defend the Bastille?’ I say, mapping escape routes.
Danton starts to shake his head and then something occurs to him.
‘You have given me an idea,’ he says. ‘It could be there is a way to help the people after all.’ He takes my hand and kisses it. ‘I wish you the best of luck in finding your cousin,’ he says. ‘I have a mad kind of thought and if it works, God willing, I shall see you again.’
‘If it doesn’t?’
‘Better not to dwell on such things. Adieu.’ And he is gone, lumbering off like a great bear.
Jemmy and I exchange glances.
We begin walking down the broad deserted corridor. The ceilings form archways above us, the height of five men, and pillars dot our path.
I’m trying to create a mental image of the interior, based on the plans. The eight-towered structure. But it is suddenly overwhelming. I swallow, making the numbers.
‘By my best calculations,’ I say, ‘there’s a half-mile of corridor ringing this ground floor alone.’
‘Seven storeys high,’ says Jemmy. ‘Eight towers. Though I think we can rule out the one where you had your friendly meeting with Monsieur Janssen.’
My hand tightens on my knife.
‘Let’s hope I have the pleasure of meeting him without a set of bars between us.’
We move deeper inside, passing grand medieval stone fireplaces, long since abandoned for purpose.
‘This is where some of the guards sleep,’ I say, pointing. ‘But there are none here now. Have they deserted?’
At one section of the corridor a big table has been laid out so the gaolers might take their meals and there’s a leather wine flagon and some crusts of bread, all abandoned. An outsized pallet bed of plank strips has been festooned with simple rugs as bedding.
‘All hands on deck,’ says Jemmy. ‘De Launay must have enlisted every last man to kill civilians.’ But he sounds uneasy all the same and I notice his fingers are worrying at the little sack of gunpowder for his pistol.
The complete absence of guards and prisoners is unnerving us both now.
We walk on, coming to the first evidence that the building is used as a prison. Metal grilles have divided two sections of corridor, creating large cells. The iron doors are unlocked and hang ajar.
‘Holding cells?’ suggests Jemmy, eyeing the shreds of blanket scattered on the stone floors.
‘Whatever they are, they’ve been cleared out,’ I say. ‘Not before last week either,’ I add, pointing to some chalk graffiti, replicating a recent satirical poem.
My eyes track around, taking everything in. A feeling of intense claustrophobia is creeping over me, despite the scale of the prison. Something about the size of it all is getting to me. You could wander for days and not see a single soul. It’s an entire dark town of loneliness and horrors.
I feel a lurch of despair. I’ve not the faintest idea how we might get to the dungeon.
A clot of people push past us, racing off into the maze-like depths. A woman in a striped skirt punches the air.
‘Down with the aristos!’ she bellows. ‘By God’s blood, we’ll have de Launay’s head!’
I turn to Jemmy.
‘Grace will be dressed as an aristocrat. We need to find her before they do.’
Fear galvanizes my thought process.
‘Up on the ramparts,’ I say, thinking aloud. ‘There was a gibbet, was there not?’
Jemmy nods.
‘Gibbets connect directly to dungeons,’ I say, ‘so a gaoler might execute a felon and hoist them up to be displayed.’ I marshal my thoughts. ‘We don’t need to locate the entrance to the dungeon,’ I say. ‘We only need to get up to the ramparts.’
CHAPTER 95
JEMMY AND I STAND AT THE DOOR THAT LEADS INSIDE Liberty Tower. The curving stone walls made it easy to identify one of the Bastille’s bulbous turrets. The door is locked, but unlike the thick old door at the front it’s a relatively modern construction.
A challenge, I decide, rather than an impossibility.
‘The ramparts can be accessed by any of the eight towers,’ I say, calling to mind the plans.
My hand touches the iron lock. I regard it admiringly.
‘This is well before the time of three-tumbler locks,’ I say, kneeling to put my eye against it. ‘It’s something of a puzzle,’ I add, removing my picks and laying them out carefully on the floor, ‘but not an unbreakable one, I think.’
‘You don’t have to sound so happy about it,’ says Jemmy. He goes back to the window.
I fall to the business of opening the lock, humming to myself as I insert successive picks. It really is an impressive construction, made, I decide, by a genius or a madman. Or possibly both.
‘Attica,’ Jemmy’s voice has a warning edge, ‘how quickly can you get that door open?’
