by Kat Dunn
Only James had volunteered to stay behind after Camille had shot him a particularly vicious look. Ada couldn’t deny she was pleased. She wanted James to know he wasn’t welcome. To keep her family to herself.
The automaton was being wheeled off to be replaced by a dancing dog who spoke French, Latin and German.
Guil frowned at the playbill. ‘I am quite sure I saw the exact same line up at the Gaîeté last month.’
Beside him, Al yawned and popped a segment of orange into his mouth. ‘Populist tosh. Far more entertaining if he got some of the schoolboy aristos from Louis-le-Grand to try to wash their own socks.’
‘The audience seems to enjoy it,’ said Guil.
‘People will watch anything. They turned out in their hundreds to watch the Opera burn. And the riot at the Théâtre de la Nation last week, most popular event since the king had his head lopped off.’
A chandelier hung on a heavy chain from the ceiling to illuminate the auditorium, all tarnished gold and dripping wax. Al lobbed a curl of orange peel at the stage that only just missed one of the low-lying candles.
Guil nodded. ‘Bread and circuses. The Romans knew well that—’
‘Oh god, please, not one of your history lectures. We get it, revolution is the human condition, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I take it back, the dog is quite amusing. Can I just watch it in peace?’
Looking put out, Guil folded the playbill and put it back in his pocket, then reached over to pluck the orange from Al’s hand. ‘Only if you stop monopolising the snacks. I’ve not had an orange since leaving Marseille.’
‘You’re all too serious. Honestly, sometimes I think I’m the only one of us with a sense of humour. I’m not sure Cam even knows what fun is,’ said Al with a sideways glance.
Camille rolled her eyes. ‘Perhaps I don’t find the same things fun as you do.’
‘Stabbing things doesn’t count. That’s work.’
‘We have different priorities.’
‘Oh, come on, you were exactly like this before the battalion. Ada’s told me, the earnest little political obsessive. The three of you, all hanging round the political clubs like teacher’s pets. I mean, you’d fit right in. Doesn’t look like Robespierre has ever cracked a smile in his life.’
Ada’s cheeks heated as Camille shot her a look. ‘He’s paraphrasing. I didn’t mean it as a bad thing.’
‘I often have fun,’ added Guil. ‘Last week I translated Kant from the original German.’
Al buried his face in his hands. ‘Oh god. What have I been reduced to? Once I was the light of Paris. Now look at me.’
Olympe cleared her throat awkwardly. ‘May I please have a piece of orange?’
It was the first time she’d spoken since they got to the theatre. Dragging her through the crowds and bustle of the city had been like trying to shove a cat into a carrying case. Camille had lost the battle of wills and they’d had to take a quieter route through the backstreets that was twice as long. But now, secreted in the corner of the box, curiosity was slowly overtaking the wary, hunted look she’d worn since escaping the prison. She flitted between avidly watching the stage, peering at the standing audience in the pit below, and across at the rich men and women in the other boxes, stroking her hand along the velvet of her seat and the silk of her borrowed gloves.
Guil carved her a segment of orange with his pen knife.
‘I love oranges. Docteur Comtois would bring me these, usually before they tried something particularly unpleasant.’ She hesitated, looking at where the orange juice had stained the tips of her gloved fingers. ‘I suppose that’s not a good memory, is it? He spoke of it as if he was doing me a kindness, but maybe saying something is kind does not make it so.’
‘Memories can be complicated. The same one can bring us both joy and pain. Here.’ Guil cut another segment and offered it along with a gentle smile. ‘My father imported oranges among other things. The best way to eat them is messily, with little care for public opinion.’
Olympe hesitantly smiled back and took the segment. ‘Maybe this can be a new memory of oranges.’
The oranges had been an expense they could barely afford, but they had worked well as a bribe to get them into the theatre. Their box wasn’t officially in use: a leak had ruined the fine silk wall hangings and left splotches of mould growing like weeds along the seams. It couldn’t be rented to the fashionable elite of Paris, so it was being used partly as a storeroom, partly as an anchor point for some of the elaborate rigging that hung above the stage. Al had kept one orange back as an indulgence.
Ada checked her watch. She could get them more money, but only if she found a chance to slip away and pick up what her father had left for her. She had taken charge of the battalion’s finances from their first paid job and had used her power to fudge their accounts to sneak her father’s money in here and there. Between the bribe and two more mouths to feed they would need it. Her gaze flicked to Camille, who was cleaning her nails with a knife. If Ada was still willing to lie.
A soft tap at the box door interrupted her thoughts.
‘Ah. That’s our cue,’ said Al. He swung his legs down from the crate they’d been propped on and beckoned to Camille. ‘Léon is ready for us.’
They left. Onstage, the dog had been taken off, and Olympe, having gained a little more confidence, started asking questions about the theatre – the first one she’d ever been to – and Paris and what other things people did to amuse themselves.
‘My mother tried to bring me up as properly as she could. I learned needlepoint and the piano and drawing and everything a young lady should. Sometimes Docteur Comtois would let me copy his anatomical drawings when I was in his lab all day. I liked drawing veins, how they look like trees.’ Olympe leaned over the edge of the box. ‘Oh, look! That woman has a birdcage in her hair. How did she do it? Why did she do it?’
Ada pulled her back out of view. ‘It’s fashion. Or it was about ten years ago.’
A new act started. The audience drew in closer, hushed and waiting. A gust of wind made the candles gutter. A Leyden jar for storing electricity had been brought onstage and volunteers were being summoned to take part in the demonstration. Olympe fell silent, watching intently as they were arranged in a circle, each end of the chain touching the jar.
‘Is that electricity? How do they do that?’
Ada explained about the static charge. Onstage a woman near to the jar yelped, loose strands of hair around her face rising.
‘You mean it’s artificial? There’s no one like … like me involved?’
Ada shook her head. ‘No. No one can do what you can do.’
Olympe looked down at her hands. The silk gloves smothered any charge so it couldn’t be conducted to anything else. Anyone else.
A hum grew, along with a prickling in Ada’s palms. She thought about what Camille had told her about Olympe stretching out her mottled hand and pressing it against the guard’s neck. She could feel her own hair begin to stand on end, lifting up against its pins.
More shrieks were coming from the act onstage. Arcing blue light leaped between people’s hands before they joined them. Then all at once, the woman at the end of the chain who’d yelped first jerked away, a streak of red coming from her nose. The rest of the chain shattered, and a thrum of concern rippled through the auditorium. Several participants were shaking uncontrollably. Some were crying.
A smattering of applause sent the jar and its scientist offstage.
Olympe watched, eyes wide and shoulders tense.
‘People let themselves get shocked on purpose?’
‘Yes … it’s entertainment,’ said Ada carefully. ‘It’s a popular scientific display.’
‘You mean other people study electricity too? Not just Comtois and the rest?’
‘Yes. All of Europe – all the world wants to know what it is.’
‘And do they know?’
Ada opened her mouth, then shut it again. None of the theories she�
�d read seemed worth talking about. Because whatever Olympe was, she wasn’t anything the world had seen before.
‘No. No one knows.’
Olympe looked down at her hands again, and Ada thought she saw a spark of excitement in Olympe’s fathomless eyes.
‘I am unique.’
‘Yes. You are.’
5
Backstage at the Théâtre Patriotique
It was a crush to get through the parterre standing area. The afternoon matinee performance was always the most rammed of the day. Camille squeezed between bodies, nose scrunching at their odours mixed with dirt and cheap beer. At the lip of the stage, a line of candles flickered dangerously close to the skirts of the women above. Al moved with an assured laziness, drifting through the crowds as if he was walking down the wide tree-lined boulevard outside. On the far side of the auditorium, he stepped through a door marked Privée. Camille followed, trying to look as though she belonged.
Al took a right, ducking beneath a curtain into the maze-like backstage area. The space was sectioned by flimsy painted backboards and lengths of dusty curtain hanging from the gantries above. The dressing rooms were off to one side. Behind the backdrop partitioning the stage was a cavernous hinterland of abandoned props and crates, ladders, buckets and ropes – but what stopped Camille in her tracks was a strange, craggy shape that loomed over twice their height. For a moment, she thought stress and exhaustion must be getting to her because it looked as if there was an honest-to-god mountain backstage.
A man stepped into their path, his face shiny and red in the candlelight. His body looked stretched out in his pinstriped breeches and waistcoat. He regarded Al with distaste.
‘Alexander. How unsurprising to find you skulking round my theatre.’
Camille looked at Al, puzzled. Alexander?
‘Hallo, Citoyen Gerard. How pleasant to see you.’
‘How unfortunate that I cannot say the same.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll be out of your hair soon enough. Just come to give Léon letters from his fans.’ He pulled out a wedge of envelopes from his pocket and brandished them under Gerard’s nose.
‘Be that as it may, you can’t come wandering back here like you own the place, because I own the place.’
‘That you do. And a very fine place it is too,’ said Al, eyeing a sad stuffed lion that looked as if it had been badly startled. ‘The finest props in Paris.’
‘Well, hurry up. Hand over the letters and be out of here. Stop distracting Léon. He’s my star turn. If you break his heart, I’ll personally bill you for my losses.’
Al grinned. ‘Duly noted.’
Gerard was about to leave when Camille stopped him, pointing to the mountainous lumps.
‘That prop looks pretty special.’
Gerard puffed up. ‘It’s for the Festival of the Supreme Being,’ he explained. ‘Specially commissioned by Robespierre himself. It’s happening in a few days, if you’ve somehow missed the posters everywhere.’
‘But why a mountain?’ she asked, her curiosity getting the better of her as she ran her hand over a faux crag.
‘It’s symbolic. The Revolutionaries rule the National Convention, so they will rule over the festival from the mountain top.’ Gerard gave a smug smile. ‘That is the calibre of patron we attract, you see. Only the very top.’
Al pulled her arm. ‘So fascinating. We’ll be getting on our way.’
They passed the back of one wing through a door, tucked under the thunder-run where cannonballs were rolled down a series of slopes to create the sound of thunder.
‘Who’s Alexander?’ she hissed, giving Al a sideways look.
‘Call it a nom d’espionage. Don’t exactly need to broadcast that a wanted aristocrat is free and alive, wandering around Paris.’
‘I didn’t think.’
He scoffed. ‘Please, give me a little credit. Just because you think I’m bad at what I do, doesn’t mean I actually am.’
Beyond was a corridor, and a series of doors with name cards in place. They stopped at one labelled Léon and Al gave a rhythmic series of raps before going in.
The room was lavishly decorated with rugs and screens and paper fans. Léon was an attractive man, a couple of years older than Al, with a firm jaw and grey-green eyes. Camille could see how he was Gerard’s star turn.
He greeted Al with a smile as Al slid onto his lap to kiss him.
‘Darling, why have you brought a spectator? I told you, I don’t give private performances.’
Al pulled away long enough to wave Camille over. ‘Alas, Camille is a theatrical heathen and has absolutely no idea who you are.’
Léon looked at her with one brow finely arched. ‘How refreshing.’
‘I do know that you’re someone with information,’ she said, folding her arms. ‘Information we’d pay well for.’
‘Is she always like this?’ Léon asked Al.
Al nodded. ‘All business. Better just tell her what she wants and make her go away.’
Léon sighed and tipped Al off his lap. He crossed the room to a squat set of drawers and took out a snuffbox. ‘Very well, then. Aloysius said you were interested in news of the Duc de l’Aubespine.’
‘Or someone calling himself that.’
‘Well, you’re in luck. He’s not a visitor to this theatre – or any theatre – but one of my patrons is a medical man and had heard of him. Seems he was a minor noble who used his money to fund his anatomy hobby. Never any success as a practising physician, thought himself too rich to slog it out at the medical schools with the riffraff, but had the king’s favour so ended up as the court’s pet scientist. Bit of a crank, by all accounts. Self-professed visionary without the talent to back it up, that sort of thing. It’s said he packed up and fled north when the king lost his head, but appears that was a false alarm. Been spotted out in the Faubourg Saint Martin.’ He offered Camille the snuffbox, then when she shook her head, passed it to Al. ‘Anyway, what do you want with him?’
Camille shifted her weight. ‘Better for you if you don’t know.’
Léon laughed. ‘Oh, you are charming.’
‘Faubourg Saint Martin, you said?’
‘Yes. Slinking about the Saint-Lazare prison, I believe. Rumour has it he was asking for the bodies of dead prisoners.’
‘Oh?’
‘Standard anatomist practice. Hard to scrounge enough bodies to experiment on through legitimate means. They usually leave off in summer – can you imagine trying to dissect a body rotting faster than you can cut it? But this year the body snatchers say they’re doing a brisk trade.’
Al and Camille exchanged a glance.
‘Do you know who they’re selling to?’ asked Al.
Léon pursed his lips. ‘If you’re asking me whether the duc is their customer, then I can’t tell you for sure. Don’t have anything to do with the snatchers if I can help it.’
Camille sagged in disappointment. They were so close.
‘There is one thing,’ said Léon. ‘They say they’re delivering all the bodies to one address.’
He named an abbey on the main road out of Paris that passed through the Faubourg Saint Martin.
‘I can’t promise anything. But it seems an odd coincidence. And if someone were to investigate, I imagine they might find quite a lot of interesting things.’
Camille smiled, a flare of hope catching in her chest.
‘Thank you.’
She tossed him a small bag of coins.
‘Much obliged.’
They left, Léon blowing a kiss to Al, who turned a furious pink and dashed back to kiss him properly before finally being dragged out by Camille.
The theatre was emptying, and they blended into the crowds flooding onto the Boulevard du Temple with its chaotic mix of carriages and promenaders and street performers. Camille stopped at the turning that went towards the city centre and bought a news-sheet. The story of the balloon crash was still plastered across the front. Al snatched it off her be
fore she could read very far.
‘Hey! Buy your own.’
‘I thought you wanted me to be in charge of information?’
‘Oh, now you listen to me? Give it back, it’s been days since I’ve read one properly. You keep squirrelling them away.’
He flipped through the pages as they turned down the Rue du Temple. ‘Sorry, very busy, have to research more on today’s mad plan. Not to burst your bubble or anything, but don’t you think barging into the duc’s secret lair a little too on the nose? I’ve avoided getting my head chopped off so far, I’m not keen on risking it now.’ He crumpled up the sheet and shoved it in his pocket.
Camille sighed. The pain in her chest was only getting worse.
‘Do you have an alternative?’
‘No.’
‘So what’s your point?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. To annoy you. To remind you that you aren’t a genius with a solution to every problem. To bring to your attention that you might get us all killed.’
‘The battalion isn’t a death sentence.’
He didn’t reply for a long while, his expression clouding over. As they crossed the Place de Grève, his eyes tracked the weathered gallows that had been abandoned for the guillotine on the other side of the city.
Camille shivered. The battalion might not be a death sentence, but sometimes living in Paris felt like one.
6
The Parlour, Au Petit Suisse
Ada took off the delicate muslin dress she’d worn to the theatre. It was the kind of dress she really needed a maid to help her in and out of, but she’d learned how to do it herself. She didn’t have many fine things left, so she took extra care with what she did have, mending torn lace and stitching velvet ribbon around hems. Finally, she took off the emerald earrings that had been her mother’s, folding them into a silk handkerchief and tucking them into the toe of a shoe. The best hiding place she had. She had cheap things scattered across her dressing table, costume jewellery with paste rubies and sapphires, faux-tortoiseshell combs and bottles of expensive scent, rosewater, lavender and sandalwood, watered down to extend its life. Her mother had always told her to ask for jewels as presents: they were the only things a woman could legally own outright, and if she ever needed to run, they could be sold.
