Dangerous Remedy

by Kat Dunn

  ‘Come on. I have an idea.’

  13

  The Théâtre Patriotique

  Inside the theatre, the stage and the expensive boxes were brightly lit but the pit was dingy. Faces half in shadow, a sheen of sweat catching the light here or there. The theatre had been rebuilt only a few years ago, but the murals on the walls and ceiling were already smoke- and tobacco-stained, the paint peeling in the corners where the damp festered. The discordant hum of the orchestra tuning to a common key filled the air.

  ‘Where’s the best place to hide?’ Al had asked Camille, as they’d dodged carts and pedestrians, beggars and street performers. ‘A crowd.’

  He had led them on a short dash from the Porte St Martin east to the Boulevard du Temple and the Théâtre Patriotique where they’d quizzed Léon for information only the day before.

  And crowded it was. The popular matinee performance was about to start, and it seemed as though half of Paris had crammed its way into the cheap standing area in front of the stage.

  A few quick words between Al and the ticket seller had seen them waved in and soon they were swallowed by the crowd. Camille pushed further in, keeping a tight hand around Olympe’s arm. The rest of the battalion could take care of themselves if they got split up. With Olympe, she wasn’t taking any risks.

  ‘What now?’ asked Guil as they edged past an orange seller and a couple taking advantage of a dark corner. All the battalion were staring at her expectantly. But Camille couldn’t look at them; her eyes kept being drawn back to the entrance. Dorval had been right behind them. They couldn’t stop. They couldn’t be complacent.

  ‘We split up.’

  ‘Is that a good idea?’ asked Ada.

  ‘Dorval is following us. If we split the scent, we make his job harder. Make sure you’ve lost him, then meet at the Saints-Innocents safe house.’

  Al opened his mouth to say something, but Camille cut him off.

  ‘It’s not a request.’

  At that moment, the curtain lifted and the crowd shifted in a surge towards the stage as the first act came on. The flow of people tugged Camille one way and Ada another. She hesitated long enough to see Al lead Ada away, and Guil salute as he melted into the crowd on his own. Then, with a tight smile at Olympe, Camille took her in the opposite direction, towards the doors near the stage. Her plan was simple: hide until the show was over, then escape amid the crowd as it poured into the street.

  It only took a few goes to remember the route Al had taken her on to meet Léon, and then she and Olympe were out of the faded grandeur of the public face of the theatre and into the grubby hinterland.

  Hiding backstage was easier said than done. It was teeming with people going back and forth carrying heaps of wigs, piles of clothes, rolled sheets of painted backdrop and bulky props. Men and women, both half-dressed, faces painted in thick make-up, paste jewels glittering at their ears and throats. A woman carried a wig the size of her torso with a white sailing ship nestled among the powdered curls. Curtains hung in regimented rows, filtering off sections of wing and stage, with ropes dangling from gantries above, and trapdoors open to the pit below.

  The further back they went, the quieter and darker it became. Camille wasn’t sure if they were going in circles, or if it was just her anxiety making the minutes stretch unnaturally. She knew there was a door somewhere here, she’d gone through it only the day before. Olympe’s hand was hot in hers, the low hum of panic tight in the air between them. She could find it, she could get them a way out of this mess – she just needed time.

  The one thing they didn’t have.

  Time – and luck.

  Camille never found the door.

  Instead, she found the end of their luck.

  Quietly, like an animal stalking its prey, Dorval stepped from behind a curtain as they passed. He had his arm around Olympe before Camille even noticed. She cried out as Olympe’s hand was wrenched from her grasp, and spun on her heel to face him in shock.

  Dorval smiled wide and wicked. ‘Mademoiselle Laroche. Thank you for delivering the girl.’

  Camille whipped her pistol out and pointed it at his head.

  ‘Let her go.’

  ‘Put that thing away. You know you’re just as likely to take her head off as mine.’

  He had one arm around Olympe’s waist, the other held a knife to her throat. Camille hesitated, then lowered the gun.

  He was right.

  And she’d seen something he hadn’t. Olympe was snaking her bare fingers towards the hand at her waist.

  ‘I’m disappointed. You’re getting sloppy, Citoyen Dorval.’

  ‘Whatever clever game you think you’re playing, it won’t work.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not a game.’

  ‘What are you—?’

  Olympe’s hand met his and a blinding blue pulse sent sparks racing up his arm. He seized up, shaking violently. Olympe tried to wriggle out of his grip but his arms had locked, hand clamped around the knife still too close to her throat. Together they toppled into a discarded backdrop of a country park. The crackle of sparks arced against the paint-soaked fabric and a flame caught in a neat blue line racing up through the backdrop like the fuse of a cannon.

  Olympe scrambled away, sparks dying on her hands but it was too late.

  Fire leaped in a yellow-orange-red wave, devouring the canvas.

  14

  The Théâtre Patriotique

  ‘I hope your girlfriend knows what she’s doing.’

  Al elbowed his way through the crowd and Ada followed in his wake. Around them students mingled with fishmongers still smelling of the catch brought upriver from Le Havre; gentry, wigless in simple dresses, rubbed shoulders with tailors and shopkeepers.

  ‘Camille always knows what she’s doing,’ Ada said with more confidence than she felt.

  Al snorted. ‘Our glorious infallible leader.’

  ‘Why do you always have to be so hostile?’ she snapped. ‘If you don’t like how we do things then you don’t have to stay in the battalion.’

  ‘My dear, the right of any worker is to complain about their employer. Isn’t that what this revolution’s all about? Rights for the proles?’

  Ada rolled her eyes. ‘Al, darling, I don’t think you could manage to pass as proletarian for five seconds.’

  Even in scruffy clothes, with a cockade hastily pinned to his lapel, Al struggled to look anything other than well-bred. Ada wasn’t sure if it was his sneer or the tilt of his jaw or the arrogant look in his eye, but he made it unnecessarily easy to be disliked. He might have been disowned by his rich family, left behind when they fled their arrest warrant, but that didn’t make a difference to the people around them. One aristocrat was as bad as the next.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I think I’m quite a man of the people. Look, I eat street food.’

  He stopped by a girl selling herring and nuts from a tray slung around her neck and bought a bag of chestnuts. As the orchestra tuned up, he leaned against the wall picking off the shells.

  He caught Ada’s eye. ‘What?’

  ‘We’re on the run from a monster with a knife and you’re stopping for a snack?’

  ‘Absolutely. This is my version of Camille’s great plan. Lie low. Blend in. Wait till the interval and then get Léon to let us out through the stage door.’

  She joined him against the wall and scooped chestnuts out of the paper bag.

  ‘You know, my mother always loved the theatre,’ he said. ‘She’d be in a box, of course. Decked to the nines in half the silk output of Lyon, skirts so wide she’d have to go through doors sideways so every dull socialite in Paris could see how rich and important she was. She would stage little scenes at home with her friends, sometimes even a slice or two of opera. She had a lovely singing voice. She would sing us to sleep as children. No one sings to you when you grow up, do they? But my point is getting away from me – the point is, this,’ he gestured around them, ‘was the one thing we had in common. The lights, the
costumes, the drama. The fiction onstage always felt far more appealing than whatever was happening in real life.’

  Ada’s hand closed over her father’s letter still in her pocket. Not yet. She wasn’t ready to read it yet.

  The orchestra drew to a single, piercing note. The players took the stage, and then the score swelled into the opening bars. Ada’s breath caught in her throat at the spectacle, despite herself. The stage was split horizontally into two levels, so two scenes could be shown to the audience at once. It was like floors of a house, decorated to the taste of a middle-class merchant or lawyer. It looked the same as their house in the Marais district when she had still lived with her father. Paintings hung on the walls of the parlour with a rococo mirror above the fireplace and second-hand harpsichord in the corner. Two men stood at the table, examining plans spread before them. On the second tier, the space was set up as a bedroom, complete with four-poster and a zinc bathtub ready for use. Scandalously, a woman was in the tub being attended to by her maid.

  The first scene had only just begun when Ada saw a wisp of smoke curling from the backdrop. It thickened, growing grey-black, and then at once like a lightning flash, a large orange flame licked through the fabric, jumping to the second tier of the stage, lapping around the lathe and plaster walls.

  For a beat, the audience was stunned, as though no one could understand what was happening in front of them. Someone applauded.

  Then chaos erupted. The crowd surged to the back where Ada and Al were standing. People were screaming and pushing each other out of the way. The pit was a heaving tide of faces and wigs and hair merging and scattering like a school of fish. Ada saw several people disappear underfoot before she could move. Al grabbed her arm and held on tight.

  ‘Let the horde go past,’ he said, eyes darting. ‘I’m not being trampled to death in a third-rate venue like this.’

  She flattened herself out of the way. Above them the balcony shook from hundreds of stampeding feet. Onstage, the fire spread quickly to the portraits in the parlour, alighting its fingers on the back of the settle. It was speeding across the set like rats on a corpse, curling flakes of paint off the walls, frothing over the upholstery. The heat was like an amazing inferno.

  The initial mass of people pushing towards the exits had stopped. Now they were bunched, clamouring and yelling, pressing forwards – but going nowhere. Al met Ada’s eye.

  ‘Well, that’s not good.’

  At the other end of the pit, flames chewed through set and props alike, throwing out billowing swells of black smoke, toxic with paint and metal fumes. The theatre interior was a nest of dry wood and rope and cloth, seeped in paint and oils. A deathtrap. But before anyone burned, there was a good chance half the crowd would be trampled. Nausea washed over her. They’d come to get lost in the crowd. Camille could be somewhere in it, and she might never find her.

  Digging her nails into her palm, she turned to Al. ‘Come on. Something must be blocking the way.’

  They skirted the crowd, stopping to check on the few people on the floor. Three dead, five with injuries, but still mobile after Al and Ada helped them to their feet. The crush hadn’t let up at either door. Some of the people at the rear had fallen away, scouring the auditorium for another exit, but the smoke drove them back. Countless more were trapped in the middle, squeezed between the lobby and doorway.

  Al gestured to the emptied galleries above.

  ‘Give me a leg up.’

  Making a stirrup from her laced fingers, she braced herself as he fitted his foot into her hands and launched himself up to the balcony. He shimmied over the edge, then hauled Ada after him.

  A few other people in the pit had copied them and were climbing the tiered galleries. The whole stage was ablaze now, she could feel the heat from halfway down the auditorium. The smoke was worse here, filling her nostrils and mouth with a burning, bitter taste.

  The doors to the stairwell were empty. The gallery crowds had flowed down the stairs into the same lobby that the pit emptied into. A heaving throng of frightened bodies pressed against the street doors. Ada could see chains and padlocks securing the doors. A low moan drifted from the stairs, but it was otherwise eerily quiet. Nobody had breath to scream any more.

  ‘Why the bloody hell are the doors locked?’ screeched Al. ‘Who had that smart idea?’

  ‘Rioters.’

  A quiet voice came from their feet. Al looked down to see a balding man in a suit too garish for the rest of his appearance, squatting in a corner of the landing, clutching his head. It was Gerard, the director.

  ‘We wanted to stop the rioters. Keep the troublemakers out. It had to be a success, you see. Had to keep the riff-raff out.’

  ‘So you locked the doors?’

  ‘Couldn’t risk it.’ He kept mumbling into his hands.

  ‘Where the hell are the keys?’

  ‘Office … backstage…’ he mumbled.

  They stared at each other in horror. Backstage, in the heart of the fire.

  15

  Backstage at the Théâtre Patriotique

  ‘Olympe! Run!’

  Olympe darted away as Camille swung her pistol like a bat into the side of Dorval’s head. He fell back and Camille fled.

  Clutching Olympe’s hand, Camille dragged them through the choking smoke towards the stage door. The fire jumped to a swinging rope and raced along the curtains. Within seconds, the whole place was ablaze. Smoke stung her eyes, and she fell to her knees, coughing. Everything in her chest and throat and mouth itched, wheezed, spasmed, burned until she couldn’t suck in a single breath. She slammed a fist on her chest; her diaphragm contracted, and she coughed out the last of her air, then sucked in a thin stream of smoke.

  Olympe had disappeared. She must have kept running, but now the smoke was too thick to see any sign of where she’d gone.

  Slowly, Camille stood.

  And found she wasn’t alone.

  Dorval walked across the burning boards towards her, dripping blood from where her pistol had hit him.

  She knew she should feel scared, but all she could feel was exhaustion. Her chest ached and her head swam. How many more times could she do this and win?

  ‘Hand the girl over before I put you and your friends down like the vermin you are.’

  Good. He didn’t have her.

  ‘If you want a girl, I’m given to understand it’s not hard to acquire one in the Palais-Royal pleasure gardens.’

  ‘You think you’re so clever, don’t you? Sniffing around our business. What did you think you were going to do? Find a way to blackmail us? It’s a shame you’re not quite as clever as you think.’

  ‘Really? Because I think I did pretty well.’

  He closed in on her. A wolf. That’s what he reminded her of. A wolf buttoned into a man-suit.

  A tongue of fire licked up, crackling the air. The heat was curling the hair on the back of her neck and sending rivulets of sweat between her breasts.

  ‘You may have seen a few things, but you have no idea what my master has planned. The girl is only the start. The world must be righted, Camille Laroche. The natural order must be restored. The king on his throne and the treasonous scum of the Revolution put down like dogs.’ A curtain engulfed in flame collapsed behind him, rippling down from the smoke-filled ceiling. ‘If the Revolutionaries want terror, then we’re more than happy to provide it.’

  She spat in his stupid, hateful face.

  Dorval scraped the glistening globule of spit from his cheek, his expression changing from smug satisfaction to unveiled rage. He twisted his fist in the front of her shirt and hauled her up so his meaty breath filled her nostrils.

  ‘Fine. Play games. If you don’t produce the girl by tomorrow, we’re coming for you,’ he hissed. ‘The duc was being polite. I won’t be. I’ll cut your skin from your face until you beg me to let you die.’ Camille felt the sharp line of a blade against her ribs. ‘I’ll cook it in front of you. Crisp it up nice in a pan. Not so much fo
od round these days, we have to make do with what we can. Lots of hungry people around willing to eat a hot bit of meat without asking where it came from.’

  Finally, fear gripped her. She’d taken a stupid risk and lost control of the situation again. Again.

  Maybe this was who she really was. A stupid, scared girl who fell apart at the moment it mattered most. Maybe her luck was finally about to run out.

  No. An answering kernel of anger caught light in her gut. She wasn’t going to faint, or cry, or beg, no matter how much her body hurt or how afraid she felt. She was Camille Laroche. Luck was something you made. If she was going down, she would take these bastards with her.

  Working the moisture from her fire-dry mouth, she spat in Dorval’s face again.

  ‘I hope you choke on my blood when you kill me.’

  He snarled.

  ‘You little bitch.’

  He scraped his once-fine sleeve against the mess on his face and she took the opportunity to slam her knee between his legs.

  He doubled over, cursing, dropping her to the floor.

  The boards were hot to touch, fire had circled them, gobbling the walls and floor until the whole world was orange flame and black smoke. Far above her, the gantry groaned and heaved, raining ash and splinters. There had to be a way out. If she could just stand. If she could just move.

  ‘Camille!’

  Guil’s voice, rasping and low, came from beyond the flames.

  Struggling to see him through the smoke on the other side of a bank of burning props, she called back, ‘Get out of here! Find Olympe. Keep her safe. Go!’

  ‘Not without you. I won’t desert my battalion again.’

  A hysterical laugh bubbled in her throat. Her battalion. Her choices.

  ‘I order you to leave.’

  For a moment, the smoke cleared and she could see his smile.

  ‘No, Camille. If this is where things end for us, I choose to lose my life standing by your side.’

  Oh, god. She didn’t deserve the faith they all placed in her.