He pushed his chair back and rose, taking his coat and hat from their hook on the tavern wall. He brought the cloak over his shoulder. “If you’re hungry, the food here’s excellent,” he said. “Have the waiter order you whatever you like—tell him to put it on my account. It was good seeing you again, Perenelle. I very much look forward to our future meetings.”
With that, he bowed to her and placed his hat on his head. He turned, gesturing to the men at the neighboring table. She could have shot him then, could have discharged the pistol she carried with her, leaving him twisting in pain on the floorboards. She could have cast a vial at him, speaking a spell word so that the chemicals inside bloomed into flames to char and blacken his flesh.
But none of that would change anything. In a few minutes, a few hours, a few days or weeks or months at worst, he would be whole and unhurt again.
She couldn’t stop him.
She watched him leave the tavern, safely in the midst of his companions.
*
Antoine’s eventual trial before the Tribunal didn’t take place until late April, but its outcome was certain from the moment it began. The judge refused to listen to Marie-Anne’s appeal to spare Antoine’s life so that he might be allowed to continue his experiments. “The Republic needs neither scientists nor chemists; the course of justice cannot be delayed,” the judge said, after glancing once at the papers in front of him. No witnesses had been called; none, she knew, were necessary. “The sentence will be carried out in ten days.” And with that, he gestured for Antoine to be taken away.
Marie-Anne went to see Antoine that night. The air of the prison was chill and damp; she could hear Antoine coughing as the guard escorted her to his cell. “A few minutes only,” he told Marie-Anne as she pressed the coins of the necessary bribe into the guard’s hand and Antoine came forward from the dark, fetid recesses of the small cell.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he told her as the guard left them. She could hear the stirring of the other prisoners in the nearby cells, could feel their gazes on the two of them. Antoine looked horrible: thin and emaciated, his hair matted to his skull and bruises mottling his face and arms. He had told her previously that he was questioned and beaten irregularly, that Robespierre sometimes attended the interrogations; it appeared that he’d experienced another beating since the travesty of his trial. She took his hand through the bars, pressing her face against the cold, rusted iron to kiss him.
“Don’t give up hope yet,” she told him. “You’re well-loved, my darling. There are those who are outraged at this verdict, and they’ve told me that they’ll make their voices heard.”
He nodded, but she saw the resignation in his eyes, bloodshot and dull. She wondered if he’d heard the lie in her voice: she had no hope now that anyone could change the verdict, knowing who Robespierre actually was. “Thank you,” he said, and she saw that he was missing teeth, slurring his words. The fingers clutching hers were little more than flesh draped over bone, the ligaments visible underneath. “The laboratory? My notes?”
She shook her head. “Everything’s been confiscated by the state, months ago: our house, the laboratories, all of our notes. Everything. It’s all gone, I’m afraid. I didn’t want to tell you.”
He nodded again, as if he’d expected the news. There was no change in his expression, and she knew then how deep his despair had become, and how hopeless he felt. It steeled her resolve.
She’d thought for a long time about this. Expecting this, she’d burned the notes she had on the elixir—she didn’t want Nicolas to have them. She made copies for herself and placed them where she could retrieve them at some later date, but left out the critical element: the blood that made the elixir work. That vital ingredient she would keep to herself. She wouldn’t let Nicolas know that. Ever.
With the laboratories intact, she might have been able to do more. She might have been able to release him from Porte Libre as she’d once released herself from her Roman prison, though Porte Libre was far better guarded, and she had no idea where they could hide afterward. But it didn’t matter; in the day following Antoine’s arrest, their laboratories had been destroyed, the chemical stores and equipment taken away. Everything. Everything save one.
In her cloak, nestled in an inner pocket, was the blue vial. She’d managed to save that.
“We don’t have long,” she whispered to him urgently. “Do you trust me?” She passed him the blue bottle. “Drink this,” she told him.
He stared at the bottle. “Marie-Anne, are things truly this desperate?”
She realized then that he thought the vial contained a poison, that she wanted him to commit suicide rather than face the guillotine. “You don’t understand. This is to keep you alive, Antoine—no matter what happens.” She could see the confusion in his face. “Trust me,” she told him again. “Please.”
He uncapped the vial. “I do trust you,” he said, “no matter what this is.” He upended the vial into his mouth; she saw his throat move as he swallowed. “Bitter,” he said, grimacing. “And it burns all through me …” His voice cut off as he gasped and cried out in sudden pain, his mouth a wide oval, his eyes nearly as wide. She could see changes rippling through his body, his hair losing the gray it had acquired, his receding hairline surging forward like a rushing tide over his forehead, the lines of his face smoothing, his back straightening. He grunted, as much in wonder as in pain, holding his hands in front of his face: a young man’s hands, the skin elastic and smooth. As she watched, the transformation ended, and his breathing became more regular and even, though he continued to stare at his hands. “Marie-Anne?” he asked, a dozen questions held in the query of her name.
“Look at me, Antoine,” she said, whispering so that none of the others could hear her. “Look at me with someone else’s eyes. Haven’t you ever wondered why I haven’t changed all that much over the years of our marriage? Haven’t you heard people say how young I still looked, with a bit of puzzlement or even jealousy in their voices? Antoine, I don’t age. I’m far, far older than you would believe if I told you. And my body heals itself: shoot me, cut my throat with a knife, snap my neck—none of that will end my life. I’ve just given you the same gift.” But the elixir will also change you, as it did me and as it did Nicolas and Verdette. I don’t know how, but it will. The elixir will demand an eternal payment for what it gives; for that, whatever it will be, I can only ask for your forgiveness.
She didn’t tell him that. He would find out, soon enough.
“This is nonsense,” he blustered, his eyes wild, though he touched his face in wonderment. “A fantasy. Even if it were true, why would you do this, when in a few days …” He couldn’t speak the rest.
“I told you,” she said. “Stab me, shoot me, and I don’t die. And neither will you, my love. Neither will you.” She patted his hand. “I know you don’t believe me, but trust me.”
Even as she heard the metallic jingle of the jailer’s keys, she saw hope bloom in his eyes, even in the darkness of the cell. She kissed him again—his lips, young and pliant—as the guard entered the corridor for his cell and grunted at her.
“I have to go now,” she said. “Trust me, Antoine. Believe in this. You will not die.”
*
It was the 8th of May, 1794. She could not think of it as 19 Floréal, Year II.
The designation hardly mattered. No matter what it was called, this was the day she was to watch her husband lose his head. Even knowing that Antoine had taken the elixir, she found herself frightened. The guillotine: this was a different kind of death than any she’d experienced.
Joseph Louis Lagrange, alone of their friends, stood with her in the thin gathering around the Place de la Révolution. At the beginning of Robespierre’s purge of anyone who might be against him, there had been enormous crowds for the executions, and the guillotine had become the favorite entertainment of the masses. The “People’s Avenger,” they called it, or “Madame Guillotine,” or “The Nation
al Razor”—as noble heads fell and the crowds jeered and cheered. People would bring their children, placing them on their shoulders so they could watch the blade fall and see the heads tumble away. But as the grisly violence of the Reign of Terror lengthened, as untold thousands fell under the blade, it was no longer just the nobility, but the intellectuals, the politicians, and even the commoners and prostitutes who were executed in a continuing, endless bloodbath.
Even the spectacle of public death became boring. The crowds had begun to wane.
Marie-Anne and Lagrange, bundled in cloaks against recognition, approached the Place. Vendors called out to them, waving pieces of parchment with the names of the condemned printed on them as a program. There were a few hundred rather than thousands of people around the bloodstained device this morning. “Are you certain you want to be here, Madame?” Lagrange asked her. Marie-Anne had stopped at the edge of the crowd as the shadow of the guillotine touched her and sun sparked from the angled blade. “If you wish, walk away. No one would blame you in the slightest, Antoine least of all. Take a carriage and return to your house. I will stay as your witness and report back to you. No wife should have to see her husband suffer this.”
“No,” she told him. “I want Antoine to see that I’m here.” She watched: as the long list of prisoners was called out one by one; as they were brought onto the platform; as they knelt down and their heads were placed on the blood-spattered board; as the blade was winched up and released, falling in an instant; as the severed, dripping heads were held up to the crowd’s roaring approval.
It sickened her, watching this, knowing that Antoine would soon experience the same fate. And she wondered, as well, what the guillotine would do to Antoine or her, if even an immortal body could survive such terrible abuse.
Even as the thought passed in her mind, she heard Antoine’s name called out. He ascended the steps to the platform, his hands tied behind him, his hair cropped short and the collar of his shirt loose. A murmur that quickly became a roar came from the crowd: Robespierre himself escorted Antoine, holding him by the arm. She saw Antoine look out over the crowd, saw him recognize her and give her a faint, brave smile. Nicolas saw her too, and his smile was broad and mocking. He pointed toward her, then made a gesture as if swallowing something from a cup or bottle. He knows. He knows I gave him the elixir … “We are conducting an experiment today,” he said aloud, his voice faint over that of the crowd. “We shall discover if science can defeat the guillotine.”
Nicolas helped Antoine to kneel down, and as he straightened again, he bowed in Marie-Anne’s direction. Antoine’s gaze was still on her as well; he must have seen her hands fly to her face in shock. But the executioner pushed Antoine’s head down into the stock, then lowered the top board.
The blade began its agonizing, final rise.
Marie-Anne turned away, with a quiet sob, then turned defiantly back. She would watch, and wouldn’t give Nicolas the satisfaction of seeing her fear. She watched the blade fall, heard the crowd’s approval, felt Lagrange’s hand on her shoulder. She wondered if it would have been better if it had been her head that had been separated from its body, but she knew that wasn’t what Nicolas wanted.
“I hate you, Perenelle, and I know that you hate me in return,” he’d told her. “That mutual hate nourishes and sustains me; if you were gone, that would be lost to me.”
“Let’s leave here, Madame,” Lagrange said, not understanding her grief, her sorrow, and her regret. He gave a huff of indignation. “It took them only an instant to cut off his head, but France may not produce another such head in a century.”
“I’ve made arrangements for the body,” she told him. “I have to take care of that.”
“Then I’ll accompany you.”
Most of the bodies were simply thrown into common mass graves outside the city. Two-wheeled tumbril carts collected them—heads in sacks, the bodies piled into the tumbrils until the cart was full. Those few bodies that were to be claimed were set aside briefly. Marie-Anne and Lagrange moved past a fully-laden tumbril from which thick blood was leaking. Large black flies buzzed thickly around the tumbril and the blood pooled on the cobbles of the Place, stirring as if in irritation as Marie-Anne and Lagrange, holding perfumed handkerchiefs to their faces against the stench, came near them: some of the bodies had evacuated their bowels and bladders during their execution. “Here,” Lagrange said, moving toward a body stretched out on an unhitched tumbril a little away from the others. “Madame,” he asked again, “are you sure … ?”
“Is it Antoine?” Marie-Anne asked, and Lagrange nodded silently.
Seeing him was worse than she’d thought possible. His head was in a canvas sack at the feet of the body, the fibers liberally soaked with his blood. The bed of the tumbril was tilted, so it appeared that the headless body was leaning back against the bed of the cart. The wound on his neck was horrible to see, still seeping blood onto the linen shirt. The body was still and unmoving. For a moment, seeing Antoine’s body, the world shivered around Marie-Anne as she remembered seeing Paolina’s murdered body, and she thought that she would faint. She clutched the side of the cart and took several gulping breaths. She felt Lagrange’s hand on her shoulder. “Come away,” he said. “I’ll deal with this.”
She shook her head, steeling herself. She crouched down to the canvas sack and untied the twine holding it together. She forced herself to take Antoine’s head in her hands, grateful that someone had closed the eyes. Rising, holding the gory mess away from herself, she placed his head against the body, where it rightfully belonged.
She heard Lagrange’s hissing intake of breath as she became aware that someone else had approached the tumbril. She looked up to see Robespierre watching from the other side of the tumbril. She glared at him; he looked blandly back at her. “You have no idea what you’ve done, Monsieur,” Lagrange spat out angrily.
Robespierre glanced at him. “I believe I know exactly what I’ve done,” he answered. “And I would be careful, Monsieur Lagrange, lest you say too much.”
Marie-Anne ignored Nicolas. She stared at the body, not certain what she was expecting to see: strands of muscles reaching out from body to neck, pulling it back together, bones and sinew and flesh knitting together, the heart starting to beat once more, the lungs to breathe, Antoine’s eyes opening to gaze at her once more …
There was nothing. No response at all. The head remained stubbornly severed, the body unmoving. “He looks so strangely young,” Lagrange said, then sighed. “Madame, we should leave.” She didn’t respond. She stared at Antoine, willing him to come back to life. She’d snapped the spines of mice in the laboratory before. They’d come back; surely the elixir could do that with Antoine.
But she’d never entirely severed the heads. She’d never removed the head from the body until all life was gone, then tried to restore them.
“Antoine …” she whispered. There was no answer.
“It would seem that the guillotine renders anyone mortal,” Robespierre said. Marie-Anne glanced up to find his amused regard on her. “I’m sure we’ll both remember that,” he said.
“Monsieur,” Lagrange interrupted. “I must ask you to leave. Allow Madame Lavoisier to grieve in peace.”
“Grief is such a rich emotion,” Robespierre answered. “It possesses such an exquisite taste.” He shivered then, as if with a sudden chill, and took a step back. He bowed to Lagrange, to Marie-Anne. “We will meet each other again,” he told her.
“The man is drunk with his power, and he’ll come to a terrible end soon enough,” Lagrange said as Robespierre left them, though he half-whispered the words so that none of the people milling around them could hear him. Marie-Anne nodded, but her gaze was still on Antoine. Now, she thought, now it’s safe, Antoine. Come back to me. Please come back, my love …
But Antoine remained obstinately dead.
It would be two full days before she allowed him to be buried. When the body began to show irrevocable signs o
f corruption, she finally permitted the lid to be nailed on the coffin. As she watched the coffin being lowered into the grave, she thought of Nicolas.
I know how to kill you now. I know.
6:
THALIA
Camille Kenny
Today
AS THE FALLING sun painted ragged clouds with purple and red, they strolled over the Pont au Double toward Île de la Cité and Notre Dame, stopping to watch a puppeteer performing on the bridge.
“Mexico’s beautiful this time of year, don’t you think?” David laughed, though Camille managed only a smile at his jest.
At Camille’s insistence, she and David had told their friends in New York that they were going to Mexico City and Acapulco. She’d dropped Verdette off with Mercedes with strict instructions to let her roam the house but not to try to pick her up or pet her.
But rather than going to Mexico City, they instead flew to Paris. She told David that the lie was “so no one can interrupt us, no one can find us, and we can surprise everyone when we come back,” though that, too, was a lie. After Helen’s murder, she was afraid that Nicolas would come after David next. She intended to spend a few days with him in Paris to make certain he was settled and comfortable, then fly back to New York alone on some pretext or another. She would deal with Nicolas; she would end the hunt.
Then, if she could, she’d come back for David. When it was safe for him.
“I’ll pay for the trip from my trust fund,” she told him. “It’s rather flush right now. You don’t need to worry; just make sure your passport’s in order. Bring your camera—think of what you can shoot there: a whole new country.”
Camille had thought that David might protest the subterfuge, especially given the continuing investigation into Helen’s murder, but he’d given only a token protest, which told her just how stressed he was also. “It’d be nice to be alone,” he’d said, “just the two of us. I’ve always wanted to see Paris, and that detective woman told me that I wasn’t a suspect, so sure. Why not?”
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