by C. S. Quinn
The man sucks the space where his teeth had once been.
‘I am also named Jacques,’ he says.
Janssen looks left to right between the men.
‘You are both called Jacques?’ he says finally.
‘I think you will find,’ says the peg-leg man easily, ‘a great many of us go by the name of Jacques today.’
Janssen’s hand curls menacingly. ‘Do not play games with me, old man.’
In the wider hall, old soldiers wordlessly raise themselves to standing, watching the exchange. Janssen’s gaze flicks around the room. He has faced men in battle, run into cannon-fire, yet there is something unsettling about these silent pensioners that defies words.
‘Why have you have done so little?’ shouts Janssen.
‘There’s two more here,’ Jacques-with-the-missing-teeth supplies helpfully. ‘So that makes twenty-two.’ He beams a toothy grin. ‘Only 41,978 to go!’
Janssen tries to collect himself. ‘You have defied orders,’ he accuses. ‘Give me your true name or you will have cause to regret it.’
Several soldiers shuffle in either side of their comrade.
‘Trouble, Jacques?’ enquires one pleasantly.
‘Go back to your work,’ commands Janssen. ‘This is not your affair.’
No one moves.
‘None of us have defied orders,’ says Jacques-with-thepeg-leg. ‘We did as we were asked. Every man here has been working, disarming muskets. I can give my word there is no insubordinate here, not one. Good men and true to France.’ His eyes flash. ‘We are but elderly soldiers. Our hands are slow.’
‘I’ll have you all imprisoned for this!’ shouts Janssen. ‘Every last one of you.’
‘We’re old men,’ says Jacques-with-the-peg-leg calmly. ‘We don’t care very much what happens to us.’
They are interrupted by a roaring sound.
‘That’s the mob,’ says Janssen, furious. ‘Our orders are they must be put down.’
‘Pardon me, sir,’ says Jacques-with-the-missing-teeth politely, ‘those are citizens of France.’
Janssen snatches the gun from the pensioner’s hand and dashes it to the ground. The old man frowns.
‘Leave the guns,’ Janssen says. ‘Line up outside. Turn the cannons on any who come within twenty yards of the musket store. That is an order. In the name of your King.’
Jacques and Jacques exchange glances.
‘We are soldiers, sir,’ says Jacques, standing firm on his peg-leg, ‘we will not shoot French men and women.’
Janssen’s good eye swivels around the pensioner-soldiers. There are so many of them, all now looking in his direction. He feels suddenly overwhelmed.
‘I command you!’ he rages. ‘Defend His Majesty’s weaponry. Fire on those people!’
‘We heard you, musketeer,’ says Jacques patiently, ‘and our answer is no.’
CHAPTER 75
JEMMY GASPS AND CROSSES HIMSELF AS THE FIRST STICK bursts into flame.
‘I told you,’ I grin, holding the fire, ‘Atherton’s weapons always work.’
‘It’s magic,’ breathes Jemmy. ‘Incredible. Simply incredible.’ He stretches out a finger then retracts it sharply. ‘Real fire.’
I touch the stick to the bench, where our chains are joined. The gunpowder ignites with enough force to free us, blowing out the match as it combusts.
We stand, manacles still on our wrists, but able to move about the room.
Jemmy takes the bag of gunpowder and lays a thin line to act as a fuse. He wedges the pouch under the door.
I take out a second fire-stick and swipe it against the wall. This time there is nothing. I try again.
‘It got damp,’ I say uncertainly.
‘Use the last one,’ says Jemmy, fear in his voice. ‘Quickly,’ he adds.
The noise of smashing and riot has returned with full force, and sounds almost upon us.
I strike the last match, concentrating hard. It doesn’t flame. I keep trying, but it’s clear this isn’t going to work.
Jemmy casts his eyes around the prison then his gaze moves to our manacles.
‘Metal on metal,’ he says. ‘We create a spark.’
‘What?’ I back away.
‘Put your manacles against the ground,’ he says. ‘I’ll strike them with mine.’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘I’ve done it before,’ says Jemmy. ‘We did it all the time in New York. Most of us couldn’t afford tinderboxes.’
‘With manacles?’
Jemmy shrugs. ‘There was always someone in Hell’s Kitchen with a sawn-off manacle.’
‘You want me to strike a spark, near a pouch of gunpowder, using metal cuffs around my hands?’
‘I can make the spark jump. I promise.’
There’s a horrible drunken roar from outside the prison. I can hear the door next to ours being smashed in.
‘No one can predict gunpowder,’ I say. ‘You’ll blow both our hands off.’
Jemmy fixes his eyes on mine. ‘Attica,’ he says, ‘I can do it. Trust me. I like my hands too.’
I don’t answer, only lay my manacled hands on the cold floor. I sense Jemmy come near and steel myself.
A sudden strange shriek echoes around the cell and my eyes snap open. Pushed up at the square of bars on the wooden door is an apparition: a bloodied, haggard face, with wide yellowed eyes and a mouthful of foul teeth.
A woman. A fish-seller I think, by the dirty striped handkerchief wrapped around her rat’s tails of greying hair. The shriek comes again and now I make out words.
‘Here they are!’ she says, not taking her eyes from us. ‘The two traitors!’
As she speaks, Jemmy brings his manacles high and strikes them hard on mine. I’m not ready and my hands jolt away, losing the force of the blow.
‘Stay still,’ says Jemmy, frowning in concentration. He raises his fists and strikes again. This time I keep my wrists firm on floor, but even so, there’s no spark at all.
‘They got black powder!’ shrieks the woman at the door. ‘Pass me some beer to dampen it.’ Almost immediately a short man appears at her side, passing up a flask.
‘Hurry,’ I urge Jemmy as he makes for a third attempt.
‘And here I was taking my time,’ says Jemmy, his face set with grim determination. Lifting his hands, he brings them down. This time the manacles bend and a single spark skitters free, lighting the fuse.
My heart soars. I see the fishwife launching the flask contents. Warm beer arcs through the bars of the door. It falls in a spray, throwing the line of crackling gunpowder into scattered heaps that flare and die.
Hope goes out of me. The door begins to splinter. There’s a rabble now, drawn by the fish-seller’s raucous threats. I look to Jemmy, realizing we’ll be dying together. But instead of readying himself for the fight, Jemmy has thrown himself prone on the cell floor.
I stare in disbelief. He’s blowing on the scattered powder. The embers are ablaze.
‘Attica,’ he twists his head up, ‘get back.’
And he blows a spark with incredible accuracy, straight into the heart of the gunpowder pouch.
The door bursts in on us just as the powder explodes. The blast flings our attackers backwards. In the aftershock, smoke fills the room, bodies are strewn.
Jemmy and I both run at the opening, stepping over the bloodied remains.
Out in the corridor, Jemmy stops short at an open door.
‘Hold steady,’ he says, folding the chain holding my manacled hands together into the door jamb. He opens it then slams it hard. My bindings spring apart.
‘Bermuda gaol?’ I say as he dangles his own fetters into the gap.
‘London,’ he admits, as I break the links between his wrists.
My eyes track back to the blasted bodies.
‘We can use their clothes,’ I say, pointing to some scattered remnants. ‘Disguise ourselves.’
‘This is the second time you’ve asked me to take my
shirt off,’ says Jemmy, eyeing me. ‘If I didn’t know better I’d say it was a preoccupation of yours.’
I wipe a little ash on my cheeks and slip off my shoes.
‘How fortunate you know better.’
CHAPTER 76
AS JEMMY AND I BREAK OUT OF THE HÔTEL DE VILLE, THE whole city is different.
‘Look at that,’ I point.
On the steps of the town hall Parisians have formed a collective. They’re pooling gunpowder and shot, sharing them out.
Even more incredibly, a steady troop of animated people are pouring from the north side of the square. Each man carries armfuls of muskets.
Jemmy’s eyes are wide.
‘There must be hundreds,’ he whispers. ‘Where did they get all those guns?’
I shield my eyes from the sun and look up to the thick crowd stretching back as far as I can see.
‘More like thousands,’ I decide. ‘If Robespierre wants panic and death, he doesn’t have it. I don’t know how they did it, but somehow the French people have raided enough guns for an army.’
Jemmy and I watch, open mouthed, as teams of people troop past the Hôtel de Ville. There is an atmosphere of focused camaraderie. The people share out guns and what little shot they have. Children pass out little leaf cockades. A steady war cry begins.
‘To the Bastille! The Bastille!’
‘Black powder for the muskets!’
I look at Jemmy.
‘They’ve got muskets but no gunpowder,’ I say, realization dawning. ‘The explosives must have been moved to the Bastille. They’re going to raid it.’
‘They’ll never get it,’ says Jemmy. ‘The whole of the French army couldn’t storm the Bastille.’
He shakes his head sadly, watching the resolute people come together.
‘Robespierre will be trying to get the diamonds,’ I say. ‘I think he’s too bloodless to kill Grace himself. It would be too great a risk. Most likely he’ll send a trusted professional.’
‘Janssen?’
I nod, an idea forming. If a crowd has formed it might create enough of a distraction, for the mighty Bastille must have a way in, after all.
‘So if you want to rescue your cousin,’ says Jemmy wryly, ‘all you have to do is cross the impossible drawbridge and storm the impenetrable fortress.’
‘My thoughts exactly.’
‘What?’
‘I’m going to save my cousin,’ I say, ‘and perhaps help a few French freedom fighters along the way.’
‘Attica,’ says Jemmy, ‘those people are all going to die. How do you think they know the gunpowder is in the Bastille?’
I pause, absorbing his meaning. Someone must have let slip this fact.
Robespierre.
‘Has it occurred to you that Robespierre might be influencing the Bastille governor?’ continues Jemmy patiently. ‘What do you think he would advise his noble friend to do if civilians come for the gunpowder? He’ll hardly open the doors and send them away peaceably.’
I’m silent, thinking of the heavy artillery at the Bastille.
‘Even if you were to get inside, you’ll never find Grace,’ says Jemmy. ‘It’s a fortress. Prisoners can be buried so deep even the gaolers forget them. If you try to do this alone, you will fail and you will die.’
‘I never fail.’
‘Then this will be a first for you. No one can break into that prison without help. You’d need an army – a real one, not a ragged mob. And someone to lead them—’ He stops, as if something has occurred to him.
Jemmy rubs a hand between his eyebrows.
‘I can’t believe I’m doing this,’ he mutters. Jemmy looks at me. ‘I might have an idea to help you.’
‘You do?’
‘We need to find Georges Danton.’
CHAPTER 77
DISCOVERING THE WHEREABOUTS OF GEORGES DANTON is remarkably easy. Everybody, it seems, is familiar with the outspoken lawyer and his preference for drinking all hours in the Café de Chevaleux. Getting to him is proving far more difficult.
Jemmy and I are forcing our way against the flow of people towards the wine shop, which is famous for attracting rebels and free thinkers.
‘Georges Danton is a great speaker,’ says Jemmy, ‘legendary for his booming voice. I’ve met him: I once smuggled him some books on the English constitution through the border at Montmartre. If anyone can rally the people, it’s him.’
‘I know who he is.’ I’m calling to mind the documents we hold on Georges Danton. To Sealed Knot intelligence he is a ‘person of interest’.
Danton is a lawyer who makes long speeches on the rights of men and enlightened thinking. He is also a great rabblerouser, drinker, womanizer and fighter. Our information has him as very large, with a country accent on account of his common upbringing and a fair deal of scarring on his face.
The crowd is getting denser and the way impossible.
‘It’s no good,’ I say to Jemmy, ‘we must have got fifty feet in the last ten minutes.’
Hope for Grace is slipping away. I try not to imagine Robespierre briefing Janssen on how to cleanly execute the English girl.
My eyes rove around the small Paris back streets, looking for a solution. There’s a little shop selling wine by the glass, a large coach house with a courtyard of wooden balconies and a cooper’s yard.
I see something else. A cart loaded with barrels marked with the sign for gypsum.
‘There’s a mine entrance nearby,’ I say. ‘If we can find it, I’ve an idea of how we could get there faster.’
‘A mine?’ Jemmy is looking at me as though I’ve turned lunatic.
‘Plaster of Paris mines,’ I explain. ‘The city is riddled with them. They form a network under the streets. The only problem,’ I admit, ‘is many of them are illegal. I don’t know where the entrance might be.’
Jemmy is casting about and his gaze lights on a laundry house with huge barrels of soaking clothes outside. He runs to a strong-armed washerwoman plunging red hands in soapy water and gives her a disarming smile.
‘If I may, madame,’ he says, raising her wet hand to kiss it and throwing a few coins on her table. And before she can protest, he seizes a tub of laundry and upends it over the dusty road. As she begins shouting in outrage, Jemmy does the same thing with four other washing butts, sending a river of water along the street.
‘Something we do with leaky ships,’ he explains, as I watch him, mystified. ‘To find a hole in the hull, you follow the water.’
I’m wondering how this technique might translate to underground mines, when I see a shape appear in the cascade: where water is draining away.
‘Straight line,’ says Jemmy. ‘So the entrance will be there, or there.’ He points to each end of the disappearing water.
I’m seeing things now that I didn’t notice before. The fact the barrels don’t look new enough to have been made recently. That man turning the hoops doesn’t have the usual humped shoulder.
‘The cooper’s yard,’ I say, ‘would be a good front for a gypsum mine. Coopers are notoriously corrupt.’
‘My brother is a cooper,’ says Jemmy.
We both make for the yard, to the surprised faces of the barrel-makers.
Inside, just as I’d hoped, is a large dusty shaft, hidden from sight from the main street. There’s a wooden track, leading down into the depths. Men are dragging up wheeled trolleys loaded with gypsum.
The mine shaft is almost vertical. Next to the trolley track are craggy steps cut into the chalky side. They wind precariously down into the gloom.
‘Come on,’ I say, ‘the last trolley!’
The miners operating the pulley are too surprised to stop us as we run for it and leap into the cart at the back of the convoy. We land on a rocky pile of dusty gypsum and the rickety plank sides of our makeshift vehicle squeak in protest.
I pull out my Mangbetu knife and rip through the cord securing us to the carts in front. With a lurch, we break away in the opposit
e direction.
We career along the precipitous winding track down into the gypsum mine.
CHAPTER 78
GRACE STARES THROUGH THE BARS OF HER WINDOW. SHE gives them an experimental tug, feeling slightly foolish as they move not an inch.
Below her, Paris’s rooftops and streets are laid out. Notre Dame is on the horizon and in between a mass of movement. All of it headed this way.
A crowd has been steadily amassing outside the prison and Grace has no idea what it might mean. The people pack into the district of St Antoine – the marketplace village that has sprung up around the great island of the Bastille.
She hears footsteps now. Someone is climbing the stairs. Grace has only been here a matter of hours, but the promise of any kind of company in this lonely tower is more welcome than it is frightening.
As they become louder and nearer, however, sweat prickles under her arms. The memory of the guard’s threat to kill the prisoners rattles around her mind.
The lock turns, the door opens and a man enters. The first thing Grace notices is that he holds the largest bunch of keys she has ever seen. He is dressed in what Grace now knows to be Paris fashion. The black coat with gold edging and lacy cravat are flowery by English standards but, as she understands it, positively funereal for Versailles.
He wears an old-fashioned white wig and a jewelled sword, which Grace would bet her last penny has never been used in anger.
The man bows.
‘I am Governor de Launay,’ he says. ‘You are something of a mystery.’
Grace’s heart lifts. ‘I am an Englishwoman. I made a mistake getting into the prison carriage. They look quite the same as Hanson cabs in London.’ The words she carefully rehearsed come out as a nervous babble. Grace sounds guilty, even to herself.
She tries for a little laugh but her throat is dry. ‘Can you imagine how my friends will tease me?’
De Launay considers.
‘The Bastille is a very secret place,’ he says. ‘Prisoners are only released having signed promises that they will not tell the inner workings.’