by Kat Dunn
She thought of Ada as she’d last seen her, expression heavy with worry, stray curls falling into her eyes. A hand at Camille’s waist, then warm lips pressed firmly against hers. Not a goodbye – a ‘see you again’.
She would see Ada again, she swore it to herself. Until then, she would use everything Ada taught her.
With renewed energy, she threw herself into the fabric selection, holding cloth against her throat for Hennie to judge. Into the conversation, she peppered a series of quiet questions about James. Had he been busy lately? How was his medical study? What did they think of the Revolution here? Between Hennie, Phil and Lady Harford, she began to piece together a picture.
‘I’m afraid it is my sisterly duty to inform you that you are marrying a man who exists only notionally,’ said Hennie. ‘We’ve hardly seen him since he started that surgery nonsense with Mr Wickham. I don’t think Father ever forgave him for going to medical school and disgracing the family name by actually working for a living.’ She affected Lord Harford’s tone. ‘Shocking behaviour for a firstborn son who should be stewarding the estate safely into the next generation. James always thinks he needs to do something flashy and impressive to get Father’s attention, when all Father wants is for James to be dull and normal.
‘Father said he was okay with the medical school, because we know he was expecting James to get bored and drop it, but he didn’t and they end up fighting and ruining family outings. Which is boring because now it means I will have to marry ever so well to make up for it, and that rather puts paid to my plan to marry a tragic émigré French count with nothing but a dashing scar to his name.’ She looked at a bolt of cotton printed prettily with wildflowers. ‘By the by, your pal Aloysius…’
Camille cleared her throat. ‘Spoken for, I believe.’
‘I supposed as much. His eyelashes are very pretty. Ah, well, plenty of other émigrés out there, isn’t that so, Maman?’
Lady Harford snapped open her fan and flapped it ineffectually. ‘I do not know what your fascination with France is. How often have I told you about the time I visited the palace at Versailles and they did their business on the floor behind curtains? The whole place stank. No, no, England is much better. You must marry a proper Anglo-Saxon. Though I suppose Norman stock would be acceptable.’
The conversation drifted and Camille let it.
Pieces of the puzzle were starting to fit together. Her assumption had been that James was working for his father – if anyone wanted to get their hands on Olympe it would be the War Ministry, surely – and she knew what stock he put in his father’s approval. It wasn’t a stretch to make the connection. She hadn’t known about James’s surgical tutor, though. Perhaps James had other allies. It made things trickier, there was no denying it, though Camille would not be discouraged easily.
James had said he knew her, but she knew him too.
And she knew exactly how to unravel him if she must.
3
The Printing House of L’Ami d’Égalité
Ada yawned as she stepped from her father’s carriage outside the offices of L’Ami d’Égalité. She’d barely snatched a few hours’ sleep before blearily washing her face and stumbling into the first clean clothes she could find. A plain day dress in cream cotton. A shawl crossed over her chest in the older style and tucked under a belt. Not her finest hour. But right now, being upright felt like a victory. Her muddied and torn street clothes were stuffed under her mattress, ready for when she next needed to sneak out.
‘You see, if literacy has not spread to the masses, then there is no need to direct printing efforts towards them.’ Her father had been holding forth on his latest business strategy as they drove from his townhouse in the Marais to the Section de la Butte-des-Moulins, where his offices were rammed into the tangled backstreets near the Jacobin Club. ‘The cause will be far better served by aiming our work towards the educated man, and through him the message can be spread.’
And what cause would that be? Ada let the unkind thought linger. Her father was so insistent he still stood for some sort of revolutionary purpose, but from where Ada stood she saw only his self-delusion and daydreaming.
It was another sweltering day, the stink rising from the overflowing gutters. Inside the printing house, the heat built with the thud of machines, the men stripped down to bare chests as they worked the huge levers and screws to churn out her father’s projects. Ada scanned everyone, but there was no sign of who she was looking for.
Guil.
Their rendezvous was still a little way off, but she hadn’t realised how much she’d been hoping to see him here already. Ada knotted her fingers together in worry. She had been sure Guil had got away last night. What if he hadn’t?
Her father disappeared into his office. Ada lingered a moment longer, holding on to her fantasy that Guil would come sloping past the bow-fronted window, a little distorted by the mullioned panes of glass, then at the doorway resolving into her friend – solid, real and safe.
But he didn’t, so Ada pinned her broad-brimmed straw hat in place and took herself off to the little shop on the Rue des Moineaux, where she picked up a stack of binding samples wrapped in brown paper and string for her father.
As she returned, she passed the shop selling naval supplies where she would always pause, pressing her face against the glass to take in the cluster of sextants, barometers and other navigation equipment on display. On impulse, she went in. She might have accepted the need to give up most of her scientific pursuits to please her father, but no one could stop her doing a little window-shopping.
It was cramped inside. Loops of rope hung from the ceiling, along with oil lamps, umbrellas and sheets of waxed canvas. Shelves and glass-fronted cabinets were stuffed with all manner of devices, only half of which she could put a name to.
She stopped in front of a set of taxidermy knives for skinning pelts. The sharp flash of the blade reminded her of the scalpels lined up in the duc’s abbey laboratory. As she reached a gloved finger to trace their sharp line, someone came up beside her. She turned to apologise, move out of their way. Her heart stopped in her chest.
It was the duc.
‘Hello, Adalaide.’
For a moment, she was transported back to the Festival of the Supreme Being, when she’d felt the same icy shock on discovering her father had been working with the duc in order to force her home.
The duc picked up the knife she had been looking at. Turned it, so the sunlight caught its blade.
‘Do you know what this is for?’
Her voice stuck in her throat. The shopkeeper seemed impossibly far away. The duc stood between her and the door.
Ada swallowed. Lifted her chin. ‘An eight-inch curved knife, used for taxidermy. When naturalists make their scientific voyages, they can’t bring back every specimen alive; it isn’t practical. So the men will kill the creature, use a knife like this to skin it and dismember it. Then they bring it to Europe in its component parts.’ Keeping her composure, she added, ‘It kills, sir. That is what it is for.’
He smiled.
‘Correct. A clever girl, indeed.’
He placed the knife back in its case.
She fought to hold her nerve. Not for the first time it crossed her mind that Camille should have been the one to stay in Paris. Camille knew how to play this game. Ada didn’t.
She would have to learn fast.
Lightly, she turned to another display, touching a set of glass beakers.
‘You seek supplies. May I venture a guess that you undertake an experiment at the moment?’
‘An astute guess.’ He didn’t elaborate. ‘I hear rumour that you have come round to our point of view. I understand you returned home to your father?’
Ada chose her words carefully. ‘I’m not a fool. I know the Terror is no good thing, Monsieur le Duc.’ She made a point of using the old aristocratic title. A crumb dropped in his path: her loyalties to the Revolution slipping.
‘I am glad to
hear it. After seeing what your Camille did to poor Monsieur Dorval, I feared you had grown a taste for it.’
Dorval had died in the foundations of the Madeleine Church, bludgeoned with a rock as Camille escaped. Ada made a careful show of nodding, seeming pained at the memory. ‘Certainly not. I will readily admit things went too far. It’s part of the reason you find me here now, and not with Camille. But I know it is not so easy to make amends for the blood on my hands.’
It hurt her to say, because what of the blood on his hands? On Dorval’s hands? She knew the role she had to play, but it didn’t mean she would like it.
‘I think we both know that Dorval’s death was not your fault, my dear,’ he said. ‘It is for the best that Camille Laroche is out of your life.’
‘I thank God every day.’
‘Away to England, so I hear?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘Hmm. Your father told me you were clever.’ He shifted, placing himself more clearly between Ada and the exit. ‘Which is why I am disappointed that you are still lying to me.’
Her mouth went dry. ‘Am I?’
‘Oh, yes. Perhaps I believe you do not know Camille’s whereabouts. But I wonder how you care to explain your presence throwing rocks in the grounds of my house last night. Such a commotion. I went to my window immediately, only to see you climbing over my garden wall, and young Guillaume vaulting my gate. I would kindly suggest that spying is beneath you.’
‘I – I’m not—’
‘The question is: who would you be gathering information for? Not Camille. At the behest of your father, perhaps? A man as stupid as that is a dangerous force; he knows not what problems he stirs up.’
She had been frightened, but as he spoke the feeling was replaced by a simmering resentment. Why did she have to be someone else’s tool?
‘No – I would posit a third theory. Perhaps you are here entirely for yourself?’
Ada stilled.
‘Ah, how interesting.’
‘And if I am spying on you? Then what?’
‘Perhaps spying was not the right word. Observing you now, I have something of the impression of a child with their face pressed up against the window of a sweet shop, hungry for something always kept just out of reach.’
A moment passed. The shop was so quiet she could hear her own breathing. She knew she should be afraid.
But she wasn’t.
She had the feeling of walking from a dark cellar into a wash of stark daylight. Of being seen.
The duc continued. ‘Your father is an idiot. He makes assumptions, acts as though only he truly understands the world. It makes him blind to what is right in front of him. When he approached me about removing you from that dangerous mess, I was all too ready to accept. Your father had the gall to paint you as a naive young girl caught up in something she didn’t understand; I knew at once he had made a grave error of judgment. You understand very well.’
He reached into his frock coat and pulled out a piece of paper. It took Ada a moment to recognise the looping handwriting that sloped up the page. It was her own.
He held the paper out so she could see what she had written. It was the notes she had made at the duc’s old hideout in the abandoned abbey. She had found his records explaining how Olympe had been created by experiments with electricity in utero. She must have left them behind when they fled Dorval.
And the duc had found them.
He went on. ‘I must say, I was quite taken aback to discover that a member of your little gang harboured such an intellect.’
‘It’s nothing. I was just copying.’
His eyes went steely. ‘Do not pander to the fools who want you to undersell your own potential. I have known clever women before, and I know you are capable of far more than people assume. What surprises me is that you allow others to hold you back.’
‘I…’
‘Say thank you when someone compliments you.’
She was pinned under his gaze, unblinking and fixed.
‘Thank you.’
He tucked the paper away. ‘The people around you are not interested in you reaching your potential. If I had such a talent to nurture, I would not make the mistake of snuffing it out.’
He let the moment hang between them. Ada thought of his workroom in the abbey, the bodies obscenely spread, organs plucked out like meat on a kitchen worktop, and of the intoxicating thrill of her first experiments with Olympe. She had been hungry, then, to know more, to try more, to take things further. At a certain angle, she could see how the two of them stood at either end of the same trajectory.
Given free rein, who knew where she might end up?
‘I … understand your offer.’
‘And?’ He arched an eyebrow in question.
‘Let me think about it.’
4
A Room in the St Giles Rookery
The door opened, and someone came into the room.
James tightened his hand over Olympe’s mouth. The stranger wore Hessian boots splattered with mud, their tassels swinging as he walked. Then came the sound of drawers opening and closing, boards creaking.
The room was being searched.
James glanced at the loose floorboard concealing the pistol and the bundles of notes he’d made on Olympe. The rest of the room was little more than a shell – a bed, some broken furniture, a jug of water and a small stash of food. If the stranger was hunting for something, a plank of wood wasn’t going to stop him finding it.
And sure enough, a minute later the boots stopped and the figure crouched, slipping a knife into the crack between floorboards to lever it open. A lock of blond hair tumbled forward and James tensed.
It was Al.
He pulled out the gun and the papers, flicking through them. James went cold and hot at the same time, panic and anger flooding him – how had he been such an easy mark to follow?
Olympe had clocked Al too; she scrabbled like a cat, a low hum of static building before being smothered by the silk; it was all he could do to keep her still.
Al’s reading was interrupted by the door bursting open and a clamour of drunken voices flooding in. He snapped upright, stuffing the papers inside his jacket.
‘Who the hell are you?’ He had dropped the overdone French accent, now speaking English in the posh, clipped tones of James’s schoolfellows.
‘Oh!’ squeaked a female voice. ‘Sorry, would you mind pissing off? We’ve only got the room for an hour.’
‘What’s this? I’m not paying to share you,’ said a man.
Al stalked round the bed commandingly. ‘This room is not for rent. Get out.’
‘My mistake!’ The woman giggled, which turned into a hiccup. ‘Come on, Joe – we’ve got the wrong door.’
‘Bloody rich boys thinking they own everything,’ the man muttered. Their voices receded, and with a hand on the stolen papers in his coat, Al left too.
James waited until it was quiet, then wriggled out from under the bed, snatching up the rope to secure Olympe again before she could run.
‘See. I told you they’d come for me,’ she crowed.
‘Don’t get your hopes up. Camille is all sound and fury. She says the right things, but she couldn’t fight her way out of a paper bag.’
‘You’re worried. You know you’re running out of time.’
He ran his hand through his hair, tugging on it. He hated to admit it, but she was right: time was no longer a luxury he had to waste. Al was only ten minutes from Bedford Square, where he could report to Camille and give her the key to the room. They could be back here to get Olympe before the day was done.
‘Look, stay put. I promise you, this will be over soon. I don’t want to hurt you.’
‘Says the man keeping a teenage girl locked up in his bedroom.’
‘Please. Trust me.’
She cast her inky gaze over him, but said nothing.
James felt hot and sweaty and panicky, his collar too tight and thoughts too messy. Fin
e. If he was running out of time, he would make things move faster.
He folded the pistol, powder and shot in a handkerchief and buried it at the bottom of the bag. Through the rippled panes of ancient glass, he watched Al weave along the street heading north. With a curse, he hurried out, taking the stairs two at a time. Al had the key so he couldn’t lock the door. Olympe was tied up; it would have to do.
The space between the Rookery and Bedford Square was swallowed in a blink as he near sprinted the distance, wriggling through slender alleys and courtyards. The storm had finally broken, lashing rain into his eyes and sliding down the back of his collar.
‘James!’
He turned in shock at Edward’s voice. There he was – on the corner of Charlotte Street, with Wickham behind him.
No, no, no. This couldn’t be happening. He couldn’t handle this.
‘We’ve been looking for you.’ The memory came back to him – Edward leaning close in the morning room of Henley House.
We were like brothers, once.
Whatever it is you are doing, decide quickly. Before we decide for you.
It was a snap decision. James could deal with Edward and Wickham, or with Al, and in that moment, all he could think of was Olympe snatched before he had a chance to talk to his father.
Edward and Wickham would have to wait.
James darted into traffic, swerving between a dray cart stacked with barrels and the thundering line of carriages turning in from Tottenham Court Road.
Edward followed. ‘James, wait!’
A yell went up as James skidded to the other side of the road, horses whinnied, then came a sickening crunch, and he looked back.
For a second he couldn’t understand what he was seeing; the shape of horse and carriage and body mixed up unnaturally. The newly laid cobbles were glossy with water and tinged with red. Edward had slipped or the carriage had struggled to stop on the rain-slicked streets. Either way, he had ended up under the wheels.