Monstrous Design

by Kat Dunn

  When her parents were executed, it had felt like the grief killed her old self. With the battalion, throwing herself into dangerous and deadly situations with no regard for herself, no thought about the future, she’d been living as though she was already dead. She could do anything, risk anything. She’d thought it was freeing.

  Now death stared her in the face, she realised she’d been alive this whole time. Loving Ada frightened her because it meant she was really still here, still alive. That there were consequences and risk and joy and despair all possible. If she were dead, she was untouchable. But she wasn’t; she was alive and she could be hurt again, just as badly as before.

  What happened to her mattered. What she did was the only thing that mattered.

  It was all that mattered. When she was gone, it would be all that was left of her.

  Right now, she didn’t like the look of what would be left.

  If she defeated the duc, would she come out the winner, Olympe in hand, but to a world in ruins?

  Was sitting on the fence all she wanted to be left of her?

  If Robespierre fell, would the world become any kinder? Would the idea of a new world even survive?

  Al interrupted her thoughts.

  ‘Would you like the rest of the gossip?’

  She waved him on.

  ‘Wickham has gone to ground. I mean, entirely. Didn’t turn up to teach at the hospital, surgeries delayed, patients ignored. He and Edward are ghosts.’

  ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

  ‘Me neither. Sounds awfully like someone plotting a nasty surprise.’ He stood, proffered his arm. ‘Well. Are you ready for him?’

  Camille chewed her lip. He didn’t mean Wickham. There was another confrontation waiting, one she would have to face before they could plan their next move.

  James was in the stables, notionally examining new tack for his horse. Olympe was at the back of the stall, perched on a stool and looking a little skittish of the sleek grey mare taking up most of the space.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.

  ‘Well enough.’ She passed him to finally, finally, embrace Olympe in the way she had wanted to at the pleasure gardens. ‘I’m sorry it took us this long. Are you well? How did he treat you?’

  James had the good grace to look ashamed. ‘Camille – I’m sorry – I never wanted it to come to this—’

  ‘Sorry doesn’t cut it,’ she snapped. The rage she had been carrying since that night in the foundations of the Madeleine Church finally erupted. Between the attack in the pleasure gardens and the confrontation with Wickham in the operating theatre, she’d had to push it aside, accept James as a tentative ally, and then she’d felt too weak to cope with her own anger. But she was stronger now, and there was no way in hell she was going to let him get away with everything he’d done. ‘You pointed a gun at my head, James. You kidnapped Olympe and locked her up – when you know what happened to her.’

  ‘And I’ve apologised to her. We’ve made our peace.’

  She pulled her shawl around her, drew herself to her full height though it only brought her nose to his chin. ‘I suppose that makes it better? How did I never notice how completely self-involved and stupid you can be?’

  James snorted. ‘Because you’re so selfless and rational all the time.’

  ‘You asked me for help. What about making your peace with me? For using me. Tricking me.’

  ‘I didn’t think you were particularly interested in peace after that stunt with the knife to my throat when you arrived,’ he replied coolly.

  How dare he? Like any of this was her fault? He should be on his knees begging her forgiveness but no, he had to have the last word. She wanted to smack that self-satisfied expression off his face.

  ‘Children, children.’ Al raised his hands to silence them. ‘We’re all a little stab-happy here, but maybe let’s try to keep the conversation on the two people out to get us, all right? I’m sure you can manage a little truce until we’ve escaped hideous death?’

  Camille narrowed her eyes. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t see why we shouldn’t just take Olympe and be done with this. Leave James to clean up his own mess.’

  He flinched, but his jaw was set firm. ‘Because my father already thinks you’re a spy. Disappear, and he’ll have every port looking out for you. You’ll never get out of the country.’

  She hated that he was right.

  ‘You did all this for what?’ she said, folding her arms. ‘To make your father proud? To make him love you? Bad news. He’s never going to love you the way you want him to. You made yourself into the villain for nothing.’

  James flushed with anger and hurt. ‘At least my parents have the potential to love me. Yours are dead. Hard to be loved by a corpse.’

  Camille sucked in a breath, reaching for something to throw at his head before she knew it. ‘And whose bloody fault is that? My mother is dead because your disloyal piece of scum father seduced her, then didn’t lift a damn finger to help when she was falsely accused.’

  James recoiled in shock, as though it was the first time he had truly put the facts together in his mind, seen the path from his father’s actions to Camille, orphaned and broken before him.

  Al caught her sleeve. ‘Easy now. I don’t think we’re at the drunken brawl part of the day yet.’ He glanced at James. ‘Camille does raise a good point. You were a big fat traitor before. A big fat traitor one thinks you may still be. If we stay and help you, what guarantee do we have that you won’t make some self-serving move again?’

  James ran a hand through his hair. ‘Look. You’re right, I lied. I made some extremely poor choices because I was arrogant and sure of my own righteousness, and no one regrets that more than me. All I can say is, I want to fix what I’ve done. And, trust me or not, we have bigger problems now. You don’t know Wickham like I do. If you leave with Olympe, he’ll come after you. He’s determined not to let any of us get in the way of what he sees as his legacy.’ James recounted everything Wickham had told him before the pleasure gardens and at the operating theatre. ‘But it’s more than that – Wickham hates my father. While my father is still at the War Ministry, he doesn’t think his research will ever be accepted. He wants to take my father out of the picture.’

  Camille rubbed her temples, turning through the messy pieces of their situation. Her anger boiled under her skin, but she knew it was time to let it die. She couldn’t let it get in the way of what mattered: getting Olympe to safety and returning to Ada and Guil in Paris. James had said they had bigger problems – he didn’t know the half of it.

  ‘I want to help.’ Olympe spoke for the first time. ‘I don’t want to leave. Not until I can speak to Edward again. He’s – different now.’

  Camille shook her head. ‘It’s dangerous.’

  ‘So? All of my life is dangerous, and I don’t want to let anyone else get hurt because of me.’

  Camille fell silent.

  She could still take Olympe and run. Risk Lord Harford sending people after them as accused spies. But was that what she wanted to leave as her legacy? Cowardice and violence?

  Goddamnit.

  ‘Olympe is right,’ she said. ‘There’s no risk-free path here. All we have is our choices; that’s all that will be left of us once we’re gone.’

  James looked at her with such sadness she couldn’t bear it.

  ‘Can’t you try talking to your father again?’ asked Al. ‘Have this murderous madman arrested? Your father might not believe in Olympe’s abilities – and that’s entirely fair because, let’s be honest, this could just be a wild fever-dream my brain has concocted to comfort me in the moments before I die at the guillotine. But the man tied up his only son, threatened to kill his whole family. Surely he can’t ignore that. Killing a government minister seems like a pretty open and shut case for having him thrown in gaol immediately. You English like to make such a fuss about your democracy and law and order, so why not indulge a little?’

 
James shook his head. ‘He won’t believe me. He thinks Wickham is a fraud and I’ve been duped.’

  Al shrugged. ‘Even a fraud can be dangerous.’

  Camille interrupted. ‘We need to make him believe you.’

  James had to be an ally now, they had no other choice; she had to believe their past still meant enough to him.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ asked Al.

  ‘Wickham is planning to attack Lord Harford – so we let him.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ spluttered James.

  ‘Will anything less convince your father?’

  James sagged, frustration and resignation sweeping across his face. ‘No. You’re right. If Wickham has a gun to his head, maybe he’ll start taking this seriously.’

  ‘Not to spoil things,’ cut in Al, ‘but there is the small matter of James and Camille’s wedding in a few days.’

  Olympe dropped the piece of straw she had been shredding. ‘Wedding? James, what is he talking about?’

  James flushed deep red. ‘Ah. Oh. Yes. That. I should have told you.’

  ‘You think? I’m an idiot. Of course you were keeping things from me.’

  ‘Not intentionally! It just … didn’t come up. And then we were quite busy with all the mortal danger.’

  ‘You can’t be serious.’ She swivelled to stare at Camille. ‘What about Ada? I don’t understand…’

  ‘It’s not a real wedding,’ Camille explained quickly. ‘It was a plot to get close to James, to find you.’

  Al was pretending to keep out of the conversation, fussing with mane of the grey mare, but said, ‘The preparations seem quite real to me.’

  Olympe still stared at Camille in shock and – oh god – disappointment.

  ‘Does Ada know?’

  Camille shifted her weight. ‘No.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘She’ll understand.’

  Olympe didn’t say anything, and Camille felt a void of shame yawn beneath her.

  ‘We are very good at getting ourselves into messes, I must say.’ Al jauntily clapped a hand to the mare’s neck. ‘I think Guil was right about us changing our name to Battalion of the Bad Plans. Trips off the tongue.’

  Camille tried to shake off the shame. ‘Fine. We use the wedding as bait. James and his father in the same place? Wickham won’t be able to resist trying something – we need to be ready for him when he does.’

  ‘While I agree that this is probably our best plan – Camille, this is my father we’re talking about. I can’t let anything happen to him.’

  ‘It won’t. We outnumber Wickham, and we’ll be expecting him.’

  James looked as though he wanted to say more, but kept quiet.

  Camille only hoped she had finally got something right.

  4

  Camille’s Bedroom, Bedford Square

  An insistent tap at the window roused her. Camille slid out of the warm cocoon of bed sheets and opened the curtains. Al was crouched outside, grinning like a demon in the darkness.

  A faux balcony ran along the back of the house, little more than a gutter a few paces wide and a stone balustrade that connected the windows that faced the garden. Al had used it to hop from his room to hers.

  Camille opened the window, a gust of drizzle sweeping in. Her face turned to the fresh air like a flower to the sun.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘I was worried you might have been smothered to death by well-meaning Harfords. Or died from stress after all that yelling at James. Can I come in?’

  A single oil lamp burned by her bed, the wick at its lowest setting. Above her, the folds of the canopy were lost in shadow.

  ‘No – I’ll come out there.’

  She fetched a dressing gown and slippers and clambered onto the balcony. They sat side by side, feet on the balustrade. The garden was a wild swathe of landscape beneath a dark sky and between the clouds a sliver of moon peeped out, then vanished.

  ‘Seriously, are you all right, Cam? James never gave us an update after he checked your lungs.’

  She pulled the dressing gown closer around her shoulders. ‘Yes. I’m all right.’

  ‘Is that an actual yes or an “I’m Camille Laroche therefore I must be all right” yes?’

  Al’s face was carved in shadow and pale planes of cheek and forehead. Camille tucked her hands under her arms; it was colder out here than she’d expected.

  ‘It’s an actual yes. James didn’t find anything,’ she lied. It was the only way she was going to be able to get through this. If her battalion knew the truth, she knew exactly what would happen. After the upset and the anger, they would look at her differently. Maybe they wouldn’t mean to, maybe it would be in subtle ways, but she wouldn’t be the same Camille to them. She would be weak. Fragile. To be pitied. She couldn’t bear that.

  And maybe it was kinder this way, to save them heartache over something they couldn’t change.

  ‘Just my bad chest. Smoke inhalation from the theatre fire caused more damage than I’d thought, then it was aggravated by the chemicals in the smoke at the hospital.’

  He didn’t reply straight away, holding her gaze. She broke first, looking down at her feet, the lichen blooming on stone.

  ‘Phew. That’s a relief. Don’t know what I’d do if our fearless leader copped it mid-mission.’ Al spoke with a forced cheeriness.

  A moment passed between them where she almost asked if he knew. Perhaps it was obvious from looking at her. But she wanted to hide it, and if he knew, he was giving her the gift of letting her pretend, so she would take it.

  ‘You’d be fine.’

  ‘No. I don’t think we would.’

  They sat for a while, watching the stars come and go behind the clouds. On Great Russell Street they could hear the occasional passing carriage, the toll of a church bell from St Giles’s or St George’s. On this side of the square, new houses backed onto the ornamental gardens behind the British Museum – and then nothing but the churned brown earth of building sites, green market gardens, and tin-roofed shanty towns stretching north and east.

  ‘Stay here with me, Cam. Don’t go back to Paris.’

  ‘I have to, Al. It’s home.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘I meant what I said before. We have to go back, people need us.’

  ‘Do they? That’s not our job, no one appointed us. We can walk away.’

  ‘No. We can’t. I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because … because I can’t,’ she said, frustrated. ‘That’s not who I am. Will you really be happy here, just sitting around drinking for ever?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘Don’t answer that.’

  ‘What about your future, Camille? Can you really keep going on like this for ever?’

  Camille stared up at the stars and thought of Ada. Thought of the last time things had felt right: the two of them dancing on the roof of the Au Petit Suisse. Ada’s skin warm against hers, the smell of her, the gentleness of her hand in the small of Camille’s back.

  Maybe that was the last time she’d ever get to be happy.

  Maybe she wouldn’t get to see Ada again.

  James said it would be slow, but what if he was wrong?

  Camille blinked, her view blurring with tears.

  ‘I know what my future is, Al. I can’t change it any more.’

  He gave a dramatic sigh and flung himself back to lean against the wall and kick his feet into empty space. ‘That’s so incredibly awkward for me, because now I have to go back to Paris too.’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘That was a swift change of heart. What happened?’

  ‘You happened. Look at you, Cam, you’re a mess.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I would be derelict in my duty to let you go back to Paris alone. I mean, you might keel over in the middle of nowhere and then what would happen?’

  She didn’t reply. She knew it was a joke, but she could picture the scene only too well
. A dusty road between Calais and Paris, her money run out and no passing cart to hitch a ride on, stumbling on a wheel rut and falling. No one there to pick her up. Lungs burning, fever-weak. The end of her.

  Al inspected his fingernails, mouth downturned. ‘And, well, I keep telling you Ada deserves better, but I realised so does Léon. Only a total arse would stay here and not send a word. And I’m only a partial arse at most. Just the one bum cheek. The left, maybe.’

  Camille closed her eyes and sank against him, letting her head rest on his shoulder. She was so tired. He wound their fingers together, stroked his thumb over hers.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘For not leaving me.’

  ‘Never, old thing. You’re stuck with me.’

  Al’s warm arm was an echo of all the moments Ada had held her close. She knew those moments were finite now, perhaps only a handful left, studded like jewels in the rough cloth of her short future.

  The night wind was too cold to stay outside so long in so little clothing, but she would linger a while. In the dark, and the cold.

  So long as she was not alone, Camille would stay anywhere.

  5

  A Ship Off the English Coast

  When the English coast came into view, the ship dropped anchor some way from land. In the starlight, the coast was visible, a roll of hill and shore, pocked with a small port town. It looked so familiar; the spire of the church, the jut of the harbour wall. It could be home.

  Ada thought of the long sea voyage with her father from Martinique; the ship had rolled and bobbed across the waves for weeks, and she had never once got over her seasickness. She had thought of it as a premonition then, a warning that she shouldn’t have left her island.

  Now, she thought she might have been right.

  Before leaving Paris, Ada had written a letter to her father conjuring a trip to the country with the ‘family she tutored’ to excuse her absence, Clémentine adding a note in her hand, reeling off credentials and references to promise his daughter would be safe.