by C. S. Quinn
‘I thought you liked a challenge.’
Jemmy makes another sidelong glance at Centime, her dark hair bobbing in front.
‘Challenges I like,’ he whispers. ‘Impossibilities, less so. Unnecessary danger to the boys, not at all.’
‘We have saved far riskier victims,’ I say. ‘What have you against Centime?’ Privately, though, I am calculating the delay to my return to London. Rescuing Centime will cost a full day at least. But I cannot let the chance to uncover La Société des Amis slip through my hands. Atherton will understand if I miss the pre-wedding dinner. I’m sure of it.
Jemmy’s mouth twists. ‘I think you are lured by her beauty, Attica. I know girls like her. Centime has learned to live as a kept woman. You cannot simply take her from that life and expect her to adapt. She isn’t like you. Better to let her vanish into the streets and fend for herself. She’s a gutter rat. A survivor. Trust me. It takes one to know one.’
I stand, slightly agog. ‘You’d leave her to fate?’
‘I don’t think she’s telling us the truth. And if she’s truly run away from Salvatore, she’ll be looking for another protector. Do you really think she can simply slip into polite English society without a murmur? She was raised in a Paris brothel, Attica, and her dark skin will mark her out wherever she goes.’
‘That doesn’t matter to me.’
‘It might not matter to you, but it matters to everyone else in your country.’
I frown, trying to choose the right words.
‘There is more to Centime than meets the eye,’ I tell him.
‘She may have been raised to be the property of a brothel owner, but there is a strength to her, something deserving of our help. All I ask is for you to trust me.’
Jemmy sighs deeply. ‘I was afraid you would say that. I do trust you, Attica.’
He makes one final glance at Centime, who has sensed how far we have drawn back and slows.
‘I just don’t trust her,’ he says, so quietly I can barely hear him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CENTIME FOLLOWS JEMMY AND ME SILENTLY AS WE REACH the base of the hill. This is where the warrens of Parisian streets come to an end and the grassy fields of industry begin. At the summit are a number of fat-bottomed little windmills, their sails turning in the breeze.
‘Montmartre?’ Centime lowers her voice.
‘I told you I would put you safe,’ I explain. ‘There are women rioting in the city, press-ganging any women they find into the march. We can’t risk your getting swept along in it.’
I don’t add that Salvatore has spies everywhere, and Centime is very conspicuous. I put a hand on her arm, trying to reassure her. ‘Tomorrow the customs gates will be open,’ I say. ‘There is one just past Montmartre which is less guarded than the rest. We can smuggle you through, and from there on to a boat bound for England. Until then, we must hide you and hide you well.’
‘People here are desperate,’ she says, her eyes scanning the other structures of Paris’s industrial outskirts.
On one side of the hill are urine-filled tanning pits; the other side is pocked with the smoking beehive-ovens of charcoal burners. These are trades too noxious to be allowed in the city.
Centime looks again at the whirling sails. ‘Now there is so little flour to grind, those windmills are low brothels,’ she says.
‘That’s why it’s so safe,’ I assure her. ‘These people are for the common cause, and detest aristocrats like Salvatore. Their loyalty is easily bought and I pay a good purse.’
‘You have hidden people here before?’
‘A number of times.’
Jemmy glances sharply at me because we have only used this safe-house once. And the revolutionary youth we secreted was already known to the young prostitutes of the mills.
‘Let’s climb the hill,’ I say. ‘I have an understanding with one of the brothel-keepers. She won’t betray us.’
I catch Centime’s expression, taking in the sparse summit, the stinking refuse trench that runs carelessly down the hillside, the tanning fumes that catch in the back of the throat. ‘It’s only one night,’ I remind her.
Centime chews her lip. ‘Even if we survive the night, we shall never get through the gate,’ she says. ‘Since the Bastille fell the guard has doubled.’
‘Not on the Montmartre gate,’ I assure her. ‘Trust me. It is open only to millworkers and the guard leaves it alone. No one wants to slow wheat coming into the city when people starve.’
Centime accepts this, looking up at the windmills. ‘Which shall we be hiding inside?’
‘Let’s climb the hill first. We can come to particulars later.’
We take the well-trodden path up the hill, populated by a thin stream of traffic in either direction: farmers taking their sacks of grain to be milled; bakers bringing flour to be baked. With bread in such short supply, there is a suspicious atmosphere. The dirt track and surrounding hedgerow are dusted white, like a snow that will not settle. A nutty smell of ground wheat and hot tallow from the windmill axles fills the air.
We reach a trio of plank-clad mills on the crest of the hill, their sails creaking loudly in the wind. I approach the middle one and knock loudly on the door, since the grinding stone is deafening. A woman answers, dressed in the usual garb of Parisian low-class prostitutes: naked to her waist with a ragged selection of skirts on her lower half.
Her weary face jolts with something close to surprise, then avarice settles at the corners of her eyes. She all but rubs her hands with the expectation of profit, eyeing Centime’s black skin and expensive dress.
‘Mademoiselle Morgan,’ she says, dipping her head in greeting.
I hold up a fat purse of coins. ‘Double your usual sum,’ I say briskly, before she can begin bartering, ‘and we shall only stay until morning, so that is half the time. You may have your girls back up in the hayloft by dawn.’
The sight of the coins sees any negotiation she was planning die on the brothel-keeper’s lips. She turns, beckoning us to follow. We move inside the dark interior, which smells of flour and hot grease from the turning parts.
Inside are three semi-dressed girls sat on wooden stools, looking bored. They barely glance at us, as the brothel-keeper shows us to a ladder leading to the back of the windmill. Behind the heavy sacks of grain is a hidden ladder leading to a hayloft. We ascend to a barn-like room, with wide planks letting the light and air through. The creaking windmill sail is loud inside, and we can see the oily mechanism turning on the far wall.
‘I’ll tell the girls not to come up,’ says the owner. ‘You’ll not be troubled up here.’
She pauses at the opening, her eyes swinging back and forth between us all.
‘Is this to do with the women causing trouble in the city?’ she asks, staring full at Centime now. ‘You are part of it?’
I shake my head.
‘Shame,’ she opines. ‘Good luck to ’em, I say. About time the girls stood up for themselves.’ She turns on her heel. ‘I’ll be keeping out of their way,’ she adds, without a hint of acknowledgement to her own hypocrisy. She exits unceremoniously.
Around the dusty plank floor, straw has been arranged in mounds as makeshift beds. Centime is staring at one and it occurs to me she might have once worked in a place like this.
Jemmy catches my expression and makes for the ladder down.
‘I’ll find us a little bread and meat,’ he says. ‘Maybe some wine.’
‘We’re going to need provisions for the gate,’ I tell him, reaching to my hip and tossing him a pouch of gold. ‘A large sack that has been patched.’
He nods and descends, but before he is fully out of view, he catches my eye and mouths something. I don’t quite hear the words, but it looks like.
Have a care.
Jemmy still doesn’t think Centime can be trusted.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CENTIME HAS SUNK TO THE FLOOR OF THE HAYLOFT, AND IS raising and dropping handfuls of straw.
>
‘If we are to sleep here, we should check for rat nests,’ she says, not looking at me. ‘I’ll do yours if you like.’
In answer I kneel beside her and lay a hand on her arm.
‘I am sorry,’ I say, ‘to bring you back to a place like this. You must have spent your whole life trying to get out.’
Centime goes back to lifting and dropping straw, throwing handfuls back on to the dusty planks.
‘I never knew much else,’ she says. ‘I was nine when I came to Paris. Traders had brought my mother to sell to a brothel. She died on the crossing. When they arrived empty-handed, the brothel-keeper took me instead.’
‘It was Salvatore who took you from that place?’ I ask, wondering what the arrangement was.
She correctly reads my mistrust. A lifetime of learning cues, I suppose.
‘I thought I loved him once,’ she says. ‘Before I knew what he was. He offered me a way out and I thought …’ She looks at the floor again. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says. ‘There it is. Now you know. I am even more wretched than you imagined. I was fool enough to give my heart to a worse villain than any of the rough comers I had before.’
‘Do you love him still?’
She turns to me. ‘Why should you care?’
I opt for honesty. ‘Salvatore made schemes with a lawyer named Robespierre,’ I say. ‘I know you must have heard much of what they discussed.’
She swallows, shakes her head, a bitter smile on her face.
‘I cannot tell you,’ she says. ‘He will kill me.’
‘He will kill you anyway, if he finds you.’
She shakes her head. ‘Disloyalty,’ she says. ‘That is what he hates the most. If he catches me, he may be kind and forgive. But that would never be if he discovered I had told secrets. You don’t know what he is capable of. That is why this revolution is nothing but a dream,’ she adds bitterly. ‘The nobles will crush the common people as they always have. They do dreadful things to anyone who stands in their way.’
‘Your people are starving,’ I say quietly. ‘The aristocrats are afraid, because their time is ending. I do not believe you are as hopeless as you pretend.’
She shakes her head and tears spill.
‘Not with men like him,’ she says, her voice catching. ‘There is no sanctuary for me. You understand in part, I think.’ Her grey-blue eyes are on mine. ‘Salvatore said you are known in the bars on the Marais,’ she says quietly. ‘Are women your affliction, or merely a pastime?’
‘That depends on the woman.’
She smiles slightly, then looks at her hands. ‘So you may be married one day, perhaps happy.’
‘I am due to wed soon.’
She considers this sadly. ‘For myself the poison runs too deep. It is something I can never be free of. So you see, you cannot save me, Attica Morgan. But perhaps you can make me happy for a time.’ Her eyes are back on mine now.
She moves a hand to the top of her dress, which she slides down at the shoulder, flinching as the branded flesh is revealed, and looks at me in part challenge, part something else.
Tentatively, I step forwards, then run my thumb slowly across her raised scar. A fleur-de-lis – the mark of the crown – imprinted on thieves and whores.
‘We were caught on the dockside, soliciting men,’ she says, holding my gaze. ‘Uusually they turn a blind eye, but that day we were unlucky. It was me and another girl that had been sent out because the house was not busy enough.’
I don’t ask how she felt, because I can imagine. From the plantation I remember the screams of people being branded, the terrible smell of burning flesh.
‘I will always be a low thing now,’ she adds in a whisper, looking at the lump of knotted flesh.
‘Salvatore could have bought any courtesan he wanted,’ I tell her. ‘And yet he chose you. A girl from a street brothel in Paris. A place where three hundred men a day take a ticket to stand in line. Why do you think that is?’
Her lips twitch but she doesn’t answer. Her eyes flick uncertainly to my hand on her branded shoulder.
‘Because he is weak,’ I tell her. ‘For all his cruelty it is just a gilded shell that will break with the smallest tap. He thinks you vulnerable – a foil to make him look strong. But he underestimates you.’
There is something unreadable in her eyes.
‘How could you know that?’ she asks finally.
‘People underestimate me too.’
It is the wrong thing to say. Her face closes down instantly. ‘We are not the same,’ she says. ‘You are a noble and can do as you please. Do not pretend to understand me, Mademoiselle Morgan. You understand nothing.’
Her hand is at the top of her dress, pulling it back up over the scar, retracting the unspoken invitation.
‘I understand if you live this life with him, dead inside, you might as well be dead,’ I say softly. ‘I understand some things are worth a little courage.’ I move closer. Put a hand on her arm.
I’m wondering how to stop her pulling away when unexpectedly she kisses me. It’s halting, uncertain, and before I have time to respond she draws away, fingers at her lips, head shaking sadly.
I take her wrist and pull her back towards me.
‘You have nothing to lose, Centime,’ I tell her, as her eyes leap across my face. ‘Why don’t you find out what it is like, when the show is real?’
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
OUTSIDE THE HÔTEL DE VILLE, THE WOMEN ARE BLEARY-eyed. Several have slept in the dirt. Others have not slept at all. Their petition has fallen on deaf ears, and the doors of the City Hall are firmly locked against them.
Ovette sent a message to Robespierre. The fight has gone out of it. The women despair.
And now something has happened under cover of night. Several barrels of wine have been dotted amongst the women, apparently without them noticing. As dawn breaks the round shapes become clear.
A thin-legged woman with a grossly bulbous stomach rises unsteadily to her feet. She is known as Drunk Greta, and spends her days in an inebriated slumber, drool-slick chin bobbing on her chest, or pissing where she shouldn’t with the exasperated market women steering her to gutters. At night she vanishes to the streets famed for providing the cheapest fucks in Paris, where elderly women clutch at men in the dark, trying to drag them into alleys.
The fish-sellers are understanding, kindly even, of her malodorous presence, since many remember Greta from happier times. Besides, she’s obviously dying. In recent months her stomach has popped outwards in a disturbingly jelly-like mass that has nothing to do with food, and the whites of her eyes have turned yellow.
Greta is first to approach a mysterious barrel, seizing hold of a flapping piece of paper tacked to it with a little nail. She rips it free, frowns at it, and hands it disinterestedly to Ovette.
‘No bunghole,’ says Greta, returning her full attention the barrel. ‘Anyone got a hammer?’
‘We don’t know why it is here,’ says a scrawny woman with a baby at her breast, sounding nervous. ‘Could be a trick to have us break the law. Get us all put in prison.’
Murmurs of agreement ripple around the group. But Ovette, who has been reading silently, now speaks.
‘This paper says the wine is for us,’ she says. ‘A token of appreciation, is what it says. “To the lion-hearted woman of Faubourg Saint-Antoine”,’ she adds, grinning wide enough to reveal her missing back teeth. She looks down. “If you find no bread in Paris,” she continues, her finger following the words as she reads, “go to the baker and the baker’s wife.”
She looks all around at the women, wondering at the riddle of it. Greta, meanwhile, has found a heavy stone and is smashing it with dogged concentration into the barrelhead.
‘Who is the baker and the baker’s wife?’ asks Ovette.
‘It is the King and Queen, you dunce,’ says another waking woman, rubbing the sore side of her face that has rested on stony ground. ‘The baker and the baker’s wife. It is said all over the c
ity. They are the ones with the bread.’
There is a pause as the women absorb the statement. Then the silence is blasted by Greta’s renewed attempts on the wine barrel, this time successful. The stone splinters through the wood, sending up a single jet of red wine.
‘Breakfast!’ shouts Greta with a grin, angling the barrel so cups might be filled.
A cheer breaks out.
As the liquid hits their stomachs, the fish-sellers are seized with something like euphoria. Suddenly it seems possible. Simple even. They will go to the King, demand to be fed. What could be fairer than that?
The only problem is not a single one knows how to go about it.
‘We should ring the bell,’ suggests Ovette. ‘Sound the tocsin. Get all the market women in Paris with us!’
Eyes slide to Ovette’s stained face and away again. No one is ready to take her suggestions, despite Robespierre’s good word. Not to mention, no one is brave enough to enter the church and risk a beating from the priest.
The women fall to talking amongst themselves, shouldering Ovette out.
Greta is lurching towards them, slurping wine, and Ovette turns on her angrily.
‘I have worked here alongside you,’ she says, failing to keep the petulance from her voice. ‘I do the same work as you, live in the same squalor.’
‘Ah,’ says Greta, casting her yellow gaze over Ovette in vague recognition, ‘but you’re not the same, are you? We’re a family.’ She points to several thick-armed women. ‘I’d die for those girls there if I had to. And they for me. That’s the part you don’t understand.’
Ovette says nothing. She doesn’t believe Greta. It sounds more like drunken chatter.
Greta shakes her head. ‘You bourgeoisie are cold. Put money before people. That’s why you are not liked. We see you, labouring for your own coins for your own self. When did you last bring food to a new mother? Or help sew a winding sheet for a dead child?’
Ovette cannot answer. She never has.
‘I didn’t think it was my business,’ she replies finally, struggling to define why she excused herself from these community endeavours, and feeling ashamed. ‘I didn’t think the women would accept my presence.’