Ribbons of Scarlet

by Kate Quinn

  “There is no need to bind me. I am in possession of no weapon and I have no intention of striking anyone.”

  But he gripped my arms, squeezing hard, enjoying it. Chabot tugged me to stand and slid his vile hands down my arms to my wrists.

  “You’re a murderess,” he whispered in my ear. “Do you know what we do to women who kill?”

  I didn’t answer, paralyzed for a moment with fear, for I had a very good idea. His breath was hot on my neck, making my stomach turn. I could smell the onions and eggs he had for dinner.

  “You will suffer endlessly before Madame Guillotine grants you compassion unless you do what I say,” he said. “You are at my mercy.” He tugged my hands back, brushing them against a part of his body no decent man would expect an honest woman to touch without the bonds of marriage. I jerked forward in disgust.

  He yanked me back with a grunt. There was no escaping him. And no one came to my defense. When he was done tying the ropes, I thought at last I might be taken from this wretched place and away from him. I’d never been manhandled so vilely in my life. I wished I could have edited my address to the people to add his name along with the other monsters.

  “What have you hidden in your fichu?” His voice was soft and menacing, his face so close to mine I could make out the broken red vessels in the whites of his eyes.

  I kept my stare locked with his. It took every ounce of willpower I had not to spit in his face. “Untie me, citizen.” My voice remained calm.

  He laughed and grabbed at my breasts, running a finger along the inside of my fichu. I jerked back at his touch, and his eyes widened as he encountered the paper. My address to the people. He pulled out my scarf and threw it to the ground and a moment later the sharp ping of my bodice fastenings coming undone echoed in the room. I stumbled away, heat burning my cheeks. My breasts were fully exposed and I whirled to face the wall, trying to hold back tears.

  Not one of the guards, not even the commissioner, sought to cover or aid me. And I wasn’t surprised, even if I was furious. How many illustrations had I seen in the radical propaganda that depicted bare-breasted women in the streets? Well, if none would fight for me, I would fight for myself.

  “I must be allowed to fix my bodice. This is indecent, citizens! Is this how I am to be presented in the street? Would you wish this on your wives? Your daughters? Help me,” I appealed directly to the commissioner, “unless you are so cruel that you mean to let him rape me.”

  “Allow her to adjust her clothing,” the commissioner said wearily. “We are not so cruel, citizeness.”

  But I knew they could be.

  A guard untied me so I could fix my gown, and I nearly sobbed with relief at this small bit of mercy. I might have been willing to sacrifice my life for France’s cause, but not my modesty or dignity. I’d expected to die instantly once I plunged the knife. By now, at long last, I was trembling. I had thought I’d either be killed or taken to prison, not abused and violated. Would they have done this to a soldier? I doubted so. But a woman was another matter. They wanted me humiliated.

  Have courage. Be brave. Stand up for yourself.

  Though I was dizzy with humiliation and exhaustion, I stifled the sob that hung at the back of my throat, straightened my shoulders, and worked to bring my trembling to a stop. I could not let them see my fear. I had to remain strong, or it would all be for naught.

  “Sign this confession.” The commissioner shoved the notes they’d taken toward me, his meaty hand covering the words.

  “Let me read it.”

  The men grumbled as though surprised I could read, and reluctantly the commissioner removed his hand. It was nothing more than what I’d said, and so I signed without hesitation.

  Then he took me by the elbow and led me into the adjoining room where Marat’s corpse was lain out on a bed. I looked at his ashen face, mouth slack, eyes unseeing. He no longer wore his shirt, revealing the grotesque and puffy sores on his skin. The knife had been removed to reveal the yawning wound in his chest. I swallowed the bile in my throat and looked away. I didn’t regret at all what I’d done, but to view the horror of it . . . I’d not prepared myself for that.

  Marat’s mistress knelt beside the bed, sobbing, her face a ghostly white. She pointed at me, lips moving as though she wanted to say something.

  A part of me wished to give her comfort, but the part of me that hated that monster couldn’t understand how this woman might have loved him. Corneille had written “Love is a tyrant sparing none,” and it had not spared this poor woman.

  I suppose I had hoped that with Marat’s death, his mistress would be free of whatever spell he cast on her. That France would be free of his spell. But if she was not, then would others be? I silently beseeched my God that it would be so.

  I did not like to think I might have given my life for nothing.

  * * *

  Pauline

  “Marat is dead.” I stared at Théo where he sat hunched over a writing desk at the Cordeliers Club.

  The screams from Marat’s mistress still echoed in my ears. How could the world go on the same way it had in the face of such catastrophe? My eyes burned from the tears I’d shed, and my stomach hurt. I couldn’t stop shaking. I’d not been able to find Claire, and so naturally, I came looking for Théo, thinking she must be with him.

  Théo startled and his gaze jerked to me. “What?” The light from the candle on the desk brought out the redness from lack of sleep in his wide, disbelieving eyes. He was tireless, as was I.

  My throat was tight with grief. “Murdered in his bathtub by some whore.”

  Shaking his head, Théo looked dazed, as if I had made up some dark jest. “Impossible. Marat has never been one for whores.” Outside, a series of shouts had him glancing behind me. “His mistress would never allow it.”

  “His death seems impossible, and yet it is true.” I shook my head in disbelief. “I talked to him only today about our rally on the Palais-Royal. I was there, outside, when his blood was spilled. I could have stopped her. Could have saved him.” My voice cracked with pent-up emotion.

  “Non, cherie, non.” Théo stood and rounded the desk, approaching as though he might embrace me, but I backed up a step, not wanting to feel a spark of yearning for him, when our dear friend, our staunchest ally, had just been murdered.

  Guilt riddled me. Was I partially to blame for Marat’s death? Could I have somehow stopped the she-devil who’d come from nowhere to snuff out the voice of our revolution? Who was she? Who sent her? I had to know!

  The same thought seemed to occur to Théo. “Where is the assassin now?” Théo touched my elbow and I realized suddenly that he’d closed the distance between us.

  “Still at Marat’s apartments.”

  “We’ll go there.”

  “What of Claire?”

  “She’ll be along when she hears the news,” he said dismissively.

  I looked down at where he held me, wanting to ask what they meant to each other. I wanted to say touch me, because in this moment of sorrow, I wanted to be somewhere else. I wanted to be with him. Some part of myself was willing to abandon my ideals and give in to that desire.

  “I want to kill her,” I said.

  “Claire?” Théo’s eyes widened.

  “No.” I shook my head and pressed a hand to where he held my elbow. “The assassin.” What if this was just part of the royalists’ plans to regain control of France? The precursor to an invasion? Who was the assassin? Where had she come from? Was she Austrian? Who would be next? It was a stark reminder that none of us were safe.

  “Do not worry, Pauline. Justice will be done,” Théo said, his voice was tight. “She will meet Madame Guillotine. We have to make sure of it.”

  “We must show Paris that she has killed a great man.” My hands fisted at my sides, and I looked around for a weapon, something I could take with us and use to maim the witch.

  “I’ll get Hébert on it right away,” he said, referring to Jacques Hébert,
the editor of the Le Père Duchesne newspaper, another radical favorite among all sans-culottes. “He believes as well as we do that Marat is a saint of the revolution.”

  “That’s perfect,” I murmured. Between his voting position on the Paris Commune and his newspaper, Hébert was perhaps only second to Marat in his ability to influence our great revolution in the most radical directions. “Let all the nation mourn our tremendous loss. Let them know that they can send as many assassins as they want, we will stomp them down.”

  Suddenly, Théo swallowed thickly and ran his hand through his mussed hair. “I can’t believe he’s dead.”

  “Me neither.” I picked up a candlestick and set it back down again. “But his legend will live on. We won’t let it die.”

  Don’t let us die.

  Théo stared hard at me; tears of rage and grief moistened his eyes. And then his hands were on me pulling me to him, as his lips sought mine.

  I shoved him away, my words stuck on the tip of my tongue, wanting to tell him that if he wanted a new mistress, he could take his interest somewhere else. But a different sort of thought struck me instead. A traitorous one that only made me angrier. What if I returned his affection?

  No! This was only grief talking. To give in would be to betray myself and everything I believed in. I might as well have ripped off my tricolor cockade and stomped on it.

  “Do not be like every other rutting dog, citizen,” I rebuked. “We mourn.”

  But even as fear coursed through me, I was shoving myself forward into his body and pressing him to the opposite wall. Because fear and lust and the need for protection filled me. I clutched onto his shirt, my mouth crushing against his.

  Théo gripped my behind and whirled me around, taking me to the couch and laying me down. I lifted my leg up around his hip, feeling the heat of his arousal press against me. Lust drove me, anger emboldened me. We fumbled hurriedly, our mouths hot and frenzied.

  “Oh, Pauline,” Théo murmured against my mouth as he took me.

  Out in the open room of the club, where anyone could walk in. I’d become the very thing I accused my enemy of being. A weak, lust-crazed harlot, rutting for anyone to see.

  But I didn’t stop.

  I reeled into it, gasping for breath, and abhorring the pleasure at the same time I took it.

  OUTSIDE OF MARAT’S house, crowds had gathered to see the murderess. To demand her head. To tie her four limbs to horses and watch her body be torn apart. We wanted to leap on her like we had during the massacres, to each feel the thrust of a blade piercing her flesh. Would they let us? Could we demand it?

  Théo shoved through the throng, holding my hand so I would not be swallowed and lost among them. Like the rest of the pulsing, violently angry crowd, my blood surged with a thirst for vengeance.

  “Vive la république!” I cried. “Give us her traitorous head!”

  We shoved our way to the door where a line of guards stood sentry.

  “We are friends of Marat and we demand justice for the assassin,” I said. “Let us in.”

  The guards looked me over with a mixture of surprise and disgust. They did not like me, or what I represented—a woman making demands.

  “Step aside,” Théo ordered the guards.

  “We cannot, citizen.”

  Théo’s voice took on a dangerous edge. “Do you know who I am?”

  “Yes, Citizen Leclerc,” one of them said. “We know you lead Les Enragés, that you are a friend to Marat. But we have been ordered by the commissioner not to let anyone in.”

  “You know Marat would want me in there if he had a voice. Now let us pass.”

  The guards shifted. “If it were up to us, citizen, we would. We could send a message to the commissioner if that is your request?”

  Théo glanced at me, anger shining red in his eyes.

  A commotion from inside the building claimed the guards’ attention and ours.

  There she was . . .

  The murderess wore a white gown I expected to be covered in blood, but it was decidedly clean. Then I saw her white bonnet tied with green ribbons, and a tricolor cockade pinned to its side as if she were a patriot.

  “Rip that off her!” I shouted, nearly unhinged with rage. “She desecrates our cockade with the blood of Marat on her hands!”

  The assassin looked right at me with piercing eyes the color of smoke, and there was triumph there, pride, and it took my breath away. Because I realized that I had seen her before. I was the one who instructed her to get the cockade! And I’d seen her again, in the marketplace. She was the one at Louise’s fruit stand whom we’d taunted with the apple. The one who’d appeared here at the residence several times earlier today. Putain! I should have known. Should have sensed her danger, her false patriotism. Should have stopped her!

  I’d failed. Maybe I’d never failed more in my whole life.

  “Your misfortunes tear my heart!” the assassin cried, her cheeks crimson with fever. “I can only offer you my life and give thanks to heaven for the liberty that I have to dispose of it. My last dying breath will be to have helped my fellow citizens. Let my death be a rallying cry for all the friends of the law! Let the wavering Mountain see its fall with my blood! Let me be the last victim of those blood-fattened monsters. For any of you who might view my conduct in a different light, know this—I care not. You know your enemies. Arise! March! Strike!”

  What crazed speech was this? I recognized in her a frenzied passion for what she believed was right. But what she thought was right was a terrible evil. Looking at her, clean and well fed, clearly a woman who had never known a day of suffering in her life, my hatred nearly blinded me.

  “Kill her! Give us her head! Kill her! Give us her head!” the crowd chanted.

  I made ready to shout at the murderess witch myself, when suddenly she sagged, held upright only by the guard’s hands on her elbows.

  One of the guards pinched the sagging woman’s cheeks, but her eyes rolled back in her head, and from the limpness of her body it was evident she had fainted. Weak, I told myself; she could not stand to hear our cries, to face those who would judge her.

  “Death to the traitorous bitch!” I thundered, and my demand was echoed in the crowd.

  * * *

  Charlotte

  Paris, July 14, 1793

  I am a prisoner.

  I awoke with a start in the dark, my hands outstretched, fingers brushing on the cool, wet stone of the wall at the Prison de l’Abbeye. I lay on a narrow bed with a thick, itchy woolen blanket beneath me. A small iron-barred window admitted vile smells from the street, but no light on this moonless night.

  As my eyes adjusted, I realized there were two hulking shadows standing just inside the cell’s wooden door, obstructing the small barred window and blocking most of the torchlight from the corridor beyond.

  My pulse leapt. “Who are you?” My voice sounded so far away, my tongue dry, throat scratchy.

  “Chabot has ordered us to stand guard here,” one man said.

  Not Chabot, thank God.

  “It is indecent for you to watch me sleep,” I said. When they ignored me, I sat up and hugged myself. “Perhaps you could fetch me pen and ink so I might write letters to my family?”

  “I will ask, citizeness. I believe they allowed Madame Roland the use of such tools during her time here.”

  Madame Roland stayed in this cell? Slept on this bed? Touched these walls? How lucky was I to follow in such footsteps. Where was she now? I wanted to ask but was afraid of the answer. The ghost of her presence comforted me somewhat. This was a sign from God, was it not?

  “Thank you.” I lay back down, but did not close my eyes, fearful of what they might do to me while I slept. Was this a tactic the Mountaineers have used with every woman? Or only those they feared might kill them?

  “CITIZENESS.” A SHARP voice woke me from my fitful sleep. The sun had risen, and so had the stench. The guards were still in their place but now the prison keeper stood on my
threshold as well, addressing me. “You have been given permission to take a walk with the other prisoners.”

  “Why?” I rubbed sleep from my eyes.

  “The Tribunal is not yet ready for you.”

  The Tribunal. So I would get a hearing. What was the point? I confessed to the murder, and they’d already told me I would die. All that was left was the killing—and my legacy: Charlotte Corday, martyr to the people of France. “Who prepares the case against me?”

  “Fouquier-Tinville.”

  “I have not been asked if I want a defender, messieurs.”

  “We can pass on that request.”

  A small smile curled inside me, but I tried to hide it. “Do you think I should request Robespierre, or even Chabot who would love another chance to abuse me?”

  “If that is your desire, citizeness.” The keeper’s voice sounded uncertain.

  What did anyone care of my desires? “I will ask a friend in Caen to come to my defense. What of my writing implements?”

  “We are still waiting, citizeness,” one of the guards replied.

  I nodded. I would be wholly surprised if Fouquier-Tinville allowed me even this small kindness.

  “Are you prepared to go outside?”

  “Will you allow me a moment’s privacy?”

  They eyed each other, perhaps afraid of what would happen if they allowed me a moment alone with the chamber pot. But eventually they relented.

  Outside, the sun beamed down. I closed my eyes and tilted my face toward the sky, grateful for the tiny gift of the warmth on my face, as though God Himself were giving me His grace one last time.

  And then came another gift.

  “You are Charlotte Corday, aren’t you? Praise to you for what you have done,” a woman said approaching me outside in the prison courtyard. “I rot in this prison thanks to Marat. You have taken down the Mountain.”

  That same rush of warmth I’d experienced in Marat’s bathroom rippled over my limbs. “I wanted only to establish peace.”

  She nodded and another woman grasped my hands. These prisoners, these wretched victims of a Jacobin government, knew what I had done for them. It was a sweet vindication after the vicious jeering for my blood by the mob the night before.