Ribbons of Scarlet

by Kate Quinn

  Afterward, Charles cradled me against him, and I whispered, “Do you think, if we are released—”

  “When,” he said, stroking my hair. “When we are released.”

  I nodded, finding strength in his certainty. “Do you think, when we’re released, that we might come to a new . . .” In a rare fit of embarrassment, I searched for the words that expressed my desire and worried that he’d think my request selfish. For his lover hadn’t abandoned him as mine had.

  Charles’s fingers tipped up my chin so that he could look into my eyes. “Charlotte-Rose-Émilie Davasse de Sainte-Amaranthe, would you consent to be my wife? And mine alone?”

  “Yes,” I managed, utterly overwhelmed. Elation filled me with such a lightness of being, and it was as vital as it was out of place amid all this despair.

  “And I pledge to be your husband, forsaking all others,” he said before sealing our vows with a kiss.

  But in the days that followed, circumstances threw more and more shadow over the lightness I’d found. We learned that there’d been assassination attempts on both Robespierre and Collot d’Herbois, the butcher who’d killed thousands in Lyon last autumn and was now a member of the Committee of Public Safety. Suspicion gripped all Paris and the arrests again accelerated, crowding our cells with so many new arrivals that our already meager rations of corn and a watery vegetable soup were halved. And then, in the wake of Robespierre’s election to the presidency of the National Convention, that body passed a law that made me tremble. For the Revolutionary Tribunal that adjudicated the cases of all those accused in the Terror was transformed into a court of condemnation without need of witnesses.

  More than two months had passed since our arrest. Occasionally, I allowed myself to believe that we had been forgotten after all. But if we were still to be tried, our chances for acquittal would be far worse than if we’d been tried under the old system. Maybe Maman’s letter to Augustin Robespierre explained our long neglect. If so, perhaps we’d never stand before any tribunal at all. It was that slender hope to which I clung.

  THE MIDDLE OF June brought an unusual heat wave that turned the old convent into an oven. Prisoners died in such numbers that the stench of rotting flesh combined with the reek of unwashed bodies and overfull chamber pots was enough to make us retch. Finally, the warden offered us the smallest of mercies—the opportunity for groups of prisoners to take the air in the square green courtyard that sat at the center of the Anglaises. Our respite lasted only fifteen minutes, but the reprieve from the horrors accumulating inside the jail lifted my spirits enough that I could imagine surviving for one more day. And then one more day after that.

  Standing in the dappled sunlight, I tipped my face to the sky and inhaled a deep, cleansing breath. Once I’d prized the finest silks and collected pearl strands and every manner of paste jewelry . . . now I could’ve fallen to my knees in worship of the sun.

  My spirits were further lightened when I recognized a face amidst the strolling prisoners one day. For a moment, I struggled to place the wraith of a young woman, her brown locks long and scraggly, and the hollows beneath her eyes a deep purple. And then, in my mind’s eye, I saw her. The fearless fruit seller who’d risked our butler and my mother’s ire by forcing her way into a party at our salon so that she could deliver a letter from François . . .

  Louise something . . . Louise Audu!

  “Mademoiselle Audu,” I said, recalling how much I’d appreciated her pluck.

  She whirled on me and charged, holding out a stick as if it were a saber. “You think you will sneak up on me as you did them?”

  I stumbled away until my back came up against the wall of the convent. “I’m sorry,” I cried, my pulse racing as confusion swamped me. “I didn’t mean to sneak . . . Louise, please, I only meant to say hello.”

  Glaring, she held the tip of her stick a mere inch from my chest, eyes wild and distant. And that was when I noticed the rat’s nest of her hair and the way her dirty shift hung on the too-apparent frame of her bones. “You aristocrats are all alike. Thinking you can use us and discard us. Just like you did to my maman and my friend.” She spat on the ground. “Well, not me. You won’t use and discard me.” She jabbed the stick against the bare skin above my breast.

  I choked back a cry, for the volume of Louise’s ranting had caught the notice of a guard who appeared to be debating whether it was worth his time to intervene. I hoped he wouldn’t. Something terrible had happened to the spirited girl I’d met, and my heart was just sick over it, sick of all the ways in which this revolution had used and discarded so many of us.

  Perhaps that was why I managed to offer her kindness instead of anger at her treatment of me when I said, “Louise, I mean you no harm. I’m still grateful for the way you risked yourself to deliver a letter to me years ago. Do you recall? You shouted my name and brought the entire party to a halt, and then you stayed to eat.”

  Her gaze narrowed and roamed over my face, and her head twitched in what seemed an unconscious tic. “And I swiped a whole plate of macarons into my basket.”

  I laughed. “So that’s what became of them.”

  Her mouth slid into a slow smile. “You were amiable.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  Just as soon, her glare returned. “But you’re an aristocrat, which means you can’t be trusted.”

  I shook my head. “Are we really so different, Louise? Look around, we’ve suffered the very same fate.”

  For just a moment, it seemed as though I might’ve gotten through to her, but then hatred twisted her harsh features once more. “We are nothing alike.” She emphasized her point with another jab of the stick, and then she stepped back. “Stay away from me, royalist scum. Or I’ll run you through like it’s the tenth of August all over again.”

  I gasped at the reference to the attack on the Tuileries. “You were there?”

  “I was no mere bystander,” Louise sneered in offense, and her head jerked in another tic. “I was a decorated soldier. The Paris Commune recognized my bravery and patriotism with the ‘Sword of Honour.’”

  Trembling, I stared at her anew, caught between horror on the one hand and defeated resignation on the other. Thank God Maman hadn’t been up to taking the air, because I wasn’t sure she had strength enough to face the girl whose very sword might’ve put an end to my father’s life. It was almost more than I could bear myself. My breath caught and my hands fisted, and it was all I could do to keep from launching myself at her and throttling her delicate neck.

  But what would that get me? Perhaps a beating from the guards, or separation from my family. And Papa would still be dead . . . as would Louise’s maman and sister.

  It was that last thought that drained the fight from my body. I hated the Jacobins for what they’d done to my father. And if she hated royalists for what they’d done to her family, how could I blame her? Especially when, in the end, Louise had fared no better than I had. Finding this grace of understanding wasn’t easy, and the grief I still carried wished to rise up in outrage against her. But it struck me with such clarity—there were angels and demons on both sides, and I wondered if anyone truly knew the full accounting of good and evil that’d occurred these past five years, or if anyone ever would . . .

  I thought once more of Princess Élisabeth’s dignity and compassion and decided that whatever wrongs Louise might’ve perpetrated had been revisited upon her enough already.

  The guard rang the bell signaling the end of our respite.

  “Adieu, Louise,” I managed.

  She blinked and her eyes narrowed. “How do you know my name?”

  The question brought tears to my eyes, but I dashed them away. If I allowed tears to fall in this place, over a once-fierce girl losing her senses or anything else, I might not ever get them to stop.

  We’d all lost so much. Too much. But still, the Revolution raged on, taking even more.

  * * *

  Conciergerie Prison, Paris, France, June 17, 1794<
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  “Did you make an attempt upon the lives of Robespierre and Collot d’Herbois, representatives of the people?” the president of the Revolutionary Tribunal asked.

  I sat trembling, my head still spinning over how fast our lives were unraveling. One moment, we were asleep in our cramped cell. And the next, we were being hauled out of the Anglaises and roughly shoved into a prison cart by an angry usher to the Tribunal who’d grumbled that he’d never before had to visit seven different jails to find prisoners gone missing from the Tribunal’s register.

  We arrived at the Conciergerie just before daybreak, and I shuddered as the cart rolled through the foreboding gate of the prison that was also the home of the Revolutionary Tribunal. Inside, the registrar was frustrated by the apparent disorder of our paperwork, and he fired a series of impatient questions at us about why there’d never been an inquiry into our case and how we’d been so long imprisoned without taking part in even preliminary proceedings. We knew no more about these violations of judicial procedure than he did . . . unless la famille Robespierre had, after all, been trying to protect us by erasing our confinement from the record so thoroughly that none of the authorities even knew where we were.

  Yet, even if such a ruse had been going on during these long months, it now appeared that not even the Robespierres had the power and influence to shield us forever. When the clock tolled ten in the morning, we were lined up with dozens of others, more than fifty in all, as haggard and terrified as ourselves. A narrow wooden door opened at the front of the line, letting in the warm glow of sunlight and the loud roar of shouts and applause. One by one, we were pushed out of doors onto an immense tier of benches overlooking the public enclosure of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

  The registrar shouted a roll call of all our names.

  Each new victim received a new round of hooting, hissing, and jeering from the spectators crowded all around the platform.

  Then it was my turn.

  “Émilie de Sartine, née de Sainte-Amaranthe,” a man called out.

  For the space of one heartbeat, I was shamed by the dirty, limp cascade of my hair, and by the way the white gauze of my dress had turned a dingy brown. But such things no longer mattered, did they? Appearance—even beauty itself—meant nothing in a world in which innocence was no defense from accusation. So I lifted my chin, straightened my spine, and stepped into the light.

  The sheer number of eyes upon me was in itself overwhelming, for there was not a free space in the entire courtyard. Red-capped spectators pushed one another and strained for a chance to see the most beautiful girl in all Paris brought low. Lewd taunts rang out from some quarters, but enough others fell silent that the roar dulled to a low rumble. And then the dizzying moment of presentation was over, and a gendarme accompanied me to a seat next to my mother.

  When my family had been reunited upon the rough-hewn benches, I clutched Charles’s hand on the one side, and Maman’s on the other. Poor Louis lost his fight against tears and buried his face in Maman’s shoulder. And, dear God, there were familiar faces among the other victims. The Vicomte de Pons, a warm and generous man and another of Maman’s admirers, to whom Louis and I bore such a striking resemblance that tongues wagged about our true parentage, now sat just behind me and gave me the saddest smile of affection and greeting.

  And, oh, poor Marie, who’d been such a friend and a help to us, along with her most trusted servant and her landlady, were presented in their turn. For less than a heartbeat, my gaze locked with Marie’s, and I felt a pang of guilt that, in what could be our final hours, I’d won Charles’s love at her expense. But then Charles squeezed my hand and looked at me with such longing that I cast away that guilt, because to find love amidst terror was too miraculous a thing to ever regret.

  I couldn’t decide if it was a solace or a further outrage that François was not among the crowd of the accused, but even his cowardice was no reason that he should die.

  But there was one person whom I was grateful into my very soul was not there. For the first and only time, I found myself glad that Papa was dead. To be happy about my father’s murder was so despicable a thought that a sharp pain momentarily seized my breast. But I was certain that his death would’ve been all the more painful if he’d fallen at the hands of this mockery of justice than having fallen in defense of king and country. Certain, too, that seeing his beloved family here awaiting their fate would have been worse to him than death.

  When all the prisoners were seated, the Court entered. Jacobins all, of course.

  An usher commanded silence, and then the president of the Tribunal, wearing a tricolored ribbon around his neck and a black-plumed hat, rose and read from a document: “This session of the Revolutionary Tribunal is now called to order. The cases before us today prove the existence of the Foreign Conspiracy dated from the end of July 1793 to the present, which had as its principal objects to carry off the widow Capet, to dissolve the National Convention, and to effect a counterrevolution. All the levers that were intended to overthrow the republic were moved by a single man, who prompted numerous allied tyrants—de Batz, baron and ex-deputy of the Constituent Assembly, is the atrocious brigand who directed the blackest crimes of kings against humanity.” The crowd booed at the baron’s name, forcing the official to wait until the clamor died down. “Batz had intermediary agents in every section of Paris, in the country, in the municipality, in the official departments, and in the very prisons, many of whom will stand before this Tribunal today.” This time, the crowd cheered.

  My stomach rolled and I trembled, for the scenario playing out around me was the very one that had kept me awake in our cell many nights. With all we’d heard from those newly imprisoned at the Anglaises since the assassination attempts on d’Herbois and Robespierre, we knew that the Committee of Public Safety was under great pressure to prove it could protect the republic by capturing the nearly mythological Baron de Batz. But if they couldn’t catch the baron, they could distract the public with a spectacle of a trial against a large group of notables. No matter if denunciations against them bore the faintest of connections to the baron or not.

  One by one, we were brought forward to sit and face the Tribunal’s accusation.

  First, a man they called Admiral, who boldly answered, “Yes!” to the accusation of the attempted assassination of Citizen d’Herbois. “I have but one regret, and that is that I missed that scoundrel,” he said belligerently, earning the boos of the spectators. Undeterred, he continued, “I would’ve been admired by the whole of France if I’d achieved my purpose!”

  Next upon the stool was a girl who appeared not quite my age. But that was where the similarities ended, for where I was terrified, she was entirely self-possessed. Moreover, she spoke with utter calmness and not a little disdain as she insisted upon her innocence, adding, “I never intended to kill Robespierre. I merely regarded him as one of the principal oppressors of my country.” Her father, brother, and aunt each faced the Tribunal after her.

  They were followed by a comte who imagined himself to be in a court of justice and attempted to present evidence and read a written defense. But the president cut him short, refusing to accept the documents. And why would they accept them, when the Convention’s recent law had made it legal for the Tribunal to pass judgment without consideration of evidence? No evidence was wanted. So instead they merely asked the comte the question that would be put to each of us in our turn: “Did you engage in the attempted murder of Robespierre and Collot d’Herbois?”

  “No!” the comte shouted. Outraged and desperate, he turned to the crowd. “I am suspected merely because I am an émigré. This so-called conspiracy is a falsehood and a calumny! How could we have conspired when we have been kept apart in prison, and when most of us are entirely unknown to one another before today?”

  But the crowd wanted blood, and so did the Tribunal.

  Which was why the Court went through the farce of asking the rest of us that same question, and nothing more
.

  All we could do was defend our innocence even as this court connived at an appalling massacre. Mama’s voice was strong when she offered her refutation. And then it was my turn to sit before them. Heaving a calming breath, I met the gazes of the closest onlookers and let them see the truth of me.

  “No,” I replied to the Tribunal.

  I rose from the stool, but did not immediately make way for the next prisoner. Resisting the gendarme, I stood there for a long moment, meeting the gazes of my curious countrymen. If beauty was truly to be the reason for my death, then I wanted them to look. To see and appreciate. And then to watch that beauty be desecrated, just as France was being desecrated by tyrants bent on covering the whole of our country in blood.

  It was over in an instant, this singular moment to speak in defense of a whole life. But instead of feeling despair, I felt the oddest sense of peace. If I was judged innocent, I would live in happiness with my beloved Charles. And if I was found guilty, then I was naught but a ghost, already dead in every way but one.

  It took the jury mere minutes to decide.

  “The verdict of the jury is in the affirmative on all the questions concerning all the prisoners!”

  A storm of anger and despair rose up from the prisoners all around me.

  “We have not been tried!” one man shouted.

  “You are murderers!” another cried, shaking his fist in the air.

  Amid the sobbing and curses, I turned to Charles and said the only thing that mattered, “Je t’aime.” I love you.

  For the first time of our whole ordeal, he had tears in his eyes. “Oh, my love. I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you.”

  I shook my head. “Let’s not waste a single moment on apologies.” I kissed him, then pressed my forehead to his. “Our life together would’ve been so beautiful.”