Where the Light Falls

by Allison Pataki

  Looking to Sophie, who shook her head slightly, André answered: “Not this time, brother.”

  “Then we will force you to join us next time,” LaSalle said.

  Leaning in toward Sophie, feeling a bit more comfortable after several glasses of wine and a warm meal, André whispered to her. “Please allow me to walk you home?”

  She looked at him sideways now, her lips stained pink from the wine, and he thought to himself that he had never seen a more irresistible woman. “But, Captain Valière, what would people say if I was escorted home after dark by a man such as you, and no chaperone?”

  “You have a better chance with me beside you than if you were to try to walk through this mad city on your own. I promise to deposit you safely before your front door, and that will be all.”

  They parted ways with Remy and LaSalle outside of the café, walking east along the Seine. In the late-summer evening, the light from the lanterns along the quay shimmered off the river’s glassy surface like a thousand diamonds. They strolled slowly, side by side, in silence. André looked up at the stars and sighed, relishing the happy awareness that he was in Sophie’s presence. He let the gentle evening breeze add to the already pleasant, dizzying feeling in his breast, the warm flush of his face.

  When they reached the old wooden bridge, André paused. “We should go up, have a look out over the river.”

  “All right.” She looped her arm in his as André guided her onto the narrow little pedestrian crossing.

  There was only one other person on the bridge at this late hour, a man. From the way he stood—shoulders slumped, chin tucked—he appeared to be either deep in thought or deeply troubled. He glanced up when he saw André and Sophie approaching. In the thin light of the cityscape he appeared only a few years older than André, and dressed like a professional sort—perhaps a professor or a lawyer. His hair, brown with just a few traces of gray, was pulled back in a ponytail, and his facial expression was serious. He accidentally grazed André’s shoulder as he passed by on the narrow bridge, so lost was he in thought. “Excuse me, if you please. Good night.” And with that greeting, spoken with an accent that seemed to place him as from somewhere outside Paris, he skulked off.

  “Oh, excuse me,” André said, taken aback by the abrupt encounter. He saw, as he watched the retreating figure, that a small card had slipped from the man’s pocket. André bent over, eager to pick it up and return it to its rightful owner. “Pardon me, sir, you dropped your card.”

  André took a few steps after the man, but either he didn’t hear or he didn’t care to turn back around. In another moment he was gone, vanished into the dark street where the light of the lamps did not reach.

  “How odd,” André said, wondering why the gentleman would appear so hurried, in such an agitated state this late in the evening. He glanced down at the card:

  Jean-Luc St. Clair

  Legal Advocate of the French Republic

  André tapped the bridge railing, putting the man’s odd behavior out of his mind as he tucked the card into his pocket. He turned back to the lovely companion beside him. He and Sophie stood alone on the footbridge. Below them, the waters of the Seine lapped the stony quay walls. All of Paris stood before them, the city covered in a blanket of velvety evening, pierced by just the tiniest bursts of light that flickered from streetlamps, apartments, and restaurant windows.

  “It’s something, isn’t it?” Sophie said, looking out over the river. “I still remember the first time I saw this city.”

  “As do I,” André said, recalling his own initial impression of Paris. The noise was what had struck him most: sounds so different than those of his rural lands to the north. The city had seen so much since that time—the Bastille torn down, the poverty and the bread shortages, the lootings and killings. He sighed. “Despite it all, she is still beautiful.”

  Sophie flashed a sad smile, her features reflecting the glimmering surface of the Seine, and André realized in that moment that he might just as well have been speaking about her. “But let’s not think about that now,” he said, straightening his posture. “We can at least try to feel happy once in a while.”

  She nodded, leaning her hands on the bridge’s railing as she spoke. “I remember how, when I first arrived in Paris, I wondered how I was supposed to sleep at night. I heard people below my window at all hours—students laughing, drunkards fighting, lovers returning from dances. I remember hating my uncle. Wishing he’d allow me out, like everyone else my age.”

  “If you’d like to dance…” André took Sophie’s hands in his own and began to sway, a slow, languid dance to match the rhythm of the river’s current beneath them. He began to sing. It was a song about another bridge, a song his mother had loved to sing to him and Remy when they were young. “Sur le pont d’Avignon, l’on y danse, l’on y danse…”

  Sophie looked up at him and smiled, a twinkle of recognition in her eyes. “The Avignon Bridge song. I know this one.”

  He nodded. “My mother always loved to sing that song.”

  “Is your mother…gone?”

  “Yes,” he said, realizing that he wasn’t exactly lying. His mother was gone. To England, last he knew, even if he hadn’t had word from her in over a year. But to tell Sophie the full story right now would be to spoil the beauty of this perfect moment.

  “I am sorry to hear it.” Sophie rested her head on his shoulder, and he was certain that she could hear the racing of his heart.

  “Sophie?”

  “Yes?”

  André swallowed, unsure for a moment—wondering if perhaps he was too brazen—before deciding to pose his question. “What is it that you want?”

  She angled her face upward, looking into his eyes with a curious expression. “What do you mean?”

  André raised his hands, fanning them out over the city. “From all of this—this city, this nation. This life. What is it that you want?”

  She tilted her head to the side, wordlessly weighing the question a moment. “You know something?”

  “What?” he asked.

  “You are the first person who has ever asked me that.”

  André nodded.

  “I think you’re probably the first person who has ever even thought I had a right to answer such a question,” she added. “What I want…” She paused. “I suppose I want what so many of us want. To live free. Free from fear. Free from the oppression of my uncle or anyone else. I suppose that someday I’d like to live in a free country. That I’d like to direct my own destiny, raise my own family. That, should I ever have a girl of my own, I will be able to love her and raise her in a manner so entirely unlike the manner in which I was raised. That she’ll never be given away at the age of fourteen, sold as chattel into a loveless and abusive marriage. I suppose I will know that I’ve succeeded in this life if…someday…my grown daughter may be allowed to marry for love.”

  André absorbed these words, his mind spinning with the weight of her confessions. After a long pause, leaning toward her, he said: “A life free from fear, and a life filled with love.”

  She broke his eye contact. “I suppose it sounds silly.”

  “No.” He leaned forward, pulled her gaze back onto himself, and took her hands in his. “Not at all. If I tell you I understand, will you believe me? Will you believe that I know those longings, because I share them myself?”

  She nodded, lowering her eyes. In the dim glow of the night, André noted how she turned, wiping her eyes. For several moments she stood quietly, looking out over the water, at the city aglow behind it. She sighed, eventually breaking the silence. “Have you ever seen anything more beautiful?”

  André, looking at her, her face shadowed and in profile, answered: “The most beautiful sight I have ever seen.”

  She tilted her gaze upward. Peering at him, her eyes reflecting the light of the streetlamps and the stars, she appeared expectant, even inviting. And yet so fragile; he couldn’t imagine anyone ever wanting to hurt her. He took h
er chin and cradled it in the cup of his fingers. “Sophie.” He said her name, relishing the fact that she stood before him. That he could say it to her.

  “Yes?” If she felt nervous, her face showed no signs. It was a smooth mask of perfect calm.

  The need to kiss her was overwhelming, a compulsion. He took her face softly in his cupped hands and angled her chin upward toward his own lips. “I’ve been waiting for this for eight months.”

  She cocked her head, her smile shimmering like the river, reflecting the glow of moonlight off of her perfect features. “I thought you were going to deposit me safely at my front door and that would be all?”

  “And I shall. But I didn’t say anything about the walk toward your door.”

  Summer cooled to autumn, the crisp days and chilly nights turning the city’s chestnut and plane trees into a bright array of oranges and reds, yellows and golds. Unsure of how long he would remain stationed in the capital, André was determined to spend as much time as he could with Sophie. The thought of an imminent departure weighed on his thoughts, and he did his best to keep both their spirits up.

  It was a pleasant golden afternoon in mid-October. André was at Sophie’s apartment on the island in the Seine, beating her in a game of échecs, chess. It was dangerous for André to visit her here, and they both knew it—her uncle visited her apartment often, rarely giving advanced notice—but Sophie’s maid, a graying woman by the name of Parsy, had offered to help them in their forbidden meetings. When André was visiting, Parsy would station herself in the adjacent room, at the window overlooking the building’s small walled courtyard. If she saw the tall uniformed figure of General Murat approaching, she had orders to alert Sophie at once. This would afford André enough time to slip down the back stairwell and out onto the street before her uncle had finished crossing the court and climbing the front stairwell to his niece’s rented rooms. They had not yet been forced to enact this escape plan, but all three of them knew exactly how it was to work, when the time should come that it would be required.

  On this afternoon, Parsy was stationed at her perch beside the window, her knitting in hand, while the two of them sat in the adjacent salon. The door was shut and André was hoping to remain at Sophie’s apartment until a dinner he had to attend later, with LaSalle and some of the other officers.

  “I’m about to take your queen,” André threatened, propping himself up on his elbows as he surveyed the board.

  “Queen?” Sophie gasped. “Shouldn’t you call her my “Citizeness of la République?”

  “Call her what you wish,” he said. “Once I take her, the game is up.”

  “Just promise me that you won’t send her to the scaffold, should you capture her.”

  “If I promise that mercy, might I have a kiss?”

  “If you want a kiss, you’d better take it now,” she said, smiling, “since I’m not yet mad at you for taking my queen.”

  “If you insist.” He rose from his seat on the carpet and sat beside her on the silk sofa. Scooting his body next to hers, he said: “I seem to have entirely forgotten my move. If I don’t take your queen, then how many kisses do I get for that?”

  She smiled and he leaned forward, his heart exultant. When his lips met hers, she sighed, a barely audible sigh, and that sound only increased his longing for her. Raising his hands, he rested the back of her head in his grip, kissing her hungrily. He loved so many things about Sophie, but perhaps best of all was that when he kissed her, she kissed him back. Not timidly, not reservedly. She kissed him with a passion that told him that she, too, longed for him.

  Their bodies were beside each other on the couch now, and Sophie reclined, looking up at him. The expectant look in her eyes was torturous for him, and he lowered his body down beside hers. Pausing a moment to meet her gaze, he whispered, his breath grazing her ear: “You do know how beautiful you are, don’t you?”

  “Only because you tell me every day,” she whispered back, bringing her finger to just lightly touch the warm skin of his cheek. The place where he still bore the scar from the enemy’s blade at Valmy. “Battle scar?” Sophie asked.

  He nodded, taking her fingers to his lips and kissing them. Then he brought his lips to the ridge of her collarbone, tracing a line to her shoulder, and then up her neck. When his lips found hers once more, she parted her mouth and began to kiss him with a fervor that he thought might drive him wild.

  Feeling warm, and longing to press his body even closer to hers, he removed his coat. She helped him out of it. Taking his hand in hers, she guided him to her breast, which he cupped over the burdensome folds of her gown. “Sophie?” He paused to look into her eyes, to make sure that he had not overstepped a line, had not made her uncomfortable. But she only groaned, frustrated that he had stopped kissing her.

  Now his hands seemed to have taken on an agency of their own as they began to wander toward the hem of her skirt. She assisted him, hoisting the folds of fabric so that he might be unencumbered. Propelled now by a force larger than either one of them, André began to touch her soft, goose-bumped skin. He shut his eyes, consumed by his desire for her. And then the door to the salon burst open.

  André jumped up, looking toward the door, where he saw the panting figure of Parsy. The old woman’s face was ashen, her lower lip falling away from her mouth.

  “Is my uncle coming?” Sophie, too, had bolted upright on the couch. André reached for his discarded coat.

  “Not him,” Parsy said, eyes down, her cheeks aflame with embarrassment over the scene she had interrupted. “But a message from him, madame.”

  Parsy held a letter, the name Brigadier General Nicolai Murat written on the front in the man’s upright cursive. Seeing the name, and the letter that had come from that man’s hands, thoroughly quashed any last remnants of the romantic ardor André had felt just moments earlier.

  “Bring it here.” Sophie waved the maid forward, taking the note from her hands. She tore the red wax seal and read, her face growing pale. When she finished, the note slipped from her hands and she began to weep.

  “What is it?” André crossed the room toward her, kneeling to retrieve the note from the floor. He read it quickly. The paper was marked with the day’s date: October 16, 1793.

  The note was brief, emotionless.

  The former queen, Marie-Antoinette of Austria, has been found guilty by the Republic of France. The widow of Citizen Capet is charged with plotting alongside the foreign enemies of the Republic to overthrow the government; attempting to escape from prison; wasting the riches of the country which were not her own; committing adultery, having relations with many at the Court at Versailles other than her husband; and molesting her son, the former dauphin, who had confessed to his jail keeper of his mother’s heinous sins. Punishment: beheading within four and twenty hours.

  You aren’t safe, my niece. No noblewoman is. I shall come fetch you shortly, within the hour, and bring you back to my home, where you shall remain for now, under my faithful protection.

  Your devoted,

  Uncle Nico

  André absorbed the news, the letter shaking in his hands. “The dauphin confessed to his jail keeper?” André scoffed. “More like the poor child was forced, by the blade of a knife, to agree to such a shameful accusation!”

  Sophie was staring blankly at the floor in a state of shock, and André folded her into his arms. Looking up at him, tears in her eyes, she asked: “Has this entire world gone mad?”

  André held her tight without answering her question. He couldn’t—he himself did not know the answer. With today’s verdict, the last ties to the old order were cut. Just a few years ago, the people had believed the queen to be a divine figure, God’s anointed vessel on earth. And now, today, she was to be beheaded.

  With no monarchs left to vilify and condemn, to whom might the Committee and its frenzied supporters turn next? André squeezed Sophie tighter, trying to suppress the shudder that threatened to force its way through his frame. This
very day, for the first time in its history, France would be without a living monarch. And Sophie would begin her own prison sentence.

  December 1793

  Jean-Luc felt as though something was amiss. It seemed strange that Gavreau, his supervisor and erstwhile mentor, hadn’t been invited to the Rue Saint-Honoré. Odd that he, Jean-Luc, would enjoy this meeting while his friend, the man who had first introduced him to Merignac, knew nothing about it. Odd that, in fact, Gavreau had not been included in any of the meetings to which Jean-Luc had been invited lately.

  Citizen Merignac had seemed blasé when he’d first proposed the ideas—a meeting in a café to enjoy a glass of wine and discuss a current legal case; an invitation after the workday to stroll through the gardens outside the former Tuileries Palace to discuss some recent piece of legislation. A note or bottle of wine or, in one instance, a small box of snuff, sent to Jean-Luc by Merignac, but always bearing Lazare’s compliments.

  Jean-Luc had been flattered by the sporadic but thoughtful attention paid him by someone as powerful and esteemed as Guillaume Lazare. And his boss didn’t need to know, really. Gavreau had little interest in legal debate or study after work hours; it made sense that he was not included in these outings or correspondences.

  But then it had turned into somewhat regular dinners. Jean-Luc had accepted these invitations, always flattered to be receiving them, and simultaneously a bit uneasy at the fact of his manager’s exclusion. And now, Merignac intended to follow through on his initial offer—he planned to introduce Jean-Luc to his patron, Guillaume Lazare.

  It was a cold, windy evening at the end of the year. Jean-Luc stood on the dark street, preparing to meet the leaders of the Committee—a powerful group of Jacobin lawyers who, behind closed doors, passed laws and held the levers of power of the entire French Republic. Guillaume Lazare had personally issued an invitation to Jean-Luc St. Clair to visit the headquarters. Robespierre himself might be there.