Assassin’s Creed®
Page 196
Adewalé: former slave and, later, quartermaster and Assassin
Ah Tabai: Assassin
Blaney: sailor
Anne Bonny: barmaid at the Old Avery and, later, pirate
Calico Jack Rackham: pirate
Seth Cobleigh: Tom Cobleigh’s son
Tom Cobleigh: Seth Cobleigh’s father
Alexander Dolzell: Edward’s first captain
Julien DuCasse: Templar
El Tiburón: executioner and Torres’s bodyguard
Matthew Hague: unsuccessful suitor to Caroline Scott, son of Sir Aubrey Hague
Benjamin Hornigold: pirate founder of Nassau
Julian: friend of the Cobleighs
Bernard Kenway: Edward’s father
Caroline Kenway, née Scott: Edward’s wife
Edward Kenway: Assassin
Jennifer (Jenny) Kenway: Edward and Caroline’s daughter
Linette Kenway: Edward’s mother
James Kidd: pirate
Laurens Prins: Dutch slaver
Mary Read: true identity of James Kidd, Assassin
Bartholomew Roberts aka Black Bart: Sage and pirate
Woodes Rogers: Templar pirate-hunter and, later, governor of the Bahamas
Rose: servant to the Scotts
Emmett Scott: Caroline’s father, Bristol tea merchant
Mrs Scott: Caroline’s mother
Edward Thatch aka Blackbeard: privateer turned pirate
Laureano Torres: Templar governor of Havana
Charles Vane: pirate
Dylan Wallace: recruitment man
Duncan Walpole: Templar
Wilson: manservant to Matthew Hague
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to
Yves Guillemot
Julien Cuny
Aymar Azaizia
Jean Guesdon
Darby McDevitt
And also
Alain Corre
Laurent Detoc
Sébastien Puel
Geoffroy Sardin
Xavier Guilbert
Tommy François
Cecile Russeil
Joshua Meyer
The Ubisoft Legal department
Chris Marcus
Etienne Allonier
Antoine Ceszynski
Maxime Desmettre
Two Dots
Julien Delalande
Damien Guillotin
Gwenn Berhault
Alex Clarke
Hana Osman
Andrew Holmes
Virginie Sergent
Clémence Deleuze
Oliver Bowden
* * *
ASSASSIN’S CREED®
Unity
Contents
Extract from the Journal of Arno Dorian
12 September 1794
Extracts from the Journal of Élise de la Serre
9 April 1778
10 April 1778
11 April 1778
12 April 1778
13 April 1778
Extract from the Journal of Arno Dorian
12 September 1794
Extracts from the Journal of Élise de la Serre
14 April 1778
15 April 1778
18 April 1778
Extract from the Journal of Arno Dorian
12 September 1794
Extracts from the Journal of Élise de la Serre
8 September 1787
8 January 1788
21 January 1788
23 January 1788
25 January 1788
7 February 1788
8 February 1788
11 February 1788
20 March 1788
2 April 1788
6 April 1788
9 April 1788
10 April 1788
2 May 1788
6 December 1788
12 January 1789
14 January 1789
4 May 1789
5 May 1789
1 July 1789
4 July 1789
8 July 1789
14 July 1789
25 July 1789
20 August 1789
5 October 1789
Extract from the Journal of Arno Dorian
12 September 1794
Extracts from the Journal of Élise de la Serre
25 April 1790
16 November 1790
12 January 1791
26 March 1791
27 March 1791
29 March 1791
1 April 1791
2 April 1791
Extracts from the Journal of Arno Dorian
12 September 1794
Extracts from the Journal of Élise de la Serre
20 January 1793
21 January 1793
10 November 1793
2 April 1794
3 April 1794
8 June 1794
27 July 1794
Extracts from the Journal of Arno Dorian
12 September 1794
List of Characters
Acknowledgements
Extract from the Journal of Arno Dorian
* * *
12 September 1794
On my desk lies her journal, open to the first page. It was all I could read before a flood tide of emotion took my breath away and the text before me was splintered by the diamonds in my eyes. Tears had coursed down my cheeks as thoughts of her returned to me: the impish child playing games of hide-and-seek; the firebrand I came to know and love in adulthood, tresses of red hair across her shoulders, eyes intense beneath dark and lustrous lashes. She had the balance of the expert dancer and the master swordsman. She was as comfortable gliding across the floor of the palace beneath the desirous eye of every man in the room as she was in combat.
But behind those eyes were secrets. Secrets I was about to discover. I pick up her journal once again, wanting to place my palm and fingertips to the page, caress the words, feeling that on this page lies part of her very soul.
I begin to read.
Extracts from the Journal of Élise de la Serre
* * *
9 April 1778
i.
My name is Élise de la Serre. I am ten years old. My father is François, my mother Julie, and we live in Versailles: glittering, beautiful Versailles, where neat buildings and grand chateaus reside in the shadow of the great palace, with its lime-tree avenues, its shimmering lakes and fountains, its exquisitely tended topiary.
We are nobles. The lucky ones. The privileged. For proof we need only take the fifteen-mile road into Paris. It is a road lit by overhanging oil lamps, because in Versailles we use such things, but in Paris the poor use tallow candles, and the smoke from the tallow factories hangs over the city like a death shroud, dirtying the skin and choking the lungs. Dressed in rags, their backs hunched either with the weight of their physical burden or of mental sorrow, the poor people of Paris creep through streets that never seem to get light. The streets stream with open sewers, where mud and human effluent flow freely, coating the legs of those who carry our sedan chairs as we pass through, staring wide-eyed from the windows.
Later, we take gilded carriages back to Versailles and pass figures in the fields, shrouded in mist like ghosts. These barefoot peasants tend noble land and starve if the crop is bad, virtual slaves of the landowners. At home I listen to my parents’ tales of how they must stay awake to swish sticks at frogs whose croaking keeps landowners awake, and how they must eat grass to stay alive. Meanwhile the nobles prosper, exempt from paying taxes, excused from military service and spared the indignity of the corvée, a day’s unpaid labour working on the roads.
My parents say Queen Marie Antoinette roams the hallways, ballrooms and vestibules of the palace dreaming up new ways to spend her dress allowance while her husband King Louis XVI lounges on his lit de justice, passing laws that enrich the lives of nobles at the expense of the poor and starving. They talk darkly of how these actions might foment revolution.
ii.
There i
s an expression to describe the moment you suddenly understand something. It is the moment when ‘the penny drops’.
As a small child it never occurred to me to wonder why I learnt history, not etiquette, manners and poise; I didn’t question why Mother joined Father and the Crows after dinner, her voice raised in disagreement to debate with as much force as they ever did; I never wondered why she didn’t ride side-saddle, nor why she never needed a groom to steady her mount, and I never wondered why she had so little time for fashion or court gossip. Not once did I think to ask why my mother was not like other mothers.
Not until the penny dropped.
iii.
She was beautiful, of course, and always well-dressed, though she had no time for the manner of finery worn by the women at court, of whom she would purse her lips and talk disapprovingly. According to her they were obsessed with looks and status, with things.
‘They wouldn’t know an idea if it hit them between the eyes, Élise. Promise me you’ll never end up like them.’
Intrigued, wanting to know more about how I should never end up, I used my vantage point at the hem of Mother’s skirt to spy on these hated women. What I saw were over-powdered gossips who pretended they were devoted to their husbands even as their eyes roamed the room over the rims of their fans, looking for unsuspecting lovers to snare. Unseen I would glimpse behind the powdered mask, when the scornful laughter dried on their lips and the mocking look died in their eyes. I’d see them for what they really were, which was frightened. Frightened of falling out of favour. Of slipping down the society ladder.
Mother was not like that. For one thing she couldn’t have cared less about gossip. And I never saw her with a fan, and she hated powder, and she had no time whatsoever for charcoal beauty spots and alabaster skin, her sole concession to fashion being shoes. Otherwise what attention she gave her comportment was for one reason and one reason only: to maintain decorum.
And she was absolutely devoted to my father. She stood by him – at his side, though, never behind him – she supported him, was unswervingly loyal to him. My father has advisors, Messieurs Chretien Lafrenière, Louis-Michel Le Peletier, Charles Gabriel Sivert and Madame Levesque. With thier long black coats, dark felt hats and eyes that never smiled, I called them ‘the Crows’, and I would often hear Mother defending Father to them, backing him regardless, despite what she might have said to him behind closed doors.
It’s been a long time, though, since I last heard her debating with Father.
They say she may die tonight.
10 April 1778
i.
She survived the night.
I sat by her bedside, held her hand and spoke to her. For a while I had been under the delusion that it was me comforting her, until the moment she turned her head and gazed at me with milky but soul-searching eyes, and it became apparent that the opposite was true.
There were times last night when I gazed out of the window to see Arno in the yard below, envying how he could be so oblivious to the heartache just feet away from him. He knows she’s ill, of course, but consumption is commonplace, death at the doctor’s knee an everyday occurrence, even here in Versailles. And he is not a de la Serre. He is our ward, and thus not privy to our deepest, darkest secrets, nor our private anguish. Moreover, he has barely known any other state of affairs. To Arno, Mother is a remote figure attended to on the upper floors of the chateau; to him she is defined purely by her illness.
Instead, my father and I share our turmoil via hidden glances. Outwardly we take pains to appear as normal, our mourning mitigated by two years of grim diagnosis. Our grief is another secret hidden from our ward.
ii.
We’re getting closer to the moment that the penny dropped. And thinking about the first incident, the first time I really began to wonder about my parents, and specifically Mother, I imagine it like a signpost along the road towards my destiny.
It happened at the convent. I was just five when I first entered it, and my memories of it are far from fully formed. Just impressions, really: long rows of beds; a distinct but slightly disconnected memory of glancing outside a window crowned with frost and seeing the tops of the trees rising above billowing skirts of mist; and … the Mother Superior.
Bent over and bitter, the Mother Superior was known for her cruelty. She’d wander the corridors of the convent with her cane across her palms as though presenting it to a banquet. In her office it was laid across her desk. Back then we’d talk of it being ‘your turn’, and for a while it was mine, when she hated my attempts at happiness, begrudged the fact that I was swift to laughter and would always call my happy smile a smirk. The cane, she said, would wipe that smirk off my face.
Mother Superior was right about that. It did. For a while.
And then one day Mother and Father arrived to see the Mother Superior, on what matter I have no idea, and I was called to the office at their request. There I found my parents turned in their seats to greet me, and Mother Superior standing behind her desk, the usual look of undisguised contempt upon her face, a frank assessment of my many shortcomings only just dry on her lips.
If it had been Mother alone to see me I should not have been so formal. I would have run to her and hoped I might slip into the folds of her dress and into another world, out of that horrible place. But it was both of them, and my father was my king. It was he who dictated what modes of politeness we abided by; he who had insisted I was placed in the convent in the first place. So I approached and curtsied and waited to be addressed.
My mother snatched up my hand. How she even saw what was there I have no idea, since it was by my side, but somehow she’d caught glimpse of the marks left by the cane.
‘What are these?’ she demanded of the Mother Superior, holding my hand towards her.
I had never seen the Mother Superior look anything less than composed. But now I would say that she paled. In an instant my mother had transformed from proper and polite, just what was expected of a guest of the Mother Superior, to an instrument of potential anger. We all felt it. Mother Superior the most.
She stammered a little. ‘As I was saying, Élise is a wilful girl and disruptive.’
‘So she’s caned?’ demanded my mother, her anger rising.
Mother Superior squared her shoulders. ‘How else do you expect me to keep order?’
Mother snatched up the cane. ‘I expect you to be able to keep order. Do you think this makes you strong?’ She slapped the cane to the table. Mother Superior jumped and swallowed, and her eyes darted to my father who was keeping watch with an odd, unreadable expression, as though these were events that did not require his participation. ‘Well, then you are sorely mistaken,’ added Mother. ‘It makes you weak.’
She stood, glaring at the Mother Superior, and made her jump again as she slapped the cane to the desk a second time. Then she took my hand. ‘Come along, Élise.’
We left, and from then on I have had tutors to teach me schoolwork.
I knew one thing as we bustled out of the convent and into our carriage for a silent ride home. As Mother and Father bristled with things left unsaid, I knew that ladies did not behave the way my mother had just done. Not normal ladies, anyway.
Another clue. This happened a year or so later, at a birthday party for a spoiled daughter in a neighbouring chateau. Other girls my age played with dolls, setting them up to take tea, only a tea for dolls, where there was no real tea or cake, just little girls pretending to feed tea and cake to dolls, which to me, even then, seemed stupid.
Not far away the boys were playing with toy soldiers, so I stood to join them, oblivious to a shocked silence that fell over the gathering.
My nursemaid Ruth dragged me away. ‘You play with dolls, Élise,’ she said firmly but nervously, her eyes darting as she shrank beneath the disapproving stare of the other nursemaids. I did as I was told, sinking to my haunches and affecting interest in the pretend tea and cake, and with the embarrassing interruption over, the law
n returned to its natural state: boys playing with toy soldiers, the girls with their dolls, nursemaids watching us both, and not far away a gaggle of mothers, high-born ladies who gossiped on wrought-iron lawn chairs.
I looked at the gossiping ladies and saw them with Mother’s eyes. I saw my own path from girl on the grass to gossiping lady, and with a rush of absolute certainty realized I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to be like those mothers. I wanted to be like my own mother, who had excused herself from the gaggle of gossips and could be seen in the distance, alone, at the water’s edge, her individuality plain for all to see.
iii.
I have had a note from Mr Weatherall. Writing in his native English he tells me that he wishes to see Mother and asks that I meet him in the library at midnight to escort him to her room. He urges me not to tell Father.
Yet another secret I must keep. Sometimes I feel like one of those poor wretches we see in Paris, hunched over beneath the weight of expectations forced upon me.
I am only ten years old.
11 April 1778
i.
At midnight, I pulled on a gown, took a candle and crept downstairs to the library where I waited for Mr Weatherall.
He had let himself into the chateau, moving like a mystery, the dogs undisturbed, and he entered the library so quietly that I barely even heard the door open and close. He crossed the floor in a few strides, snatched his wig from his head – the accursed thing, he hated it – and grasped my shoulders.
‘They say she is fading fast,’ he said, and needed it to be hearsay.
‘She is,’ I told him, dropping my gaze.
His eyes closed, and though he was not at all old – in his mid-forties, a little older than Mother and Father – the years were etched upon his face.
‘Mr Weatherall and I were once very close,’ Mother had said before. She’d smiled as she said it. I fancy that she blushed.