And Bellec at last sank to the stone of the church floor, his hands at his belly. His eyes went to Arno. ‘Do it,’ he implored, close to death now. ‘If you’ve got an ounce of conviction and aren’t just a love-addled milksop, you’ll kill me now. Because I won’t stop. I will kill her. To save the Brotherhood I’d see Paris burn.’
‘I know,’ said Arno and delivered the coup de grâce.
ix.
Arno told me later what he had seen. He had seen something in a vision when he’d killed Bellec, he’d said with a sideways look, as though to check I was taking him seriously, and I’d thought about what my father had said of Arno, how he believed Arno had possessed special gifts, something not quite … usual. And here it was in action. A vision in which Arno had seen two men – one in Assassin robes, the other a Templar thug – who were scuffling in the street. The Templar seemed to be triumphant but then a second Assassin entered the fray and killed the Templar.
The first Assassin was Charles Dorian, Arno’s father. The second was Bellec.
Bellec had saved his father’s life. From that incident Bellec had recognized a pocketwatch Arno carried and then, when in the Bastille, realized exactly who Arno was.
There was another thing Arno had seen, a second vision, presumably from another killing. This one showed Mirabeau and Bellec talking at some point in the past, Mirabeau telling Bellec, ‘Élise de la Serre will be Grand Master one day. Having her in our debt would be a great boon.’
Bellec in reply saying, ‘A greater one would be to kill her before she is a real threat.’
‘Your protégé vouches for her,’ Mirabeau had said. ‘Don’t you trust him?’
‘With my life,’ Bellec had replied. ‘It’s the girl I don’t trust. Nothing I can say to convince you?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
And Bellec – reluctantly, Arno had said, seeing that his mentor had taken no pleasure, no sense of Machiavellian satisfaction, in slaying the Grand Master; that in his mind it had been a necessary evil, like it or not – Bellec dropping poison into a glass and handing it to Mirabeau. ‘Santé.’
Ironic that they should drink to each other’s health. Later Mirabeau was dead and Bellec was planting the Templar pin and leaving. And not long after that, of course, I had come on to the scene.
We had managed to find the culprit and so prevent me being accused of the crime. Had I done enough to ingratiate myself with them? I didn’t think so.
Extracts from the Journal of Arno Dorian
* * *
12 September 1794
i.
I knew what happened next, although it wasn’t in her journal.
I leafed forward, but no – instead there were pages missing, torn out at some later date, perhaps in a fit of … what? Regret? Anger? Something else?
The moment I told her the truth – she had torn it from her diary.
I knew it would be difficult, of course, because I knew Élise as well as I knew myself. In many ways, she was my mirror, and I knew how I would have felt had the shoe been on the other foot. You can’t blame me for putting it off and putting it off, then waiting until one evening when we had eaten well and there was an almost empty bottle of wine on the table between us.
‘I know who killed your father,’ I told her.
‘You do? How?’
‘The visions.’
I gave her a sideways look to check she was taking me seriously. As before she looked bemused, not quite believing, not quite disbelieving.
‘And the name you came up with is the King of Beggars?’ she said.
I looked at her, realizing that she had been conducting her own investigations. Of course she had. ‘So you were being serious when you said you would avenge him,’ I said.
‘If you ever thought otherwise then you don’t know me as well as you think you do.’
I nodded thoughtfully. ‘And what did you learn?’
‘That the King of Beggars was behind the attempt on my mother in ’75, that the King of Beggars was inducted into the Order after the death of my family; all of which makes me think that he was inducted as a way of rewarding him for successfully killing my father.’
‘Do you know why?’
‘It was a coup, Arno. The man who has declared himself Grand Master arranged for my father’s killing because he wanted to take his position. No doubt he used my father’s attempts to make a truce with the Assassins as leverage. Perhaps it was the final piece of the puzzle. Perhaps it tipped the balance in his favour. No doubt the King of Beggars was acting on his orders.’
‘Not just the King of Beggars. There was someone else there, too.’
She nodded with an odd, gratified smile. ‘That makes me happy, Arno. That it took two of them to kill Father. I expect he fought like a tiger.’
‘A man named Sivert.’
She closed her eyes. ‘That makes sense,’ she said after a while. ‘They are all in on it, no doubt, the Crows.’
‘The who?’ I asked, because of course I had no idea who she meant by that.
‘It’s a name I call my father’s advisors.’
‘This Sivert – he was one of your father’s advisors?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘François took his eye out before he died.’
She chuckled. ‘Well done, Father.’
‘Sivert is dead now.’
A shadow crossed her face. ‘I see. I would have hoped to have done the deed myself.’
‘The King of Beggars too,’ I added, swallowing.
And now she turned to me. ‘Arno, what are you saying?’
I reached for her. ‘I loved him, Élise, as though as he was my own father,’ but she was pulling away, standing and folding her arms across her chest. Her cheeks coloured red.
‘You killed them?’
‘Yes – and I make no apology for it, Élise.’
Again I reached for her and again she stepped nimbly away, unfolding her arms to ward me off at the same time. For a second – just a second – I thought she was going to reach for her sword but if so she thought better of it, she gained a hold on her temper.
‘You killed them.’
‘I had to,’ I said without going into it, although she wasn’t interested in why, whirling around as though not quite sure what to do with herself.
‘You took my revenge from me.’
‘They were mere lackeys, Élise. The real culprit is out there.’
Furious, she rounded on me. ‘Tell me you made them suffer,’ she spat.
‘Please, Élise, this isn’t you.’
‘Arno, I have been orphaned, beaten, deceived and betrayed – and I will have my revenge at whatever cost.’
Her shoulders rose and fell. Her colour was high.
‘Well, no, they didn’t suffer. That is not the Assassin way. We take no pleasure from killing.’
‘Oh? Really? So now you’re an Assassin you feel qualified to lecture me on ethics, do you? Well, make no mistake, Arno, I take no pleasure from killing. I take pleasure from justice.’
‘So that is what I did. I brought these men to justice. I had a chance. I took it.’
That appeared to calm her and she nodded thoughtfully. ‘You leave Germain to me, though,’ she said, not a request, a command.
‘I can’t promise that, Élise. If I get a shot, then …’
She looked at me with a half-smile. ‘Then you’ll have me to answer to.’
ii.
After that, we did not see each other for a while, though we wrote, and when at last I had some information for her, I was able to tempt her away from Île Saint-Louis and we went in search of Madame Levesque, who fell beneath my blade. It was an adventure that continued with an unexpected and unscheduled ride on Messieurs Montgolfiers’ hot-air balloon, though gallantry forbids I should reveal what took place during the flight.
Suffice to say, at the conclusion of our journey Élise and I were closer than ever.
But not close enough for me to notice what was
happening to her, that the deaths of her father’s advisors were a mere sideshow for her. That what was concerning, maybe even consuming, her was getting to Germain.
Extracts from the Journal of Élise de la Serre
* * *
20 January 1793
i.
In the street in Versailles was a cart I recognized. Harnessed to it a horse I knew. I dismounted, tethered Scratch to the cart, loosened his saddle, gave him water and nuzzled my head to his.
I took my time making Scratch comfortable, partly because I love Scratch and he deserves all the attention I give him and more, and partly because I was stalling, wanting to put off the moment I faced the inevitable.
The outside wall showed signs of neglect. I wondered which of our staff had been responsible for it when we all lived here. The gardeners, probably. Without them the walls ran thick with moss and ivy, the tendrils reaching up to the top like veins on the stone.
Set into the wall was an arched gate I knew well yet which seemed unfamiliar. At the mercy of the elements the wood had begun to mottle and pale. Where once the door had looked grand, now it looked merely sad.
I opened the gate and entered the courtyard of my childhood home.
Having witnessed the devastation of the villa in Paris, I suppose I was at least mentally prepared. Yet still I found myself stifling a sob to see flower beds full of spindly weeds, the benches overgrown. On a step by a set of drooping shutters sat Jacques, who brightened on seeing me. He rarely spoke; the most animated I ever saw him was deep in hushed conversation with Hélène, and he didn’t need to speak now. Just indicated behind him into the house.
Inside were boards across the windows, the furniture mostly overturned, the same sad story I was seeing so often now, only this time it was even sadder because the house was my childhood home and each smashed pot and splintered chair held a memory. As I stepped through my wrecked home I heard the sound of our old grandfather clock, a noise so familiar and redolent of my childhood that it hit me with all the strength of a slap, and for a second I stood in the empty hallway, where my boots crunched on floors that had once been polished to a high shine, and stifled a sob.
A sob of regret and nostalgia. Maybe even a little guilt.
ii.
I came out on to the terrace and gazed out upon the sweeping lawns, once landscaped, now overgrown and unkempt. About two hundred yards away Mr Weatherall sat on the slope, his crutches splayed on either side.
‘What are you doing? I asked, coming to join him.
He’d started a little as I sat, but regained his composure and gave me a long, appraising look.
‘I was heading for the bottom of the south lawn, where we used to train. Trouble is, when I pictured myself being able to make it there and back, I pictured the lawns looking like they used to, but then I arrived and found them like this, and suddenly it’s not so easy.’
‘Well, this is a nice spot.’
‘Depends on the company,’ he said with a sardonic smile.
There was a pause.
‘Sneaking out like that …’ he said.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I knew you were going to do it, you know. I haven’t known you since you were knee-high to a grasshopper without learning something about a certain look that comes into your eyes. Well, you’re alive at least. What have you been up to?’
‘I went for a ride in a hot-air balloon with Arno.’
‘Oh yes? And how did that go?’
He saw me blush. ‘It was very nice, thank you.
‘So you and him …’
‘I would say so.
‘Well, that’s something then. Can’t have you being lovelorn. What about –’ he spread his hands – ‘everything else? You learn anything?’
‘Plenty. Many of those who plotted against my father have already answered for their crimes. Plus I now know the identity of the man who ordered his murder.’
‘Pray tell.’
‘The new Grand Master, the architect of the takeover, is François Thomas Germain.’
Mr Weatherall made a hissing noise. ‘Of course.’
‘You said he was cast out of the Order …’
‘He was. Our friend Germain was an adherent of Jacques de Molay, first-ever Grand Master. De Molay died screaming at the stake in 1314, raining curses down on anyone in the near vicinity. Master de Molay is the sort of bloke nobody can decide on, but that was an argument you had to have in private back then, because showing support for his ideas was heresy.
‘And Germain – Germain was a heretic. He was a heretic who had the ear of the Grand Master. To end the dissension he was expelled. Your father had begged Germain to come back into line and his heart was heavy to expel him, but …’
‘He was cast out?’
‘He was, and the Order was told that any man standing by him would be exiled as well. Long afterwards his death was announced, but by then he was just a bad memory anyway.
‘Not so, eh? Germain had been rallying support, controlling things behind the scenes, gradually rewriting the manifesto. And now he’s in charge, and the Order scratches its head and wonders how we moved from unswerving support to the king to wanting him dead – the answer is that it happened because there was nobody to oppose it. Checkmate.’ Mr Weatherall smiled. ‘You’ve got to give it to the lad.’
‘I shall give him my sword in his gut.’
‘And how will you do that?’
‘Arno has discovered that Germain intends to be present at the execution of the king tomorrow.’
Mr Weatherall looked sharply at me. ‘The execution of the king? Then the Assembly has reached its verdict already?’
‘Indeed it has. And the verdict is death.’
Mr Weatherall shook his head. The execution of the king. How had we arrived here? As journeys go, I suppose the final leg had begun in the summer of last year when twenty thousand Parisians signed a petition calling for a return of rule by the royal family. Where once there had been talk of revolution, now the talk was of counter-revolution.
Of course the revolution wasn’t having that, so on 10 August the Assembly had decided to march on the palace at Tuileries where the king and Marie Antoinette had been staying ever since their undignified exile from Versailles almost three years before.
Six hundred of the king’s Swiss Guard lost their lives in the battle, the final stand of the king. Six weeks later the monarchy was abolished.
Meanwhile, there were uprisings against the revolution in Brittany and the Vendée, and on 2 September the Prussians took Verdun, causing panic in Paris when stories began to circulate that the royalist prisoners would be released and take bloody revenge on members of the revolution. I suppose you’d have to say that the massacres that followed were pre-emptive attacks, but massacres they were, and thousands of prisoners were slaughtered.
And then the king went on trial, and today it was announced that he should die by the guillotine tomorrow.
‘If Germain is there then I shall be there, too,’ I told Mr Weatherall now.
‘Why is that, then?’
‘To kill him.’
Mr Weatherall squinted. ‘I don’t think this is the way, Élise.’
‘I know,’ I said tenderly, ‘but you realize I have no other choice.’
‘What’s more important to you?’ he asked testily. ‘Revenge or the Order?’
I shrugged. ‘When I achieve the first, the second will fall into place.’
‘Will it? You think so, do you?’
‘I do.’
‘Why? All you’ll be doing is killing the current Grand Master. You’re as likely to be tried for treachery as welcomed back into the fold. I’ve sent appeals all over. To Spain, Italy, even America. I’ve had murmurs of sympathy but not a single pledge of support in return, and do you know why that is? It’s because to them the fact that the French Order is running smoothly makes your dismissal of marginal interest.
‘Besides, we can be sure that Germain has used his
own networks. He’ll have assured our brothers overseas that the overthrow was necessary, and that the French Order is in good hands.
‘We can also assume that the Carrolls will be poisoning the well wherever their name has any standing. You cannot do this without support, Élise, and the fact is you have no support, yet even knowing that you plan to carry on regardless. Which tells me that this isn’t about the Order; it’s about revenge. Which tells me I’m sitting next to a suicidal fool.’
‘I will have support,’ I insisted.
‘And where will that come from, Élise, do you think?’
‘I had hoped to form an alliance with the Assassins,’ I said.
He gave a start then shook his head sadly. ‘Making peace with the Assassins is pie-in-the-sky stuff, child. It’ll never happen, no matter what your friend Haytham Kenway says in his letters. Mr Carroll was right about that. You might as well ask a mongoose and a snake to take afternoon tea.’
‘You can’t believe that.’
‘I don’t just believe it, I know it, child. I love you for thinking otherwise, but you’re wrong.’
‘My father thought otherwise.’
He sighed. ‘Any truce your father brokered was a temporary one. He knew it, like we all do. There never will be peace.’
21 January 1793
i.
It was cold. Biting cold. And our dragon breath hung in the air in front of us as we stood on the place de la Concorde, which was to be the site of the king’s execution.
The square was full. It felt as though the whole of Paris, if not the whole of France, had gathered to watch the king die. As far as the eye could see were people who just a year ago would have sworn fealty to the monarch but who were now readying their handkerchiefs to dip in his blood. They clambered on to carts to get a better view, children teetering on their fathers’ shoulders, young women doing the same as they sat astride husbands or lovers.
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