Above us women leaned from windows across folded arms and watched the world go by. Lining the street were stalls that sold fruit and fabrics, barrows piled high with goods manned by shouting men and women in aprons who immediately called to us. “Madame! Mademoiselle!”
My eyes were drawn to the shadows at the edges of the street, where I saw blank faces in the gloom, and I fancied I saw starvation and desperation in those eyes as they watched us reproachfully, hungrily.
“Come along now, Élise,” said Mother, and I picked up my skirts just as she did and trod daintily over the mud and excrement beneath our feet and we were ushered into Christian’s by the owner.
The door slammed behind us, the outside world denied. A shop boy busied himself at our feet with a towel, and in moments it was as though we had never made that perilous crossing, those few feet between our carriage and the door of one of Paris’s most exclusive shoe shops.
Christian wore a white wig tied back with a black ribbon, a justaucorps and white breeches. He was a perfect approximation of half nobleman, half footman, which was how he saw himself on the social ladder. He was fond of saying that it was in his power to make women feel beautiful, which was the greatest power a man possessed. And yet to him Mother remained an enigma, as though she was the one customer upon whom his power did not quite work. It didn’t, and I knew why. It was because other women simply saw the shoes as tributes to their own vanity, whereas Mother adored them as things of beauty.
Christian, however, hadn’t yet reached that conclusion, so every visit was marked by him barking up the wrong tree.
“Look, Madame,” he said, presenting to her a pair of slippers adorned with buckles. “Every single lady through that door goes weak at the knees at the mere sight of this exquisite new creation, yet only Madame de la Serre has ankles pretty enough to do them justice.”
“Too frivolous, Christian.” My mother smiled and with an imperious wave of the hand swept past him to other shelves. I cast an eye at the shop boy, who returned my look with an unreadable gaze, and followed.
She chose briskly. She made her choices with a certainty that Christian remained bewildered by her. I, her constant companion, saw the difference in her as she chose her shoes. A lightness. A smile she cast in my direction as she slipped on yet another shoe and admired her beautiful ankles in the mirror to the accompanying gasps and bleats of Christian—every shoe an exquisite work of art in progress, my mother’s foot the final flourish in order to make them complete.
We made our choices, Mother arranged for payment and delivery and we left, Christian helping us out onto the street where . . .
There was no sign of Jean, our coachman. No sign of our carriage at all.
“Madame?” said Christian, face creased with concern. I felt her stiffen, saw the tilt of her chin as her eyes roamed the street around us.
“There’s nothing to worry about, Christian,” she assured him, breezily. “Our carriage is a little late, that is all. We shall enjoy the sights and sounds of Paris as we await its return here.”
It was beginning to get dark and there was a chill in the air, which had thickened with the first of the evening fog.
“That is quite out of the question, Madame, you cannot wait on the street,” said an aghast Christian.
She looked at him with a half smile. “To protect my sensibilities, Christian?”
“It is dangerous,” he protested, and leaned forward to whisper with his face twisted into a slightly disgusted expression, “and the people.”
“Yes, Christian,” she said, as though letting him into a secret, “just people. Now please, go back inside. Your next customer values her exclusive time with Paris’s most attentive shoe salesman as highly as I do, and would no doubt be most put out having to share her time with two strays awaiting their negligent coachman.”
Knowing my mother as a woman who rarely changed her mind, and knowing she was right about the next customer, Christian bowed acquiescence, bid us au revoir and returned to the shop, leaving us alone on the street, where the barrows were being removed, where people dissolved into shapes moving within the murky fog.
I gripped her hand. “Mama?”
“Don’t concern yourself, Élise,” she said raising her chin. “We shall hire a carriage to return us to Versailles.”
“Not to the villa here in Paris, Mama?”
“No,” she said, thinking, chewing her lip a little, “I think I should prefer that we return to Versailles.”
She was tense and watchful as she began to lead us along the street, incongruous in our long skirts and bonnets. From her purse she took a compact to check her rouge and we stopped to gaze in the window of a shop.
Still as we walked she used the opportunity to teach me. “Make your face impassive, Élise, and do not show your true feelings, especially if they are nerves. Don’t appear to hurry. Maintain your calm exterior. Maintain control.”
The streets were thinning out now. “At the square they have carriages for hire, and we shall be there in a few moments. First, though, I have something I need to tell you. When I tell you, you must not react, you must not turn your head. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Good. We are being followed. He has been following us since Christian’s. A man in a tall felt hat and cloak.”
“Why? Why is the man following us?”
“Now that, Élise, is a very good question, and that is something I intend to find out. Just keep walking.”
We stopped to look into another shop window. “I do believe our shadow has disappeared,” she said thoughtfully.
“Then that’s a good thing,” I replied, with all the naivety of my unburdened eight-year-old self.
There was concern on her face. “No, my darling, it’s not a good thing. I liked him where I could see him. Now I have to wonder if he really has gone or, as seems more likely, he’s sped on ahead to cut us off before we can reach the square. He will expect us to use the main road. We shall fox him, Élise, by taking another route.”
Taking my hand she led us off the street, first onto a narrower highway, then into a long alleyway, dark apart from a lit lantern at each end.
We were halfway along when the figure stepped out of the fog in front of us. Disturbed mist billowed along the slick walls on either side of the narrow alley. And I knew Mother had made a mistake.
iv
He had a thin face framed by a spill of almost pure white hair, looking like a dandyish but down-at-the-heel doctor in his long black cape and tall shabby hat, the ruff of a shirt spilling over his collar.
He carried a doctor’s bag that he placed to the ground and opened with one hand, all without taking his eyes off us as he took something from it, something long and curved.
Then he smiled and drew the dagger from its sheath, and it gleamed wickedly in the dark.
“Stay close, Élise,” whispered Mother. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
I believed her because I was an eight-year-old girl and of course I believed my mother. But also because having seen her with the wolf, I had good reason to believe her.
Even so, fear nibbled at my insides.
“What is your business, monsieur?” she called levelly.
He made no answer.
“Very well. Then we shall return to where we came from,” said Mother loudly, taking my hand and about to depart.
At the alley entrance a shadow flickered and a second figure appeared in the orange glow of the lantern. It was a lamplighter; we could tell by the pole he carried. Even so, Mother stopped.
“Monsieur,” she called to the lamplighter cautiously, “I wonder if I might ask you to call off this gentleman bothering us?”
The lamplighter said nothing, going instead to where the lamp burned and raising his pole. Mama started, “Monsieur . . .” and I wondered why the man would be trying to light a lamp that was already lit and realized too late that the pole had a hook on the end—the hook that they used fo
r dousing the flame of the candle inside.
“Monsieur . . .”
The entrance was plunged into darkness. We heard him drop his pole with a clatter and as ours eyes adjusted I could see him reach into his coat to bring something out. Another dagger. Now he, too, moved forward a step.
Mother’s head swung from the lamplighter to the doctor.
“What is your business, monsieur?” she asked the doctor.
In reply the doctor brought his other arm to bear. With a snicking sound a second blade appeared from his wrist.
“Assassin,” she said with a smile as he moved in. The lamplighter was close now too—close enough for us to see the harsh set of his mouth and his narrowed eyes. Mother jerked her head in the other direction and saw the doctor, both blades held at his side. Still he smiled. He was enjoying this—or trying to make it look as though he was.
Either way, Mother was as immune to his malevolence as she was to the charms of Christian, and her next move was as graceful as a dance step. Her heels clip-clopped on the stone as she kicked out one foot, bent and drew a boot knife, all in the blink of an eye.
One second we were a defenseless woman and her child trapped in a darkened passageway, the next we were not: she was a woman brandishing a knife to protect her child. A woman, who by the way she’d drawn her weapon and the way she was now poised, knew exactly what to do with the knife.
The doctor’s eyes flickered. The lamplighter stopped. Both given pause for thought.
She held her knife in her right hand, and I knew something was amiss because she was left-handed, and presented her shoulder to the doctor.
The doctor moved forward. At the same time my mother passed her knife from her right hand to her left, and her skirts pooled as she dipped and with her right hand outflung for balance slashed her left across the front of the doctor, whose justaucorps opened just as neatly as though cut by a tailor, the fabric instantly soaked with blood.
He was cut but not badly wounded. His eyes widened and he lurched backward, evidently stunned by the skill of Mother’s attack. For all his sinister act, he looked frightened, and amid my own fear I felt something else: pride and awe. Never before had I felt so protected.
Still, though he had faltered he stood his ground, and as his eyes flicked to behind us, Mother twisted too late to prevent the lamplighter’s grabbing me from behind, a choking arm around my neck.
“Lay down your knife, or . . .” was what the lamplighter started to say.
But never finished, because half a second later, he was dead.
Her speed took him by surprise—not just the speed with which she moved but the speed of her decision, that if she allowed the lamplighter to take me hostage, then all was lost. And it gave her the advantage as she swung into him, finding the space between my body and his, leading with her elbow, which with a yell she jabbed into his throat.
He made a sound like boak and I felt his grip give, then saw the flash of a blade as Mother pressed home her advantage and drove her boot knife deep into his stomach, shoving him up against the alley wall and with a small grunt of effort driving the blade upward, then stepping smartly away as the front of his shirt darkened with blood and bulged with his spilling guts as he slid to the floor.
Mother straightened to face a second attack from the doctor, but all we saw of him was his cloak as he turned and ran, leaving the alley and running for the street.
She grabbed my arm. “Come along, Élise, before you get blood on your shoes.”
v
There was blood on Mother’s coat. Apart from that there was no way of telling she’d recently seen combat.
Not long after we arrived home messages were sent and the Crows bustled in with a great clacking of walking canes, huffing and puffing and talking loudly of punishing “those responsible.” Meanwhile, the staff fussed, put their hands to their throats and gossiped around corners, and Father’s face was ashen and I noticed how he seemed compelled to keep embracing us, holding us both a little too tightly and a little too long and breaking away with eyes that shone with tears.
Only Mother seemed unruffled. She had the poise and authority of one who has acquitted herself well. Rightly so. Thanks to her, we had survived the attack. I wondered, did she feel as secretly thrilled as I did?
I would be asked to give my account of events, she had warned me in the hired carriage on the way back to our château. In this regard I should follow her lead, support everything she said, say nothing to contradict her.
And so I listened as she told versions of her story, first to Olivier, our head butler, then to my father when he arrived, and lastly to the Crows when they bustled in. And though her stories acquired greater detail in the telling, answering all questions fired at her, they all lacked one very important detail. The doctor.
“You saw no hidden blade?” she was asked.
“I saw nothing to identify my attackers as Assassins,” she replied, “thus I can’t assume it was the work of Assassins.”
“Common street robbers are not so organized as this man seems to have been. You can’t think it a coincidence that your carriage was missing. Perhaps Jean will turn up drunk but perhaps not. Perhaps he will turn up dead. No, Madame, this has none of the hallmarks of an opportunistic crime. This was a planned attack on your person, an act of aggression by our enemies.”
Eyes would flick to me. Eventually I was asked to leave the room, which I did, finding a seat in the hallway outside, listening to the voices from the chamber as they bounced off marble floors and to my ears.
“Grand Master, you must realize this was the work of Assassins.”
(Although to my ears, it was the work of “assassins” and so I sat there thinking, Of course it was the work of assassins, you stupid man. Or “would-be assassins” at least.)
“Like my wife, I would rather not leap to any false conclusions,” replied Father.
“Yet you’ve posted extra guards.”
“Of course I have, man. I can’t be too careful.”
“I think you know in your heart, Grand Master.”
My father’s voice rose. “And what if I do? What would you have me do?”
“Why, take action at once, of course.”
“And would that be action to avenge my wife’s honor or action to overthrow the king?”
“Either would send a message to our adversaries.”
Later, the news arrived that Jean had been discovered with his throat cut. I went cold, as though somebody had opened a window. I cried. Not just for Jean but, shamefully, for myself as well. And I watched and listened as a shock descended on the house and there were tears to be heard from below stairs and the voices of the Crows were once more raised, this time in vindication.
Again they were silenced by Father. When I looked out the windows, I could see men with muskets in the grounds. Around us, everybody was jumpy. Father came to embrace me time and time again—until I got so fed up I began wriggling away.
vi
“Élise, there’s something we have to tell you.”
And this is the moment you’ve been waiting for, dear reader of this journal, whoever you are—the moment when the penny finally dropped, when I finally understood why I had been asked to keep so many vérités cachées, when I discovered why my father’s associates called him Grand Master, and when I realized what they meant by Templar and why “assassin” actually meant “Assassin.”
They had called me into Father’s office and requested that chairs be gathered by the fire before asking the staff to withdraw completely. Father stood while Mother sat forward, her hands on her knees, comforting me with her eyes. I was reminded of once when I had a splinter and Mother held me and comforted me and hushed my tears while Father gripped my finger and removed the splinter.
“Élise,” he began, “what we are about to say was to have waited until your tenth birthday. But events today have no doubt raised many questions in your mind, and your mother believes you are ready to be told, so . .
. here we are.”
I looked at Mother, who reached to take my hand, bathing me in a comforting smile.
Father cleared his throat.
This was it. Whatever dim ideas I’d formed about my future were about to change.
“Élise,” he said, “you will one day become the French head of a secret international order that is centuries old. You, Élise de la Serre, will be a Templar Grand Master.”
“Templar Grand Master?” I said, looking from Father to Mother.
“Yes.”
“Of France?” I said.
“Yes. Presently, I hold that position. Your mother also holds a high rank within the Order. The gentlemen and Madame Levesque who visit, they too are Knights of the Order and, like us, they are committed to preserving its tenets.”
I listened, not really understanding but wondering why, if all these knights were committed to the same thing, they spent every meeting shouting at one another.
“What are Templars?” I asked instead.
My father indicated himself and Mother, then extended his hand to include me in the circle. “We all are. We are Templars. We are members of a centuries-old secret order committed to making the world a better place.”
I liked the sound of that. I liked the sound of making the world a better place. “How do you do it, Papa?”
He smiled. “Ah, now, that is a very good question, Élise. Like any other large, ancient organization there are differing opinions on how best to achieve our ends. There are those who think we should violently oppose those who oppose us. Others who believe in peacefully spreading our beliefs.”
“And what are they, monsieur?”
He shrugged. “Our motto is, ‘May the father of understanding guide us.’ You see, what we Templars know is that despite exhortations otherwise, the people don’t want real freedom and true responsibility because these things are too great a burden to bear, and only the very strongest minds can do so.
Assassin's Creed: Unity Page 3