Assassin's Creed: Unity

by Oliver Bowden

  “Nonsense. We would have nothing to do with such a disgusting man. My father wouldn’t have allowed him in the Order.”

  Ruddock shrugged and spread his hands. “I’m dreadfully sorry if what I’m telling you comes as a shock, my lady. Perhaps you should not take it as a reflection on your entire Order, rather the rogue elements within it. Speaking as something of a ‘rogue element’ myself . . .”

  Rogue elements, I thought. Rogue elements who plotted against my mother. Were these the same people who killed my father? If so, then I was next.

  “You want to rejoin the Assassins, do you?” I said, pouring more wine.

  He nodded.

  I grinned. “Well, look, I’ve got to say, and you’ll have to pardon my rudeness, but you did attempt to kill me once so I think I’m owed a free shot. But if you’ve got any hopes of rejoining the Assassins, you need to take care of that smell.”

  “The smell?”

  “Yes, Ruddock, the smell. Your smell. You smelled in London, you smelled in Rouen and you smell now. Perhaps a bath might be in order? Some perfume? Now, is that rude?”

  He smiled. “Not at all, mademoiselle. I appreciate your candor.”

  “Why you’d want to rejoin the Assassins is beyond me anyway.”

  “Begging your pardon, mademoiselle?”

  I leaned forward, squinting at him and waggling the beaker of wine at the same time. “I mean I’d think very carefully about that if I were you.”

  “What can you mean?”

  I waved an airy hand. “I mean that you’re out of it. Well out of it. Free of all that . . .” I waved a hand again. “. . . stuff. Assassin, Templar. Pah. They’ve got enough dogma for ten thousand churches and twice as much misguided belief. For centuries they’ve done nothing but squabble, and to what end, eh? Mankind carries on regardless. Look at France. My father and his advisers spent years arguing over the ‘best’ direction for the country and in the end the Revolution went ahead and happened without them anyway. Ha! Where was Mirabeau when they stormed the Bastille? Still taking votes on tennis courts? The Assassins and Templars are like two ticks fighting over control of the cat, an exercise in hubris and futility.”

  “But, mademoiselle, whatever the eventual outcome, we have to believe we have the capacity to effect change for the better.”

  “Only if we’re deluded, Ruddock,” I said. “Only if we’re deluded.”

  viii

  After I had dismissed Ruddock, I decided I would be ready for them if they came, whoever they were: looting revolutionaries, agents of the Carrolls, a traitor from my own Order. I would be ready for them.

  Luckily there is more than enough wine in the house to fortify me for the wait.

  25 JULY 1789

  It was daylight outside when they came. They stole into the courtyard, the noise of their footfalls reaching me where I waited in the darkened, boarded-up hall, a pistol at hand.

  I, who had waited, was ready for them. And as they climbed the steps to the door that I had deliberately left ajar, just as I did every day, I reached for the pistol, pulled back the hammer and raised it.

  The door creaked. A shadow fell into a rectangle of sunlight on the floorboards and lengthened across the floor as a figure crossed the threshold and came into the gloom of my home.

  “Élise,” he said, and dimly I realized that it was a long, long time since I had heard another human voice, and how sweet the sound of it was. And what bliss that the voice should belong to him.

  Then I remembered that he could have saved my father, and didn’t, and that he had fallen in with the Assassins. And, now I came to think of it, perhaps those two facts were connected? And even if they weren’t . . .

  I lit a lamp, still holding the gun on him, pleased to see him jump slightly as the flame blazed into life. For some moments the two of us simply regarded one another, faces conveying nothing, until he nodded, indicating the pistol.

  “That’s some welcome.”

  I softened a little to see his face. Just a little. “One can’t be too careful. Not after what happened.”

  “Élise, I . . .”

  “Haven’t you done enough to repay my father’s kindness?” I said sharply.

  “Élise, please. You can’t believe I killed Mr. de la Serre. Your father . . . He wasn’t the man you thought he was. Neither of our fathers were.”

  Secrets. How I hated the taste of them. Vérités cachées. All my life.

  “I know exactly who my father was, Arno. And I know who yours was. I suppose it was inevitable. You an Assassin, me a Templar.”

  I saw the realization dawn on his face. “You . . . ?”

  “Does that shock you? My father always meant for me to follow in his footsteps. Now all I can do is avenge him.”

  “I swear to you I had nothing to do with his death.”

  “Oh, but you did . . .”

  “No. No. By my life, I swear I didn’t . . .”

  To hand was the letter. I held it up now.

  “Is that . . .” he said, squinting at it.

  “A letter intended for my father the day he was murdered. I found it on the floor of his room. Unopened.”

  I almost felt sorry for Arno, watching the blood drain from his face as it dawned on him what he’d done. After all, he had loved Father too. Yes, I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

  Arno’s mouth worked up and down. His eyes were wide and staring.

  “I didn’t know,” he said at last.

  “Neither did my father,” I said simply.

  “How could I have known?”

  “Just go,” I told him. I hated the sound of the sob in my voice. I hated Arno. “Just go.”

  And he did. And I barred the door behind him, and then took the back stairs down to the housekeeper’s study, where I had made my bed. There I opened a bottle of wine. All the better to help me sleep.

  20 AUGUST 1789

  i

  Shaken awake, I blinked blurry bloodshot eyes and tried to focus on the man who stood above my bed, crutches under his armpits. It looked like Mr. Weatherall but it couldn’t be Mr. Weatherall because my protector was in Versailles and he couldn’t travel, not with his leg the way it was.

  And I wasn’t in Versailles, I was in Île Saint-Louis in Paris, waiting—waiting for something.

  “Right, you,” he was saying. “I see you’re already dressed. Time to get out of your cot and come with us.”

  Behind him stood another, much younger man, who lurked uneasily by the door of the housekeeper’s study. For a second I thought it was Jacques from Maison Royale, but no, another younger man.

  And it was him—it was Mr. Weatherall. I shot upright, clasped him by the neck and pulled him to me, sobbing gratefully into his neck, holding him tight.

  “Hold up,” he said in a strangulated voice. “You’re pulling me off my bloody crutches. Just wait a minute, will you?”

  I let him go, pulled myself up to my knees. “But we can’t go,” I said firmly. “I need to be ready, when they come for me.”

  “When who comes for you?”

  I gripped his collars, looked up at him, into that bearded face creased with concern, and didn’t want to ever let him go. “The Carrolls sent killers, Mr. Weatherall. They sent two men to kill me for what I did to May Carroll.”

  His shoulders slumped onto his crutches as he embraced me. “Oh God, child. When?”

  “I killed them,” I went on, breathlessly. “I killed them both. I put a wooden stake into one of them.” I giggled.

  He pulled away, looking deep into my eyes, frowning. “And then celebrated with a couple of hundred bottles of wine, by the looks of things.”

  I shook my head. “No. Only to help me sleep, to help forget that . . . that I’ve lost Arno, and my father, and what I did to May Carroll, and the two men who came to kill me.” I began to sob now, giggling one second, sobbing the next, dimly realizing that this was not normal behavior but unable to stop myself. “I put a stake into one of them.”


  “Right,” he said, then turned to the other man. “Help her to the carriage, carry her if need be. She’s not herself.”

  “I’m fine,” I insisted.

  “You will be,” he said. “This young man here is Jean Burnel. Like you, he’s a newly inducted Templar, though unlike you, he isn’t Grand Master and he isn’t drunk. However, he is loyal to the de la Serre name, and he can help us. But he can’t do that until you’re on your feet.”

  “My trunk,” I said. “I need my trunk . . .”

  ii

  That was—well, the truth is, I don’t know how long ago that was, and I’m embarrassed to ask. All I know is that since then I’ve been confined to bed in the grounds-keeper’s lodge, perspiring profusely for the first few days, insisting I was going to be okay, getting angry when I was denied a little wine to drink; then after that sleeping a lot, my head clearing enough to understand that I had been in the grip of some dark fugue—a “disorder of the nerves,” Mr. Weatherall had said.

  iii

  At last I was well enough to get out of bed and dress in clothes that had been freshly laundered by Helene, who was indeed an angel, and had indeed formed a strong relationship with Jacques during my absence. Then Mr. Weatherall and I left the lodge one morning and walked in near silence, both of us knowing we were heading for our usual place, and there we stood in the clearing where the sun fell through the branches like a waterfall, and we bathed in it.

  “Thank you,” I said, when at last we sat, Mr. Weatherall on the stump, me on the soft floor of the copse, absentmindedly picking at the ground and squinting up at him.

  “Thank you for what?” he said. That growly voice I loved so much.

  “Thank you for saving me.”

  “Thank you for saving you from yourself, you mean.”

  “Saving me from myself is still saving me.” I smiled.

  “If you say so. I had my own difficulties when your mother died. Hit the bottle myself.”

  I remembered—I remembered the smell of wine on his breath at the Maison Royale.

  “There is a traitor within the Order,” I said next.

  “We thought as much. Lafrenière’s letter . . .”

  “But now I am more sure. His name is the King of Beggars.”

  “The King of Beggars?”

  “You know him.”

  He nodded. “I know of him. He isn’t a Templar.”

  “That’s what I said. Ruddock insists.”

  Mr. Weatherall’s eyes blazed at the mention of Ruddock’s name. “Nonsense. Your father would never have allowed it.”

  “That was exactly what I said, but perhaps Father didn’t know.”

  “Your father knew everything.”

  “Can the King of Beggars have been inducted since?”

  “After your father’s murder?”

  I nodded. “Perhaps even because of my father’s murder—as payment for carrying it out, a reward.”

  “You’ve got a point there,” said Mr. Weatherall. “You say Ruddock was hired by the King of Beggars to kill your mother, maybe to curry favor with the Crows?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, he failed, didn’t he? Perhaps he’s been biding his time since, waiting for another opportunity to prove himself. Kills your father, finally gets what he wants—an initiation.”

  I considered. “Maybe, but it doesn’t make an awful lot of sense to me, and I still can’t understand why the Crows would want Mother dead. If anything, her third way was a bridge between the two sets of ideals.”

  “She was too strong for them, Élise. Too much of a threat.”

  “A threat to whom, Mr. Weatherall? On whose authority is all this happening?”

  We shared a look.

  “Listen, Élise,” he said, pointing, “you need to consolidate. You need to call a special meeting and assert your leadership, let the bloody Order know whose hand is on the tiller, root out whoever it is who’s working against you.”

  I felt myself go cold. “What you’re saying is, that it’s not just one individual, it’s a faction?”

  “Why not? In the last month we’ve seen the reign of a remote and disinterested king overthrown by revolution.”

  I frowned at him. “And that’s what you think I am, do you? A ‘remote and disinterested’ ruler?”

  “I don’t think that. But maybe there are others who do.”

  I agreed. “You’re right. I need to rally my supporters around me. I shall host the gathering at the estate in Versailles, beneath portraits of my mother and father.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, all right. Let’s not run before we can walk, eh? We need to make sure they’ll turn up first. Young Jean Burnel can begin the task of alerting members.”

  “I need him to sound out Lafrenière as well. What I’ve learned gives his letter even more credence.”

  “Yeah, well, you just watch that one.”

  “How did you recruit Jean Burnel?”

  Mr. Weatherall colored a little. “Well, you know, I just did.”

  “Mr. Weatherall . . .” I pressed.

  He shrugged. “All right, well, look, I have my network, as you know, and I happened to know that young Burnel would have jumped at the chance to work closely with the beautiful Élise de la Serre.”

  I smiled my way through an uneasy, disloyal feeling. “So he’s sweet on me?”

  “It’s the icing on the cake of his loyalty to your family, I’d say, but yes, I suppose he is.”

  “I see. Perhaps he would make a good match.”

  He guffawed. “Oh who are you kidding, child? You love Arno.”

  “Do I?”

  “Well, don’t you?”

  “There’s been a lot of hurt.”

  “Could be that he feels the same way. After all, you kept some pretty big secrets from him. Could be he’s got just as much right as you to be feeling like the injured party.” He leaned forward. “You ought to start thinking of what you have in common rather than what separates you. You might find the one outweighs the other.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, turning my face away. “I don’t really know anymore.”

  5 OCTOBER 1789

  i

  I have written before that the fall of the Bastille marked the end of the king’s rule and though it did in one sense—in the sense that his power had been questioned, tested and failed that test—in name, at least, if not in reality, he remained in charge.

  As news of the Bastille’s fall began to travel around France, so too did the rumor that the king’s army would wreak a terrible revenge on all revolutionaries. Messengers would arrive in villages with the dreadful news that the army was sweeping across the countryside. They pointed to the sunset and said it was a burning village in the distance. Peasants took up arms against an army that never came. They burned tax offices. They fought with local militia sent to quell the disturbance. These disturbances were called the Rural Uprising.

  On the back of it, the Assembly passed a law, a “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,” to stop nobles demanding taxes, tithes and labor from peasants. The law was drafted by the Marquis de Lafayette, who had helped draft the American Constitution, and it killed noble privilege and made all men equal in the eyes of the law.

  It also made the guillotine the official instrument of death of France.

  ii

  But still, what to do with the king? Officially he still had power of veto. Mirabeau, who had so nearly formed an alliance with my father, argued that the protests should end, and that the king should still rule as he had done before.

  In this aim he would have been joined by my father if my father had lived, and when I wondered whether an alliance of Assassin and Templar might have changed things, I found myself sure it would have done, and realized that was why he had been killed.

  There were others—chief among them the doctor and scientist, Jean Paul Marat, who, though not a member of the Assembly, had found a voice—who felt that
the king’s powers should be stripped away from him altogether, that he should be asked to move from Versailles to Paris and there continue purely in an advisory role.

  Marat’s view was the most radical. As far as I was concerned that was important because not once did I ever hear talk of the king’s being deposed, as I had overheard growing up.

  To put it another way: the most passionate revolutionaries in Paris had never proposed anything quite so radical as that suggested by my father’s advisers at our estate in Versailles as far back as 1778.

  And realizing that sent a chill down my spine as the day of the Templar council approached. The Crows had been invited, of course, although I was going to have to stop using that nickname for them if I was to be their Grand Master. What I should say is that all of my father’s close associates and advisers had been requested to attend, as well as representatives of other high-ranking Templar families.

  When they were assembled, I would tell them I was in charge now. I would warn them that treachery would not be tolerated and that if my father’s killer came from their ranks, then he (or she) would be exposed and punished.

  That was the plan. And in private moments I had imagined its happening that way. I had imagined the meeting taking place at our château in Versailles, just as I’d said to Mr. Weatherall that day at Maison Royale.

  In the end, however, we’d decided more neutral territory would be preferable and chosen to meet at the Hôtel de Lauzun on the Île Saint-Louis. It was owned by the Marquis de Pimôdan, a Knight of the Order known to be sympathetic to the de la Serres. So not totally neutral. But more neutral at least.

  Mr. Weatherall demurred, insisting on the need to maintain a low profile. I’m grateful for that, the way things turned out.

  iii

  Something had happened that day. These days it felt as though something happened every day but that day—or to be precise, yesterday and today—something bigger than usual had happened, an event for which the wheels were set in motion when, just a few days ago, King Louis and Marie Antoinette drank too much wine at a party held in honor of the Flanders regiment.