The crowd loves the thump of the head falling into the basket, a sound I’ll never forget. Phoebe shrieks and turns away in anguish. The crowd hoots and hollers like football hooligans when the executioner holds up the head by its hair and the vacant eyes either stare or don’t—I can’t tell. The jaw drops open, giving this unfortunate man the regrettable look of having been very, very stupid.
The tumbrels arrive now and come to a stop. The people are shuffled out of them, to wait their turn. It’s a literal line, I see in horror. They are waiting like cows to the slaughter.
The blade lifts again, the board is swabbed of blood, and the headless body is taken away to lie in a tumbrel so recently vacated by standing people.
The next woman is led up the steps to her death. She’s shivering. Her hands move so rapidly it’s like she’s writing a letter with two hands.
“I can’t do it,” says Phoebe. We’ve been holding on to each other this whole time, but I lost track of her in the face of what I’m seeing. She’s as panicked as if she’s about to mount the scaffold and lie down on that wet board.
I nod and use all my strength to intention to the present, to Eleanor and Tabby and her parents.
It doesn’t work.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s at least try to be somewhere else if we can’t leave this time period. How about the plaza in front of Notre Dame?”
“Yes! Anything!” I see her fierce determination and I close my eyes to focus, too, because I can’t be here, I can’t stand this violence and brutality, but the jeers of the sadistic crowd continue in my ears.
“We’re meant to watch,” says Phoebe grimly.
“You don’t have to,” I say. “Close your eyes.” As I say it, I open mine.
“It’s too scary to keep my eyes shut. Even though I’m already dead and they can’t hurt me, I don’t trust them.”
We press ourselves to the back of the crowd to at least be farther away from those forlorn people in the tumbrels and the despicable glee of the peasants.
What makes people want to see others be hurt? They’re starving, I get that, but surely they understand that the people in these carts aren’t directly responsible?
Phoebe’s nails are digging into my wrist.
“Ouch!” I snap my hand away.
“Look, Miles!”
It’s Giraude.
She’s not associated with the other nobles, and she’s dressed in brown, coarse clothing. Her face is stark with determination, and a man pulls at her sleeve, trying to stop her from moving forward. He’s dressed simply, like her, and his face shows a lack of courtliness or sophistication.
“My lady, please do not do this. We’ve risked so much to keep you safe,” he implores.
She whirls around and almost snarls at him. “My life is worth nothing. You may save yourself, but I welcome the chance to be delivered from this living hell.”
“For my sake?” he pleads.
She’s so scornful she doesn’t even bother to respond. I see desperation come over his expression.
“I must say this—you know my feelings but I’ve never dared voice them.”
“Don’t,” she says. “You are my manservant and I value the service you have rendered me over the years. But more than that, you may not proffer.”
“I proffer it nonetheless,” he says with a boldness I have to admire. “I love you, my lady.”
She sighs and permits him to see the derision resting openly on her face. I take a step back from this cruelness.
“I have loved only one man in my life, and he is long dead. You have tried to blackmail me,” she says, “protecting me and hiding me as a peasant in return for affection I can never feel. But I don’t value my life, so your labors are for naught.”
“I did not save you to blackmail you. I saved you because despite your faults and despite the gap in our circumstances, I love you. You believe yourself high above me, but this revolution changes that and evens out our status. Égalité!” he shouts.
A few of the women standing near them echo his cry, but then return their attention to the guillotine.
“A revolution does not make us equals,” she says. “Dirty peasants killing their betters is nothing but a temporary upturning of the natural order. It is like a flea thinking itself the master of the hound it bites.”
“You are a haughty snip,” he says, his voice deflated, “and yet I admire you.”
“Save yourself, Pierre,” she says. “As for me, I crave my spot on that scaffold.” She breaks away from him. He no longer pulls at her sleeve, but follows behind her, letting someone get between them, and then a second person. He’s resigned.
“What on earth?” asks Phoebe. I translate the gist of their discussion, summarizing it into a few sentences.
Giraude pushes her way to the front of the crowd, and of course we follow, too, a bit behind Pierre. We don’t want to return, but we have to learn from this moment. We were flung backward in time by some unknown force to witness it, and it’s something important. As we approach the guillotine again, I can smell it: blood has its own distinct tinny smell and it’s so profuse it’s running in the gutters.
Giraude strides to the base of the scaffold and calls out, “Hark! Here is a noblewoman of the House of Arnaud who turns herself in!”
Everyone turns to gape at her, including the executioner, who forgets his work in the release of weights and cables. But the blade doesn’t forget. It flies down resoundingly onto the slender neck of the woman who, too, had turned to look at Giraude and her dramatic announcement. I see in her face multiple surprise as the mystery of Giraude’s pronouncement is replaced by the mystery of her own death.
She will become a ghost, I think. Some of these other people will, too, killed in the crush of dread and for no real reason they can discern other than a nation’s caprice . . . but this woman was also robbed of the acknowledgment of her final mortal moment. Distracted at the most important second of her life.
I feel awful for her. Her head, bewildered, rolls into the basket, spraying blood as it goes.
This doesn’t faze Giraude at all. She climbs the steps even as the executioner belatedly recalls his duty and gathers up the limp body.
“I have hidden myself for months, dressing as you do, eating and behaving as you do,” says Giraude loudly as the crowd hushes to hear her. “But I am done with that. I wish to pay the ultimate price for my greed, my wealth, my noble birth. I renounce all that I am and beg you humbly to end my life as it should be ended.”
A cheer goes up. I glance at the line of nobles, who seem dumbfounded. A few look angry. The man who was next to go is visibly sweating. He must’ve resolved himself and found some courage—and now his death is being delayed by her arrogance. She can’t even sacrifice herself in a selfless manner.
“You are correct in all that you suspected of my kind,” she informs the peasants. “We supped and busily drank all the night and day that you labored, and we laughed at your plight.”
I frown over at Phoebe, although she has no idea what was just said. What does Giraude gain by this? She’s just making it worse for people who are going to die anyway. Now I see them swelling with indignation, and one screams out, “That is untrue! I am a minor noble and have barely enough food for my family! It is my name I will die for today, not my wealth!”
Others are shouting now, too, arguing her down. She laughs carelessly and pulls her grimy fichu away from her neck to ready it for the blade. The executioner looks as if he has no idea what to do with her.
“The price of bread? We didn’t care what you paid or what you did if you couldn’t pay it or if there was no bread,” she tells the mob. “I care now, and that is why I ask you to let me die for the excesses of my vile past.”
“Is it my fault I am born into the family I am born into?” calls another man. “I landed in a golden cradle as the guest of fate. It could just as easily have been a blanket laid on the floor. None of us control this!”
I glance
at Pierre. Silent tears run down his cheeks. Or maybe he’s loudly sobbing; I have no idea. I can’t hear anything other than the desperate calls of the nobles using this moment to bargain, to try, to throw any reason to the mob calling out chants of hatred.
“My squalid Parisians,” Giraude says, “you may not have bread today. But if you do, I invite you to dip it in the blood that will flow from my neck. Let my blood flavor your bread.”
I almost swear I can feel the cobblestones under my feet adjusting, tipping, with the crowd’s furious stamping of approval—but of course I feel nothing.
Women open up their kerchiefs to take out a bit of bread in readiness, and men check their pockets. “They’re seriously going to do it?” I say aloud in disbelief.
The executioner walks the boundary of the platform, his arms open to ask the crowd’s . . . what, permission? They roar back at him, throats red and wide, eyes blazing, and Giraude laughs at their vehemence. Satisfied, he completes his circuit and returns to her.
“Citizeness,” he says, waving his arm at the guillotine as if he is inviting her to take a seat. He assists her onto the board and secures her. I watch to see if she’ll look for Pierre for one last moment with him, but she is so involved in herself she doesn’t seem to remember he’s here. The board lowers into position and the executioner grins and snaps the rope.
It’s done.
Her body pulses and jumps as her artery gushes its last earnest offerings: blood that is unconstrained by the narrow vessels it had kept itself to for decades, now lofting without limits into the air. Her face is satisfied as the executioner holds it aloft for an extended period and parades it around the four sides of the platform.
“Keep her head with her body,” he barks to the man who is ferrying bodies from the scaffold to the tumbrels. “She’s a special one.”
And, yes, women bend to the blood that drips to the ground below the scaffold. They eat bread soaked in Giraude’s blood.
They are vampires.
Blood smears their lips.
“How did Giraude survive this?” Phoebe asks, her eyes frantically searching my face. She’s broken, changed. She’s never seen anything like this before.
How did she? How do you keep living when your head has been separated from your body?
I watch Pierre’s progress as he walks to the tumbrel holding Giraude’s body. He has a sense of watchfulness, of protectiveness. So, too, does the young girl standing there next to him. They don’t know each other, they say nothing to each other, but they both act like they’re standing guard over these murdered bodies.
I remember the story from the Picpus cemetery.
“Pierre is going to dig her back up tonight from the mass grave these people will be thrown into,” I say. “He’s going to attach her head. She’s going to wear a black ribbon around her neck to hide the seam.”
“She’s the one from the story at the cemetery,” says Phoebe slowly.
We look at each other.
“I want my mom,” says Phoebe, and we hug each other fiercely. There is no “mom” anymore. There’s no comfort. There’s just the attempt to feel sensation through the fog.
CHAPTER TEN
Buried at Picpus are the sixteen Carmelite nuns who took courage in their pending executions and sang hymns of joy as the tumbrels brought them to the guillotine. Even as they stood in line they sang, the hymns quieted voice by voice until only one sister continued the thread of the song as she mounted the steps to the scaffold.
—Catholic Martyrs
We try to return to the present with more urgency, but some force wants us stuck in this dark evening of death upon death. “Thank God Eleanor’s with my family,” says Phoebe. Morose, we experiment with how to get as far from the guillotine as possible. We can move a block away, where the people begin to thin out and the cries and cheers are at least, if not muted, not yelled directly into our ears. But as we try to take one extra step, we’re immediately blinked back to the foot of the scaffold.
I keep Pierre in my peripheral vision, because it’s easier to look at him than the headless body of Giraude . . . and clearly, it’s them we’re here for. For some reason, we have to see this day out.
Eventually, the tumbrel Giraude shares with a dozen other people, crammed together as if they were sacks of potatoes, no dignity, no sense of their being people, begins moving. It’s part of a caravan of about ten tumbrels.
Pierre and the young girl follow, but they try to be discreet. The cover of darkness helps their cause. Phoebe and I follow and learn that now we are able to go farther than a city block away. We’re part of this strange, secretive funeral procession. Pierre and the girl don’t talk to each other, may not even be aware of each other. We walk as the horses pick their way slowly through the streets, turning right, turning left.
The ground is marshy and impedes the wheels’ progress, and the cart drivers pass the whip over the horses’ heads to make them step faster.
Finally in the distance I see the outlines of the Picpus church. There’s no neighborhood around it now; it’s a far-flung choice for the leaders of the Revolution. They were smart about it. No one but the four of us is dedicated enough to follow the tumbrels this far on foot.
We enter through a gate in the churchyard’s fence. The tumbrels remain in line as the first approaches the edge of a pit. The horseman pulls his horse sharply to the side and then in a curve so that the back of the cart now faces the trench. He gets off his horse and, swearing slightly at the cold we don’t feel, the cold that makes his breath a cloud, he tips the cart back on its two wheels . . . and the contents go sliding down into the pit with a sound I can’t even begin to describe. He gets back on his horse and the cart moves off, perhaps back to Paris.
The girl is sobbing. Quietly, for she doesn’t want to draw attention to herself, but there are people in these tumbrels she loves. Dumped into the earth as if their lives hadn’t mattered.
We wait as the carts empty their contents, sometimes urging the horses around to a different part of the trench as the level of the bodies inside approaches the top and we see the pale gleam of arms in strangely graceful positions, rigor mortis arranging them like those of Roman statues forever reaching for a cluster of marble grapes.
The heads go, too, reserved in several red barrels that are dumped indiscriminately.
Finally, the cart we know holds Giraude approaches the lip of the pit. I can’t bear to look at Pierre’s face. She slides down in an indistinguishable mass, combined in a clump of bodies with strangers, people she may have danced with in the same ballroom at one point, who may have sipped champagne from the same cellar. A few more tumbrels dump their loads, then two men with shovels begin tossing some white material over the bodies as the horses and carts depart. I hear one lone horseman whistling some jaunty tune, its playfulness completely out of place on the thin wind.
“What are they spreading over the bodies?” I ask Phoebe.
“Lime,” she says. “I remember reading about it once. It keeps the smell of decomposition down. Pierre will need to be careful. It burns. He can’t get it on his skin.”
She points to him. He’s leaning down on the edge, trying to pull Giraude up. He’s got hold of one arm, but a heavier body lies sideways across her, and he can’t get her. He lets go and tries to push the man away. He’s using all his strength, but the angle is too difficult. I hear harsh cries escape his throat. It’s all right to shout and rage now—the tumbrels are gone. The men with shovels broadcast one last load of lime and then retreat to the shadows. It’s just us, him, the girl, the silent hundreds reeling.
“I’ll help you,” says the girl, coming up to Pierre. “Hand me down there.” Her voice is unutterably sweet. She’s got that small pang of childhood in her voice.
“What did she say?” asks Phoebe, and I translate the French for her. “God, no, she can’t go down there!”
She runs toward the girl but we are powerless. We’ve done nothing but give ourselves a bet
ter view of the horror in that pit, the lolled heads and their stricken faces, the bodies that look so crazy, so abjectly wrong, without the balancing head on top. The little girl climbs down into the pit with the assistance of Pierre, who knows he is asking too much of her, but has no other choice.
She stands unevenly, her booted feet astride the torso of an otherwise unseen woman, half buried under others. She’s light and lithe and can do the job Pierre can’t. She gestures to the body of Giraude, twisted as if she sleeps restlessly, and he nods.
“Yes, this one,” he says.
“She was so pretty and so brave,” says the girl. “She gave herself up.”
She bends and almost falls, her balance dependent on an uneven flooring of corpses. She regains herself and pushes at the large man atop Giraude, her effortful grunt turning triumphant as he rolls off. She grins up at Pierre, who quickly pulls her back up out of that atrocious playground no child should ever witness, let alone set foot in.
And then together, each holding one arm, they pull Giraude’s form out and up. She doesn’t come easily, but with two working together, they are able to do it. Giraude’s head, tucked between her legs by the headman’s assistant, her skirts divided for the task, comes with her. Rigor mortis holds her thighs stiff, and it looks in some horrific way as if she were giving birth to her own head.
“Thank you, my sweet,” says Pierre to the girl, and he reaches into his pocket to give her a coin. She shakes her head but he insists, and she takes it. I’m glad. She may be an orphan making her own way on the streets . . . no adult has taken an interest in her whereabouts for the last six hours or so we’ve been here.
“May I help you in turn?” he asks.
Her face is ancient as the pagan stones you find sometimes in an abandoned field. “No,” she says. “There’s nothing I can do for my father and brother. I just wanted to know where they lie and to say my prayers.”
Pierre nods.
“Besides,” she adds, “they were in one of the first cartloads. They’re deep in; I don’t think I could fetch them out even with three men.”
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