Guns were fired in the distance, but not in the direction of the Bastille. “Where’s the gunfire coming from?”
“City Hall,” Watin said. “We have to hurry.”
She didn’t want to go the Hôtel de Ville and be subjected to more violence, but she couldn’t leave the safety of her companions.
The crowd was as thick, hot, and angry as it had been at the Bastille. There was a stink in the air as powerful as a physical blow. And it wasn’t unwashed bodies or gunpowder. It was the rot of death.
Watin grasped her hand firmly and led the way through the crowd, inching closer to the front of the Hôtel de Ville and the entrance to City Hall. “Stay close.” He didn’t have to remind her, or Jacques either. He followed closely behind, hovering at her shoulder.
“What are they saying? I can’t hear them,” she said.
“They’re debating how to kill de Launay.”
She squeezed Watin’s hand. “Haven’t they had enough blood today?”
“It’ll take more than killing to fill their empty bellies. I’ve got to stop this,” Jacques said.
“You can’t go out there,” Watin said. “You deprived them of killing the woman they thought was de Launay’s daughter. If you try to save him, they won’t let you walk away this time.”
She looked at the gaunt, angry faces of the men and women standing closest to her, all wearing red and blue cockades. If they knew the revolution would continue for the next ten years, would they be so eager to stand here today demanding justice?
Watin pointed. “The governor is being escorted to the front of City Hall. If he makes it through the front door it will be a miracle.”
“There’s de Launay,” a man yelled. “The Revolutionary Committee will decide his fate.”
The crowd shook their rakes and swords in the air, screaming.
“No. They won’t do anything,” another man yelled. “We need to decide his fate.”
A man close by yelled, “Drag him behind a horse over the cobblestones. Make him suffer.”
She turned away from the man, afraid he’d remember her from the Bastille. Don’t be ridiculous. There were thousands gathered there. No one would remember her.
But if anyone did recognize her, they’d want to kill her too, and Jacques wouldn’t be able to save her again. Needing a disguise, she untied her hair and let it fall over her shoulders and down her back. It wasn’t much, but it was all she had. She shrank behind Watin, once again hiding in plain sight.
“Why do they dislike him so much?” she asked.
“He’s a proud, stupid despot,” Watin said. “The prisoners and soldiers hate him. If he’d been willing to compromise like the officers at the Invalides, he could have avoided this.”
De Launay’s eyes darted from one side of the mob to the other, and she felt sorry for him. He must have realized it was futile to fight, and his only hope was to avoid a lingering death. Showing a frantic burst of energy, he shouted, “Let me die.” Then to hasten his own death, he kicked a man squarely in the genitals with his heavy riding boot. It was a brutal kick, and the victim screamed and writhed on the ground.
“Kill him. Kill him,” the crowd chanted.
Sophia flashed back to the angry mob screaming for her death. The horror of what almost happened and the sickening reality playing out within feet of her was overwhelming.
“This isn’t right.” Jacques made a move to intervene, but Watin stopped him.
“Stay out of it.”
The mob attacked de Launay viciously, piercing his body with pitchforks and bayonets.
She jerked back and slapped her hands over her face. “Oh, God. Oh, God. Why?”
De Launay, horribly wounded, toppled into the gutter, still alive, anguished moans pouring out of him, but it wasn’t enough for the mob. Several men fired their pistols into his twisting body.
She was sickened by the sight. When a man attacked de Launay’s neck with a saw, her stomach cramped. “I have to get out of here.”
The crowd surged forward to watch the decapitation, separating her from Watin and Jacques. The harder the mob pushed, the wider the separation, until she could no longer see them. The crazed mob formed a circle around the beheading. Frantically looking around, she spied an opening in the crowd, allowing her to escape for the second time.
But where was she going? And she hadn’t said goodbye to Jacques and Léopold.
She couldn’t wait around to find them. She had to get as far away as possible.
She was about a mile from the Palais Royal. She could go back there and decide what to do. Maybe one of the shop owners could give her a lead on where to sell her pearls or find a place to stay. The farther from the Hôtel de Ville, the quieter the city, and the safer she felt.
When she reached the Palais Royal, she kept going, passing the Tuileries Palace and the Place Louis XV, walking briskly down the Champs-Élysées, her footfalls echoing back from the rows of trees lining both sides of the wide dirt avenue.
There were a few people hurrying by in carriages and on foot, and an old, snorting horse pulling a cart with creaking wheels, but compared to where she’d been, she could have been on the other side of the moon.
The ache in her side forced her to stop and rest.
A stiff breeze picked up, rustling the branches and sighing through the grass. It would be easy to believe she had imagined the horrors she just witnessed, except she was dirty, her boots were covered with muck, and while she could probably reclaim her wig from Jacques’s studio, she’d permanently lost her hat.
She leaned against a wrought iron fence at the rue de Berri guarding the entrance to a mansion. The residence’s façade glowed in the afternoon sunshine while the sun blinked back from leaded, paned windows.
Ahead of her stood a massive gate, one of dozens in the wall circling Paris, placed there to collect taxes from farmers when they came to town to sell their produce. Some portions of the Wall of the Farmers General still existed in the twenty-first century, like the rotunda of the Parc Monceau.
The city gates opened, and a man on horseback and wearing a dark green coat trotted through. A tricorn hat sat atop sandy-colored hair. His broad shoulders and strong arms exerted expert control over the stallion beneath him.
He continued on through the second gate leading to the mansion, where he swung down from the saddle with athletic grace. He handed the reins to a servant dressed in livery, and they spoke briefly, although she was too far away to hear what was said. The horse nickered and pressed his big face against the servant’s shoulder.
The man—tall, slender, square-shouldered, with a long face and high nose—was familiar to her. She pressed her nose against the fence for a better view, and wrapped her fingers around the bars, hoping he would turn her way. He cocked his chin slightly, and his eyes, deeply carved below bushy eyebrows gazed at her.
Oh merda! Thomas Jefferson.
He was more handsome than in any painting she’d ever seen of him, and she had an uncanny ability to remember details of art she’d seen in person. He was also handsomer than the bust by the greatest sculptor of Jefferson’s time, Jean-Antoine Houdon, considered to be the definitive image of Jefferson. The bust portrayed him as an intellectual and idealistic statesman with his strong brow above a knowing half-smile. Gazing into his face—a living, breathing face—her memory collided with reality.
They homed in on each other for a moment in shocked silence.
The power and intelligence flashing in the widening of his eyes consumed all thoughts of Houdon’s bust and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her only interest right now was painting him exactly as he looked at this moment. His eyes, and the passion gleaming there, were permanently imprinted on her brain.
“Excusez-moi monsieur.” She waved, hurrying through the wide-open gate. Jefferson removed his tricorn and tucked it under his arm. Unaware of the yard’s hazards, she stepped in a pothole—too deep and too narrow to step out of unharmed. She wrenched her knee
and face-planted against his rock-solid chest, shrieking.
Jefferson tossed his hat aside and grabbed one of her pinwheeling arms. “Oh, mon Dieu.” He adjusted his grip and prevented what would have been a very nasty fall. Then he swooped her up into his arms. It all happened in a split second, long enough for another surge of adrenaline to explode through her and temporarily block the pain of her knee injury.
He smelled of leather and outdoors, sunshine and possibility. Her senses rose up with primitive sharpness, and she tried to count the rapidly increasing beats of her heart—seventy, eighty-five, a hundred or more. He seemed to take up the whole of the outside, as if he absorbed all of Paris, leaving only his solid arms and broad chest.
All sorts of things passed through her brain, including where could she find a sheet of paper and pencil?
Then excruciating knee pain reminded her she’d been dumped in the middle of the French Revolution, thanks to the maledetto brooch, and no good could possibly come of that.
4
Paris (1789)—Sophia
A leather-scented silence rolled over her, warming the air, and Sophia breathed it in deeply. If only she could breathe out the knee pain in equal measure, she would enjoy the moment.
Thomas Jefferson hadn’t simply swallowed her world, he’d become it. And in the bright sunlight, his intense, deep-set blue eyes gazing down at her changed from blue to gray and back again.
“Est-tu blessée?”
His accent, a combination of colonial British with a bit of Scots thrown in, was mesmerizing. In response to his question, she could only shake her head. Slowly, her heart rate returned to its usual pace, and her nerves settled down and smoothed away their jagged edges.
Jefferson carried her up several steps to what appeared to be the residence’s main entrance, while the heat radiating from him further soothed her shattered nerves. He ducked below the lintel before pausing momentarily in a vestibule. A patch of new sunlight shone through the transom onto his red hair, and she nearly wept, not from throbbing knee pain, but solely because she didn’t have a paintbrush in hand.
Her brain snapped pictures of him instead. Click. Click. Click.
She had to paint him. Right now. She nibbled the corner of her lower lip as she mentally fit him into a frame, zeroing in on his most prominent features—angular nose, pointed chin, long neck, freckled complexion, and reddish hair turning sandy as it grayed. But his grayish blue eyes were his most arresting feature.
The reception hall led into a circular salon and smelled of lilies and polish. She was about to tell him to set her down anywhere when she noticed the domed ceiling with an oval painting of a white, winged horse pulling a chariot. She leaned back against his shoulder and gazed appreciatively at the extraordinary artwork. It had to be an allegorical painting of the one on the ceiling of the Apollo Salon at Versailles by Charles de La Fosse.
The painting at Versailles, along with the room’s stuccos, recently underwent restoration, as she learned from an art blogger who posted regularly on the project. Jefferson’s ceiling might have been done by Jean-Simon Berthélemy, who’d been commissioned to paint the ceilings in the Palais du Louvre and other palaces. This could be one of his. The room was rich with the ambiance of a museum.
She pushed aside her study of art and returned to her study of Jefferson, preparing to paint him exactly as he looked at this moment—curious yet concerned. But even with those emotions flickering over his face, the intelligent man she knew him to be was evident in the set of his jaw and the way he carried his height with natural grace. His arms weren’t quivering from the strain of carrying her up the stairs, and the taut skin on his face had a ruddy hue that would likely disappear when his heart rate, elevated from a brisk horseback ride and carrying her, returned to normal.
A black ribbon held his thick, full hair just below his collar, and her fingers itched to untie it, to let his hair fall free. Her mind went immediately to working out a composition, drawing imaginary straight lines, laying out her painting on canvas, constructing the armature to support his portrait. She wanted to paint him as he was at this crucial time in his life, when cascading events in his public and private lives led him to live vibrantly in France while fretting constantly about America.
Her shoulders, the small of her back, and her knee were all shooting warning pains up and down her body, but she somehow managed a smile, her cheeks warming slightly. “I sprained my knee. It hurts, but I’ve gone through worse today.”
He let out a bark of laughter, and the sound was richer than she could have imagined. “You speak English.” Not waiting for a response, he carried her to a sofa with a serpentine high back and gently set her down.
The blue-silk upholstery was cool and soft beneath her.
“I’m Sophia Orsini from New York City. I’ve been living in Florence for the past few years.” Now the obfuscation would start, as it always did when she traveled back in time. She had trained herself to react quickly, to be creative in her responses, but to always keep her story as close to the truth as possible.
Her knee needed icing. Did they even have ice in 1789? “I was traveling with a companion, but we were separated when a mob confiscated our carriage and raced toward the Hôtel des Invalides to steal muskets.” This was the sixth time she’d used some variation of the missing companion and stolen carriage and luggage story, and so far it had always worked.
He rested one hand on his hip, the other he raked through his hair to the ribbon in a masculine gesture she adored—silly as it sounded. In the room’s natural light, tiny lines fanning from the outer corners of his eyes were visible.
“I’m sorry for your misfortune,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do, but first I’ll send word to a physician to call on you immediately. He can give you laudanum for pain.”
“That’s not necessary. I’m sure all available physicians are at the Bastille, but if you have any ice, it will help with the swelling.”
“I’m not familiar with the use of ice on injuries.”
“Ice reduces swelling and inflammation, and eases pain by numbing the affected area. It works on migraines, too. Cold constricts blood vessels and helps reduce the neurotransmission of pain to the brain. Instead of registering pain, it registers, ‘Oh, that’s cold.’” Okay, maybe neurotransmission was a bit too much.
He gave her an odd, disbelieving look.
“Trust me, it works.”
“I’ll try it on my next migraine.” Jefferson called with a slightly raised voice, “Mr. Petit.”
A man dressed as a butler appeared in the salon immediately, as if he’d been standing close by waiting for a call.
“Bring a bucket of ice—” Jefferson said.
“Ice chips,” Sophia said. “And a towel, please.”
“A bucket of ice chips and a towel,” Mr. Petit said. “What size chips do you require?”
Jefferson looked at her with a raised eyebrow. “Mr. Petit is my maître d’hôtel. What size ice chips should he bring?”
Her sternum was tender, but it didn’t ache as much as her knee. Both places needed ice packs but, dressed as she was, it would be impossible to ice. “Small. Pebble size.”
“And a towel?” Mr. Petit asked.
“I’ll add ice chips to the towel and wrap it around my knee. The cold will reduce the swelling and pain.”
After Mr. Petit left with his instructions, Jefferson said, “You mentioned a mob going to the Hôtel des Invalides to steal muskets. Did they get the weapons? And how long ago did this happen?” His voice sounded strange…far away, as if someone else was asking on his behalf.
“A few hours ago. But that’s not the worst of it.”
He moved to an open window facing the Champs-Élysées, as if from this distance he could see what was happening. The Bastille was almost four miles away, but even in the quiet countryside surrounding Jefferson’s mansion, a low rumble could be heard over the occasional shouting of men standing guard at the nearby gate.
&
nbsp; “Did you witness what happened at the Invalides?”
She dropped her eyes for a moment, not wanting to relive any of it, but she knew he needed a report. “I got caught up in an angry and aggressive mob. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get out.
“After they got the guns, they stormed the Bastille. The rioters shot the guards, and the guards shot the rioters. They finally breached the drawbridge into the third courtyard and gained control of the gunpowder. A bit later they escorted the governor to City Hall, but refused to hand him over to the States-General, and brutally murdered him.” The mental images flashed in front of her mind’s eye, and she shook them away before they could make her sick.
The hurried click of bootheels on the hardwood floor grew louder until a younger man, dressed more fashionably than Jefferson in a brown coat, embroidered waistcoat, and a linen shirt with decorative cuffs, entered the salon carrying Jefferson’s hat. While he also cut a striking figure, he didn’t have Jefferson’s commanding presence. In fact, he was gawky.
“Mr. Jefferson…” The man’s Southern voice was alarmed, and his gaze jumped between Jefferson and Sophia.
“If you’re going to tell me Parisians stormed the Bastille, Mademoiselle Orsini has already informed me.”
“I couldn’t get close enough to see what was happening, but I heard the screams and cannon fire. I returned immediately to tell you.”
“I need to see the situation with my own eyes so I can report accurately to Secretary Jay.”
“You shouldn’t…” She caught herself, knowing she saw the events of the day through a unique lens, from a future perspective, not a present-day one, and her words had to be measured carefully. “I mean…”
The Pearl Brooch Page 5