by H. G. Parry
The figure dismissed the question with a wave of his hand. “We needed to talk. But I wasn’t expecting it to be here. Unless… Of course. This was where it happened.”
Against his will, Robespierre looked back at the house. Upstairs, the sound of a door bursting open; in the wake of the crash, outlines played against the lit window. His mother, slender and frail, leaping out of bed; two tall men that he knew without seeing bore the red cross of the Knights Templar across their chests. His father’s voice was loud, slurred with sleep or drink.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?”
Robespierre wanted to run to them. The back door was unlocked; it led to the inner staircase; he could be in his parents’ room in moments. He couldn’t move. His limbs were rooted in place by childhood terror. If they came out into the garden… If they found him…
“Whoever you are,” Robespierre said to the figure, as calmly as he could, “whatever you’re doing, make it stop.”
“This is your side of things, I’m afraid, not mine. As I said, I only wanted to talk. I came into your mind—or at least, the place where our minds could meet. I didn’t expect it to be quite so vivid. This is your mother’s arrest?”
Robespierre didn’t answer. Against the lit window, in terrible shadow theater, his mother’s arm was gripped by a large hand. She twisted against the table—the white table, at which she had sat only that evening making lace. He had watched, fascinated, as her deft fingers wove a thousand threads together, in and out, leaving something perfect in their wake. The table crashed to the floor.
“I read the records,” his visitor said. “The Knights Templar came for her when the neighbors reported a dead bird flying on broken wings outside the grounds. Necromancy. One of the unforgivable magics. She was sentenced, taken to the Bastille, and put to death within weeks. Strange, wasn’t it, that after hiding her abilities for so long, she would let a little thing like that destroy her. A dead bird.”
“You have no right to talk about her.” Robespierre had to speak tightly around the lump constricting his throat. “What do you want?”
The figure seemed not to hear him. “So you were out here, watching from the garden? A strange place to be at this time of night.”
“I heard them coming, that was all.” It sounded too defensive to his own ears. “I saw the sign on their carriage from my window. I slipped out the back door to hide.”
“From a Templar carriage coming up your street in the middle of the night? How perceptive of you. Or paranoid. And you didn’t think to wake your parents?”
“I never thought this would happen. It wasn’t my fault. I was six years old. I thought—Oh God.”
A scream shattered the night: a child’s scream. Charlotte, his little sister, woken to their house torn apart. He should have been there with her—he should still go to her now, in whatever memory or dream this was. He couldn’t move then, and he couldn’t move now. Terror gripped him too tightly. It was his mother’s voice that went to her.
“Don’t cry, Charlotte.” She was breathless, tearful, brave. He didn’t need to see her face to know what it looked like. “It’s all right. Tell Maximilien it’s all right. For God’s sake, won’t you at least let me say goodbye to them?”
No reply came from her captors. In all the times he had seen this in his memories, he had never once heard the voices of the Knights Templar. They must have spoken. He just couldn’t remember.
“Yes,” the figure in the dark said. “I understand why you came here.”
The front door slammed shut. Memory magnified the sound to the force of a gunshot. His stomach contracted, and he gripped the tree beside him. The garden now was quiet but for Charlotte’s cries, and those were spiraling down into whimpering, bewildered misery.
He had gone to her, back then. It had been far too late, and he had been clammy and knotted with fear, but he had at least gone inside then. This was where his nightmares usually ended. Yet here he stood, still, with the strange figure beside him. For a long time, he couldn’t speak.
“Who are you?” he repeated at last.
“In light of what I’ve just seen,” the figure said, “I would say that I’m someone who can help you out of the bushes. But it doesn’t do to get too metaphorical inside somebody’s head. You really have no idea what I am?”
“None at all.”
“Then I have you at a disadvantage. I know you very well. I know what happened to your mother. I know that your father abandoned you and your siblings soon after her death and left your family name in poverty and disrepute. I know about your years of schooling, your legal career, your friend Camille Desmoulins and his taste for the revolutionary. I know about your attempts to publish your pamphlets and essays; I’ve actually read them, unlike most. I know that you want to change France. I’ve come to make you a proposition.”
“And what might that be?”
“I can make people listen to you.”
Robespierre actually found a laugh at that. He had very little practice with laughter; it wasn’t surprising it came out closer to a choke. “To me? Forgive me, but if you know me as well as you claim, you’ll know that nobody listens to me. Nobody ever has.”
“Camille Desmoulins did, at university.”
“Yes, well.” The mention of his old school friend calmed him a little. “Nobody listens to Camille either. The only difference is, it doesn’t stop him talking. He wants a revolution.”
“So do you. Let’s not pretend, Robespierre. I told you, I know you.”
“So do I, then. But I don’t see how it can be brought about. Perhaps I lack Camille’s vision.”
“I’ve read his pamphlets as well. He writes better, but your vision is much further-reaching than his. And he lacks your particular magic.”
Any desire to laugh dried up. “What magic? What are you talking about?”
“I told you I knew you, didn’t I?” The figure paused, just a beat too long. “You have a strain of mesmerism in your blood. It’s dormant at the moment; the Templars noted it at your christening.”
“Oh.” Robespierre suspected he paused a beat too long as well. “Oh, that. Yes, it’s true; it comes from my father’s side, I presume. But—”
“It’s dormant. Quite so. But if it were awakened, you could nudge and influence. You’re not registered; nobody would suspect, if you were careful and clever, and you are both. You could save the illegal magicians you are so keen to represent, or at least have their sentences reduced to imprisonment rather than death.”
“Some would say a life in the Bastille is worse than death.”
“Not if France changes. They could be free in a few years. If things go according to plan, they could all be. That is my proposition: I can awaken your mesmerism and fire it to an extent that this country hasn’t seen for years. I can give you the strength to free France from its Templars and its Aristocracy and its oppression. The strength to be more than a poor lawyer from Arras. The strength to embody a revolution.”
A chill crept up his spine. It was both frightening and exhilarating, like stepping outside on a black, stormy night. “And what would you ask in return?”
“For the moment? Nothing at all.”
“Nobody asks for nothing,” Robespierre said flatly. “Not these days. If you know my life as well as you claim, you know that since my father left, nobody has ever given me anything except to make better use of me.”
“True,” the figure acknowledged. “And I do want to use you. But what if I wanted to use you for the good of France? What then?”
The garden was quiet now. Only the sound of Charlotte crying, and it was very faint. The light had gone off at the window.
As it happened, the Temple Church in Rheims had just as difficult a time comprehending the three English travelers as Pitt had predicted. In fact, the Templar in question took one look at them as Monsieur Coustier struggled to explain and decided they were sinister and possibly dangerous. Monsieur Coustier was either unwilling or
unable to translate his words to them, but it didn’t take them long to work out what des intrigants were.
“He thinks we’re spies,” said Wilberforce. He didn’t know whether to laugh or be very worried. His natural inclination was to laugh, but not if he was actually about to be tried for espionage.
“Frankly, I’m insulted for England,” Pitt said. “If he thinks our country doesn’t have better spies than three hopelessly disorganized twenty-four-year-olds who have blundered into the Temple Church because the wine ran out…”
“It doesn’t have better MPs,” Eliot pointed out. He was looking distinctly uneasy.
“Is he going to lock us up in prison?” Wilberforce asked.
“It would probably be an improvement on our hotel,” Pitt said.
They weren’t quite put into cells, though they were held in the waiting room for some hours while the Templar went to report to his superior that he had three Englishmen of very suspicious character, who their grocer claimed were very important gentlemen but who were staying in wretched lodgings with no attendants and no papers. By this time, Eliot was convinced they were all going to be locked up, Wilberforce was inclined to agree, and Pitt was so adamant that they weren’t that Wilberforce suspected he thought the same.
But they were young and privileged, and for them the world was still a kind one. As it happened, the Master Templar was a generous man who spoke excellent English. He listened to their explanation and, to their immense relief, accepted it. As a Master Templar, he explained, he was used to believing improbable things; besides, he had been twenty-four once himself. Within a matter of hours, they had moved from their disreputable lodgings to the Master’s very comfortable house—a huge improvement for everybody but the fleas.
For the next week, the Master delighted in letting them explore while he provided huge meals, long conversations, and the best wine France could offer. This was, it transpired, somewhat better than what they had been drinking. They went to the theater every night, understood less than one word in three of the plays, and spun their own increasingly nonsensical versions of the plots as they walked back under the stars.
And then, at last, they were invited to Fontainebleau, in order to be introduced at court.
Marie Antoinette, queen of France, was a highly accomplished fire-mage. The marriage, it was rumored, had been made to bring magical blood back into the royal line when it became plain that Louis XVI had inherited none of his own. She was also exquisitely beautiful, or, at least, knew how to use her ornate gowns, elaborate hairstyles, and impish smile to seem so. Word had reached her of their adventures with grocers and Knights Templar before they were introduced, and she plainly found them hilarious.
“I’m afraid you’ll find the company here far less exotic,” she said, laughing, in heavily accented English. “Only royals and Aristocrats, none of them at all interesting.”
This, of course, was not true. Royal courts throughout Europe were always riots of magic: the royal families were bred for the strongest Inheritances and the most magical bloodlines, and the favorites and hangers-on tended to be Aristocrats with at least a modicum of magical skill. George III in England was a very powerful shadowmancer, but he preferred to keep magic strictly regimented even among the royal family. His court was thick with unwoven spells. The court at Fontainebleau, by contrast, glittered with it. Both king and queen were fascinated by obscure bloodlines and magical practices, and it was not uncommon to see fireworks spark suddenly in the banquet hall or illusions clatter through the dining tables as though they were back at Cambridge amid a mess of rowdy Aristocratic undergraduates. Wilberforce had a fascinating conversation one night with a druid, the first he had ever met, and Eliot swore he had seen a unicorn in the surrounding forest. It led Wilberforce to assume that magic was far less restricted in France than in England as a whole, though Pitt disputed that as the three of them sat out on one of the balconies late one night.
“It’s really only that the Aristocracy use their magic more freely here,” he said. “Or at least, so I understand it. Their Commoners are still braceleted; the Temple Church operates by the same code; their Commoners caught using magic are locked in the Bastille as ours are in the Tower. I think the penalties are worse, actually. They give life sentences for unregistered magic here. And their bracelets burn hotter than ours when they detect magic stirring in the blood: it’s a punitive measure, rather than a warning.”
“It was very mundane in Rheims before we fell in with the Templars,” Eliot agreed. “Mundane, and a little grim, did you notice? Being here is like being in another world entirely. Everyone seems to be an Aristocrat and a magician. I’m not entirely sure how it is that we’re invited. I must admit, I feel rather like somebody’s going to find me out.”
“We all do, I think,” Wilberforce agreed. “Well, perhaps not you, Pitt, since you’re at least an Aristocrat.”
“In name only,” Pitt pointed out, almost defensively. “I was born a Commoner. My father wasn’t titled until I was seven.”
“Well, yes, Pitt,” Eliot said. “But before that, he was prime minister.”
It was actually something of a surprise to Wilberforce to realize how famous Pitt already was in France; partly, as Eliot said, for his parentage, but also for his skills, youth, and promise in office. There were moments when Wilberforce caught sight of him surrounded by the wealthy and the powerful and suddenly felt he couldn’t possibly have just spent a week in a wretched hotel drinking cheap wine with him.
Eliot still did not know of the night of the shadow. Wilberforce was not quite sure why, now that the danger had passed; he knew only that it felt like Pitt’s secret to keep or reveal, and as Pitt had said nothing about it, neither had he. He tried to dismiss it from his mind, and in their new surroundings it wasn’t difficult. Already, it seemed like a dream. But every so often he thought about it, and wondered.
A few weeks later, Wilberforce hurried up the stairs to their rooms, hot and dusty after a long walk through the surrounding forest. Pitt had returned earlier that afternoon with most of the party, but Wilberforce and Eliot had stayed on with the rest to walk what they were told was a very short loop in the trail. It had been longer than expected, and now he was cheerfully worn-out and facing the possibility of being late for dinner. They were all running out of good clothes to change into after so long spent at court, and Eliot had cursed the two of them for being such vastly different sizes that there was no possibility of swapping coats and shirts around.
Pitt’s door was ajar, so Wilberforce paused to rap his knuckles briskly on the wall panel alongside it.
“Come in,” came the absent reply.
Wilberforce duly stuck his head through the door. “I just thought I’d tell you we were back,” he said. “You missed the most incredible flowers—”
He paused, seeing that his friend wasn’t listening. Pitt was standing by the window overlooking the forests, studying a letter that he held tight in his hand. His face was unreadable, as it had not been all summer.
Wilberforce remembered the clatter of hooves against the courtyard cobblestones as he’d come in. “Has that come from England?”
Pitt nodded slowly, without looking up. “It requests that I return immediately. They’re forming a new government.”
Wilberforce entered the room and closed the door behind him instinctively. “When?”
“Now. Immediately. Which will probably mean after a few months of pitched battle, but things are set in motion.”
“And does it say…?” He trailed off, not sure how far he could go.
“Not in so many words,” Pitt said. “But yes. It does.”
For a second, Wilberforce wondered if he could have misunderstood what his friend had meant. He knew he hadn’t.
“The king wants you to head the government.”
“It’s far from settled.”
“But it’s what he wants.” His friend didn’t answer, which was all the answer he needed. He shook his head in
wonderment and tried to decide if he felt any trace of jealousy. A little, perhaps, though not for the reasons some might think. He had no desire for power, and certainly no desire to head the British government. But he knew that for Pitt, government wasn’t about power, or not solely. Pitt believed in serving the country—deeply, truly, to an extent Wilberforce had never seen in anyone else. This, to him, wasn’t an offer of a position, but a calling. If Wilberforce was jealous of anything, it was that he had never found that kind of calling himself.
“Are you going to accept?” he asked.
“I never said that I wanted it,” Pitt said, a little defensively. “I said that—”
“I know, that you had no great desire to come into the government in the first place, and you have no great reluctance to go out whenever the public were disposed to dismiss you from their service. I was there. It was excellent. I took notes.”
“I turned it down the first time the king suggested it to me.”
“You were twenty-three. Far too young. You’re a whole year older now.”
“I truly did mean it.”
“I never meant to imply you didn’t,” Wilberforce said, immediately dropping his light tone. He’d meant to make things less solemn, but that had been foolish. Of course they were solemn. “I believed you. I think everyone believed you. But you did want it to happen, at some point. In the back of your mind, you did go into politics hoping to head the government someday. Of course you did.”
“I suppose.” He shook his head. “Yes. Of course I did. I just didn’t expect it to be now.”
“I don’t think anyone could have reasonably expected that,” Wilberforce agreed. “But apparently it is now. Or it could be, if you accept. Are you going to accept?”
“Do you think I should?”
It wasn’t spoken with any particular import, but Wilberforce realized at once that it was an important question, and unexpectedly, his answer would be very important in turn. This, after all, was what they had been avoiding as they’d explored and laughed and reveled in being young idiots submerged in a foreign country. All this time, it had been waiting for them on the other side of summer.