by H. G. Parry
The Estates General was composed of three parties: the First Estate, the Knights Templar; the Second Estate, the Aristocracy; and the Third and largest, the Commoners. The three groups had not assembled in more than two hundred years. The king was ordering them to do so now only because, after a year of hopeless deadlock, he had still not managed to pass any new restrictions on Aristocratic or Commoner magicians. The Parlement of Paris was proving particularly obstinate; most thought cynically that their main objective was to exercise their power to annoy the king. Yet the outrage over the proposed magic laws was genuine, and it was not going away.
The king, then, was relying on the combined forces of the Knights Templar and the Aristocracy to support his wishes at the Estates General, and to subdue any rebellious Commoners who might be elected to the Third Estate. In this, he had miscalculated greatly. The Knights Templar’s numbers had declined in recent years, and their powers likewise. The Aristocracy were divided among themselves over whether their allegiance lay with their monarch or their fellow human beings starving on the streets. And the Commoners would not be subdued.
“The meeting is set for early next year,” Robespierre said. “I need to be there.”
Charlotte frowned. “In Paris?”
“At Versailles. At the meeting. I need to be elected to represent the Third Estate.”
His sister must have known what he had meant from the first, but her face still registered doubt. “You’re a provincial lawyer, Maximilien. You have no experience in politics.”
“Until now, I’ve had no opportunity. Things are changing. Or they will, if we can make them. I need to make sure of that as well.”
There was clearly more she could have said; the look she gave him implied that she was doing him a great favor by not doing so. Perhaps she was startled out of her usual sarcasm by his excitement. He was usually a creature of such quiet, unalterable habit.
“Well, you need to eat first,” she contented herself with saying. “I’ve put dinner on the table.”
“I’ve no time, I’m afraid.” He embraced her quickly as he moved past her, to lessen the sting, but he nonetheless moved past. Brount followed him, wagging his tail. This, at least, was habitual. “There’s a meeting in the town hall tomorrow to discuss the elections. I need to prepare. I’ll be up in my study.”
“It’s called a bedroom.”
He ignored this. He didn’t see why a room with both a bed and a desk couldn’t be a study as well as a bedroom. Certainly he worked more than he slept.
“Oh, did we hear from Camille as well?” he asked, turning on the stairs. “I think he’s in Paris at the moment.”
She rolled her eyes, on firmer ground. “You and that Camille.”
“You’ve never even met Camille.” He managed to keep his patience. “We haven’t seen each other since school.”
“I don’t have to meet him to know he’s unstable. The way he writes about this meeting is downright dangerous. I don’t understand what he wants half the time. I don’t think he does, except that it involves fire and blood and people shouting in the streets.”
“So we did hear from him.” He had long since given up trying to stop Charlotte from reading his letters.
“Of course we did. He intends to stand for deputy as well, back in Guise—There! I saw that face.”
“I didn’t make a face.”
“You did,” she countered, triumphant. “You know very well he has no chance of being elected. They have no regard for him in his hometown. Why should they? He’s only there when he runs out of money and has to return to his parents, and when he is, he offends everyone. And God knows what he gets up to in Paris.”
“No worse than most get up to in Paris,” Robespierre said, although for all he knew it was perhaps a little worse. Camille knew better than to tell him. “Well. If he isn’t elected, I’m sure he’ll find a way to be in the city.”
“No doubt. He wants to throw what’s left of his legal career aside for one as a pamphleteer, from what I can tell. I’m not sure how he plans to pay for it—or who he thinks will publish him. Frankly, what he writes, nobody would dare.”
“He’s very clever. And very excited.”
“So he probably hasn’t considered either question.”
He had to concede that she was probably right, on all counts. Camille Desmoulins at university had been all light and shadows, fire and joy, dancing from thought to thought like a dragonfly over surface water. Robespierre, whose ideas ran deeper and more serious, had found it difficult to keep up; though he was barely two years older, he often felt like a parent struggling after a precocious child. Yet he knew Camille could see his vision for France, and share it: the country of free magic and free ideas and free people. And though Camille’s temper tended to burn hot and fast while Robespierre’s, once lit, never went out, their anger smoldered very well together.
“He’ll be in Versailles if it kills him,” he told Charlotte. “As will I.”
When Robespierre finally fell asleep that night, he woke once more in the garden.
He was accustomed to this by now. Many times over the last five years, he had found himself in the darkness, surrounded by swishing grass and the scent of dying roses. The house had been quiet since the first time, though sometimes a light burned at the window. Each time, his benefactor had been standing on the path, waiting. And each time, he had stood before a court the following day and felt his eyes blaze with secret mesmerism. Under his influence, prisoners had been acquitted of illegal magic, received lesser sentences for theft, and escaped death by the gibbet. It was exhausting, but it was exhilarating, feeling others’ minds open to him, reaching out and pushing them to his will, seeing justice done and things set right.
This time was different. His benefactor was not standing; a latticed table and set of chairs were on the lawn, and he was seated there. The night sky was clouded, and the breeze in the air had the sting of a building storm.
“Maximilien Robespierre,” his benefactor said, as he did every time. Robespierre had long suspected it was not a greeting, but a necessary component of the magic that brought them together. What that magic was, he had never been able to discover. There was little access to magical theory in Arras, and he was forced to be careful not to arouse suspicion. He was practicing illegal magic himself now. He couldn’t save France from within the Bastille, and certainly not from beyond the grave.
“I thought I might see you tonight,” Robespierre said.
“I read in the papers that Mademoiselle Dubois was acquitted of illegal magic.”
“She was,” Robespierre said. That had been two weeks ago; in the recent excitement, he had nearly forgotten. Elle Dubois was a maid in the house of a local Aristocrat; she had, at thirteen, unexpectedly manifested strong telekinesis. The Aristocrat in question had responded by locking her in a cellar and calling the Knights Templar; when her father remonstrated, he was arrested for assault. “Thank you for your assistance. She was braceleted and released without charge. But her father could not be saved. He had already been sent to prison by lettre de cachet. I condemned that entire rotten practice, I felt your power in my words, and yet—”
“Exactly. The condemnation was the important thing. People heard it, and they felt the injustice of a father imprisoned on the whim of an Aristocrat for trying to protect his little daughter. I know you find it gratifying to free the weak, and that certainly has its place, but a revolution needs blood—the blood of martyrs as well as the blood of kings.” He waved a hand at the empty chair. “Sit down, Maximilien. There’s something we need to discuss.”
Robespierre sat, cautiously. It was the closest he had ever been to his benefactor. In the faint light through the clouds, he could see lean, sculpted features and eyes that seemed unnaturally large and dark.
“I need your help tomorrow,” he said before his benefactor could speak. “There’s—”
“I know what there is. And yes. You certainly do need my help, tomorrow and in
the coming months. But first, I need something from you. Tonight.”
“Tonight?” Robespierre frowned. “I don’t understand. I’m still only a lawyer. If I were to be elected to the Estates General…”
His benefactor smiled, a visible shifting of shadows on his face. “What kind of help do you imagine I require?”
“I assumed… I thought the aim of this exercise was to put me in a position to change things. Laws, working conditions, and so forth. You’re clearly an illegal magician. I imagined, at some point, you would want a specific law changed for you. I thought you wanted a society where magic was free.”
“I see. Very logical, based on what you know of the world. And quite true, of course. But not tonight. Tonight, I only need your magic.”
“You want me to mesmerize somebody?”
“No.” He paused. “Have you never wondered why I approached you in the first place? I mean why I approached you, specifically. There are hundreds of unregistered magicians in the country, or people with latent powers who could become magicians with my help. If I had needed a mesmer, there are many I could have chosen. Why would I come to you?”
“I never thought about it.”
“Not true. You thought about it. You almost asked, at the time. But you were too afraid of the answer.”
“Very well.” Robespierre tilted his head and tried to squash the swirl of fear in his stomach. “Give me the answer. Why me? What do you need from me, if not mesmerism?”
“Necromancy,” his benefactor said.
The garden was silent. A single light kindled in the top window of the house. By the faint illumination, Robespierre stared at his benefactor. As always in their dreamworld, the face in front of him was sharp and well defined, but he knew now that his mind’s eye had never been clear at all.
He swallowed hard before he managed to speak. “I’m not—”
“Don’t lie.” For the first time, the cultured voice was laced with the scorn Robespierre recognized from childhood tormentors. Yet still, it was not unkind. It was almost affectionate. “You can’t lie very effectively here, haven’t you noticed that? And in any case, I know the truth. You’re a necromancer. You’re the only living necromancer in France, perhaps in all of Europe.”
“I’m not.” He could hardly breathe. His rapidly beating heart needed more air than the garden held. “I can’t—How do you know?”
“I’ve always known, in the same way I knew about your mesmerism. I can feel it in your blood. I felt it from very far away. It glitters in the darkness, like a strain of black jade in weathered rock. I felt it kindle all those years ago. It was here in the garden, wasn’t it? It was the reason your mother died.”
Robespierre said nothing. In the lit room of the house, footsteps echoed, and shadows moved against the window.
“You were six years old. You found a dead bird. You were sad it was dead; you grieved for it. The magic flowed from you, animating limbs and cartilage and frail wings. A late manifestation, though not so late as some. The bird flew away on that first burst of your power and fell dead outside the garden walls.”
“I didn’t find the bird.” The words were torn from him in short bursts like gasps. Mesmerism, it had to be, the lightest, most skillful touch he had ever heard of. But if his benefactor was already a mesmer himself, then… “It was mine. I raised it. My sisters—Charlotte and Henriette, before Henriette died—they begged me to let them look after it. They killed it. They left it out in a storm, and it died of terror. It wasn’t their fault. They were too young. I should never have let them. It was so beautiful. I couldn’t bear… How do you know this?”
(Inside the house, he heard his mother’s voice. “It’s me you want.” She sounded so calm. How could she be? How could she have been so brave, when he was always so frightened? “There’s no need to shout. I’ll come with you.”)
“She had the gift as well, of course,” his benefactor said. He was looking up at the window. “It was from her you had inherited it. They never looked once they had found her; they should have retested you all, of course, but tests are so expensive. She exposed herself to hide you, and died for you. She stepped up to them and let them put a hangman’s noose around her neck, all to protect you. And you have never been able to forgive them, or yourself.”
(His sister was screaming. “It’s all right,” his mother said. “Tell Maximilien it’s all right.”)
“What are you?” Robespierre whispered.
“You know what I am. You’ve always known what I am.” His benefactor stood. “This is no time for forgiveness, Maximilien, not after all these years. This is a time of blood and fire and revolution.”
For just a moment, Robespierre forgot his horror. “The revolution is really coming, then?”
“It’s almost upon us. And we need to be ready for it.”
There was no choice. Not now. He wondered now if there had ever been. “What do you need of me?”
“All of you,” his benefactor said. “Eventually. But for this occasion, I need you only to do exactly what I say.”
Early that morning, Charlotte Robespierre opened the back door to find her brother shivering on the step. A coat was thrown roughly over his shirt and breeches, and his face was streaked with dirt. He flinched at her touch before he appeared to recognize her.
“Maxime!” She lowered her voice as he motioned her to be quiet. “God. What happened?”
“Nothing,” he said hoarsely. He staggered to his feet, brushing aside her help. “Don’t touch me. Don’t ask me any questions. Please. I need to clean up. They’ll be meeting in the town hall this morning…”
“Something clearly happened! You’re not the sort of person who—”
“Please.” His face was enough to silence her. However annoyed she was by her elder brother’s rigid pride, she could never bear the rare moments when it collapsed. What lay beneath it was so terrifyingly vulnerable.
“All right.” She wanted, unexpectedly, to reach out to him, but he had told her not to touch him. “I’ll get you some clean clothes. But you can’t possibly go to the meeting. Look at you. You’re freezing.”
“I’ll warm up.” He managed a shadow of a smile for her. “It’s been a long night—a horrible night—but I’m quite well. I don’t want to talk about it. I need to be at the meeting.”
A few hours later, Maximilien Robespierre joined the thronging crowd at the town hall. There were so many people that they spilled out into the courtyard, where they listened encircled by winter trees and graceful white buildings. Some who saw young Robespierre get up to speak noted that he looked rather pale, even by his standards. Yet those who heard him agreed that he had never sounded so convincing.
London
November 1788
I refused to eat the food they gave me. I knew not what it was, nor what it would do. I knew only that I wanted to die, and that food would force me to live. They came to me on the second day and held red-hot coals to my lips, and told me that if I didn’t swallow my dinner, I would be made to swallow those. I spoke no English then, but I understood their meaning. By then, the people around me were already lost.”
Clarkson’s voice, often dry and even bitter, was surprisingly soft as he read the words by candlelight. Around him, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade listened. They were silent, without even a gasp or a shudder, but their silence was heavy with revulsion.
They were an intelligent, passionate collection of people, and Wilberforce had come to know them very well over the last year. The oldest, Granville Sharp, was a Commoner lawyer who had been fighting for the individual rights and liberties of freed slaves on British soil for as long as Wilberforce had been alive; the youngest, Zachary Macaulay, was barely twenty, freshly returned from working at a slave plantation in Jamaica and still in the first grip of disgust at what he had seen there. Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano had come to the meeting from the Sons of Africa, the group of twelve ex-slaves working to end slavery and ai
d London’s poor black community. Hannah More, the brilliant playwright and scholar, sat by the fire, her face grave as she made notes in a tiny book. Outside Wilberforce’s house in Old Palace Yard, just across the courtyard from Parliament, the late autumn night was dark and rain-scattered; inside, discussion burned hot and bright.
“That was from a freed woman now living in London,” Clarkson said, lowering the paper. “But I have a good deal more from sailors who have worked or still work on the vessels. I spoke to over a hundred of them this summer.”
“They’re willing to speak out against their own trade?” Macaulay asked.
Clarkson’s mouth twitched. “With a few drinks in them.”
“They suffer too,” Wilberforce explained. “Not just in their conscience: overcrowding and disease kill a good many of the crew. Many of them just won’t speak openly because of the power of the merchants. Can we distribute that testimony to the public as soon as possible, Clarkson? The sailors’, too, preferably. They’d complement each other.”
“It’s being done,” Clarkson said. “And Miss More’s poem on slavery is still causing a stir.”
“I read it in Windermere.” He turned to the dark-eyed older woman next to him and found a smile in the wake of the lingering pain of Clarkson’s report. “It was magnificent. Truly. I read it to everyone I could find in my house—which was quite a number of people, considering. Some of them I’d forgotten were staying with us at all.”
“Did they all share your opinion?” Hannah More asked with a raised eyebrow.
“I wouldn’t have had them in my house if they didn’t.”
“That’s very gratifying, thank you.” She meant it, too, though her intelligent face was serious once more. “Sadly, it doesn’t in itself free slaves. My sister and I want to publish a pamphlet too, about our findings on the detrimental effects of spellbinding, but I doubt it will be well received. Most aren’t interested in our kind of scholarship.”
The More sisters were part of a growing group of braceleted Commoners who had taken to studying magic on a purely academic level. Many of them were women or members of religious sects unwilling to bind themselves to the Knights Templar—Miss More, a Quaker, was both. The Templars didn’t like it, of course, but as long as the Commoners never acted upon their studies, there was nothing they could do about it.