by H. G. Parry
“I told you. It starts with the death of the king. You need to impose order. He’s in your power now.”
In his sleep, Robespierre tossed restlessly. “It’s not my decision.”
“But the people listen to you now. They trust you. If you tell them to kill the king, they’ll do it in the end.”
Robespierre struggled to put his feelings into words. “I’ve always hated capital punishment. It’s wrong.”
It was beginning to sound weak to his ears: more like a matter of taste than a moral precept.
“You’ve always hated injustice,” his benefactor said. “The monarchy has been at the heart of it for generations. It’s no betrayal of your principles to see it dead.”
“It would mean war with England. They’ve been holding back thus far. They won’t be able to look the other way if we do this. And it will be a war of magic, sooner or later.”
“Then we’ll be at war with England, and it will be a war of magic. It was inevitable in the end. We’re already at war with half of Europe.”
“I’ve always been opposed to that war as well. I hoped to end it.”
“Back when it was still the king’s war, a war of tyranny. Without the king, this will be a war of free people defending their ideals. A war of liberty. If it’s the price we have to pay for liberty, is it so great?”
“Why does it matter to you?” Robespierre asked, with a flash of insight. He so rarely questioned what his benefactor wanted, or why he asked what he did. In some ways, he wasn’t a person at all, just a dark figure in his mind who voiced things that Robespierre himself would never dare. But he wasn’t just in Robespierre’s mind. He existed somewhere in the world. And he had an agenda of his own. “What do you want?”
“I told you. I want France freed from the monarchy.”
“Yes, of course. But we’ve deposed Louis, and still you’re not content. What does his death gain for France that his deposition doesn’t? You must have something in mind.”
His benefactor fell silent. “I want the monarchy destroyed,” he said eventually, “because it threatens France. But I also want the king destroyed because I intend to set another in his place.”
“Another king?”
“No more kings. Another leader. Someone who will lead France to its natural destiny.”
Robespierre’s heart quickened. “Is it me?” he asked bluntly. “Is that what this has been about?”
“Would you like it to be you?”
“You think I want power. I don’t, not for its own sake. I never have. But I want the France in my head. The France where all are free, and equal, and at peace. To bring that about—yes, I would be that leader.”
“Then,” his benefactor said, “you need to do what is necessary. Besides, Robespierre, you do owe me.”
The garden dissolved after that; a moment later, Robespierre opened his eyes to his sloping bedroom ceiling.
He lay there, staring up at it, for a long time. His thoughts circled, backtracked, swarmed. The occasional scream drifted in from the night outside, and the clash of pikes.
By the time the results of the elections came in, the violence had ended, or perhaps there was nobody left to kill. The National Convention was made of 749 deputies from all over France. Danton was elected the second of Paris’s twenty-four delegates; Camille was the sixth. Robespierre’s brother, Augustin, was—to Robespierre’s surprise and pleasure—nineteenth. Robespierre was first.
It was at the opening of the first National Convention that the bracelets were finally removed. Danton and his temporary government had insisted upon it from the moment they took the palace, and nobody left dared to oppose it. The last of the Knights Templar had either fled the country or been killed in the September massacres. Anybody who attempted to assume their role, at this point, would have been quickly made to join them. Magicians had taken the palace and liberated France from the monarchy at last. Support for free magic had never been so strong.
The moment when the clasps unlocked and the air resounded with the thud of metal hitting the ground was among the most beautiful of Robespierre’s life. For the second time, he could almost wish he had a bracelet, just so he could watch it fall.
Camille didn’t wait for his to fall; he wrenched it off before it was even fully open, and flung it across the room so hard it chipped a column and spun sideways into the crowd. There were mixed cheers and laughter from the people—and, probably, a cry of pain from whoever had been hit by it at full speed.
“We did it,” he whispered to Robespierre as they filed in with the other delegates. He was trembling. “We actually did it.”
Robespierre didn’t remind him that there was far more work to come. Camille knew that. He looked down at his friend’s bare wrist, blanched and scarred from thirty years of burning metal, and gave a rare smile. “We did it,” he agreed.
Robespierre was indeed an intelligent man. He had learned two things from the September massacres. First, the people could not be held back from their desire for blood, and this being the case, it was best that the government distribute death so that it could be sated without mass slaughter. He still hoped that France could free itself from the death penalty entirely, but plainly the time was not right. Second, as long as there needed to be death, such death could be used as a weapon—but not as Danton had used it, looking the other way and leaving it to chance and the whims of a mob. That caused more suffering than it prevented. There would have to be another way.
Under the old regime, a swift execution by beheading was reserved for the Aristocracy. Commoners were hung, often after long and pointless torture. That could not be the case under the Republic of Magicians: if there must be capital punishment, Robespierre proposed in the Convention, it should be democratic, easy, and painless for all. Death by the sword was too messy and inefficient for large groups, when the slightest wriggle of a shoulder could send the blade glancing off the base of a skull or into a spine. Fortunately, technology had progressed as rapidly as ideologies.
Almost at once, the guillotine was set up near the Tuileries, at what was now being called the Place de la Révolution.
After that, Robespierre set about planning the death of the king.
London
October 1792
When the ripples of the monarchy’s downfall reached England, they stirred a contradictory swirl of public emotion. The conservative were horrified; the radical were filled with violent exultation. Fox and his party sent public letters of congratulations to the French government; the Aristocrats among them fired off bursts of magic from their club, which were legal but considered in very poor taste. Many who had supported the Revolution now turned against it. Others, already angered by the government’s rejection of magical reforms the year before, turned toward it.
All these reactions, from Wilberforce’s point of view, were equally dangerous. His hopes of turning the House around to anything that looked like abolition or reform dwindled with every angry shout.
He had been struggling against overwork and despair since Clarkson’s arrest. This, apparently, was a weight too far. One morning he woke from broken sleep with his old wound twisting viciously, burning with fever and too weak to rise from his bed. Thornton insisted he go to Bath, where he could seek treatment at the famed magic springs; the prospect was made more enticing by Hannah More, who invited him to come and recuperate with her afterward in nearby Mendip.
“You’ll love Mendip,” Eliot coaxed him at his bedside, having visited Hannah More there himself the year before. “Cheddar Gorge is one of the most spectacular natural wonders I’ve seen outside the Lake District. When you’re feeling strong enough, you can get them to show you around. Harriot and I would come too, if it weren’t for the child, you know.”
Eliot’s offhand tone made Wilberforce smile, despite the icy tendrils shooting up his side. “Oh, are you two having a child, Eliot?” he asked, mock sincere. “Really, you should have mentioned it before.”
“Oh, shut u
p,” Eliot said, but he was grinning. “When you finally find the time to marry and start a family, you’ll talk of little else yourself. Honestly, Wilber, get out of London before you kill yourself. You’ll be with like-minded people the entire time, so you can discuss the slave trade as much as you like. Pitt and I can keep you informed of everything that’s happening in town. And you know you’ll be of no use to anyone in January if you’re not stronger.”
This last was undeniably true.
Cheddar Gorge, when he was well enough to walk it, was indeed glorious: a massive split in the land, draped over with rambling woods and flowers, with rare wildlife teeming in every crevice. Yet Wilberforce couldn’t help noticing the more common scraps of life: men, women, and children scraping together a living in the gorge, starving and ill. Most were living in tumbledown shacks; many were living in caves.
Braceleted Commoners, mostly, the guide told him. In the nearby villages, there was a strong prejudice against employing them; since the French Revolution, in particular, it was thought to be unsafe. Their eyes, watching him resentfully as he toured the scenery, haunted him that night. For the first time since Clarkson’s arrest, something kindled in his chest. It was a familiar flicker: not quite anger, but purpose. Or perhaps it was a promise.
“Something needs to be done for those people,” he told Hannah More at breakfast the following morning.
“What do you propose?” she asked at once. She, like Wilberforce, had no patience with people who claimed a thing needed to be done without doing it themselves at once.
“Well. They need decent clothing, food, and houses. They need a school.”
“Many would say that Commoners of their status don’t need to learn to read and write. That, in fact, it would be dangerous for them to encounter the kinds of ideas that inflamed Paris.”
“I know you don’t think that. Nor do I.” He paused. “I think the magicians among them need more than that, in fact. I think they need rudimentary magical theory.”
He watched her closely as he spoke. She and her sister were, after all, the leading scholars of magic outside of the Knights Templar.
Her eyebrow quirked. “Now, that would certainly inflame public opinion.”
“If Commoner magic is ever made legal, these are the men and women who will wield it. They’ll need to know how to wield it safely, and ethically, and to the best of their abilities. That time hasn’t come yet. But I see no reason why they shouldn’t be ready for it when it does.”
“Nor do I,” she said. “You know I’ve always thought that. But what you’re talking about will cost money.”
He smiled. “Fortunately, as I was told in my youth, money is something I have. If you and your sisters are willing to arrange the particulars from here, I’ll fund anything you need.”
They set to work that same day. And, for the first time in a long while, the world began to make sense again.
In the midst of it, he received a letter from Pitt. Harriot Eliot had died from fever five days after the birth of her little girl. The news had nothing to do with kings falling and countries at war. Women had children all the time; they died bringing them into the world all the time. It was perfectly natural, and devastating.
Wilberforce called in at Downing Street almost as soon as he returned to London—in the evening, after dinner, so as not to put the house to the trouble of finding food for him. Pitt met him in the library, where the firelight dappled across the worn volumes of Milton and Shakespeare and Virgil and Horace. He managed only a flicker of a smile. Pitt tended, even when exhausted, to be lit from within with energy and optimism; now heaviness had settled over him like fine dust. There were new lines around his eyes, as though his face had hollowed or collapsed, and he moved as though not quite certain of the world he was in.
“I’m so, so sorry,” Wilberforce said, without preamble. “Truly. But she’s with God now.”
He longed to say more, but he knew well enough that trying to force God onto people who were grieving could do more harm than good in some cases. He also knew Pitt well enough to know that he was one of those cases.
“Thank you,” Pitt said, and did seem to mean it sincerely. “I’m glad to see you looking so much better. I hope Bath was restful?”
“I started a school,” Wilberforce said. “For magical Commoners.”
“Of course you did.” He sank down in his chair by the fire; Wilberforce sat opposite. “Eliot’s in his room, I’m afraid; I’ve just come from him. I managed to get him to venture downstairs for dinner last night, but today he hasn’t left his bed. I’m very concerned about him. I hope you’ll go up and talk to him.”
“Of course I will.” It was what he had feared. Eliot had never been the sort to take bad news well; a loss like this might destroy him. “Poor Eliot. Does he want to see me, though? I don’t want to disturb him.”
“Please, disturb him—or at least distract him. He needs it badly. I’m doing my best, but I suspect I’m too close to this to take him away from it. Try to convince him to take an interest in his daughter, if you can. Right now, he blames her, and is trying not to. If he actually spent some time with her, I have no doubt he’d fall in love completely, and it might save him.”
“I have no doubt either.” Eliot loved children. When Pitt’s other three nieces came to town, Eliot played with them as rambunctiously as Wilberforce himself. “The baby’s well, then?”
“Thriving, thank God. She’s a beautiful little thing. I’m taking her out to my mother as soon as Eliot can be left alone. You can see her, if you’d like. She’s somewhere about this awkward house—a nurse is attending to her. She’s pure Commoner,” he added, as though Wilberforce had asked. “Not even a strain of mesmerism. She’s in no danger.”
“I’m so glad.” He paused. “And you? How are you feeling?”
“I hardly know, most of the time,” Pitt said tiredly. He glanced at Wilberforce. “It’s growing easier. I’ve been able to resume work. I slept better last night than I have since it happened. I know time is very kind in cases like this.”
“In other words,” Wilberforce said, “you feel terrible.”
The flicker of a smile was real this time. “How did you know?”
“You look terrible.”
“Tactful. Thank you.”
“I mean it in a sympathetic, concerned way, I assure you. A way that implies that I’m very much hurt on your account and on Eliot’s, and if I can do anything, ever, at all, to make it any better, please don’t hesitate to ask.”
“I know. And thank you for that, as well.” He fell silent for a moment; when he spoke again, he sounded more like himself. “It’s far worse for Eliot, of course. I’ve been through this before. My older sister died a few years ago; my younger brother died the same year; my father died not long before that. This has been the hardest in some ways, given that it happened under my roof, but it’s horribly familiar. Eliot lost his wife.”
“My father and two of my sisters died when I was still a child,” Wilberforce said, though he knew it wasn’t quite the same thing. He loved his family, but he had been sent to school young; in some painful respects, he barely knew them. “I don’t think it’s ever easy. I’ll go up and see Eliot now, shall I?” He hesitated. “Before I heard about Harriot, there was actually something I wanted to talk to you about. If it’s not too terrible of me—”
“No, please. Believe me, I would far rather be thinking about business than remembering other things. You might find my thoughts working rather slowly, for which I apologize.”
“Your thoughts have never worked slowly in your life. I just wanted to talk to you about Clarkson.”
“Yes.” Wilberforce watched him pull together a version of himself then, painfully, as someone might pull on a familiar garment when their ribs were broken. “I was very sorry to hear the Knights Templar insisted on the Tower for him. Is he well?”
“As well as can be expected. We’ve done all we can to make sure he’s comfortable. But
the Knights Templar are making difficulties about his classification. He was tested at birth, you see, as a pure Commoner; that’s not unusual, as you well know. He tested strong alchemist upon his arrest. But he was tested again in the Tower—they were very thorough. He’s certainly an alchemist. But they now say his ability isn’t strong enough to have done what he claims. It’s practically latent, according to them.”
Pitt frowned. “But they don’t think he’s innocent?”
“Not at all. He confessed. But they think he has an accomplice whom he’s protecting. They questioned him, under mesmerism; he maintained he was the one who carried out the alchemy.”
His interest was no longer forced. “Why wasn’t I told about this?”
“You will be, probably, too late and buried at the bottom of a list of other issues. You know what the Knights Templar are like. Clarkson wrote to us in Mendip, or I wouldn’t know myself. They’re investigating all of us again—the Abolition Society. I am all but positive that Clarkson is the only one of us involved in Saint-Domingue, but I’m a little concerned about—”
“Yes, I quite understand. The Temple Church are not your strongest supporters at the moment. I’ll have a word with the Knights Templar about persecuting your society without evidence, of course.”
“Thank you. And Clarkson? Are they right about his abilities, or was that just an excuse to investigate us further?”
“I doubt the latter. The tests are a matter of scientific record; they couldn’t simply make up the blood results. As to the former…” He fell silent. The flames danced in the grate as he looked at them without seeing them.
“I’ll go and see Eliot,” Wilberforce said when the quiet had stretched out a little too long.
Pitt blinked, coming back. “I’m sorry. Yes, please do. I’ll think about it while you’re gone.” He smiled wryly. “Slowly. I did warn you.”
Eliot, as Pitt had also warned him, was in a miserable state, although he did seem genuinely pleased to see Wilberforce. He was out of bed, but only just: the covers were in a mess, as was Eliot’s fine ginger hair, and his nightshirt hung rumpled about his slender frame. His eyelashes quivered with unshed tears. It wrenched Wilberforce’s heart, as Pitt’s quieter grief downstairs had. He couldn’t help but think that it wasn’t fair.