by H. G. Parry
Wilberforce held back from mentioning the elixir. It wouldn’t help, and it risked betraying Pitt. The vampire strain in that bloodline was no secret, nor was Pitt’s friendship with Wilberforce. “Not at the moment. But you must have older records from France? Records that were copied into the books before they were destroyed?”
“Perhaps. They’ll be old, though—and they won’t tell you anything important.”
They probably wouldn’t, it was true. But it would be a place to start. “Thank you so much. I really do appreciate it.”
“I haven’t promised to look them up for you yet,” Holt protested, then smiled ruefully. “But I will. Just don’t ask me for anything else. I mean it, Wilber—you really do need to be careful these days. The Temple Church are very nervous about your kind—reformers. They’re afraid of what happened to us in France.”
“So am I, believe it or not,” Wilberforce said. “And I’m very much afraid that the Temple Church are the least of my concerns.”
Paris
Winter 1792–1793
Robespierre was very pleased that Charlotte and Augustin had come to Paris, of course, but it did present difficulties. The Duplays assured him that his siblings were welcome to come and live with them; though there were no more upstairs bedrooms, they cleared two rooms for them on the ground floor. (For Brount, they found a basket, and he ignored it entirely and slept at the foot of Robespierre’s bed.) Augustin was perfectly happy with this arrangement; he got on well with the family and was too excited to be in Paris to question particulars. Charlotte, however, did not approve of the Duplays. Robespierre had enough good sense to realize that she was jealous of the place they had gained in his heart and his life, but not enough to know what to do about it.
“It’s not good for your reputation,” she said as he sat at his desk writing out notes for the Convention that night. “Living with a carpenter’s family. You should have your own lodgings, in a better part of the city.”
“If I notice my reputation start to suffer,” he said, “then I’ll consider it. I promise.”
“You won’t notice. You never do. They’re using you, you know. They clearly gain by association with you. And I’m sure Madame Duplay intends for you to marry her eldest daughter.”
“What would be wrong with that?” he said, as carelessly as he could. He and Éléonore had found the time to go for a long walk that day through the Champ de Mars, and he was sure that Charlotte had noticed. “Perhaps I intend to marry her as well. It’s absurd to think about it now, though. I’m far too busy.”
“Everyone will say she’s your mistress. I’m sure they do already.”
He knew they did. She wasn’t, in fact, though she would often come up to his rooms to talk to him, as did Babette, but in Éléonore’s case there was something in her friendship other than strictly sisterly. It hung between them like a promise, or a door; a word or look from him would unlock it, but until then she seemed content to leave it closed. Robespierre himself wasn’t sure how he felt about it. He was very fond of Éléonore, and when he had time to think about it, he liked the idea of marrying her. Charlotte was quite right that Madame Duplay undoubtedly intended it. But he could never be sure how much of his feelings were for Éléonore herself, and how much were for her family. He had lost his own parents very young, and while he loved his siblings, the Duplays’ uncomplicated warmth filled a hunger in him he had never realized was so deep and so aching. Éléonore was something between a sister and a lover to him, just as Maurice and Madame Duplay were something between parents and friends. He couldn’t help but wish he didn’t have to work it out—especially when Charlotte was going to be so difficult about it.
“If she and her family have no objections to the rumors,” he said, “then neither do I. Nobody with half a brain would believe them. How could I take Éléonore as my mistress under her family’s roof, with her parents asleep in the next room?”
“They wouldn’t mind! This is Paris.”
“Charlotte, please, I’m sorry you’re upset, we’ll talk about it later, but I really do need to work now. I have to say this to a hall of people in an hour or so.”
She sighed. “They make too much of a fuss of you, Maxime.”
It took him a moment to realize she was waiting for a response. “Who do?”
“The Duplays. It’s my fault, I know. I made too much of a fuss of you back in Arras. You became too used to it. But it’s not good for you. If you don’t watch out, you’re going to become horribly conceited.”
She left with a flourish before he could work out if she truly expected him to be motivated to leave a family that loved him for the promise of being more roughly treated by his own.
Those were domestic battles. The battles in the Convention were far more serious.
The political landscape of the National Convention of the Republic of Magicians was a landscape in more than one sense. The Mountain, Robespierre and Danton’s faction, sat at the high end of the benches. They were far from a united party. Robespierre’s supporters and Danton’s were really two separate groups, Robespierre’s having followed him from the Jacobins and Danton’s from his own club; this, for now, mattered very little, while their plans accorded so well and any allegiance to one or the other was purely personal. More troubling to Robespierre were the undesirable elements of the Mountain, those who gave their party a rather disreputable edge: Jean-Paul Marat, a druid strikingly disfigured by a curse that had gone awry, whose aggressive rhetoric chilled the blood of the most hardened Republicans; and Jacques Hébert, a fire-mage whose pamphlets were written in the language of the street and called for violence in the filthiest terms. Yet they were all loosely held together by their opposition to the war with Austria, their Republican fervor, and their determination to see the king dead. They were also overwhelmingly Commoner magicians; perhaps Camille’s presence saw to that. The exceptions, or so the public believed, were the Mountain’s two strongest speakers, Danton and Robespierre. In Robespierre’s case, of course, they were misled.
Across the room were Brissot’s supporters, the Girondins. They supported the war with Austria and had nearly all opposed the total freedom of magic that had won the day; even now, while they supported many of the same reforms as the Mountain, they sought to limit the magicians’ legal rights. They were also suspected of being sympathetic to the king, or at least not actively intent on his death. All these things, according to the Mountain, made them the enemy.
Between the two groups, uneasy and perpetually undecided, lay the Plains. They, according to Robespierre’s benefactor, did not really matter. Robespierre kept an eye on them all the same.
The Convention met every afternoon, to debate the issues of the ever-shifting political situation, rule on policy, and discuss the war currently raging on the borders between France and the Low Countries. At least, that was the theory. In practice, they tended to spend most of the time fighting with each other. Most of these fights were verbal, punctuated here and there by outbursts of magic from the Mountain that inflamed the Girondins further. Politics had become a lot more dangerous since the early days of the Revolution. Every so often, the conflicts would escalate into physical brawls: low-level magic and fisticuffs, mostly, but once or twice there had been flashes of knives and pistol shots discharged into the air. Camille, in the middle of a particularly provoking oration, had been unceremoniously decked across the room by one of the Girondins; he had sent a few flames in their direction at other times himself. At times, Robespierre had to admit, having Danton’s powerful presence on their side felt less a political advantage and more like having the friendship of a school athlete when crossing a playground populated by bullies. The public crowded into the stands to watch and cheer in delight at each burst of violence, which gave the new Republic the frisson of a Roman arena.
In November, they met to decide the fate of the king of France.
It was the first time Robespierre had been seen in the Convention for a month. His bene
factor’s support had returned to him wholeheartedly since the rise of the Republic, with the consequence that the mesmerism pouring from him had been almost too much to bear. It was like holding a burning coal in his chest. After weeks straight of it, he had started to find it difficult to breathe; finally, after one marathon session, he was so chilled and so weak that he had been forced to curl up in bed and stay there. It had frustrated him at the time, not least because Charlotte had taken advantage of his weakness to move him from the Duplays’ to a house of their own. Yet the reception he received now almost made him feel it had been worth staying away. His supporters rushed to cheer him, but it was in some ways more gratifying to watch his enemies’ looks of loathing and fear.
“You’re quite certain you’re ready for this?” Camille asked as Robespierre took a seat beside him.
“Certainly,” Robespierre said. “I feel much better.”
“I didn’t mean that—you look rather pale, but you always do. I mean the king. Are you truly ready to push for his immediate death without trial? It’s only that I used to talk about hanging Aristocrats from lampposts and tearing out their entrails, and you used to say, ‘Stop it, Camille, were you raised in a barn?’”
“I’m truly ready. It isn’t murder if we do it in the name of liberty.”
“It certainly is,” Camille said. “I don’t see the point of calling it anything else. If you can’t face the thought of murder, then you have no business calling for bloody revolution.”
The thought was disquieting. He was afraid it might be true and yet felt it couldn’t be. “You didn’t come to visit me in the last few weeks,” he said, mostly to change the subject. He tried to keep it from sounding like a rebuke.
“I know. I’m sorry—we were busy. Honestly, Maxime, your sister doesn’t want me there. She keeps looking at me like she thinks I should brush my hair.”
“In fairness,” Danton said, turning in his seat, “that’s neither a hanging offense nor a minority opinion.”
“I’ve moved back to the Duplays’ now,” Robespierre said. “They’ve insisted on it.”
“No wonder you’re feeling better,” Camille said.
Robespierre smiled, but couldn’t shake his growing sense of disquiet. He wasn’t at all certain that he was ready to face any kind of murder.
Don’t you dare falter now. The voice made him jump: it was only the second time he had heard it in his waking ear.
Fortunately, it was on that day that Antoine Saint-Just delivered his maiden speech. Robespierre had met the twenty-five-year-old in person only recently, but the two of them had been corresponding for years; he had written to Robespierre to introduce himself as he embarked on a career in politics. Something about the young man had interested him, quite apart from his flattering reverence for Robespierre himself. At the time, he had just been released from prison, not for magic or any revolutionary activity but for stealing from his own mother. While in prison he had made his name by writing a long, obscene poem and dedicating it to the Temple Church. And yet there had been no hint of this disreputable background in his address or his ideas, in that letter or since. It was as though he had come through the Revolution a new man, with his misdeeds melted away and only a hard, intelligent core remaining. Still, Robespierre and the Convention were not prepared for the effect of his speech. He was strikingly handsome, dark-haired and marble-faced; his voice had a clear ring that reminded Robespierre of Camille on the day the Bastille fell. He was a shadowmancer like Camille, for that matter; whether by accident or intent, the shadows of the room danced around him in patches of gray as he spoke. But he had none of Camille’s fire in his magic or in his manner. He was pure ice, and yet he burned just the same.
“I say that the king must be judged as an enemy,” he said, “that we must not judge him so much as combat him. For myself, I can see no compromise: this man must reign or die. No one can reign innocently.”
There was an intake of breath at the last. It seemed that in the midst of so much confusion and doubt, someone had found some elemental truth that outweighed all other considerations. Robespierre’s head cleared suddenly, unexpectedly. At once, he could see his France again. Saint-Just could see it too.
(“God, did you see him after that speech?” Camille snorted as the two of them sat together later at the Jacobins. “He carries his head about on his shoulders like a sacred host.”
“Oh, shut up, Camille,” Robespierre said. “You do talk nonsense at times.”)
By the time Robespierre stepped up to speak, he felt fully recovered in both body and soul. The king was the enemy. They were at war. The Revolution had been his trial; it had sentenced him to death. Different laws applied—yes, and a different morality, if that was what it took. Just for now.
“This is not a question of legal justice,” he said. The magic inside him scorched. “We can have law later. This is a revolution. A people does not judge as does a court of law. It does not hand down sentences; it hurls down thunderbolts. It does not condemn kings; it plunges them into the abyss. Louis must die because the nation must live. He must die to nourish in the spirit of tyrants a salutary terror of the justice of the people.”
“Is that what you and your kind did this September?” The speaker was a Girondin; Robespierre thought it was Roland, the rather fussy minister of the interior, who had risen to authority largely through the machinations of his brilliant wife. The disadvantage to pushing up his spectacles to allow his mesmerism to spill forth was that his audience became a hot, flesh-colored blur. “Hundreds of innocent people were butchered while you and Danton stood by and profited—”
Robespierre stood in the wave of protests and jeers that drowned out Roland’s words, and felt oddly above it all. He had made his peace with the events of the autumn now. Indeed, it seemed strange that anyone would bring them up.
“You complain that innocent people have died this September,” he said when he could. The room quieted to listen. “One or two were innocent, perhaps, and we should grieve for them. We should grieve also for the guilty victims, reserved for the vengeance of the laws, who fell beneath the blade of popular justice. We can even grieve for the king when this has all passed. But let this grief have an end, like all mortal things. Weep instead for the hundred thousand victims who died under the old regime; that is where our sympathies need to be. You complain that I have committed illegal acts. Of course I have. We all have. The Revolution is illegal. The fall of the Bastille was illegal. The formation of this republic was illegal—as illegal as liberty itself. Citizens, do you want a revolution without a revolution?”
He believed it. The crowds knew it. The magic in him surged, but perhaps he didn’t even need it.
It was a long, hard fight to have the king executed. Even the combined power of Saint-Just and Robespierre was not enough to persuade the Convention to kill the king outright, only to put him on trial, and the trial dragged on for weeks—weeks of noise and public spectacle, weeks where Robespierre began to feel he was blazing with mesmerism every waking moment. Camille’s pen blazed with the same fervor: vicious, clever, deadly. Saint-Just became a constant visitor to the Duplays’, running up the outside staircase that led to Robespierre’s room at all hours of the day and night. Even at the last, Louis’s fate came down to just a handful of votes. It was all it took.
Once, as a young lawyer back in Arras, before the Revolution or his benefactor or the war, Robespierre had served as a justice on a capital case. It was nothing to do with magic or politics, just a common murderer, a barrel maker who had clubbed his brother over the head in a brawl over a woman. The punishment for such an offense was execution: not the clean decapitation reserved for the Aristocracy, but slow, excruciating death by hanging, while the same crowds who now flocked to the guillotine talked and laughed and pointed out the stages of his dying. There was no doubt of his guilt. Robespierre’s job was merely to pass the sentence.
Robespierre lived that death in his mind a thousand times before the
man was condemned to it. For two days before the trial, he had neither eaten nor slept, but paced the house in a black fog of dread. Right until the last moment, his brain had raced, scrambling for anything, any excuse at all, that would enable him to save his principles and the man’s life. Yet when it came to it, he had sentenced the man to death. His hand had shaken when he had signed the warrant, but he had signed it. He had collapsed at home afterward, shivering and retching with nothing to bring up, but he had returned to work the next day. He had thought it would destroy him, but he had lived.
“For God’s sake, Maximilien,” Charlotte had sighed as she brought him a hot drink and shooed Brount from his bedroom. “The man was a criminal. You did your job. You do get worked up over nothing.”
This time, as the king was wheeled past the jeering hordes to his death, Robespierre knew better than to get worked up. He breakfasted at home that day with the Duplays. If he ate less than usual, nobody commented. Madame Duplay kept the talk on small matters, and everyone seemed relieved to follow her lead.
Babette came downstairs last. At twenty, she was lively, scatterbrained, and warmhearted; she paused by Robespierre’s chair to give him an extravagant hug.
“It’s so good to have you back home!”
He laughed and wriggled free playfully. Fortunately, Charlotte wasn’t with them. “I’ve been back home for weeks.”
“And it’s still good to have you here.”
“Still? I’m glad to hear it. When does it stop being good?”
“When you do. I’ll let you know.”
“For goodness’ sake, Babette, let the poor man eat,” Éléonore said, with an amused glance at Robespierre. He felt that pleasurable stir in his chest and wondered, not for the first time, if it was really only familial love he had missed over the winter.