by H. G. Parry
“No two countries are mortal enemies. We happen to be at war at this point in time, that’s all. It isn’t personal.”
Wilberforce smiled. “Sometimes I think you just don’t understand people very well.”
“Sometimes I don’t,” Pitt conceded. “I certainly don’t understand Camille Desmoulins. But no, I don’t think he’d make an alliance with Britain, or help us in any way. He certainly wouldn’t help me, any more than Robespierre would. He’d rather murder me in my sleep.”
“I think you’re important enough that it would be an assassination, rather than a murder.”
“Comforting, still unhelpful. But I believe he would talk to you. You aren’t part of the British government: you’re an abolitionist and a reformer. You were declared an honorary citizen of the Republic of Magicians, back in the beginning.”
“I know. It was kind of them, I’m sure, but it didn’t help convince people that abolition was not synonymous with revolution.”
“At the moment, that correlation might be exactly what we need. Desmoulins doesn’t have to agree to help Britain. If France is falling under the influence of a vampire—if his revolution is being corrupted from within—then that’s a far greater problem for the Republic than it is even for us. He only needs to listen to you.”
“To the idea that the Incorruptible is being influenced by a vampire. I have to say, I can’t imagine him believing it. And I can’t imagine what he could do about it if he did.”
“As to him believing it—who knows? The two of them have been close for years, Robespierre and Desmoulins. Who knows what he may have seen or suspected over those years? Whatever else he is, he’s intelligent. I think he’ll believe it. What he could do about it is the pointed question.”
“Do you have a pointed answer?”
“At best, I think he could find out where the enemy is and get the information to us. That might allow us to actually capture the enemy, or at least end his control over France. But at worst—well, he’ll have been told. He can take steps of his own, if he isn’t willing to work with us. We’ll know that someone close to Robespierre—a political ally, and a magician, and a friend—is trying to stop him. I know that’s more of a blunt answer than a pointed one.”
Oddly enough, it was the blunt answer that struck Wilberforce more forcefully than the pointed one. He wasn’t convinced that Camille Desmoulins would help them—Desmoulins was no particular advocate of abolition, and he had no particular connection to Wilberforce or his friends. But he was Robespierre’s friend—one of very few who could claim that, if reports were true. And if they were right, Robespierre was in the deepest, darkest trouble of anyone. In a similar case, Wilberforce would do anything he could to save his own friends. That, perhaps, was worth more than any political consideration.
He nodded slowly. “Very well. I agree it might be worth an attempt. But how can we talk to him?”
Pitt sat forward; this, clearly, had been what the conversation had been steered toward. “You might recall I mentioned that we had a daemon-stone in Paris from which we probably wouldn’t hear a good deal more. It was the one that gave us the first news of Robespierre creating an army of the dead. At the moment, it’s in the hands of a spy of ours in Paris. Unfortunately, it’s no longer safe for him—for one thing, shadows talk to each other, and with so many being poured into life at the guillotine it’s unlikely that the stone can stay hidden for much longer. I’ve just recently heard that, with any luck, we can get him across the border to Switzerland in the next few days, where Grenville’s spymaster will be waiting for him. Before he leaves, I can ask him to transfer the allegiance of the stone to Desmoulins, so that only he can communicate through it. And then, if he’s willing to listen, you can talk to him.”
“I never did learn very much French,” Wilberforce said.
“That doesn’t matter when imparting a message to a daemon-stone. They use thought, not language. You hear words but understand meaning.” Pitt frowned. “Have you never used a daemon-stone before?”
“Never.”
“I knew I hadn’t talked to you through one. But there’s one in the York Guildhall that is supposed to be for emergencies. I’m sure we’ve received messages from it.”
“Those were all from Wyvill. I told him only one of the MPs for York needed to use it. I never liked touching it.”
Pitt started to laugh. “Dear God, Wilberforce.”
“You know how I feel about shadows!”
“I do.” He resumed a straight face, but his eyes were twinkling. “I’m sorry. I hope you don’t mind making the sacrifice this once. I really think it should come from you.”
“Of course. As you say, if it works…” He paused. “It isn’t only superstition, you know. You and I have encountered high-level shadows—you must know it isn’t. Even if you don’t believe in evil in quite the same way I do, even shadowmancers say that shadows never forgive being imprisoned in daemon-stones. They do what they’re required because they must, but they want to destroy the one they obey.”
“I’ve heard it said, and I respect the people who say it—you included. But there are a lot of people and things that want to destroy us at the moment. I’m more concerned about them.”
He sighed but didn’t argue. “I hope you don’t mind if I keep the message short.”
“I was going to warn you not to let the message get too long. I’ve had letters from you—and conversations. You never know how to stop. And a person can lose consciousness if they hold a daemon-stone for too long—I speak out of consideration for Desmoulins in this, as well as you.”
“I’m so glad you hold my welfare in the same concern as that of the spark that lit a revolution,” Wilberforce said gravely. He said it mostly to make Pitt laugh again, at which he succeeded, though the laugh trailed into another spasm of coughing. Really, he didn’t look well. Wilberforce wasn’t sure how he’d missed it before, but he resolved to keep a closer eye on him in the future.
“Might it not put Desmoulins in danger?” he asked. “Especially, as you say, if the stone is detected.”
“It will certainly put him in danger, which is another reason he may not agree to do it. What I’m more concerned about is the danger he’ll be in if he does anything with the information we’re about to give him other than what we suggest.”
“Such as?”
“All of France is potentially under the influence of the enemy. I really do mean anything.”
Jean Baptiste Henry, age eighteen, journeyman tailor, convicted of sawing down a tree of liberty, guillotined.
Henrietta Frances de Marboeuf, age fifty-five, convicted of hoping for the arrival in Paris of the Austrian and Prussian armies and of hoarding provisions for them, guillotined.
Jean-Paul Robert, convicted of using mesmerism to influence his neighbors against the Revolution, guillotined.
Francis Bertrand, age thirty-seven, convicted of producing “sour wine injurious to the health of citizens,” guillotined.
Mary Angelica Plaisant, age seventy-seven, seamstress, convicted of exclaiming, “A fig for the nation!” Guillotined.
“Yes,” Robespierre answered his benefactor. “Yes, this is so very terrible.”
Paris
December 1793
Lucile Desmoulins usually greeted Robespierre with every appearance of delight. He had come to call on them often in the last few years, especially in the early days of their marriage; he tried to come when they had no other guests, so he would often find her there alone, playing the piano or working in her garden. If Camille was out or finishing up something in his office, the two of them would talk—about Camille, sometimes, or their other friends, but often about books. Lucile, like him, was a passionate devotee of the Enlightenment philosophers, in sharp contrast to her husband, who lived and breathed the air of ancient Rome. Camille, coming in to their conversations, would sigh and throw up his hands in exaggerated despair.
“Wonderful. My wife and my oldest friend are be
traying me with Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”
Upon greeting him this time, Lucile seemed subdued, even nervous. When Robespierre asked if Camille was at home, she hesitated before replying.
“I just got him to sleep an hour ago,” she said, as though she were talking about little Horace. It was late in the afternoon; Robespierre had come straight from the Convention. “He’s been awake all night—and the night before.”
“Doing what?”
“Writing. Pacing. More writing. Sending sparks and shadows flying. I haven’t seen him in a state like this since last August. I wish you wouldn’t press him to the guillotine quite so often, Maximilien. There must be other shadowmancers you can use.”
“There are, and I do use them. But to the Commoners, Camille is still the much-loved enfant terrible of the Revolution; that has power. Besides, the next strongest shadowmancer is Saint-Just, and he and Camille hate each other. Camille will step up willingly every time if it means forcing Saint-Just down.” Besides, though he didn’t say it, he had other, less public uses for Saint-Just’s shadowmancy lately. His benefactor had spoken to him again. “Why? Has this something to do with him fainting at the October trials?”
“You heard.”
“Everyone heard. They heard about his defense of General Dillon afterward, too, and his other indiscretions. It doesn’t look good these days to show so much sympathy for our enemies. I’ve warned him of that, as his friend.”
“As his friend, you know that Camille has no control over his sympathies.”
“Then he needs to gain some control over himself.”
“Is that what you came to tell him?”
“No. No, I didn’t come to talk about that at all. Please, Lolotte, can you tell him I’m here? I’m due at the Committee soon, and then I won’t be able to get away until the small hours of the morning. I was awake all last night myself.”
She was clearly wavering, either at the “please” or the family nickname, but it turned out it was unnecessary. Camille chose that moment to enter. For once, his rumpled, just-out-of-bed disarray was probably quite genuine: his face had the soft, sleepy innocence of a young child in the morning. It was absurd—Robespierre knew that even as a young child, Camille had never been innocent, and now he was considered downright dangerous. Still, as it had in school, the look wrung the protective instincts of his heart. So did little Horace, curled against Camille’s hip and watching Robespierre with inquiring eyes.
“I thought I heard your voice,” Camille said. He sounded neither pleased nor displeased; he just said it.
“I need to talk to you,” Robespierre replied.
“I need to talk to you too.”
“Good,” Lucile said, with a sigh of resignation. “You both need to talk to each other. I’ll leave you alone, shall I? Camille, do you want me to take Horace?”
“It’s fine,” Camille said, still looking at Robespierre. “I’ll look after him awhile. He was starting to make a fuss.”
“He likes to be the center of attention. I wonder whose son he could be?” She stroked her son’s fuzzy head; then, deliberately, she leaned forward and kissed her husband. It was not out of character; the Desmoulinses were not shy about displays of affection. But this time, from the sideways glance Lucile gave Robespierre as she drew away, he suspected the kiss was mixed with something a little more proprietary. “I’ll be just outside.”
“Don’t listen at the door,” Camille advised. “We might open it unexpectedly and trip over you. Use the chimney.”
“Will do.”
Robespierre smiled, but he nonetheless made a mental note to lower his voice, and he waited until he heard the door click shut before he turned back to Camille. The irony was, of course, that there would almost certainly be nothing spoken that Lucile couldn’t hear, or that Camille wouldn’t tell her. Paranoia was a habit these days, like biting his nails.
“It’s going too far,” Camille said, without prelude. “The Terror. The guillotine. The Committee. All of it. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, with everybody turning on each other. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about it for some time, but—”
“I agree,” Robespierre said.
Camille blinked, for once taken completely off guard. “You do? When did you decide that?”
“From the first—almost. From Marie Antoinette’s trial, actually. The Committee bungled that—accusing her of child molestation and magical perversion and of all sorts, while she sat there a mother and a widow. It generated all the wrong kinds of sympathy. And again, at the Girondin trial. I know it’s all gone wrong, again. I just needed the time to decide what to do about it.”
“About the Terror?”
“About the extremists on the Committee.” His words almost tumbled over each other; he forced himself to stop, and breathe. “I’ve gone over and over it in my head. Why is this going so wrong? We’re rid of the Girondins now. The Convention belongs to the Mountain. That happened as we planned. What I didn’t foresee was how much power their downfall would give the pamphleteers we used to bring about their end.”
“I was one of those pamphleteers,” Camille reminded him. “And I’d like to think, however incorrectly, that I wasn’t used by anyone.”
“I didn’t mean you. I didn’t mean Marat either—he might have been a problem, if he hadn’t been murdered in his bath so soon after—”
“Convenient of him,” Camille said, with a trace of his old humor.
Robespierre waved this aside. “I’m talking about Hébert and his supporters.”
“Oh,” Camille said flatly. “Him.”
Hébert had undeniably risen in prominence since his writings had helped bring down the Girondins. Unlike Camille, he wasn’t content to stay by the side of Danton or Robespierre—his writings were even more extreme, and they had an audience of their own who were far more brutal than even Camille’s had once been.
“He’s brought down our cause from the beginning,” Robespierre said. “This is where the problem lies: not in the Terror itself, but in its instruments. At best, his people are enjoying it too much, and making a mockery of its virtue. It might even be worse than that. I very much fear they’re doing it on purpose, trying to destroy the Revolution by excess. He’s a clever man, you know. Just because he writes for men and women with almost no education doesn’t mean that he has none himself—quite the reverse.”
“You really do think that everyone is trying to plot against you, don’t you? Danton told me that. I thought he was exaggerating.”
Somehow, Robespierre didn’t like the idea of Danton and Camille talking behind his back. It made him wonder what else they had said. “Then you don’t agree that Hébert’s the problem?”
“I didn’t say that. He’s certainly a problem—he’s a monster. We all know that. He loves the killing. A lot of people do. But—”
“That’s my point. This is meant to be a means of order, of justice. People like Hébert are turning it into a massacre, and they’re inflaming the counterrevolutionaries. They need to be stopped.”
“Then you do want to stop the Terror?” Camille asked. “I mean—you have no reason to want to keep it going?”
“Of course I want it to stop! It can’t stop now, of course. We need it, if we want to keep order here, and of course for the army of the dead. We’re at war. But I think if we can just take tighter control of it and get rid of those who are, well, enjoying it too much—I never wanted to kill people. You know that.”
“Of course I know.” He said it quickly enough that Robespierre wondered if it were true. “Of course. I should have talked to you about this sooner; I could have saved myself a lot of panic. You’ve just been so inaccessible lately, since you’ve been on the Committee…”
“I’m sorry for that. There are so many suspects to get through. It becomes all-consuming.” The flicker of suspicion, so quick to stir these days, whispered to him that Camille sounded very much like a man making excuses when he shouldn’t have needed to. What
for? Why? (Stop it, he told himself. This is Camille.)
“Not your fault. We’re all busy, I suppose. And everybody’s turning on each other—it’s so difficult to know who to trust.”
Robespierre frowned. “Did someone tell you not to trust me?”
Camille shook his head. His curls fell across his face; with Horace in his arms, he had to toss his head to flick them away. “It doesn’t matter. So you want to remove Hébert and his supporters?”
“The way we did the Girondins.” He tried to shake off his own paranoia as easily. “The Girondins were too moderate; the Hébertists are too violent. They’re just as dangerous, perhaps even more so. Only I want to avoid a riot this time, if at all possible. I was hoping you…”
“We’re thinking on the same lines,” Camille said. It wasn’t until he moved his hand that Robespierre saw the sheaf of papers there. He held them out between his fingers, careful not to dislodge his son. “I wrote this last night. I couldn’t sleep.”
Robespierre took it, adjusting his glasses to peer at his friend’s familiar scrawl. After a while, he looked up. He found himself looking at his friend as though he had never seen him before. “It’s brilliant,” he said simply.
“Brilliant?” Camille laughed. “And here I was thinking it was merely genius.”
“No, I mean it, Camille. It’s truly brilliant. This is exactly what we meant the Revolution to be, and what we’ve drifted away from.”
Camille, uncharacteristically, blushed. “I meant it to critique the excesses of the Committee of Public Safety. I can tweak it to target Hébert more specifically, if that’s what you need.”
“It doesn’t need to. Everyone will know who you mean. I think there are a few places where you could tone it down, make sure that everyone knows you mean to accuse only certain members and not the Committee itself—but yes. This is the start.”
“Again.” Camille managed a very pale smile. “We seem to make so many starts we’ll never see an end.”