by H. G. Parry
“We’ll see an end. How many issues do you intend to run?”
“As many as it takes. If we can turn the tide of public opinion again…”
“Yes. That’s exactly what we need.” Robespierre glanced down at the paper once more. “We waste you, putting you in all our committees and conventions and clubs. This is where you belong. On paper. In words.”
“You make it sound as if I’m not quite real.”
“Sometimes I think you’re not. Those years when I was out in Arras, and all I saw of you was your handwriting, remember? I started to think you existed only in pen and ink.”
“I know what you mean. Words frighten me sometimes. They’re like magic. They’re both me and not me at the same time. And yet this feels more like me than anything I’ve ever done.”
He shifted Horace’s weight in his arms; Robespierre, picking up on the hint, said, “May I take him for a moment?”
“Please. I keep forgetting how heavy he’s getting.”
Robespierre nestled his godson’s solid bulk against his chest. Horace clung to him, unafraid, and raised one curious hand to touch the green-tinted spectacles. His parents’ black eyes were startling in such a dimpled, cherubic face.
“What’s the verdict on you now, little one?” Robespierre asked the child softly. He was remembering the morning after the attack on the Tuileries. “Politician or revolutionary?”
“Neither, if I can help it,” Camille replied. He stretched and sighed. “I want him a long way away from verdicts of any kind. But he set the curtains on fire yesterday when we didn’t feed him quickly enough, so perhaps revolution is in his blood.”
“He looks very well. You look very tired.” He didn’t mention what Lucile had told him.
“One is not a direct result of the other, for once. This last month… But it’s going to be all right now. I’m so glad you agree, about the Terror. I thought…” He rubbed his eyes. “Never mind what I thought.”
Robespierre knew he should press, but he didn’t. There were so many long hours of interrogation ahead of him already that night; besides, he didn’t want to know. “Well. Get some rest, now you’ve calmed down; then come see me first thing tomorrow. We’ll get the first issue finalized; then you can go away and write it up for the printer. Is seven o’clock in the morning too early for you?”
“No. I don’t think any of us sleep much anymore, do we?”
Robespierre had to admit this was true.
“Oh, Camille?” he said, turning before he was at the door. It came to him, unwillingly, that this was the kind of theatrical nonsense Hébert might employ at the Committee of Public Safety to catch suspects off guard. He tried to modify his tone, and succeeded only in sounding too serious. “I need you at the guillotine tomorrow, if you could possibly manage it. It’s a large batch: they found a royalist printing press. You’re one of the few whose magic is up to the numbers.”
Camille hesitated. “I think I’ll be busy with this paper, actually.”
“It’s not until the afternoon. You’ll be done with the manuscript by then, surely.”
“I can’t be sure.”
“None of us enjoy it, Camille.” He kept his voice as gentle as he could. It probably sounded threatening. “None of us with any imagination, at least; Hébert’s problem is that he doesn’t have any. It’s a duty. It’s for the Republic.” He caught himself, remembering Lucile. “Still—never mind. Perhaps it’s best you don’t, if you feel you’re not up to it.”
“No,” Camille said unexpectedly. “No, you’re right. I’ll be there.”
Robespierre felt a wave of relief he couldn’t quite name. “You’re sure?”
“Very. As you say, it’s a duty. And I’m not making a habit of fainting every time a royalist loses his or her head.”
“Good. It would give entirely the wrong impression.” He was joking, but only half. Perhaps not even that. “I’ll see you tomorrow, with the manuscript.”
“You’re making a mistake,” his benefactor said.
“I’m saving the Revolution,” Robespierre said. “You’ll still get your undead, don’t worry. But they’ll be true enemies from now on, not innocents and old Aristocrats. Once we clear the extreme elements out, as we did the moderates. Camille was right: Hébert and his people are monsters.”
“Oh, that. No, I have no concerns about that. Choose your own victims, if it helps you, particularly if it tightens your grip on France. You’re very good at targeting your political enemies, you know. I meant that you’re making a mistake about Camille Desmoulins.”
Something inside him chilled. Perhaps it was his heart. “What kind of mistake?”
“You trust him. Trust is dangerous. And Camille… I don’t know. Something has changed in him lately.”
“He doesn’t like the undead. They’ve shaken him. It’s my fault: I relied on him too heavily, especially in the first few weeks. But he’s a true patriot. He’ll recover.”
“No, not that. It’s something else.” His benefactor paused, thinking. It occurred to Robespierre that he had never seen him uncertain before. “Proceed, if you like,” he decided. “I agree, he’s the best person for what you want. And Camille is the sort to hang himself, given enough rope, far more surely than anyone else can manage it. Let’s see how this unfolds. But watch him carefully.”
“If I thought I was putting him in danger, I would stop this now. He’s my friend—my oldest and best friend.”
“And that’s why you need to be careful. It’s the ones we love that know the most dangerous ways to hurt us.”
He startled himself with the sound of his own voice. “I don’t believe you love anyone at all.”
“You’re quite right,” his benefactor said. “I was speaking rhetorically.”
Camille’s new journal, The Old Cordelier, flew off the shelves too quickly for printers to keep up. Robespierre and Camille had been worried, among other things, that the journal would be a lone voice crying out in the wilderness. In fact, it seemed that many were sick of living in blood day and night, as they had been for the past few years. They devoured his words against the Hébertists, as they had against the Girondins before them, and the royal family before that. Once again, four years after the Bastille, he was the spark that lit a revolution.
Robespierre was glad, of course. It was exactly what they had intended. People began to ignore the Hébertists at the Committee of Public Safety; in the streets, the Commoners jeered and hissed as they passed. Not all—Hébert’s own pamphlets, with their filthy, street-language humor, still had followers. But the tide was turning against them, as it had against the Girondins, and Robespierre’s power surged accordingly.
The trouble was, so did Danton’s. And Robespierre had nothing against Danton; he really didn’t. But if Hébert was becoming too extreme, Danton was becoming more moderate every day: the dark mood that had prompted him to support the army of the dead had passed, and he had found the subsequent purge of the Girondins difficult to accept. Perhaps he’d had a crisis of conscience—those took a great deal of will to forestall at times. Either way, he was no longer a friend to the Terror. And Camille thought so much of him. Really, now, he was far closer to Danton than to Robespierre. Sometimes Robespierre suspected that Danton was guiding Camille’s pamphlets as much as Robespierre himself was, and guiding them into waters other than those originally intended. Dangerous waters. He started to glimpse Camille in a different, unfamiliar light, no matter how hard he tried not to.
Why, he thought one night as he lay awake staring at the ceiling, was nothing ever pure, simple, and easy?
The gnawing cold was no longer merely inside him, or at least he didn’t think it was. The air had darkened around him. Shadows deepened as he passed, and at times he could hear a muttering of voices on the air as though he walked through ghosts. He didn’t know if this was in his head, or if others saw and heard it too, but people had started to avert their eyes from him in the halls.
They had
begun to do that anyway, of course. He was a necromancer. As far as he knew, he was the only necromancer in France, perhaps even Europe. They didn’t trust him. Many hated him; many more wanted him dead. He started to see flashes of blades in crowds, concealed pistols in streets, poison in wine. Every whisper was a conspiracy against him. But they needed him. For now, at least, some of them needed him.
Saint-Domingue
January 1794
By the beginning of the New Year, Toussaint’s army controlled the entire north. He had four thousand soldiers under his command. The Spanish no longer treated him with respect, but with reverence. He was, they knew, their greatest opportunity to wrestle Saint-Domingue from the French: more than that, though, he was difficult not to revere. Fina, at his side, found it more and more difficult to believe that he had ever been a slave.
It wasn’t only the French against whom they had to contend now. Barely a month after Fort Dauphin, the first of the British troops had put to shore at Jérémie in the south and been greeted with open arms by the planters and white townspeople. They had come by way of Jamaica—the same journey that Fina had taken to get there. Something had hardened inside her when news of their approach filtered across the battle lines into the north. The old wounds in her heart that had opened the day she had saved Toussaint tore apart again, and her magic came pouring out.
From then on, she no longer only watched during the battles. As before, she sat at the camp as Toussaint’s army rode into the fray, and moved among his enemies like a ghost. Now, though, any who came near him found themselves held rigid in her grip. It was difficult, and not just because her magic strained at each new use. More often than not, she found herself in their heads as Toussaint’s own soldiers came to kill them. She felt their hearts pierced, their legs shattered, their skulls caved in, and each time woke shuddering in her tent. The superstitious among the camp began to give her a wide berth. Her magic was too strange, and too invasive.
“I promised you that I would never ask you to accompany me into battle,” Toussaint said to her one night. “That, in some ways, is what you do now. You must let me know if you want to stop.”
“I don’t want to stop,” Fina said. “I’m not afraid of their deaths, you know.”
He said nothing, only sighed.
At Gonaïves they found the tattered remains of a British garrison, most of them half-dead or dying of yellow fever. Toussaint saw that they were given what medicine could be spared, instructed the healthy in caring for the sick, and arranged for their evacuation from the area. Fina, who spoke English, helped broker the deal. It was the first time she had heard the language in two years. Though they spoke to her far more politely than any overseer had, she saw the contempt in their eyes and about their mouths, and the foreign words rose in her throat to choke her. For the first time in months, she felt like a slave again.
“Why are you helping them?” she asked Toussaint when they had turned away.
“Because they’re sick,” he said. “And I know how to make them better.”
“They knew how to make Molly better,” Fina said. “They left her to die. She wasn’t worth the time and money to save.”
She had never told Toussaint about Molly’s death; she didn’t need to tell him now. He could guess exactly what she was talking about. “I’m sorry. But it wasn’t these men. These men are soldiers.”
“It doesn’t matter! They trade in slaves when they can. They use slave labor when it suits them. They came here to enslave us again.”
“You didn’t protest when we let the townspeople go.”
“Because I respect your vision; I understand that Saint-Domingue needs to be a flourishing colony. But these men aren’t farmers or planters. They aren’t part of your vision.”
“They are. They are part of my vision of a Saint-Domingue that is enlightened, civilized, and free. This is a matter of pragmatism as much as morality: England needs to know that we’re not savages or butchers, but people capable of dealing with them on equal terms.”
She laughed. “If we dealt with them on equal terms—”
“Not the terms on which they deal with us—the terms on which they claim to deal with each other. They have to see us the way they see themselves.”
“They won’t.” Something hard and ugly had been unlocked in her. “You don’t understand, Toussaint. You think you do, because you were born a slave and you saw the worst of what could happen, but the worst never happened to you. You weren’t snatched from your home and chained to the bottom of a ship. You didn’t lie in darkness and filth as that ship stole you across the world. You weren’t forced to swallow magic and watch your body turn against you. They never made you into their property.”
She thought she had gone too far then, but he was unfazed. Only a twitch in his jaw betrayed him. “I know. And because of that, it’s easier for me not to want to hurt them. But if I had—if I’d been captured, beaten, spellbound—then I would still have to try to do exactly what I’m doing now. Because it’s the right way; I know it is. It would just be a lot harder. For God’s sake, Fina. Do you think I’m not angry every day? Of course I am. But because I’m an intelligent man, not a murderer like Jeannot was, I hold it back. You held back your anger for years before you came here. When you were out in the fields, and the smallest twitch could betray you. That’s all I ask of you now.”
“I was a slave then.”
“And now you’re free. Don’t be better as a slave in fear than you are as a free woman with all the power in the world.”
She didn’t reply. Her face settled into the familiar, impervious lines it had held for so many years. Inwardly, she seethed.
Toussaint looked at her and sighed. “I know this is difficult. These men are from the nation that enslaved you; I’m making you walk among them again. But we all do it. All of us who were enslaved by the French—we walk among them every day.”
“It’s different.” She folded her arms tightly across her chest. “You’re fighting them to free your people from the French. Mine—the men and women on Jamaica I grew up among—are still enslaved by the British. Nothing’s changed over there. These men aren’t here trying to take back what they’ve lost. They’re here to take more. Even if we beat them back, it won’t help my people at all.”
From the flicker of understanding that crossed his face, she knew this hadn’t occurred to him. “That’s true. And if I could change anything about that, I would. But I can only fight the battles in front of me, and so can you. If you decide you can’t fight by my side anymore, then I’ll understand.”
“I never said I didn’t want to fight beside you.”
“Then I’m afraid you need to obey my orders. And I’ve ordered that these men will go free.” He turned away. Toussaint had an annoying habit of doing that: ending an argument when he had the upper hand, and moving on to something else. As if their disputes were tasks to be ticked off, or skirmishes in a long string of battles to be won. “If it makes you feel better, most of these men will die within a few days. They’ll die like you saw many die in the Middle Passage: far from home, in their own filth, and in terrible pain.”
Fina looked at the closest of the soldiers. He was a young man, a boy even. His ginger hair was plastered damply to his head; his skin was yellow under his sunburn. He shivered in the heat, eyes closed, and coughed in the back of his throat. Of course she didn’t want him to die like that, not exactly. Nobody should die like that. He was her enemy, but he was still a person.
And yet no matter how much he suffered, how scared he would be to die, how much he screamed, it still wouldn’t be like the Middle Passage. He wouldn’t be spellbound. People around him would care that he had died and would honor him as a human being. It wasn’t the same at all.
“That doesn’t make me feel better,” she said aloud. She didn’t know which way she meant it.
Fina couldn’t settle that night. It ought to have been easy. The mayor of Gonaïves had surrendered his house to them; f
or once, she wasn’t curled up on the ground under canvas. She had a room to herself, with a soft bed; there had been enough food in the stores to quiet everybody’s hunger; the streets outside were silent. There was no danger: she would know. Her magic was attuned enough to threats now that any evil intent in close proximity would stir it. Even without this, she had spent all her life keeping herself and her feelings quiet. Whatever was happening in her heart, she had always been able to lie still.
Not this time. Anger, guilt, and grief stormed in her chest; she crossed her arms tight to hold it in, and paced the tiny room in the hope of leaving it behind. It followed her like a cloud, and she couldn’t breathe. Outside, the night was heavy with the threat of rain.
Before she had left the first camp at the Galliflet plantation, just after she had made her bargain with Toussaint, Celeste had taken her aside and given her a hug.
“Be careful of Toussaint,” she had said as they drew apart.
“Why?” Fina had said, surprised. “You were the one who told me he was special.”
“He is special. And, what’s more rare, I’m pretty sure he’s good. But he has his own vision, and nobody else can see it. Visions are dangerous when nobody else can see them.”
She had been in Toussaint’s head; she knew he was good. What’s more, she had seen his vision, or a shadow of it. It was a beautiful vision: on her best days, when she was almost happy, it was what she wanted not only for Saint-Domingue but for Jamaica and the British colonies as well. But seeing it was different from believing in it, however much she tried to do both. And Toussaint’s refusal to see that, to accept anything less than his own merciless forgiveness, was maddening. This rebellion wasn’t a clean, fresh start. It was a fresh wound across a landscape where the scars already ran too deep, and Toussaint wouldn’t hear the screams.
If only Molly were here, or Jacob. She always missed them; on that night, she longed for them with such force and intensity that it frightened her. Her heart was tearing itself from her in its desire to be with them. She hated her own homesickness; Jamaica wasn’t her home. There had been nothing there but pain and fear and exhaustion. And yet that wasn’t quite true. There had been people who loved her, and who didn’t regard her as something powerful and uncanny. There had been the quiet hours between days when they could find some kind of freedom. She didn’t know anymore what she was doing on Saint-Domingue.