by H. G. Parry
At last, aching and tired, she threw herself down onto the bed. Her magic raged inside her.
She couldn’t remember falling asleep, and yet she must have. The room with its slatted window had gone, and so had the clouds and the smell of the storm. She was standing, and there were wooden boards beneath her bare feet. Moonlight spilled through a tiny window, high in the rafters, and illuminated a large, ugly building, little more than a barn. It was empty of furniture, but the heavy door was bolted, and row upon row of sleeping forms lay upon the ground. Her heart tightened, and for the first time since her freedom, tears sprung to her eyes. She knew where she was. She had slept there every night for more than twenty years.
Jamaica. Somehow, impossibly, her magic had brought her home.
It was very quiet in the slave barracks. Perhaps it was early, and the spell had yet to wear away, or it was late, and their talk had dissolved into exhausted sleep. The men and women on the ground lay straight, stiff, and apparently unaware of her presence. Even in the dark, she saw Jacob almost at once. He looked older than she remembered, and there was a cut above his eye that was healing badly; as she rushed to his side, she wondered how she could ever have thought he was so indomitable. She had been away only two years among free men and women, fighting a war, but he seemed to her worn beyond endurance.
“Jacob?” she whispered. She put her hands on his shoulder and felt the bones beneath. “Can you hear me?”
He didn’t stir; none of them did. It might have been the spellbinding keeping them locked in place; she suspected, though, that she wasn’t really there. How could she be? Her body was hundreds of miles away, on another island.
“I’m so pleased to see you,” she said anyway. She realized that she had lapsed back into Jamaican creole. The taste of the words on her tongue, after so long, released her tears. “I’ve missed you all so much.”
And then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw someone else. A stranger, standing among the rows of sleeping people: even with his face shadowed, she recognized him. She froze.
Of course. What else could it be? She had reached for Jacob and Clemency, but she was here, not behind their eyes but awake and apparently capable of movement. Her magic didn’t take her places. It saw through others’ eyes, and inside heads. And there was only one person whose head worked in this way. Usually it was in a garden half a world away. Today, it had brought her to Jamaica.
Somehow, all of this was still inside the mind of the stranger: the owner of the voice that had called the revolution.
She got to her feet slowly. Now that she had seen him, she could hear his voice as well. It seemed more something in the air than from his lips: a low whisper, the words indistinguishable to her. They might not be in creole or English, but she knew her friends would understand them, as she had understood the words that must have been spoken in French. The ground beneath her feet quivered like a divining rod, and the air was growing hotter and hotter. She could barely breathe.
“Who are you?” she said out loud. “What do you want?”
The voice paused in its lilt. Perhaps the stranger’s eyes rose to light on her for a second; perhaps they didn’t.
“When I first heard you, I thought you wanted to free Saint-Domingue,” she said. “But I know better than that now. Toussaint is trying to free Saint-Domingue. So is Biassou, and Dessalines. The rebellion came about because of Boukman and the voodoo priests. Even Thomas Clarkson from England helped. But what you did that night wasn’t about freedom. It wasn’t even about revenge. I know more about battles now; I’ve been in the heads of a lot of different soldiers. And I’ve seen you, in the head of that little Frenchman. I’ve seen how scared he is. You wanted violence. You wanted to make the violence worse.”
The stranger had turned back to Jacob. His voice was muffled now, and far away, like an echo. It chilled her.
“What are you doing?” she demanded. “Whatever it is, you need to stop. You have no right.”
All at once, light flared, and she was sitting bolt upright in her unfamiliar bed, gasping and shivering as Saint-Domingue returned to her. Jamaica had fallen away, and with it Jacob and the voice. It came to her as she struggled to quiet her breathing that she hadn’t seen Clemency.
“Who are you?” she said aloud, in the language she and Molly and Toussaint shared.
There was no answer.
On that same night, across the sea, the motion to abolish the slave trade was heard again in the House of Commoners. Already, nobody was bothering to pretend that anything was being put in place to do so gradually. The question was, yet again, whether it would happen at all.
This time, Wilberforce spoke for four hours, and was careful to stress not only the inhumanity of the trade but also how little the British economy in fact depended on it for survival. Pitt supported this with far more calculations than Wilberforce could have supplied or made easily understood, and Fox’s rotund form sprung to their defense, all the masterful oration and eyebrow-bristling indignation usually directed at the government now being flung at the traders. Once again, nobody mentioned the possibility of emancipation from slavery or even from spellbinding, but the trade, they insisted, needed to stop.
The House was not responding. Wilberforce knew it wasn’t, even as the walls resounded around them, and he knew what Clarkson meant when he said that brilliance and honesty weren’t enough. Words needed somebody to listen to them.
“In all honesty, I don’t care very much what this House decides,” he said, and heard in his own defiance an admission of what that decision would be. “Whatever you might do, the people of Great Britain will abolish the slave trade, when, as will soon happen, its injustice and cruelty shall be fairly laid before them. It is a nest of serpents, which would never have endured so long but for the darkness in which they lay hid. Never, never will we desist until we have wiped away this scandal from the Christian name, released ourselves from the load of guilt under which we presently labor, and extinguished every trace of this bloody traffic, of which our posterity, looking back to the history of these enlightened times, will scarce believe has been suffered to exist so long as a disgrace and dishonor to this country.”
The walls sang. When the votes were counted, eighty-eight members voted to put an end to the slave trade. One hundred and sixty-three voted against.
Paris
February 1794
In the New Year, a party of delegates arrived in Paris from Saint-Domingue. There were three men: one white, one mixed race, and one a free black man. They had come to report the French governors had ended slavery in the north of their colony, and the men, women, and children who had once been spellbound were now made French citizens. They had come to ask that the Republic of Magicians make their freedom legal and binding, and that they extend it to every enslaved soul on the island.
The Convention met to rule on the issue the following day. Robespierre took Danton briefly aside before the meeting began, much to the other man’s surprise. They had not been on friendly terms lately. Danton, like Camille, thought the Terror had gone too far; unlike Camille, he was not inclined to blame everything on the Hébertists.
“Just for once,” Robespierre said, “let’s do this properly. Let’s actually do what we always meant to do. If we do nothing else, we’ll have done this.”
Danton nodded slowly.
And so, in February 1794, slavery was abolished in the French Republic of Magicians. They were the first nation in the world to declare the people they had once enslaved free and legal citizens. The voice in Robespierre’s head said nothing about this, neither in praise nor in condemnation. Perhaps, as usual, he had his own reasons for allowing freedom to be declared; perhaps the tide of public opinion had turned to the point where it would be more effort to stop abolition than bring it about. More likely, Robespierre suspected, his benefactor truly cared for nothing he did anymore, as long as he was still increasing the army of the dead. It was a terrible freedom, and he feared to test it too f
ar, but it gave him hope.
The following day, Robespierre stood up in the Convention and shared his vision of France. It was the most important speech of his life, and he was almost too exhausted to give it. Apart from the work he had carried out with Saint-Just in the Conciergerie the night before, he had made undead forty-six men and women at the guillotine that day. His skin was ice, and it hurt to breathe. Yet the crowd listened, enraptured.
“We want to substitute morality for egoism, honesty for love of honor, principles for conventions, duties for decorum, the empire of reason for the tyranny of fashion, the fear of vice for the dread of unimportance.” Pause for breath. “We want to replace good company with good character, intrigue with merit, wit with genius, brilliance with truth, dull debauchery with the charm of happiness. In the place of an easygoing, frivolous, and discontented people, we would create one that is happy, powerful, and stouthearted and replace the vices and follies of the monarchy with the virtue and astounding achievements of the Republic.”
It was a shadow of the vision in his head: he had never, despite all his efforts, found the words with which to articulate that. It grew more insubstantial the more he tried to pin it down. But he tried to imbue the mesmerism pouring from him with the glow of that vision, and the applause was deafening. This, he argued, was why the Terror needed to go on; this was the end that sanctified all the means. This was why the Terror needed to be protected from those like Hébert, who took it too far, and those who would prevent it from going far enough. This was what it was all for.
The following morning he couldn’t get out of bed. Éléonore found him when she came to get him for breakfast, shivering convulsively, barely conscious, struggling for breath.
“Maximilien!” She sank to her knees at his side, shaking him. He couldn’t focus his eyes, but his pale lashes parted to reveal a sliver of green. “My God.”
“It’s all right,” he managed. His voice was a whisper. “It’s the magic. It was too much yesterday. I just need to rest this morning.”
“You went out again last night, didn’t you? You do that all the time lately. Where? What did you do?”
He said nothing.
“You never tell me things,” she said. It was as if she had realized it for the first time. “We talk every day. And yet you never tell me anything.”
“Please,” he said. His eyes closed again.
The Duplays called a doctor, who recommended that he be confined to bed for at least a month and eat fewer oranges. He didn’t attend the Convention or the Committee for some weeks, but he still went to the guillotine. He still went to the Conciergerie at night too. His benefactor insisted, and Robespierre, though he no longer trusted him, still needed him.
In his absence, Hébert attempted to rally an insurrection to expel Robespierre from the Convention, a pathetic copy of the one against the Girondins the summer before. It failed miserably. Hébert was no mesmer, and the crowds simply weren’t inclined to stir. In March, Robespierre returned to work, and amid the ecstatic applause denounced Hébert and his supporters as traitors to liberty. They were arrested almost at once. The time for Robespierre needing two days of violent riots to have someone killed was long past.
There had been two main parties in the Convention once: the Girondins and the Mountain. The Girondins were gone.
There had been three loose factions of the Mountain: the Robespierrists, the Dantonists, and the Hébertists. Now the Hébertists were gone as well.
“This is all very well,” Saint-Just said as they left the Committee. “But you have to do something about Camille.”
“What about Camille?” Robespierre said, too impatiently. He knew very well what his friend was going to say.
Saint-Just wasn’t fooled. “You know what I mean about Camille.”
The week before, Camille had published an issue of The Old Cordelier that had certainly not been approved by Robespierre. It was really no more than a loose translation of Tacitus, outlining the tyrannical Law of Suspects that existed in the age of the Roman emperors, and which Camille claimed was an illustration of the evils of the monarchy. It was all too obvious, though, what the Roman Law of Suspects truly paralleled. Robespierre had felt his blood run ice-cold as he read it.
“Augustus was the first to extend the Law of Suspects,” Camille wrote, “in which he comprised writings which he called counterrevolutionary. As soon as words had become state crimes, it was only a step to transform into offenses mere glances, sorrow, compassion, sighs, silence even…”
It was perfect: brilliant, sparkling, cutting, devastating. And in that moment, Robespierre knew that his benefactor had been right.
“Camille is being Camille,” he told Saint-Just. “He doesn’t mean any harm to us—to you, perhaps, but you don’t exactly wish him well either.”
Saint-Just didn’t answer that; they both knew it was true. Camille had laughed at Saint-Just too many times, and his laughter had too much of real contempt. Saint-Just, Camille, and himself, Robespierre reflected—perhaps their only common attribute was that none of them could stand to be mocked.
“Whatever he means,” Saint-Just said, “he’s causing harm: he and Danton both. You know this. That last issue of The Old Cordelier was treason. You wouldn’t hesitate to put a stop to it if it were anyone else.”
“But it isn’t anyone else.” He had been feeling much better that evening, before he had stepped into the committee room. Now his head was pounding, and the twitch in his left eye was back. He resisted the urge to rub it away; even in front of Saint-Just, these days, it would look like weakness. “I asked Camille to start The Old Cordelier. I wanted him to rile up public opinion against the Hébertists. And it worked exactly as we planned. They’ll be dead tomorrow, and their corpses will fight for the Republic.”
“And that, as I said, is all very well,” Saint-Just said. “But do you really think Camille will stop there? He’s going too far, as always. He wants to bring the whole Committee down, not just the extremists among us.”
“Camille wants an end to the Terror. So does Danton. So do I. The only difference is that I know it’s too soon. We’re not there yet.”
“Exactly. And we never will be if views like his are allowed to go on. He has opposed the Terror.”
“He hasn’t quite done that.”
“A technicality. You said it yourself: there are three sins against the Republic. One is to be sorry for state prisoners, another is to be opposed to the rule of virtue, and the third is to be opposed to the Terror.”
“That was what you said.”
“I was saying it on your behalf.”
Robespierre said nothing.
Saint-Just, uncharacteristically, sighed. It might have been that, just this once, he was tired as well. “You have to do something about Camille,” he repeated.
The following morning, the fourth edition of The Old Cordelier rolled off the press and was gobbled up by the waiting public. In it, Camille Desmoulins referenced the possibility Robespierre had once raised of a Committee of Justice. He called instead for the establishment of a Committee of Mercy, to bring about an end to the Terror.
“‘O my dear Robespierre!’” Robespierre, reading it in newsprint, imagined his name in Camille’s small, scratchy handwriting, amid crossed-out lines and perfectly sculpted sentences. “It is you whom I address here. O my old school friend, whose eloquent discourses posterity will read! Remind yourself of the lessons of history and philosophy: love is stronger, more lasting than fear; admiration and religion are born of generosity; acts of clemency are the ladder of pride by which members of the Committee of Public Safety can elevate themselves to the sky (the Romans tell us this). They will never reach it through paths of blood.”
Robespierre didn’t go to the Committee that evening. He pleaded illness, which was not entirely a lie: he was still very weak, and his magic at the guillotine that afternoon had pushed him back to the edge of exhaustion. To his siblings and the Duplays, all of whom were wo
rried about him, he explained that he just needed a few hours to rest and collect his thoughts. He hadn’t slept the night before. He knew what the voice in his dreams would say, and he didn’t want to hear.
He was at his desk, trying to write, when a soft knock came at the door. He wasn’t sure how late it was. The courtyard outside was velvety dim, and quiet but for the odd bubble of conversation drifting in from the street.
“Maxime?” It was Éléonore. “Am I disturbing you?”
“Come in,” he said, and the door opened. Éléonore glanced around until her eyes found him at his desk. He wondered if the room looked as dark to her as it did to him.
“Camille’s downstairs,” she said. “I told him you were busy, but he insisted I come up and check if that meant busy to specific people, and if so, was one of those people him.”
One of those people was indeed him, but he could hardly say so. “I’m not really in any state for company at the moment.”
“I told him that too,” she said. “Do you want me to tell him again?”
“Yes—no.” He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “No, you may as well send him up. He’ll only make a nuisance of himself otherwise. Thank you.”
Éléonore looked around his room again, taking in the small bed, the desk, the shelves of neatly sorted books. Shadows lurked in the corner, and whispered. All she said, though, was “Don’t let the fire go down, will you? It’s cold in here, and you’re not well.” She closed the door behind her on the way out.
Earlier in their acquaintance, Éléonore had asked him about the pictures in his room. Even then, the walls had begun to fill with medals, prints, and engravings, all designed to commemorate moments of the Revolution and many depicting himself. Babette had teased him already, and so had Camille, but Éléonore had really been asking.