by H. G. Parry
Camille gave a quick, breathless laugh. His composure was back. “You mean Saint-Just.”
Robespierre didn’t answer. “As for the papers—perhaps I can persuade the Committee to let you renounce them publicly. Burn every issue.”
“Burning is not answering,” Camille shot back.
That, after everything else, was suddenly it. The line had been Rousseau’s response when the old order had burned Emile. The book was written on Robespierre’s heart, and Camille knew it. Twisting it against him now was worse than taking a knife to him. It might not have even occurred to Camille that this would be the case until after he had spoken—it was exactly the kind of quick-witted, lightning-fast allusion that came easily to him. It didn’t matter.
Robespierre drew himself up. Anger was coursing through his blood, hot and stinging. The shadows around him grew darker, so dark his friend’s face was almost hidden from him. Camille took a step backward.
“If you were anybody else,” Robespierre said, and heard every word drip with venom, “you would already be awaiting the guillotine. Do you understand that? I’ve protected you. You and your family. Everyone told me that I was letting sentiment blind me. My enemies laughed at me behind my back. And still I protected you. Now you’ve publicly turned against me.”
“You—you let me write that journal.” He was fighting his stutter now. Robespierre looked at him coldly, knowing he was making it more difficult. “You asked me to—to write that journal in the first place. You practically dictated—”
“You didn’t show me what you printed today. That wasn’t me; that was treason.”
“The Revolution was treason, remember? We didn’t care. We had to save the country. That’s all I’ve tried to do now. I know you wanted me to stop with denouncing the Hébertists, but it wasn’t enough. Hébert wasn’t the problem. The problem is that we’re killing people, and it needs to stop.”
“There’s only so much I can protect you from. There’s only so much I want to protect you from. Your activities are becoming too dangerous. You are becoming too dangerous.”
“I don’t—I don’t want you to protect me. I—” He gritted his teeth and tried again, frustrated with himself. “I want you to listen to me. I—You need to—”
“Get out.”
Camille opened his mouth, but his words jammed in his throat, and finally he had to close it again. He turned, and he left.
And that was how Robespierre would have remembered him: stammering and frightened, realizing for the first time in his life that he had gone too far. Except that he turned back once before he reached the door. “What about Lucile?” he said. “And Horace? He’s your godson.”
“And I’ll do what I can to make it easy on them,” he said. “But it’s not up to me. I’m not a dictator. This is a Republic.”
“This is a bloodbath,” Camille said. “And you will drown us all.”
Robespierre gritted his teeth. A pulse throbbed painfully in his temple. “If I were you,” he said, as calmly as he could, “I’d get out of France as soon as possible, and I would take your wife and child with you. Go to your English friends.”
“This is my country,” Camille replied. He still knew he had gone too far, but he wasn’t frightened anymore. “I’m not going anywhere.”
They came for him at dawn.
Camille answered the door on the third round of knocking. He looked shockingly white and exhausted, as though the last of his youth had fallen from him over the long, sleepless night. There were streaks of gray in his hair that hadn’t been there before. Yet he addressed them with his usual schoolboy charm.
“Good morning,” he said. “We expected you hours ago. We waited up.”
“I’m sorry, Citizen,” the guard replied dryly. “We stopped to arrest Citizen Danton first. Are you ready to come with us now?”
Nothing was provided in prison. Lucile had to help him pack a bag, as though he were going away on business. She folded clothes as if in a dream. Would it be warm or cold in the cells, this time of year? Would his stay be long? How many clean shirts? Camille selected two books, both in English, and quantities of pen and ink.
Lucile cried out loud when they came with the bracelet open.
“Oh no,” she said. “No, don’t.”
Camille squeezed her hand tightly. “It’s all right,” he said, but when the metal clasp clicked tight around his wrist, swallowing up the old scars, his bravado cracked. His eyes filled with tears.
“You bastards,” Lucile said flatly. “You’d still be under the old regime if it weren’t for him.”
“It’s not our fault,” the same guard said. He looked uncomfortable. “Come on. Time to go.”
Camille drew a deep breath and brushed his hair from his eyes. The familiar gesture was made clumsy by the metal encircling his arm. “May I say goodbye to my son?” he asked.
“If you’re quick,” the guard replied.
It was too quick, in the end. They tore him from Horace before he could finish saying goodbye; from Lucile before they could finish their last, desperate kiss; from his home before he could finish taking one last look. They tore him away before he could finish.
The Old Cordelier, seventh issue: “I believe that Liberty is humanity; thus I believe that Liberty would not prevent the relations of prisoners from seeing their fathers, their husbands, or their sons; I believe that Liberty would not condemn a mother to knock in vain for eight hours at the door of the Conciergerie, in the hope of speaking to her son, and when this unhappy woman had accomplished a hundred leagues in spite of her great age, to oblige her, to see him yet once again, to wait for him upon the road to the scaffold. I believe that Liberty is magnanimous: she would not insult a condemned criminal at the foot of the guillotine, and after his execution, because death wipes out the crime.”
Paris
March 1794
Robespierre had not wanted to go to the executions of the Dantonists. He never wanted to go to the guillotine, he admitted to himself; in another world, he would hide in his room every time and not come out until it was over. This one might be finally too much. This, surely, would destroy him.
“They’ll still be dead,” he said out loud, in the gray dawn. He had been awake all night. “Can’t they just be wheeled away and forgotten?”
Don’t be ridiculous, a voice said in response. It might have been his benefactor, but he suspected it was just himself. Perhaps, somehow, it was Saint-Just. He couldn’t tell anymore. How would that look? If they alone don’t become soldiers in the army of France. How would it look?
And so, because of how it would look, Robespierre was standing on the scaffold as his friends were wheeled toward him. Saint-Just was at his side, steely and uncompromising, and perhaps just a little triumphant. Robespierre looked ahead, and his face showed nothing. It was a fine, cold day. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, and without their green tint the colors seemed too bright to be real.
Camille was third in the line of eight. He had not come quietly. Small and light as he was, it had taken three strong men to get him to the tumbril; his shirt had been ripped from his back in the struggle, and on his wrist his new bracelet glinted silver. On the way, he had alternately pleaded and cursed the crowds as Danton tried in vain to soothe him. Now, approaching the gigantic silhouette of the guillotine, his voice had finally failed him, but his face was drawn and frightened and his dark eyes were enormous. They had cut his mass of dark curls to avoid impeding the blade. His neck without them looked white and naked.
Many people had been to the guillotine before them. Many had faced their deaths bravely, with stoicism and dignity and resignation. Camille had never been one for any of those things. He was young, and distraught, and he did not want to die.
It was only steps from the guillotine itself that he stopped fighting the men whose job it was to wrestle him to the blade. Robespierre was trying not to look at him, but when he heard the noise of the scuffle quiet, he turned his head before he could help
himself. For the rest of his life, he wished he had never moved. Suddenly, Camille was in front of him: not a blurred figure in a cart but real, familiar, as he might have been standing a thousand times in the past for a thousand more innocent reasons. There was a sheen of sweat on his bare skin; it mingled with dirt and dried tears and a tiny trail of blood where the shears had nicked his ear. A bruise was blossoming on his right cheekbone. His brilliant eyes were dark in the hollows of his face. Robespierre had thought somewhere in the back of his mind that Camille would forgive him, or at least pity him. It was nonsense. Camille didn’t forgive, and this wasn’t forgivable. He looked at Robespierre with utter hatred.
“You won’t survive us by long,” Camille said. Then, quite deliberately, he turned his back and looked at the executioner.
“There’s a locket in my hands.” He sounded almost calm. “It’s from my wife. See that her mother gets it, won’t you?”
The executioner took it, and they put Camille’s head on the block.
Later Robespierre would find out, against his will, that Danton had rescued the locket for Camille before it could be cut from around his neck, and been allowed to slip it to him before the men had bound their hands. Camille had carried it, curled about his fingers, all the way down the interminable road to the scaffold. When he had learned that his wife had been arrested a week after him, they said, he had all but lost his mind. The touch of the metal that enclosed her hair, and the physical support of Danton beside him, were all that had kept his trembling, beaten body upright on the tumbril. Amid everything he was trying not to feel, Robespierre actually felt jealous of Danton. Camille had once been his to protect.
Robespierre had known Camille for twenty years. The guillotine cut him away in less than a second. His magic stirred within him, and as the blood flowed he took Saint-Just’s shadow and pushed it into the frail corpse that was left behind. Soon, it was all over, and a new undead went to join the ranks. He didn’t look at the head in the basket, but he never did anyway.
Danton was last. He stepped up to the guillotine, magnificent to the end. His murdered supporters, now animated with newly summoned shadows, stood in line awaiting further orders. He did not look at them, nor did he look at Robespierre beside them.
“Show my head to the crowds,” he told the executioner. “It’s worth the trouble.”
The worst part was that it was not too much. It did not destroy him. As he had discovered in Arras the day he signed his first death warrant it was possible to do truly terrible things, and go home to bed afterward, and get up the next day.
“You’re weakening,” his benefactor said.
“I’m not.” Robespierre wiped his eyes; they were as wet with tears here as in the real world. Perhaps he was crying within as well as without. “How can you say that? I used to kill my enemies. Now I kill my friends. If strength is measured by corpses, I grow stronger every day. One day I may even kill you.”
He said it with bitter irony but was astonished to find how much he meant it.
His benefactor showed no sign of surprise. “Possible, but unlikely.”
Robespierre drew a deep breath and let it out through gritted teeth. He was weakening—not in his will, perhaps, but in his body. His magic was not meant to be mingled with shadows. It felt poisoned.
“Was Camille right?” he asked. He could even say his name. “Could this magic kill me?”
“Yes,” his benefactor said. “It could.”
“Will it?”
“Would you stop if I said it will?”
“No. But I would like to know.”
His benefactor smiled. “No,” he said. “The magic will not kill you.”
Ten days later, on the other side of the Channel, a shadow appeared in the garden at Battersea Rise. Henry Thornton was away in town on business, and the house was very quiet. Wilberforce was writing a letter at his desk, enjoying the crisp sunlight after a week of rain, when the butler came to fetch him.
“It’s a real one, sir.” His Cockney twang sounded apprehensive. “I mean, a powerful one. Human form. Sort of wispy, though—more gray than black. We thought we’d better fetch you.”
“Yes,” Wilberforce said, as calmly as he could. His heart was pounding. “Yes, of course. Thank you, Thomas. But—you’re sure it’s not rogue?”
“Not sure, sir. But it’s not hurting anyone. It’s just standing there. And…”
“And what?” Wilberforce prompted after a moment.
“And it’s saying your name, sir. At least, we think it is. They don’t really speak, you know. But… it’s in the wind.”
“The shadow?”
“Your name. Your name is in the wind.” He paused. “One of the maids nearly fainted.”
“I don’t wonder,” Wilberforce managed. He felt he could faint himself. “Poor thing. Was it Laura?”
Thomas was unsurprised by the question. “Yes, sir.”
“She’s very nervous. See that she’s given the night off, will you? And I’ll go down to see what this shadow wants.”
“It’s dangerous, sir,” Thomas said. “And you’re too important to lose. Best call the Knights Templar and let them deal with it.”
“Come now,” Wilberforce said lightly. Thomas’s fear made him paradoxically braver, perhaps simply because the other man’s regard for him made him feel that he had to be. “That’s no way to talk. It might have something interesting to tell me. If the Knights Templar came, they’d cart it off or destroy it, and we’d never find out what it was.”
“I’d live with the disappointment, sir. Anyway, shadows never tell anyone anything.”
In the end, Thomas insisted on accompanying Wilberforce with a rifle, at a distance of a few feet. Wilberforce had his own stake too, just in case, but when he stepped out into the garden, he was glad of the added protection. The wind was indeed calling his name. It whispered through the leaves of the trees above his head, and swirled around the rosebushes that circled the house. It raised the hairs on the back of his neck.
The shadow stood in the center of it all, grotesque in the bright light of day. Thomas had been right: it was a peculiar shade. Usually they were solid black; this one was soft gray, darker in the middle and almost invisible at the edges. The feet seemed not to touch the ground. It was utterly still.
Wilberforce, the wind hissed.
“I’m here,” Wilberforce said. He wasn’t sure it would understand him, but its head turned in his direction. “What do you want of me?”
The shadow turned. Nestled in its chest, just below where the heart would be, a folded piece of paper lay shrouded in cloud. A letter. It had no seal, and the address could not be read.
A shadow bearing a letter. To Clapham. Such a thing had never been done, as far as Wilberforce knew. But it was here.
“Do you wish me to take it?” Wilberforce asked. “Is that it? Is it for me?”
It didn’t move. Even if shadows could communicate, perhaps that was the only answer his question deserved.
He had been thinking of the phrase “to steel oneself” lately. He had watched Pitt do it countless times, before stepping into the House of Commoners or a cabinet meeting or a dinner party. There would be the faintest intake of breath; then he would draw himself up, ramrod straight, head high, face unreadable, every inch as though encased in inviolable armor. Wilberforce launched himself into things unarmored, with his mind and heart wide open, not a defense in the world. He had wondered, once or twice, which of them was the more vulnerable.
This time, he steeled himself. He drew a deep breath and held it, as though about to plunge into water. He imagined himself coated in metal, a barrier between his skin and the shadow in front of him, unable to be touched. Then, before his nerve could break, he plunged his hand into the shadow’s chest and snatched out the folded paper. It wasn’t as terrible as he had feared. Really there was no sensation at all. It was almost certainly his imagination that his hand felt tainted and the scar on his side ached.
; “Thank you,” he said to the shadow, belatedly.
It gave no sign of hearing him. It shivered in the breeze, like a ripple across a pond, just once. Then it was gone. It dispersed into the bright April afternoon, as another shadow had dispersed in France with a shot through the heart. Wilberforce had never heard of such a thing happening spontaneously before. He didn’t know whether it had died or been set free.
He opened the letter. It was from Camille Desmoulins.
London/Saint-Domingue
April 1794
Citizen Wilberforce,
Forgive the Latin. I can read English, but I write it clumsily, and I’m not sure if you have enough French to appreciate my more delicate verbal flourishes. If this is to be my last surviving letter, I want it appreciated.
If you ever receive this, I did what you told me not to do, and it went badly, and I was executed. I doubt I make a very good undead. My head is generally conceded to be my best feature.
I haven’t been executed. I refuse to believe I’m dead. You will never get this. But I write it anyway. A lot of things have happened over the past few years that I would never have believed. And I know too well that life is made up of evil and good in equal proportions. For some years evil has floated around me, so that it seems to me my turn to be submerged must come.
Even if I am indeed dead, you still may never get this. I realize the difficulty in trying to write and smuggle a letter to England at the best of times, much less under the nose of an enemy who is in the mind of every citizen of the Republic. I might have done better with the daemon-stone, of course, but I fear I threw that thing into the Seine as soon as it had delivered its message. Robespierre’s men search for such things regularly; I had no wish to be arrested. But. Whatever this thing is, vampire or not, it can’t watch everything at once. Right now, Robespierre is speaking at the Convention; I can hear him through the door of the private office he’s set up just off the debate chamber, where I’ve ducked for a few minutes. Picture him, if you like: standing at the tribune, glasses pushed up on his forehead, surrounded by flickering candles. His speech low, hypnotic, punctuated by long pauses that bear no relation to grammar or sense. There’s no air around him these days. When he speaks the room can’t breathe. I suspect mesmerism is flooding his every sentence. My hope is that this thing cannot give such help to Robespierre, and be so present among his audience, and notice me scribbling at the same time. I’m finding this as easy to write as can be expected, so either I’m right, or it’s playing games with me right now. I can play games too.