by H. G. Parry
It was not there.
Panic stabbed him; he fumbled for it in his mind as one searches a pocket for a missing coin. He knew it was no use. It was gone. In the moment between him sitting and standing, something had reached out and snatched his power away. Or rather, his benefactor’s power. Robespierre recognized the feeling from the long months when he had refused to kill the king and his benefactor had withheld his mesmerism to punish him. But this was different, and infinitely more perilous. This wasn’t the Jacobins, but a whole room out for his blood. And he had done nothing wrong this time. He was not being punished. He had been abandoned.
In a life full of corpses and shadows and blood, this was the worst moment of all.
His own gift was still there—as he’d learned three years ago, that could not be stolen or diminished now that it had been awakened. He tried to gather that, if it was all he had, and send it out into the room. But it was so small and pathetic in the mass of hatred and suspicion—like dashing the dregs of a cup of wine into the ocean.
“I was here from the beginning,” he said. He had said such things, with variation, for years. He knew no other way to prove his revolutionary credentials. “I was there at the Estates General when the meeting pledged to free Commoner magicians from persecution and imprisonment. I was there when the crowds rose up and tore the Bastille to the ground. I was there when the king fled, and when we punished him for it. I was part of the first Convention of the French Republic of Magicians. When France was battered by its enemies, I gave it an army of the dead, at the expense of my own safety and my own strength. I have given this revolution everything I have, and I will continue to do so until my last breath.”
“Of course you have,” someone said. He couldn’t see faces or distinguish voices now, in the darkness that shrouded him. “You’ve controlled it from the beginning. It’s the product of your insatiable ambition.”
“No. No, that’s not…” He gathered his voice. “You don’t understand. This revolution is the first to have been founded on the theory of the rights of humanity and the principles of justice. Other revolutions required nothing but ambition; ours imposes virtue.”
“Then where is that virtue? Why has it led us to the foot of the guillotine?”
“Because this revolution has been persecuted constantly since its birth, as have the men of good faith who have fought for it! It has been persecuted by conspiracists, and liars, and traitors who seek their own gain. And all the deceivers have adopted, each more convincingly than the last, all the formulas and the rallying words of patriotism.”
“Then what marks them from you? If the enemies of the Revolution can speak its language as well as you, then how do we know you are not such a one yourself?”
There was no real answer to this. He knew it only too well. It was what had plagued him from the beginning, what had haunted his fears all along, what he had seen happen to the faces of the Girondins and the Hébertists and Danton and finally even Camille. There was no way of telling. Words were only words. What lay behind them was an eternal mystery, and he had never learned how to penetrate it. Perhaps there was no way.
“You know,” he said, “because I am Maximilien Robespierre, the Incorruptible, and I have never once lied to you. Those who accuse me are the ones you need to fear. I dare not expose them here. But believe me, when I do, you will know in your own hearts who is innocent and who is guilty.”
The room hissed with a group intake of breath, and he realized, too late, that this had been a misstep. He had assumed they would wait to see whom he would accuse: in truth, he had not yet decided himself where the blame for all this lay. But the Convention had now also seen him throw his closest friend under the blade of the guillotine. Almost everybody in the room would fear that he meant to accuse them.
The same thing must have occurred to Saint-Just. He sat by Robespierre’s empty seat in the Mountain. His face was its usual mix of impassivity and contempt, but just once he shot Robespierre a look of alarm.
He couldn’t back down. It would be an admission of a mistake. All he could do was forge ahead.
And so he forged ahead, reaching for his mesmerism again and again without effect, trying to pour his conviction into the little magic he had left, trying to do without magic at all. It was like fencing with a man in armor when his blade was no larger than a pin.
“If you are so pure, so virtuous,” the Convention said, “then why are so many dying every day?”
“It isn’t my fault!” His green eyes blazed. “I’m not a dictator. I’ve never sent anyone to the guillotine. I sit on the Committee, which finds people guilty of treason; the Convention sentences them to death. And then you blame me. You all blame me. You blame me for Danton, and for Camille. You blame me for the Girondins. But all I ever did was speak; you all listened, and you all acted.”
“Did you use magic to control us?”
“I used magic to give you a revolution!” It was the closest he would ever come to the truth. “We have that revolution now. It belongs to all of us. And it can still survive. It has to still survive.”
It was not his best performance; he knew that. He had nothing to say that he had not said before—a hundred times, a thousand. He had no powerful magic left; only words, and feeling, and the conviction that he had been right—he had to have been right. The room was against him. He could feel their hostility, and knew, without doubt, that it was being encouraged and stoked by an unseen force. They were tired of blood and terror. They were scared of what he had become.
And yet still, when the Convention ordered his arrest and the soldiers came forward and gripped him by the arms, he could feel nothing but complete and utter shock.
That night, a letter was brought to the Duplays’ house, addressed to Robespierre. Duplay put it on Robespierre’s desk with his other correspondence numbly, out of sheer habit, as his family wiped their tears and struggled to plan for a future rapidly dissolving. The letter was in French, but it had been dictated by Pitt the morning before to an English spy, over the very last daemon-stone left in Paris. It warned Robespierre that his silent partner meant to destroy him. Nobody would ever open it.
On the same day, an emergency sitting of Parliament took place in Westminster. The House of Commoners buzzed with disgruntled politicians, most called back posthaste from summer residences or luxurious retreats they insisted were for their health. The debate was to be on the breaking of the Concord, and many thought it was really about time.
The war had changed things in the House of Commoners. The symphonies that played about the walls were darker and full of foreboding; debates stretched out longer into the night and ended less often in laughter; the crowds that gathered in the gallery overhead were angrier. The conversations were no longer about taxes and treaties and magical reform alone, but troops and naval battles and sedition.
It had changed other things as well. Things that Wilberforce had never thought would change, things that he did not think he could bear.
“I can’t do this,” he said quietly as the House assembled. Over the noise, the only person to hear him was Thornton, taking his seat at his side.
“You don’t have to do anything,” Thornton said. “I intend to stay quiet myself.”
“But you always stay quiet. Your silence won’t be remarked upon, or taken as tacit agreement with government policy.”
“Your silence or your support is a matter for your conscience and nothing else, Wilber,” Thornton said. “It always is. It doesn’t matter what people think.”
And Thornton meant it. For him, perhaps, it truly felt that simple. Wilberforce, though, had been seeking that kind of simplicity all his life, and had never found it.
The House of Commoners was emptier that evening than usual: there hadn’t been an emergency session during the summer for decades, and many had been too far away to come in time. Wilberforce himself had arrived only an hour before, hot and travel worn, from the north. It gave an air of unreality to the familiar
room as Pitt stood and told them that, in light of the surge of executions in France following the death of the Dantonists, the government proposed the Concord be broken as soon as possible. The army of the dead was growing.
Wilberforce found he was barely following his friend’s words. Instead, he watched him closely, as he hadn’t in years. When Pitt had come to power, he could, unhelpfully, have passed for much younger than twenty-four. His features had still been too soft; his energy and confidence were too youthful; even his reserve was too much that of a teenager trying not to be laughed at. He looked older than his age now. The last year had thinned his face and whittled lines at the corners of his eyes; months of being continually tired and not quite well were wearing at him like fine grit at sandstone. Other than that, he was much the same as he ever had been. He presented the case for the breaking of the Concord as he had presented everything since before he had taken power: clearly, reasonably, cleverly. Whatever had prompted the decision, it was not written on his face for anyone to read, not even Wilberforce.
Fox, predictably, shot to his feet after Pitt had finished. Wilberforce barely heard him either, though judging from the walls, he and Pitt were well matched as ever. Some things, at least, were familiar.
“I should have gone to see him earlier,” Wilberforce said quietly—to himself, but of course Thornton heard.
“Who? Fox?”
“Pitt. I don’t know why he’s doing this.”
“When could you have seen him? In the hour before the House assembled? You’d never have pried him away from Dundas and Grenville, even if he’d wanted to be pried. Besides, why would it make any difference?”
“It wouldn’t, of course,” Wilberforce said, which was probably true. But he felt he was losing his mind, or something worse.
Another speaker. Then another. And then, as the night wore on, it was his turn, or could be—should be, if he were going to take a turn at all. Eyes were beginning to look in his direction, not expecting anything in particular, just for him to speak. He was the Nightingale of the House of Commoners. He was known for it.
I can’t do this, Wilberforce thought, and then he got to his feet and did it.
“Mr. Speaker,” he called, and all heads turned to him. “Might I address the House?”
The Speaker was a man their own age: Henry Addington, the son of the doctor who had saved Pitt’s life. He and Pitt had been childhood friends, and Wilberforce had dined with them both at Downing Street a thousand times. It was strange, Wilberforce thought irrelevantly, how many of them caught up in all of this, on both sides of the Channel, seemed to have been born at the same time. Pitt, Robespierre, Camille, Danton, Clarkson, even himself—all of them within a year or two of each other, and none of them past thirty-six.
He drew a deep breath.
“I am afraid it falls upon me to perform a painful act of duty. I must express a difference with those with whom it has been the happiness of my political life so generally to agree.”
Those who had talked to him recently must have been prepared for it: Eliot would have been, at least, and Thornton, sitting protectively at his side. But for most of the House, it was a bolt out of the blue—or a betrayal. Shock and excitement rippled the room. Even the walls resounded, for one brief note, like an exclamation.
Pitt should perhaps have been prepared as well: Wilberforce had certainly told him of his opinions about the war and the Concord, many times. And yet when Wilberforce dared glance in his direction, he knew he had not been prepared at all. His face had become utterly still, as it did on reflex when he wanted to hide his feelings. His eyes were not so easy to veil, and the surprised hurt in them went straight to Wilberforce’s heart.
The Speaker was calling the House to order, but it was unnecessary. Wilberforce’s voice, tiny as he was, had always been more than capable of speaking above the crowds. Against every natural impulse, he raised it now.
“I know that my honorable friend has the greatest interests of the country at heart,” he said, “and of no man’s political integrity do I think more highly. But I am sent here by my constituents not to gratify my private friendships, but to discharge a great political trust; and for the faithful administration of the power vested in me, I must answer to my country and my God. I therefore cannot agree to the breaking of the Concord. I cannot believe that it will save us; I believe instead that it will plunge us into black magic and misery of the acutest kind, at the very moment when we most need to come to terms of peace with France.”
Pitt had mastered his shock now—at least, to the eyes of those who did not know him very well. He rose, quietly, with the utter confidence that transformed him in the House of Commoners. His voice betrayed barely a tremor. Even after all these years, Pitt still appeared at his most self-possessed when he had been badly shaken. “Mr. Speaker, might I question my honorable friend as to the nature of these terms he proposes? As far as I’m aware, France has offered us none that we might accept with honor or security.”
“I propose that we ask them what terms they might accept from us,” Wilberforce replied, over the renewed clamor Pitt’s words prompted. “And then we in turn might suggest what we might accept from them. I propose we talk to them, for God’s sake, before we both fall headlong into something from which we can never extricate ourselves.”
Wilberforce looked Pitt directly in the eye, willing him to understand. Pitt looked back. And suddenly, without warning, Wilberforce found himself unable to speak. Reluctance to harm the government—to harm his friend—rose in his throat to choke him. It was very like his own reluctance; he recognized the doubts rising in his own mind. But he had spent hours struggling with his own reluctance in the dark: he knew it too well, and more to the point, he knew Pitt. He recognized the touch of his magic in his brain, even though he’d never felt it before. His surprise was so great that he barely had a chance to feel angry or afraid.
This, it came to him, was what it felt like to be spellbound. This was what abuse of magic looked like.
Paralyzed, he met Pitt’s gaze evenly. It seemed they were locked in silent struggle for long minutes. In fact, a matter of seconds passed before Pitt looked away, and Wilberforce felt the hold on him release. He caught his breath with relief.
“Please,” he said, as though there had been no pause. He felt weak and dizzy, but his tongue was free. “I know this House is afraid; I know this entire country is afraid. But we need to be better than this.”
He sat down amid a torrent of voices, too shaken to care who was shouting what and why.
Part of him was furious now that the shock had settled; it was difficult not to be when the memory of the magic was still so vivid that his limbs seemed barely his own. And yet that was wrong. He remembered the last time he had seen that mesmerism, the night at the Tower of London. He had understood then that it had come from grief, from exhaustion, and from desire to keep the country safe. It came from the same place now, only this time, Wilberforce had been at the center of it. He had not blamed Pitt for his magic when Clarkson had been the recipient; it would be hypocrisy to be outraged now, simply because the magic had been used on him.
He wasn’t angry. But he was sick with guilt, and with worry and fear. Everything had gone horribly wrong, and he didn’t know how to make it right.
“Are you well?” Thornton asked quietly as the next speaker stood. He was unaware of the mesmerism, of course, but he understood Wilberforce’s internal struggle perfectly.
Wilberforce managed a tight nod. “Yes. Yes, I think so.”
“You did the right thing,” Thornton said. “Pitt won’t blame you. He would never expect you to go against your conscience.”
“In his eyes, I’ve betrayed his trust and endangered the country,” Wilberforce said miserably. “He’ll blame me.”
He thought he had indeed done the right thing, morally speaking. He believed that—he could never have done it otherwise. And yet morality was a harsh, cold thing, as uncompromising as a blade, and
Wilberforce was only a human being who never wanted to hurt anybody. He sighed deeply, and felt that he was trying to expel something that could never be expelled.
They had taken Robespierre to prison. It was nothing like the grim torture chamber of the Bastille: the Luxembourg had until recently been a palace, and was still an impossibly graceful building of pale stone. The gardens around the palace were dry in the summer heat. It was the same prison to which Danton and Camille had first been brought upon their arrest. Lucile had stood in those gardens, hoping that Camille could see her from the dark, secured rooms inside. Robespierre’s room had no window, only a bed, and a desk in the corner.
“Please,” he asked the men who delivered him to it, “may I have pen and paper, and a candle?”
“We’ll see,” one of the men said awkwardly, and Robespierre knew that they had been told not to give him a thing.
For the first time in his life, Robespierre had a bracelet clamped around his wrist. It was not as heavy as he had expected, and it did not burn. If anything, it felt cool against his skin, and only a little too tight. As an experiment, he rallied the magic in his blood, and at once the metal stung as if drawn close to a naked flame.
Camille must have hated it, he thought before he could stop himself, and knew it was an understatement. Imprisoned again, braceleted again, he must have almost lost his mind. No wonder news of his wife’s impending execution had pushed him over the edge. He would have been standing on the brink for two weeks.
The shadows had been waiting for him to be alone in the dark. They converged on him the moment the door closed behind the guards. He no longer had the will to force them back.