by H. G. Parry
What’s happening to you? he heard again.
It was nothing, he told himself firmly. It couldn’t be. He wouldn’t let it be.
He heard a knock on the door and collected himself hurriedly before it opened and Eliot came in. His friend’s sensitive face was furrowed in concern, laced with just a trace of awkwardness. Eliot hated people to be at odds, and certainly was not used to seeing his two greatest friends so.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “I met Wilberforce on the stairs; he was worried about you.”
“What did he say?”
Eliot looked faintly surprised, indicating that perhaps that question hadn’t come out quite as neutrally as he had intended. “Nothing unusual. He said that you were very much hurt, and it was his fault.”
Of course he had. The characteristic simplicity and concern made Pitt want to laugh and cry at the same time, but he summoned a faint smile instead. It was neither sincere nor convincing.
“It’s not his fault,” he said. “Except in that public difference with someone whose support I value is always going to be hurtful.”
“He was very distressed himself,” Eliot said tentatively. “More than I’ve ever seen him.”
“Did he warn you he was going to speak tonight?”
“No—not in so many words. He said he was going to have to follow his conscience on this vote, whatever the cost. He didn’t ask me to support him. He knew that would be impossible—given my position on your cabinet.”
He caught the addendum. “And what would you have done if you weren’t on my cabinet? Do you agree the war should end?”
“I truly don’t know what I think,” Eliot sighed. He looked more troubled than Pitt had seen him since the early days after Harriot’s death. “I value both your judgments too much to choose between you. I do know that Wilber would never have opposed you had he not thought it absolutely necessary.”
“I wasn’t doubting his feelings or his motivations. Others are, though. And it does make my job a good deal more difficult.” He shook his head, trying to find his usual wellspring of optimism somewhere inside. This was not the time for self-doubt. The country was at war, and it needed him to be better than that, or at least to seem to be. But Wilberforce’s words were still echoing in his ears, and he did not seem to be able to hear anything else.
“I’m afraid Grenville’s asking for you downstairs,” Eliot said. “News has just come from France. I could tell them to send it up to you.”
“No, don’t do that. I have news to convey as well, probably more recent. Could you tell him and anyone else down there to meet me in the cabinet room?”
“If you’re sure.” Eliot frowned doubtfully. “You look rather white, actually. Have you eaten at all today?”
“Yes,” he said, which he thought was true. He couldn’t quite remember. His body now had settled to a quiet throb; his magic had settled to the same degree. “It’s been a long night, that’s all.”
Eliot nodded. “Poor France.” He said it lightly, but there was a definite thread of wistfulness in his voice. “It seems a long time since we were there, doesn’t it?”
It did. Pitt thought of the French court, with all its glamor and opulence, and then, suddenly, of the tiny hotel room in Rheims where the three of them had drunk cheap wine as the stars had come out, and not cared that they had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do.
“I imagine it will look very different there now,” he said.
And he knew, with pain that had nothing to do with magic, that he and Wilberforce would not be returning to the way they had been then. They were in a different world now. It had changed around them, almost without their noticing, and now they were standing in the middle of it, and somehow they were no longer standing quite together.
Paris/London/Saint-Domingue
10 Thermidor, Year II of the French Republic of Magicians / 28 July 1794
They carried Robespierre down to the tumbril in the morning, in the chair in which he still sat. He had wanted to walk, but his strength had failed him. The bright light outside after the long, dark night staring up at the ceiling was too much for his eyes. He opened them sparingly, with effort, taking in as much of his surroundings as he could before he had to let his eyelids drop.
Every inch of the road was crammed with people. Mile after mile, an endless stream of them, all crowding to see him and clamoring for his death. He couldn’t believe Paris still held so many people, after all who had died. The press of them was overwhelming. They called to him and spat in his face.
“Monster!” he heard a woman say distinctly. He didn’t know why that should stand out, in the midst of so much else.
Once the cart stopped. He forced his eyes open, expecting to see the guillotine. The ride had felt long enough. But they were at his lodgings, where he had lived with the Duplays. The windows were boarded and the door shut tight. The cart stopped long enough to dash the contents of a bucket against the wall, and Robespierre watched without feeling as the pale stone walls turned the color of blood. Then the cart jolted on its way.
He was aware of the city and the jeering crowds. It was thin and translucent over his vision, like one of Éléonore’s watercolors.
He was also in the garden. It didn’t surprise him to see that it was on fire.
“Why?” he asked. “Why are you doing this to me? What did I do wrong?”
He didn’t know whom he was asking, the mob or the vampire. But only the vampire could answer, for Robespierre’s jaw was shattered, and he could speak only in his head.
“Nothing,” the vampire said. He said it almost kindly. “You did nothing wrong—well, nothing that couldn’t be easily amended. Everything happened exactly as it was meant to happen.”
“You mean I was always going to die.”
“You were always going to die. This is perhaps sooner rather than later. Your power is too distinctive—people across the oceans are already using it to lead them to me. And I have my army of the dead. That was always your purpose.”
Those on the cart with Robespierre saw him close his eyes. They didn’t see that, in the world in his head, the trees were turning black and the sky was red as blood.
“I thought—You said you were making a place for a leader of France.”
“I am. But that leader was never you. There’s no need to be jealous of him, though. He, too, has his purpose to serve, but not forever. Sooner or later, you all fall, and you all die.”
“But the Republic will survive, won’t it? If not for me, for others? My death will help the Republic live.”
“This is the end of the French Republic of Magicians,” the vampire said. “That mob out there don’t know it yet, but they have already signed its death warrant. I will have my leader at the head of an army of the dead, but he won’t lead a republic. He will lead an empire.”
When Robespierre next opened his eyes, the Tuileries Gardens swam into view. The guillotine stood at the Place de la Révolution, just for the occasion. The trees were green in the summer wind. The voice in his head had gone.
He had believed he was right. Truly, deeply, and completely. That was his only defense. Perhaps it was enough. Perhaps too many had died for that to make the slightest bit of difference.
Downing Street cabinet room
“Two thousand guillotined in Paris,” Grenville said. He held the dispatch open in his hand. “That’s the final count. And every last one of those a soldier of the dead now.”
Pitt nodded and kept his face perfectly still. “Well. That’s worse than we hoped, but not than we feared. If we can keep those forces spread thinly across Europe, we can manage.”
“That was in Paris,” Grenville said. “It seems that—it wasn’t public knowledge, which is why we didn’t have this information sooner. But those being executed elsewhere in France were being shipped into Paris after their deaths. They were brought to the Conciergerie after dark. It looks as though Robespierre and Saint-Just would, at least in the last year,
visit them at night and…”
“Animate them,” Pitt supplied when Grenville’s voice failed.
“Yes. Animate.”
“I see. How many?”
“I assume it was done in secret precisely so we wouldn’t know—and so that we wouldn’t move sooner to stop it. Not even the National Convention knew. We still can’t know for certain how many executed were made undead. Surely not all of them.”
“But how many were executed?”
“Since the start of the Reign of Terror—a little over sixteen thousand.”
For the first time since Pitt had become prime minister, his cabinet saw him completely speechless. “Dear God,” he said at last.
Approaching the guillotine now. Death was very close.
They wrenched him to his feet before the tumbril had even stopped. He stumbled, but somehow, miraculously, managed to stay upright. He could walk himself to the guillotine, at least. He had walked those steps before, a thousand times, to stand by the blade and animate the broken bodies of its victims. He knew the look of the grained wood, scrubbed every day but still stained with dark shadows of blood. Camille had walked this path, and Danton. Saint-Just would walk it after him, and his brother. It was only a short walk, the last any of them would ever take.
A few steps up, and he was standing above the crowd. The sky was blue above him. The sun glinted on the statue of Liberty that Madame Roland had addressed before she died. He saw his France, the French Republic of Magicians. He held it in his head, shining and pure, free and equal and united. It was not difficult to do so. His vision was dim. The shadows were thick about him, and whispering. Through the darkness and the roaring in his ears, the crowds and the buildings and the sky were no different from the ones in his dreams, and the noise could be the voice of the people cheering him to speak.
Liberté. Égalité. Fraternité. Surely they would still have cheered at that.
Saint-Domingue
Fina sat, feet tucked under her, on the wall of the fort. Above her, the sky was still and cloudless; below her, Toussaint’s army was yawning and stretching awake, or coming off night patrol, or sitting eating and talking on the stone bones of the enemy fort. The day was barely breaking. She knew it was there, but she saw none of it. She was behind the weakening eyes of the little Frenchman, whose name she still didn’t know.
She saw the crowd of white faces, blurred and ugly. She saw their lips move in shouts she couldn’t hear. She saw the strange contraption stretching into the air, and though she had never seen anything like it before, she knew an instrument of death when she saw one. The little man was pushed toward it. His lungs expanded and contracted with their last taste of sunbaked air.
They forced him roughly to his knees and forced his head onto the block. His broken jaw crunched against the wood. Still he endured in silence. He drew his vision tighter about him, and it was there with him as the executioner lowered the stocks and positioned his neck. It was there right until the executioner studied the bandages that bound his jaw together and without ceremony ripped them off.
He had thought he was in the worst pain he could be in; he had borne it, silently, throughout the dark night and the long morning. Now new agony shot through him like a second bullet—excruciating, piercing, all-consuming. With it came sudden, sickening clarity. The crowds burst into relief. Their voices crowded into his ears. The breeze was sharp and cruel.
The French Republic of Magicians shattered. There was no revolution anymore. He was not its embodiment. He was just a frail, broken body, with nothing in his head, not even his enemy.
He screamed.
The blade came down and silenced him.
“I’m sorry,” Fina said. “I know you tried to help. But this is our war now.”
Acknowledgments
Stories are big, wild, ridiculous, impossible things. It takes a lot of people to tame them into anything resembling a book. I still can’t quite believe this one made it, and I have many people to thank for it.
To my agent, Hannah Bowman: thank you so very much for rescuing the early version of this book from your queries, for pushing me to take it apart and make it better, for not giving up on it when I did, and for seeing it through to what it finally became. I hope we get to tell many more stories together.
To my editor, Sarah Guan: thank you for believing in this book, for seeing what it could be, for asking perceptive questions, and for making the story so much deeper and richer. It’s an honor to be one of your authors.
Thank you so much to everyone at Orbit/Redhook for everything you’ve done to bring this book into the world: to Alex Lencicki, Ellen Wright, Laura Fitzgerald, Paola Crespo, and Stephanie Hess for your tireless work in publicizing and marketing; to Lauren Panepinto and Lisa Marie Pompilio for the beautiful cover; to Bryn A. McDonald, managing editor; to Tim Holman, publisher; and to Emily Byron, my UK editor. I’m so lucky to work with you all.
This book is a mythologization of the real history of Britain, France, and Haiti in the eighteenth century, which is more interesting and dramatic and downright weird than anything I could make up. Thank you to the many, many brilliant historians whose work helped illuminate that time period for me. Everything I know comes from their research. Any errors, simplifications, inaccuracies, vampires, and acts of stray magic are my own.
As always, thank you, Mum and Dad, for your continual belief and support, and to my sister Sarah, not only for your patience and insight, but for letting me drag you across Hull in the rain to see Wilberforce’s birthplace, for hours of rambling conversations about the eighteenth century, and for telling me to write this in the first place. This book wouldn’t exist without the three of you.
Thank you to my beloved rabbits, O’Connell and Fleischman, and to the guinea pigs, Jonathan Strange, Mr. Norrell, and Thistledown. None of you were any help with this book at all. Thank you also to our cat-lodger, Angel, who at least sits beside me and purrs encouragingly sometimes.
Finally, if you’ve read this book, if you’ve read my last book, if you think you might like to read my next book: thank you. That means more to me than I’ll ever be able to say.
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