A Far Better Thing, page 23
“May I help you, sir?” she said, in a voice that dripped with irony. Up close, her eyes were hard and dark, and the lines around them had deepened since we had last met. My heart sent another spike of panic to my limbs, as though I had seen a venomous spider.
“I think you can,” I said. “Please sit down. I think we have a good deal to talk about. You know what I am, of course.”
I didn’t make it a question, and after a long, hard look, she nodded.
“I know what you are.” The chair scraped as she sat. “I knew what you were the moment you stepped through my door all those years ago, mortal servant. Even with the glamour, it shows. You can’t grow up in another world and not carry it with you. You’re wearing cold iron this time. It was brave of you to come here, with that on you.”
I ignored this last part, for now. “Did it show on Barsad?” I countered. “You never answered my question, all those years ago. Did he come to visit you in Saint-Antoine, shortly before I did?”
She paused, considering, and I leaned forward.
“Go on. Surely it can’t hurt him now, after all this time?”
Madame Defarge rolled her dark eyes expressively. “You can hurt him all you like, as far as I’m concerned. He did come, yes. On a fairy’s orders. There was a letter for us.”
“A letter? From whom?” She didn’t answer, and I knew better than to press. “Very well. So Shadow sent him. But that wasn’t the only interaction you two had, was it? You helped him to escape the fairies.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I saw him in court. He wasn’t smart enough to escape the fairies on his own.”
Her lips twitched. “Neither are you, it seems.”
“Perhaps I don’t want to escape.” The memory came to me, unbidden, of the night I had stood outside Charles Darnay’s apartment with a pistol in my hand. “Perhaps I have things that I can accomplish better in the fairies’ service.”
“You have nothing to accomplish. You have no life of your own. I know your kind.”
It was my turn to shrug. “Then there’s little point in my being free. What is Barsad accomplishing with his new life?”
She gave a snort that could almost pass for a laugh. “That little wretch. I have no idea where he’s spent the last decade or so. Two months ago he came back to Paris, miserable, asking for our help. He’s a sheep for the prisons now—one of those who poses as a prisoner to get information for the guards. Not because he cares at all about our cause, but because a spy is all he knows how to be.”
That startled me. “He’s back in Paris?”
“He is. Talk to him, if you like. I doubt you’ll learn anything useful from him—he was following orders, that was all, until he managed to escape. Some escape. He lives in the dark, skulking in bars, in constant terror of being found. You wouldn’t have been the first or the last he’d poisoned to keep himself safe.”
So he had been in their shop all those years ago. “I assume when he saw me in your shop, he thought the fairies were coming for him?”
“He always thinks the fairies are coming for him. They never have, to my knowledge. If they did come looking for him, I’d likely turn him in myself. I held up my end of the bargain by supplying him with Realm-silver.”
“What did he give you in return?”
“Very little, for what he got. Information, that was all. Information about the identity and whereabouts of Charles Saint Evrémonde, against whom he’d just testified in the English court.”
There it was. “Darnay. What do you want with him?”
Her mouth twisted—a smile, or a grimace. It was at that moment that I felt a sharp jab in my ribs, under the table. It could have been the point of a blade. I glanced at her, and with a raise of her eyebrow she laid the second of her two knitting needles on the table. It was solid steel, and tipped like the head of an arrow. The first needle, of course, was right at my side. I didn’t move.
“Don’t play games with me,” she said, and her voice held the same edge between amusement and disgust as her face. “When we met the last time, I knew you only as a mortal servant. Now I know what else you are. What’s more, I know that you’re wearing cold iron. I told you, it was brave to do that.”
“Why does that make me brave?”
“Because it means you know your true name. You know who your family is. If you know that, then you’re very brave to come here. Or very foolish.”
I kept my eyes steady, but let a smile of my own play over my face. I didn’t feel it. My breath was coming short and rapid, and each intake of air pushed my stomach painfully against the point of her needle. I wasn’t sure how much damage it could do, but at best it would hurt to have a shaft of steel straight through my ribs, and at worst it could be tipped with something very unpleasant. This might have been a miscalculation after all.
“Perhaps I just don’t know as much as you think,” I said slowly. “I know who I am, it’s true. I know my parentage. That’s why I came. It wasn’t merely to ask about Barsad this time, although you’ve been very helpful on that score. I wanted to ask you about the Marquis de Saint Evrémonde and his brother. My uncle, and my father.”
The point of the needle dug in on reflex. “What about them?”
“I know they murdered your family—”
“Murdered.” Her face was blank now, and smooth. It looked younger somehow. “That sounds simple and clean, doesn’t it? It wasn’t. You want to know about your family and mine? Your father wanted my sister for his own. Your uncle, the Marquis, gave her freely. Her husband objected. He was frail already, and they harnessed him to a dog-cart and drove him until he dropped dead. Then they took my sister. The news broke my father’s heart, and killed him. I never saw my family again. My brother got me to safety, and then he went to find my sister. When he did, he drew his sword and tried to defend her. Your father ran him through and left him to die. My sister lingered a week longer, her mind and body broken. They brought Dr. Manette out to save her in the end. It did no good, and Dr. Manette was sent to prison to ensure he never spoke of it to another living soul. As far as I know, he never did.”
I thought I was hardened to tragedy, but my stomach tightened against the point of her needle. “I’m sorry,” I said, and felt keenly the inadequacy of those words.
“Not yet you aren’t. But you will be. I was a very small girl when I saw your father, but I never forgot his face. I saw it on Darnay, but I see it clearer still on you. You had better be very careful of your face.”
How much had Rosemary known of this? I wondered, far too late, if this had been the real reason she had warned me not to come. Never mind. It was too late now.
“I understand why you want revenge,” I said, very carefully. “What happened to your family was unforgivable. Under normal circumstances, I would leave you to it. But there’s more to it than that. For some reason, one particular fairy seems very invested in the Evrémonde family, and specifically his connection with the Manettes—which, as far as I can tell, is the murder of your family. And the Marquis was obsessed with fairykind. I know he had a book about them in his possession, a very powerful one. You seem to know rather more than is usual about fairy magic yourself. It’s very important that I know why he might have had such a book.”
“Why is that important?”
“Because I have revenge of my own to seek,” I said. “I think you understand that.”
It was the best thing I could have said—perhaps the only thing that could have worked. I saw the words hit, and I saw Thérèse Defarge nod slowly. “Very well,” she said. “As to why the Marquis had such a book, I don’t know. But in the name of vengeance, let me tell you something about my sister, mortal servant. Her name was Aurore. She was twelve years my senior, very clever, and very beautiful. She loved clouds and horses and sunsets. I knew her all my life. I also met her for the first time one year before her death.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that I woke up on the morning after my seventh birthday, came downstairs, and she was there. I knew at once that she was my sister, and that she had always lived there. I also knew that I had never seen her before in my life.”
“Bewilderment.” It was the way a mortal servant entered the human world for the first time. Children could see through it sometimes, just enough to be confused. One or two of the youngest at Shrewsbury had given me some odd looks on my first day, as though trying to remember something they had forgotten.
When he drank too much he would tell me about a woman from fairyland who had got away from him, Darnay had said.
“We never spoke of it,” Madame Defarge said. “She knew I knew, but she also knew I loved her and she loved me back. She loved all of us. Especially she loved Gérard, who lived next door, and who she wed very soon after arriving in my life. She would tell me stories, sometimes, that we both knew weren’t stories at all. Stories about growing up in the fairy world, in houses of bone. About how to work iron and Realm-silver to keep the fairy folk at bay—yes, she had Realm-silver with her, from the first. She hung it above the door to protect us, knowing the Realm might seek to claim her back. Only it wasn’t the fairies that came for her, in the end. It was the Marquis and your father.”
The fairies never let us be loved. They never put us in places where we ever could be. Which meant, somehow, Aurore put herself there. She had grown in the Realm, a stolen child; she had come into the world at thirteen, a mortal servant. And somehow, at the age of nineteen, she had found Realm-silver and escaped their clutches, just as Barsad had so many years later.
Shadow knew. Somehow, she had meant something to Shadow. It could not be a coincidence that I had been told to murder one of the men responsible for her death, that the other was already dead. Now, for whatever reason, he had plans for Darnay and the Manettes as well. Plans that involved the arrest of Darnay, the changeling son of Aurore’s murderer.
Thérèse must have seen something on my face, because her own suddenly softened. Without the fury blazing and hardening it, she looked only very worn and tired. The needle at my ribs withdrew.
“Get out of here, mortal servant,” she said. “I’ll deal with you sooner or later. This isn’t the time or the place. But if you ever come back here again, I might change my mind.”
* * *
I DIDN’T go back to the Rolands that night—there hardly seemed to be a point, when I had no chance of sleep. It was drizzling outside, and the wet cobbles caught the lights from the street and reflected them like glass. My feet were learning the twists and turns of the city, and they took me on a wander through the bars open late, the cafés gone to sleep, the unsavoury alleys where prostitutes smiled toothlessly from every corner. At last, as they had so often in London and many times since I had come to Paris, they took me to Lucie Manette.
I only knew the street where she was lodging, not the house, but the very first night I had come I had seen the single light burning at a window and known it was her. I’d seen that light burning in Soho Square. She had dreams that woke her as I did, and worries that kept her from sleep. In the daytime, I tried to remind myself that she was a changeling, and might not even have true feelings at all. At night, I knew she was on the other side of the glass, her heart aching with unshed tears as her husband waited under threat of death. Charles, too—changeling or not, his life was real to him, and beautiful, and he must fear to lose it. Real or not, it was worth so much more than mine.
I didn’t know how to save them yet. All I had were questions and doubts and half plans, fairy books and dark family histories, twisting in my head like smoke in a bottle. But looking up at the lit window, I felt them take the beginnings of a terrible shape.
CHAPTER 17
RIOTS
FOR THE next few weeks nothing very much happened, at least by the standards of Revolutionary France.
Jean-Paul Roland wrote a letter to his cousin asking for an introduction, as he promised, and received a courteous reply. Their situation, however, was already too precarious for him to meet with me. The Montagnards had renewed their attacks against the Girondins: they were too moderate, they were Royalists, they were traitors to the Revolution. By now, the city was beginning to respond in earnest. Marat, one of the lead voices behind the September massacres, led an assault on them in print; whenever I saw Rosemary, she was furiously countering it with pamphlets of her own. Until the civil unrest ended one way or another, there was no point in asking for anything to be done for Darnay. Thorne made slow progress on the fairy book, which could only be read from cover to cover and which defied translation at every step, but I had his promise that he would share with me anything of value. I had to be content with that, for now.
In the meantime, as I had in London, I waited. I watched the new Paris, with its feverish shifts and restless moods. I made contacts where I could: errand-runners, tavern-keepers, card-players. When I struck up a partnership with Renard, the greasy clerk at the Palace of Justice, Roland was as pleased as I was. We had fair warning of who was going to be called before the courts at least a day in advance, usually more; very useful, as the numbers wheeled through the city on their way to the guillotine continued to rise.
And, most importantly, I watched Barsad.
He hadn’t been difficult to find in the end, my fellow mortal servant. He stuck to bars and wineshops to hide himself in the fog of alcohol; he kept his amulet about his neck at all times; he had changed his name. All three tactics were good for deterring fairies. None of them had any effect on me. If Rosemary and Thorne had kept looking they would have found him too, but I supposed they could be forgiven for losing interest after so many years. A sheep, Thérèse Defarge had called him: someone who pretended to be a prisoner to obtain information from the other prisoners. It turned my stomach, but it also meant that he had access to at least one prison. He was a possibility.
I didn’t tell Rosemary and Thorne I had found him, or what I had learned about Thérèse Defarge’s sister. They would want to question Barsad about Bartholomew; that would scare him away, and I wanted him to stay where he was.
Nothing very much happened.
Then, it all happened at once.
* * *
IT WAS the first day of June, a hot summery morning, and I was down in the law library entirely ignoring the riots outside. It was the second day Paris had raged with them: yesterday, a Friday, they had been slow to begin because so many of the workers supposed to be demonstrating were, by definition, working. The Montagnards had called for the twenty-four Girondin deputies to be dragged before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and the people of Paris had responded with enthusiasm. They were back again today in more force—how much more force, I hadn’t been in Paris long enough to comprehend. Marie had insisted the family stay in the house and barricade the doors and windows. I had agreed, considering their family connections, but the precautions hadn’t seemed to apply to me, and the house had been stifling with darkness and fear. After an hour or so, I had volunteered to look up some material Roland and I needed for our work on Monday, and had brushed aside their concerns one by one until they ran out.
I’ve always liked law libraries, however dull the material. I like their stuffy, drowsy calm, the settled dust that flies into the air when you take up a volume, the quiet that makes every cough and dropped book sound like a pistol shot.
When the voice spoke into my mind, it cut across my thoughts like a scream.
Memory.
My ears stung; I was precariously balanced halfway up a ladder, and I barely managed to catch myself as my head spun dizzily. I had felt a fairy whisper into my mind on occasion, and I recognised the sensation. This was no whisper, though, nor did it belong to any fairy. I knew that voice.
“Thorne?” I whispered. There was a terrible pressure building in my chest and the base of my jaw. “What on earth are you doing?”
Can you hear me?
The burst of thought made me wince. “Yes!” I checked the shelves discreetly, and when I saw nobody in earshot I risked raising my voice. “For God’s sake. Get out of my head.”
Believe me, I’d rather not be here, but you aren’t standing near a mirror at present and there’s no time for me to find you. You have to get to the Convention.
“It’s a riot there.”
Yes. Rosemary’s in the middle of it.
“What?” I forgot my discomfort. I understood the urgency now. “Why? They’ll kill her.”
Exactly! It came on a rush of frustration that pierced my ears. I came downstairs and found her note. She’s trying to stop it. She can’t. She needs to be pulled out of there. I tried to get to her, but Bartholomew is hovering right over the mob.
“Bartholomew? Is she causing this?”
Just watching, I think. But she’ll see me if I go any further, amulet or no amulet. I can’t help Rosemary if the fairies find me first. Memory …
“I’ll go.” Bartholomew might well see me too, but that was no matter. She had no reason to care where I was; almost certainly she wouldn’t interfere. Unlike Thorne, I wasn’t quarry for the Wild Hunt. “Can you tell her I’m coming?”
I’ll try. I can’t reach her. Or she won’t let me. His sentences were becoming shorter, fragmented. Whatever he was doing, it was hard-won. Where are you?
“Across town. I’ll hire a cab. Where is she, exactly? Can you see her?”
I’ll try the mirror. It can be difficult in crowds. Let me know when you get there.
“I will. Don’t worry. I’ll find her.”
Perhaps it was because he was in my head, but in that moment Addison Thorne made perfect sense to me. The barely controlled panic in his voice was that of my own heart the night I had lost Ivy.
* * *
IT WOULD have been better if I’d walked. I managed to find a cab to take me as far as the Tuileries, but once we turned the corner, the horse pulled up short. Around us, the streets were packed with people. Tens of thousands of people. They went on without end, a vast, bobbing sea of red caps. The noise was deafening.
