A Far Better Thing, page 6
“Very well,” I said, as normally as I could. “I’ll make plans to go to Paris in summer. I can take rooms at a hotel as Sydney Carton, and then Charles Darnay can visit his uncle. Now please leave me alone.”
“I shall leave you to your rest,” Shadow said. “But this is very important. Until you’ve done your task, you will never truly be alone.”
He vanished, leaving behind a scent like the sharp tang of pine needles. I had thought I felt ill before.
* * *
NOW, THROUGH the window of the carriage the Marquis himself had sent to ferry his nephew from Calais, I looked out onto the streets of Saint-Antoine. I had passed through the area before as a student, but only briefly, wrapped in my own concerns. I was struck by how grim it had become. The cooking fires were dark; the shops were bare; the faces of the people on the street were gaunt and aged before their time. The streets themselves were dark with filth.
We were at the town centre when something jerked me forcibly and painfully out of my thoughts. At first, I didn’t even recognise what I was looking at; I only felt a shock of horror that had roots in something I had seen before. Then I saw it: a tiny, broken body lying on the ground, gold hair fanned over a pale face.
My heart stopped before my brain reasserted itself. Of course it wasn’t Ivy, not again. It was another little girl. A child killed in a road accident. A horrible tragedy, more horrible for being not unusual in a busy city street.
Still, I was so struck and sickened by the terrible resemblance that I heard myself call out for the driver to stop the carriage. I had jumped to the ground almost before the wheels ceased turning. I have to admit, I was not quite prepared for the smell. London is no flower garden, but I had been in a carriage strewn with herbs, and the mingled sweat and smoke and dust was overwhelming.
I had seen the little girl’s body as if she had been lying alone, as Ivy was. In fact, she was surrounded by women, one of whom cradled her in her arms and wept—her mother, perhaps. Their faces were twisted with grief and fury.
“Excuse me,” I said to one of the more dry-eyed, in French, and she looked at me.
One of the few gifts the fairies give their mortal servants is language. As a child, it was the lilting tongue of the Realm, seeded into my brain as I grew so that I couldn’t remember a time without it. When I came into the mortal world, it was the human languages. English, French, Latin, Italian, Mandarin—all imaginable dialects come to my tongue as they would to the tongue of a native speaker, in all their wondrous shades of nuance and meaning. It drove Stryver insane during our year in Paris. It also meant that I could speak without a trace of an English accent if I didn’t want it there, and right then I didn’t.
“What tragedy has occurred here?” I asked.
“It’s little Éloïse Gaspard,” the woman said bitterly. Her eyes took in my too-fine clothes, clearly weighing up the benefits of talking to me as opposed to hitting me with something heavy. Fortunately, she chose the former. “The Marquis passed through here not a half hour past, and ran her down in his carriage. She was only crossing the street on an errand for her father.”
“The Marquis de Saint Evrémonde? Did he stop?”
“Yes, he stopped.” The bitterness in her voice turned to venom. “He stopped to throw a coin at her father to pay for his losses, and to declare when his offer was refused that he would ride over any of us very willingly, and exterminate us from the earth.”
This told me two important things. The first was that the Marquis was about half an hour ahead of me on my voyage. The second was that I need not worry that the deed I’d come to do would be unwelcome.
“Her father tried to throw himself on the neck of the monster,” the woman added. “Defarge stopped him. Monseigneur threw a coin at him too.”
“Did you say the name was Gaspard?” Out of nowhere, I had the beginnings of a thought.
The woman frowned, but nodded. “He’s over there, with the wine vendor. Why?”
I didn’t answer her, only nodded and moved away through the crowds, past the great fountain spouting its dirty water, towards the wineshop. My thoughts had begun, without much direction from me, to form a plan.
I saw him immediately: the one slumped miserably over a table, being consoled by a beefy man with rolled-up sleeves. I waited until the wine vendor moved to the counter, and approached him.
“Monsieur Gaspard?”
He looked up. His face, a mess of mud and tears, seemed hardly human. “Who are you?”
“I’m the nephew of the man who killed your child,” I said, and jumped back with a hand raised warningly as his eyes fired. “No, listen to me. Do you wish to kill him?”
He stopped, startled out of fury. I suspected grief was dulling his comprehension, but I wasn’t worried. I knew how it felt to hold a body in your arms. “What?”
“The Marquis de Saint Evrémonde. The man who killed your child and threw you a coin to cover your loss. Do you wish to kill him?”
“More than anything.”
“Good,” I said. “Then do exactly as I say.”
* * *
IT WAS another three hours to the Evrémonde estate. Gaspard spent them on the floor of my carriage, where he had been able to hide while the coach driver drank a pint of ale at my expense. I tried to keep my feet from resting too near him, but the carriage was not so spacious or grand that I could avoid kicking him on occasion when we hit a rough patch of road. He could fit beside me on the seat, of course, but that would reveal him to any idle glances on the roadside, and that would probably seal my fate. The fact that Darnay was at home in England would not stop me from being executed in France should a murder charge catch me first.
He wasn’t much of a travelling companion, the man whose dead child was not yet cold on the side of the road. We did not speak; he had nothing to say to me, nor I to him. I didn’t say that I was sorry for his loss, because my sympathies meant nothing to him. He simply lay there, curled up, muscles and teeth clenched. There were still tears on his face. Once in a while I heard a groan. He smelled very strongly of dirt and sweat, which I tried not to mind. The carriage felt hot and airless enough as it was.
After the first hour, we began to move into straggling countryside: the gold of what should have been abundant corn was part of a patchwork of rye, wilted peas, coarse substitutes for wheat. Gaspard seemed to have fallen into a doze, and I covered my hand with my mouth and decided to risk it.
“Shadow?” I whispered, as quietly as I could; too quietly to be heard over the rattle of the wheels by human ears.
His voice came back immediately, though I couldn’t see him. “What are you doing, Memory?”
“You did tell me to be very clever,” I reminded him, though those might not have been his exact words. “I’m doing my best. A bit of bewilderment might help, if you have it.”
“What bewilderment?”
“I need someone to have seen the Marquis’s carriage go past earlier. I need them to have seen a man clinging to the bottom of the carriage, who subsequently dropped off and rolled out over the bank. They need to be prepared to swear that in court afterwards. It might even help if they warn the Marquis about it tonight.”
“I will arrange that,” Shadow said, with unusual hesitation. “And I will trust that you are indeed being clever. But do not be too clever, Memory.”
Gaspard stirred at my feet, and I didn’t speak further.
* * *
I ARRIVED—Gaspard no longer in the carriage—at the chateau of the Marquis shortly after sunset. In the dark, the estate seemed one great mass, and all stone: a stone courtyard, heavy stone balustrades, stone urns, stone flowers, stone faces of men and heads of lions leering down from the terraces and gardens. I heard the wet burble of water falling into a stone basin, and couldn’t shake the feeling that if I were to drink it, I would become stone too. The darkness itself seemed still and heavy.
I had little time to prepare, or to refresh myself after the long journey. Evidently, the Marquis had been waiting for me with some impatience. I announced myself as Charles Darnay, and was all-too-quickly whisked from one dizzyingly sumptuous room to another to change with the assistance of three footmen and a valet. Then, looking tidier and more fashionable than I had ever looked in my life, I was shown to the top of one of the chateau’s four pointed towers to dine with my uncle.
After the richness of the vaulted chambers below, the dining room was small and lofty; a faint, welcome breeze from outside blew through the slats of the wooden jalousie-blinds, making the candle flames flicker. In their light, I saw the elderly gentleman seated at the table. He had clearly begun his supper without me—the table was scattered with food, and there was a curved glass of Bordeaux in his hand—but when I was announced he stood to greet me. Like Charles—like myself—he was very tall.
“Charles,” he said graciously. “I’m pleased to see you again.”
“Monseigneur,” I replied, inclining my head stiffly. Neither of us moved to take the other’s hand, or embrace. I kept my eyes downcast, hoping their colour would not be visible in the dim light.
“Do join me for supper,” the Marquis said. “I’m sure you must have starved upon the roads.”
I remembered the families I passed on the road, their cheeks hollow with hunger, and was pleased to feel a stab of hatred for the Marquis. More practically, I knew I needn’t worry. He believed me as Charles Darnay. My heartbeat slowed a little.
“Thank you,” I said.
We sat down.
The Marquis made no move to speak to me further as we dined. This gave me a chance to collect my thoughts, and to study the Marquis across the table as he ate his soup daintily. He was a fascinating man to look at. Around sixty, thin and rather angular: the Evrémonde build, perhaps, or I simply took after him. I saw traces of myself in the high cheekbones and natural pallor. The aquiline nose was pinched above the nostrils, and there were lines about the eyes and mouth that did not get there through smiling. A handsome face, but cruel. He was dressed in the powdered and primped style of the court, and yet he managed to wear it with contempt.
Stone and dark and candlelight, and the commoners starving and hating outside. I imagined a young Charles Darnay eating his childhood supper in these surroundings, and shivered.
I ate more than I wanted, and drank more than I should. After a long day on the road without nourishment, my uneasiness didn’t altogether stay my appetite. Finally, though, after the table had been cleared, the coffee served, and the servants departed, I broke the silence. This was a mistake born of nerves, of course. I should have waited for him to speak, but there are limits to what even I can bear.
“I have come back, sir,” I said, “but I cannot stay long. I am still pursuing the object which took me away.”
I spoke vaguely, because I was not entirely sure what the object in question was. Darnay told Miss Manette on the night they met that he was on business of a delicate and difficult nature, and he told Stryver only that he was fulfilling a duty that concerned his family’s honour. I hadn’t known what this meant in the courtroom, and I didn’t know now. I suspected that the Marquis did, but he didn’t seem to notice my evasion. Darnay was often rather vague anyway.
“That object carried you into some peril recently, I believe,” the Marquis said.
“Yes.” I assumed he meant Darnay’s prosecution for treason. “But it is a sacred object, and if it had carried me to death I hope it would have sustained me.”
That was pure Darnay, at his most intense and humourless. I was rather proud of it.
“Not to death,” the Marquis said mildly. “It is not necessary to say, to death.”
I knew I should keep quiet, but a sudden suspicion made me speak. “I doubt, sir, whether, if it had carried me to the utmost brink of death, you would have cared to stop me there. Indeed, sir, for anything I know, you may expressly have worked to give a more suspicious appearance to the suspicious circumstances that surrounded me.”
“No, no, no,” the Marquis said pleasantly. He could have been lying, but he was so genuinely complacent that I suspected he was not. From what little I’d been able to find out about him, he was out of favour with the courts in France, and had little influence in England. He would not have had the power to arrange Darnay’s arrest—fortunately, or I might have found myself under arrest in France the moment I arrived in Darnay’s stead.
Still, he hated Darnay—me. I could see it in the tightening of his lips, the narrowing of his eyes. I knew what hatred looked like. Had it been in his power to do Darnay harm, he would have done so.
“I take it you will not reconsider then,” the Marquis said, and when I looked at him he was smiling lazily. “Your absurd plan to abandon your birthright and waste your life among the drudges of the earth? It was for that I sent for you.”
That explained, at least, something of what Darnay was trying to achieve by changing his name and living as a penniless tutor in London. Clearly he wanted nothing to do with his family’s wealth. For the first time, I felt a grudging respect for my changeling. It must have taken courage to break free of all this. I wondered, if I had grown up in the place that should have been mine, whether I would have done the same.
“I am sorry you took the trouble.” I did not need to question what Darnay would answer. “I could have told you just as well merely by perpetuating the silence that previously existed between us.”
“Repression is the only lasting philosophy,” the Marquis said. “You would do far better to be a rational creature, and accept your natural destiny. There is the family name to consider.”
My laugh at that was my own, not Darnay’s. “From what I saw on the journey here, that name is more detested than any name in France.”
“Let us hope so,” the Marquis said. “Detestation of the high is the involuntary homage of the low. But it is your name, Charles. Whether either of us like it, you are my heir. What will you do, when the property passes to you?”
I couldn’t answer that, because I did not know what Darnay would do. “That will be my concern, when the time comes,” I prevaricated. “Until that day, I earn my own living in England. If that is all, I will return there tomorrow.”
“England is very attractive to you, seeing how indifferently you have prospered there,” he observed, and there was a knowing smile on his face that chilled me.
“It is my refuge,” I said.
“They say, those boastful English, that it is the refuge of many. You know a compatriot who has found a refuge there? A doctor?”
Now I knew that I was right to be chilled.
“Yes,” I said evenly; sounding nonchalant would be entirely incredible.
“With a daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Yes,” said the Marquis, and again the terrible knowing smile. “You are fatigued. Good night!”
I could do nothing but stand with him, and bow with him, watching the diabolic face incline towards my own in response. I felt as though turned to ice. Somehow he had seen Lucie Manette, and he had seen her in me. I, coming here, had betrayed her. It was Charles’s association with her about which he had information, of course, not really mine, but he had looked into my eyes, not his, and apparently she had been emblazoned there for all to see. In that moment, I didn’t care that she was only a changeling. She was Ivy’s changeling. I couldn’t allow this monster to threaten her.
“Yes,” repeated the Marquis, turning the words over on his tongue. “A doctor with a daughter. Yes. So commences the new philosophy!”
A footman had come at the ringing of the bell, and he waited politely.
“Good night!” my uncle said again. “I look to the pleasure of seeing you again in the morning.”
“I plan to leave at first light,” I managed, because it was essential for what was to come. “You won’t see me.”
He only nodded, as if he had expected this. “Good repose!—Light Monsieur my nephew to his chamber there!” he added to the servant.
As I left, I heard him mutter, “And burn Monsieur my nephew in his bed, if you will!” before the tinkling of the bell summoned his own valet. The light from his sleeping chambers was already burning.
* * *
MY ROOM was richly furnished to the point of tastelessness, and I wondered if he had put me in it to torture Charles with his own wealth or to tempt him. It had the former effect in my case. I felt as though the gold leaf would burn me on contact, as cold iron burns fairies.
I didn’t know why the fairies, or at least Shadow, wanted this man dead, but he terrified me. I admitted that to myself with some surprise. I had seen a good many criminals in my time, a good deal of ruthlessness and cruelty and sordid appetites. None had so much as unnerved me. This man did. Perhaps it was the stirring of a primal childhood fear—it was not, after all, the first time we had met. The horror of him made me feel a very little better about what I was about to do.
At midnight, I went down the stairs, and down to the main entrance. I opened the door, and saw movement in the deep green shadows. Gaspard, of course. He had been waiting out there among the statues for the last three hours, ever since I let him out of my carriage when the coachman got down to open the gates. The air was cool, and yet a stifling hush hung over the gardens.
“Come in,” I whispered, as loudly as I dared. “His light’s been out for an hour at least. I’m as sure that he’s asleep as I can be, short of drugging him.”
The shadows shifted into Gaspard’s form, very large and steeped in day-old rage. I was glad to see his anger burning fiercer than ever; it would have been terrible if it had cooled to grief as the incident faded, and his mind had changed in the cooling.
“You have a weapon, I assume,” I added, as he drew near.
In answer, he held a knife between us. I saw how white the knuckles around the hilt had become.
It turned my stomach, but I nodded. “Up the stairs and third on the left. Try to keep it quiet.”
