As though we could really share the same world, ever, we two — such as I, and such as
he
'What y'have here, Monsewer Sansterre,' Keynes observed, touching the blister's surface but delicately, yet leaving behind a dent, along with a lingering, sinister ache, 'is a continual pocket of sequestered blood. 'Tis that what we sawbones name haematoma: from the Latin haematomane , or 'drinker of blood'.'
There was, the doctor explained, a species of bats in the Antipodes — even upon Jean-Guy's home island — whose very genus was labelled after the common term for those legendary undead monsters Desmoulins had once fixated upon. These bats possessed a saliva which, being composed mainly of anticoagulant elements, aided them in the pursuit of their filthy addiction: a mixture of chemicals which, when smeared against an open wound, prolong — and even increase — the force and frequency of its bleeding. Adding, however:
'But I own I have never known of such a reaction left behind by the spittle of any man , even one whose family, as your former Jacobin compatriots might term it, is — no doubt — long accustomed to the consumption of blood.'
Which concludes, as it ensues, the entire role of science in this narrative.
And now, the parallel approach to Dumouriez's former apartment, past and present blending neatly together as Jean-Guy scales the rickety staircase towards that last, long-locked door, its hinges stiff with rust
Stepping, in 1815, into a cramped and low-hung attic space clogged with antique furniture: fine brocades, moth-eaten and dusty; sway-backed Louis Quatorze chairs with splintered legs. Splintered armoires and dun- smoked walls, festooned with cobweb and scribbled with foul words.
On one particular wall, a faint stain hangs like spreading damp. The shadow of some immense, submerged, half-crucified grey bat.
Jean-Guy traces its contours, wonderingly. Remembering, in 1793
a bloodstained pallet piled high with pale-eyed corpses left to rot beneath this same wall, this same great watermark: its bright red darkness, splashed wet across fresh white plaster.
Oh, how Jean-Guy had stared at it — struck stupidly dumb with pure shock — while La Hire recounted the details his long day's sleep had stolen from him. Told him how, when the committee's spies broke in at last, Dumouriez had merely looked up from his work with a queasy smile, interrupted in the very midst of dumping yet another body on top of the last. How he'd held a trowel clutched, incongruously, in one hand, which he'd then raised, still smiling
and used, sharp edge turned inward — even as they screamed at him to halt — to cut his own throat.
Under the stain's splayed wing, Jean-Guy closes his eyes and casts his mind back even further — right back to the beginning, before Thermidor finally stemmed the revolutionary river's flood; before the chevalier's coach, later found stripped and abandoned at the lip of a pit stuffed with severed heads and lime; before Dumouriez's suicide, or Jean-Guy and La Hire's frantic flight to Calais, and beyond — back to Martinique, where La Hire would serve as plantation master on Old Sansterre's lands till the hour and the day of his own, entirely natural, demise. The very, very beginning.
Or Jean-Guy's — necessarily limited — version of it, at any rate.
Then, once more, 1793. Five o'clock on that long-gone 'August' day, and the afternoon sun has already begun to slant down over the Row of the Armed Man's ruined roofs, dripping from their streaming gutters in a dazzle of water and light, along with the last of the previous night's rainfall. Jean-Guy and La Hire sit together at what passes for a table by the open window of a street-side cafe, their tricolor badges momentarily absent from sashes and hats; they sip their coffee, thus disguised, and listen to today's tumbrils grind by through the stinking mist. Keeping a careful tandem eye, also, upon the uppermost windows of Dumouriez's house, refuge of a suspected traitor, and previously listed (before its recent conversion into a many-roomed, half-empty 'citizens' hotel') as part of the ancestral holdings of a certain M. le Chevalier du Prendegrace.
Jean-Guy to La Hire: 'This Prendegrace — who is he?'
'A ci-devant aristo, what else? Like all the rest.'
'Yes, to be sure; but besides.'
La Hire shrugs. 'Does it matter?'
Here, in that ill-fit building just across the way, other known aristocrats — men, women and children bearing papers forged expertly enough to permit them to walk the streets of Paris, if not exit through its gates — have often been observed to enter, though rarely been observed to leave. Perhaps attracted by Prendegrace's reputation as 'one of their own', they place their trust in his creature Dumouriez's promises of sanctuary, refuge, escape; the very fact of their own absence, later on, seems to prove that trust has not been given in vain.
'The sewers,' La Hire suggests. 'They served us well enough during the old days, dodging royalist scum through the Cordeliers' quarter'
Jean-Guy scoffs. 'A secret entrance, perhaps, in the cellar? Down to the river with the rest of the garbage, then to the far shore on some subterranean boat?'
'It's possible.'
'So the accused Church used to claim, concerning Christ's resurrection.'
A guffaw. 'Ah, but there's no need to be so bitter about that , Citizen. Is there? Since they've already paid so well, after all — those fat-arsed priests — for spreading such pernicious lies.'
And: Ah, yes, Jean-Guy remembers thinking, as he nods in smiling agreement. Paid in full, on the Widow's lap just like the king and his Austrian whore, before them.
Across the street, meanwhile, a far less elevated lady of ill-repute comes edging up through the row proper, having apparently just failed to drum up any significant business amongst the crowds that line the Widow's bridal path. Spotting them both, she hikes her skirt to show Jean-Guy first the hem of her scarlet petticoat, then the similarly red-dyed tangle of hair at her crotch. La Hire glances over, draws a toothless grin, and snickers in reply; Jean-Guy affects to ignore her, and receives a rude gesture for his politesse . Determined to avoid the embarrassment of letting his own sudden spurt of anger show, he looks away, eyes flicking back towards the attic's windows
