he hears their signal, using the time between to prime his pistol. They give Dumouriez a few minutes' lead, then rise as one.
Crimson-stained sweat, memories swarming like maggots in his brain. Yet more on the clan Prendegrace, a red-tinged stream of sinister trivia.
Their motto: nus souvienz le tous . 'We remember everything.'
Their hereditary post at court: attendant on the king's bedchamber, a function discontinued some time during the reign of Henri de Navarre, for historically obscure reasons.
The rumour: that during the massacre of Saint Barthelme's Night, one — usually unnamed — Prendegrace was observed pledging then-King Charles IX's honour with a handful of Protestant flesh.
Prendegrace. 'Those who have received God's grace.'
Receive.
Or, is it take God's grace
for themselves?
Jean-Guy feels himself start to reel, and rams his fist against the apartment wall for support. Then feels it lurch and pulse in answer under his knuckles, as though his own hammering heart were buried beneath that yellowed plaster.
Pistol thrust beneath his coat's lapel, Jean-Guy steps towards Dumouriez's door — only to find his way blocked by a sudden influx of armed and shouting fellow citizens. Yet another protest whipped up from general dissatisfaction and street-corner demagoguery, bound for nowhere in particular, less concerned with destruction than with noise and display; routine 'patriotic' magic transforming empty space into chaos-bent rabble, with no legerdemain or invocation required.
Across the way, he spots La Hire crushed up against the candle-maker's door, but makes sure to let his gaze slip by without a hint of recognition as the stinking human tide, none of them probably feeling particularly favourable, at this very moment, towards any representative of the committee who as they keep on chanting — have stole our blood to make their bread
(a convenient bit of symbolic symmetry, that),
sweeps him rapidly back past the whore, the garbage, the cafe, the row itself, and out into the cobbled street beyond.
Jean-Guy feels his ankle turn as it meets the gutter; he stumbles, then rights himself. Calling out, above the crowd's din —
'Citizens, I' No answer. Louder: 'Listen, Citizens, I have no quarrel with you; I have business in there' And, louder still: 'Citizens! Let me pass !'
But: no answer, again, from any of the nearest mob-members: neither that huge, obviously drunken man with the pike, trailing tricolor streamers, or those two women trying to fill their aprons with loose stones while ignoring the screaming babies strapped to their backs. Not even from that dazed young man who seems to have once however mistakenly thought himself to be their leader, now dragged hither and yon at the violent behest of his 'followers' with his pale eyes rolling in their sockets, his gangly limbs barely still attached to his shaking body.
The price of easy oratory. Jean-Guy thinks, sourly. Cheap words, hasty actions; a whole desperate roster of very real ideals and hungers played on for the mere sake of a moment's notoriety, applause, power
— our Revolution's ruin, in a nutshell.
And then
a shadow falls over him, soft and dark as the merest night-borne whisper, but one that will lie paradoxically heavy across his unsuspecting shoulders, nevertheless, for long years afterwards. His destiny approaching through the mud, on muffled wheels.
A red-hung coach, nudging at him — almost silently — from behind.
Perfect.
He shoulders past the pikeman, between the women, drawing curses and blows; gives back a few of his own, as he clambers on to the coach's running-board and hooks its nearest door open. Rummages in his pocket for his tricolor badge, and brandishes it in the face of the coach's sole occupant, growling —
'I commandeer this coach in the name of the Committee for Public Safety!'
Sliding quick into the seat opposite as the padded door shuts suddenly, yet soundlessly, beside him. And that indistinct figure across from him leans forward, equally sudden a mere red-on-white-on-red silhouette, in the curtained windows' dull glare — to murmur:
'The committee? Why, my coach is yours, then'
Citizen .
Jean-Guy looks up, dazzled. And notices, at last, the Prendegrace arms which hang just above him, embroidered on the curtains' underside — silver on red, red on red, outlined in fire by the sun which filters weakly through their thick, enshrouding velvet weave.
1815
Jean-Guy feels new wetness trace its way down his arm, soaking the cuff of his sleeve red: his war-wound, broken open once more, in sympathetic proximity to what? His own tattered scraps of memory, slipping and sliding like phlegm on glass? This foul, haunted house, where Dumouriez — like some Tropic trapdoor spider — traded on his master's aristocratic name to entice the easiest fresh prey he could find into his web, then fattened them up (however briefly) before using them to slake M. le Chevalier's deviant familial appetites?
Blood, from wrist to palm, printing the wall afresh; blood in his throat from his tongue's bleeding base, painting his spittle red as he hawks and coughs all civility lost, in a moment's spasm of pure revulsion on to the dusty floor.
