much less make her final confession to-any clergyman who had sworn such an oath.
But he also knew that, once she saw his face beneath the black brim, she would understand that something else was afoot.
As he approached the Conciergerie, once a Merovingian palace, but now-along with the Tour de L’Horloge and the Palais de Justice-the hub of the Revolutionary Tribunal, he could feel its silent menace poisoning the very air. A Gothic fortress, it was recognizable from afar by its three towers-the Caesar Tower, named for the Roman emperor; the Silver Tower, so-called because it reputedly held the royal treasury at one time; and the third and most awful tower of all, the Bonbec, or “good beak.” The name was inspired by the “singing” of the prisoners who were consigned to its torture chambers.
The marquis hurried along the banks of the Seine as it caught the full morning light, and across the old stone bridge. There was a strange heavy air in the courtyard, compounded of victory, revenge, and a vague sense of unease. Even the hostlers and guards, going about their usual business, seemed to feel the weight of what they were about to do. Killing the king had been bad enough; killing the queen, the weaker vessel, the mother of two living children and the last person who would ever sit upon a throne of France, felt, even to some of the firebrands among them, fundamentally ignoble.
In all the commotion and confusion-horses being tethered to the tumbrels, gendarmes reading out the lists of those to be executed that morning and corralling them into the waiting carts, lawyers searching for their doomed clients-the marquis was able to make swift progress toward the queen’s own chambers in the inner courtyard. Looking up, he could see the narrow window of her cell, not only barred but partially blocked up. Two sentries stood at the door to the tower, and he brandished his letter of authorization from the Tribunal (which he had forged several weeks before, and signed in the name of Fouquier Tinville, the principal prosecutor in the case against the queen). He watched their worried faces as they debated its merits.
“Come, come,” the marquis said impatiently, “the widow Capet is entitled to her last communion.” The words- the widow Capet -were like ashes on his tongue, but that was how the court now referred to her. The ancestors of Louis XVI had borne that ordinary surname.
“But she already refused a priest yesterday,” one of them objected.
“She wasn’t on her way to the guillotine then.”
“She says that any priest who’s pledged his first allegiance to the Constitution is no priest at all.”
“I’ll hear that from her own lips,” Sant’Angelo said, as the massive gong in the clock tower rang out. “Or would you rather explain to the prosecutor why the widow was late to her appointment on the scaffold?” He made as if to leave in a huff, when the sentries grudgingly let him pass.
Holding up the bottom of his black robe, he ascended the winding steps three at a time, waving the letter at two more guards, who were presently occupied with wrestling a condemned husband away from his sobbing wife, then up to another barred door. Here again he showed the letter, but once he determined that the jailer could not read, he quickly produced his purse and poured a cascade of coins into the man’s weather-beaten hand.
Going ever higher, he passed several cell doors, where other prisoners of consequence were being kept. In the Conciergerie, there had always been varying levels of discomfort. For the wealthy and privileged, willing to fork over the necessary bribes, there were private cells with a bed, a desk, and even writing materials. For the less- well-to-do, there were pistoles, with a bunk and a table. And for the commoners-known as the pailleux -there were the rocky, underground caverns kept damp by the Seine, where matted hay, or paille, was strewn on the floor. In previous times, the prisoners there were simply left to die from malnutrition, or the infectious diseases that lingered in the gloomy vaults.
The queen, Sant’Angelo knew, was housed at the top of the tower, not out of any pity or concern but because it afforded the greatest security. There was only one staircase up, and at the door to her cell, another pair of gendarmes was waiting. The marquis slowed his step and approached with his breviary in hand.
“I am here for the prisoner to make her final communion.”
“I don’t know anything about that claptrap,” one of them snapped. “You’ll have to see Citizen Hebert; he’s inside.”
The marquis had not counted on this. Of all the bloodthirsty wolves of the Revolution, Jacques Hebert was the worst. Chief of the Committee of Public Safety, it was he who had published some of the most defamatory and revolting lies about the queen, and it was he who had declared, in his role as the champion of the sansculottes, “I have promised them the head of Antoinette! I will go and cut it off myself if there is any delay in giving it to me.”
Apparently, he had decided to monitor the execution himself.
The marquis ducked his head to enter the cell (Hebert had had the doorway purposely lowered, so that the queen, whenever she came out to receive a visitor from the Convention, would have to bow her head to him), and found the chief and a couple of his minions from the Committee keeping vigil in the anteroom.
“Who are you?” Hebert demanded, wheeling on him. He was armed, as usual, with a tasseled rapier hanging at his side.
The marquis produced the letter and waited as Hebert read it. His eyes were close-set and red-rimmed, like a rodent’s, and his jaw was constantly grinding. His dark hair, wet with perspiration, was tied back with the tricolor cockade.
“I’ve never seen you before,” Hebert said suspiciously. “Which one of those corrupt orders do you belong to?”
“I follow St. Francis.”
“And what makes you think the Capet woman will want to talk to you?”
“I don’t know that she will,” the marquis replied, affecting indifference. “But this privilege is still established by law.”
He knew that the mention of the law was a cunning stroke; these assassins liked to pretend that they were only upholding justice-equal for everyone in the new Republic-and that their bloody acts were simply the seamless working of the state’s machinery. Even the guillotine, now the dreaded symbol of the Revolution itself, had been invented as a swifter and more humane method of execution; in fact, however, it had become an indispensable means for conducting murder on an unprecedented scale.
Monsieur Hebert tossed the letter back at Sant’Angelo, and taking an iron key from his own pocket, unlocked the inner door.
“Be quick about it. She’s had thirty-seven years to make her peace with God. I don’t know how she can catch up now.”
One of his minions laughed, and Hebert, too, seemed to enjoy his little jest. The marquis swallowed the anger that rose in his throat like a ball of boiling tar and went inside.
The room was nearly bare, with just a few sticks of battered furniture and a rumpled sheet strung on a line to conceal the privy bucket. With the window blocked, and the sun in another quarter, the tiny cell was as dim as it was chill.
Marie Antoinette lay on her hard pallet, with her hands folded under her cheek, her eyes glassy and staring at nothing.
Sant’Angelo would hardly have recognized her. He remembered so well the shy, sweet, and bewildered girl who had first arrived at court twenty-three years before… and, of course, the gay, beautiful woman that she had become, known for her finery and sophistication.
What he saw now was a haunted shadow of her former self, with wild, uncombed hair and a face that seemed an utter stranger to anything but sadness.
But had she truly aged? He drew a stool close to the bed, but even then he could not be sure. It was only a few years ago that the Pope had sent her the true Medusa, and the haggard expression she wore now could be nothing more than the natural countenance of a woman who had had everything in the world taken from her and was about to lose her own life, too.
“Your Majesty,” he whispered, knowing that there was not a second to waste.
“I do not want you,” Antoinette said, never bothering to raise her eyes past his black cassock.
“Look at me,” he said. “I pray you, look at me.”
Wearily, as if obeying yet another of her persecutors’ commands, she raised her blue-gray eyes, then, after a second or two, understood that it was her old friend, the marquis, lurking under the brim of the priest’s hat.
“How did you-”
