Page 115 of Don't Let Me Go
“Get out of Paris,” she answers, refusing to look at me.
“How?” I demand. “Surely they’ll have locked the gates to the city. We’retrapped.”
“Even so.”
“But, Madame—”
“I saidgo!” She spits the words, and for the first time I notice how exhausted she looks, as if a great weight were pressing down upon not just her body but also her soul.
Is it possible for a person to be so transformed in so short a time? I think it must be. This tired, broken woman is a far cry from the laughing, irreverent hostess who rented us her very last room because, as she put it, “Huguenot or Catholic, the money’s all the same.” Madame Montague has seen things tonight. Things that have changed her. Things, I suspect, that will change everyone in Paris.
Or at least those of us with the good fortune to survive.
“Thank you,” I say, taking her hand in gratitude.
She pulls it away as if my touch were fire. “Go,” she whispers. Then, looking up at me with tears in her eyes, she says it again. “Go.”
The sun has just started to paint the dawn red when we slip into the alley behind Madame Montague’s inn. Thierry hasn’t said a word sinceI pried him out from under the bed. His eyes are wide and wild with panic, but his body is like a marionette whose strings have been cut. I have to keep my arm around his waist to stop him from collapsing with every step.
The alley we’re in is dark and cramped and reeks of a hundred emptied chamber pots, but it’s safer than the open streets. Alarm bells still clamor in the distance, calling the city to battle, and the morning air is thick with screams.
If Thierry and I can but get across the Seine and then out of Paris, we’ll have a fighting chance. The Catholics may outnumber us here in the city, but in the countryside, we’ll find safety. We just need to get back to our families in Thouron.
It’s a desperate hope, but right now hope is all I have.
“What’s that?” Thierry gasps, stopping abruptly and staring at a large mass lying on the ground a few paces in front of us.
It’s a body. A man’s body. His eyes are open but lifeless, as if surprised by his own death. His gray beard and nightshirt are covered in blood, a fresh pool of which congeals around his body. I look up at the neighboring building, at the window ajar on the third floor, and I can’t help but wonder if he died before or after he was thrown from it.
Thierry buries his face in my shoulder and weeps, his body trembling as if it contained a great earthquake that longed to shatter his entire being.
“We’re going to die,” he says through his sobs. “We’re going todie!”
I’m no less horrified by the slaughter in front of us, but panic and sorrow are not luxuries we can afford. We have to keep moving.
“Listen to me,” I tell him, taking his face in my hands and forcing him to meet my eyes. “We’re not going to die. We’re going to get out of Paris and get back to our fathers, and we’re going to live. Do youunderstand? We’renotgoing to die.
“Besides, even if we did,” I add with a miserable laugh, “do you think death could keep us apart? I would tear down the gates of heaven and wade through the fires of hell to find you.”
I don’t know where I find the confidence to believe these words, let alone speak them to Thierry, but my certainty calms his terror.
“Do you swear it?” he asks.
I put my lips to his and, in the kiss that follows, he has his answer.
Our courage revived, we set off into the city, winding our way through its haphazard streets like Theseus in the labyrinth.
We turn down an excrement-stained alley, then another, only to find ourselves at a dead end. We backtrack and try a different alley and a different direction, but a minute later another dead end blocks our path. Despite my earlier words of assurance to Thierry, I can feel my panic quicken. I don’t know Paris well enough to navigate it by these furtive little backstreets. We need a main thoroughfare. It may expose us to danger, but it’s the only way we’ll be able to find our way out of this infernal maze.
I pull Thierry in the direction of what I believe is the nearest boulevard in order to get my bearings. He doesn’t resist, but when we finally turn onto a wide, open street and see what awaits us, I almost wish he had.
Corpses litter the cobblestones like a graveyard vomiting up its dead. Men, women, children: No one has been spared. Their bodies lie mutilated, as if savaged by marauding beasts, their gaping wounds staining the ground in a thick river of blood.
Hell has truly come to Paris.
“No, please, let me go!” a terrified voice cries.
I turn and see a group of men dragging a young woman in her nightgown from an inn. The men aren’t soldiers. Their clothes aresimple and plain, like that of ordinary citizens, but each is wearing a white cloth tied in a makeshift band around his right arm and a white cross pinned to his hat. A few carry knives, but the rest have fashioned weapons out of rakes and shovels.
