Page 11 of Love Beneath the Guillotine
REIMS PRISON
From the small antechamber where the others stood staring after him, Léon ran through an archway, pushed a key into the lock of a metal grate, dashed past, and slammed it closed. He didn’t pause there, but did the same again with a thick wooden door. It was short work to figure out which key belonged to which door, as the prison used a skeleton key system for most of the locks inside, making the jingle-jangle of the loop resonant to only seven keys.
Having made it safely through that second door, Léon pressed it closed with his back, leaned against it, and took a deep breath, which he needed, but which he deeply regretted the moment he tasted the gut-churning stench of the cells.
He couldn’t have said what he was doing there. He hadn’t the faintest idea. It was only now that he’d found himself in the prison that he realised the futility of his actions. What was he to do? Approach each and every cell and ask those inside if they happened to know a handsome, dark-haired man who might have kidnapped a small child in order to save them? And what difference would it make if he knew who the man intended to free? What was he hoping to do? Find a way to make a deal?
It was both cool and humid inside. Dank, one might say. The prison, in its entirety, ran three stories high, held a rectangular shape, and in all, contained seventy-eight cells. Seventy-nine, if you included the disused Witches’ Tower, but that was a fearsome and decrepit place, separated from the rest by ten yards of overgrown grass. It sat solitary outside the prison walls, abandoned and boarded up for over a century. It held far too many horrific memories of long dead and barbaric superstition for anyone to want to look into it anytime soon.
The enormous room he currently stood in stretched to the full height of the prison. Not a gasp of daylight was able to enter the space, which was surrounded on three sides by cells, row after row of wooden doors bolted with iron, locked with enormous padlocks. The fourth wall was a monumental stone structure that housed one huge fireplace, the single source of heat in the building, in front of which two guards huddled for warmth. They looked at Léon upon entrance, but recognising him, turned away again with no more than a mumbled salutation.
Besides the fire, the whole area was lit by one gargantuan lantern, flickering high above the piles of straw, wood, and shackles that lay all around.
This was where they tortured men, just as they had for the last one hundred and fifty years. This was where Léon himself had heard the screams. And Léon, a firm believer in ghosts, despised the place. He couldn’t stomach it. It was, officially, his job to torture, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it, to witness it, or even to hear it if he could avoid it, which was why he’d had them hire someone else to do it. And he was sure, if he died like that, if his mortal soul suffered that way in a room like this… He was sure his spirit would never leave.
A ghastly light tapped across the walls, the curling iron frame of the lantern dancing around like a procession of ghouls,stretched and lanky, looking for all the world like they were reaching for him.
Léon put his head down and ran for the stairs. He ran up, in a short spiral, to the first level of cells, and opened the first viewing hole he came across.
The man inside stared up at him from his straw mat on the floor. He was filthy, his face terrified. The sight, the smell of the chamber pot and rotten remains of food that rose up to meet Léon made him slam the hole closed just as quickly as he’d opened it.
The next, different cell, same smell, different man, who shot death straight into Léon’s eyes with one malevolent glare.
He recognised neither man so far and felt there was little use in going on. But who knew? Maybe the man’s very twin would be lurking in there somewhere, some brother with an irrefutable likeness, or some man who wore the same haughty expression.
So he tried another, and another. One threw their scraps at him, another pleaded for an interview with a judge, and on and on. Léon searched pointlessly and fruitlessly until he’d cleared two-thirds of the floor.
Church bells rang, and they counted out ten long and nerve-fraying clangs.
“Fuck,” Léon whispered.
He clasped the keys tight, fiddling with them on their loop. How was he to get them out? There was no way back through that door and past Mollard with them. And what would happen to all these men and women if he stole them? They would be locked in their cells, their feeding doors stuck shut, and for how long?
Stupid Mollard!What kind of an idiot had only one set of keys to an entire prison?
The crushing weight of the inevitable leaned on Léon’s shoulders as he curled fingers around the iron safety rail and looked over the balcony at the floor below.
There had to be another way. But the man who’d kidnapped his brother didn’t seem the type to be reasoned with. What he remembered of him.
A flash of eyes and lips.
Léon raised his fingertips to the bruise on his cheek, sore and swollen.
The man was violent. A thug. And he had Émile.
Propelled back into action, Léon set about checking the remaining cells on the floor. Only the women’s cells remained, mostly empty, though they evidently wouldn’t remain that way much longer.
They were exactly the same as the men’s cells, just as small, just as sparse, but with an extra lock on the door. Léon wondered, not for the first time, what it must have been to wait in those cells all the long and frigid night, alone, wondering what kind of man your gaoler would be when he came.
He saw one woman crouched in a corner, crying. The other, who shared her cell, stretched out long on her straw mat, staring blankly at the ceiling.
And on he moved to the final occupied cell. He flicked the latch open, and immediately his gaze locked with Sophie Cauchoix’s. She jumped to her feet on sight of the gorgeous green eyes, reaching her fingers through to be grasped by Léon’s. “Have you come for me? Is it now?”
Sophie, as sweet a woman as the day was long, was also as guilty as sin. Léon remembered her from his childhood as the kind face of the butcher’s shop. The one who always had a smile and a pie for him, however small or misshapen. One of the few back then who weren’t repulsed by the cursed hands of hisfather. “You have one more night,” he reported dutifully. “All are to go before God tomorrow.”
“All?” she rasped on a long breath. “But… how many are there?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been told. I can tell you this: Take heart and do not be frightened. I will be by your side at the end, and I will make it fast. Faster than even my axe, for there is a new…” He thought hard over the name. ‘Guillotine,’ had he said? “A new blade. And it may look scary to you when you see it, but know it is…” A vision of a sheep’s crying eyes—a bleat cut off at the throat. He could not and would not say it was painless. “It is going to be over fast. I’m sorry.”
