Page 7 of Love Beneath the Guillotine
“Souveraine, please.” Léon half turned towards the prison, then towards the inn, and there he became stuck. His shoulders dropped, blond hair falling in the face he hid from her. “I’ve messed up. I’ve really messed up this time.” His voice cracked, a tear dropped to the pavement, and Léon stood there, completely helpless, as the long night caught up with him.
Her soft hand met his cheek with a tenderness that he leaned into. “What is it, Léon? Is it Émile? Where is?—”
“Shhh!” Léon hissed out the sound. His eyes flicked up and down the street, at a vagrant, at a couple of drunks, at the men and women starting for market, any of them possibly in collusion with the man he’d met the night before. On a scant whisper, head dipped low, “Please ask me to carry your milk. Please ask me loudly.”
Souveraine had pulled many a ruse over the people of the town with Léon through the years, but she hadn’t once seen him cry since he got his hand caught in the wheel of a cart when he was nine years old. She quickly said, “Please, I know you’re busy, but they are too heavy. I cannot carry them all the way. Please take them for me.”
Like a puppet on a string, Léon bent at her words, taking up the two pails and making straight for her inn without another word. She took the lead, moving two paces ahead for the rest ofthe short walk. She unlocked the door and held it for him with all the distance of a stranger, until he’d stepped into the dark room, where she locked the door and rounded on him. “What’s happened? Tell me.”
Léon rushed forward with a milky finger on her lips, whispering, “You must swear you will not breathe a word. And that you won’t stop me.”
She swore neither, because that was the instant she got a good enough look to see the cut on his cheek, the bruise on his brow. Her hand went straight to the dried blood, and Léon batted it away impatiently, commencing a pace of the large, fire-lit room. “It’s Émile. Souveraine, someone’s…” He could no more get the words out than if they’d been a brick lodged in his throat. Instead, he said, “I need to get the keys—the keys to the prison cells—and I need them today, and if I don’t get them…”
She watched him with bated breath. “Then what?”
“Someone will kill him,” he forced out, eyes burning into hers. “Someone’s taken him and…” He threw another panicked look around the room, seeing nothing, then dashed for the door. “I have to go back to the prison.”
“To kill Mollard?” Souveraine bolted in front of him, her two strong arms arresting his. “No, I won’t allow it. You’ll stop right here, or… or…” Using all her strength, she shoved him down onto a bench. “Sit there. Sit there, and we’ll figure this out.”
Now it was Souveraine who paced, keeping half an eye on him all the while, part wary, part accusatory, as though he’d done her a personal wrong in his thwarted murder attempt. “Someone has Émile,” she paraphrased. “They’re keeping him to exchange for a key from the prison. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Is Mollard involved?”
“No. I just need his keys.”
“Then who is it?”
“I don’t know.”
Impatiently, “What do you mean you don’t know?”
Léon dropped his voice low, a glowing secrecy in his eyes reminding her to speak quietly. “There was a man. A stranger. He told me—he said he’d—” Léon chewed over the words he hated to make real by speaking them. “He-he said I cannot tell anyone, and that he would take a finger for every hour I’m late delivering those keys. One of Émile’s little fingers.” Souveraine’s shocked cry was drowned out by Léon’s desperate, “Do you see? This is why I don’t have time. I cannot be late. And there will be other people at the prison now, and— Oh, god, Souveraine, how am I to do this?”
Souveraine, showing the kind of courage that comes with being a solo female innkeeper at one of the roughest bars in town, grounded him with her calm and reliable voice. “When do you need them by?”
“Midday.”
“Where?”
“The river. The bend. In the forest.”
She gave a confident nod, hands on hips, eyes hard. “Then we have time. Don’t worry, Léon. We will get those keys. I’ll help you.”
The first tremor of hope, the first spark of the Léon that Souveraine knew and loved, was in fast affect. His big eyes shot up to her, all trust, and she’d have done anything to keep them there. Even gutted Mollard herself. After all, it wasn’t as though she hadn’t fantasised about it in the past. But for now, she kept her plans practical and non-violent. “This man, what did he look like?”
Léon turned his gaze to the floor. Since the moment he’d been pulled into the alley, everything had been a swirling rush of panic. But with little thought, the enemy form began to rise to the forefront of his foggy mind. “He was in here last night,”he commenced. “He stood by me, drinking a brandy. You don’t remember him?”
Souveraine shook her head, awaiting more detail; dozens and dozens of men had drunk brandy near Léon the night before.
“He had…” Léon searched the wall blindly, conjuring the offender. “He had eyes like a furnace. At midnight.”
“Like a…” Her lips parted, and her brow fell. “A furnace?”
“Yes, that’s right. Like fire.” Léon stood, wandering aimlessly, talking excitedly, closing in on his assailant’s likeness. “Cheekbones like… like…”
“Like?”
