Page 12 of Love Beneath the Guillotine
“Do not apologise to me, Léon.” She squeezed his fingers, long strands of unkempt brown hair falling across his hand as she tilted her head to catch his ashamed eyes. “I know you would spare me if you could.”
“That I would.” He looked up, sadness clouding his face. “In a heartbeat. If only these things were up to me.”
“Smile, Léon. For look at me. I’m smiling.” And so she was. In fact, Sophie had barely stopped smiling since the day she’d taken her largest knife to the neck of her husband while he slept.
An odious and cruel man, no one had been sad to see him go—not even the men who convicted her. He’d killed his and Sophie’s only daughter in a fit of rage, a girl Léon knew well. And when Sophie cut him to pieces, baked him into pies, and sold him to the townspeople, it seemed a fitting end, to those who hadn’t eaten the pies.
But if all unhappy wives took all the heads of all the cruel husbands in the world, well… the streets would run red with blood. And even though that might have gone some way to solving the problem of the grain shortage in one fell swoop, the law was the law. So despite her very reasonable cause for decapitation, despite the fact that she’d been honest with thecourt from the moment she was caught, she was shown no clemency. Straight to jail that very day, to be dealt the dreadful sentence a short time later. And still she smiled. She’d made her choice.
But Léon hated to kill another friend—to end another life prematurely and see that face for the very last time with no life or colour in it. But he would do it. For that was his lot in life. “What can I bring you? Is there anything?”
“No, Léon. You have little more than I do. Although…” Sophie pulled back and looked over her shoulder, and for the first time Léon saw there a young woman. Perhaps eighteen or nineteen. Blonde and hazel eyed, watching Sophie and Léon intently, a lost and wild look about her. But the eyes… They bore a startling familiarity.
Sophie slipped down to the floor in front of her and took hands which squeezed hers back. “I’m to go tomorrow,” Sophie said gently. “Is there something you’d like? Léon will get it for you. An apple maybe? A piece of bread?”
The frightened eyes cut back to Léon, wary, and no sound came from the tightly closed, deathly pale lips.
Sophie brought her gaze back by saying, “Just nod.” But the girl shook her head with a definitive rejection of Léon and whatever goods he may have had to offer. “It’s okay, he won’t hurt you.”
Even more forcefully, the head shook, but now the lips trembled too, fingers tearing into Sophie’s hands as a sob broke out of her.
Léon stumbled slightly as the prison shifted—another of the strange tremors they’d been having of late. But it soon settled, and Sophie barely noticed, busy working a hand free to take around the girl’s back. She held her close with a marked tenderness. Léon wondered if that had anything to do with the daughter she had lost so recently, who was around this youngwoman’s age. He watched her stroke her hair as she calmed slightly, then she explained to Léon, “Mute. The poor girl never could have stood much of a chance with the courts.”
“Do you know what she’s in for?” asked Léon.
“No idea. She came in yesterday, and it’s been nothing but crying. Poor little kitten. She’s terrified. You couldn’t find out for her, could you? I don’t know if she’s to…” Sophie’s face drew into a knot, and Léon nodded his understanding. Why say it in front of the poor girl? No doubt she must have known Sophie’s fate, as Sophie had mentioned it so calmly in front of her. There was a chance the girl might be spared, but given the fact she was here in this cell, with the condemned… Was Léon to kill that girl in the morning, too?
His heart went out to her, as it so easily did to so many people. She was so young. He rarely had to kill teenagers, though, of course, it happened. But what could she have done to have tempted that fate at her age?
“I’ll try to find out,” Léon offered. Then uselessly, ridiculously, “And I’ll bring something nice. To eat. I’ll find something.” He had to depart, precious seconds constantly ebbing away, but it felt every kind of wrong to walk out on the pair of them. “Please explain to her, I’ll make it… I’ll do my best. I’ll come early, and I won’t let anything happen…” He knew well the kinds of dangers female prisoners in particular faced, close to death, no one to hear or believe them before their words were silenced once and for all. But if this girl didn’t know, he wasn’t about to voice it and give her even more to worry about.
“I’ll take care of her,” said Sophie. And Léon believed she would try her best. She was large and strong and had a protective fierceness to her that had always inspired a great deal of respect in Léon.
“I have to go, but I’ll be back just as soon as I can.” It was on the tip of Léon’s tongue to ask the girl if she happened to know adark-haired kidnapper, but the question seemed both ludicrous and useless, given she was mute. Instead, he said fast goodbyes, bolted the grate shut, and made for the stairs at breakneck speed, pounding down to the ground floor, and back to where Mollard still strolled about, examining the murder machine, DuPont having wandered off somewhere.
“The girl. What’s she in for?” Léon snapped immediately. “Is she due to die tomorrow? Why haven’t I been informed?”
Mollard inspected him with the irritated boredom of a man being asked to clean a public latrine for the hundredth time. “Why should anyone tell you anything?”
“Fuck you, Mollard, just tell me!” Léon shouted.
Mollard’s repugnant mouth stretched into a smirk. He went around behind the wide desk and pulled a thin sheath of papers from a drawer. This he threw down in front of Léon, turning his insides to mud.
Léon stared down at it, pride fighting with shame. The words crawled out of his throat like a broken-legged spider. “You know I can’t read that.”
Mollard huffed a laugh that sounded like a mouthful of phlegm. “Then I guess you’ll never know.”
Despite the goading face that loomed over him, Léon ran his eyes across the front page. Indecipherable black scratchings here and there above pre-printed lines, those next to clearer letters that he could occasionally decipher, yet make no sense of in their long, intimidating groupings. The documents bore a stamp, red, the seal of some city or town he couldn’t place, but it wasn’t Reims, that much he knew. He picked the papers up, concentrated hard, but it was nothing more than a stabbing and a swirl to him. He refused to raise his eyes to Mollard. He only said softly, “Just tell me if she’s to die tomorrow so I can plan the day.”
“Why?” His fat tongue rolled over his already wet lips as his fingers curled around the pages. “You like her?”
“No!” Léon gasped out, appalled at the notion. “I just want to know if I’m to kill her and why.”
“She’s a very special case. So how about this…” Grubby fingers stuffed the young woman’s file back into the drawer. “You give me a go with Souveraine, and I won’t say a word to anyone about it.” He added a greasy wink to the suggestion.
“Give you a…” Léon’s lips were white with disgust, anger, revulsion, sending a tingle down his arm and to his fist. Mollard was big, but Léon was strong. He could have beaten him to a pulp. He could have painted those white walls with his blood and left him there to rot. If he was fast, he might get away with it, too. How many others must have had a motive to kill this man?
The slithering eel of a laugh that crept out of Mollard’s neck brought Léon to his senses. He was doing his best to wind him up, and Léon was letting him.
