Page 121 of Love Beneath the Guillotine
“But here we are.”
“Here we are.”
He threw the vegetables and meat into a pot with some water and hung them on a hook over the fire, giving the lot a complacent stir.
Souveraine placed the knife down and leaned her elbows on the bench. “Will you tell me what Guillotin said?”
He didn’t want to. He’d reached the end of his inclination to talk. But it was important. He withdrew into himself then, staring and stirring. “If he’s not improved in the next few hours…” He blew out a long, steadying breath. “He won’t be. He needs to wake up, and he needs to drink something. But this thing, this infection… It’s my fault. He got shot because he was trying to protect me. He saved my life.” Those innumerable tears filled his eyes, hazying his vision. “I can’t ever repay him.”
“If he knows you love him, I believe that’s payment enough.” The gently spoken words added a bittersweet stab to his chest, hearing it from her of all people. “And what you did for Catherine… How could he ask for more than that? You probably did him the greatest service one man ever did for another. It’s no wonder…” Souveraine gathered vegetable scraps into a pile with shaking fingers, speaking as lightly as she could manage. “It’s going to be hard on her. We’ll need to make plans. I will stay with her and see it all through.”
“Of course,” he said mechanically. “We can’t leave her. But Souveraine…” He rose and walked to her, even as she turnedaway from him. “I have to ask you something more… Things are difficult. And… I don’t know how to say this.”
She let out a sad and stressed laugh. “How can it get worse than it already is, Léon?”
“You might be surprised,” he returned.
She nodded slowly. “Then out with it.”
Lowering his voice, moving closer, “We can’t tell Catherine yet.”
Her eyes shot up to him. “Are you quite mad?”
“No. It’s… She’s very volatile. She feels things deeply.”
Nostrils flaring, “Are you worried about her womanly hysteria?”
“No, it’s not that?—”
“That’s her brother lying up there!”
“I know! Souveraine, listen?—”
“If that was you, and they kept it from me because they were worried I might be a bit upset?—”
“Not abitupset. Catherine is known for overreacting to things?—”
“Known by who? She’s been perfectly calm-headed since I’ve known her.”
“Souveraine, listen. I will tell her. I will. I just need you to please take Émile out when I do.”
“Oh, so you’re hiding it from him, too? He adores Henri. Don’t you think he has a right to say goodbye? And…” She thrust two hands into her hair before shaking them angrily in his general direction. “Do you see the way you infantilise her, a grown woman, as much as you do a literal child?”
“Why do you keep saying that word, ‘infantilise’? I don’t even know what it means!”
“It means I’m not going to let you keep treating her like this. You expect no more from Catherine than to sit there and shut upwhile you and Henri do all your ‘important’ things together, and now you want to keep this from her too?”
“That is not the situation at all?—”
A finger slammed down between his ribs. “You tell her, or I will.”
Desperately, he hissed, “You cannot tell Catherine!”
A puff of plaster cracked above Léon’s head, and a lightning shape gashed its way up the wall, back, forth, back, forth, then across the ceiling.
Léon, heart nearly bursting out of his chest, turned, his eyes settling on Catherine, fuming in the doorway.
“Tell me what?”
