Page 140 of Love Beneath the Guillotine
There were two boats due to leave France within the hour that still had room on board for all five.
“Where to, then?” asked Henry, as they made their way back to the carriage.
“If we leave France, we can’t come back. We’ll be declared traitors, even if it is untrue and revolting,” Léon sighed.
“You do realise that boat probably sailed, so to speak, when you killed dozens of people in the main square of Paris?”
“And I’d do it again,” said Léon. “Look what they did to you.” He touched a hand to Henry’s cut cheek. “And your beautiful hair.” He kissed him. “And that was five nights without you in my arms.”
“There won’t be another one,” said Henry. “Not ever again. But you have to know, if we do this, if we leave, Émile can’t come back either. Not to France. Maybe not ever.”
“Then so be it,” said Léon. “I promised I’d save him from the axe. Then today’s the day. I never expected to get here the way we have, but this was my dream.Thisis what I worked for.”
Henry kissed Léon’s cheek. “Your name suits you, you know? Léon Lyon. Twice the lion. Twice the courage. Twice the beauty. Twice the appetite.” At this last, Léon blushed, out in the open as they were, so Henry tried to pull them back on track. “You’re all in?”
Léon smile back brightly. “Let’s do it. Let’s go.”
He lifted Léon’s hand to kiss him. “I promise you won’t regret it.”
Léon laughed. “I don't believe that for a second. But this is the only adventure I ever want to have. A life with you.”
Henry swung the door of the carriage open, and they climbed in to find the others sitting on the floor, huddled around a lamp, sharing some bread and cheese they’d bought for the trip.
“So here are our options,” Henry began. “There are two boats leaving within the hour. There’s America.” He scanned their eyes for a reaction that never came. “Or there’s England.”
“Back to England?” Catherine wailed. “But we escaped! We just escaped!”
“Well, I know,” Henry said, “but France is slightly fucked right now.”
“Slightly,” Léon agreed. Shuffling for his brother to climb onto his lap, “But that doesn’t mean it always will be.”
“It won’t,” Henry declared, that same light in his eyes that Léon both adored and had learned to fear. “We’ll come back one day when things settle. When all those beautiful things we’ve dreamed of come true. Because I still believe it, even now, that the world will become better for what we’ve all done here today. Nothing beautiful is ever born without blood.”
“What about flowers?” asked Émile.
“Well, yes, flowers, but that’s not exactly?—”
“Or bread,” said Souveraine, snapping off a piece of hers.
“That’s not really my point.”
“Books,” mused Catherine.
“The point is,” said Henry, “good things take time. And I was talking to Mary’s fake husband, you know, the American one, and he assured me their nation is built on all the same great principles as our revolution. Freedom, compassion, a belief in the rights of all men?—”
“And women?” Souveraine interjected.
“Well, they didn’t specifically say that,” said Henry. “But yes, probably, the rights of menandwomen to be equal. It’s the very thing we’ve been searching for here in Europe, only over there, it’s a very young country, and they don’t have to deal with half the complications we have going on.”
Léon noted the naïve idealism that sparkled over Henry’s words. Perhaps he would never learn. And that was exactly what Léon loved about him. He asked softly, “If this American is so in love with America, what’s he doing over here in Paris?”
“Business,” Henry mumbled. “Business goes on.”
“Mmm. There’s a lot of money to be made in ‘business’ right now, I’m sure, when all of France is being cut up and redistributed by the new regime.”
Henry wrinkled that haughty mouth Léon adored. “That’s rather a cynical view of things.”
“And isn’t half the reason our people are starving that the king I just decapitated gave it to America to fight a war against the English?”
