Page 28 of Love Beneath the Guillotine
“What?” Dupont’s brow scrunched in an affable effort to understand the problem. “What’s dreadful?”
“Everything!” Léon cried. “All of it. Can’t you see? This whole manner of death and destruction and-and utter distance. It’s intolerable!”
That hand on his shoulder again. “Léon, your job isn’t going anywhere. I know it’s a little different?—”
“It’s not that!” Léon pulled away sharply, the heel of his boot coming down in a puddle of already-congealing blood, and slipping with it.
DuPont reached out to steady him. “Then what is it?” Taking both Léon’s forearms in hand, he twisted his neck about to try to meet Léon’s eyes. “What’s the matter with you? You haven't been yourself all day.”
The man’s eyes, when Léon met them, shone clear and kind concern. It did something to Léon’s insides—spurred some kind of guilt, latent until then, but quickly at the forefront of his emotions. DuPont had always been so good to him. He meant well. He was by far the kindest man of Léon’s circle, and all he was asking was for Léon to do the job he paid him for. And why couldn’t he simply do that today? What had suddenly changed so much that Léon found these things shocking? These things he’d always been capable of handling, because he’d had no choice but to handle them.
That rain, that red rain, dropped down onto Léon’s hand, onto his cheek, and he tried to reel his racing thoughts in—compile them into some simple explanation he could give DuPont, that he could scream at him, get it out, so he could understand what was going on himself.
A man has taken Émile. And I hate that man, but he’s done what he’s done for a good reason. And I find I cannot fault him for the act because I would have done the same thing in his position. And he has me in a bind, and if I do nothing, innocent people are going to die, either tonight or tomorrow morning. And it strikes me as absurd that I am to murder people in the morning with this hideous machine, while I’m trying so very hard to prevent deaths tonight. For none of it appears just or right, no matter what I do, and I am stuck, and I am lost. And I need help. And I am perfectly alone.
DuPont’s aspect darkened as he waited for Léon, the shade of worry spreading ever deeper into the fine lines of his forty-something years. He wanted to understand. But he couldn’t help. If Léon told him, he’d only send men to find Henry. And then Henry would exert the only revenge he could when pressed. Léon didn’t doubt that. His spine shot out a cruel shiver of warning at the image of Émile, that knife to this throat, and those eyes like murder.
Léon was stuck. And his only bargaining chip was held behind bars and a stone wall, beyond his coercion or control.
Yet he didn’t want to use her that way either.
“Léon?” The word broke into his living nightmare, all images of blood and gore and burning flesh and a child’s body limp on the ground
“I’m tired,” Léon mumbled over the suffocating din that existed only in his head.
“Of course you are.” DuPont’s voice and aspect lightened, taking on a cajoling note. “I heard you were still running about with Souveraine at dawn.”
That bastard Mollard!“It wasn’t like that. I did go home?—”
“I’m sure you did.” DuPont chuckled fondly over the top of Léon’s next attempt at a defence, then he said, in a decidedly fatherly tone, “Listen, that’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about.”
Exasperated, “Thereisnothing to talk about.”
Point blank, he asked, “When are you going to marry her?”
Sent into a miserable spin, “I-I-I… Um… I don’t…”
Turning pink as he was, embarrassed by all of it, DuPont saved him the stress of answering. “You won’t find a better girl.”
“No.” Léon looked down at his feet. “No, I know that.”
“And she loves you.”
“I… I know.”
“So, what’s the problem?”
“There isn’t… Um…” Léon looked distantly across the square, shadows growing long in the ever-fading light. “Did you ever… What if it’s…” He focused on DuPont, imploring him to somehow understand his vague implication. “I don’t think I can give her what she wants. I don’t think she’ll be happy with me.”
The ripping guffaw that spilled out of DuPont crushed any hope Léon had of being heard. “She worships the ground you walk on. Don’t be ridiculous. Go over there and do it now, and I’ll tell you what. All this tiredness, all these worries, they’ll disappear when you’ve got a woman like that waiting at home for you. Cooking for you, cleaning for you. And what about little Émile? The boy needs a mother.”
“Hmm,” Léon replied, as some sort of affirmative response, desperate to leave the conversation.
“Come on, lad. You’ve had your fun. Now it’s time to be responsible.” Léon might have tried to argue, might have said Souveraine was as chaste as the day was long, and all the village were pigs for suggesting otherwise, but DuPont cut in with exactly the reprimand that showed he thought the same as them. “Do you really want people saying those things about the mother of your children?”
No. Léon didn’t want them saying anything. He shook his head, ashamed.
“That’s the kind of reputation that gets your head cut off,” DuPont added, something joking back in his tone.
