Page 36 of Love Beneath the Guillotine
He reflected a moment, then his tone fell a little harsher, firming up for the next part. “My uncle was not an executioner by trade, and he was unfamiliar with the weapon…” Léon moved an arm in an absentminded downward motion, as though he were holding the very axe. “He brought the first blow down, but not hard enough, because, you understand, it was his ownbrother. He couldn’t bear to do it. He gashed into his neck, and the scream from my father… The blood…” Léon swept the tip of his tongue over his lips. “He stood, staggered about the place, the blood gushing from his neck, stupefied by the blow. My uncle, he brought the axe down again, but cut a great wound into his back. He was so sick, in tears up there on the scaffold, white and shaking, and my father, in such pain, screaming, so I…” Léon rocked a little, fingers moving faster in Émile’s hair. “I climbed onto the scaffold. I took the axe in my own hands, I pushed my father to the floor, and I took his head. In one blow, it was off, and it was done. And I remember when it fell. When it rolled over and he looked at me. And the look on his face…” The tears shone bright in Léon’s eyes, right on the cusp of slipping down his cheeks. “He was so disappointed. I could see it in his eyes. He understood what I’d done, and the last thing he saw in this world was that his entire life’s work, saving me, had been for nothing. He would have chosen to be hacked to pieces on that stage before he’d ever have let me do that.”
A single tear escaped, and he quickly swiped it away. “Heads don’t die fast. It’s not the quick and noble death people will tell you it is. He watched me, and his lips said something I never heard, and he blinked, and he cried.” His lips tilted into an expression of disgust. “And the crowd cheered. They loved me for it, and I can never tell you how much I hated them. But I promised myself, and my father, two things right there. One, that I would never stand by and let another person die with such barbarity as I had witnessed that day. And two, that I would be the end of that line. I swore to never have children of my own. And I will get Émile out before it ever afflicts him.”
Henry had never once in his life been so entirely put in his place. All the pure and honourable spirit his mind yearned for, all the romance of mankind he’d read about in great poetry, all the beauty of mountainous cliffs and vast oceans and the sunburning down and beautifying the land, here it all was right before him. The spirit of the revolution that had drawn him, that he had pinned every dream on, all the tragic beauty he’d been seeking—here it was.
Henry fell hard, and he fell fast, that very moment, even as he tried to convince himself it hadn’t just happened. Even as he tried to tell himself that Léon was nothing but a local fool, pretty and simple-minded, a lie he needed so he wouldn't have to feel terrible about what he had done to him, and so he wouldn’t have to miss him when they left. But the change in his understanding of Léon knocked at the very principles of who he was, or who he thought he was, and he sat there in the dark by the fire, utterly speechless.
Léon fixed him with his hard gaze. “I didn’t get your keys. I tried my best, but I couldn’t do it. The ones I gave you are fake, and if you go to the prison tonight, you won’t get in.”
The complete shock of the revelation ripped Henry straight out of the starry-eyed obsession he’d so nearly fallen into. Righteous anger and indignation swelled in his chest. He’d been correct about Léon all along! The duplicitous peasant! The absolute shit! The complete and utter?—
But then Léon also said, “I still think I can save your sister.” He focused his clear, emerald eyes on Henry’s, searching them for understanding when he earnestly revealed, “Iwantto help you save her.”
Henry, hurled into a dizzying spin, tried to ask how, but nothing more than a confused and indecipherable grunt-breath came out.
“Tomorrow morning, I will execute everyone else. And she simply will not appear when she’s due to. I will sneak her out, and by the time they realise what’s happened, by the time they think to search the town and investigate, the two of you will be long gone. You’ll meet me at the western entrance to the forestat two o’clock tomorrow afternoon, and you’ll bring Émile. You’ll hand him over, job done. Do that, or I will never tell you how to find her, and she’ll die a death far more horrible than I would ever have inflicted on her.”
This last comment landed as a threat, setting Henry back on his guard, trying to crush down the tendrils of adoration that were springing up in his heart faster than he could stamp them out. “How do I know that I can trust you? That you won’t just take her head and send men for me while I’m waiting in the woods?”
“You don’t have a choice,” Léon said. “If I do nothing, she dies. You’ll never get into that prison tonight, and the place will be crawling with people come dawn. You’ll be shot dead in the street if you try to interfere.”
Henry watched Léon gathering his arms about his sleeping brother, pulling the boy’s weary head to his chest, his arms so strong and so gentle, making the child look as light as a feather. It seemed to Henry just then as if Émile were carried through the world on a cloud, no burden at all, while the heart that held him aloft was weighed down so heavily.
When Léon had reached his full height and turned towards the cabin, Henry halted him with the gravelly question, “Why would you help me? After what I’ve done.”
Léon took a few moments, trying to decipher whatever was happening in his mind and heart that had made the change in him. “I think I just need to know it can be done. Or that I did something. That one thing.” So carelessly, so lightly, Léon gave Henry the second genuine smile he’d ever offered him, and said, “For what it’s worth, I think your ideals are beautiful. I hope you get the revolution you want, and that the result is the world you envision. And I hope your sister will be safe and happy. With you by her side to protect her.”
He walked away, perfectly ignorant that with those words, Henry’s heart had fallen at his feet, to be picked up and held and cherished, or trod into the mud and forgotten, exactly as Léon deemed suitable.
The great romance of both their lives had just begun in earnest.
Even if the two were, at that time, determined to remain oblivious to the fact.
19
THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM
Henry did not sleep well all that long night. Any dreams that came for him were of Catherine’s burning flesh, gunshots, riding hard while being chased, and Léon. Léon in the alleyway with his beautiful drunk smile. Henry knocking him to the ground. The look in his eyes when he first saw him in that bar, and then, unprecedented, Léon’s head rocking back with pleasure, the long line of his neck, the sensation of his naked skin beneath Henry’s lips, the gasp that racked out of him when Henry took him in his mouth…
This last catapulted Henry from tenuous slumber to bolt upright in a still-dark room. The space was dully illuminated by the ever-burning fire, which Léon tended, shoulders hunched, vest back on over his sweater. “Sorry,” he whispered, imagining he’d awakened him. And so he had. In a way.
Henry scrambled to cover himself with the blanket in case Léon saw the truth of the matter through his breeches.
But Léon, who, in Henry’s eyes, had taken on a fresh and forbidding beauty after that dream, was paying him scant attention. He dropped another log onto the fire and pushed it back in a flurry of sparks, lighting his sensual lips in profile.
Henry wiped a tingle of sweat from his forehead. “Couldn’t sleep?”
“No. But I have to go, anyway.” He raised his chin towards a window. “It will be dawn soon.”
Henry watched Léon cross the room, tall and lithe, settling down by his brother, stroking his face to wake him. A sleepy head turned his way, and Léon whispered, “I have to go to work now. But Henri will bring you to me in a few hours.”
“No,” Émile protested weakly, stretching warm arms around Léon’s neck.
“Ssssh. Back to sleep. I’ll see you soon.” It didn’t take a great deal of coercion from Léon for a sleepy Émile to settle back into his comfortable slumber. But Henry knew what it must have taken for Léon. His smile dropped just as Émile’s eyelids did, and he kissed his brother’s cheek, grief and devotion writ in every feature.
Henry wondered if he looked like that every time he went to work. He wondered how long he’d been doing it. And he wondered what toll it had taken.
But Léon’s boots walked quietly and deliberately across the floorboards towards the door, straight past Henry, who had now been left to care for Émile with Léon’s full knowledge, and not a word about it.
