Page 91 of Love Beneath the Guillotine
“The buildings are old, ancient, but they hang in a mad scramble over everything. Every wall is a sign or anadvertisement, all the things you can have or can do, and there’s everything to do in Paris. And my friends there?—”
“Your friends?”
Henry laughed humbly. “My father’s friends, mostly. But he won’t have told them what happened back in England. He’ll be playing happy families. And we’ll be accepted into the first circles as soon as I drop my name. Léon, I’ll take you everywhere. No one will care that we’re together after the revolution. We’ll hold hands, and we’ll be in love, and maybe one day we’ll even marry.”
Now it was Léon’s turn to laugh. He kept all the bitterness and disbelief out of it. He hardly felt any. Henry’s enthusiasm was so beautiful to him. So fresh and alive and youthful, as though Léon was touching something of himself that he’d buried with his father seven years earlier. “How can you claim to be in love, Henri? How can a man fall in love in less than two weeks?”
“Life’s too short these days to not fall in love in two weeks,” Henry returned. The statement might have sounded flippant, but it was delivered in a sad tone, and the words struck a blow at the iron cage enclosing Léon’s heart. Henry was right. They might both die tomorrow on entrance to Paris, or be caught earlier and go up in smoke together.
“Get the wine,” Léon said. “And all the food. And let’s eat it here in bed. Then let’s fuck again. And again, until the sun sets.”
And he was back, the Léon who was true and tangible and vibrant in Henry’s arms. Henry kissed his soft lips. “How can you ask how I fell in love with you when you’re this easy to love?”
Léon made no protest regarding his claim, imagining it was the scene and the cheer and the carefree element of the moment that Henry was in love with.
But it was quite the opposite.
Léon had never, and would never, be more understood, more seen, and more adored for who he truly was, than byHenry. Every spark of real life that flickered in him held Henry entranced, on tenterhooks for more, like a card player who’d just bet his last livre, who was praying the next card he turned over would win him the game.
41
PARIS
They started out in the early evening and pushed both horses hard. Not that they needed to. The animals were charged with strange energy. Henry said it was because they couldn’t wait to get in amongst all the violence of the city streets. He then countered with a reassurance that reports of disorder and terror in Paris were wildly exaggerated, and that he expected to find a far more civilised society than either of them had ever encountered before.
Despite Henry’s mollifications, warm ramblings, and absurdly sunny outlook on the situation, all manner of anxiety gripped Léon through the long and arduous night. He worried over Émile—he hadn’t stopped worrying over him. He trusted Souveraine, who had always been like a sister to the boy, but he was scared for her too. It was no small ask to take over Émile’s care while he rescued Henry. And now she’d travelled to Paris for him, too.
Guilt twisted in his gut as payment for the day he’d spent at the inn. And the day in the cottage. Of course, it was smarter to travel by night, but the taking of so much pleasure felt grossly self indulgent, careless, even cruel. Especially to Souveraine.
He knew, logically, that he would have to do the right thing by her after everything was done. He was resolved to do it—to see the wedding through.
Then Henry would say something sweet, or something funny, or simply talk at all, and Léon would melt all over again. A thousand times or more he dreamed of resting his head on Henry’s soft shoulder, of the possibility they’d travel too slowly and have to spend one more day hidden away together…
Then the guilt would return.
What would Henry say when he saw Souveraine again? What would Souveraine say if she knew about the two of them? How could it be possible that the right thing to do was to disappoint them both, one way or the other, and end up miserable himself by marrying her?
But the alternative was impossible.
They arrived in the outskirts of Paris at sunrise, and Léon was amazed to discover that Henry’s splendid rhetoric hadn’t done the city justice. But what words could?
The major streets were wide, buildings towering high, and row upon row of glittering windows twinkled in the new dawn. For beauty, Reims could hold its own, but for sheer scale which amplified that beauty tenfold… Paris was a glory.
Henry pointed out landmarks as they went, and with every block they passed, he seemed more like a man returning home than one on holiday. He sat a little taller, talked a little more proudly, and Léon, inch by inch, felt a little more foreign.
How strange that this Englishman knew the city so much better than he did—could find his way around and meet the people and take all the things he wanted from it. How strange the network of the aristocracy, that even across shores stretched out a safeguard for men like Henry. So long as he kept to the correct circles in the correct cities, he would always be morewelcome anywhere in the world than Léon felt in his own country at that moment.
But as they wound their way deeper in, Henry’s aspect changed, his confidence slipping when he noted the scars the last few years of famine and war had wrought. The very atmosphere darkened, and a palpable tension gripped the city.
Here were walls fallen down, buildings gaping open with enormous gashes in their sides. There were the homeless—great swaths of them—crouching in corners in rags on a frigid morning. Deeper still, and those once-glittering windows were replaced by wooden boards. A door hung off a cathedral, ransacked of its goods. Then, half a block further down the road, they found the cathedral’s priest, dragged out into the street and hung from a lamppost, his body swaying in the light breeze. The streets grew dirtier with every block—discarded papers, mud, horseshit, the grime of a city with no resources to clean itself.
The nauseating fear of real danger brought Léon’s eyes across to Henry. He could practically hear him trying to excuse the state of it all, trying to keep his dream alive. ‘Afterthe revolution’. Alwaysafter…
They rode on, and Léon was glad for his long leather executioner’s pants, for Henry’s knee-britches—fashionable anywhere else—drew the disparaging eyes of men who’d been out drinking all night, readying for violence, determined to keep up their fight at the smallest instigation. They immediately picked him, correctly, as a member of his own class.
Léon’s axe was strapped to his back, and he had returned the sword Henry lost when he was arrested, but Catherine had kept hold of his pistols. Léon was already shocked at the things he’d done in order to protect Henry. He found he barely trusted himself when one man whispered to another as they passed, all of them dressed in a patriotic fervour of blue, white and red.
They kicked their worn and ragged horses on. “How much further?” Léon asked, breaking the silence of many streets.
