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THINGS FALL APART.

AGAIN.

L éon had left the soup over the fire the whole night through, but as luck would have it, he’d never used a kitchen fireplace in his life.

The wood had burned away slowly, cooking the soup on the lowest possible simmer until, when the morning came, it was rich and unctuous and full of all the life-giving goodness Léon believed would make Henry better.

He relinquished the pleasure of feeding Henry himself only because Catherine was so insistent she should do it, and he didn’t want to risk her exploding the bowl of soup all over them.

Also, she was his sister, and had, somewhat, saved his life.

Henry remained weak.

After the effort of eating and washing, his body was shaking all over.

Léon got him back into bed and stayed just as long as he could.

Long enough to see Henry’s eyes close, to know he was healing.

Then he departed, slinging his axe over his shoulder before stepping out into a crisp September morning.

Léon’s purpose in finding employment had only been to pay the medical bills, and to acquire some decent sustenance for the group, specifically Henry.

But now, seeing the strength the illness had sapped from Henry’s body, Léon knew a few days of work wouldn’t be enough.

He needed food for all of them on an ongoing basis—good food—which came at a premium in the city.

He bought a newspaper on the way to work, brimming with pride to see the front page.

It came with a little graphic of Louis’ head, decapitated, dripping blood.

Léon’s fingers traced greedily over the black ink, searching for Henry’s name.

He thought he found it.

He overheard people at the newspaper stand talking about the article, and he thought he felt the distinct buzz of approval in the air.

He swung by Guillotin’s office and asked him to come see Henry as soon as possible.

Guillotin was surprised to hear he’d lasted the night, then astounded to hear he’d eaten breakfast and walked around.

He hastened to go to him, so Léon asked him to take the newspaper to Henry, and he walked on.

He arrived at Place de la Révolution at exactly ten a.m., as requested, and there met the eyes of his new employer, Charles-Henri Sanson.

Gripping his axe tight, he trod up the steep and creaking stairs, and once again found himself standing atop the executioner’s scaffold.

A place, a week earlier, he thought he’d never set foot again.

Sanson regarded him grimly.

“Have you seen the paper yet?”

Rather than admit he couldn’t read, Léon replied in the affirmative.

“I bought it for him just now.”

“It was strong stuff. Radical, even.”

Sanson shook his head, but Léon smiled.

That was Henry all over.

Henry with his beautiful and provocative words.

Henry, with his powerful beliefs and determination to fix the world for all of them.

“People seem excited. Everyone appears to be talking about it.”

“They do,” Sanson said, an oddly wary note in his voice.

His eyes moved pointedly to a group of men across the square.

They ran as one, with marked animation, flying a newspaper like a flag.

Léon wondered if it was Henry’s paper.

He felt another pulse of pride in his chest.

“We should get started,” Sanson said.

“We’ve got several to get through this morning.” Then, with another glance at those men and their unusually frenetic energy, “I fear there will be more than enough work for us both in the coming days.”

Léon’s bloody work being done for the day, he helped clean away the blood and the bodies, said goodbye to Sanson, then took a seat on the scaffold stairs to rest a moment before he had to go join a bread line.

The cool breeze brought goosebumps to his skin.

A couple of raindrops landed on his cheeks from the gathering clouds.

Léon leaned on his knees, rubbing his hands along his biceps for warmth, watching people.

It was busy in the square.

Men and women, all of them in their correct colours, milling about, talking.

Then more arrived, these carrying bats and hatchets.

Léon sat a little taller, tuning in to the air of aggression, the noise of the crowd.

One of them was yelling, as if speaking to the group, but it carried only faintly on the wind.

They began to move, the lot of them, weapons in hand.

Léon scanned the square for Sanson, for someone who might be able to explain what was happening.

Finding no one he knew, he let his curiosity get the better of him and decided to follow the group.

He had to jog to catch up with them.

Back over the bridge, down Quai d'Orsay, past Henry’s townhouse. Léon considered stopping there, but something about the atmosphere made him wary of bringing attention to their property by entering.

Some said there was an important address at the assemblies. Others spoke in coded messages about ‘work to be done’. Léon kept his axe in hand, looking every bit as much a member of the group as the rest of them.

By the time they arrived at the assemblies, whatever speeches might have remained to be given evidently held no interest for the group. They were drawn, en masse, to some commotion further along the road. Incited by three men at the front, the full number lunged forward into a run. Léon was swept along with them, horrified to hear screams up ahead.

He was only able to get a brief look as he was jostled past. There, on the ground in the middle of the street, lay priests, beaten, hacked to pieces. From what little was left of them, it was a wonder he could make out what they had once been at all. People pulled at the remains of their mercifully deceased bodies, then the crowd moved on, faster now, following a procession of carriages from which the unfortunate dead had been torn.

With no way of fighting against the growing tide, Léon pushed on, heart sinking as fervour heightened around him.

They followed the carriages to the Prison de l'Abbaye, the mob jeering at the occupants, raising their weapons.

Those at the front of the group seemed to have known the carriages would arrive here.

They seemed, to Léon, to act with premeditation, while those at the back followed blindly, some having started out with the same interested confusion he did, others mimicking those who knew more.

As the carriages drew up, more than a dozen priests were hauled out and forced into the prison.

And that, thought Léon with relief, must have been that.

He wasn’t surprised to see them being taken in.

After all, they were followers of a religion that sought to oppress people.

Working-class people like him.

Women. Men who loved men.

A religion that walked hand in hand with the monarchy, that bled the nation dry of money and food.

They deserved to be judged fairly for their crimes.

Léon was ready to leave, but the crowd was so dense by now, he couldn’t make it through.

He resolved to wait a few bored moments until they dispersed, regretting his choice to waste time following them, especially as the image of those bodies lying in the road hung about his memory.

But then the door of the prison reopened.

The crowd surged forward, Léon carried with it, stumbling up the stairs, ripping his fingers along the stone wall to save himself falling and being crushed.

There, the horror began.

The prisoners, eighteen of them, he later discovered, were set upon by the group with their spades, hammers, clubs, and knives.

Léon backed himself against the wall and watched in horror as this one was stripped, his gut sliced open, his insides ripped out.

That one, his head cut off, then stuck on a pike to a cheer from the crowd.

Another, tied to a pole and carefully dismembered, with no regard for his agonised cries.

It was, in short, a massacre, and despite the axe in his hand, Léon, in the middle of an armed and blood-thirsty mob, knew the only person he had any chance of protecting that day was himself.

He worked his way to the door, sticking close to the walls, trying to go unnoticed, while those around him seemed to strike out blindly, as if starved for gore.

He made it to the stairs, and there one of the priests was thrown into the courtyard.

The crowd lurched forward like so many rabid dogs, and Léon turned his face away when he saw the man with the hacksaw fall upon the victim’s legs.

Shoving his way through, he fought blindly up the street, people everywhere, hundreds of them.

Barely knowing Paris at all, he quickly became lost. He asked people, got vague directions which he followed through the winding streets only to become lost again.

He ran onto one of the larger roads and was swept along to a convent.

Half a dozen heads sat gruesome and grim on the fenceposts, blood dripping to the ground, necks roughly hewn, eyes under half-closed lids, staring as though still pained and terrified even in death.

On approach to the courtyard, whence racking screams bounced off stone walls, it was a perfect replay of what he’d just seen, only this on a larger scale, more well organised.

Priests were thrown to the crowd, but with an announcement of their crimes as they fell to their knees.

‘Not supporting the revolution.’ ‘Refusing to take the oath.’ The condemnations were handed down fast. One after another, just as soon as this one was hacked to death, up their head went on a fencepost, and so they threw the next to the crowd with the same verdict as the last. Blood flowed from paving stones into the street, squelching beneath Léon’s boots as he fought for purchase and ground.

He fled in horror, swept along in a sea of fury, all the anger and terror of a humanity starved and beaten, living beneath years of uncertainty and violence.

When he reached the bridge to the ?le de la Cité, Léon knew he’d gone too far.

But with the bearing of the Seine, he followed it, on and on, for what felt like miles, the sun setting behind dark clouds, the shouts of the crowd in the distance, but not distant enough.

Never distant enough.

When he finally reached Quai d'Orsay, he sprinted, trying to outrun his mental exhaustion, trying to get as much space between himself and the ongoing massacre as he could. Relief washed over him to find their gate so entirely nondescript, and he slowed his pace just past it, falling to barely walking, waiting for a moment in which the street would be empty.

The first chance he got, he pushed the key into the lock, slipped inside, and closed the door on all the horrors of Paris. He picked the plank of wood from the ground and boarded them in once again, thoroughly, using every nail to hand.

Catherine had been right to do it. She had been right when she said they should leave. As had Souveraine.

All Henry’s gorgeous ideas of revolution… His beautiful words. Beautiful, beautiful dreams… But the reality was out there. Just as Léon had once known it would be.

He’d lied to himself about human nature. He’d lied to himself about their chance to be happy. He’d fallen under Henry’s spell.

He knew better now.