Page 58
Story: Love Beneath the Guillotine
58
A STEADY RECOVERY
H enry worked hard.
The King’s head, he wrote, was the balm the nation needed to heal.
Louis Capet was the gaping wound seeping infection into France.
All the atrocities of the September Massacres, as they came to be known, were due to that ailment.
No billionaire boys’ club for France.
It was time to take the money back from the stupidly rich and hand it over to the destitute.
It was time to start valuing intelligence over the luck of the draw, decent people over those born wealthy, who got the biggest shovels to scoop everything up first. It was time to wipe the slate clean and start again, and do it with the blood of the one man who truly deserved it.
Henry also spoke of the failings of the leaders of the day.
He pulled no punches when he accused the very men who drove the revolution of having lit the fuse of the September Massacres as a means to clear out the prisons, to murder innocents, because there were no crimes for which they could be condemned, yet the prisons had been overflowing.
He got paid less and less, steadily, for each article.
These latter ideas didn’t sell so well, because printers and publishers, who weren’t half so starry-eyed as Henry, knew better than to distribute them.
But Henry wrote them and Léon faithfully took them out.
What money he got either went in the breadline, or was saved.
Léon, meanwhile, took heads.
He worked with Sanson, and he became mighty efficient with the blade.
It wasn’t work he enjoyed, but after what he’d seen of the ‘justice’ of the people, he chose to make death fast and dignified.
He bought food with his payment each night, and he hid what was left away.
Souveraine and Catherine had become thick as thieves.
They occasionally invited trusted friends over, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, who refused to leave the country, even though it was said authorities had taken to arresting the English for the grand crime of not being French.
She pretended to be married to an American and thus obtained diplomatic immunity to carry on with her work documenting the revolution.
Olympe de Gouges was another favourite with the small group.
What they called a feminist. The four of them, and a few others, would lock themselves away in the library with wine for hours at a time.
On occasion, Léon would hear something smash followed by a round of applause, but the few times he tried to get a look in, Souveraine ousted him quick-smart.
Henry mended day by day, but it was a long time until he was well enough to stay downstairs for extended periods.
He took to walking in the garden with émile, for as long as he could, before either Léon or Catherine scolded him for his carelessness.
He was fussed over to a ridiculous extent, though he tried to pull his weight every bit as much as he could while sick, either in writing or tutoring émile.
Léon was happy again.
But wary. As the persecution of non-French people grew, so did his worries about Henry and Catherine.
It wasn’t for nothing that she’d shut her mouth during her witchcraft trial.
Even then, they knew it wouldn’t look good.
But now… National fervour had grown to terrifying extremes, and Léon, leaving the house daily, saw more than anyone else.
He’d seen a man lynched in the street over his accent.
A woman dragged from the breadline and imprisoned for complaining about the price of eggs.
But as outside grew more dangerous each day, inside…
Inside was calm and beautiful.
And there was sex. There was so much beautiful, endless, glorious sex.
Every day. Every night.
Until they were exhausted, but replenished.
And during those months, the love Henry and Léon had forged in fire was tempered to the point of indestructibility.
They hated to be apart, and every second spent that way was for no purpose but to insure their future.
No decision had been made about what they would do, but as tensions in Paris rose, so went out the decree that any person who attempted to leave France would be viewed as a traitor, and prosecuted as such.
And not only that. So would their husbands, wives, daughters, sons, fathers, and mothers.
One wrong move and the lot would be arrested and tried, with the national razor waiting in the square should they be found guilty.
“Don’t worry,” Henry assured him for the thousandth time.
“As soon as Louis dies, all this ends. It takes one chop, and the madness stops.”
When the day came that Louis Capet was finally charged with treason, due to face trial in a court of law, it was as though a metric tonne of exhaustion and stress had been lifted from their shoulders.
That was it.
With the salve of the once-King’s blood, everything was going to be beautiful.
They enjoyed a white Christmas, with very little food, but more than enough cheer, and they saw in the new year of 1793 with enormous optimism.
On January the fifteenth, it was announced that the King had been sentenced to death by guillotine.
And the very next day, they came for Henry.
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