Page 6

6

A BASTARD AND NO DOUBT

T he tips of Léon’s fingers ached with cold, but still he clutched the stone.

He trod a short line back and forth in front of the prison doors, perfectly conspicuous, but he wasn’t thinking about whether he’d be seen or whether he was likely to get away with the crime.

He was barely thinking straight at all.

He’d decided he was going to hit Mollard over the head with that stone—maybe even kill him—then make away with the keys.

He’d wait in the forest until the exchange was made, then he’d kill his brother’s kidnapper, too.

Two murders. He and émile would have no choice but to away after that.

A moment he’d been dreaming of for years.

Out of Reims, once and for all.

It was too soon—sooner than he’d ever thought it could happen—but his heart began to warm with the flame of excitement at the idea of escape.

Where to steal a horse?

Two horses? And which direction to run in?

Perhaps he should leave without émile.

Place him in Souveraine’s care, then come back to claim him when he’d made a fortune by…

highway robbery? It was a desperate measure, to be sure, but no more desperate than becoming a headsman had been.

No more desperate than killing a warden and a kidnapper to save his brother.

The echo of boots clomping over worn stone snapped Léon’s figure to attention.

He scrabbled around the edge of the building to wait and watch.

Closer, closer, Mollard came, relaxed and measured, like a man taking a morning stroll.

A man enjoying the first rays of sunlight cutting through the yellow fog that had arrived with the scarlet rain.

A man taking the air, reluctant to spend the day in the dank environment of the prison, extending his own freedom for as long as he could.

Léon heard the jingle jangle of his keys swinging on his belt.

His spare fingers twitched at the thought of closing around them.

Closer, closer, and Léon, overexcited, desperate and frenzied, all but jumped out of his hiding place, giving Mollard a mighty shock and extracting from him such a cry of fright that it ricocheted across the court.

Léon hadn’t expected it, and he gripped the rock twice as tight behind his back.

“Citizen Mollard,” he vomited out, eyes as crazed as a sleepless and troubled man who was about to beat another to death with a brick.

Mollard clutched his chest as his pupils dilated into understanding.

“Léon? What do you want?” As always, his speech had turned into sneering by the time he’d reached the end of his sentence.

“I need to…” Mollard turned away to shove the key into the lock.

Léon, eyes on the back of the man’s balding head, raised the rock.

The muscles in his arm readied.

Clink ! The ring of keys dropped to the ground, and Léon caught himself just in time to stop the blow hitting the man’s spine as he bent to snatch them up.

Both hands now turned the rock over and over behind his back while Mollard’s red face rose up, angry, as though it was Léon’s fault he’d fumbled the keys.

“What is it? Are you drunk?”

“No.” He certainly was.

“Only, I need to get in there. With you. As soon as possible.”

Mollard narrowed his beady eyes at him.

“What for? Why?”

“Because. I, uh, I have to… kill… you…” The man’s eyes widened and Léon stuttered, “S-someone! Kill someone! But not you. I wouldn’t… not you …”

Mollard fiddled with the keys in his fingers, feeling for the right one while he kept his keen gaze on Léon.

“At this time of day?” He sniffed.

“You smell drunk.”

“No.” Léon gave his shirt an absentminded swipe, wondering if it was covered in vomit.

He hadn’t thought to check.

“No, I haven’t a drop in me.”

Not convinced, clearly, Mollard stood there awaiting more explanation.

“Um,” Léon meandered, “I need to hang them. All of them. The prisoners. I’m bringing back hanging. Just for a laugh, you know? Thought it might be fun.”

The already narrow eyes thinned to mocking slits.

“What are you playing at?”

“I’m not playing at anything,” Léon breathed out anxiously.

“A pussy like you, with your ‘official torturer’, and your fancy axe, and your pretty show? You haven’t got the balls for hanging.”

Mollard shoved the key in the lock and turned it successfully this time, while Léon watched on, tight-lipped, rock begging to be used.

“I’ve the balls for that and more, Citizen Mollard.”

With a nasty little chuckle, Mollard threw across one last disparaging look, said, “Fuck off,” then spat, narrowly missing Léon’s shoe with a foul globule of phlegm.

Léon’s immediate compulsion was to lift that foot and smash Mollard’s shin in two, but he had something so much better.

Mollard pushed the door open, Léon raised his rock high, and “Léon!” came a loud cry from over his shoulder.

Spinning around, he pulled the rock into his coat in record time, but not fast enough to hide it from Souveraine’s appalled eyes.

“I wasn’t!” Léon shouted across the square.

The sound of her boots stomping on the ground smacked against the surrounding buildings with a demanding clap, and the two full milk pails she carried sploshed puddles of white on the ground as she went.

Mollard let out a long and low whistle, eyes crawling over every curve of her body, now taut with repulsion as her gaze moved from Léon to him.

“You don’t deserve that,” he said to Léon, loud enough for her to hear.

Then he called out, “When are you going to let me make you an honest woman? Stop going around with him like a slut?”

“Léon.” This time, the way she said his name was a plea, curt as her voice was.

Though he’d never once felt more like caving a man’s head in, Léon immediately crossed the square to her until they were standing toe to toe, her blue eyes burning into his green ones.

He dropped the rock by his foot, then stooped and took hold of the handles of both pails.

Souveraine watched every movement as intently as a mother might had her toddler been about to strangle a kitten.

He turned and began to make his way towards her inn.

She stayed glued to his side, as silent and tense as he was, and they both shuddered when Mollard shouted out a parting, “I don’t mind having seconds!”

The very moment they’d turned the corner, she was in front of Léon, the buckets sloshing with his abrupt halt to avoid walking into her.

“What was that?”

“Are you going to pretend you don’t want me to?” He said it with more anger than he would ordinarily have used with her, but he was beside himself with exhaustion and worry.

His mind was reeling, trying to find a way to grasp back the lost opportunity.

He set the pails down.

“I need to go back.”

But Souveraine’s hand was firm on his arm.

“No! What are you doing? Why would you do that?”

“Souveraine, please.” Léon half turned towards the prison, then towards the inn, and there he became stuck.

His shoulders dropped, blond hair falling in the face he hid from her.

“I’ve messed up. I’ve really messed up this time.” His voice cracked, a tear dropped to the pavement, and Léon stood there, completely helpless, as the long night caught up with him.

Her soft hand met his cheek with a tenderness that he leaned into.

“What is it, Léon? Is it émile? Where is?—”

“Shhh!” Léon hissed out the sound.

His eyes flicked up and down the street, at a vagrant, at a couple of drunks, at the men and women starting for market, any of them possibly in collusion with the man he’d met the night before.

On a scant whisper, head dipped low, “Please ask me to carry your milk. Please ask me loudly.”

Souveraine had pulled many a ruse over the people of the town with Léon through the years, but she hadn’t once seen him cry since he got his hand caught in the wheel of a cart when he was nine years old.

She quickly said, “Please, I know you’re busy, but they are too heavy. I cannot carry them all the way. Please take them for me.”

Like a puppet on a string, Léon bent at her words, taking up the two pails and making straight for her inn without another word.

She took the lead, moving two paces ahead for the rest of the short walk.

She unlocked the door and held it for him with all the distance of a stranger, until he’d stepped into the dark room, where she locked the door and rounded on him.

“What’s happened? Tell me.”

Léon rushed forward with a milky finger on her lips, whispering, “You must swear you will not breathe a word. And that you won’t stop me.”

She swore neither, because that was the instant she got a good enough look to see the cut on his cheek, the bruise on his brow.

Her hand went straight to the dried blood, and Léon batted it away impatiently, commencing a pace of the large, fire-lit room.

“It’s émile. Souveraine, someone’s…” He could no more get the words out than if they’d been a brick lodged in his throat.

Instead, he said, “I need to get the keys—the keys to the prison cells—and I need them today, and if I don’t get them…”

She watched him with bated breath.

“Then what?”

“Someone will kill him,” he forced out, eyes burning into hers.

“Someone’s taken him and…” He threw another panicked look around the room, seeing nothing, then dashed for the door.

“I have to go back to the prison.”

“To kill Mollard?” Souveraine bolted in front of him, her two strong arms arresting his.

“No, I won’t allow it. You’ll stop right here, or… or…” Using all her strength, she shoved him down onto a bench.

“Sit there. Sit there, and we’ll figure this out.”

Now it was Souveraine who paced, keeping half an eye on him all the while, part wary, part accusatory, as though he’d done her a personal wrong in his thwarted murder attempt.

“Someone has émile,” she paraphrased.

“They’re keeping him to exchange for a key from the prison. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Is Mollard involved?”

“No. I just need his keys.”

“Then who is it?”

“I don’t know.”

Impatiently, “What do you mean you don’t know?”

Léon dropped his voice low, a glowing secrecy in his eyes reminding her to speak quietly.

“There was a man. A stranger. He told me—he said he’d—” Léon chewed over the words he hated to make real by speaking them.

“He-he said I cannot tell anyone, and that he would take a finger for every hour I’m late delivering those keys. One of émile’s little fingers.” Souveraine’s shocked cry was drowned out by Léon’s desperate, “Do you see? This is why I don’t have time. I cannot be late. And there will be other people at the prison now, and— Oh, god, Souveraine, how am I to do this?”

Souveraine, showing the kind of courage that comes with being a solo female innkeeper at one of the roughest bars in town, grounded him with her calm and reliable voice.

“When do you need them by?”

“Midday.”

“Where?”

“The river. The bend. In the forest.”

She gave a confident nod, hands on hips, eyes hard.

“Then we have time. Don’t worry, Léon. We will get those keys. I’ll help you.”

The first tremor of hope, the first spark of the Léon that Souveraine knew and loved, was in fast affect.

His big eyes shot up to her, all trust, and she’d have done anything to keep them there.

Even gutted Mollard herself.

After all, it wasn’t as though she hadn’t fantasised about it in the past. But for now, she kept her plans practical and non-violent.

“This man, what did he look like?”

Léon turned his gaze to the floor.

Since the moment he’d been pulled into the alley, everything had been a swirling rush of panic.

But with little thought, the enemy form began to rise to the forefront of his foggy mind.

“He was in here last night,” he commenced.

“He stood by me, drinking a brandy. You don’t remember him?”

Souveraine shook her head, awaiting more detail; dozens and dozens of men had drunk brandy near Léon the night before.

“He had…” Léon searched the wall blindly, conjuring the offender.

“He had eyes like a furnace. At midnight.”

“Like a…” Her lips parted, and her brow fell.

“A furnace?”

“Yes, that’s right. Like fire.” Léon stood, wandering aimlessly, talking excitedly, closing in on his assailant’s likeness.

“Cheekbones like… like…”

“Like?”

He clicked his fingers.

“Like Mont-Saint-Michel! Sharp and angular, and very precise, but in a non-deliberate sort of way. Very unique. Singular, one might say—isolated and bold.”

“Beautiful?” Souveraine suggested.

“No, ghastly!” Léon corrected.

“He had lips like… like, oh, I don’t know. The curving arches of the Cathedral, perhaps. The buttresses. Those smooth, sensual lines, you understand? The way they meet overhead, lofty and strong, yet comforting, yet forbidding.”

“Sounds awful,” she muttered, eyes sharp on the pensive face of her would-be lover.

“Oh, he was dreadful,” he insisted.

“Hideous! His eyelashes, I would liken to?—”

Her mouth curved tartly in on itself.

“I’m not sure we’re getting anywhere with this. Was he tall?”

“Yes. Tall and strong, like the pillars of?—”

“And which direction did he go?”

“West, down Rue Pasteur, but from there, I have no indication. To the forest, I suppose, where I’m due to give him what he wants. But now the sun is rising, and I have precious few hours to fix this. Souveraine, do you know this man?”

She replied flatly, “No, I do not know any man who is tall and strong like pillars with eyes like a furnace at midnight and cheekbones like cathedral arches.”

“No, cheekbones like Mont-Saint-Michel,” he amended, quite seriously.

“The arches were more an overall impression of his bone structure. His jaw, specifically, was like?—”

“I don’t think I care if you get thrown in prison for murder,” she muttered.

“Then why are we still here?” he cried.

“Let me kill this man and let’s have done with it!” This time, Souveraine was not fast enough to stop him, and Léon was out the door, striding back to the prison so fast and so intent on murder that she had to sprint to catch up with him.