Page 8

8

REIMS PRISON

F rom the small antechamber where the others stood staring after him, Léon ran through an archway, pushed a key into the lock of a metal grate, dashed past, and slammed it closed.

He didn’t pause there, but did the same again with a thick wooden door.

It was short work to figure out which key belonged to which door, as the prison used a skeleton key system for most of the locks inside, making the jingle-jangle of the loop resonant to only seven keys.

Having made it safely through that second door, Léon pressed it closed with his back, leaned against it, and took a deep breath, which he needed, but which he deeply regretted the moment he tasted the gut-churning stench of the cells.

He couldn’t have said what he was doing there.

He hadn’t the faintest idea.

It was only now that he’d found himself in the prison that he realised the futility of his actions.

What was he to do? Approach each and every cell and ask those inside if they happened to know a handsome, dark-haired man who might have kidnapped a small child in order to save them?

And what difference would it make if he knew who the man intended to free?

What was he hoping to do?

Find a way to make a deal?

It was both cool and humid inside.

Dank, one might say.

The prison, in its entirety, ran three stories high, held a rectangular shape, and in all, contained seventy-eight cells.

Seventy-nine, if you included the disused Witches’ Tower, but that was a fearsome and decrepit place, separated from the rest by ten yards of overgrown grass.

It sat solitary outside the prison walls, abandoned and boarded up for over a century.

It held far too many horrific memories of long dead and barbaric superstition for anyone to want to look into it anytime soon.

The enormous room he currently stood in stretched to the full height of the prison.

Not a gasp of daylight was able to enter the space, which was surrounded on three sides by cells, row after row of wooden doors bolted with iron, locked with enormous padlocks.

The fourth wall was a monumental stone structure that housed one huge fireplace, the single source of heat in the building, in front of which two guards huddled for warmth.

They looked at Léon upon entrance, but recognising him, turned away again with no more than a mumbled salutation.

Besides the fire, the whole area was lit by one gargantuan lantern, flickering high above the piles of straw, wood, and shackles that lay all around.

This was where they tortured men, just as they had for the last one hundred and fifty years.

This was where Léon himself had heard the screams. And Léon, a firm believer in ghosts, despised the place.

He couldn’t stomach it.

It was, officially, his job to torture, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it, to witness it, or even to hear it if he could avoid it, which was why he’d had them hire someone else to do it.

And he was sure, if he died like that, if his mortal soul suffered that way in a room like this…

He was sure his spirit would never leave.

A ghastly light tapped across the walls, the curling iron frame of the lantern dancing around like a procession of ghouls, stretched and lanky, looking for all the world like they were reaching for him.

Léon put his head down and ran for the stairs.

He ran up, in a short spiral, to the first level of cells, and opened the first viewing hole he came across.

The man inside stared up at him from his straw mat on the floor.

He was filthy, his face terrified.

The sight, the smell of the chamber pot and rotten remains of food that rose up to meet Léon made him slam the hole closed just as quickly as he’d opened it.

The next, different cell, same smell, different man, who shot death straight into Léon’s eyes with one malevolent glare.

He recognised neither man so far and felt there was little use in going on.

But who knew? Maybe the man’s very twin would be lurking in there somewhere, some brother with an irrefutable likeness, or some man who wore the same haughty expression.

So he tried another, and another.

One threw their scraps at him, another pleaded for an interview with a judge, and on and on.

Léon searched pointlessly and fruitlessly until he’d cleared two-thirds of the floor.

Church bells rang, and they counted out ten long and nerve-fraying clangs.

“Fuck,” Léon whispered.

He clasped the keys tight, fiddling with them on their loop.

How was he to get them out?

There was no way back through that door and past Mollard with them.

And what would happen to all these men and women if he stole them?

They would be locked in their cells, their feeding doors stuck shut, and for how long?

Stupid Mollard! What kind of an idiot had only one set of keys to an entire prison?

The crushing weight of the inevitable leaned on Léon’s shoulders as he curled fingers around the iron safety rail and looked over the balcony at the floor below.

There had to be another way.

But the man who’d kidnapped his brother didn’t seem the type to be reasoned with.

What he remembered of him.

A flash of eyes and lips.

Léon raised his fingertips to the bruise on his cheek, sore and swollen.

The man was violent.

A thug. And he had émile.

Propelled back into action, Léon set about checking the remaining cells on the floor.

Only the women’s cells remained, mostly empty, though they evidently wouldn’t remain that way much longer.

They were exactly the same as the men’s cells, just as small, just as sparse, but with an extra lock on the door.

Léon wondered, not for the first time, what it must have been to wait in those cells all the long and frigid night, alone, wondering what kind of man your gaoler would be when he came.

He saw one woman crouched in a corner, crying.

The other, who shared her cell, stretched out long on her straw mat, staring blankly at the ceiling.

And on he moved to the final occupied cell.

He flicked the latch open, and immediately his gaze locked with Sophie Cauchoix’s.

She jumped to her feet on sight of the gorgeous green eyes, reaching her fingers through to be grasped by Léon’s.

“Have you come for me? Is it now?”

Sophie, as sweet a woman as the day was long, was also as guilty as sin.

Léon remembered her from his childhood as the kind face of the butcher’s shop.

The one who always had a smile and a pie for him, however small or misshapen.

One of the few back then who weren’t repulsed by the cursed hands of his father.

“You have one more night,” he reported dutifully.

“All are to go before God tomorrow.”

“All?” she rasped on a long breath.

“But… how many are there?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been told. I can tell you this: Take heart and do not be frightened. I will be by your side at the end, and I will make it fast. Faster than even my axe, for there is a new…” He thought hard over the name.

‘Guillotine,’ had he said?

“A new blade. And it may look scary to you when you see it, but know it is…” A vision of a sheep’s crying eyes—a bleat cut off at the throat.

He could not and would not say it was painless.

“It is going to be over fast. I’m sorry.”

“Do not apologise to me, Léon.” She squeezed his fingers, long strands of unkempt brown hair falling across his hand as she tilted her head to catch his ashamed eyes.

“I know you would spare me if you could.”

“That I would.” He looked up, sadness clouding his face.

“In a heartbeat. If only these things were up to me.”

“Smile, Léon. For look at me. I’m smiling.” And so she was.

In fact, Sophie had barely stopped smiling since the day she’d taken her largest knife to the neck of her husband while he slept.

An odious and cruel man, no one had been sad to see him go—not even the men who convicted her.

He’d killed his and Sophie’s only daughter in a fit of rage, a girl Léon knew well.

And when Sophie cut him to pieces, baked him into pies, and sold him to the townspeople, it seemed a fitting end, to those who hadn’t eaten the pies.

But if all unhappy wives took all the heads of all the cruel husbands in the world, well…

the streets would run red with blood.

And even though that might have gone some way to solving the problem of the grain shortage in one fell swoop, the law was the law.

So despite her very reasonable cause for decapitation, despite the fact that she’d been honest with the court from the moment she was caught, she was shown no clemency.

Straight to jail that very day, to be dealt the dreadful sentence a short time later.

And still she smiled.

She’d made her choice.

But Léon hated to kill another friend—to end another life prematurely and see that face for the very last time with no life or colour in it.

But he would do it. For that was his lot in life.

“What can I bring you? Is there anything?”

“No, Léon. You have little more than I do. Although…” Sophie pulled back and looked over her shoulder, and for the first time Léon saw there a young woman.

Perhaps eighteen or nineteen.

Blonde and hazel eyed, watching Sophie and Léon intently, a lost and wild look about her.

But the eyes… They bore a startling familiarity.

Sophie slipped down to the floor in front of her and took hands which squeezed hers back.

“I’m to go tomorrow,” Sophie said gently.

“Is there something you’d like? Léon will get it for you. An apple maybe? A piece of bread?”

The frightened eyes cut back to Léon, wary, and no sound came from the tightly closed, deathly pale lips.

Sophie brought her gaze back by saying, “Just nod.” But the girl shook her head with a definitive rejection of Léon and whatever goods he may have had to offer.

“It’s okay, he won’t hurt you.”

Even more forcefully, the head shook, but now the lips trembled too, fingers tearing into Sophie’s hands as a sob broke out of her.

Léon stumbled slightly as the prison shifted—another of the strange tremors they’d been having of late.

But it soon settled, and Sophie barely noticed, busy working a hand free to take around the girl’s back.

She held her close with a marked tenderness.

Léon wondered if that had anything to do with the daughter she had lost so recently, who was around this young woman’s age.

He watched her stroke her hair as she calmed slightly, then she explained to Léon, “Mute. The poor girl never could have stood much of a chance with the courts.”

“Do you know what she’s in for?” asked Léon.

“No idea. She came in yesterday, and it’s been nothing but crying. Poor little kitten. She’s terrified. You couldn’t find out for her, could you? I don’t know if she’s to…” Sophie’s face drew into a knot, and Léon nodded his understanding.

Why say it in front of the poor girl?

No doubt she must have known Sophie’s fate, as Sophie had mentioned it so calmly in front of her.

There was a chance the girl might be spared, but given the fact she was here in this cell, with the condemned…

Was Léon to kill that girl in the morning, too?

His heart went out to her, as it so easily did to so many people.

She was so young. He rarely had to kill teenagers, though, of course, it happened.

But what could she have done to have tempted that fate at her age?

“I’ll try to find out,” Léon offered.

Then uselessly, ridiculously, “And I’ll bring something nice. To eat. I’ll find something.” He had to depart, precious seconds constantly ebbing away, but it felt every kind of wrong to walk out on the pair of them.

“Please explain to her, I’ll make it… I’ll do my best. I’ll come early, and I won’t let anything happen…” He knew well the kinds of dangers female prisoners in particular faced, close to death, no one to hear or believe them before their words were silenced once and for all.

But if this girl didn’t know, he wasn’t about to voice it and give her even more to worry about.

“I’ll take care of her,” said Sophie.

And Léon believed she would try her best. She was large and strong and had a protective fierceness to her that had always inspired a great deal of respect in Léon.

“I have to go, but I’ll be back just as soon as I can.” It was on the tip of Léon’s tongue to ask the girl if she happened to know a dark-haired kidnapper, but the question seemed both ludicrous and useless, given she was mute.

Instead, he said fast goodbyes, bolted the grate shut, and made for the stairs at breakneck speed, pounding down to the ground floor, and back to where Mollard still strolled about, examining the murder machine, DuPont having wandered off somewhere.

“The girl. What’s she in for?” Léon snapped immediately.

“Is she due to die tomorrow? Why haven’t I been informed?”

Mollard inspected him with the irritated boredom of a man being asked to clean a public latrine for the hundredth time.

“Why should anyone tell you anything?”

“Fuck you, Mollard, just tell me!” Léon shouted.

Mollard’s repugnant mouth stretched into a smirk.

He went around behind the wide desk and pulled a thin sheath of papers from a drawer.

This he threw down in front of Léon, turning his insides to mud.

Léon stared down at it, pride fighting with shame.

The words crawled out of his throat like a broken-legged spider.

“You know I can’t read that.”

Mollard huffed a laugh that sounded like a mouthful of phlegm.

“Then I guess you’ll never know.”

Despite the goading face that loomed over him, Léon ran his eyes across the front page.

Indecipherable black scratchings here and there above pre-printed lines, those next to clearer letters that he could occasionally decipher, yet make no sense of in their long, intimidating groupings.

The documents bore a stamp, red, the seal of some city or town he couldn’t place, but it wasn’t Reims, that much he knew.

He picked the papers up, concentrated hard, but it was nothing more than a stabbing and a swirl to him.

He refused to raise his eyes to Mollard.

He only said softly, “Just tell me if she’s to die tomorrow so I can plan the day.”

“Why?” His fat tongue rolled over his already wet lips as his fingers curled around the pages.

“You like her?”

“No!” Léon gasped out, appalled at the notion.

“I just want to know if I’m to kill her and why.”

“She’s a very special case. So how about this…” Grubby fingers stuffed the young woman’s file back into the drawer.

“You give me a go with Souveraine, and I won’t say a word to anyone about it.” He added a greasy wink to the suggestion.

“Give you a…” Léon’s lips were white with disgust, anger, revulsion, sending a tingle down his arm and to his fist. Mollard was big, but Léon was strong.

He could have beaten him to a pulp.

He could have painted those white walls with his blood and left him there to rot.

If he was fast, he might get away with it, too.

How many others must have had a motive to kill this man?

The slithering eel of a laugh that crept out of Mollard’s neck brought Léon to his senses.

He was doing his best to wind him up, and Léon was letting him.

And he had more important things to do.

Fast.

Léon turned briskly to depart, but his boots scuffed to a halt when Mollard said, “Keys.”

Cheek twitching, Léon threw them down on the desk with a clatter, then swept out of the jail.

He made straight for Souveraine’s inn for the second time that morning.

He went around the back this time, down a narrow and stinking alley, and threw a stone up at what he knew to be her bedroom window.

At this hour, she would ordinarily be stocking up on her precious few hours of sleep, but today it took only that one stone before the casement flew open, and her worried eyes found his.

With one scan of Léon, she understood.

“He wouldn't give them to you?”

“Please. I need… several keys. If I’m to trick him, I need… Please? Any you can spare.”

She breathed his name out on a frustrated breath, but with all the purpose and kindness that he was accustomed to, she ran about unlocking everything she could afford to, and possibly more than she should have. Every window latch was eased, her wardrobes were opened, her inn’s latrine was unlocked and now available to all, and she soon appeared at the back door of her establishment. With a pre-emptive look down the silent and lonely alley, she pressed the ring of keys into Léon’s hand, quickly and discreetly. “Will you let me come?”

“No.”

Which she had known would be the answer. So she pleaded, “Be careful. If you’re not back this evening, I will tell DuPont to come find you.”

“Please do. I’ll try to hold that over him. Souveraine…” He gripped her hands, looked into her faithful, too-loving eyes, then pulled her close, placing a chaste kiss on her cheek. The church clock rang out the hour of eleven, and they locked eyes.

“Run.”

He gave a nod, and was gone, stumbling down the alley as the frenzy of emotion from his very long night and morning crept up on him. What he would have given to step back in time to one day earlier, when he would have let émile witness Marie’s death. When he would have kept him by his side unrelentingly. When he would have watched him so, so carefully… And now what was happening to him?

Bleary-eyed, he trod on towards the forest, images flashing of little émile’s bruised skin, the sight of his terrified face, the sound of his cries, screaming for Léon to come and save him as that terrible man did whatever he might have been doing to the poor, defenceless child.