Page 11 of The Tides of Time (Storm Tide #1)

M ikhail hardly stopped speaking throughout the meal. The only pauses came when he remembered he was hungry and took a bite of ratatouille.

The one-sided conversation gave Lili ample time to think. She’d placed the book of folktales in the bedroom she’d been given use of. She needed to read the chapter about the waters around Loftstone but didn’t trust herself to do so with witnesses around. Not trusting herself was a new and unpleasant experience for her.

“Miss Lili don’t seem keen on the whiddle, do she?” Mikhail’s question pulled her attention back to the moment.

Lili looked up. “I do not know what that means.”

“I don’t either,” Mr. Pierce said. “Likely a bit of London speak.”

She returned her gaze to Mikhail.

The young man just laughed. “I was only saying you don’t seem to want to gab with us.”

Lili arched a brow. “I did not seem needed for your gab, Monsieur McGuile.”

Armitage turned a laugh into a cough and dropped his eyes to his bowl. Had she made him laugh? She liked the idea more than she ought. After all, not more than a few hours ago, she’d suspected him of being part of a horrible trick perpetrated against her. A bit of relief at knowing he wasn’t as dastardly as she’d feared was one thing. Wanting to prove a source of momentary enjoyment to him was another entirely.

“In case you’re wondering, Miss Lili,” Mr. Pierce said, “you’re always welcome to join us in a knabble.”

Unfortunately, she hadn’t the first idea what a knabble was either. With a sigh, she looked yet again at Armitage. “Does no one speak English here?”

“A knabble is a gab,” Armitage said.

“What are you wanting to talk about, nipper?” Mr. Pierce asked Mikhail.

“I can’t think of nothing I don’t like talking about.”

After listening to Mikhail speak almost without stopping during their evening meal, no one could doubt the truth of that.

“We could share tales of strange things that happened when we were younger than we is now,” Mikhail suggested with marked enthusiasm. “I’ll go first.”

Armitage looked at Lili. His eyes were dancing with mirth. She felt a perfectly natural tug at her lips, but she bit it back.

“When I was ten years old,” Mikhail said, “my mum took me to Madame Tussauds.”

Armitage and his grandfather both nodded in a way that said the name was significant to them.

“This Madame Tussaud, she is French?” Lili asked.

“I think she was,” Mikhail said.

Mr. Pierce confirmed it. “Madame Tussauds is a waxworks exhibit in London. The woman who made most of what’s inside was Madame Tussaud sheself. And her was French.”

“Are wax sculptures popular in France?” Mikhail asked.

“Mademoiselle Grosholtz taught Madame élisabeth to work with wax, though I think their focus was candles. But Mademoiselle Grosholtz’s talent is for wax sculptures. Of course, both ladies are now”—she stopped herself short of saying “imprisoned.” No matter how the Révolution had played out, both ladies were now—“dead,” she finished.

The men were watching her.

“ Pardonnez-moi ,” she said. “I was so pleased to know something of a topic that I let myself chase the thought. I ought not to interrupt your story.”

“I wonder if Madame Tussaud knew that Mademoiselle Grosholtz.” Mikhail seemed to like the idea. He continued on with his tale, every bit as enthusiastic as he had been. “We went to the waxworks museum, and I were agog. I told Mum we needed to go straight for the Chamber of Horrors, but she were shiver-shaking about that. My grandfather said that if a person saw a waxworks that looked just spittin’ like himself, that meant he were doomed, or blessed as the case may be, to meet the same fate as his lookalike.”

“Did you find your lookalike there?” Armitage asked.

Mikhail’s gaze turned overly solemn as he nodded slowly. “Did, and bad cess to me.”

“ à qui ressemblais-tu ?” The looks of confusion told her she’d slipped back into French. “Who was it you looked like?”

“We found my match, not in the Chamber of Horrors, as my grandfather had feared, but in the Hall of Kings.”

“To be a king wouldn’t put a fellow in a pucker,” Mr. Pierce said.

“Oi, but this king ended without his head.”

Lili’s stomach dropped. “Louis XVI,” she whispered.

“The very,” Mikhail confirmed.

She wasn’t a royalist, by any means, neither was she opposed to the original intent of the Révolution. It was simply so horrid to know that any person had been killed by guillotine. She’d seen so many thrust into the carts in front of La Conciergerie to begin their morbid journey to the place of death. She’d heard their cries, seen their loved ones desperate for one final look. She’d heard that mechanism fill the air with the grotesque sounds of efficient execution.

But she had not yet become so immune to the violence of Paris that she didn’t feel for the suffering of those whom violence was inflicted upon. And it had been inflicted upon Louis XVI mere months earlier.

Eighty years earlier , she reminded herself. She had to pretend the violence of the Révolution had occurred decades before her lifetime. She had to pretend she hadn’t witnessed it herself, that she hadn’t seen the bloodstained cobblestones with her own eyes, that she hadn’t been running from it days earlier.

“You can rest easy, nipper,” Mr. Pierce said to the young man. “Us don’t cut people’s heads off in England. Them still do in France.”

Her head snapped upward. They still do? Non . Paris couldn’t still be drowning in blood after eighty years. Pain pierced her at the thought. How could there be anyone left in France if her countrymen had been killing each other for eight decades?

Non.

A surge of dense emotion clogged her throat. Tears stung the back of her eyes, threatening to spill over for all to see. She stood and turned toward the shelf where she’d placed the tin of biscuits Mrs. Goddard had given Armitage. It was an excuse to not be looking at any of them. A moment was all she would need to get herself under control again.

Feeling more firm in her footing, she turned back, holding the tin. She set it on the table, then removed the lid.

“Your turn for a bit of a chinwag, Miss Lili.” Mikhail reached across the table to take a biscuit from the tin. “Tell us a tale from before now.”

He couldn’t possibly have known the significance of the phrasing he’d chosen: before now. Refusing to share would likely raise Armitage’s suspicions anew. Inventing a memory would mean needing to remember later what she’d said. So, she hastened to think of an actual tale from her past that could reasonably be believed to have occurred at least in the 1800s. A childhood story could likely fit in any time or place.

“When we were children,” she said, “ mon frère et moi , we would attempt to capturer le soleil .”

With a barely hidden grin, Mikhail asked, “Don’t anyone speak English here?”

She recognized the good-natured repetition of her earlier observation. “Did I speak in French?”

“Some and some.”

Feeling unexpectedly encouraged by Mikhail’s easy friendliness, she looked to Armitage. “How much of it did you understand?”

“I knew ‘my brother’ and ‘capture.’”

Of all the words for him to pull out and lump together, those struck pain to her heart. She kept that hidden though. “I said that my brother and I would try to capture the sun.” The Pierce men and Mikhail looked intrigued. That was reassurance enough to press forward. “I was afraid of the nighttime,” she said. “The dark was not comforting.”

Nods told her they understood what she was trying to explain.

“My brother”—she swallowed against the thickness in her throat—“wished for the sun to stay with us so I would not be afraid. But every night, it ran away. So we began running after it, determined to snatch it from the horizon and bring it home in our pockets.”

“Did you ever catch it?” Mikhail managed to maintain an expression of earnest inquiry for the length of a breath before his laughing grin emerged again.

“We tried for a long time before we realized we could never be fast enough,” she said. “Then we decided to be sneaky, trying to get closer without the sun spotting us.” It had been a long time since thoughts of Géraud had proven comforting and pleasant. “We grew very skilled at darting out of sight if we thought the sun had seen us. We learned to be remarkably good at hiding.”

“Sounds like a wonderful lark,” Mr. Pierce said.

“ Une alouette ?”

“Lark isn’t only a bird,” Armitage said. “It can also mean a game or a lighthearted adventure.”

“The English use words very oddly.” She took a biscuit from the tin as well, eyeing it a moment before snapping a piece off.

“Our words might be odd,” Armitage said, “but our biscuits are second to none.”

Lili appreciated the lightness of his tone. She popped the broken-off piece into her mouth. It was sweet and buttery.

“Well?” Armitage pressed.

“ C’est délicieux. ”

Mikhail had finished his biscuit entirely and was wiping the crumbs from his fingers.

“Do you and your brother still chase the sun?”

The smile slipped away as she shook her head. “I lost my brother a few months ago. The light never returned after that. He was the last membre de ma famille . I will never stop grieving him.”

Mr. Pierce set a kind and fatherly hand on hers. “Losing people us love is a harrowing thing. Nothing prepares a person for that.” His eyes told the story of one who knew that pain all too well. “My wife took so much of my light with her when she passed.”

Lili set her other hand atop his. “She was une femme remarquable , oui ?”

“A remarkable woman,” Armitage quietly translated.

“Oh, yes.” A smile whispered across Mr. Pierce’s face. “There was no one in the world like she. Not anyone.”

Though the sorrow remained in his eyes, even the brief moment speaking of his admiration for his wife had helped lift some of the weight from Mr. Pierce.

“Will you tell me about her?” Lili asked.

He focused on his bowl once more. “Perhaps another time.” But he didn’t sound upset or dismissive. If she asked again, she suspected he would speak of his wife and get some relief from doing so.

He needed the escape, whether he realized it or not. And Lili was an expert at offering people an escape.