Page 24 of The Tides of Time (Storm Tide #1)

A rmitage retreated to his bedchamber that night after supper. He wasn’t on watch, and he didn’t trust himself to spend any amount of time with Géraud Gagnon. Armitage was too sorely tempted to belt the man. The heartbreak Géraud had caused his sister had been painful and palpable, and he had shown no remorse.

Something would have to be done about him. Perhaps they could lean on the “no lodgers” rule. Lili, after all, was now technically employed there. That allowed her to remain.

But how would they explain to the village that her brother had been evicted when their families were meant to have a friendly connection? Honestly, they needed only allow the people of Loftstone to spend a brief amount of time with Géraud to understand why even his own sister would wish to be rid of him.

And the man made no secret of the fact that he wanted to be in France. Further, he wanted to meet Captain Travert. That might be the answer to all their difficulties. Géraud could go home, and Lili could have some peace.

Can him go home though?

Lili had told Armitage not long after her arrival that she had no home to return to. And if the reason she couldn’t have gone home was the one Armitage could hardly believe he was entertaining, Géraud had no home in France either. Not now.

The entire idea was madness, yet it was lodging itself ever more strongly in his mind.

He sat on the chair at his small writing desk, meaning to peruse the book he’d purchased from Mr. Vaughn, but his mind wouldn’t focus on it.

No one believed in the Tides of Time. They were nothing but folktales meant to entertain children or frighten them into keeping away from the sea during dangerous storms. But Armitage wasn’t laughing at the entertainment now.

Lili didn’t know about paraffin lamps, friction matches, music boxes, kitchen stoves, trains. She spoke of groups of people she knew who hadn’t existed in decades. She had lived in a France that too closely matched the France of the Revolution.

His mind shifted at last to his newly acquired book: Lived Narratives and Records Kept of the Revolution and the Reign of Terror, Translated from the French. He’d hesitated to buy it, but not on account of the cost. Something inching toward premonition told him he would find the indisputable answer to his question in its pages.

But he needed to know.

He opened the front cover, leaning forward to better see the pages as he flipped through them.

Tiers état .

She had used that phrase, and it was found throughout these pages, a phrase no longer used for people no longer labeled as such.

Le Deuxième état.

Another of those outdated phrases.

Les Nobles .

And another.

He was inching closer to the answer he had suspected he’d find, but it wasn’t comforting. A fidgety sort of anxiousness crept over him, and a weight settled in the pit of his stomach. The Tides of Time weren’t real. Everyone knew that.

Maybe everyone was wrong.

The historical recountings were organized by year. He didn’t know what year Lili had come from—

He stopped the thought before it continued. This book was meant to help him decide what to think and what to believe about her origins. Why, then, was he already thinking of her history in such decided terms?

He skimmed over page after page, his eyes catching on more phrases that echoed what she had said to him. The theme of the recountings in 1792 and early 1793 was change. Upheaval.

“France changed,” Lili had said. “It needed to. It had to.”

As he moved through the narratives later in 1793, that change turned to chaos and violence and death.

Lili’s voice echoed anew in his memory. “But that change didn’t have to be blood in the streets. It didn’t need to be murder upon murder.”

Armitage took a slow, deep breath. He rose from his chair, the need to move overpowering him. Change that had turned to death.

“No one is safe. I have seen people killed, Armitage. I have seen people dragged to what I know were their deaths. Every face is either angry or terrified. There is nothing but fear and suffering.”

Her words. This book. They told the same tale.

Without sitting again, he flipped more pages. Tribunal Révolutionnaire jumped off the page at him. She had spoken of the Tribunal .

Georges Danton, supported by Robespierre, convinced the déeputés to revive the Tribunal Révolutionnaire with the aim of quelling uprisings and forcing compliance in the citizenry. Without order imposed by the Tribunal, working in consortium with the Comité de Salut Public , the people would respond to the tensions among themselves with further violence, even massacres. “Let us be terrible,” he argued, “so that the people will not have to be.”

And the Tribunal was terrible indeed.

“Death comes at the decree of the Tribunal and Comité. There is no refuge and no protection to seek. Carnage is the law.” Lili had been describing this. This precisely.

The Revolutionary Tribunal.

The Committee of Public Safety.

The Reign of Terror.

Armitage’s pulse pounded painfully in his head. His Lili had come to Loftstone, not over the Channel but over the Tides of Time. He was struggling to believe anything else. Yet it was impossible. Impossible and ... the only thing that still made sense.

He flipped another page, then another. And another. Until his eyes fell on something he couldn’t ignore and couldn’t explain away. In a narrative about 1793 Paris, about a decades-old revolution, about the terrors and horrors no one alive today had experienced, Armitage found a name: Lili Minet.