Page 39 of The Tides of Time (Storm Tide #1)
L ili didn’t know how long she’d been imprisoned in le Conciergerie. There was no reliable way to mark the passage of time. Barely edible gruel was shoved at seemingly random intervals through a small opening in the door of the cell she shared with far too many people. Hunger had been too constant and too significant for meals to consistently mark the passage of a day.
Candles were extinguished at shouted demands from guards, but sometimes there were still tiny spills of light from adjacent cells with windows. The lack of candles didn’t necessarily mean another night had come.
Crying echoed around the stone corridors and walls at all hours. There was no moment when the air was still or quiet. Every second melted into the next. Days might have been weeks, weeks might have been minutes. Time was as unreliable in these merciless walls as it had been on the unforgiving waves around Loftstone Island.
With no evidence other than a vague instinct, Lili suspected her stay had lasted a few weeks. It was not an unreasonable amount of time to await trial.
The king had been imprisoned for five months before his trial and execution. The queen had languished in this very prison before her execution.
This was a prison that broke people; all of Paris knew that. La Bastille had gained a reputation for being a place of brutality. Le Conciergerie had come to be known as a place of hopeless despair.
But it hadn’t fractured her. She’d kept her wits through her dark and miserable sojourn there. She’d pondered endless means of defending herself at trial, of perhaps even escaping if she were taken in the infamous cart to la Place de la Révolution and the well-used guillotine that served as its focal point.
Nothing she thought of seemed the least likely to work, but as her trial began, she could stand firm, upright, unmoving, and unafraid. She had been captured, but she had not been destroyed.
“Elisabeth Minet,” the judge had said, “you stand here guilty of treason against the Republic.”
The courts of this new Republic operated under a presumption of the accused’s guilt, with an eye to expediting the process. Nothing about it was truly a trial. And the aim was not justice but speedily eliminating all threats to their end goal. If that meant wrongful convictions and executing the innocent, so be it.
“You have participated in the exchange of correspondence with émigrés in England. You planned and carried out the fleeing of seventy-eight people from France without permission and in defiance of the desires of this Tribunal.”
Seventy-eight. They knew of the Romillys’ escape. Better still, the Romillys clearly had escaped. They were safe.
Eyes, somehow both angry and uncaring, watched her unblinkingly. She knew that no emotion showed on her face. She wasn’t resigned, necessarily, but she wasn’t in suspense. She knew the fate that awaited her. Her name was in Armitage’s book, and she had realized while in prison awaiting this farce of a trial that it had been her , not merely her same name. She was that Elisabeth Minet, seamstress, who was executed by guillotine.
Those who stood poised to be the facilitators of that fate did not frighten her. They were as subject to the inevitability of this moment as she was, no more powerful than she, no more determinant.
“You are guilty of interfering in the work of M. Gagnon, an agent of the Tribunal révolutionnaire , and causing him to delay the fulfillment of his duties.”
The accusateur public stood, ready to begin the trial. “The Tribunal révolutionnaire calls for its witness.”
The accused were not permitted witnesses. The Republic, however, was.
Mutters and whispers sounded around the room—the first hint of disorder in the proceedings—as a man made his way to the open space between Lili and the judge.
“Identify yourself to the Tribunal révolutionnaire ,” the judge said.
Lili didn’t need the witness to give his name; she’d known him all her life.
Holding a tricorn hat in his hand, his hair pulled back neatly in a queue, he answered in firm tones. “Géraud Gagnon, agent of the Tribunal révolutionnaire .”
“Proceed, Agent Gagnon,” the accusateur public instructed.
“Elisabeth Minet spied upon the work of agents of this body, stealing information to carry out the escape of those facing arrest and justice. She has frustrated the work of this body. She has thwarted the laws of this glorious land.”
Murmurs of angry disapproval rumbled around the room. The glares already focused on her grew angrier. If she hadn’t already known the outcome of this charade, she likely would have been quaking with fear. Instead, she stood proud and calm, grieved but reconciled to her fate.
“When I moved to apprehend her in Honfleur, she did not give herself over to the power of the state, as anyone with loyalty to this Republic would do. She ran.” Géraud glanced at her. She held his gaze.
There was nothing of her brother there any longer. Even the fleeting glimpses she had seen at the lighthouse of the good person he had once been were gone entirely. The boy who had chased the sun with her and brought her tartlettes to ease her sorrow had been replaced entirely by bitterness and hatred.
For the first time since arriving in this room, she truly grieved. Power corrupted, and fear destroyed. And it was heartbreaking.
“Elisabeth Minet is a traitor to the people,” he said, “and the people demand her head.”
Shouts of agreement, tinged with inhuman delight at the thought of more blood being shed, answered his declaration.
Once calm had been restored, the judge looked at Lili. His nose wrinkled in disapproval. In tones of distaste, he asked, “Have you any defense in the face of these charges?”
There was no point to the question other than theatrics. Many still pleaded for their lives, offered counterevidence against others in exchange for leniency. She planned to do neither. She looked the judge in the eye, unwavering and uncowed.
His expression hardened. “Elisabeth Minet, seamstress. This court finds you guilty on all counts. The sentence is death by guillotine.”
“Elisabeth Minet!”
Hers was not the first name called out over the squalid gathering of prisoners; neither was it the last. If Lili’s accounting was correct, and she was certain it was, the day was the 12th of December 1793. It was the day she died.
She could have pretended the name was not her own and attempted to disappear among the others. She’d seen people do just that over the past few days. It never worked. The guards knew who they were looking for. Rather than cause difficulty over something she knew was inevitable, she stepped forward.
The guard, with his rough hands and rotting teeth, snatched hold of her arm and dragged her from the large, thick-aired room. She was shoved into the back of a line of others whose names had been announced. Some were crying, some calling out and pleading for mercy. Some were silent as death itself. Lili’s heart beat a bit harder and a bit faster than usual, but otherwise, she was calm.
Seventy-eight. She silently repeated the number. It had become something of a communion, bringing an unexpected peace and even a sense of purpose to the senselessness of all that was happening.
Slowly, the line moved forward. Lili moved with it until she stood at the front.
Seventy-eight.
A grizzle-faced woman with emotionless eyes twitched her fingers. “Back in your own clothes.”
Lili was made to change there, in full sight of those in the line and the guards standing about. It was the position of the Tribunal that, as part of an egalitarian society, no one had special clothing, and that included those going to the guillotine. They wore prison-issued clothing inside la Conciergerie, but a person being taken to her death made the journey in her own clothes. The cut and feel of them was familiar, but the stench of prison hanging heavy on everything she now wore served as a stark reminder of all she had lost.
“Come on, then. Sit.” The woman motioned at a low, three-legged stool. “Your back to me.”
Lili had heard enough about the executions to know what came next. Those working the blades preferred an easy-to-see target and a clean cut. All obstacles were removed.
The woman grabbed hold of Lili’s hair and pulled it tight enough to hurt. Still, Lili didn’t wince, didn’t pull back. She closed her eyes.
Seventy-eight.
The overused shears squealed as they tore at and sliced through her hair.
“The gravediggers likely won’t pilfer those shoes,” one of the guards said with a laugh.
“Not a bit of them’s salvageable,” the woman with the scissors answered.
It was well-known that those who deposited each day’s bodies into the enormous grave set aside for them were recompensed for their ever-increasing workload with the right to rifle through the bodies and take anything and everything they wished—shoes, stockings, clothing, teeth. Anything they wished.
“Odd dress,” the woman said. “But good fabric. Someone’s wife’ll make use of it, no doubt. If she can get the blood out.”
The guard chuckled.
Seventy-eight.
Lili was shoved from behind, and she stumbled to her feet. The guard motioned her out of the small cell just as another prisoner was dragged in. There was a cold efficiency to the process that spoke of far too many executions, far too many lives snuffed out in the name of patriotism.
She stopped at the end of a dark stone corridor, once more in a line, once more surrounded by the echo of weeping. For just a moment, her own composure almost slipped. Armitage had told her that the blood did eventually stop flowing in the streets of Paris, that murder and violence and intentional terror was not France’s future. There was some comfort in that. Her fate was what it would be, but the country would eventually find its way past what it had become.
Light spilled in from the open door ahead. Another guard stood there. The line of condemned prisoners moved slowly past him.
When Lili reached the front, he asked, “Your name?”
“Elisabeth Minet,” she answered.
He marked something in the book he held, then motioned for her to step through the door.
The light was blinding after days in the dark of le Conciergerie . The air was fresh and crisp. The buildings seemed more elegant than she remembered. It was a painful sort of beautiful, seeing what she’d not noticed before only now, when time was too short to treasure the newness of it.
The street was far from empty. People always gathered to watch that day’s group of victims emerge for their ride to death. Some watched in stony silence; others jeered and shouted. It would be multiplied at the Place de la Révolution.
She was dragged alongside many others into the back of the open prison wagon. They would be driven to their execution in full view of a city torn between celebrating the deaths of those whom they had declared didn’t love France enough and those who mourned the violence borne of that twisted and hate-filled distortion of “love.”
Seventy-eight.
But the simple reminder didn’t feel like enough as the wagon jerked into motion. It was a number, nearly as impersonal as the labels given by the Tribunal and the Comité and so many heartless others.
Antoine Séverin. Thérèse Séverin. Marcel Séverin. Sylvain Séverin.
She breathed a little easier. Naming those seventy-eight brought her closer to the feeling of peace she needed.
Onward the cart rolled.
Viviane Courtois.
Jean-Louis Lapointe.
People watched them all the way along the banks of the Seine. The reactions inside the cart were as varied as those outside: Tears. Wails. Anger. Defiance.
Pierre Bertrand. Amélie Bertrand.
Lili’s heart pounded with a little fear as the journey continued, but she wasn’t overwhelmed by it.
Sylvestre Laurent.
She didn’t run out of names by the time the Place de la Révolution came into view. The sight of the guillotine glinting in the bright sunlight and the crowd gathered for the day’s spectacle didn’t topple her.
When she finally stepped out of the cart, there were but six names remaining on her list of seventy-eight.
Marceau Desjardins. Gisèle Desjardins. Francois Desjardins. Marie Desjardins.
She faced the towering Madame with shoulders squared. Lili knew she was guilty of the crimes she’d been condemned for. And she didn’t regret a single one.
Romilly Pierce. Eleanor Pierce.
No. She didn’t regret them at all.