And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood. I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live. Ezekiel 6:16
At the very height of the French Revolution, after they killed the king and drank his blood, they started everything over: new calendar, new months, new history. Wind back the national clock and smash its guts to powder; wipe the slate clean, and crack it across your knee. A failed actor named Fabre d'Eglantine drew up the plans. He stretched each seven-day week to a ten-day decade, and recarved the months into a verdant litany of rural images: fruit and flowers, wind and rain. The guillotine's red flash, masked in a mist of blistering, lobster-baked heat.
The first year of this process was to be known as Year Zero. Everything that happened next would be counted from then on. And all that had happened before would be, very simply…
… gone.
Then: Paris, 1793. Thermidor, Year Three, just before the end of the Terror…
"Oh, la, Citizen. How you do blush."
I must wake up. Jean-Guy Sansterre thinks, slow and lax — the words losing shape even as he forms them, like water dripping through an open mental hand, fingers splayed and helpless. Rouse myself. Act. Fight…
But feeling, instead, how his whole body settles inexorably into some arcane variety of sleep — limbs loose and heavy, head lolling back on dark red satin upholstery. Falling spine-first into the close, dim interior of the Chevalier du Prendegrace's coach, a languorous haze of drawn velvet curtains against which Jean-Guy lies helpless as some micro-organism trapped beneath the fringed, softly sloping convex lens of a partially lidded eye.
Outside, in the near distance, one can still hear the constant growl and retch of the Widow, the National Razor, the legendary Machine split the air from the Place de la revolution — that excellent device patented by dapper Doctor Guillotin, to cure for ever the pains and ills of headaches, hangovers, insomnia. The repetitive thud of body on board, head in basket. The jeers and jibes of the tricoteuses knitting under the gallows steps, their Phrygian caps nodding in time with the tread of the executioner's ritual path; self-elected keepers of the public conscience, these grim hags who have outlived their former oppressors again and again. These howling crowds of sansculottes, the trouserless ones, all crying in unison for yet more injurious freedom, still more", ever more: a great, sanguinary river with neither source nor tide, let loose to flood the city streets with visible vengeance…
"Do you know what complex bodily mechanisms lie behind the workings of a simple blush, Citizen Sansterre?"
That slow voice, emerging — vaporous and languid as an audible curl of smoke — from the red half-darkness of the coach. Continuing, gently:
"I have made a sometime study of such matters; strictly amateur in nature, of course, yet as thorough an enquiry as my poor resources may afford me."
In the chevalier's coach, Jean-Guy feels himself bend and blur like melting waxwork beneath the weight of his own hypnotized exhaustion; fall open on every level, like his own strong but useless arms, his nerveless, cord-cut legs…
"The blush spreads as the blood rises, showing itself most markedly at the skin's sheerest points — a map of veins, eminently traceable. Almost… readable."
So imperative, this urge to fly, to fight. And so, utterly…
… impossible.
"See, here and there, where landmarks evince themselves: those knots of veins and arteries, delicately entwined, which wreathe the undersides of your wrists. Two more great vessels, hidden at the tongue's root. A long, humped one, outlining the shaft of that other boneless — organ — whose proper name we may not quote in mixed company."
Sitting. Sprawling, limp. And thinking:
I — must…
"And that, stirring now? In that same — unmentionable — area?"
… must — wake…
"Blood as well, my friend. Blood, which — as the old adage goes — will always tell."
But: This is all a dream, Jean-Guy reminds himself, momentarily surprised by his own coherence. I have somehow fallen asleep on duty, which is bad, though hardly unforgivable — and because I did so while thinking on the ci-devant Chevalier du Prendegrace, that traitor Dumouriez's master, I have spun out this strange fantasy.
For Prendegrace cannot be here, after all; he will have fled before Jean-Guy's agentSj like any other hunted lordling. And, knowing this…
Knowing this. I will wake soon, and fulfil the mission set me by the Committee for Public Safety: catch Dumouriez, air out this nest of silken vipers. And all will be as I remember.
At the same time, meanwhile, the chevalier (or his phantom — for can he really actually be there, dream or no?) smiles down at Jean-Guy through the gathering crimson shade, all sharp — and tender — amusement. A slight, lithe figure, dressed likewise all in red, his hereditary elegance undercut by a distressingly plebian thread of more than usually poor hygiene: lurid velvet coat topped by an immaculately tied but obviously dingy cravat; silken stockings, offhandedly worn and faded, above the buckled shoes with their neat cork heels. Dark rims to his longish fingernails: dirt, or something else, so long dried it's turned black.
His too-white skin has a stink, faintly charnel. Acrid in Jean-Guy's acquiescent, narrowed nostrils.
"You carry a surplus of blood, Citizen, by the skin-map's evidence," the chevalier seems to say, gently. "And thus might, if only in the name of politeness, consider willing some small portion of that overflowing store… to me."
"Can't you ever speak clearly, you damnable aristo?" Jean-Guy demands, hoarsely.
And: "Perhaps not," comes the murmuring reply. "Though, now I think on it… I cannot say I've ever tried."
Bending down, dipping his sleek, powdered head, this living ghost of an exterminated generation; licking his thin white lips while Jean-Guy lies still beneath him, boneless, helpless. So soft, all over — in every place…
— but one.
So: Now, 1815. Paris again, late September — an old calendar for a brand-new empire — in the Row of the Armed Man, near dusk…
… where the Giradoux family's lawyer meets Jean-Guy, key in hand, by the door of what was once Edouard Dumouriez's house.
Over the decade since Jean-Guy last walked this part of Paris, Napoleon's civil engineers have straightened out most of the overhanging tangle of back alleys into a many-spoked wheel of pleasant, tree-lined boulevards and well-paved — if bleakly functional — streets. The Row of the Armed Man, however, still looks much the same as always: a narrow path of cracked flagstones held together with gravel and mortar, stinking of discarded offal and dried urine, bounded on either side by crooked doorways or smoke-darkened signs reading Butcher, Candle-maker, Notary Public. And in the midst of it all, Dumouriez's house, towering shadowy and slant above the rest: three shaky floors' worth of rooms left empty, in a city where unoccupied living space is fought over like a franc left lying in the mud.
"The rabble do avoid it," the lawyer agrees, readily. Adding, with a facile little shrug: "Rumour brands the place as… haunted."
And the unspoken addendum to said addendum, familiar as though Jean-Guy had formed the statement himself —
Though I, of course, do not ascribe to the same theory… being, as I am, a rational man living in this rational and enlightened state of Nouvelle France, an age without kings, without tyrants…
With Jean-Guy adding, mentally, in return: For we were all such reasonable men, once upon a time. And the Revolution, our lovely daughter, sprung full-blown from that same reason — a bare-breasted Athena clawing her way up to daylight, through the bloody ruin of Zeus' shattered skull.
The Giradoux lawyer wears a suit of black velvet, sober yet festive, and carries a small satin mask; his hair has been pulled back and powdered in the "antique fashion" of twelve scant years past. And at his throat, partially hidden in the fold of his cloak's collar, Jean-Guy can glimpse the sharp red edge of a scarlet satin ribbon knotted — oh, so very neatly — just beneath his jugular vein.
"I see you've come dressed for some amusement, M'sieu."
The lawyer colours slightly, as if caught unaware in some dubious action.
"Merely a social engagement," he replies. "A Bal des Morts. You've heard the term?"
"Not that I recall."
"Where the dead go to dance, M'sieu Sansterre."
Ah, indeed.
Back home in Martinique, where Jean-Guy has kept himself carefully hidden these ten years past and more, the "Thermidorean reaction" which attended news of the Terror's end — Jacobin arch-fiend Maximilien Robespierre first shot, then guillotined; his Committee for Public Safety disbanded; slavery reinstated, and all things thus restored to their natural rank and place — soon gave rise to a brief but intense period of public celebration on those vividly coloured shores. There was dancing to all hours, Free Black and Creole French alike, with everything fashionable done temporarily à la victime — a thin white shift or cravat-less blouse, suitable for making a sacrifice of oneself on the patriotic altar in style; the hair swept up, exposing the neck for maximum accessibility; a ribbon tied where the good Widow, were she still on hand to do so, might be expected to leave her red and silent, horizontal kiss…
At the Bal des Morts, participants' dance-cards were filled according to their own left-over notoriety; for who in their family might have actually gone to good Doctor Guillotin's Machine, or who their family might have had a hand in sending there. Aping executed and executioners alike, they dressed as corpses and preened like resurrected royalty, bobbing and spinning in a sluggish stream of old blood — trash caught in frenzied motion against the gutter's grate, at the end of a hard night's deluge.
The roll-call of the tumbrils: aristocrats, collaborators, traitors and Tyrannists, even the merely argumentative or simply ignorant — one poor woman calling her children in to dinner, only to find herself arrested on suspicion of sedition because her son's name happened to be (like that of the deposed king) Louis. And in the opposing camp, Jean-Guy's fellow Revolutionaries: Girondists, Extremists, Dantonists, Jacobins, patriots of all possible stamps and stripes, many of whom, by the end of it all, had already begun to fall under fatal suspicion themselves.
And these, then, their inheritors and imitators, these remnants wrapped in party-going silk, spending their nights laying a thin skin of politeness, even enjoyment, over the unhealed temporal wounds of la Mere France.
Jean-Guy met the girl who would become his late wife at such an affair, and paid her bride-price a few scant weeks later. Chloe, her name had been. An apricot-coloured little thing, sweet-natured and shy, her eyes almost blue; far less obviously du sang negre than he himself, even under the most — direct — scrutiny.
And it is only now, with her so long dead, that he can finally admit it was this difference of tone, rather than any true heart's affection, which was the primary motive of their union.
He glances down at a puddle near his boot, briefly considering how his own reflection sketches itself on the water's dim skin: a dark man in a dark frock-coat — older now, though no paler. Beneath his high, stiff silk hat, his light brown hair has been cropped almost to the skull to mask its obvious kink; under the hat-brim's shade, his French father's straight nose and hazel eyes seem awkwardly offset by the unexpected tint of his slave-born mother's teak-inflected complexion. His mixed-race parentage is writ large in every part of him, for those who care enough to look for it: the tell-tale detritus of colonization, met and matched in flesh and bone. His skin still faintly scarred, as it were, by the rucked sheets of their marriage-bed.
Not that any money ever changed hands to legalize that relationship, Jean-Guy thinks. Maman having been old Sansterre's property, at the time.
This is a tiring line of thought to maintain, however — not to mention over-familiar. And there will be much to be done, before the Paris sun rises again.
"I wish you the joy of your bal, M'sieu," Jean-Guy tells the lawyer. "And so, if it please you — my key?"
Proffering his palm and smiling, pleasantly. To which the lawyer replies, colouring again —
"Certainly, M'sieu." and hands it over. Adding, as Jean-Guy mounts the steps behind him:
"But you may find very little as you remember it, from those days when M'sieu Dumouriez had the top floor."
Jean-Guy pauses at the building's door, favouring the lawyer with one brief, backwards glance. And returns —
"That, one may only hope… M'sieu."
1793
Jean-Guy wakes to twilight, to an empty street; that angry crowd which formerly assembled to rock and prison the Chevalier du Prendegrace's escaping coach apparently having passed on to some further, more distant business. He lies sprawled on a pile of trash behind the butcher's back door, head abuzz and stomach lurching; though whether the nausea in question results from his own physical weakness, the smell of the half-rotten mess of bones beneath him or the sound of the flies that cluster on their partially denuded surface, he truly cannot tell. But he wakes, also, to the voice of his best spy — the well-named La Hire — telling him he must open his eyes, lurch upright, rouse himself at last…
"May the goddess of reason herself strike me dead if we didn't think you lost for ever, Citizen — murdered, maybe, or even arrested. Like all the other committee members."
Much the same advice Jean-Guy remembers giving himself, not all so very long ago. Back when he lay enveloped in that dark red closeness between those drawn velvet curtains, caught and prone under the stale air's weight in the damnably soft, firm grip of the chevalier's upholstery.
But: "Citizen Sansterre!" A slap across the jaw, jerking his too-heavy head sharply to the left. "Are you tranced? I said, we couldn't find you."
Well… you've found me now, though. Haven't you —
— Citizen?
The chevalier's murmuring voice, reduced to an echo in Jean-Guy's blood. His hidden stare, red-glass-masked, coming and going like heat lightning's horizon-flash behind Jean-Guy's aching eyes.
He shakes his head, still reeling from the sting of La Hire's hand. Forces himself to form words, repeating:
"… the committee."
"Gone, Citizen. Scattered to the winds."
"Citizen… Robespierre?"
"Arrested, shot, jaw held on with a bandage. He'll kiss the Widow tomorrow — as will we, if we don't fly this stinking city with the devil's own haste."
Gaining a weak grip upon La Hire's arm, Jean-Guy uses it to lever himself — shakily — upwards. His mouth feels swollen, lips and gums raw-abraded; new blood fresh and sticky at one corner, cud of old blood sour between his back teeth, at the painful root of his tongue. More blood pulls free as he rises, unsticking the left panel of his half-opened shirt from the nub of one nipple; as he takes a step forward, yet more blood still is found gluing him fast to his own breeches, stiff and brown, in that —
… unmentionable area…
And on one wrist, a light, crescent-shaped wound, bruised and inflamed, pink with half-healed infection. A painfully raised testimony to dream-dim memory: the chevalier's rough little tongue pressed hard, cold as a dead cat's, against the thin skin above the uppermost vein.
I have set my mark upon you, Citizen.
Jean-Guy passes a hand across his brow, coughing, then brings it away wet — and red. Squints down, and finds himself inspecting a palm-full of blood-tinged sweat.
"Dumouriez," he asks La Hire, with difficulty. "Taken… also?"
"Hours ago."
"Show me… to his room."
And now, a momentary disclaimer: let it be here stated, with as much clarity as possible, that Jean-Guy had never — hitherto — given much credence to those old wives' tales which held that aristos glutted their delicate hungers at the mob's expense, keeping themselves literally fat with infusions of carnal misery and poor men's meat. Pure rhetoric, surely; folk-tales turned metaphor, as quoted in Camille Desmoulins's incendiary pamphlets: "Church and nobility — vampires. Observe the colour of their faces, and the pallor of your own."
Not that the Chevalier du Prendgrace's face, so imperfectly recalled, had borne even the slightest hint of colour…healthy, or otherwise.
Not long after his return to Martinique, Jean-Guy had held some brief discourse with an English doctor named Gabriel Keynes, a man famous for spending the last ten years of his own life trying to identify the causes of (and potential cures for) that swampy bronze plague known as yellow fever. Bolstered by a bottle or two of good claret and Keynes's personal promise of the most complete discretion, Jean-Guy had unfolded to him the whole, distressing story of his encounter with the chevalier: shown him the mark on his wrist, the marks…
… elsewhere.
Those enduring wounds which, even now, would — on occasion — break open and bleed anew, as though at some unrecognizable signal; the invisible passage of their maker, perhaps, through the cracks between known and unknown areas of their mutual world's unwritten map?
As though we could really share the same world, ever, we two — such as I, and such as…
… he…
"What y'have here, Monsewer Sansterre," Keynes observed, touching the blister's surface but delicately, yet leaving behind a dent, along with a lingering, sinister ache, "is a continual pocket of sequestered blood. 'Tis that what we sawbones name haematoma: from the Latin haematomane, or 'drinker of blood'."
There was, the doctor explained, a species of bats in the Antipodes — even upon Jean-Guy's home island — whose very genus was labelled after the common term for those legendary undead monsters Desmoulins had once fixated upon. These bats possessed a saliva which, being composed mainly of anticoagulant elements, aided them in the pursuit of their filthy addiction: a mixture of chemicals which, when smeared against an open wound, prolong — and even increase — the force and frequency of its bleeding. Adding, however:
"But I own I have never known of such a reaction left behind by the spittle of any man, even one whose family, as your former Jacobin compatriots might term it, is — no doubt — long accustomed to the consumption of blood."
Which concludes, as it ensues, the entire role of science in this narrative.
And now, the parallel approach to Dumouriez's former apartment, past and present blending neatly together as Jean-Guy scales the rickety staircase towards that last, long-locked door, its hinges stiff with rust…
Stepping, in 1815, into a cramped and low-hung attic space clogged with antique furniture: fine brocades, moth-eaten and dusty; sway-backed Louis Quatorze chairs with splintered legs. Splintered armoires and dun-smoked walls, festooned with cobweb and scribbled with foul words.
On one particular wall, a faint stain hangs like spreading damp. The shadow of some immense, submerged, half-crucified grey bat.
Jean-Guy traces its contours, wonderingly. Remembering, in 1793…
… a bloodstained pallet piled high with pale-eyed corpses left to rot beneath this same wall, this same great watermark: its bright red darkness, splashed wet across fresh white plaster.
Oh, how Jean-Guy had stared at it — struck stupidly dumb with pure shock — while La Hire recounted the details his long day's sleep had stolen from him. Told him how, when the committee's spies broke in at last, Dumouriez had merely looked up from his work with a queasy smile, interrupted in the very midst of dumping yet another body on top of the last. How he'd held a trowel clutched, incongruously, in one hand, which he'd then raised, still smiling…
… and used, sharp edge turned inward — even as they screamed at him to halt — to cut his own throat.
Under the stain's splayed wing, Jean-Guy closes his eyes and casts his mind back even further — right back to the beginning, before Thermidor finally stemmed the revolutionary river's flood; before the chevalier's coach, later found stripped and abandoned at the lip of a pit stuffed with severed heads and lime; before Dumouriez's suicide, or Jean-Guy and La Hire's frantic flight to Calais, and beyond — back to Martinique, where La Hire would serve as plantation master on Old Sansterre's lands till the hour and the day of his own, entirely natural, demise. The very, very beginning.
Or Jean-Guy's — necessarily limited — version of it, at any rate.
Then, once more, 1793. Five o'clock on that long-gone "August" day, and the afternoon sun has already begun to slant down over the Row of the Armed Man's ruined roofs, dripping from their streaming gutters in a dazzle of water and light, along with the last of the previous night's rainfall. Jean-Guy and La Hire sit together at what passes for a table by the open window of a street-side cafe, their tricolor badges momentarily absent from sashes and hats; they sip their coffee, thus disguised, and listen to today's tumbrils grind by through the stinking mist. Keeping a careful tandem eye, also, upon the uppermost windows of Dumouriez's house, refuge of a suspected traitor, and previously listed (before its recent conversion into a many-roomed, half-empty "citizens' hotel") as part of the ancestral holdings of a certain M. le Chevalier du Prendegrace.
Jean-Guy to La Hire: "This Prendegrace — who is he?"
"A ci-devant aristo, what else? Like all the rest."
"Yes, to be sure; but besides."
La Hire shrugs. "Does it matter?"
Here, in that ill-fit building just across the way, other known aristocrats — men, women and children bearing papers forged expertly enough to permit them to walk the streets of Paris, if not exit through its gates — have often been observed to enter, though rarely been observed to leave. Perhaps attracted by Prendegrace's reputation as "one of their own", they place their trust in his creature Dumouriez's promises of sanctuary, refuge, escape; the very fact of their own absence, later on, seems to prove that trust has not been given in vain.
"The sewers," La Hire suggests. "They served us well enough during the old days, dodging royalist scum through the Cordeliers' quarter…"
Jean-Guy scoffs. "A secret entrance, perhaps, in the cellar? Down to the river with the rest of the garbage, then to the far shore on some subterranean boat?"
"It's possible."
"So the accused Church used to claim, concerning Christ's resurrection."
A guffaw. "Ah, but there's no need to be so bitter about that, Citizen. Is there? Since they've already paid so well, after all — those fat-arsed priests — for spreading such pernicious lies."
And: Ah, yes, Jean-Guy remembers thinking, as he nods in smiling agreement. Paid in full, on the Widow's lap… just like the king and his Austrian whore, before them.
Across the street, meanwhile, a far less elevated lady of ill-repute comes edging up through the row proper, having apparently just failed to drum up any significant business amongst the crowds that line the Widow's bridal path. Spotting them both, she hikes her skirt to show Jean-Guy first the hem of her scarlet petticoat, then the similarly red-dyed tangle of hair at her crotch. La Hire glances over, draws a toothless grin, and snickers in reply; Jean-Guy affects to ignore her, and receives a rude gesture for his politesse. Determined to avoid the embarrassment of letting his own sudden spurt of anger show, he looks away, eyes flicking back towards the attic's windows…
Where he sees, framed between its moth-worn curtains, another woman's face appear: a porcelain-smooth girl's mask peering out from the darkness behind the cracked glass, grub-pale in the shadows of this supposedly unoccupied apartment. It hangs there, pale and empty as a wax head from Citizen Curtuis's museum — that studio where images of decapitated friend and foe to France alike are modelled from casts taken by his "niece" Marie, the Grosholtz girl, who will one day abandon Curtuis to the mob he serves and marry another man for passage to England. Where she will set up her own museum, exhibiting the results of her skills under the fresh new name of Madame Tussaud.
That white face. Those dim-hued eyes. Features once contemptuously regal, now possessed of nothing but a dull and uncomplaining patience. The same wide stare which will meet Jean-Guy's, after the raid, from atop the grisly burden of Dumouriez's overcrowded pallet. That proud aristo, limbs flopped carelessly askew, her nude skin dappled—like that of every one of her fellow victims —
(like Jean-Guy's own brow now, in 1815, as he studies that invisible point on the wall where the stain of Dumouriez's escape once hung, dripping)
— with bloody sweat.
His "old complaint", he called it, during that brief evening's consultation with Doctor Keynes. A cyclic, tidal flux, regular as breath, unwelcome as nightmare, constantly calling and recalling a blush, or more, to his unwilling skin.
And he wonders, Jean-Guy, just as he wondered then: why look at all? Why bother to hide herself, if only to brave the curtain periodically and offer her unmistakable face to the hostile street outside?
But…
"You aristos," he remembers muttering while the chevalier listened, courteously expressionless. "All, so… arrogant."
"Yes, Citizen."
"Like… that girl. The one…"
"At Dumouriez's window? Oh, no doubt."
"But how…" Struggling manfully against his growing lassitude, determined to place the reference in context: "How… could you know… ?"
And the chevalier, giving his version of La Hire's shrug, all sleek muscle under fine scarlet velvet.
"But I simply do, Citizen Sansterre."
Adding, in a whisper — a hum? That same hum, so close and quiet against the down of Jean-Guy's paralyzed cheek, which seems to vibrate through every secret part of him at once whenever the blood still kept sequestered beneath his copper-ruddy mixed-race flesh begins to… flow…
For who do you think it was who told her to look out, in the first place?
In Martinique — with money and time at his disposal, and a safe distance put between himself and that Satanic, red-lined coach — Jean-Guy had eventually begun to make certain discreet enquiries into the long and secretive history of the family Prendegrace. Thus employed, he soon amassed a wealth of previously hidden information: facts impossible to locate during the Revolution, or even before.
Like picking at a half-healed scab, pain and relief in equal measure; and since, beyond obviously, he would never be fully healed, what did it matter just… what… Jean-Guy's enquiries managed to uncover?
Chevalier Joffroi d'Iver, first of his line, won his nobility on crusade under Richard Coeur-de-Lion, for services rendered during the massacre at Acre. An old story: reluctant to lose the glory of having captured 300 infidels in battle — though aware that retaining them would prevent any further advancement towards his true prize, the holy city of Jerusalem — the hot-blooded Plantagenet ordered each and every one of them decapitated on the spot. So scaffolds were built, burial pits dug, and heads and bodies sent tumbling in either direction for three whole days, while swords of d'Iver and his companions swung ceaselessly, and a stream of fresh victims slipped in turn on the filth their predecessors had left behind.
And after their task was done, eye-witnesses record, these good Christian knights filled the pits with Greek fire, leaving the bodies to burn, as they rode away.
Much as, during your own famous Days of September, a familiar voice seems to murmur at Jean-Guy's ear, 378 of those prisoners awaiting trial at the Conciergerie were set upon by an angry horde of good patriots like yourself, and hacked limb from limb in the street.
Eyes closed, Jean-Guy recalls a gaggle of women running by — red-handed, reeling drunk — with clusters of ears adorning their open, fichu-less bodices. Fellow citizens clapping and cheering from the drawn-up benches as a man wrings the Princess de Lamballe's still-beating heart dry over a goblet, then takes a long swig of the result, toasting the health of the Revolution in pale aristo blood. All those guiding lights of liberty: ugly Georges Danton, passionate Camille Desmoulins…
Maximilien Robespierre himself, in his Incorruptible's coat of sea-green silk, nearsighted cat's eyes narrowed against the world through spectacles with smoked-glass lenses; the kind one might wear, even today, to protect oneself while observing an eclipse.
La Famille Prend-de-grace, moving to block out the sun; a barren new planet, passing restless through a dark new sky. And their arms, taken at the same time — an axe argent et gules, over a carrion field, gules seulement.
A bloodstained weapon, suspended — with no visible means of support — above a field red with severed heads.
We could not have been more suited to each other, you and I. Could we —
— Citizen?
1793
Blood and filth, and the distant rumble of passing carts; the hot mist turns to sizzling rain, as new waves of stench eddy and shift around them. Dumouriez rounds the corner into the Row of the Armed Man, and La Hire and Jean-Guy exchange a telling glance: the plan of attack, as previously determined. La Hire will take the back way, past where the prostitute lurks, while Jean-Guy waits under a convenient awning — to keep his powder dry — until he hears their signal, using the time between to prime his pistol. They give Dumouriez a few minutes' lead, then rise as one.
Crimson-stained sweat, memories swarming like maggots in his brain. Yet more on the clan Prendegrace, a red-tinged stream of sinister trivia.
Their motto: nus souvienz le tous. "We remember everything."
Their hereditary post at court: attendant on the king's bedchamber, a function discontinued some time during the reign of Henri de Navarre, for historically obscure reasons.
The rumour: that during the massacre of Saint Barthelme's Night, one — usually unnamed — Prendegrace was observed pledging then-King Charles IX's honour with a handful of Protestant flesh.
Prendegrace. "Those who have received God's grace."
Receive.
Or, is it take God's grace…
… for themselves?
Jean-Guy feels himself start to reel, and rams his fist against the apartment wall for support. Then feels it lurch and pulse in answer under his knuckles, as though his own hammering heart were buried beneath that yellowed plaster.
Pistol thrust beneath his coat's lapel, Jean-Guy steps towards Dumouriez's door — only to find his way blocked by a sudden influx of armed and shouting fellow citizens. Yet another protest whipped up from general dissatisfaction and street-corner demagoguery, bound for nowhere in particular, less concerned with destruction than with noise and display; routine "patriotic" magic transforming empty space into chaos-bent rabble, with no legerdemain or invocation required.
Across the way, he spots La Hire crushed up against the candle-maker's door, but makes sure to let his gaze slip by without a hint of recognition as the stinking human tide, none of them probably feeling particularly favourable, at this very moment, towards any representative of the committee who — as they keep on chanting — have stole our blood to make their bread
(a convenient bit of symbolic symmetry, that),
… sweeps him rapidly back past the whore, the garbage, the cafe, the row itself, and out into the cobbled street beyond.
Jean-Guy feels his ankle turn as it meets the gutter; he stumbles, then rights himself. Calling out, above the crowd's din —
"Citizens, I…" No answer. Louder: "Listen, Citizens, I have no quarrel with you; I have business in there…" And, louder still: "Citizens! Let… me… pass!"
But: no answer, again, from any of the nearest mob-members: neither that huge, obviously drunken man with the pike, trailing tricolor streamers, or those two women trying to fill their aprons with loose stones while ignoring the screaming babies strapped to their backs. Not even from that dazed young man who seems to have once — however mistakenly — thought himself to be their leader, now dragged hither and yon at the violent behest of his "followers" with his pale eyes rolling in their sockets, his gangly limbs barely still attached to his shaking body.
The price of easy oratory. Jean-Guy thinks, sourly. Cheap words, hasty actions; a whole desperate roster of very real ideals — and hungers — played on for the mere sake of a moment's notoriety, applause, power —
— our Revolution's ruin, in a nutshell.
And then…
… a shadow falls over him, soft and dark as the merest night-borne whisper, but one that will lie paradoxically heavy across his unsuspecting shoulders, nevertheless, for long years afterwards. His destiny approaching through the mud, on muffled wheels.
A red-hung coach, nudging at him — almost silently — from behind.
Perfect.
He shoulders past the pikeman, between the women, drawing curses and blows; gives back a few of his own, as he clambers on to the coach's running-board and hooks its nearest door open. Rummages in his pocket for his tricolor badge, and brandishes it in the face of the coach's sole occupant, growling —
"I commandeer this coach in the name of the Committee for Public Safety!"
Sliding quick into the seat opposite as the padded door shuts suddenly, yet soundlessly, beside him. And that indistinct figure across from him leans forward, equally sudden — a mere red-on-white-on-red silhouette, in the curtained windows' dull glare — to murmur:
"The committee? Why, my coach is yours, then…"
… Citizen.
Jean-Guy looks up, dazzled. And notices, at last, the Prendegrace arms which hang just above him, embroidered on the curtains' underside — silver on red, red on red, outlined in fire by the sun which filters weakly through their thick, enshrouding velvet weave.
1815
Jean-Guy feels new wetness trace its way down his arm, soaking the cuff of his sleeve red: his war-wound, broken open once more, in sympathetic proximity to… what? His own tattered scraps of memory, slipping and sliding like phlegm on glass? This foul, haunted house, where Dumouriez — like some Tropic trapdoor spider — traded on his master's aristocratic name to entice the easiest fresh prey he could find into his web, then fattened them up (however briefly) before using them to slake M. le Chevalier's deviant familial appetites?
Blood, from wrist to palm, printing the wall afresh; blood in his throat from his tongue's bleeding base, painting his spittle red as he hawks and coughs — all civility lost, in a moment's spasm of pure revulsion — on to the dusty floor.
Spatter of blood on dust, like a ripe scarlet hieroglyphic: liquid, horrid, infinitely malleable. Utterly… uninterpretable.
I have set my mark upon you, Citizen.
Blood at his collar, his nipple. His
( — groin).
My hook in your flesh. My winding reel.
Jean-Guy feels it tug him downward, into the maelstrom.
1793
The coach. Prendegrace sits right in front of Jean-Guy, a mere hand's grasp away, slight and lithe and damnably languid in his rich, red velvet; his hair is drawn back and side-curled, powdered so well that Jean-Guy can't even tell its original colour, let alone use its decided lack of contrast to help him decipher the similarly pallid features of the face it frames. Except to note that, as though in mocking imitation of Citizen Robespierre, the chevalier too affects a pair of spectacles with smoked glass lenses…
… though, instead of sea green, these small, blank squares glint a dim — yet unmistakable — shade of scarlet.
Play for time, Jean-Guy's brain tells him, meanwhile, imparting its usually good advice with uncharacteristic softness, as though, if it were to speak any louder, the chevalier might somehow overhear it. Pretend not to have recognized him. Then work your pistol free, slowly; fire a warning shot, and summon the good citizens outside…
… those same ones you slipped in here to avoid, in the first place —
… to aid you in his arrest.
Almost snorting aloud at the very idea, before he catches himself: as though an agent of Jean-Guy's enviable size and bulk actually need fear the feeble defences of a ci-devant fop like this one, with his frilled wrists and his neat, red-heeled shoes, their tarnished buckles dull and smeared — on the nearest side, at least — with something that almost looks like…
… blood?
Surely not.
And yet…
"You would be Citizen Sansterre, I think," the chevalier observes, abruptly.
Name of God.
Recovering, Jean-Guy gives a stiff nod. "And you — the traitor, Prendegrace."
"And that would be a pistol you reach for, under your collar."
"It would."
A punch, a kick, a cry for help, the drawing forth of some secret weapon of his own: Jean-Guy braces himself, a match-ready fuse, tensed to the point of near pain against any of the aforementioned. But the chevalier merely nods as well, undeterred in the face of Jean-Guy's honest aggression, his very passivity itself a form of arrogance, a cool and languid aristocratic challenge to the progressively more hot and bothered plebian world around him. Then leans just a bit forward, at almost the same time: a paralytic blink of virtual non-movement, so subtle as to be hardly worth noting; for all that Jean-Guy now finds himself beginning — barely recognizing what he does, let alone why — to match it.
Leaning in, far too slow to stop himself, to arrest this fall in mid-plunge. Leaning in, as the chevalier's red lenses dip, slipping inexorably downward to reveal a pale rim of brow, of lash, of eye socket. And leaning in yet further, to see — below that —
— first one eye, then another: pure but opaque, luridly empty. Eyes without whites (or irises, or pupils), the same blank scarlet tint — from lower lid to upper — as the spectacles that masked them.
Words in red darkness, pitched almost too low to hear; Jean-Guy must strain to catch them, leaning closer still. Places a trembling hand on the chevalier's shoulder, to steady himself, and feels them thrum up through his palm, his arm, his chest, his wildly beating heart: a secret, interior embrace, intimate as plague, squeezing him between the ribs, between the thighs. And…
… deeper.
Before him, the chevalier's own hand hovers, clean white palm turned patiently upward. Those long, black-rimmed nails. Those red words, tracing the myriad paths of blood. Suggesting, mildly…
Then you had best give it to me, Citizen, this pistol of yours. Had you not?
Because: That would be the right thing to do, really. All things considered.
Do you not think?
Yes.
For safety. For — safe-keeping.
. . . exactly that, yes.
Such sweet reason. Such deadly reasonableness.
Jean-Guy feels his mouth drop open as though to protest, but hears only the faint, wet pop of his jaw hinges relaxing in an idiot yawn; watches, helpless, as he drops the pistol — butt-first — into the chevalier's grip. Sees the chevalier seem to blink, just slightly, in return: all-red no-stare blurred by only the most momentary flicker, milky and brief as some snake's nictitating membrane.
And —
"There, now," the chevalier observes, aloud. "That… must suit us both … so much better."
Must it — not?
A half-formed heave, a last muffled attempt at a thrash, muscles knotted in on themselves like some mad stray cur's in the foam-flecked final stages of hydrophobia — and then, without warning, the chevalier is on him. Their mouths seal together, parted lip to bared, bone-needle teeth: blood fills Jean-Guy's throat, greasing the way as the chevalier locks fast to his fluttering tongue. His gums burn like ulcers. This is far less a kiss than a suddenly open wound, an artery slashed and left to spurt.
The pistol falls away, forgotten.
Venom spikes Jean-Guy's heart. He chokes down a numbing, stinging mouthful of cold that takes him to the brink of sleep and the edge of climax simultaneously as the chevalier's astringent tongue rasps over the inflamed tissues of his mouth, harsh as a cat's. Finds himself grabbing this whippet-slim thing in his arms by the well-arranged hair, anchoring himself so it can grind them ever more firmly together, and feels a shower of loose powder fall around both their faces like dirty city snow; the chevalier's ribbon has come undone, his neat-curled side-locks unravelling like kelp in an icy current. At the same instant, meanwhile, the nearest lapel of his lurid coat peels back — deft as some mountebank's trick — to reveal the cold white flesh beneath: no pulse visible beneath the one flat pectoral, nipple peak-hard but utterly colourless…
Oh, yes, yes, yes…
Jean-Guy feels the chevalier's hands — clawed now — scrabble at his fly's buttons, free him to slap upwards in this awful red gloom. Then sees him give one quick double thumb-flick across the groove, the distended, weeping velvet knob, and send fresh scarlet welling up along the urethral fold faster than Jean-Guy can cry out in surprised, horrified pain.
Name of death and the devil!
The chevalier gives a thin grin of delight at the sight of it. His mouth opens wide as a cat's in flamen, tasting the slaughterhouse-scented air. Nearly drooling.
People, Revolution, Supreme Being, please …
Lips skinning back. Fangs extending. His sleek head dipping low, as though in profane prayer —
… oh, God, oh, Jesus, no —
… to sip at it.
More muffled words rippling up somehow through the femoral knot of Jean-Guy's groin, even as he gulps bile, his whole righteous world dimming to one pin-prick point of impossible pain, of unspeakable and unnatural ecstasy — as he starts to reel, come blood, black out.
Ah, Citizen, do not leave me just yet. Not when…
— we are… so close —
— to meeting each other, once more.
In 1815, meanwhile: Jean-Guy looks up from the bloody smudge now spreading wide beneath his own splayed fingers to see that same familiar swatch of wet and shining scarlet resurface, like a grotesque miracle, above his gaping face. Dumouriez's death stain, grown somehow fresh again, as though the wall — the room, itself — were bleeding.
Plaster reddens, softens. Collapses inward, paradoxically, as the wall bulges outward. And Jean-Guy watches, frozen, as what lies beneath begins to extrude itself, at long last, through that vile, soaked ruin of chalk dust, glue and haemoglobin alike: first one hand, then another, one shoulder, then its twin. The whole rest of the torso, still dressed in the same rotten velvet equipage, twisting its deft way out through the sodden, crumbling muck, grub-white neck rearing cobra-like, poised to strike, grub-white profile turning outward — its lank mane still clotted with calcified powder, its red-glazed glasses hung carelessly askew — once more to cast empty eyes Jean-Guy's way…
This awful revenant version of M. the former Chevalier du Prendegrace shakes his half-mummified head, studying Jean-Guy from under dusty lashes. He opens his mouth, delicately, pauses, then coughs out a fine white curl, and frowns at the way his long-dormant lungs wheeze.
Fastening his blank red gaze on Jean-Guy's own. Observing:
"How terribly you've changed, Citizen." A pause. "But then — that is the inevitable fate of the impermanent."
"The devil," Jean-Guy whispers, forgetting his once-vaunted atheism.
"La, sir. You do me entirely too much honour."
The chevalier steps forward, bringing a curled and ragged lip of wall along with him; Jean-Guy hears it tear as it comes, like a scab. The sound rings in his ears. He puts up both palms, weakly, as though a simple gesture might really be enough to stave off the — living? — culmination of a half-lifetime's nightmare visions. The chevalier notices, and gives that sly half-smile: teeth still white, still intact, yet jutting now from his fever-pink gums at slight angles, like a shark's… but could there really be more of them, after all these years? Crop upon crop, stacked up and waiting to be shed after his next feeding, the one that never came?
They almost seem to glow, translucent as milky glass. Waiting —
— to be filled.
"Of course, one does hear things, especially inside the walls." the chevalier continues, brushing plaster away with small, fastidious strokes. "For example: that — excepting certain instances of regicide — your vaunted Revolution came to naught, after all. And that, since a Corsican general now rules an empire in the monarchy's place, old Terrorists such as yourself must therefore count themselves in desperate need of new… positions."
Upraised palms, wet — and red; his "complaint" come back in force, worse than the discards in Dumouriez's long-ago corpse pile. Jean-Guy stands immersed in it, head swirling, skin one whole slick of cold sweat and hot blood admixed — and far more blood than sweat, all told. So much so, he must swallow it in mouthfuls, just to speak. His voice comes out garbled, sludgy, clotted.
"You…" he says, with difficulty. " You… did this… to me…"
"But of course, Citizen Sansterre; sent the girl to the window, tempted you within my reach, and set my mark upon you, as you well know. As I —"
Told you.
Or… do you not recall?
Sluiced and veritably streaming with it, inside and out: palate, nipples, groin. That haematoma on his wrist's prickling underside, opening like a flower. The chevalier's remembered kiss, licking his veins full of cold poison.
(If I can't stop this bleeding, it'll be my death.)
Numb-tongued: "As you did with Dumouriez."
"Exactly so."
Raising one clawed hand to touch Jean-Guy's face, just lightly — a glancing parody of comfort — and send Jean-Guy arching away, cursing, as the mere pressure of the chevalier's fingers is enough to draw first a drip, then a gush, of fresh crimson.
"God damn your ci-devant eyes!"
"Yes, yes." Quieter: "But I can make this stop, you know."
Me. And only me.
Seduction, then infection, then cure — for a price. Loyalty, till death…
And — after?
How Prendegrace trapped Dumouriez, no doubt, once upon a long, long time past; or had Dumouriez simply offered himself up to worship at this thing's red-shod feet, without having to be enticed or duped into such an unequal devil's bargain? Coming to Prendegrace's service gratefully, even gladly; as glad as he would be, eventually, to cut his own throat to save this creature's no-life, or spray fresh blood across a wet plaster wall to conceal the thing he'd hunted, pimped and died for, safely entombed within?
And for Jean-Guy, an equally limited range of choices: to bleed out all at once in a moment's sanguinary torrent, and die now, or live as a tool, the way Dumouriez did — and die later.
Minimally protected, perhaps even cherished; easily used, yet — just as easily —
— discarded.
"There can be benefits to such an arrangement," Prendegrace points out, softly.
"He sacrificed himself for you."
"As was required."
"As you demanded."
The chevalier raises a delicate brow, sketched in discoloured plaster. "Me? I demand nothing, Citizen. Only accept — what's offered me."
"Because you aristos deign to do nothing for yourselves."
"Oh, no doubt. But then, that's why I chose you: for being so much more able than me, in every regard. Why I envied and coveted your strength, your vital idealism. Your…"
Life.
Jean-Guy feels the monster's gaze rove up and down, ap-praisingly — reading him, as it were, like —
Hoarse: "A… map."
The chevalier sighs, and shakes his head.
"A pretty pastime, once. But your body no longer invites such pleasantries, more's the pity; you have grown somewhat more — opaque — with age, I think."
Taking one further step forward, as Jean-Guy recoils; watching Jean-Guy slip in his own blood, go down on one knee, hand scrabbling helplessly for purchase against that ragged hole where the wall once was.
"What are you?" he asks. Wincing, angrily, as he hears his own voice crack with an undignified mixture of hatred —
fear ( — longing?).
The chevalier pauses, mid-step. And replies, after a long moment:
"Ah. Yet this would be the one question we none of us may answer, Citizen Sansterre, not even myself, who knows only that I was born this way, whatever way that might be…"
Leaning closer still. Whispering. Words dimming to blood-thrum, and lower, as the sentence draws to its long-sought, inevitable close.
"Just as you were born, like everyone else I meet in this terrible world of ours, to bear my mark —"
— or be my prey.
With Jean-Guy's sight narrowing to embrace nothing but those empty eyes, that mouth, those teeth: his disease made flesh, made terminal. His destiny, buried too deep to touch or think of, till it dug itself free once more.
But…
I am not just this, damn you, he thinks, as though in equally silent, desperate reply — not just your prey, your pawn, your tool. I was someone, grown and bred entirely apart from your influence: I had history, hopes, dreams. I loved my father, and hated his greed; loved my mother, and hated her enslavement. Loved and hated what I saw of them both in myself: my born freedom, my slave's skin. I allied myself with a cause that talked of freedom, only to drown itself in blood. But I am more than that, more than anything that came out of that… more than just this one event, the worst — and most defining — moment of my life. This one encounter with…
… you.
Stuck in the same yearning, dreadful moment through twelve whole years of real life — even when he was working his land, loving his wife, mourning her, mourning the children whose hope died with her. Running his father's plantation, adjudicating disputes, approving marriages, attending christenings; watching La Hire decline and fall, being drunk at his funeral, at the bal, at his own wedding…
Only to be drawn back here, at last, like some recalcitrant cur to his hidden master's call. To be reclaimed, over near-incalculable distances of time and space, as though he were some piece of property, some tool, some merest creeping —
— slave.
Marked, as yours. By you. For you.
But — this was the entire point of "my" Revolution, Jean-Guy remembers, suddenly. That all men were slaves, no matter their estate, so long as kings and their laws ruled unchecked. And that we should all, all of us, no matter how low or high — or mixed — our birth either rise up, take what was ours, live free… or die.
Die quick. Die clean. Make your last stand now, Citizen, while you still have the strength to do it —
— or never.
"It occurs to me," the chevalier says, slowly, "that… after all this… we still do not know each other's given name."
Whatever else, Jean-Guy promises himself, with one last coherent thought, I will not allow myself to beg.
A spark to oil, this last heart's flare: he turns for the door, lurching up, only to find the chevalier upon him, bending him backwards by the hair.
Ah, do not leave me, Citizen.
But: "I will," Jean-Guy snarls, liquid, in return. And hears the chevalier's laugh ring in his ear through a fresh gout of blood, distant as some underwater glass bell. That voice replying aloud, as well as — otherwise —
"Ohhhh… I think not."
I have set my mark upon you.
My mark. Mine.
That voice in his ear, his blood. That smell. His traitor's body, opening wide to its sanguine, siren's song. That unforgettable red halo of silent lassitude settling over him like a bell jar once more, sealing them together: predator, prey, potential co-dependents.
This fatal Widow's kiss he's waited for, in vain, for oh so very long — Prendegrace's familiar poison, seeping into Jean-Guy's veins, his heart. Stopping him in his tracks.
All this — blood…
Blood, for all that blood shed. The Revolution's tide, finally stemmed with an offering made from his own body, his own — damned —
— soul.
Prendegrace raises red lips. He wipes them, pauses, coughs again — more wetly, this time. And asks, aloud:
"By your favour, Citizen… what year is this, exactly?"
"Year Zero," Jean-Guy whispers back. And lets himself go.