Le 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 blood-stained 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: Nous souvienz le tous. “We remember everything.”
Their hereditary post at court: Attendant on the king’s bedchamber, a function discontinued sometime 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 honor 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 favorable, at this very moment, toward 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 which will lie paradoxically heavy across his unsuspecting shoulders, nevertheless, for long years afterward. His destiny approaching through the mud, on muffled wheels.