Assassin's Creed: Unity (15 page)

At the same time Mr. Weatherall drew his sword and deftly fended off the second of Carroll’s men.

“Stop,”
ordered Mr. Carroll, and the skirmish was over, Mr. Weatherall and I, our backs to the window, faced the three Carroll swordsmen, all five of us breathing heavily, blazing eyes on each other.

With a tight voice, Mr. Carroll said, “Please remember, gentlemen, that Mademoiselle de la Serre and Mr. Weatherall are still our guests.”

I didn’t feel much like a guest. By my side the fire flared then died, the letters reduced to gray, fluttering sheets of ash. I checked my stance: feet apart, center balanced, breathing steady. My elbows bent and close to the body. I kept the nearest swordsman on point and maintained eye contact while Mr. Weatherall covered another one. The third? Well, he was a floater.

“Why?” I said to Mr. Carroll, without taking my eyes off the nearest swordsman, my partner for this dance. “Why did you burn the letters?”

“Because there can be no truce with the Assassins, Élise.”

“Why not?”

With his head slightly on one side and his hands clasped in front of him, he smiled condescendingly. “You don’t understand, my dear. Our kind have warred with the Assassins for centuries . . .”

“Exactly,” I pressed. “And that is why it should stop.”

“Hush, my dear,” he said and his patronizing tone was setting my teeth on edge. “The divisions between our two Orders are too great, the enmity too entrenched. You might as well ask a snake and mongoose to take afternoon tea together. Any truce would be conducted in an atmosphere of mutual distrust and the airing of ancient grievances. Each would suspect the other of plotting to betray them. It would never happen. Yes, we will prevent any attempts to spread the promotion of any such ideas”—he wafted a hand at the fire—“whether they be the writings of Haytham Kenway or the aspirations of a naïve young girl destined to be the French Grand Master one day.”

The full impact of what he meant hit me. “Me? You mean to kill me?”

Head on one side, he gave me sad eyes. “It is for the greater good.”

I bristled. “But I am a Templar.”

He pulled a face. “Well, not quite yet, of course, but I understand your meaning and admit that does affect matters. Just not quite enough. The simple fact is that things must stay as they are. Don’t you remember that from when we first met?”

My eyes shifted to May Carroll. Her purse dangling from her gloved fingers, she watched us as though enjoying a night at the theater.

“Oh, I remember our first meeting very well,” I told Mr. Carroll. “I remember my mother giving you very short shrift.”

“Indeed,” he said. “Your mother had progressive tendencies not in line with our own.”

“One might almost think you would want her dead,” I said.

Mr. Carroll looked confused. “I beg your pardon.”

“Perhaps you wanted her dead enough to hire a man to do the job. A disenfranchised Assassin, perhaps?”

He clapped his hands with understanding. “Oh. I see. You mean the recently departed Mr. Ruddock?”

“Exactly.”

“And you think we were the ones who hired him? You think we were the ones behind the attempted assassination? And that, presumably, is why you have just helped Mr. Ruddock escape?”

I felt myself color, realizing I had given myself away as Mr. Carroll clapped his hands together.

“Well, weren’t you?”

“Much as I hate to disappoint you, my dear, but that particular action was nothing to do with us.”

Silently I cursed. If he was telling the truth, then I’d made a mistake letting Ruddock go. They had no reason to kill him.

“So you see our problem, Élise,” Mr. Carroll was saying. “For now you are just a young girl with fanciful notions. But you will one day be Grand Master and you have not one but two key principles in opposition to our own. Letting you leave England is out of the question, I’m afraid.”

His hand went to the hilt of his sword. I tensed, trying to get a sense of the odds: me and Mr. Weatherall versus three Carroll fighters as well as the three Carrolls themselves.

They were terrible odds.

“May,” Mr. Carroll was saying, “would you like to do the honors? You can be blooded at last.”

She smiled obsequiously at her father, and I realized that she was the same as me: she’d been trained in swordplay but had yet to kill. I was to be her first. What an honor.

From behind her, Mrs. Carroll proffered a sword, a short sword like my own, custom-built for her size and weight. The light gleamed from an ornate, curved handguard, the sword handed to her as though it were some kind of religious artifact, and she turned in order to take it. “Are you ready for this, smell-bag?” she said as she turned.

Oh yes, I was ready. Mr. Weatherall and my mother had always told me that all sword fights begin in the mind and most end with the first blow. It was all about who made the first move.

So I made the first move. I danced forward and rammed the point of my sword through the back of May Carroll’s neck and out through her mouth.

First blood was to me. Not exactly the most honorable killing, but at that very moment in time, honor was the last thing on my mind. I was more interested in staying alive.

ix

It was the last thing they expected, to see their daughter impaled on my sword. I saw Mrs. Carroll’s eyes widen in disbelief in the half second before she screamed in shock and anguish.

Meanwhile I’d used my forward motion to shoulder-charge Mr. Carroll, yanking my sword from May Carroll’s neck and hitting him with such force that he pinwheeled back off balance and splayed into the doorway. May Carroll had sunk, dead before she hit the floor, painting it with her blood; Mrs. Carroll was rooting in her purse but I ignored her. Finding my feet, I crouched and spun in anticipation of an attack from behind.

It came. The swordsman lumbering toward me had a look of startled disbelief plastered across his face, unable to believe the sudden turn of events. I stayed low and met his sword with my blade, fending off his attack and pivoting at the same time, taking his feet from him with an outflung leg so that he crashed to the floor.

There was no time to finish him. By the window Mr. Weatherall was battling but he was struggling. I saw it in his face, a look of impending defeat and confusion, as though he couldn’t understand why his two opponents were still standing. Like this had never happened before.

I ran one of his assailants through. The second man pulled away in surprise, finding he suddenly had two opponents rather than one, but with the first swordsman pulling himself to his feet, Mr. Carroll up and reaching for his sword, and Mrs. Carroll at last freeing something from her purse that turned out to be a tiny, three-barrel turnover pistol, I decided I’d pushed my luck far enough.

It was time to go the same way as my friend Mr. Ruddock.

“The window,” I shouted, and Mr. Weatherall threw me a look that said, “You must be joking,” before I put two hands to his chest and pushed so that he tumbled bottom first out the window and onto the sloped roof outside.

Just as I did there was a crack, the sound of a ball making contact with something soft, and in the window a soft spray of blood, like a red lace sheet suddenly drawn across it, and even as I wondered whether the sound I had heard was the ball hitting me, or if the haze of blood in the window was mine, I hurled myself through the opening, smacked onto the tiles on the other side and slid on my stomach to Mr. Weatherall, who had come to a halt on the lip of the roof.

I saw now that the ball had hit his lower leg, the blood staining his breeches dark. His boots scrabbled on the tiles, which loosened and fell into the yard, accompanied by the sound of shouts and running feet below. There came a cry from above us and a head appeared at the window. I saw the face of Mrs. Carroll contorted with anguish and fury, her need to kill the woman who killed her daughter overriding everything else in her life—including the need to remove herself from the casement so her men could get through and come after us.

Instead, she waved the turnover pistol at us. With a snarl and bared teeth she aimed it at me and surely couldn’t miss unless she was jostled from behind . . .

Which was exactly what happened. Her shot was as wild as it was wide, spanging harmlessly off the tiles to our side.

Later, as we raced toward Dover in a horse and carriage, Mr. Weatherall would tell me that it was common for a barrel of a turnover pistol to ignite the other barrels, and that “it could be nasty” for whoever it was doing the firing.

That’s precisely what happened to Mrs. Carroll. I heard a fizzing then a popping sound and the pistol came skidding down the roof toward us while up above Mrs. Carroll screamed as her hand, now a shade of red and black, began to bleed.

I took the opportunity to heave Mr. Weatherall’s good leg off the side of the roof. He hung on by his fingertips, screwing his face up in pain but refusing to scream as I manhandled his other leg over then shouted, “Sorry about this,” as I clambered over him and, dangling, jumped to the courtyard below.

It was a short drop, but even so it knocked the wind out of us, sweat popping on Mr. Weatherall’s face as he chewed back the pain of his shot leg. As he stood I commandeered a horse and carriage, and he limped to take his place beside me.

It all happened in a moment. We thundered out of the courtyard and into Fleet Street. I glanced up and saw faces at the window of the guest room. They would be after us soon, I knew, and I drove the horses as hard as I dared, silently promising them a tasty snack when we reached Dover.

In the end, it took us six hours, and I could at least thank God that there was no sign of the Carrolls behind us on the route. In fact, I didn’t see them until we had pushed off Dover beach in a rowing boat, making our way toward the packet, which, we’d been told, was about to weigh anchor.

Our oarsmen grunted as he pulled us closer to the larger vessel, and I watched as two coaches, both bearing the Carroll crest, arrived on the coast road at the top of the beach. We were drawing away, being swallowed up by the ink black sea, with no light of our own, the oarsmen guided by the light of the packet, so they couldn’t see us from the shore. But we were able to see them, indistinct but illuminated by their swinging lanterns as they scurried about in search of their quarry.

I couldn’t see Mrs. Carroll’s face but could imagine the mix of hatred and grief she wore like a mask. Mr. Weatherall, barely awake, his wounded leg hidden beneath travel blankets, watched. He saw me do a discreet
bras d’honneur
and nudged me.

“Even if they could see you, they wouldn’t know what you were doing. It’s only rude in France. Here, try this.” He stuck up two fingers so I did the same.

The hull of the packet was not far away now. I could feel its bulky presence in the night.

“They’ll come after you, you know,” he said, his chin tucked into his chest. “You killed their daughter.”

“Not just that. I’ve still got their letters.”

“The ones that got burned up were a decoy?”

“Some of my letters to Arno.”

“Perhaps they’ll never find out about that. Either way, they’ll come after you.”

They had been swallowed up by the night. England was now just a mass of land, the huge, moon-dappled cliffs rising to our left.

“I know,” I told him, “but I’ll be ready for them.”

“Just make sure you are.”

9 A
PRIL
1788

“I need your help.”

It was raining. The sort of rain that feels like knives on your skin, that batters your eyelids and pummels at your back. It had plastered my hair to my head and when I spoke the water spouted off my mouth, but at least it disguised the tears and snot as I stood on the steps of the Maison Royale at Saint-Cyr, trying not to fall over from sheer exhaustion, and watched Madame Levene’s face pale from the shock of seeing me, as though I were a ghost appearing on the steps of the school in the dead of night.

And standing there, with the carriage behind me, Mr. Weatherall asleep or unconscious inside, and Helene looking anxiously from the window, gaping through the sluicing rain to where I stood on the steps of the school, I wondered if I was doing the right thing.

And for a second, as Madame Levene took in the sight of me, I thought she might simply tell me to go to hell for all the trouble I’d caused and slam the door in my face. And if she did that, then who could blame her?

“I’ve got nowhere else to go,” I said. “Please help me.”

And she didn’t slam the door in my face. She said, “My dear, of course.”

And I dropped into her arms, half-dead with fatigue.

10 A
PRIL
1788

Was ever a man more brave than Mr. Weatherall? Not once had he shouted out in pain on the journey to Dover, but by the time we boarded the packet he had lost a lot of blood. I met Helene on the packet, the Dover cliffs shrinking in the distance, my time in London becoming a memory already, and we had laid Mr. Weatherall on a section of the deck where we had a little privacy.

Helene knelt to him, placing cool hands to his forehead.

“You’re an angel,” he said, with a smile up at her, then slipped into unconsciousness.

We bandaged him as best we could, and by the time we reached the shores of Calais he had recovered some of his color. But he was still in pain, and as far as we knew, the ball remained inside his leg, and when we changed his dressings, the wound gleamed at us, showing no signs of healing.

The school had a nurse but Madame Levene had fetched the doctor from Châteaufort, a man experienced in dealing with war wounds.

“It’s going to have to come off, ain’t it?” Mr. Weatherall had said to him from the bed, five of us crammed into his bedchamber.

The doctor nodded and I felt my tears prick my eyes.

“Don’t you worry about it,” Mr. Weatherall was saying. “I knew the bloody thing was going to have to come off, right from the second she got me. Sliding on the bloody roof in me own blood, musket ball stuck in me leg, I thought, ‘That’s it—it’s a goner.’ Sure enough.”

He looked at the doctor and swallowed, a little fear showing on his face at last. “Are you fast?”

The doctor nodded, adding with a slightly proud air, “I can do a leg in forty-four seconds.”

Mr. Weatherall looked impressed. “You use a serrated blade?”

“And razor-sharp . . .”

He took a deep, regretful breath. “Then what are we waiting for?” he said. “Let’s get it over with.”

Jacques and I held Mr. Weatherall, and the doctor was as good as his word, being fast and thorough, even when Mr. Weatherall passed out from the pain. When it was over he wrapped Mr. Weatherall’s leg in brown paper and took it away, and the following day returned with a pair of crutches for him.