Love's First Light
Copyright © 2009 by Jamie Carie Masopust
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
978-0-8054-4813-9
Published by B&H Publishing Group,
Nashville, Tennessee
Dewey Decimal Classification: F
Subject Heading: LOVE STORIES \ FRANCE—
HISTORY—1789–1799, REVOLUTION—FICTION
HISTORY—1789–1799, REVOLUTION—FICTION
Scripture quoted from the King James Version.
Publisher’s Note: This novel is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, and incidents are either productsof the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.
Names, characters, places, and incidents are either productsof the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.
Dedicated to Stacy Crays, sister of my heart.
This one is for you . . .
Acknowledgments
To Narelle Mollet, my beautiful Aussie friend! Thank you for the critique of this book. Your perspective on all things Christian fiction and your love for God helped make this story what it is. I am so blessed to have you in my life!
To Dave Bender, my scientific genius neighbor. Thanks for allowing me to ply you with questions about light and color (and a bunch of other topics I can’t remember now). I am sure a future book will need your help too!
And finally, to Jordan, Seth, and Nicholas, my three boys. Thanks for being so self-sufficient when I need to work. Thanks for giving up time with me and helping to take care of each other. You are each the light of my life.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
1789—Paris, France
They were coming. They were coming! Christophé shoved his little sister, twelve-year-old Émilie, through a hidden door in the wall, quickly following after her. He held the door open, waiting for the rest of his family, but they didn’t appear. The sounds of the soldiers were close. He had no choice. He let the panel fall shut with sudden finality, leaving them in utter darkness.
His sister whimpered and clung to his broad shoulders behind the pearl-paneled, gilt-molded wall. He held her tight against his quivering body, his palm over her ear, pressing her other ear into his chest so that she wouldn’t hear their mother’s screams.
Too late . . .
His heart felt sick, leaden. They’d captured the rest of the St. Laurent family. He clasped Émilie’s filmy sleeved dress in his fist and willed the evil away.
Too late . . .
His heart felt sick, leaden. They’d captured the rest of the St. Laurent family. He clasped Émilie’s filmy sleeved dress in his fist and willed the evil away.
Together they stilled their bodies into stark fear as they heard the rolling wheels of the guillotine. Christophé heard a voice command his mother, the Countess Maria Louisa St. Laurent, to come forward. At twenty-three, Christophé recognized that they’d chosen her first to heighten the horror. He clenched his eyes as the rattle of wooden wheels over the hard floor softened when they met carpet, then stilled. It had reached its place of death and damnation. A heavy thud sounded on the other side of the wall as his mother, shrieking, was locked into place. Wails filled the room. His throat ached with silent screams. A second of shocked silence.
And then the thick thud of the blade.
The eldest son was next. Christophé heard his older brother Louis’s heavy grunts as they forced him to the guillotine. He remembered when Louis had sounded like a boy, and then his voice changed. Still, there was the occasional squeak that they weren’t to notice. Finally, when his voice no longer squeaked, his brother shot up four inches in a single summer. How proud Christophé had been of that cool, confident young man.
A guttural yell against cloth broke into his thoughts. He closed his eyes and willed it away.
But this nightmare was far from over. Jean Paul would be next—and so he was. The brother who laughed with him and wrestled with him, who ran across fields with him long after Christophé should have outgrown such things.
Jean Paul—brother of my heart!
Jean Paul—brother of my heart!
Christophé’s whole being became stilled screams.
His body jerked as the sound of the blade sliced through the darkness. He nearly lost consciousness. His body grew weak, his breath vanished in terror. He lost the strength to hold Émilie. He could only blink in the dark and feel his eyes flow with tears that seemed never ending. His shirt and Émilie’s hair became soaked with his silent grieving.
A sudden sound rang out. A father’s cry. He begged and promised things he taught them never to say. The Count of St. Laurent.
Laurie,
his mother called him. Their father. A husband. Now, in the end, just a man.
Laurie,
his mother called him. Their father. A husband. Now, in the end, just a man.
Christophé heard threats shouted into his father’s face. He pictured him bent for the blade, his hands tied behind his back. “Where are they?” some evil demanded. “You will only prolong their misery.”
“We will find them.” Another voice, as subtle a threat as a rapier thrust.
This voice sounded familiar. From the few times he had visited their chateau, Christophé could picture a narrow face and wide-set eyes that seemed to see everything. He remembered a cuffing on the chin when he was a child, dark eyes glaring into his as the man stood in the corner of their crowded salon. Christophé would never forget those piercing eyes.
That evil smile.
He couldn’t remember the name, but he knew the face. It was as imprinted now as if he’d seen him drop the blade himself.
Christophé vowed he would never forget.
Their father did not give up the hiding place of his two youngest. He said only, over and over, “Don’t kill me. Please, don’t kill me.”
And no matter how hard Christophé pressed his hand against his sister’s quivering body, he knew she heard it too. The final
thwack
of a blade . . .
thwack
of a blade . . .
The end to any life they had ever known.
RUN.
Run from Paris.
It was the one thought that kept him sane while trapped in the room. He had to protect Émilie.
He
had to save her.
He
had to save her.
They waited in the dark smallness of the space, their ragged breath making the air hot and still. They listened in panting silence while men ran about the room, ransacking and looting, searching for them. They heard the glass break and the fabric rip. Footsteps pounded around the place where they hid—close, causing them to cling together, and then above them and all around them. It seemed a hundred men had come to participate in the fall of the house of St. Laurent. Émilie had not stopped shaking for the first two hours, and then, suddenly, went slack in his arms. He held her tight, knowing she had fallen into an exhaustion of body and emotion. He was thankful for it, hoping she would sleep and that he alone would commit the full horror to memory. The muscles of his arms and back quivered with the strain of endurance. But he wouldn’t lay her down; he would not allow the slightest movement that might awaken her.
He didn’t know how long to stay hidden. It frightened him, this indecision. He was old enough to be strong for the both of them, but he felt his place as leader slip . . . with two older brothers, he’d never needed to fill that role. He’d been allowed his eccentricities, his head always bent over some experiment or laboring over equations or taking something apart to see the mechanisms. So he continued to wait. Long after all noise had ceased, long after they had both slept and then woke and then slept again, neither saying a word. He was afraid to open the door, afraid of what they were sure to see, but he knew that a full day must have passed and the cover of night was their only hope of escape.
Christophé pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and whispered his first words since they’d entered the room. “I’m to open the door now, Émilie.” Then he folded the cloth and put it gently to her eyes. She reared back, afraid, but didn’t speak; her breathing grew more rapid as she shook her head. “To protect you,” he insisted in a voice meant to soothe. “I don’t want you to see whatever is on the other side of that door. I would save you that memory.”
Her body stilled. Then she bowed her head and began to cry. She was only twelve, and Christophé could tell that the thought had not yet occurred to her. He allowed her to cry silently into his chest, wetting his shirt, his arms tight around her until she was spent. Then he lifted the cloth and tied the knot behind her head.
The hidden door creaked as he opened it, causing him to stop and listen. Nothing but moonlight spilled in. The air in the room was tainted with the smell of blood, but Christophé could see the illumination of familiar shapes in the light through the long windows. The portable guillotine—the kind they transported to battlefields—and the bodies of his family had been taken away. He kept the blindfold on his sister, though. There was enough blood staining the Persian carpet for a lifetime of nightmares.
Once out of the room, they crept, hand in hand, through the great hall and toward his father’s library. Christophé hoped to find his father’s gold still hidden there. He remembered how his father had taken his three sons into this room and explained his escape plan to them. After the storming of the Bastille, where a mob had torn the famed prison apart brick by brick, a new wave of panic had struck the nobles. Some fled, some hid their valuables but refused to leave Paris—all watched the new political dealings of the Convention with leaden hearts, angry that King Louis and his queen, Marie Antoinette, were now little more than prisoners, sitting on a barrel of gunpowder, and trying to remain dignified in their palace prison. That is when the Count St. Laurent had called his sons home and made a family plan.
Other books
The Art of Friendship by Erin Kaye
All The Turns of Light by Frank Tuttle
Exiled: Kenly's Story (A Talented Novel) by Sophie Davis
This Can't be Life by Cannon, Shakara
The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller, Anderson, Jeff
The Oblate's Confession by William Peak
The Orion Plague by David VanDyke
Christmas with the Boss by Seaton, Annie
The Tiger's Egg by Jon Berkeley
Two for Tamara by Elle Boon
