Revenant Eve (26 page)

I considered that. Spies in these strange days, with rapid change in the French government ringing outward, sometimes violently, could hardly be defined so simply as ‘bad’ or ‘good.’ Meanwhile, I knew the
broad outlines of what was to come, even if I didn’t know all the regional details. Yet she was waiting for me to answer, so I said, “Perhaps the question is better put, are they dangerous to you? So far they have been civil.”

“Yes,” Aurélie agreed with an emphatic nod. “And I do like playing music. And learning Latin. But it must end, for they think me a boy.” I could tell from her tone that she didn’t want it to end. She liked traveling with them, and who could blame her, after the horror of her initial experience in Dieppe?

So I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to risk losing her trust again, especially as I still had to get her to Dobrenica. And how were we supposed to save the country? No clue.

She put the mirror away and slipped back down to the road.

Mord rejoined them a short time later, saying nothing as Jaska went right on with the Latin lesson. But as they approached another village, and Aurélie wandered a little ways off to peer at some lovely deep red climbing roses at the side of a cottage, Mord looked around. Again, he seemed to stare right at me before he said in German, “Something’s going on. I counted ten signals in three minutes.”

Jaska’s answer was in French as he pointed out the sign of a local inn. “Shall we try this place? I don’t like the looks of the sky.”

The thunder held off for a few days, then crashed over them in a spectacular storm late one afternoon. The trio got a gig at a prosperous inn directly on the riverside, where it caught some of the Seine traffic. Everything started well, if you didn’t count Mord’s silence all day. They had developed a standard list of tunes, including some of Aurélie’s fae songs. But as the daylight faded beyond the low-pressing clouds, Mord, who left the singing to Jaska, began drinking heavily. He’d never done that before.

Aurélie’s gaze followed the journey of pale liquid from glass to lip, over and over. Mord played with his eyes closed, his profile severe; as usual, some of the young women in the gathering watched him, though he seldom responded past a quick smile and a flippant answer. The light was low enough to mask the grime and shabby, patched clothes. He
made a romantic contrast against the fire, his sharp-etched, mournful face so pale, framed by his tangled dark hair.

Jaska, too, was watching Mord, but his expression was wary.

Finally Mord set the cup down with exquisite care, as if its placement was a matter of cosmic importance, then he stood up, grabbed his violin and bow, and left.

Jaska gave Aurélie a rueful smile, and the two of them launched into a popular dance tune. Promptly the young paired up and began romping their way through the
Monaco
.

It seemed that Aurélie and Jaska would cover Mord’s inexplicable absence, but then the innkeeper’s wife said during the lull after a dance, “
Alors
, citizens! You must see this. I have never witnessed the like!”

Jaska cursed under his breath as many of the customers ran to the windows, then threw them open. Rain dripped from the eaves, but the storm had lifted, leaving a sky full of racing dark clouds. In the west, the sun rested on a bluff, the sky above like melted gold shading upwards to the cobalt blue of sunset, departing ragged purple clouds edged with fire.

Silhouetted against that golden sun was a tall, straight figure. Seen in silhouette, Mord was the very picture of romance, even to the drips from his wet hair that caught the light before they fell in diamond sparkles all around him. Birds dipped and dove, swirled and circled around him, blackbirds and starlings, skylarks and jackdaws.

That was nothing to the sound.

How to describe that music? The fiddler had vanished, replaced by a violin master. The closest music to the passion, the joy and grief expressed in those complicated, soaring flights is Ernest Bloch’s
Nigun in the Baal Shem Suite
. Though it wouldn’t be written for a couple of centuries, the comparison is eerily appropriate.

Since pretty much the entire audience stood at the windows, Jaska and Aurélie remained with them. For a time they stood in silence.

“Why does he do that?” Aurélie finally asked. “If the rain comes back, it will ruin his violin.”

“Then he will clean and revarnish it. Tonight is the fifteenth of Nissan, which the Jews call Pesach,” Jaska murmured.

Aurélie said, “He is Jewish? I thought they had beards.”

“He shaved his off.”

“And they don’t eat the same meats.”

“He makes a point of partaking in
treif
every day he can get it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He’s an apostate. Though some Fridays at sunset, if he’s been drinking enough, I find him outside with his Siddur in hand—even though he cannot see it to read—disputing the wisdom of the Baal Shem Tov with his father’s ghost.”

“His father’s ghost?”

“He says he sees them all around. He says there’s one following you.” Aurélie flushed but didn’t answer as Jaska went on, “I’ve never seen any ghosts, so it all may merely be the effect of drink.” Jaska shook his head. “He’s angry, that’s all.”

“All?” Aurélie’s crooked smile was tentative. “My Nanny Hiasinte once said that anger eats the soul. Why is he angry?”

“You know what happened at Praga? To Berek Joselewicz?” Jaska’s voice dropped a note, roughening. “To the Great Kosciusko?”

Okay, Praga was vaguely familiar, and Kosciusko I recognized at once. But that still didn’t explain the connection, like if Mord had been fighting with or against the famous general.

On each name Aurélie gave a tiny shake of her head, her eyes wide.

Jaska’s mouth was bitter as he looked down, sighed, and picked up his hautbois. He began playing very softly, one of the madrigals from
Lagrime di San Pietro.

There was no more conversation. Aurélie seemed lost in reverie as I thought,
So Mord does see me
. That made three people, including Nanny Hiasinte. Four, if you counted that fae, but I wasn’t sure they could be termed people. The weird thing was that Mord was the second to see me without the aid of the mirror, Nanny Hiasinte being the first.

Mord returned when the light was gone, and again he seemed to look right at me. As he set bow to chin, his movement was tracked by Aurélie’s thoughtful gaze. He ignored exclamations and questions. Jaska pumped the regal, and Mord played the first few measures of the
lively dance
Les Deux Coqs.
The other two joined in, and the moment passed.

But it wasn’t forgotten. Why is it that a guy has only to reveal depths of emotional pain to rivet the interest of every romantic girl around?

Because Aurélie was romantic, of course. And because he was striking in appearance, and so kind, and musical, and mercurial…Aurélie had got over James, but she was in the process of shifting all that tender interest onto Mord the mystery man, who couldn’t possibly be Dobrenican royalty.

M
ORD BEHAVED AS IF
that sunset on the bluff had never happened, and somehow this total shutout only increased Aurélie’s interest. She didn’t pester him with questions, but her manner toward him became tentative, almost tender.

This raised another hideous question: What if they’d be happy together? Had I any right to interfere? But the horribleness of balancing my life and future against the possible happiness of a couple right now was mitigated by the fact that Mord clearly thought she was a boy and showed no interest in her except as a fellow musician.

This made it easier to try to interfere without seeming to interfere. I poked her one evening when she was alone, coming back from a visit to the outhouse.

She took out the mirror at once. “Duppy Kim?”

“You’re forgetting to be René,” I warned her. “Do you want them to guess that you aren’t a boy?”

A deep blush gave her away. “Mord doesn’t see me. He’s short-sighted like Diana, though not in the same way, for he can see at a distance, but she cannot. And Jaska never looks my way, did you notice? He looks at the road for danger, or at the sky for storms, or at his books or musical instruments. But he never looks at me, even when we talk.”

“Do you want to tell them that you are a girl?”

“Should I?”

There were so many things I could say, but I had to think ahead to the questions that would follow. “They’ve been good companions, but I believe they are both army deserters. Maybe not from the same army. And deserters don’t have the best reputation for behavior with women. It might be safest not to tell them. Especially since you plan to part when you reach Paris.”

She sighed, her expression wistful. But she didn’t disagree.

A few more days on the road brought them near Paris.

Aurélie withdrew, her troubled emotional state bothering me enough to attribute to it a growing sense of unease. I certainly felt it.

The last day, when they reached the outskirts of Paris, this before-the-thunderstorm feeling coalesced into the deep bone chill you find in caves underground.

Maybe it was the ghosts. Except for those floating above the sunken portion of Port Royal in Jamaica, I hadn’t seen any until now. The closer we got to Paris, the more of them I saw, some bright and glittery, reflecting a quality of light different from the hazy spring sunlight. Others were vaporous as wisps of smoke.

The traffic increased steadily, as did the number of buildings, many undergoing repair, renovation, or rip-down-begin-again construction.

During the last couple of days the trio continued to play for their supper, but the guys’ conduct had altered. Instead of one of them vanishing to hilltops to watch for signals, they engaged customers in talk about Paris news.

And there was plenty of it, most concerning the Concordat of Easter, and its
Te Deum
in the Notre Dame cathedral, which had not heard the Mass echo in its vaults for several years. Napoleon had shown up in all his glory—liveried servants, trumpets—and the churches were to officially reopen. “Everything like the old days of the kings, except no king,” said a man with joiner’s tools at his belt.

“
Pardieu!
” An older man spat upon the floor. “He will be king yet. 18th Brumaire, it was the Directors and the Council of Five Hundred
thrown off their curule chairs, red robes and all. Next it’ll be
Your Majesty
, you watch.”

“Not even the Luxembourg Palace was good enough,” the innkeeper’s wife observed sarcastically, strong arms akimbo, and I wondered if she had numbered among the roaming female gangs during the Terror who had lynched people who didn’t look properly
sans-culottes
. “He’s moved into the Tuileries!”

“Peace, daughter. If he so desires to be king, let him. At least we can walk the streets again and not fear being dragged off by the mob if we forget and say
pardieu
,” an oldster said with a meaningful look at Citizeness Innkeeper. The other elderly people in the common room laughed, then the old man went on with the expansive tone of the person who knows the audience is on his side, “If he wishes, the Corsican can call himself High Mandarin, or Grand Turk, if we may be done with Madame la Guillotine, and Frenchman fighting Frenchman.”

“Yes! A drink to that!”

Mord struck up
La Marseilles
, which ended the discussion.

The next day we reached the inner city. When the road veered off the bend in the Seine and headed south toward the heart of Paris, it broadened into a boulevard ever more crowded with both the living and the dead.

I had never before encountered so many ghosts for so sustained a time. The chill came from a specific direction, but as usual I could not look around, being bound to Aurélie, who seemed unaware of any change in atmosphere.

The three walked in silence for a long time, until Mord abruptly said, “I shall see if the lens maker is still there.” He touched his eyes, then turned an absent smile Aurélie’s way. “To be denied reading one more hour than necessary is to be denied life. Fare you well, Citizen René.” He walked off without a backward glance.

That left the other two alone, Aurélie gazing wistfully after Mord. Jaska fidgeted with his walking stick, looked all around, and then at last faced Aurélie. “Do you know what you want to do, now that we’re here? I’ve been in Paris before. I can point you in the right direction.”

Her chin came up. “I’m going to seek news of my homeland from a connection who assuredly might know.”

Jaska said, “Where lives this person?”

“From the news we overheard, she is now at the Tuileries,” Aurélie said.

Jaska’s brows twitched upward. “Of course! You mean the wife of the First Consul, who I understand came from one of the islands.” He pointed. “That street, last I heard, was called the Rue du Mont Blanc. I don’t know for certain if you’ll suffer a fate most sanguinary if you use the wrong name anymore, but to be safest, just keep due south. That should lead you straight to the Tuileries.”

“I thank you.” Aurélie straightened her shoulders. “Should I relinquish to you your sword? The regal is yours as well.”