Surrender to a Stranger (2 page)

“Any ideas?” prodded Fouquier-Tinville.

Jacqueline hesitated. There were several possibilities, but without proof she would not denounce anyone. The action could not save her life anyway, but it would undoubtedly extinguish another. She shook her head.

“Send her to the national razor!” cried out a woman over her knitting. “She is an enemy to the Republic!”

The public prosecutor nodded with satisfaction. “Perhaps the jury has heard enough to render a verdict. I could continue with my questioning, but in light of the evidence already presented against the defendant—”

“Has the jury heard enough?” demanded the judge president.

The weary members of the jury nodded that they had, and were quickly removed to an adjoining room to discuss their verdict. Normally the prisoner would also be removed from the courtroom so the Tribunal could continue with its session, but as the last prisoner of the day, Jacqueline was permitted to remain standing in the dock.

She scanned the audience as she waited for the jury to return. It was getting late, and the men and women who had enjoyed the painful ordeal of the prisoners who faced the dreaded Revolutionary Tribunal that day were packing up their belongings to head home. She searched the crowd for someone she knew. She suspected that Henriette was there somewhere, for her loyal maid would not be able to stay away, even though Jacqueline had expressly forbidden her to come. She did not see François-Louis anywhere, and he would surely stick out in such a rough-looking crowd. His absence did not surprise her. Her betrothed was not a man who took unnecessary risks, and he undoubtedly feared his association with her would soon be called into question. She was sorry for that, and despite her disappointment that no one was there to offer support through their presence, she could not fault him for his desire to be cautious.

For the most part the members of the audience ignored her as they gathered up their food and drink and discussed her fate among themselves. Her eyes came to rest upon an old man who was sitting at the back of the courtroom. He did not speak to anyone around him, apparently uninterested in sharing their harsh enthusiasm over what was certain to be a guilty verdict. He was dressed entirely in black, and his head was covered with a battered, low crowned hat that bore a revolutionary cockade. The scraggly hair spilling out from underneath his head dress was snowy white, the sallow skin that sagged upon his face spotted and lined with age. He hunched forward on the bench, his pale hands gripping the top of a cane that was evidently very much needed to give his ancient, fragile body support. He stared vacantly into space, apparently oblivious to the coarse remarks about “the aristo whore” who would soon find herself lying down for Sanson, the executioner. Someone jostled him and laughingly asked him a question while pointing at her, and the old man smiled and nodded. He turned his eyes to her and appeared surprised to find her looking at him. They locked gazes for the briefest of seconds, and Jacqueline found herself transfixed by the intensity of his stare. Then he turned abruptly and made some remark to the burly man seated beside him, which caused the lout to shake with booming laughter before wiping his nose on his sleeve. Jacqueline looked away.

The jury returned after a few minutes with a verdict of guilty. The audience cheered.

“Citizeness Doucette, you have been found guilty by this court of committing crimes against the Republic of France. Do you have anything you wish to say in your defense before you are sentenced?” asked the judge president.

Jacqueline gripped the bar of the dock as she looked at the judges and jury with contempt. “You have found me guilty of trying to protect my family from the cruelty and corruption that has hooked its claws into France,” she began, her voice tight and frigid. “You have already murdered my father, and undoubtedly you will soon do the same to my brother. Do you think I believe you would have stopped there? By attacking the scum who invaded my home, I merely saved you the time and expense of sending another party to the Château de Lambert to arrest me later.” She paused and stared hard at them. “My advice to you, my fellow citizens, is that you enjoy today, and tomorrow, and the day after that, because your days are sadly numbered. By murdering the noblesse, and the wealthy bourgeois, and anyone who has the courage to speak out against you, you cannot solve the enormous problems that are choking the breath out of France.” She gestured to the men and women in the audience, who had settled back into their seats to listen to her. “It is only a matter of time before these people to whom you have promised so much grow weary of your fancy rhetoric,” she continued. “Ceremonies of liberty and reason and the constant chop of the guillotine do not put food on a table or clothing on a body.” She looked at Fouquier-Tinville and smiled. “Even you, fellow citizen, will not be exempt,” she told him with certainty. “But my sisters will be safe. And when reason and justice have been restored to France, they will return.”

“Citizeness Doucette, the hour grows late and your political opinions are no longer of interest to this court,” interrupted the judge president impatiently. “Since you do not seem to have anything to say which would alter the verdict of this jury, I find you guilty of the charges laid against you, and hereby sentence you to death by the guillotine. This execution will take place immediately,” he added as he began to shuffle together the papers on his bench.

The audience, which had been relatively quiet during Jacqueline’s speech, began to cheer and applaud the court’s decision. One of the court clerks laid down his pen and pulled out his watch to examine the time. He motioned to Fouquier-Tinville to come over to him. After exchanging a few words, the public prosecutor shrugged and turned to face the bench.

“It would appear the last tumbril departed for the Place de la Revolution some half hour ago,” he informed the judge president.

“Then Citizeness Doucette may be returned to her cell in the Conciergerie until tomorrow,” amended the judge. “But the sentence is to be carried out within twenty-four hours.”

Four members of the National Guard stepped up to the dock to escort Jacqueline out of the courtroom. They surrounded her as she walked down the aisle. The crowd around them began to surge in, cursing and trying to grab at her clothes and her hair.

“Pretty hair—too bad Sanson will have to cut it so the blade can find your neck—” sang out one toothless hag who shot her hand in between the guards and gave Jacqueline’s hair a yank. The pins came loose and the rough coiffure she had managed to fashion before she left her cell sagged down around her shoulders.

“See how proudly the bitch walks,” commented a man with a face reddened by too much cheap wine. He spat at her. “Take that, bitch.”

“Let’s see how proud she is tomorrow when she lies down and puts her head through the republican window,” said a skinny youth whose bony shoulders slumped forward at an unnatural angle as he laughed.

“Or when the tart’s body is tossed headless into the pit,” added another with a sneer.

Jacqueline kept her eyes straight ahead and used the comments to fuel her sudden hatred of these people. The soldiers closed ranks around her so no one else could touch her, and she was grateful for that. She had heard stories of atrocities committed against arrested people who never made it as far as the court, or even the prison, for that matter, and she supposed she was grateful that she had not been openly butchered by an angry mob. At least the guillotine was quick and, she hoped, painless.

The new Republic of France, birthplace of Liberty, Equality, and Reason, was a world gone mad. The men who had wrested power from their king, insisting that even a monarch who ruled with divine right was answerable to his people, had quickly discovered they were no better equipped to feed or clothe millions of angry, starving peasants than Louis XVI had been. It was a sobering realization. They blamed the soaring inflation and lack of food on a royalist conspiracy, and removed Louis’s head. But then the wars against Great Britain, Holland, and Spain began, spiraling the national debt out of control, and the crops continued to fail. The people, now proudly called citizens, continued to starve. And so they removed the head of their former queen, Marie-Antoinette. And still they were freezing and miserable. Surely someone was to blame?

The former noblesse, who for centuries had made their fortunes on the sweat and misery of others, were undoubtedly the cause of so much want. They were leeches, traitors, enemies of the revolution. True, they had already been stripped of their titles and their privileges. But now they must pay for their crimes with their blood. France must be purged of her enemies. And thanks to the new Law of Suspects, any loyal citizen could denounce another and cause their arrest without the slightest trace of evidence. The fifty-odd prisons of Paris swelled with elegant inmates who had no hope of escaping the razor-sharp justice of the guillotine. Their deaths did not feed the population, but somehow the constant river of blood that flowed out of the Place de la Revolution made the people feel something was being done.

The prison called La Conciergerie adjoined the Palais de Justice in which the Revolutionary Tribunal held its sessions. The severe, imposing castle dated back to the end of the thirteenth century and had served as a prison since the 1500s. Dark, cold, damp, and evil smelling, the Conciergerie was widely recognized as the worst prison in Paris. As Jacqueline walked with the guards along twisting corridors and up narrow staircases, their way lit only by the faint glow of an occasional torch mounted on the thick stone walls, she could hear the scratches and squeals of rats scurrying out of the way of their feet. She had grown used to those sounds and was no longer terrified by them. The one time a rat had decided to invade her small cell she had consolidated fear with fury and smashed the loathsome creature over the head with her soup bowl until it lay dead. She decided if she was to die in prison, it would not be from the plague.

The fumes that assaulted her as they reached the floor of her cell made her stomach wrench and her throat constrict. The hallway was thick with the stench of sewage and sickness, of unwashed bodies and fouled floors. She lifted her hand to her nose and tried to breathe through her mouth, but the fetid air was so bad it threatened to choke her. She pressed her lips together and forced herself to take small, shallow breaths. It had taken her days to grow used to the stink when she first arrived here. Her short trip to the Palais de Justice had been an almost welcome reprieve from her miserable surroundings, and her nose had quickly grown used to inhaling cleaner air. As she was only staying here one more night, she doubted she would be able to adjust to the stench again.

“What’s she doing back here?” demanded Citizen Gagnon, the jailer of the wing they had come to.

“She is sentenced to death, but it was too late to take her to meet Sanson,” commented one of the guards indifferently.

“Missed the last cart, did you?” asked Gagnon, his voice heavy with sarcasm. He lifted a torch from the wall and stood before Jacqueline. He was a huge bear of a man, with enormous shoulders and thick, strong arms straining beneath the dirty, ragged clothes he wore. His skin was black with years of grime, and when he smiled he exposed an uneven set of brown, rotting teeth. Unlike most of the prisoners, who tried to wash themselves and their clothes as best they could in the icy water of a fountain located in an open courtyard below, the jailers were quite accustomed to their own filth.

“Well, my beauty, you’re in luck, because your room is still available,” he joked as he led them down a hall while sorting through an enormous iron ring of keys.

He stopped in front of a wooden door with a tiny grille window and inserted a key into the heavy lock. The door swung open with a groan to expose a small cell, perhaps nine feet square, accommodating a trestle bed with a coarse woolen blanket, a table, and a chair. Jacqueline raised her chin, drew her shawl up around her shoulders, and calmly stepped into the room. She could hear the hasty footsteps of the soldiers retreating down the hall. Undoubtedly they were as anxious to leave the foulness of the place as she was. She examined her surroundings for a moment and then turned to face her keeper.

“My candle is gone,” she pointed out. “I would like it back.”

“Certainly, certainly,” replied Gagnon agreeably. “You remember the fee?”

“I paid for the one that was in here,” Jacqueline stated flatly.

“Ah, but I was not expecting you to return, so I sold it to another,” he told her with a shrug. He slowly looked her up and down, causing Jacqueline to draw her shawl even tighter around her shoulders. “Have you any money?”

“I will write my maid and instruct her to bring some tomorrow,” she replied.

The jailer shook his head. “Tomorrow you will expose your pretty little neck to the hot blade of the guillotine. How do I know your maid will come and pay me?” he demanded.

“Because she is a woman of honor and she will see to it that the debts I acknowledge are paid,” answered Jacqueline impatiently. The cell had no window and was oppressively dark. If she had to spend her last night in blackness, unable to write a letter to Antoine or make out the shape of a rat that may have invaded her tiny space, she felt sure she would go mad.

Citizen Gagnon appeared unconvinced. “She might pay me,” he agreed, “and she might not.” He scratched his head thoughtfully as he studied her. “Have you anything you could give me?”

Jacqueline considered for a moment. She had no jewelry, and the gown she wore, which had once been a pretty blue silk day dress with fine lace trim, was now nothing but a filthy, tattered robe. Her black knitted shawl was still in good condition, but having no cloak, she would need it tonight and tomorrow for warmth. She shook her head.

“Well now, maybe we could work out something,” Gagnon mused as he stepped toward her. He reached out a grubby hand to touch her hair, which was half falling down her shoulders. He wrapped his massive fist around a thick lock of it and examined the golden strands between his filthy fingers. “Very nice,” he murmured appreciatively. He looked at her, still holding fast to her hair. “We’ll make a trade,” he announced. “Your hair for a candle.”