PROLOGUE

Marie
1794
Place de la Concorde

TOUCHING THE DEAD brought good luck. If you believed in luck, which Marie now did. At first she’d shied away in disgust from the heads and their gushing blood that quickly slowed, stilled and stank. Until the day she had recollected a superstition passed on from her grandmother: to touch a corpse meant that you said goodbye to it, but if you failed to do so, it would fasten its ghostly grip upon you forevermore.

With her own shaven head covered with a piece of dirty linen to disguise how close she had come to the embrace of the blade, she wove her way around the base of the guillotine and listened to the old women talk.

She had a duty to do – it was the price of her freedom – so she hoisted the basket up onto her hip and waited.

And then it began.

The jagged laughter born out of malice, mockery and resentment ceased.

A collective holding of breath.

The hiss of the blade dropping swiftly through air, and the wooden frame shuddering as it completed its trajectory.

It was done. Again.

Marie turned aside to see a toothless mouth stretched open with rotten brown stumps, eyes milky with blindness and hands gnarled with swollen knuckles now raised in clenched fists of triumph.

The woman darted forward to the edge of the platform where the blood dripped lazily over the edge. While Marie picked up the head and deposited it into her basket, the woman patted her handkerchief through the puddle, sending droplets into the air like dancing red flies.

‘Is good, is good,’ the woman cried, and turned around to face the crowd. Specks of blood had landed around her mouth, and Marie watched as she tucked the handkerchief into her bosom, smearing red on the way.

A handkerchief dipped in the blood of a victim also brought good luck. Marie would try it with a scrap of cloth the following day. After all, the other superstitions had worked. Wasn’t she free?

But for what purpose? Her life was so small; she made little difference to anyone. Why was she spared when others, so much more important, wealthy and beautiful, were not? She adjusted the basket on her right hipbone, directly on top of the rounded yellow bruise stretched across the skin from the weight it was forced to bear daily.

She already knew why she’d been spared: her skill. And it was this, fuelled with her store of good luck, that would one day take her far from here and the cursed Revolution.

Turning aside, Marie took her place amongst the crowd, the old women making more room than was necessary for her without comment. She faced the guillotine again and waited. She would complete her sentence while learning how the game of deception, betrayal and power was played.

A stab of pain from her right hipbone, and she swung the basket over onto her left. Her fingers dug into the gaps in the weave of the cane to steady the weight. The dry skin around her nails soaked up the liquid congealing there. Surely, if she could endure just a little longer, there would come a time when she could win a game of her own design.