“‘I AM GOING TO STEAL HER OWN EXISTENCE AWAY FROM HER!’ ”
I lifted my voice as I read the declaration, attempting to match the almost comically overwrought capitalization. Beside me, Josephine snorted in amusement.
“Now, how,” she asked, “is he going to do that?”
“Just wait,” I said, holding up a finger without looking up from the worn book. “He explains it.”
I read on, returning my voice to its regular register. “ ‘Making use of modern science, I can capture the grace of her gesture, the fullness of her flesh, the resonance of her voice, the turn of her waist, the light of her eyes…her complete identity, in a word. I shall be the murderer of her foolishness, the assassin of her triumphant animal nature.’ ”
Outside, I heard the sounds of male voices laughing and chattering. I recognized them as belonging to Charcot’s interns, probably returning from one of the evening soirées for which Charcot and his wife were known, and at which literary and social luminaries were usually in attendance. As they passed, the men broke into a slurred version of the “interns’ anthem,” a ditty penned by a former Charcot protégé and sung to the tune of “La Marseillaise”:
It is the famous unit of
Old Man Charcot, our leader
The man cannot utter a word
Without the whole universe repeating it
Rows of hysterics, amyotrophics,
Those with Ménière’s disease or multiple sclerosis
Fill the wards of the Salpêtrière, the Salpêtrière
Glancing at the rusted carriage clock on the bedside table, I blinked. It felt as though we’d just opened The Future Eve a moment earlier. But it was already nearly midnight. If Babette had seen us like this, she’d no doubt have doused the light—and then snatched the book away for good measure.
But Babette couldn’t see us—because we were no longer in Hysteria. Or at least, no longer in the downstairs ward, which Josephine had managed to flee from in the middle of the night a week earlier while in the throes of one of her night terrors. She’d been found shivering in the asylum stables two hours later, and had so vehemently resisted Jacques’s attempts to bring her back that the orderly ended up with an egg-sized bruise on his head after she threw him into the wooden stall wall.
Normally, Babette simply strapped hysterical sleepwalkers to their bed frames overnight. Charcot, however, had ordered Josephine and me into a private room in Esquirol’s old isolation area, instructing me to pull my cot in front of the door at night before locking it for good measure. Babette still frequently materialized in our threshold without warning, doubtlessly hoping to catch me in some infringement or oversight. Overall, though, our new quarters felt gloriously free. Not just from the old woman’s shrewd surveillance and my ever-present fears about Rosalie’s bracelet (now stuffed deep inside my new mattress), but from the oppressive ambience of Hysteria itself. From the continual threat of outbursts and catfights, of hysterical fits and frozen-in-place female forms that hung over the place like a lowering storm cloud. From that torpid mixture of despair and ennui that so permeated that dark place that it seemed part of the very air we’d breathed there.
To be sure, our new, shared space was in an even greater state of dilapidation than the centuries-old ward that was now below us. It smelled of must and mold and whatever rodents had nested among the surplus furniture and medical equipment that had been stored there. It was separated from Hysteria by a floor so thin that we could still hear Bernadette sermonizing in her sleep.
And yet it felt a whole world apart, as though, like Jules Verne’s balloonists, we’d ascended into an entirely new atmosphere. Its flaking walls were free of the newspaper clippings of Rosalie that had remained above Josephine’s old bed downstairs (for apparently no one had felt comfortable taking them down) and its one barred window looked out over one of the asylum’s overgrown but colorful rose gardens. After I’d finished moving our few things in, Josephine—who’d seemed alternately listless and almost manically energetic throughout the process—had flung herself on her cot, bouncing there a few times in a way that reminded me of Amélie before falling onto her back, her thin arms spread toward the ceiling. “It feels like we’ve moved into Le Meurice,” she’d sighed. “Can we ring a bell and have champagne and beef tenderloin sent up?”
Since her overnight trance, her reserve toward me had vanished as completely as the blue dress she’d still been certain she’d been wearing. She’d said little about the icy reserve with which she’d treated me in those painful days after my omissions to her had been exposed, apart from one short comment on our first night in our new beds. “Promise me,” she’d commanded, catching on to my wrist as I passed her cot on the way to sleep in my own by the door.
“What?” I’d asked, startled by both the intensity of her tone and the ever-surprising strength of her grip.
“That you’ll never lie to me,” she said fervently. “Not about anything. Ever again.”
And equally fervently, I had promised.
“ ‘The murderer of her foolishness,’ ” she repeated now, bemused. “So Thomas Edison wants to kill this girl, Alicia, because he thinks she’s foolish?”
“He isn’t actually planning to kill her,” I explained. “He’s only going to re-create her face and body as an android, and give the android a better soul.”
“Better according to who?”
I laughed. “To Thomas Edison, I suppose.”
She made a skeptical-looking moue. “This Edison. He’s American?”
I nodded. “In real life, yes. But the Edison in this book isn’t actually Edison himself. He’s a fictional version of the real man.”
Josephine considered this, absently picking at a blood-crusted line on the inside of her forearm. The looping scab was from a research session two days earlier, the focus of which had been dermography. After entrancing her, Charcot had used his stylus to inscribe l’hystérie on the inside of one of her arms and l’hypnose on the other. From where I’d sat, the tool’s pointed metal tip had barely seemed to brush against Josephine’s soft skin, and yet a bright red line of perhaps a millimeter in height had sprung up instantaneously in its wake. Even more astonishingly, Charcot was able to make the letters lightly bleed merely by murmuring the suggestion into Josephine’s ear.
“Stop,” I told her now, putting my hand over hers. “You’ll make it weep again.”
She grimaced, pulling her cuff over the shallow wound. “Why would a writer use a real person in a made-up story?”
“It’s hard to say,” I said. “Perhaps he thinks it’s a good way to get his story’s ideas across to his audiences.”
“The way Charcot uses me to get his ideas across to his audiences?”
I frowned, unexpectedly unsettled by this comparison. “He isn’t telling stories. He’s explaining his medical theories. And you’re a real person, not a character from some book.” Thoughtfully, I drew the book’s satin ribbon down to mark our place for next time. “Though I suppose the fact that something didn’t happen in real life doesn’t mean there isn’t truth to it. In fact, I think stories—even untrue ones, or maybe especially untrue ones—can teach us things about life that true events can’t.”
She looked at me sidelong. Her color had mostly returned since the magnet episode, but there were still bruiselike shadows beneath her eyes, products of a continuing and acute lack of sleep. “Then what truth does The Future Eve teach us?”
“What do you think it teaches us?” I shot back.
She twirled a strand of her hair around a forefinger, tightly enough that the fingertip turned pink. “Not to trust men who work in laboratories.”
I laughed, struck not only by how deftly she’d just turned Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s story line on its head (the book’s intended villainess, after all, was the impossibly beautiful but unforgivably crass Alicia Clary) but by how precisely she’d given voice to what had preoccupied me since almost losing her completely the prior week.
For I was more convinced than ever that I needed to get her out of the asylum—and soon, our improved sleeping arrangements notwithstanding. I kept seeing her as she’d looked when I’d tried to wake her that morning: The ice-white skin. The blue lips and nails. The shallow breath, barely misting Rosalie’s mirror. Nor could I shake the memory of Dr. Boudu’s shocking denouncement: Madness. Even within a madhouse.
I didn’t think Josephine was mad—or at least, not yet. But her increasingly erratic behavior had me more worried than ever: her nightly battle against sleep, the violent nightmares when she succumbed to it, her growing skittishness and agitation during her waking hours. Since moving upstairs, I’d found her studying her Lourdes medallion several times, her expression bordering on panicked. Her fear of Claude had increased as well: After spotting him approaching on one of the grounds’ gravel paths a few days earlier, she’d let out a small scream and pulled me into the little rose garden behind the chapel until he’d passed. When I asked her what was the matter—for to my knowledge they’d had no interaction since the feeding room episode well over a month earlier—she’d merely said: “I don’t trust that man.” But her voice had been shaking.
She’d also begun slipping into my bed at night, sometimes lying there for hours after I turned the light down, staring up at the beamed ceiling, her green eyes defiantly unblinking as she fought against slumber. I did my best to soothe and calm her, using the same technique I’d used when Amélie claimed to be afraid of the dark: telling stories. I’d usually have read aloud to Josephine for a good hour or more already by that point, for she was as voracious a listener of stories as I was a reader of them, and claimed these nightly sessions improved her own reading skills. But I’d still share more quiet narratives aloud in the dark: Sinbad’s finding himself atop a sleeping whale or in a diamond-filled valley of elephant-swallowing serpents. Edmond Dantès’s escaping the notoriously brutal Château d’If prison, and transforming himself into the rich and powerful Count of Monte Cristo so he could punish those who’d unjustly imprisoned him. Jim Hawkins’s perilous voyage on the Hispaniola to find buried pirate treasure on a faraway island. Afterward, still determinedly battling sleep, Josephine would pepper me with questions: Are there really island-sized whales? How did this Edmond disguise himself? Where did Jim learn to shoot a pistol so well? And once: Are there no books about girls who have such adventures? (To my chagrin I couldn’t think of any; most of the books I’d read about women were about their tragic lives and misadventures: Nana’s sleeping her way through Paris’s elite before dying of smallpox. Madame Bovary’s sleeping her way through the Normandy countryside before swallowing arsenic. Anna Karenina’s destroying her life and marriage for Vronsky before hurling herself beneath the steel wheels of a Russian freight train.)
As I whispered these tales to her, I often had to struggle to stay awake myself. But it seemed to work: Despite her own best efforts, Josephine’s eyes would finally drift shut. Her breathing would even, and she’d curl into me like the sleeping cat in the “invisible” photograph she’d pinned over her new bed. As often as not, though, an hour or two later she’d be sitting bolt upright, muttering something about him, or that beast, or that still-chilling refrain: They are coming! Each time this happened, I’d swear again to myself that I’d finally take the last few steps needed to ensure our escape from this place. A few days earlier, in fact, I’d sent a revised version of my initial (and ultimately unsent) response to Amélie, telling her to expect us soon. I am here, I’d said, and I am cured, and I will come in two weeks, if not sooner. I am bringing someone with me, another girl from the hysteria ward. Please tell Madame Granger that we will only impose on her for a night or two—not even that, if she can recommend a safe boardinghouse for women in Vault-de-Lugny or Avallon.
To date, I’d held off sharing my plans with Josephine herself, not wanting to add to her agitation. Seeing her like this now, though—laughing, playful, as close to relaxed as she’d been in weeks—it seemed to me that it was finally time.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” I said, turning back to her.
She gave me an arch look. “Let me guess. You want to change out my soul for a better one.”
But then our eyes met, and the smile faded from her lips.
“What?” she said, a new note of apprehension in her voice. “What is it?”
I took a deep breath. “I’ve heard from my sister. She’s safe; she’s been living with a midwife, in a little village near Avallon. She wants me to go there. To join her.”
She didn’t move, and for a fleeting moment I had the strange sense that I was looking not at the living girl who’d recently taken Paris by storm, but at one of Monsieur Londe’s flat and colorless images of her.
“When?” she asked.
“Two weeks at most. I’d been planning to go sooner, but…” I let the words trail off. We both knew well enough what had delayed me. “Anyway,” I continued, “I think that together with what I’ve saved, and by selling some books and a few other things, I have enough to get to Dijon.” The “other things” were Rosalie’s paste pearls and little hand mirror. Though I felt strange about doing it, I told myself Babette was right: Rosalie certainly didn’t need them in the softs or in Hydro, the two places between which Charcot supposedly had her dividing her time since the kitchen incident. And if I bargained well at the mont-de-piété—a skill I’d bleakly honed while pawning my father’s medical instruments—they’d fetch a decent enough price.
“Dijon?” Josephine repeated.
I nodded. “I’ll sell the bracelet there. It’s safer, I think, than trying to sell it here. And then I’ll buy tickets from there to Avallon. From there it’s an hour or so to Vault-de-Lugny, by horse or carriage.” I’d shown the bracelet to her after we’d moved rooms, locking our door before retrieving it and the wrinkled copy of Les citoyennes from their new hiding place. After asking me about the broadsheet’s stories on female “enslavement” and imprisonment, and hearing about the outroar they’d sparked on rue de Richelieu (“They should write about this place,” she’d said dryly), Josephine had draped the gold chain over her slender wrist, shaking it gently so that the late-morning sunlight transformed the gems into a string of dancing blue flames.
“Oh,” she’d half whispered, in something like awe. “I wish someone would give something this lovely to me. Even if it were only paste.”
The longing in her voice had caught me off guard. For all the time I’d spent ruminating about that cursed thing—how to steal it, hide it, sell it—I’d never thought of it as something to covet for its own sake. But the sheer delight on Josephine’s face had almost tempted me to give it to her on the spot.
Now she stared down at her hands, held loosely clasped in her lap. Their nails had finally lost the purplish tinge they’d taken on while she was in her “sleep of death.” The redness and calluses left by months of washing and scrubbing at her old position had all but vanished as well, thanks to Charcot’s decree that she be spared the usual asylum work shifts and chores. But a pink scar from the knife she’d used to kill the judge still bisected her left palm.
“That’s wonderful,” she said. “I’m happy for both of you. I really am.” Her voice was as flat as her expression. As though it, like that of the beautiful android in the book we’d just closed, were being generated by one of Thomas Edison’s recording cylinders.
“It’s not just me!” I exclaimed, taking her hands in mine. “It’s you too! I want to take you with me.”
“You…” Inhaling sharply, she looked up, her expression brightening briefly. Then, a wary shadow crossed her face. “Why would you do that?”
Because I love you.
The words popped into my head, as crisp and clear as if someone had hissed them into my ear. I almost said them aloud, but was stopped by a sudden, urgent sensation in my belly; the same exhilarated and yet bilious feeling I’d felt atop the chalk cliffs of Étretat. As though I were about to plunge headlong into something that might be flight—but might just as easily be death.
“Because,” I said instead, a little shakily, “you’re not safe here. Surely you see that.”
Her brows flew up in surprise. “What do you mean? Charcot says I’m recovering. He said my pulse and temperature are normal again, and that—”
I cut her off. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“Then what are you talking about?”
“What they’re doing to you,” I said. “All these hours of hypnosis in Charcot’s office and in his lectures—I don’t think it’s good for you. I think it might even be dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” she repeated incredulously. “How?”
“By making your hysteria worse. That’s what Dr. Boudu said when he examined you.”
“But it’s all part of my treatment! It’s being done by my own doctors!”
You yourself just said you don’t trust them, I thought. But I held off saying it, fearful of upsetting her further, or set off yet another hysterical attack.
“I’m not sure,” I said carefully, “that what they’re doing has anything to do with curing you. Or any of us, for that matter. I think the goal is simply to learn as much about hysteria as they can. Even if, in the process, they might be making us worse.”
“But isn’t learning about it the only way to find a cure for it?” She was staring at me now, her eyes narrow and her jaw clenched. It was the same look she wore when I recounted things the doctors had done to her during entrancement that she found troubling or upsetting.
“Maybe in the long term,” I said. “But I’ve been here over a year now. I’ve never seen any of the girls they hypnotize get any better.”
“You got better.”
“But they couldn’t entrance me. And once they learned that they couldn’t, they all but stopped paying attention to me.”
It was an idea that had been taking shape slowly, and one I found increasingly impossible to dismiss. But it still felt strange—nearly sacrilegious—to be putting words to it now. “I don’t think the doctors had anything to do with my recovery,” I went on, lowering my voice even though no one could hear us. “I think the only reason I did get better was that they left me to my own devices.”
She stared at me for a moment. Then her shoulders slumped. “But they’re not leaving me alone,” she said, slowly. “They’re never leaving me alone. Not so long as the audience and the newsmen still like me.”
“No,” I said quietly. “They aren’t.”
For a long moment neither of us spoke. Outside, from the direction of the unité des incurables came a low, moaning cry that quickly swelled into a full-throated shriek. It made me think of my grandmother’s stories about the Salpêtrière during her childhood. She’d died when I was very small, before Amélie was born. But I still remembered her whispering her recollections to me at bedtime sometimes, the way one tells a ghost tale: Le cri de l’asile, she called it. The cry of the asylum. “It’d start low,” she would croon. “Just a few of the real crazies at first. But it would grow by the minute, until it was thousands upon thousands of those awful lunatic voices rising and falling together. As though conducted by Lucifer himself…”
The scream stopped with an abruptness that seemed almost as ominous as the despairing howl itself. Despite myself, I shivered. She can’t end up there, I thought. She can’t.
“So you see,” I said, reaching out to touch her knee. “You need to come with me. Before they do lasting damage to you.”
“What if they already have?” Her eyes were locked on the rough weave of the hospital skirt she still hadn’t changed out of.
I looked up at her, alarmed. “Why do you say that?”
She toyed with the edge of her cuff. “I keep seeing him, Laure. The judge.”
“I know.” I touched her knee. “Or at least, I’ve guessed as much, that it’s what your night terrors are about.”
She didn’t answer right away, just picked distractedly at the L-shaped scratch on her skin. Then she lifted her gaze to meet mine, her eyes glittering beneath the coppery veil of her lashes.
“It’s not just when I sleep,” she said.
“What?”
“It’s not just when I sleep,” she repeated. “I’ve been seeing him when I’m awake, too. Or at least, when I think I’m awake. Ever since that day with the magnets.” She passed a hand over her eyes. I saw that it was trembling. “The truth is, I’m not sure I even know anymore whether I’m awake or entranced. It all seems to blur together and change shape in ways I hardly even notice at first—the way places and even faces blur and change inside a dream.”
“When?” I asked, my alarm deepening. “Where else have you seen him?”
“All the time.” There was a new brittleness to her voice. “Everywhere. I see him in the public tour groups outside and with the doctors on morning rounds. I’ve seen him twice now at lectures. I’ve even thought I saw him with Claude at the market—though when I looked again he’d disappeared.”
A cold fingertip seemed to be tracing its way down my spine. “And you say this all started after Charcot left you entranced overnight?”
She nodded. “It’s always after I’ve been entranced. I realize that now.” She wrung her hands together in her lap. “At first I thought it was his ghost, here to haunt me. After all, he looks so strange. Not just in the way he stares at me, with his fat face and piglike little eyes, but in the way his whole—his whole shape looks sometimes.”
“What does his shape look like?” I asked, already dreading the answer.
“It’s hard to describe.”
“Try,” I prompted her.
She frowned vaguely, as though struggling to recall a receding dream. “It’s as though—as though his edges are melting, somehow. Like in one of those photographs where people have moved before the photographer told them to.” She shook her head. “But maybe that’s not it, either. He’s been in the very back when I see him, you see. In the shadows.”
“In the back of the amphitheater?”
She nodded again. “Right beneath that big painting of Rosalie and Dr. Babinski. He was leaning against the wall, smoking. But it wasn’t really ‘leaning.’ It was more like he was—like he was sinking into the wall itself, behind all that smoke. And then I’d blink, or look away, and when I looked back he’d be gone entirely, the way he was in the marché,” she finished. “It was as though the wall had simply…swallowed him up.”
My heart seemed to drop inside my chest. On the one hand, these visions helped explain Josephine’s increasingly odd behavior—not just her refusal to sleep, but her bizarre obsession with the Lourdes medallion and her escalating fear of the Basque. It made sense, too, that she’d have woven Claude into her delusions—he’d been the most physically menacing force toward her in this place.
But it was the hallucinations themselves—the repeated sightings of the dead judge; the fact that he’d “melted” into the amphitheater wall—that were the most alarming. They offered the first real evidence that what I’d feared might happen to her was happening, that whatever luminous membrane had separated her consciousness from her unconsciousness had been pierced by the doctors’ continual assaults on her mind.
Just as Rosalie’s had.
Rosalie. My mind darted to the last time I’d seen her. I’d been hurrying to the kitchen to get Josephine breakfast. The Alsatian had been on one of the shuffling group walks with her fellow lunatics, each woman secured by the wrist to a thick length of rope carried between two orderlies. She’d been in the very back, doubtlessly so that the attendant behind her could keep a close watch on her. I’d been stunned by her transformation: Her milky skin now turned mottled and ashen, her sapphire eyes sunken and dulled. The flaxen hair I’d spent so many hours brushing and pinning was now a matted mass against her head, and she’d walked not with her former quick-stepping impatience, but with the shuffling gait of an ancient reposante. When our eyes met, I’d managed to push past my shock enough to smile faintly. But there hadn’t been so much as a flicker of recognition in those cerulean eyes. It had been like looking into the flat blue gaze of one of the tattered newspaper illustrations that still hung above her old bed in the ward.
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to erase the pitiful image. We have to go, I thought. We have to go soon. Not in two weeks, as I’d written Amélie. Sooner—much sooner. The very first moment we could.
When I opened my eyes again, Josephine was watching me, worry etched on her face. “You think I’m mad already, don’t you.”
“No,” I said, although I wasn’t sure this was fully true. “But I do think we have to leave. Right away.”
“Laure—” she began uncertainly, but I cut her off, taking her hand.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll have enough for both of us by Saturday. We’ll have to find you something else to wear, of course. Perhaps we should get you a veil of some sort as well. Given how crowded the lectures have been—and that color portrait in Paris illustré last week—we should at least try to cover your hair….”
“Laure.” She pulled her hand away, her voice sharper now. Tight. “I can’t leave now. Not like this.”
I blinked, caught off guard by her vehemence. “Why not?”
She looked away, biting her lip. When she looked back at me again there was misery in her gaze. I felt it almost as a physical force, a cold tightening of the air between us.
“Don’t you see?” she asked quietly. “I can’t go anywhere. I won’t escape anything if I do. I’ll simply be taking my madness with me. And if I’m going to be mad, I might as well just stay here.”
“But once you leave, it will stop!” I insisted. “You’ve just told me that the visions happen after you’ve been entranced. Surely that means once they stop hypnotizing you, you’ll stop seeing them.”
“But what if I don’t?” She pressed both hands against her forehead, as though trying to physically force her mind into compliance. “What if the damage they’ve done only leads to other damage? I already can’t tell when I see him if I’m dreaming or awake—or even if what I remember him doing to me, and I to him, really happened. What if everything else starts to become uncertain and confused in the same way? What if I stop knowing you’re real, I’m real, the very ground beneath our feet is real? What if it all just…collapses on me, suffocating and crushing me?”
Her hands had dropped to her throat now. Alarmed, I reached for them, thinking she’d worked herself into a fit. But she pulled herself out of my grasp, shaking her head. “I can’t go,” she repeated. “I can’t go without knowing.”
“Without knowing what?”
In answer she only closed her eyes, squeezing them shut so tightly that creases appeared at their corners. Six faint, fanning lines. Sunbeams inscribed in sun-freckled skin.
“Do you remember,” she asked, “when you told me the story about your travel sickness?”
She’d asked me if I’d ever traveled by train (she hadn’t), and I’d told her about the first time Papa took me to my old school. It was only five hours from Gare du Nord, but within twenty minutes I’d become so motion sick that I felt as though my insides were spoiling like bad meat. I’d truly thought I was dying. But I had no idea what that had to do with our escape.
“Yes,” I said uncertainly.
Josephine opened her eyes again. “Do you remember what you said he told you then?”
“That I was ill because the moving scenery outside was confusing my body, which wasn’t moving at all. He said the only way to feel better was to try to find one thing that didn’t change or move—some spot on the horizon or inside the train—and focus on it. And then the nausea would pass.”
Josephine nodded. “I’ve been thinking that I need to do the same.”
“On the train to Dijon?” I was still confused.
“No.” She took a deep breath. “In the house.”
“Which house?” I asked, now utterly lost.
“Guillaume’s,” she said. “The judge’s.” Leaning forward, she took my hands. “I need to go back there, Laure. I need to see it for myself.”
I gaped at her. “But that would be—” I’d been about to say madness but stopped myself. “Disastrous,” I said instead. “How would you even get inside?”
She shrugged. “The kitchen staff left windows open sometimes, for when they went out to the dance halls at night. But if they were locked I’d find another way.”
“But what if someone sees you?” I insisted, aghast at her recklessness. “Someone who knows about the murder? You’d all but be handing them a confession. And I don’t see how going back will change anything.”
“It will for me,” she said stubbornly. “I know it will.”
“But how?”
“In the same way looking at something solid helps you when you’re feeling travel sick,” she said. “It will give me something real, something unchanging, to focus on when these—visions—come. Something to remind me that I’m not going mad.”
She took hold of me again, this time grasping my forearms. “I need proof that what I think happened actually did. That the house is as I remember it. That he’s really dead. Something that I can hold on to.” Her grip on my arms had tightened, enough that it almost hurt. “Something I know to be true, no matter what tricks my mind is playing on me. I need to know for certain that he can’t hurt me anymore. That I’m safe.”
“You won’t be safe from the police,” I pointed out. “You might end up in even more danger. You might end up…”
I didn’t finish the thought. I didn’t need to.
“That’s better than going mad,” she said simply. “I’d rather risk the guillotine than keep on living like this.”
I wouldn’t, I thought. I can’t risk losing you. But once more, I didn’t say it.
“Maybe you don’t have to risk it either,” I said instead.
“What? What do you mean?” She was still holding my arms tightly, and I thought for a moment that I felt her pulse there, dancing lightly above my own.
“I can do it. I’ll go to his house for you.”
Her brow puckered again. “How would that help? You won’t know what to look for. You’ve never even been there before.”
Gently disentangling myself, I turned and pulled the coverlet and sheets back from my mattress, reaching into the slit I’d made there to find my journal and the pencil stub I kept sandwiched in its pages. Pulling both out, I opened the worn little book to a clean page and positioned the lead tip just above it.
“Then tell me,” I said. “Tell me everything you can remember.”