Cold.
Raw cold, the kind that crept through three layers of wool and lay like steel against the spine.
In the dream it was Vendémiaire, the month of vintage, and the pre-dawn chill made his breath smoke and made a brittle skin on puddles that broke beneath his feet and filled his boots with ice water.
He’d flung off his covers in the heat of fever, but the movement taxed him of all his strength. He hadn’t enough to draw them back over him, or even to fight sleep. He shivered in his own clammy sweat.
Forty guns.
Forty, forty, forty.
A biblical number: days and nights of rain, lashes from Pharaoh’s oxhide whip, years wandering in the desert.
Bronze giants, these pieces, scarred and tarnished blue-black; veterans of Lyons and Toulon, a few pieces rescued by blockade runners from Gibraltar, muzzles charred inside like the bowl of a pipe. Garrison guns: Gribeauval twenty-four-pounders, their carriages grinding cobble stones into dust beneath their ironbound wheels.
No, not mechanical grinding; nothing so remorseless. Voices. Two men were speaking in the next room.
“Monsieur le Docteur,” that much he made out, in its officious tone. The rest of the conversation was too low.
The door opened. Automatically he groped for his pistol, then remembered it wasn’t there.
The General spoke.
“Tell me, Captain, the best way of bringing a drunken man to his senses?”
“I don’t know, sir. I rarely drink.”
“An aggressive dog, then. Use your head for something other than a place for your hat.” As high as this singular man would rise—and in this autumn of 1795 even perverse history could not predict just how high—he would ever retain the coarse battlefield manners of a master sergeant.
“I’ve heard a dash of cold water in the face helps.”
“The cold hasn’t stopped this rabble. What else?”
He thought; a difficult thing to do with those gray eyes boring holes in his face. Inspiration then, sudden as a spurt of flame when a log split in the hearth.
“A whiff of pepper. Even a dog must stop to sneeze.”
“Excellent. You may yet deserve those bars. But the pack is large, and we haven’t the pepper. We’ll give them a whiff of grapeshot instead. Yes, a whiff of grapeshot. Good man.”
Sensing movement in the room, he exerted every ounce of pressure and opened his eyes.
Dr. Eslée, wearing a hat and overcoat, had a satchel open on the zinc shelf of the cupboard where he stored his instruments. They clinked when he put them in the bag. He glanced at his patient, started when he saw he was awake.
“I’m called out,” he said. “I won’t be long.”
Church bells chimed the hour: four strokes in the watery afternoon. The insurrectionists had blundered, postponing their attack on this latest government, this Directory, for hours while the guns were deployed.
“Ready!” The General’s voice was a bellow.
Flint struck steel, ignited rope-ends saturated with slow-burning powder. They hovered over the touch-holes of the hair-trigger cannon.
No command to aim was given. There was no need: All forty guns had been elevated properly on their wooden rails under the General’s personal supervision. In his heart he would always be a lieutenant of artillery, as he’d begun.
He raised his saber, paused to observe the crowd surging into the courtyard, into the center of the circle of heavy guns. Into the valley of the shadow of death.
“Tenais”; gentle now, like a stable hand soothing an excited horse; yet it carried. “Tenais … tenais…”
Holding, holding. Sweat trickled into the captain’s eye, red-hot and stinging.
Silence then; acres of it, building, pulsing, pressing tight enough to make a man mad. Then—
The saber slashed down. “Fire!”
And once again hell came to Paris.
The doctor’s satchel snapped shut. His patient felt his covers being drawn back up under his chin, but he was still half submerged in 13 Vendémiaire—the Royalist revolt that made Bonaparte a butcher—couldn’t stir. A hinge squeaked. The patient opened his eyes and saw the doctor hasten through the gap and pull the door shut behind him.
Not fast enough for the Viper to miss the dusty-blue tunic of a country official loitering in the next room.
He struggled into a sitting position, ignoring the lancing pain in his hip. But he was no longer light-headed; his skull was packed with mud. His body would not support its weight. He fell back into blackness.
“I said you would have no need of equipment.” Constable Malroux sounded peevish. “I asked you to accompany me in order to determine if the men died the way I suspected. It doesn’t require a degree in medicine to prove they’re dead.”
“I’m sure your diagnosis is sound.” Eslée shifted the sling attached to his satchel to a more comfortable position on his shoulder. The contents tinkled merrily. “But I always travel prepared.”
“Will you measure their wounds with calipers, to determine whether they were broad enough for their souls to escape? They look ample even to the naked eye.”
The doctor guided his mount carefully along the furrow that passed for a road.
He and the brown mule had never been comfortable with their arrangement; he suspected the animal of honoring it only until a rock or a rut gave it an excuse to stumble and dump him off its back. The previous owner had inspired loyalty in patients and animals with his good cheer; Eslée was solemn. He knew he’d lost business because of this, and most assuredly the esteem of his mount.
“You say they were highwaymen?”
“One was, for certain. The country won’t mourn long. Jean-Luc Écraser was the name he answered to: Crush, in ugly English. He seemed to prefer it, for some reason. And so we called him Crusher, not being disposed to offend a felon of his talents. The other no longer has a face for me to identify.”
“No face?”
“As if a charge of powder went off inside his head. I never saw its like, apart from a direct hit from a mortar.”
“You were a military man?”
“I served. It isn’t quite the same thing. If it were, I might know how Crusher managed to cause so much damage with just his pistol. I’d think the other man’s musket was the greater weapon.”
“Is it possible the man who lost his face was the robbery victim?”
“I considered it. But there was a third party at least. A horse and cart left fresh tracks. No horse and wagon was to be found.”
“Perhaps the animal bolted during the shooting.”
“The possibility suggested itself. However, I suffer from a narrow throat.”
Eslée was distracted. The road had entered a decline littered with treacherous rubble. He wound the reins tighter around his wrist.
“A narrow throat, you say? I treated you for diphtheria a year or two ago. I noted no deformity then.”
“And yet I find it impossible to swallow certain theories. They catch in my craw like fishbones.”
“A goose has instincts. They wouldn’t stand the test of law.”
“Yet he always finds his way north in the spring.”
“I wasn’t ridiculing you,” Eslée said. “I’ve seen men survive when medical science said they were dead. It can’t be explained, but there it is.”
“You and I are refugees, Doctor, from the Age of Reason.”
“Take care, Constable. Even the hills have ears.”
“So does Monsieur Blaq. But he also has a weak stomach.” Malroux let his gelding pick its way down the grade. “Mind you, there are features about my theory I also find difficult to choke down. That’s why I’m imposing upon you. I trust you have no matters more pressing.”
“None whatsoever.”
“Then we’re both fortunate in the timing.”
The doctor wondered if the constable was being ironic.
He went over all his precautions.
He’d put his patient’s horse and cart in the carriage house behind his home, which was big enough as the cart was small and he kept no carriage, only the mule; rubbed down the mare and given it straw. No one had seen him, he felt sure. He’d made sure Malroux had not been looking when he went into the examining room for his supplies and when he came back out, leaving his patient asleep.
Still, there was something about the little man in the shabby uniform that put him on his guard.
A horse and cart, the constable had said.
Well, they were anything but rare. A stranger with a gunshot wound and a brace of brigands shot dead could be coincidence. The past dozen years were an anarchist’s dream. No village, however quiet and remote, could claim that it had not witnessed a villainous act.
The courier story held up. The letter in the patient’s coat, which had escaped damage when he was shot, bore the name of the Bank of England embossed and a gold seal. Eslée hadn’t much English, but the charge was brief and the vocabulary simple enough to grasp its meaning.
Men would be careless with their own weapons. Two years ago, he’d removed a ramrod from Emile the tailor’s cheek after he forgot to discharge his fowling piece before cleaning. He’d nearly lost an eye.
So what if his patient lied? If Malroux was right and the man who’d escaped was the intended victim of a robbery, it wasn’t the physician’s duty to surrender him.