Bastille Day broke heavy and hot.
The press of unwashed bodies in the old Place de la Revolution made it more oppressive yet. As the Viper neared the Tuileries the air grew thick as paste.
In just a dozen years, the Day of Liberation had become a combination Easter, Christmas, and harvest festival, complete with women in elaborate bonnets, peddlers hawking roasted offal, masqueraders in costume, and effigies on every corner: It was difficult to determine whether a toothless scarecrow decked out in a powdered wig and shingles of lace was making fun of aristocrats or paying them tribute.
Indeed, there were those who’d never laid eyes on a count, a duchess, or even a footman in livery. Such figures would appear to them as fantastical as goat-bottomed satyrs prancing in an illustrated book on pagan mythology.
A generation too young to remember the fall of the prison so emblematic of Royal repression would soon come of age. It had no concept that things were not always as they were now, under the orderly rule of the Consulate. That boy there, the one licking grease off his fingers from his baked potato; was he aware he stood on a patch of earth soaked yards deep with the blood of the decapitated? Would he care if it was explained to him?
The Viper doubted it.
The crowds were not so dense in the courtyard of the palace as they would have been were the Bonapartes in residence. The balcony was dark where the First Consul and his lady usually stood on such occasions, a pair of primitive islanders basking in the adoration of the rabble. The grenadiers guarding the entrance sweltered in their dress tunics and bearskin shakos, stifling yawns. Heat, and a palace deserted by its luminaries, had made them soporific.
Monsieur Marechal—a hasty invention, that name, adopted on the run from Pontoise—made a circuit of the grounds, shouldering his way through throngs of revelers reeking of beer, jug wine, cheap scent, and sweat, and returned to his quarters. He had the house to himself. The landlord and landlady were out enjoying the pageantry. Their cook, Juliette of the incomparable stewed lamb, had deserted her own post within minutes of their departure.
He stretched out on the mattress with his hands behind his head, staring at the cracked ceiling, restructuring his itinerary, and wondering if the First Consul had in fact been warned away from public exposure.
The announcement in the Moniteur that affairs of state would keep Bonaparte away from the celebration had been a bitter disappointment. There was no telling when the First Consul would offer himself next as a target. Behind this came a surge of panic: The Viper was known: quarry now for that godless ex-clergyman Joseph Fouché and his pack of vicious rat-terriers. But now that one had time to think about it, he took careful inventory of the things he’d done that might have betrayed him to the men in charge of security.
What evidence had he left behind in Pontoise? Two dead highwaymen, a wounded local busybody, and possibly a hysterical seamstress with an incredible story she probably would try to pass off as rape. He was grateful more than ever for his restraint. Dead, she was proof of something more sinister than two brigands slain in the pursuit of their trade; alive, she would be dismissed as a whore, and an irrational one at that.
The tale the doctor would tell was more outlandish yet.
The Viper’s courier story explained the money and explosive rounds on his person, but it would unravel under close questioning by the provincial police. It would play out as cock-and-bull, and Eslée a liar. In that light, the happenstance that had spared him the fate the Viper had planned for him was another stroke of good fortune. Just as it was with the Widow Deauville (that man-eating baggage!), a slain physician would have posed a far greater danger than a live one with an axe to grind.
Even if the local constabulary believed them both, there was nothing to connect Meuchel with the Cutthroat Club and its intentions. The provincials would canvass their jurisdiction, make a fine show of energy; yet when all was said and done, the bandit population was the only loser in the affair. But others would be only too eager to fill the void; there would be no repercussions from the demimonde. And there was no reason for Paris to involve itself. Cosmopolitan authority was already predisposed to disregard anything that came from the hinterland. The “Age of Reason” to the contrary, France remained the feudal nation it had been in the time of the Huguenots, divided into fiefs, each of which feared and distrusted its neighbors.
The more he thought about things, the more convinced he was that the newspaper had reported the truth. With new laws to pen and a war to fight, Bonaparte had no time for mummery. Josephine rarely appeared in public without him; her fear of the mob stretched back to her own imprisonment before the cyclone blew in from Corsica.
He got up and tilted a straightback chair against his door, wedging it under the knob. He distrusted the latch, and there was no predicting how long he’d be alone under that roof. The greedy wife and clownish husband who owned the place were meddlers. Claudine Frontenac could be silenced with a franc, but Jean-Baptiste was just the sort of buffoon who’d blurt out colorful discoveries to anyone within earshot.
The item his lodger had ordered from the tailor to the King—now the Republic and its officers—was certain fuel for idle gossip if it were found in that room.
He’d smuggled the tall cylindrical box into the house while the couple was out, and slid it under the bed behind his valise, which he’d left packed. A flock of dust balls told him the girl who came in to clean would be too indolent to discover it.
At all events, that was his hope. For it to be found in that room meant arrest, trial, and execution.
He lifted off the lid, unwrapped the blue cloth protecting the contents, and examined it again. He blew on the hairs, spreading them, rubbed at the glossy black leather with his thumb and inspected it for the stain of cheap dye. The thumb was clean.
Adequate. In fact, altogether a superior piece of craftsmanship. But impossible to conceal under the false bottom of his valise. It was the one piece of his plan he couldn’t arrange beforehand.
He put it back and returned the box to its hiding place. Then he cleaned and oiled his pistol and inspected the ammunition. The Republicans who drew up the calendar had named that month Thermidor for a reason. Heat, fug, and mold could be nearly as destructive as the explosive balls themselves.