Falcon in the Dive by Leah Angstman

Author:Leah Angstman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Published: 2024-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Eight hundred and forty-one

Courage isn’t having the strength to go on—

it’s going on when you don’t have strength.

—Napoleon Bonaparte

Ani yelped at a prick of pain in her left thigh. She opened her eyes to Dr. Breauchard staring into them. The stall-sized room was packed tight with labeled cases messily strewn on shelves. Such disorganization was uncharacteristic of him.

“Where am I?” she asked.

“If you hadn’t led the Marquis de Collioure to Boutique de l’aquatinte, then you’d know where you were.”

She felt another poke at her upper leg and looked down to see herself exposed to her thighs. A towel draped over her tender parts, and a bayan robed the upper half of her body. The latter lay unfastened and parted at her ribcage beneath her breasts and hung open onto the cot, leaving most of the lower half of her body bared. This wouldn’t have been so alarming if Breauchard were the only one in the room. But the realization that three other men were also present scarleted her cheeks. They all knew that she’d led the marquis to the doctor’s secret workroom.

“You don’t needs to know where you is.” The voice of Évard Pinsonnault was like bass notes on a pipe organ. “I’m sure the marquis has men tearing apart the printshop right now, but they willna find nothing.”

Ani hated coming face to face with Évard Pinsonnault. He was an old medical colleague of Breauchard’s, always angry about something. A man in his early thirties, rugged good looks soured by a permanent scowl. He was, in all endeavors, a man in charge, though he remained poorly dressed, and that satisfied him, his hair tousled without encasement, his fingernails always dirty. The changing political powers left tension between Jacques Breauchard and him, and their friendship increasingly gapped. Flippantly moving from less-extreme faction to more-extreme faction, Évard gathered documents and evidence that he could present against the men he deemed guilty, according to whoever was paying. The guilty men now were the ones who’d lost at the Tuileries. The King’s Guard, the Swiss, the foreign alliances. The men of the Legislative Assembly and former National Guard who still remained royalists, now being replaced by the National Convention. Noble families with great wealth. If you had wealth, the poor, who once merely coveted it, now demanded it.

Among those wealthy families were the ill-fated Beaumercys, noblemen cast from an ancient mold who hoarded money from the masses; conducted deputies who extolled intolerably high taxes from peasantry, by force as often as not; purchased detained children to slave in their factories and mines; and embezzled their noble share off the top with cooked accounting books. Even though Ani had never found documentation supporting Aubrey’s personal role in this, his name was Beaumercy. He was as guilty as the rest.

“What was I supposed to do?” she asked. “He wouldn’t leave me. He was the only reason I reached you alive, Christ.” She paused and pictured him crossing himself. “And I’d just killed his father, so I couldn’t go back.

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