hands. She bolted to a stand when she saw me, her eyes like lemons and puffy from crying. She shrieked before dropping to her knees, begging for me to turn around. When she realized I wasn’t stopping, and that the Milice were seconds away from noticing me, she tried covering me with a lacy robe she took from her display window. ‘I’m sorry.’ Her face drooped like a melting candle. ‘I was delirious when I told him.’
I gasped—Gérard. I thought an informant must have told him. Never once did I think Charlotte had something to do with it. ‘You told him?’
She barely nodded—but it was there, a slight jitter of an admission. I shoved her from me, and she folded to the ground weeping. I turned toward the Milice, who stood dumbfounded as much as some others, the smell of last night’s champagne and black caviar wafting from their wool jackets.
A shout, ‘Vive le Catchfly!’ rang out from the crowd. People clapped, low at first, but then it turned into an outright roar. The miliciens grabbed on to me, their hands like meat hooks, and dragged me to the nearest Morris Column, tying me to it with ropes they had looped near their waists like cowboys. They circled like vultures, blood in their eyes. They’d want me to scream. I pressed my lips together and hoped I could hold it in.
‘Say something,’ one said. ‘Ask for mercy—see if you get it.’ He pointed the barrel of his gun between my eyes, Charlotte’s horrific scream the only thing that stopped him from shooting as she crawled to her knees just a few feet away.
‘This is how we treat résistants,’ the other one shouted at the crowd, taking his thick leather belt from his trousers and holding it between his hands in the air, Charlotte’s body quaking at the sight of it.
He swung his hand back, and in that split-second with his hand suspended in the air, my body seized up.
Wpssh! My eyes bugged from my head when the leather struck my ribs, the pain like a million bee stings. Wpssh! Wpssh! ‘Forgive me, sister,’ Charlotte cried through heaving wails, and my mind travelled to a faded memory of Charlotte and I running barefoot through Papa’s vineyards, the cool-black volcanic soil heavy between our toes, a lofty giggle from us both, the sight of her dress ruffling against her calves as I chased her in the sun and through the grass—clear as my skin ripping under each lash. ‘Forgive me…’
Everything got still, the smell of the leather against my wet-with-blood skin curdling under my nose. And then I heard what they had heard—a rumbling in the distance, people marching, an army if I ever heard one. Under the swell of a bruising face I saw the Milice step back, dropping the whip.
‘Riot!’ someone shouted, and people scattered. The miliciens ran to their truck as people with sticks poured out of the alley and rushed into the square, throwing what little food merchants had in their markets out into the street and tossing bottles into the air that crashed like bombs against the cobblestones.
‘Open the food reserves,’ they shouted. ‘Bastards!’
A thin layer of smoke rose in the street, Prêtre Champoix appearing like an apparition, moving toward me from within the haze. He crossed his arms and stood like a wall with his back to me as two nuns untied the ropes from the Morris Column. I fell into their arms, and we slipped away into a building not far away, my whole body hidden in the thick folds of their black habits.
The nuns held me up by the arms against the wall in a brick room—the only parts of my body that didn’t ache—as people I couldn’t see talked about what to do with me next.
A woman with oversized, black-rimmed glasses sitting on the tip of her nose, looked me over. ‘First, she needs some clothes.’ She slipped a thin floral dress over my head and then pulled it down from the hem, fitting it to my body as she talked. ‘No rosewater for you this time, Adèle.’ She wrapped a striped shawl around my shoulders, and then whispered near my ear even though she didn’t have to. ‘Now that I know who you are, love.’ She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and smiled.
‘Mme Dubois?’ I could barely push the words from my mouth.
She nodded, putting a hand to my swelling face. ‘No need to talk. You’re sorely beaten.