to the next with the stooped shoulders, ducked head, and furtive sideways glances of a man who had never known command, who had been forced to claw and bluff his way through life, who could rarely be certain where his next meal would come from, and who always knew that the heavy hand of vengeful authority could fall upon him at any moment.
It was in a public house just off Great Earl Street that Sebastian finally spotted his quarry in earnest conversation with three cohorts huddled around a battered table. Ordering a pint of ale from a barmaid who couldn’t have been more than fourteen, Sebastian stood with his back to the counter, one knee bent so that the sole of his boot rested against the rough planking behind him. The close atmosphere smelled of spilled ale and tobacco and unwashed men. Narrowing his eyes against the smoke, he watched Collot nod to his cohorts and rise from the table to walk toward him.
Sebastian held himself very still.
But the Frenchman brushed past Sebastian without a flicker of either recognition or suspicion and pushed open the door. His companions remained at their table.
Setting aside his tankard, Sebastian followed Collot out into the dark coolness of the night.
He trailed the Frenchman down a crooked lane lit only by a rare torch flaring in a rusted sconce fastened high to the side of a crumbling wall, or by whatever dim light filtered through the thick, grimy panes of old glass in the windows of the occasional coffeehouse or gin shop. Quickening his pace, he caught up with Collot just as the Frenchman was passing a narrow alley between a pawnshop and a tallow-candle maker.
As if sensing the danger behind him, Collot half turned as Sebastian plowed into him.
“Mon Dieu!” he cried as the force of Sebastian’s momentum carried the two men deep into the fetid darkness of the alleyway.
Sebastian slammed the Frenchman face-first against a rough brick wall, one hand tightening around Collot’s right wrist to yank his arm behind his back and lever it up, effectively holding him pinned in place.
“Bête! Bâtard!” swore Collot, his gray-whiskered face twisted sideways, his hat askew, his one visible eye opened so wide Sebastian could clearly see the white rimming his dark, dilated iris as he struggled against Sebastian’s hold. “Put a hand on my purse, you whore’s son, and I’ll—”
“Shut up and listen to me very carefully,” hissed Sebastian, every affectation gone from his manner.
Collot stilled. “You?”
Sebastian drew his lips back into a smile. “Yes, me.”
“What is this? What do you want?”
“Two rules,” said Sebastian softly. “Rule number one: Don’t even think about lying to me again. Lies have a tendency to make me cranky, and I’m already not in the best of moods at the moment.”
“But I did not lie—”
“Rule number two,” said Sebastian, increasing the pressure on the Frenchman’s arm in a way that made him grimace. “Don’t waste my time. There’s an innocent man in Newgate who’s liable to hang for a murder he did not commit. Which means that when you waste my time, you’re helping to kill him.”
“Are you so certain, monsieur, that he is indeed innocent of what he is accused? Perhaps you—”
“You’re forgetting rule number two,” said Sebastian evenly.
Collot fell silent.
Sebastian said, “I learned something interesting today. It seems that, far from coming from a family of Parisian lapidaries, you are actually descended from a long line of Parisian thieves.”
Collot huffed a nervous laugh. “Jewel thieves, jewelers—is there such a difference?”
Sebastian was not amused. “Tell me about the theft of the French Crown Jewels from the Garde-Meuble in Paris.”
“But I never—”
Sebastian tightened his grip. “Now you’re forgetting both rule number one and rule number two. You told me you sold jewels to Daniel Eisler in Amsterdam in 1792. What I want to know is, was one of them the French Blue?”
Collot gave a snort of derision. “You think they would allow us to keep something as valuable as the Emblem of the Golden Fleece?”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“Danton.” Collot spit the word out as if it were a bite of tainted old mutton.
The name caught Sebastian by surprise. A coarse, physically ugly mountain of a man, Georges Danton had initially fled the Revolution, only to return and rise to prominence as one of the architects of the Revolutionary Tribunal and the Reign of Terror. “Danton? Not the Minister of the Interior, Roland?”
“They were both in on it—the two of them, Danton and Roland, working together.”