Fallen Angels. Bernard Cornwell
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‘Fourth floor. Cut up.’ Gitan’s deep voice was laconic, seemingly uncaring, but his words provoked the fat man to sudden enthusiasm.
‘Long black hair? Pretty girl? Christ! We had joy with that one. Dear God!’ He shook his head with remembered admiration. ‘They’re different, you know.’
‘Different?’ Gitan looked at the grossly fat man.
Brissot nodded. ‘White skins, Gitan, like bloody milk. They only brought her in this morning. I took one look and I couldn’t believe our luck! God! A man could live a hundred years and not see a girl like that.’
The Gypsy had rolled another cigar that he lit from a torch above his head. ‘Who brought her in?’
‘Marchenoir.’
‘Ah!’ The Gypsy nodded as though the answer was not unexpected.
Brissot looked nervously at the tall, calm Gypsy. ‘He knows you’re here. I mean I sent word when you came with the Englishmen. You can’t be too careful these days.’
The Gypsy nodded. ‘True. You did the right thing.’ He smiled reassuringly at the fat man, then stared at the bodies; fat, thin, old, young, a mess of death. ‘So you had the girl, Jean?’
‘Twice!’ Brissot laughed. ‘You should have been here, Gitan. Skin like milk! Soft as bloody silk!’
The Gypsy blew smoke over the lolling, black-streaked bodies in the yard. ‘I need to find a sack. I’m taking her away.’
‘Look in the storeroom.’ Brissot jerked his head towards a doorway. ‘Plenty of empty flour sacks.’ He watched the Gypsy pick his way among the corpses towards the store. ‘Gitan?’
‘My friend?’
‘Why did the Englishman want to find her?’
The Gypsy turned. He blew smoke into the torchlight, and it drifted above a small child’s corpse. He grinned. ‘He was going to marry her next week.’
‘Next week?’
The Gypsy nodded.
Brissot bellowed his laughter round the courtyard.
‘He should have hurried! We got her first! I hope the bastard knows what he’s missing! Married next week, eh? Skin like cream! She was a bloody treat, my friend, I tell you. Still,’ his laughter died and he shrugged, ‘I suppose you’ve had lots of them.’ He sounded jealous.
‘No,’ Gitan said, ‘I haven’t.’
‘You haven’t had an aristo?’ Brissot was unbelieving. ‘Not this week?’
‘Not ever.’ The Gypsy turned away to find a sack to serve as a shroud for a dead aristocrat.
The Gypsy worked slowly, the foul cell lit by a single candle as he scooped the remains from the stone floor and, with bloodied hands, pushed it into the sack.
When the work was half done he heard heavy footsteps on the landing. With them came the thick smell of cigar smoke. The Gypsy rubbed his hands on a corner of the sack, stood, and leaned against the wall.
A large, fierce-faced man appeared at the cell door. He was a man in his late forties whose shoulders were humped with muscle like an ox. He was huge-chested, massive-armed; everything about him spoke of strength and weight. His shirt had separated from his trousers, showing the straps of a corset that held in his belly. He looked at the mess on the floor and at the Gypsy’s stained hands. ‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t shake hands with you.’ He laughed.
The man was called Bertrand Marchenoir. There had been a time when he was a priest, a fierce preacher made famous by the vitriol of his sermons, but the revolution had let him abandon the service of God for the service of the people. He was now a leader of the revolution; a man to fear or love, but never ignore.
Marchenoir bullied his followers; he preached, he shouted, he thumped tables into the night, he led, he harangued, he wept false tears to rouse the mob, his gestures were as expansive as his oratory. His voice, starting low and rising to a massive crescendo, had stirred the people from their slums out into the great streets of Paris. He had been at the Bastille, he had helped fetch the King from Versailles, and now his massive, terrifying force whipped the laggards in the National Assembly. ‘Forward! Forward!’ was his cry, and this week in Paris, fearing that the revolution would go backwards, Bertrand Marchenoir had led the slaughter in the prisons.
For those who wanted vengeance on their betters, Marchenoir was an idol. For those who wanted moderation, he was a scourge. No one was allowed to forget that he was peasant born; no gutter, he said, was lower than the one in which he had been spawned, and no palace, he shouted, was so high that it could not be pulled down. Forward, ever forward, and this week a thousand and more had died that Marchenoir’s revolution could go forward.
This was the man who came to the cell, who looked almost disinterestedly at the mess on the floor, then back to the Gypsy. ‘So you’re Gitan?’
‘I am Gitan.’
‘You know me?’
‘I know of you, citizen.’
Marchenoir smiled and waved his cigar at the scraps of the body. ‘You’re doing woman’s work, Gitan.’
‘A man is lucky to have a job these days, citizen.’
The heavy, jowled face stared at the Gypsy whose words had verged on criticism of the revolution. Then Marchenoir twitched his unshaven cheeks into a smile, into a laugh, and he kicked at the sack. ‘Why are you doing it, Gitan?’
‘The English lord wants to bury her.’
‘So let him do his own dirty work. Are you a slave?’
‘I am a horse-master.’
‘And she’s a corpse.’ Marchenoir stepped over the sack and peered at the face on the window ledge. ‘She took a long time dying.’
‘So Brissot said.’
‘Brissot has a fat mouth. One day I’ll sit on it and fill it up.’ Marchenoir spoke without anger. ‘I let them have her first. They queued from her to the second floor!’ He leaned against the wall, the candle throwing the shadows upwards on his big, red face. ‘I should have charged two livres a go, eh?’
‘Not a very revolutionary thought, citizen.’
Marchenoir laughed. He was a leader of ‘the left’, so called because they sat on the left side of the Assembly. They were revolutionaries who sought to abolish the crown, destroy the old privileges, and declare France a people’s republic. The events of the last two months were bringing that dream to fruition. Now Marchenoir blew a plume of smoke over the cell. ‘I was thinking that we ought to have a people’s brothel with girls like this. Every whore an aristo, yes? It would pay for the army.’ He looked at the girl’s head. ‘Do you think she deserved to die, horse-master?’
‘We all die,’ Gitan said. He was astonished at the brooding sense of power that was in this room. He had heard Marchenoir speak many times, he had seen the powerful arms beckoning at the crowd, listened to the voice arouse their anger and their hopes, yet still he was astonished at the sheer presence of the man.
Marchenoir chuckled at the non-committal answer. ‘She had to die, Gitan, but why? That, my friend, is my secret.’ He stabbed with his cigar at the Gypsy. ‘Nothing can be done without blood, nothing! Even the church taught that! If we fear blood we fear life! Isn’t that right, sweet child?’ He had asked the question of the severed head. He chuckled, and pushed the stub of his cigar into the dead lips. He turned back to the Gypsy. ‘I wanted to talk with you.’
‘I’m here.’ Even with such a rising, powerful man as Marchenoir, the Gypsy seemed laconically independent, yet there was a hint of respect, of deference in his bearing. Marchenoir, after all, was in the new government.
Marchenoir