An Affair of Poisons(15)

She stiffens, and when she speaks, her voice is careful and cold. “Of course not. Mother would never lead us astray. The massacre may have been difficult to witness, but that doesn’t mean it was wrong. Those men needed to die for the greater good of the people. Now that our hold is secure, all will be well. Mother plans to open the palace gates and welcome all to court. And there’s to be a victory procession.” She stitches a smile across her lips. Brittle and steely. Eerily similar to Mother’s.

I let out a breath and stare up at the lacy bed curtains, wondering how she can lie to herself. And whom I’m supposed to believe. And how I can possibly march in Mother’s procession when the last thing I feel is victorious.





4



JOSSE


I always imagined Hell would be hot—a lake of fire and brimstone and all that. But Hell, it turns out, is being trapped in these dank, freezing sewer tunnels, helpless to stop the eerie green specks from spreading like ink beneath my sisters’ skin. It’s hearing them cry my name and being unable to ease their suffering. It’s the feel of their brittle arms and legs withering beneath their dresses, smaller and smaller until I could snap them like twigs.

Every waking moment feels like a nightmare, and during the fleeting snatches when I accidentally nod off, I am bombarded by actual nightmares. Sometimes I’m carrying the girls through a blazing, endless forest, only to discover they’ve been dead all along, corpses clad in dresses. Other times I’m standing at the edge of the road, watching the blade sink into Rixenda’s back over and over again. But always, no matter the dream, Father’s voice taunts me, hissing and popping like the crackling flames: You wished for this. My death is on your head—as will be your sisters’.

I wake up sweating, shaking, and sometimes even sobbing. Yes, I wished for change, for acknowledgment, but never like this. Everything is twisted and wrong. I finally have access to my sisters only to watch them die. My siblings and I share the same status and accommodations, but they’re squalid and putrescent, even worse than the servants’ quarters.

The Devil must be having a good laugh.

“When can we go home?” Anne asks, as she has every morning for the past two weeks. Only today she coughs so violently between words, droplets of blood dapple her lips. Frowning, I offer her a sip of water we collected in a shoe and tug my waistcoat tighter around her shoulders, wishing, for the millionth time, we had a proper bed and blankets. A torn burlap sack in the corner of the chamber where the ceiling drips the least is the best we can manage.

The entire room is less than twenty paces across and barely tall enough for me to stand. The floor is jagged and misshapen and sudden gusts of reeking wind threaten to strangle us—made worse by Condé’s decaying body. The wound in his side wouldn’t stop bleeding, and he died not long after we reached the tunnels that first night. I dragged him as far away as I could, but it isn’t nearly far enough.

I smooth Anne’s hair away from her clammy cheeks and adjust her dress to cover the ghastly green bruises creeping across her shoulders. “We’ll go home soon, love,” I lie. “Now close your eyes and rest.”

Marie dabs a soaked bit of satin she ripped from her petticoats across Fran?oise’s forehead, but her fever’s burning so hot, the cloth dries the moment it touches her skin.

“What do we do, Josse?” Marie whispers.

I don’t know, I want to cry. I don’t know how to be the steady one, the strong one. No one’s ever noticed me, let alone depended on me. The ghost of Rixenda’s wooden spoon thwacks the back of my knuckles. Her gravelly voice is close, as if she’s sitting in the puddle beside me. Quit simpering and crying. You know what to do. I taught you.

“Tear more compresses,” I say, motioning to Marie’s petticoats. “Keep them cool against the rocks and rotate them every few minutes.” It probably won’t help. Nothing has. But it’s worth a try. In two weeks, the girls have gone from round-cheeked cherubs to wasted shells. I’m afraid to imagine what will become of them if we’re trapped down here for another two weeks.

The sewer was never meant to be a permanent solution, but finding alternate lodging and arranging transportation when you’re supposed to be dead—and cannot be seen, or else you truly will be dead—is next to impossible.

But I haven’t given up.

Once the girls finally drift off into a fitful, whimpering sleep, I pull on a tricorne hat that I nicked from a market stall and creep across the chamber. Louis scowls as I pass. He badgered me relentlessly those first few days, arguing that he should accompany me up above. But I flashed a pointed look at his opulent clothes, flaxen hair, and his altogether recognizable face—with that long, straight de Bourbon nose—and he muttered an oath and stayed put.

This is the first and only time being the nameless, nobody bastard has benefited me.

It’s too dangerous to venture out the grate we entered through—smack in the middle of the bustling rue Montmartre—so night after night, I scour the stinking tunnels until I find the hatch leading up into Madame Bissette’s patisserie. She’s a shrewd woman of business and agreed not to hand us over to the masked intruders in exchange for a few seed pearls and sapphires, which I took great pleasure in ripping from Louis’s extravagant frock coat.

For the past week, I’ve been creeping around Les Halles marketplace, stealing carrots and tomatoes and cabbages and listening in on conversations, which is how I know the attack on Versailles was orchestrated by the devineresse, La Voisin, and her Shadow Society. A witch masquerading as a fortune-teller, aided by poisoners and alchemists and magicians, like Lesage. They’ve taken the Louvre and are murdering courtiers and police officers to secure their hold on Paris.