Assassin's Creed: Unity by Oliver Bowden Read Free Book Online

mirrored surfaces of the palace’s marble floors we ran—through legs, along corridors, past columns and pillars. Even to me now the palace is huge, its ceilings impossibly tall, its halls stretching almost as far as the eye can see, huge arched windows looking out to the stone steps and sweeping grounds beyond.
    But to me then? To me then it was impossibly vast. And yet, even though it was this vast, strange place, and even though with each step I took I went farther away from my father’s instructions, I still couldn’t resist the lure of my new playmate. The girls I had met weren’t like this. They stood with their heels together and their lips pursed in disdain at all things boylike; they walked a few steps behind like Russian-doll versions of their mothers; they didn’t run giggling through the halls of the Palace of Versailles ignoring any protests that came their way, just running for the joy of running and the love of play. I wonder, had I already fallen in love?
    And then, just as I started to worry that I would never find my way back to Father, my concerns became irrelevant. A shout had gone up. There was the sound of rushing feet. I saw soldiers with muskets and, quite by chance, came upon the spot where he had met his killer and I knelt to him as he breathed his last.
    When at last I looked up from his lifeless body it was to see my savior, my new guardian: François de la Serre.

E XTRACTS FROM THE J OURNAL OF É LISE DE LA S ERRE

    14 A PRIL 1778
    i
    He came to see me today.
    “Élise, your father is here,” said Ruth. Like everyone else her demeanor changed when my father was around, and she curtsied and withdrew, leaving us alone.
    “Hello, Élise,” he said stiffly from the door. I remembered that evening years ago when Mother and I had returned from Paris, survivors of a terrible attack in an alleyway, and how he had been unable to stop taking us in his arms. He’d embraced me so much that by the end of the night I’d been wriggling away from him just to get some air. Now, as he stood there looking more like a governor than a father, I would have given anything for one of those embraces.
    He turned and paced, hands clasped behind his back. He stopped, gazing from the window but not really seeing the lawns beyond, and I watched his blurred face in the reflection of the glass as without turning, he said, “I wanted to see how you were.”
    “I’m fine, thank you, Papa.”
    There was a pause. My fingers worked at the fabric of my smock. He cleared his throat. “You do a fine job of disguising your feelings, Élise; it is qualities such as these that you will one day call upon as Grand Master. Just as your strength comforts our household it will one day be of benefit to the Order.”
    “Yes, Father.”
    Again he cleared his throat. “Even so, I want you to know that in private or when you and I should find ourselves alone, that . . . that it’s okay
not
to be fine.”
    “Then I will admit I am suffering, Father.”
    His head dropped. His eyes were dark circles in the reflection of the glass. I knew why he found it difficult to look at me. It was because I reminded him of her. I reminded him of his dying wife.
    “I, too, am suffering, Élise. Your mother means the world to us both.”
    And if there was a moment in which he might have turned from the window, crossed the room, gathered me in his arms and allowed us to share our pain, then that was it.
    But he didn’t.
    And if there was a moment when I might have asked him why, if he knew my pain, did he spend so much of his time with Arno and not with me, then that was it.
    But I didn’t.
    Little else was said before he left. Sometime later I heard that he left to go hunting—with Arno.
    The physician arrives soon. He never brings good news.
    ii
    In my mind’s eye I revisit another meeting, two years before, when I was summoned to Father’s study for an audience with him and Mother, who unusually for her wore a look of concern. I knew