The Barbed Crown by William Dietrich Read Free Book Online Page B

put up against the wall of a dry moat, and shot.
    Eighteen others had been condemned with Cadoudal in a sensational spring show trial designed to demonstrate the peril to the government. Subtracting six pardons, the guillotine schicked this day thirteen more times, filling five wicker baskets that were shared, for economy. Some victims wept, some proclaimed final loyalty to the Bourbons, and most went with stoic silence.
    I’m not a believer in last words, either, since you never get a proper reply.
    Rumor held that a composer named Ludwig van Beethoven was so disturbed by Napoleon’s suppressions that he’d renamed his new “Bonaparte Symphony” the vaguer Eroica , a puzzling title I doubt will ever catch on. The cranky German songmeister believed Napoleon, once the Prometheus of Liberty, was betraying his own reforms.
    No matter. Most Frenchmen had concluded Bonaparte was the best thing since the baguette. The audience sighed and applauded every time the blade dropped. It’s mesmerizing to watch a massacre.
    Astiza kept Harry home at our Paris apartment while I morbidly witnessed the slaughter with Catherine Marceau. She pressed to my shoulder, one of a number of surprising intimacies that made me increasingly uncomfortable, but which I couldn’t bring myself to entirely discourage. She jerked slightly each time a head rolled, eyes wide, no doubt remembering the execution of her parents. Since we’d begun sharing an apartment, the comtesse had become inexplicably more flirtatious, as if inspired by the competition of a wife. Women forever confuse me.
    “I’m sorry you have to see this, Comtesse,” I said.
    “On the contrary, it reminds me of my purpose,” she murmured.
    Astiza considered execution barbaric. “What if the judges make a mistake?” she asked. “The truly secure show mercy.”
    “Napoleon preaches that killing a few keeps the many in line. He says executions are a mercy for the nation as a whole.”
    “The creed of the hangman, not the hanged. Wait until it’s his turn.”
    I watched the slaughter to gauge our situation. Even the English captain who had brought Astiza to France ahead of me, John Wesley Wright, had been captured off the French coast and imprisoned. Betrayal had followed betrayal. Sir Sidney Smith’s brother Spencer had been forced by French pressure to leave Württemberg in Germany, where he’d served as a spymaster. Another British agent, Francis Drake, had fled Munich. My family was marooned as forgotten agents of a conspiracy in utter collapse. My investments in England were out of reach, and the gold I’d been given as salary had to be carefully nursed because we were supporting Catherine, and communication with Sir Sidney Smith was broken. I calculated we’d just enough to last until the coronation, planned for early December. I could still send messages out to England, using a collaborating priest in the confessional at Saint-Sulpice, but received no word in return.
    In short, I’d given up control of my fortune and joined the wrong side at the worst possible time, at frozen wages, with a flirtatious roommate who lost her own money in the Channel, all to avenge a wife who turned out to be alive.
    My foresight could be improved.
    We also suspected we were being followed. Catherine said men watched her from café tables (a claim I didn’t doubt), and Astiza said clerks made notes of books she examined at the imposing Bibliothèque Nationale on rue de Richelieu. These gatekeepers claimed that the records she most ardently sought either didn’t exist or were restricted. Harry reported seeing a shadowy giant, though this specter melted away every time I turned, and I knew he might be a product of my son’s anxious imagination. He would wake with nightmares. It’s natural for a child to have a nervous imagination, but it was with love and guilt that I’d buy him pastries—or an early orange from the Mediterranean—or tell him monsters aren’t true.
    Police were