LITMIR.BIZ

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poke around! Bloody English!’

      The smoke from Gitan’s tobacco drifted under the archway. Flies buzzed in the courtyard behind him. He picked a shred of leaf from his lip. ‘They say we don’t want war with the English yet.’ He spoke lazily, as if he did not really care whether there was war or not. His name, Gitan, simply meant ‘Gypsy’. If he had a real name no one used it. He was horse-master to the young redheaded man, described on the paper as ‘Mr Lazender’. Mr Lazender, in truth, was Viscount Werlatton, heir to the Earldom of Lazen, but this was no week to advertise aristocratic birth in Paris.

       Two girls came through the archway, laughing, their wooden sabots clattering on the cobbles. They saw the Gypsy and became coy, giggling and nudging each other. ‘Gitan!’ one of them called.

      He looked at them with his bright, amused eyes.

      The black haired girl jerked her head. ‘You with the foreigners?’

      The Gypsy smiled. ‘Which one do you fancy, Terese?’

      They all laughed. Jean Brissot, sucking in his belly, looked enviously at the Gypsy. ‘Is there a girl in Paris you don’t know, Gitan?’

      ‘The Austrian whore.’

      That provoked more laughter. Marie Antoinette was imprisoned with her husband, the King.

      Terese came close to the Gypsy. He smelt of leather and tobacco. She played with the laces of his black coat. ‘Are you at Laval’s tonight?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Gitan!’

      ‘I work! I sleep at the stables. If you ask my master he might let you in, but the straw gets everywhere.’ He blew smoke over her head, then cuddled her almost absent-mindedly. Brissot was jealous. The Gypsy, it was said, had a way with women as he did with horses. Now Gitan smiled down at the girl. ‘You’re getting in the way of the bottle. Go on with you.’ He pushed her out into the square where the martins flickered between the dark houses.

      Jean Brissot shook his head. ‘How do you do it?’

      ‘Do what?’

      ‘The women!’ The plump man laughed. ‘If I had your luck, Gitan, just for one day!’

      The Gypsy shrugged. ‘Women are like horses.’

      ‘You ride them, eh?’

      The tall, handsome horse-master smiled. ‘You love them, you let them know who is master, and you always have a spare one.’

      ‘Gitan! Gitan!’ The voice, peremptory and desperate, shouted from within the prison. ‘Gitan!’

      The Gypsy tossed away his paper-wrapped cigar and shrugged. ‘Watch my horse, Jean.’

      Pierce, the oldest of the three Englishmen, stood by a flight of steps that led up from the courtyard. His face, always pale, seemed paper white in the fading light. ‘She’s there. Upstairs.’ Pierce looked as if he had been sick.

      The Gypsy nodded, climbed the steps and pushed past the men who loitered in the entrance. He climbed more stairs, noting how the still, hot air within the prison buildings seemed to have trapped the stench of blood and death so that it was thick in his nostrils and sour in his throat.

      He saw Toby Lazender, Lord Werlatton, at the end of a long landing on the fourth floor. The young, redheaded man was leaning against the wall and he was lit by the last rays of the setting sun that filtered through a barred window and through the cell door. He did not turn as the Gypsy walked towards him, he just stared into the cell.

      Gitan stopped by the door. He looked at Toby Lazender. He doubted whether, at this moment, the young Englishman was even aware that he was present. The young face was set harder than stone, the eyes empty of everything. He was utterly still. Beside him, a look of helplessness on his face, was Drew.

      The Gypsy looked into the cell.

      The sun dazzled him. Something stood on the window ledge.

      He stepped slowly into the cell, treading gently as though in a flower bed.

      ‘Gitan?’ Toby’s voice was low.

      The Gypsy crouched and grunted.

      The young Englishman’s voice was filled with loathing. ‘Was there anything they didn’t do to her?’

      The Gypsy did not reply. There was no need to reply.

      Lucille de Fauquemberghes had been twenty, lovely as the night, a creature of joy and love and beauty.

      Now what was left of her was in this cell. She looked like cuts of meat, nothing more.

      Blood was splashed a yard high on the stones. Flesh clung to bones. It was as if she had been torn apart by wild creatures.

      Gitan stepped to one side, out of the sun’s rays, and saw the object on the window sill. It was her severed head. Her hair, long and raven, fell below the sill.

      ‘Christ!’ The shout was like a wail, drawn out, wolf-howling, and the Gypsy turned, stepped over the horror and caught Toby Lazender about the waist. He pushed the young Englishman back against the landing wall, holding him there as Drew, an Embassy clerk, hovered helplessly. Drew, the Gypsy saw, had been sick.

      ‘I’ll kill them! I’ll kill all those bastards! I’ll kill them!’

      Pierce, a Secretary at the Embassy, came running down the corridor. ‘Toby!’

      Toby was sobbing the word ‘kill’ over and over, and Pierce looked in horror as the Gypsy held the struggling young lord against the wall. It was in anticipation of this reaction, this anger, that Lord Gower, the ambassador, had ordered the men to ride without weapons.

      The Gypsy spoke to Toby Lazender in French. ‘Go downstairs.’

      ‘No!’ Toby howled the word. ‘No!’

      ‘I’ll bring her for burial. Go downstairs, my Lord.’

      ‘My Lord!’ Pierce took the younger man by the arm.

      ‘Come on. Come on! Gitan will bring her.’ He looked despairingly at the tall gypsy. It had been the ambassador who suggested that Gitan accompanied the search party; there was no man more competent, more accomplished than the Gypsy. Pierce saw the ease with which he pinioned Lord Werlatton. ‘You’ll have to help us take him down.’

      The three of them took Toby Lazender down the stairs, down the steps into the yard where the bodies lay in muddled heaps, led him over the blood in the gutter, and even the grinning, blood-spattered men and women at the open gate looked nervous because of the anger and grief that was on the Englishman’s face. Pierce talked to him all the time, talked in English, told him to make no trouble, to leave, to go back to the Embassy, and the horse-master untied their horses and watched them ride away.

      The Gypsy let out a long breath. If Toby Lazender had lashed out just once then the crowd would have reacted, would have drawn their blood-stained swords and hacked the Englishmen to pieces. He waited until the three horsemen had disappeared in a dark alley and until the sharp sound of their hooves had faded into the gathering night.

      He turned back to the yard of the prison. Torches were being lit and pushed into their iron brackets and the flames were lurid on the heaped bodies. There were men, women and children in the pile of corpses. Some of the children had been too young to have known what happened to them.

      It was the same in half the prisons of Paris. The Commune, the new rulers of Paris, had howled that the aristos and the rich were sending messages to the Prussian and Austrian enemies and so the Minister of Justice had ordered them arrested and imprisoned. Then the rumour had gone round the little streets that the aristos planned to break out of the prisons and bring swords and knives to murder the Revolutionary government, and so the people had struck first. They had massacred the prisoners. Aristocrats, priests, servants; men, women, children, all dead in the prisons. Over a thousand had died in the week, hacked and raped and mutilated until the mob was tired

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