Where the Light Falls(116)

After a quarter of an hour of running, he turned a corner near Rue de Cléry and nearly charged face-first into a blue-coated guardsman. “Easy, there!” The man stood smoking a long pipe. He eyed Jean-Luc with a mixture of disapproval and mistrust, as if deciding whether there was something for which he ought to arrest him.

His breath frantic and uneven, Jean-Luc stammered out the reason for his frantic chase. “Please, good citizen! My boy…a little boy.” Jean-Luc raised a hand to where Mathieu’s height would fall against his leg. “Six. Dark hair like his mother’s…”

Through a piecemeal explanation, Jean-Luc relayed the urgency of his search, and the officer promised to keep an eye out for the child. “It’s highly likely, citizen, that he just wandered off looking for some mischief and, growing tired, or bored, has returned home. We see it all the time. Either way, he wouldn’t have come this far. You’re much better off returning to your own neighborhood.”

Jean-Luc thought about this, considering it to be possible. Perhaps Mathieu was home right now, safe and happy as he ate some of the roast chicken that Marie had prepared for their supper. “Home? Yes, perhaps you’re right. Perhaps he’s gone home.”

With that, he sought the officer’s assurance that the gendarmes would search that evening for a little boy with dark hair and dark eyes. And gaining that promise, he set off toward home, sprinting back across the river.

Back on the Left Bank, his neighborhood was quiet and the streets were empty, save for a few students and a barking dog. As he came upon his building, he spotted a familiar coach. The dread in his belly thickened, and he stopped in his footsteps, gasping to steady his breath; Guillaume Lazare stood outside the coach.

“Citizen St. Clair.” The old man opened the carriage door when Jean-Luc approached. “You look fatigued. Please, have a seat.”

“Not now, Lazare.” Jean-Luc barely paused, still marching toward the door that would take him inside his building.

“I shall not detain you for long. I have news concerning a matter that may be of interest to you.” Guillaume Lazare slipped a black box of snuff from a pocket in his jacket, spilled some of the contents onto his hand, and sniffed it in one swift gesture.

Jean-Luc paused in his steps, noticing the peculiar silence of the street around him.

“Your son,” Lazare said, his voice barely a whisper. “Have you found him?”

Jean-Luc turned toward the carriage, his entire frame rigid. All that was in him longed to lurch forward and take Lazare’s thin, reedy neck in his hands. If he had wanted to, he could have snapped it in two. “Where is my son?”

“Come in, have a seat.” Lazare retreated back into the darkness of the coach, his figure concealed in shadow as he left the door ajar. Jean-Luc forced himself to climb into the velvet interior.

“You tell me where my son is.”

“Care for any?” Lazare, his white face enshrouded in darkness, extended the small case of snuff.

“No.” Jean-Luc waved it away. Lazare poured another small sprinkling on his hand, which he snorted through his thin nose with two quick gasps. Sighing, he leaned his head back, his emotionless eyes holding Jean-Luc in their steady gaze.

After a pause that seemed interminable, the old man spoke. “Seems your boy stole some bread from the baker. Tried to make a dash for it.”

“That’s a lie.” Jean-Luc leaned forward. “He has never stolen. Would never do such a thing, not when he was there with his own…aunt…who had the money to pay for the bread.”

“His aunt, you say?” Lazare tittered, his narrow teeth glistening in the shadows of the coach as he sneered. “Well now, I’m simply reporting what I heard.”

“Where is he?”

“He has been detained.”

“Detained? But this is preposterous! He’s just a child!”

“I am telling you what I know, Citizen St. Clair. I am a man of the law; justice is the only master I serve. You know that.”

Jean-Luc narrowed his eyes, allowing himself to admit, for the first time, that this man was his enemy. This powerful, cunning man. He knew, in that moment, that Lazare would accept nothing more out of Jean-Luc than pleading. Submission. Absolute surrender.

And so that was what he, a desperate father, would give. “Please, Lazare. I will do whatever you ask. Just give him back.”

“I’d like to help you, St. Clair. I believe that it’s a bit…excessive…to detain your little boy. Why, he wouldn’t last more than a month in those dungeons. If it’s not the other prisoners, it’ll be the malnourishment. Or the diseases, the way they spread in this heat.”