Where the Light Falls(53)

Their bodies were beside each other on the couch now, and Sophie reclined, looking up at him. The expectant look in her eyes was torturous for him, and he lowered his body down beside hers. Pausing a moment to meet her gaze, he whispered, his breath grazing her ear: “You do know how beautiful you are, don’t you?”

“Only because you tell me every day,” she whispered back, bringing her finger to just lightly touch the warm skin of his cheek. The place where he still bore the scar from the enemy’s blade at Valmy. “Battle scar?” Sophie asked.

He nodded, taking her fingers to his lips and kissing them. Then he brought his lips to the ridge of her collarbone, tracing a line to her shoulder, and then up her neck. When his lips found hers once more, she parted her mouth and began to kiss him with a fervor that he thought might drive him wild.

Feeling warm, and longing to press his body even closer to hers, he removed his coat. She helped him out of it. Taking his hand in hers, she guided him to her breast, which he cupped over the burdensome folds of her gown. “Sophie?” He paused to look into her eyes, to make sure that he had not overstepped a line, had not made her uncomfortable. But she only groaned, frustrated that he had stopped kissing her.

Now his hands seemed to have taken on an agency of their own as they began to wander toward the hem of her skirt. She assisted him, hoisting the folds of fabric so that he might be unencumbered. Propelled now by a force larger than either one of them, André began to touch her soft, goose-bumped skin. He shut his eyes, consumed by his desire for her. And then the door to the salon burst open.

André jumped up, looking toward the door, where he saw the panting figure of Parsy. The old woman’s face was ashen, her lower lip falling away from her mouth.

“Is my uncle coming?” Sophie, too, had bolted upright on the couch. André reached for his discarded coat.

“Not him,” Parsy said, eyes down, her cheeks aflame with embarrassment over the scene she had interrupted. “But a message from him, madame.”

Parsy held a letter, the name Brigadier General Nicolai Murat written on the front in the man’s upright cursive. Seeing the name, and the letter that had come from that man’s hands, thoroughly quashed any last remnants of the romantic ardor André had felt just moments earlier.

“Bring it here.” Sophie waved the maid forward, taking the note from her hands. She tore the red wax seal and read, her face growing pale. When she finished, the note slipped from her hands and she began to weep.

“What is it?” André crossed the room toward her, kneeling to retrieve the note from the floor. He read it quickly. The paper was marked with the day’s date: October 16, 1793.

The note was brief, emotionless.

The former queen, Marie-Antoinette of Austria, has been found guilty by the Republic of France. The widow of Citizen Capet is charged with plotting alongside the foreign enemies of the Republic to overthrow the government; attempting to escape from prison; wasting the riches of the country which were not her own; committing adultery, having relations with many at the Court at Versailles other than her husband; and molesting her son, the former dauphin, who had confessed to his jail keeper of his mother’s heinous sins. Punishment: beheading within four and twenty hours.

You aren’t safe, my niece. No noblewoman is. I shall come fetch you shortly, within the hour, and bring you back to my home, where you shall remain for now, under my faithful protection.

Your devoted,

Uncle Nico





André absorbed the news, the letter shaking in his hands. “The dauphin confessed to his jail keeper?” André scoffed. “More like the poor child was forced, by the blade of a knife, to agree to such a shameful accusation!”

Sophie was staring blankly at the floor in a state of shock, and André folded her into his arms. Looking up at him, tears in her eyes, she asked: “Has this entire world gone mad?”

André held her tight without answering her question. He couldn’t—he himself did not know the answer. With today’s verdict, the last ties to the old order were cut. Just a few years ago, the people had believed the queen to be a divine figure, God’s anointed vessel on earth. And now, today, she was to be beheaded.

With no monarchs left to vilify and condemn, to whom might the Committee and its frenzied supporters turn next? André squeezed Sophie tighter, trying to suppress the shudder that threatened to force its way through his frame. This very day, for the first time in its history, France would be without a living monarch. And Sophie would begin her own prison sentence.





December 1793