“André.”
Hearing a voice behind him, he turned around and saw Sophie emerging from the crowd. Her eyes were moist with tears, and the sight of her sent a stab of pain through his chest.
“Oh, André.”
He walked over to her and they embraced. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “You shouldn’t have come. You don’t need to see this.”
“I know. I wish I could be anywhere but here, but I also know how much you loved him. How much you all loved him. We can’t do anything for him now, but we can at least say goodbye.” André held her to his chest; otherwise she would have seen the tears that swelled in his own eyes.
They turned and made their way to join the crowd gathering toward the center of La Place, managing to push their way toward the front, where guards with bayonets struggled to hold the hordes back. Their view of the guillotine was partially obscured by someone waving a large tricolor flag. A noise from behind drew André’s attention and he glanced back; there, over the sea of fists and hands, a tumbril rolled into the square at precisely three o’clock, its arrival greeted by uproarious cheers and shouting.
There was just one carriage loaded with ashen-faced passengers. As the cart rolled to a halt before the platform, the horses whinnied in response to the noise of the crowd. The front horse jerked its head, attempting to rear up before its coachman gave it a cuff. Even these beasts, so seasoned in their daily task of bearing the tumbrils into the sea of madness, were jumpier than usual. Perhaps, André thought, they sensed the heightened energy of the crowd inside La Place today.
André and Sophie watched as the carriage gate was lowered. He was able to see the condemned more clearly now—six of them, the day’s haul. Kellermann stood at the back of the carriage, the tallest passenger. He wore the gray sackcloth of the prisoner. His hair had been shorn, his familiar gray-laced ponytail gone. The crowd had seen him, too, and even though there were five figures before him, some began to chant his name.
A middle-aged man was escorted up to the platform first. His escorts turned into his carriers when his knees buckled halfway up the steps and he fell to the ground, his hands clenched in supplication. When he was jostled into position, the crowd roared ever louder. Still he cried out, begging for deliverance.
“You will have it, soon enough,” André mouthed, as the man’s head was fitted into the smooth wooden cradle. André joined the crowd in a collective gasp, a sharp intake of breath, when the rope was pulled loose from the apparatus. The blade whirred downward and euphoria erupted around André and Sophie when the man’s head fell away from the body into the woven basket.
Two women were brought forward next—sisters, by the look of it. They clutched each other, their unnaturally thin arms interwoven like spools of braided thread. The guards wrested them apart and the first one was ushered up the stairs, her face wracked with terror as she looked back at her companion.
“Amélie!” The one who had been held back reached out a pale hand toward the platform. Her hair was the same strawberry blond shade as her sister’s and, like her sister’s, had been cropped short. Some guard would make a pretty fortune off those two heads of hair.
The sister on the platform was being roughly handled, pushed into place in spite of her protests. The neck rest was slicked with the other man’s blood. She threw one last look out at her sister, who was shrieking and reaching for her still. “Amélie!”
The girl on the platform moved her lips fast, inaudibly, reciting a prayer. Her head was taken in Sanson’s hands and slid into place under the blade. The crowd cheered ever louder when her head tumbled free, joining that of the middle-aged man.
Her lifeless frame was tossed behind the platform as her sister was led upward. André looked around, more aghast than even a moment earlier.
“You’ll join her now, dearie!” A toothless man to the right of André and Sophie snickered, picking at his gums as he did so. André took hold of Sophie and shuffled her away from the man. He wished that Sophie hadn’t come, and he feared that she would be sick. He had seen enough death on the battlefield as to become hardened to it, but this was something else entirely. He shut his eyes and grasped Sophie’s hand with a gentle but firm grip.
The young woman’s sobs were silenced by the blade as her head joined her sister’s. André saw the next victim. He was a youth, fair-skinned and small in frame. André guessed that he could have been no more than twelve, judging by his smooth cheeks that had not yet grown even the hint of a beard. An innocent, surely, his only crime being born into a doomed family.