“You’ll wear a new bruise ’cross your ugly aristocratic face if you don’t hurry out now.” The guard lifted the butt of his musket menacingly. “Now, get out, or I might lose my temper.”
One of the other prisoners peered out of his cell, staring at André, his dark eyes earnest. “May God be with you, brother. May God be with you.”
God hasn’t been with me for quite some time, André thought, as he shuffled through the cell door. His legs were unsteady, barely up to the task of carrying his body to its condemnation. As he walked, his thoughts turned to Sophie’s letter, the news he had just read in his cell. He agonized now, one question haunting him more than even the dread of his upcoming trial and sentencing: where was Remy?
—
André stepped down from the wagon, hands and ankles shackled, and shuffled his way through a small passage toward the court. The sun poured down, a blinding light he had not seen in months, forcing him to raise his hands and shield his squinting eyes.
Jean-Luc stood outside the court, his face dropping noticeably when he saw his client. “André, you are not dressed in your army uniform.”
André glanced down at his body covered in the scratchy gray sackcloth. Looking back up at his lawyer, he could read the disappointment in Jean-Luc’s soft hazel eyes. “I’m sorry. It was gone. Taken from my cell by one of the guards.”
“Murat, no doubt,” Jean-Luc growled under his breath, his face momentarily shedding his constant composure. He sighed. “Very well. We will carry on regardless.” He forced an encouraging smile, patting André gently on the back, his eyes taking in his client’s emaciated frame. Just then, a bailiff called out the next case, and Jean-Luc and André were shuffled inside toward the front of the hall.
“The Citizens and People of the French Republic versus André de Valière, heir to the former Marquis de Valière.” At that announcement, the crowd stuffed and squeezed into the courtroom began to hiss and stomp their feet. The row of jurymen, all wearing tricolor cockades and red caps, whispered to one another, their eyes fixed eagerly on the doorway where André and his lawyer entered.
Jean-Luc leaned close to whisper: “Never mind that. Just remember—you fought at Valmy, you fought on the Italian front, and you have risked your life for the Revolution. You’ve willingly renounced your title, your lands, and your claims to nobility. You merely wish to continue serving the Republic.”
Putting a hand on André’s shoulder, Jean-Luc heaved in a fortifying breath before saying: “Right, then, let’s go.”
André kept his eyes firmly ahead, though in truth he saw little and felt less. Nodding, he stepped forward alongside Jean-Luc, and the counselor set his gait to remain in stride with his client.
As they entered the court, the crowd turned to get a better look at the two men. Since the fall of Robespierre and the Jacobins, the tribunals had changed in many ways. Noticeable among these changes was a more mechanical functioning of these proceedings, which, to some, seemed dull by comparison. Seething emotion and rage from the gallery was replaced with a bureaucratic rigidity that, Jean-Luc fervently hoped, might give him an opening to reasonably plead André’s case. But there was no certainty, for many in the crowd still remained hostile to the nobility and fearful of a royalist uprising; the scars of the Revolution would not disappear so easily.
The head magistrate rang the shrill bell, its noise falling in with the roar of the audience but restoring no order.
André took his seat, ringed on all sides by benches of spectators. The chamber was less grand than the courtroom in which Kellermann had been tried, this being a lower-profile case. All the same, the hall overflowed with the usual mass of eager, spectating faces.
André blinked, trying to overcome this paralyzing sense of numbness and detachment. The room of spectators blurred together—their humorless smiles and stringy hair blending into one tableau of concentrated hostility. Only one face stood out, a familiar set of features: gray eyes, an ink-black ponytail, a prominent mustache. Nicolai Murat sat in the center of the room, several rows back, his gaze fixed on the prisoner with singular focus.
When André saw his accuser—Sophie’s hunter, Remy’s tormenter—he felt a sudden wave of emotion stronger than anything he had experienced in months. His numbness gave way to a swell of anger. Pain at the thought of Kellermann’s memory and unjust death. Of Sophie’s fear and unhappiness. Of poor Remy, from whom he’d had no news. André felt so overcome with emotion that he struggled with a great effort to hold back tears.