Read Chapter 10: The Catacombs of the Commune

Dawn had not yet broken when the guides led her down. The entrance was a wine cellar in a half-collapsed building on the Rue des Rosiers—a trapdoor beneath a barrel that still smelled of vinegar and rot. Élise went down the ladder first, her skirts bunched in one fist, the other hand pressed flat against the damp stone wall. The air changed. Above, Paris was burning. Below, it was cold and still, and it breathed like a sleeping animal.

The tunnels opened into a wide chamber where barrel arches met in the dark. Lanterns hung from hooks driven into the stone, and the light fell on rows of cots—Communard fighters, women, two children with bandaged eyes. A hospital. Of course. The wounded always found their way underground.

A woman in a bloodstained apron came forward, a broad-shouldered nurse with iron-grey hair pulled back so tight it lifted her brows. "You're the teacher from the Eleventh?"

"Élise Moreau. I've nursed at the barricades. I can help."

The woman—she introduced herself as Citoyenne Garnier—looked at Élise's hands, her fine coat, the shoes that had never known mud until last week. But the Commune did not waste time on suspicion when the wounded kept coming, and so Élise was given a cot at the end of the aisle and a kerchief of clean linen, and she went to work.

Three days passed in the lamplight. There was no sun to mark time, only the shift change and the rhythm of screams that came muffled through stone. She washed wounds with boiled water and rubbed tincture of iodine into gashes that would not close. She held a boy's hand while his leg was taken above the knee. She learned the names of fighters who would not live to see the street again, and she gave them water and lies that tasted like hope.

On the third night—or what she guessed was night—a stretcher came down with a prisoner. He was a Versailles soldier, so young his face was still smooth, shot through the shoulder and the thigh. The guides had taken him from a skirmish near the Panthéon. There was talk of executing him. Élise heard it in the corridor, low voices, men who had lost brothers in the same hour.

She put herself between the prisoner and the door. "He's wounded. You bring him to a hospital, you don't bring him to a wall."

"Soldier of Versailles," the man with the rifle said, and spat.

"He's a boy," Élise said. "And he'll die in three hours without treatment. Let me do my work. You can judge him when he can stand."

Citoyenne Garnier backed her with a look that could have melted iron, and the men withdrew. Élise worked on the soldier, extracting the bullet from his shoulder with a spoon handle and a knife she had sterilized in the lamp's flame. He woke halfway through, screaming in a language she didn't know, and she held his head and told him he was safe. He didn't believe her. Neither did she.

When it was done, she sat on the floor beside his cot, her hands shaking from the exhaustion that had been pooling behind her eyes for days. A voice above her said her name.

Not loud. Quiet. The way a name sounds when it is only supposed to be heard once.

Élise looked up. Henri stood at the foot of the cot, still in his officer's coat, but the coat was torn at the shoulder and his collar was open. He held a lantern and he looked like a man who had not slept in weeks.

"How did you find me?"

"Guides talk. You were seen coming below. And there was a prisoner exchange at the Barrière d'Italie." His eyes moved to the boy on the cot. "He's one of ours. This one was taken from the Hôtel de Ville infirmary. I followed the stretcher."

"You came down here alone?"

"There are no ranks in tunnels, Élise. They let me pass because I came with the boy and because I promised not to raise a weapon." He stepped closer and she saw the red on his knuckles. "It cost me a pint of blood at the gate."

She took his hand without thinking. The skin was torn and raw, the nails cracked. "You'll need this cleaned."

"In a minute."

But he didn't move, and she didn't move, and for a moment they stood in the lamplight with the wounded between them and the dead pressing down from above. Then Élise pulled him to the far end of the chamber, past a curtain of canvas, into a storage alcove that held rolls of bandages and a pile of clean blankets. She sat him on a crate and knelt to wash his hands.

"Talk to me," she said, working the blood out of his knuckles with cold water. "Why are you really here?"

"Because I thought you were dead."

She looked up. His face was pale in the lantern glow, and there was a wildness in his eyes she had not seen before—the kind that came from days of expecting the worst.

"Jules found me. He threatened to turn me in," she said. "I left the house. I couldn't go to the school—not with him knowing it. Marguerite—" She stopped. "Do you know anything? About the children?"

"I saw your school from the roof of the Vieux-Chêne yesterday. There are Communard flags still flying over it. A barricade has gone up in the street, but the buildings have not been hit." He swallowed. "As far as I know, they are alive."

It was not enough. It would have to be enough.

Henri's hand turned under hers and gripped her fingers. "I came to Paris to tell you something, and if I don't say it now, I may not get another chance." He paused. "Your father is not what you think."

Élise felt her chest tighten. She pulled her hand away.

"I know what he is," she said carefully. "He sold his name to Versailles years ago."

"He's not your father by blood."

The words hung in the air. She shook her head. "What?"

"I saw his file—Do they wonder how a Deputy Minister from the provinces has no military record? I found a different name in the archives. Moreau ran a foundling home in Caen. There was a ledger of children who were given to him by their mothers, too poor to keep them." He met her eyes. "Your name was in that ledger, Élise. You were five years old when he took you. Your mother gave you to him because she could not feed you, and the record says she signed her name and never came back."

Élise found she could not breathe. She had imagined her mother a hundred times—a face in a locket, a voice in a song. She had never imagined being sold, even kindly, for want of bread.

"And Jules?" she said, barely above a whisper.

"He's the blood son. That's why he fell in with Versailles so easily—why he wants you out of the way. If you die on the barricades, your father's name goes unchallenged to the grave."

The floor seemed to tilt. She put a hand on the stone wall, and Henri stood and placed his hands on her shoulders, steadying her.

"This doesn't change who you are," he said. "It changes the field."

The alcove was small. The moment was narrower. Élise looked at him—his tired face, his torn knuckles, the way he had crossed the line between enemy and man for her, for a truth that had nothing to do with politics.

"If the Commune falls," she said, "and we live through it—how do we make a family out of this?"

"I don't know." His voice cracked. "But I will find a way to reunite us, Élise. You and Jules, your father, whatever remains of your family. I meant what I said on the roof. I will find the seam between this war's two sides, and I will pull it apart for you."

He did not know. He still did not know that Jules was his own blood—that their families were already stitched together by the worst thread of all. Élise opened her mouth to tell him, and closed it. Not here. Not with both of them half-dead and the world above crumbling.

Instead, she took his hand again, and she did not let go.

"I will hold you to that, Henri," she said quietly. "I will hold you to that until there is no more war to come between us."

They stayed that night in the alcove, the city groaning above them, wrapped in two thin blankets and each other's impossible promises. In the morning, he was gone before she woke, and a clean white bandage lay across her hand where he had re-dressed her wound in his sleep.