Read Chapter 20: The Enemy Within

The cell smelled of wet straw and old blood. Jules sat against the far wall, his hands bound behind him, one eye swollen shut, the other fixed on the grimy light that fell through the barred window. He looked smaller than Élise remembered—less like a man who had sold his neighbors to the Versailles army, more like a cornered dog waiting for the boot.

Véronique stood guard by the door, rifle cradled in her arms. She glanced at Élise with something close to pity.

"You shouldn't be here, schoolteacher."

"I need to see him alone."

Véronique hesitated, then nodded once and stepped into the corridor, pulling the door half-closed behind her. The sound of her boots faded. Élise knelt in front of Jules. The straw was damp through her skirt.

"Why?" she asked.

Jules laughed, a dry rattle in his throat. "Why what? Why did I tell them where the cache was? Why did I point out the safe house on Rue de la Roquette?"

"All of it."

He lifted his head. His good eye found her, and there was something hard in it—not shame, not regret. A kind of hollow glitter, like glass catching firelight.

"Because I know what they'll do to us if they win," he said. "And I know what we'll do to ourselves if we don't. The Commune is dying, Élise. It's been dying since April. You think the National Guard can hold the walls? You think the men with the cannons are going to lay down their arms because we waved a red flag at them? I wanted to live. I wanted my sister to live. That's all."

"By sending other people's sisters to the firing squad?"

"By making sure someone remembers my name after all this is over. Someone in the government who can say—'that one helped us. That one deserves mercy.' You think I wanted this? I was a printer. I set type. I didn't ask for any of this."

Élise stood. Her knees ached from the damp floor. She looked down at him, and for a moment she wanted to walk away. Let the tribunal do what it would. He had sold women and children to the very soldiers who were even now marching on Neuilly. But she couldn't. The part of her that had once taught children to read, that had bandaged the wounded of both sides without asking which uniform they wore, that part would not let her simply turn her back.

"If I can stop it," she said slowly, "if I can convince the tribunal to commute your sentence—will you leave Paris? Will you take your sister and go?"

Jules stared at her. The hard glitter in his eye flickered.

"You can't stop it. Sedan's already been chosen. He wants blood."

"I'll find a way."

"Why would you do this for me? I would have seen you dead. I would have named you, if they'd asked. I did name you—to one of Roux's men, before I knew who you were. I told them there was a schoolteacher at the barricade on Rue de la Roquette who knew the captain of the guard."

The words settled in her chest like stones. She had known the risk. She had walked into this hospital, this city, this revolution, with her name burned into enough notebooks and registers to hang her ten times over. Jules was not the first to know her face. But he was the first to have sold it.

"Then I suppose I'm a fool," she said quietly. "But I've spent the last month learning that we're all somebody's enemy. And I would rather be the kind of person who tries to save even the ones who would have killed me." She moved toward the door, then paused. "I'll speak to the tribunal this evening. You'll be taken to the yard tomorrow at dawn. If I can't stop it, at least you'll have a priest. If I can—" She looked back at him. "Go. Don't look back."

Jules was quiet for a long moment. Then he laughed again, but there was something broken in it now.

"You really are a fool," he said. "But I'll tell you something anyway, since you're going to try to save my worthless neck. You think your doctor friend is safe? You think the government doesn't know who helped the prisoner escape Sainte-Anne? Roux knows. And Roux talks to men who pay well. If you want to know who's really on your side, ask yourself whose name appears in the paperwork for that night."

He said no more. Élise stood in the doorway, the cold air of the corridor washing over her.

"What paperwork?"

Jules only smiled—a thin, ugly expression on a battered face.

"Go ask your cousin. The one who wears the white coat."

---

The tribunal met in the old schoolhouse on Rue de la Fontaine-au-Roi. Élise had taught there—two years ago, before the war, before all of this. She stood now on the same worn floorboards where children had recited their verbs, facing three men behind a long table. Sedan sat in the middle, his beard gray and his eyes older than his years. On his left was a woman she knew only as Marguerite, a laundress who had organized the women's battalions. On his right sat a young man named Delacroix—no relation, as far as she knew, to the painter or to her own tangled family—who had once been a lawyer's clerk and now served as the tribunal's secretary.

"You know what this man did," Sedan said, not unkindly. "You know what he cost us. Twelve dead on Rue de la Roquette. Two more in the cellar on Rue des Dames. Children among them, Élise."

"I know."

"And you still ask for mercy?"

"I ask for a different kind of justice." She kept her voice steady. "He's a traitor, yes. But he's also a coward. And cowards can be shamed, can be made to serve in ways that will redeem more than a quick execution ever could. Send him to the barricades without a weapon. Let him fetch water for the wounded, carry powder for the gunners. Let his hands do the work his betrayal undid."

"Or," Marguerite said slowly, "we could hang him from the lamppost as a warning to every other rat who thinks to sell us to Versailles."

The silence stretched. Élise met Sedan's eyes.

"You've known me since February," she said. "I've never asked anything for myself. I'm asking this for the soul of this city. If we become them—if we kill without mercy—what was any of it for?"

Sedan was quiet long enough that Élise felt her heart sink. Then he nodded.

"He'll work the water detail at the barricades," he said. "Under armed guard. If he touches a weapon, if he speaks to anyone without permission, he'll be shot on sight. And if he betrays us again, you'll be the one to carry the sentence to him yourself."

"Agreed."

---

She found Jules in the yard an hour later, his bonds removed but his face still raw. He looked at her with an expression she couldn't name—not gratitude, not anger. Something in between.

"You did it," he said.

"I did."

"You should have let them shoot me."

"Probably."

He turned away, staring out at the darkening sky. Then, without looking at her, he spoke.

"You think you've saved me. But you've only made me your prisoner for longer. And I warn you now, schoolteacher—I will find a way out of this. And when I do, I will destroy you. Not because I hate you. Because you should have let me die with what was left of my honor, and instead you've made me live with nothing but my shame. That's a debt I can only repay in kind."

He walked off before she could answer. Élise stood alone in the twilight, Jules's words hanging in the air like the taste of copper.

She had saved a life. And perhaps, in doing so, she had made an enemy who would bring them all down.

She thought of his final question—whose name appears in the paperwork for that night—and realized she was more afraid of the answer than she had been of anything yet.