Read Chapter 26: The Second Betrayal

They came in the gray hour before dawn, when the wounded were sleeping and the morphine had finally done its work. Élise was bent over a Versaillais lieutenant whose leg had gone septic, her hands steady as she packed the wound with lint soaked in carbolic, when she heard the change in the sound outside—the rough tramp of many boots, not the shuffle of the dying.

She straightened. The tent flap lifted.

Her father stood there in his dress uniform, the collar high and stiff, his face arranged in the particular expression of sorrowful duty she had known her whole life. Behind him, a file of soldiers with rifles at the ready. Behind them, Henri, his hands already bound behind his back, a bruise blooming along his jaw.

“Papa,” she said. It came out small, a child's word.

Moreau stepped into the tent. The smell of him—cigar smoke and bay rum, the scent of his study, of her childhood—cut through the rot and blood like a blade.

“Élise Marie Moreau,” he said, as if reading from a charge sheet. “You will come with me.”

She looked past him to Henri. Henri shook his head once, almost imperceptibly. Don't fight. Don't make it worse.

But she was already moving, stepping between her father and the wounded lieutenant. “This man needs surgery. I'm the only one here who knows how to—"

“He'll die,” Moreau said, with no particular cruelty. It was worse than cruelty; it was indifference. “Or he won't. The city burns around us, Élise. This lieutenant's life is not my concern.”

“Then you're not the man who raised me.”

Something flickered across his face—a muscle in his jaw, a tick at the corner of his eye. He stepped closer and lowered his voice so only she could hear. “The man who raised you is a fool who believed his daughter shared his principles. That man is dead. The man standing before you is a soldier with orders.”

“From who? Versailles? They don't even recognize your commission. You're fighting a civil war against your own countrymen.”

“I am fighting a war against traitors,” he said. “And my daughter has chosen to lie down with them.”

He turned and gestured. Two soldiers seized Henri by the arms and marched him out of the tent. Henri did not resist, but he twisted his head to look back at her, and there was something in his eyes—not fear, but certainty. He was not going to survive this. They both knew it.

“No,” Élise said, and she ran.

She made it three steps before her father's hand closed on her arm with an iron grip that shocked her. He had never touched her like this before. His fingers bit into the flesh of her upper arm, hard enough to leave bruises, and he pulled her to his chest and held her there, his voice hot against her ear.

“You will not make a spectacle. You will not cost me any more than you already have.”

She struggled. He was too strong. She was tired from weeks of no sleep, too thin from eating whatever the wounded didn't need, and he was a man who still fought duels for sport.

He marched her out of the tent. The hospital—her hospital, the one she and Henri had built from nothing in the ashes of Neuilly—was ringed with soldiers. The wounded who could stand had gathered at the entrance to watch. She saw the faces she knew: the Communard boy with the shattered arm, the Versaillais sergeant who had wept when they saved his leg, the nurse who had learned her craft under Élise's hand. They watched her being dragged away like a criminal, and she watched them watch, and she understood that she would never see them again.

A carriage waited in the rutted road. Henri was being forced into another, his head low to avoid hitting the frame. She caught his eye one last time before the door was slammed shut.

“Henri,” she called, and the name came out in a sob.

“I told you not to make a spectacle,” her father said, and shoved her into the carriage.

---

The mansion on the Rue de Varenne was unchanged. The same marble floors, the same painted ceilings, the same smell of beeswax and old paper. It was obscene, Élise thought, that a world could burn and this house would stand in the same spot, waiting for her like a trap she had been born into.

Her father did not speak to her as he escorted her up the stairs. He did not speak to her when he opened the door to her childhood bedroom—the rose wallpaper, the white canopy bed, the lace curtains she had drawn as a girl to watch the carriages pass below.

He stood in the doorway. She stood in the middle of the room, and she felt her own rage recede into something colder, more clinical.

“What will they do to him?” she asked.

“A military trial,” her father said. “There is only one possible verdict.”

“Then what is the point of the trial at all?”

“Order,” he said. “Process. The appearance of justice is as important as justice itself.”

“You're going to murder him.”

Her father's face did not change. “He knew the risk when he chose to consort with the enemy. When he chose to help an enemy of the state escape execution. When he chose to run with you into the night. Every choice led to this end. He is not a victim of circumstance. He is a victim of his own poor judgment.”

“He's your son.”

“He was,” her father said, and the past tense landed like a stone in a well.

Élise shook her head. She felt the ground shifting beneath her feet, some foundation she had always assumed was bedrock turning out to be sand. “What did I do to make you hate me so much? I was trying to save lives. That's all. I was trying to—I was trying to be like you.”

Her father laughed. It was a short, bitter sound, and it startled her because she had never heard it from him before.

“Like me,” he repeated. “Do you think I became who I am through virtue, Élise? Do you think I rose through the ranks with a clean conscience and unbroken promises? I am a survivor. And you,” he said, pointing a finger at her, “you are not my blood. That is the only explanation for why you turned out this way.”

The words hung in the air between them.

“What did you say?” She felt the floor fall away.

“Your mother loved a man I could never be,” her father said. He was looking past her now, at the window, at the dawn light bleeding through the lace. “And she was pregnant when I married her. I raised you as my own because she asked me to. Because I loved her, and it did not matter whose daughter you were. But I should have known. The Moreau blood does not run in your veins. The Moreau loyalty certainly does not.”

Élise opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

“Who?” she managed.

“Does it matter? He is dead. He has been dead for twenty years.”

But it did matter, because she saw it suddenly, the way his face had arranged itself with such distaste when she had first mentioned Henri's family name. The way he had never once warmed to Henri, even before the war. The calculation behind his coldness.

“Which one?” she asked. “Which one was it?”

Her father moved toward the door. He paused at the threshold, his hand on the frame, and looked back at her with an expression she had never been able to read—something between disgust and regret.

“His uncle,” he said. “Henri's father's brother. The one who died in Algeria. The one who was never spoken of.”

He closed the door. The key turned in the lock, and Élise sat down on the edge of her childhood bed, and she understood that she and Henri were bound by more than love.

They were bound by blood. And it was the kind of blood that got people killed.