Read Chapter 30: The Rescue of the Medic

Sister Angélique pressed the worn woolen habit into Élise’s hands. The fabric smelled of candle smoke and old stone, rough against fingers that still bore the faint calluses of chalk dust.

“You’ll pass for a tertiary sister, come to administer last rites to the prisoners,” Angélique whispered, adjusting the white coif over Élise’s dark hair. “The guards at the Convent of the Carmelites know the sisters by sight. You are the new one, sent from the motherhouse at Saint-Denis. The curfew patrols won’t check your papers twice—they’re all looking for a woman in a nurse’s apron with blood on her sleeves.”

Élise tucked Henri’s safe-conduct pass into her underskirt, its paper worn soft from handling. Her hands trembled. She pressed them flat against her thighs.

“And if they don’t believe me?”

“You’ll believe yourself first.” Angélique handed her a small wooden rosary, the beads carved from olive pits. “The transfer happens at dawn. The convoy moves through the courtyard, down to the underground passages that connect the convent to the old Roman aqueduct. They’ll use those to reach the river. You keep watch by the south gate. When you see the guards light their lanterns, you wave this shawl once from the second-floor window. I’ll have twenty men in the alley behind the bakery.”

Élise looked at the shawl, faded red wool, the color of dried blood. Or maybe the color of the flag that flew over her schoolroom in the better months, before the shells.

“Twenty men against how many?”

“Enough.” Angélique’s face was kind, but the steel behind her eyes was not. “Your nurse Marthe is still in the convent’s infirmary. She hasn’t broken. But if the guards start transferring the wounded first, the plan shifts—you’ll have to move Henri before the convoy forms.”

Élise nodded, though her stomach turned over. She slipped through the service door into the icy night air of the convent garden. The moon was a pale crescent, barely enough to see by, and she hugged the shadows along the ivied wall until she reached the servants’ entrance to the convent itself.

Inside, the air was thick with incense and the particular cold of a building never warmed. A portly sister took her cloak and examined the forged letter Angélique had written on convent letterhead.

“The motherhouse sends us help late,” the sister said, her voice flat. “The prisoners are in the crypt. The men are worst—beaten, many of them, and fevered from the river water they drink. You will hear their confessions? Yes?”

“Yes,” Élise said, and the warmth of the lie sat strange on her tongue.

The crypt stairs descended into a long stone corridor lined with iron doors, each set with a small grate. The stench hit her first—unwashed bodies, rotting straw, and something deeper, the metallic tang of infected wounds. Two guards sat at the far end of the corridor, playing cards by a single guttering candle. They glanced at her habit, at her bowed head, and returned to their game.

She found Henri’s cell by the sound of his breathing—a slow, rattling rhythm that caught in his chest. Through the grate she could make out his shape, slumped against the wall, his fine coat gone now, replaced by a stained shirt that had not been washed in weeks.

“Henri,” she breathed. “Henri, it’s me.”

He stirred like a man waking from a deep water. When he turned his face to the light, her heart folded in on itself. A bruise bloomed across his left temple, the color of a decaying plum, and a cut split his eyebrow where the skin had not yet closed. But it was the pallor beneath—that sickly grey of a man whose body is fighting something it cannot see—that frightened her most.

“Élise,” he rasped. “You should not be here. He—your father—put a guard on the house.”

“I climbed out the window.” She pressed her forehead to the grate, feeling the cold rust against her skin. “The same way I did when I was twelve and wanted to see the fireworks for the Emperor’s birthday. You look terrible.”

Henri laughed, a rattling sound. “Interrogation has a way of doing that. They want the troop positions. I told them my father had withdrawn to the north, but they don’t believe me. I think they’re waiting for Marthe to confirm what I say.” He paused, the air wheezing in his lungs. “She’s strong. But she’s been down here three days. Everyone breaks in the end.”

Élise put her hand through the grate as far as it would go. Henri reached up and took it, his fingers warmer than she expected, feverish. She could feel the pulse fluttering at his wrist. Too fast. Too thin.

“The transfer comes at dawn,” she said. “We’ll have to move before then. The fever will slow you down, and I can’t carry you through the catacombs alone.”

“You’re not alone,” he said. “You have Sister Angélique. And her twenty men.”

“Twenty men against a hundred.”

“We’ve had worse odds in worse places.” Henri squeezed her fingers. “Remember the barricade at Rue du Bac? We held that with twelve, and one of those was a drunkard who kept shooting at his own shadow.”

Élise smiled despite herself. “You were the drunkard.”

“I was the shadow.” His fingers tightened again. “Élise. If this goes wrong—if the guard is changed, if they move me early—you have to promise me something.”

“What?”

“Don’t follow me to the ship. Don’t get yourself caught for a man who’s already sentenced.” His eyes found hers through the grate. “You have your own life to live. Your own war to fight. This one is mine.”

“We agreed. Side by side.”

“We agreed while we still had the same enemy in front of us.” His voice cracked. “But your enemy is your father, and mine is his, and that makes it complicated.”

Before she could answer, footsteps echoed down the stairwell. A guard with a lantern approached, his boots heavy on the stone floor. Élise pulled her hand back, crossed herself, and lowered her head into the posture of a praying sister.

“You there,” the guard said. “You’re not from the regular sisterhood. What are you doing down here alone?”

Élise kept her voice low, pitched into the accent of a country girl. “I was sent to hear confessions, monsieur. The prisoners are to be transported tomorrow. It is my duty to prepare their souls.”

The guard stepped closer. His eyes narrowed, scanning the pale oval of her face beneath the coif.

“You look familiar,” he said slowly. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere? There was a woman—at the hospital in Neuilly—” His hand went to the pistol at his belt.

What happened next she felt like a fever dream. Her hand moved out from under her sleeve, and she swung the rosary—a heavy weight on its carved olive pit beads—in a fast, hard arc that connected with the guard’s jaw. He staggered back with a grunt, his gun clattering to the floor.

Élise dove for it, her habit tearing at the shoulder as she landed on the damp stone. She came up with the pistol in both hands, pointed at the guard’s chest.

Behind her, Henri was working at the cell door. “The guard’s keys—he has them on his belt.”

Élise kept the pistol trained as she crouched toward the man, who was gasping for air, his eyes wide with recognition. “You. You’re the schoolteacher. Moreau’s daughter.”

“And Moreau’s prisoner will not die in your cells.” She tore the keys from his belt and slid them backward toward Henri, who caught them with a clatter. The lock turned, and the cell door swung open.

Henri stumbled out into the corridor, swaying on his feet. Élise caught him around the waist, feeling ribs too sharp through the thin cotton shirt.

“The tunnel under the crypt,” Henri said. “The old aqueduct. I mapped it during my first interrogation, when the guards thought I was unconscious.”

They moved into the darkness, the pistol cold in Élise’s grip, Henri leaning hard against her shoulder. Behind them, the guard had recovered enough to shout. From above, they heard the answering bell of boots pouring down the stairwell.

The passage branched left and right, and Henri steered them left without hesitation, into a narrow slit of darkness that descended steeply into the earth. The walls grew rough, slick with water that had been seeping through the foundations of Paris for a thousand years. Henri’s breathing grew ragged, each inhalation a saw.

“They’re behind us,” Élise whispered. “I can hear them.”

“They don’t know the route.” Henri’s voice was a pale ghost. “I drew it myself. The old aqueduct feeds into the catacombs—the bone galleries. There are a hundred dead ends down there if you don’t know the markers.”

They pushed deeper. The stone began to change, brickwork giving way to rough limestone. And then the air turned. It smelled like earth that had been turned over—and something else, something drier and older.

They rounded a corner into a long gallery, and Henri stopped.

Élise’s lantern caught the wall, and she understood what had stopped him. The bones were stacked neat as cordwood, femurs crossed over skulls, arranged in patterns that someone had taken terrible care with. The catacombs of Paris, the ossuary of a city that had outlived its dead.

Henri passed a trembling hand across his face. “We’re here.”

From behind them, the guards’ shouts echoed through the stone, closer now. A hundred soldiers with lanterns and rifles, threading through the bones.

Élise gripped Henri harder and pulled him forward into the dark.