Read Chapter 8: A Fatal Confession

The tent flap was still damp with dawn mist when Moreau pushed through, and the smell hit him first—copper and cordite, a reek that had no business in a quartermaster's canvas. Lefebvre hung from the center pole, a length of bridle leather cinched around his throat, his face the color of old tallow.

Behind him, Pichegru let out a low whistle. "Poor bastard. Couldn't live with what he did."

Moreau didn't answer. He stood very still, studying the scene the way he studied a supply manifest before signing it—looking for the discrepancy. The body swayed slightly, though there was no breeze inside the tent. A stool lay on its side beneath the sergeant's boots, which hung a full two feet off the ground.

Too far. A man stepping off a stool to hang himself didn't float. He'd need to kick, to struggle. The stool should have been closer, or the rope longer.

"Cut him down," Moreau said.

Pichegru moved to comply, drawing his knife, but Moreau caught his wrist. "Not yet. Look at his hands."

Pichegru leaned in, squinting. Lefebvre's fingers were raw, the knuckles skinned, the nails split and blackened with dried blood.

"He fought," Pichegru said quietly.

"Or someone fought him." Moreau crouched, scanning the trampled earth floor. The ground was churned, but the disturbance was concentrated in a circle around the center pole, not scattered like a death struggle. Controlled. Deliberate. "Two men could hold a man like Lefebvre if they caught him sleeping. One to pin his arms, one to slip the noose over his head and haul."

Pichegru's eyes narrowed. "You think this was murder."

"I think this was theater." Moreau moved to the small campaign desk in the corner, its surface tidy except for a single sheet of paper weighted by a pewter inkwell. The paper was crisp, freshly cut, unweathered by the damp air. He didn't touch it, merely read the neat script from a few inches away.

*I, Sergeant Michel Lefebvre, being of sound mind, confess that I stole the regiment's payroll gold. I acted alone, out of greed, and I have hidden the gold where it will never be found. I cannot live with the shame. I have wronged my comrades and my Emperor. — M. Lefebvre*

Below the signature, a single drop of wax from the regimental seal, pressed cleanly as if by a stamp.

"It's a confession," Pichegru said, reading over his shoulder.

"It's a forgery." Moreau straightened. "Lefebvre wrote with his left hand. I saw him sign the mess requisitions every week—his letters slant backward, his 'f's cross twice. This script is a right-hander's hand, educated, schooled. And the grammar—Lefebvre couldn't spell 'confess' without asking three men for help."

Pichegru was silent a moment. "Then who?"

"Someone who wanted me to stop digging." Moreau turned from the desk, scanning the tent more carefully. His eyes caught the edge of a canvas satchel beneath the cot, half-hidden. He crossed the space in three strides and pulled it out.

The satchel was heavy. Heavy in a way that made Moreau's stomach drop before his mind caught up. He undid the brass clasp and tipped the contents onto the cot.

Coins spilled out in a dull golden torrent, a dozen or more spilling across the rough wool blanket. Moreau picked one up, turning it between his fingers. The head of Emperor Francis II of Austria stared up at him, and on the reverse, the double-headed eagle.

"The Austrian coin," Moreau breathed. "The one Lefebvre said Delacroix dropped."

Pichegru froze. "Delacroix's?"

"Or planted." Moreau let the coin fall back into the pile. "Someone wanted this satchel found. They wanted the noose and the note and the gold in the same tent, a neat little package for the provost to unwrap."

"And you." Pichegru's voice had gone flat. "The confession is damning for Lefebvre, but it clears the Crow. If the provost accepts it, the case closes. The gold stays hidden, the real traitor walks."

Moreau nodded, his jaw tight. "Unless the confession is meant to point at me."

Pichegru raised an eyebrow.

"The signature," Moreau said. "Look again at the wax. Not a drop from a candle—there's a mold mark on the seal. They pressed it with a stamp. Who in this camp has access to the regimental seal?"

Pichegru's face went carefully blank.

"The quartermaster's office," Moreau said. "I do. And that's what they're counting on." He tapped the paper. "See how the handwriting is too perfect? The spelling too clean? They wanted it to look like Lefebvre, but they wanted it just flawed enough that when I disputed it, I'd seem defensive. A man who protests too much."

He turned the paper over. On the reverse, faint pencil marks—a rough sketch of the east perimeter, the gate where the gold had passed, with a cross marked beside the guardhouse.

"Lefebvre never drew maps," Moreau said, his throat dry. "He couldn't draw a straight line to save his life. But Delacroix was in the engineers before he transferred to artillery."

"This is deliberate," Pichegru said. "Every clue points to Lefebvre or Delacroix, but they cancel each other out. You can't trust the suicide, you can't trust the confession, you can't trust the coin."

"Someone built a maze," Moreau agreed. "Every turn leads to a dead end, except one. The one that leads back to me, standing in a dead man's tent with a dead man's confession and a pouch of Austrian gold."

He bent and began gathering the coins, sliding them back into the satchel. His hands were steady, but his mind raced. Desmoulins, forced to forge a pass. Lefebvre, murdered to create a confession. The night sergeant in the artillery park, killed to buy time. Every thread led to men he knew, men he'd served beside, and now the net was closing around him.

"We have to go," Pichegru said. "If someone sees us here—"

"Then we look like the discoverers of evidence, not its architects." Moreau laced the satchel shut and shoved it back under the cot. "We leave it. We walk out, we report the body to the provost, and we play our part."

Pichegru studied him. "And if the provost doesn't believe you?"

"Then I'll be in irons by nightfall, and the Crow will have his prize." Moreau moved to the tent flap, pausing with his hand on the canvas. He looked back at Lefebvre's swaying body, and for a fleeting moment, the mask slipped. Grief and fury flickered across his face, chased quickly by resolve.

"One thing is certain now," he said quietly.

Pichegru waited.

"The Crow is in this camp. He knew Lefebvre would be alone tonight. He knew the sentry rotations. He knew the wax seal would be in my office this week because I signed the new requisition orders with it." Moreau's voice hardened. "He knows my name, my routines, my trust. He's watched me for weeks."

He pushed through the flap into the gray dawn, and the light that fell across his face seemed to age him. Somewhere beyond the tents, a bugle sounded assembly, tinny and distant, and the camp stirred to uneasy life.

"Whoever he is," Moreau said, "he wants me to find him. He's leaving me bread crumbs."

"Then the question is why," Pichegru said from behind him.

Moreau didn't answer. Because the answer was already forming in his gut like a stone: not to help him, but to bury him. Every crumb led downward.