Read Chapter 18: The Inquiry

The inquiry chamber smelled of old paper and fear. Lise had stood in this room before, delivering finished garments to the Tribunal's clerks, but never as a witness. Never as a woman whose own words might hang her.

Fouquier-Tinville sat at the raised desk like a spider at the center of its web, his thin fingers steepled beneath a face that revealed nothing. To his left, a scribe scratched notes with mechanical precision. To his right, three judges in tricolor sashes regarded her with expressions ranging from bored to openly hostile.

“Citoyenne Marchand,” Fouquier-Tinville said, his voice carrying the false warmth of a creditor greeting a debtor. “You have been called to clarify certain discrepancies in the matter of your father, Pierre Marchand.”

Lise kept her hands still at her sides. Her mother had taught her that a seamstress's hands were her fortune—steady, precise, never betraying what the mind was thinking. She flexed her fingers once, feeling the calluses from years of needlework, and let them go slack.

“I will answer what I can, Citizen.”

“The official record states that your father escaped from La Force prison on the night of the fourteenth. A guard was found unconscious. The prisoner's cell was empty.” Fouquier-Tinville paused, letting the words settle. “Yet we have received testimony suggesting otherwise. That the prisoner was, in fact, still present days later. That he was seen in the prison annex.”

Lise's throat tightened. The forged document. Dumas's failed presentation. It had all led to this moment, and now the Tribunal head was circling her like a hawk over wounded prey.

“I visited my father at La Force,” she said, choosing her words as carefully as she chose threads for a wedding gown. “Before his supposed escape. I brought him clothing. Food. Whatever comforts I could manage.”

“And after?”

“I did not see him again.”

Fouquier-Tinville leaned forward. The movement was small, but the chamber seemed to shrink around it. “That is not what our sources tell us. Our sources say that a woman matching your description was seen in the annex corridor during the period when your father was officially recorded as escaped. A woman carrying a sewing basket.”

Lise's heart stumbled. The night she and Jean-Luc had freed Hébert—she had carried her sewing basket then, the one with the false bottom. If someone had seen her, recognized her—

“I am a seamstress, Citizen President. I carry my sewing basket nearly everywhere. It would be surprising if no one had seen me with it.”

A murmur rippled through the assembled crowd. Fouquier-Tinville's eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly.

“And yet,” he continued, “the witness describes seeing you in the company of a man. A large man. A man who matches the description of Jean-Luc Moreau, a known counter-revolutionary agent currently in our custody.”

Jean-Luc. Alive. In custody. The words hit her like a physical blow, and she had to grip the edge of the witness rail to keep from swaying. He was alive. But captured—and if Fouquier-Tinville was mentioning him publicly, it meant he was not merely a prisoner but a weapon to be used against her.

“I do not know this man,” she said, the lie tasting like ash.

“No? Two witnesses place you together at the Palais de Justice not three days ago. Near the holding cells where a printer named Hébert was being detained.”

Lise forced herself to breathe slowly. In. Out. The rhythm of her work. Each stitch measured, each breath deliberate.

“Citizen President, I am a dressmaker. I go where my clients require. I cannot account for every face that passes me in the street, nor every witness who might confuse one woman for another.” She paused, letting a note of wounded dignity creep into her voice. “I have served the Tribunal faithfully. I have dressed the condemned. I have done my duty by the Republic.”

For a long moment, Fouquier-Tinville simply looked at her. His eyes were flat, calculating—the eyes of a man who played chess with human lives and rarely lost a piece.

“Where were you on the night of the sixteenth?”

“In my workshop. Alone. Working on a commission for the widow Aubin. A mourning dress.”

“Can anyone verify this?”

“The widow Aubin herself. I delivered the finished garment the following morning.”

Fouquier-Tinville exchanged a glance with the scribe, who flipped through several pages before nodding almost imperceptibly. The delivery had been noted, then. Thank God for small mercies.

“And yet,” the Tribunal head said slowly, “our witness places you at the Palais de Justice at the hour when the printer Hébert escaped custody. During which escape, two guards were injured and one is still unable to walk. A remarkable coincidence for a woman who was, by her own account, safely at home with her needle.”

“Coincidences happen, Citizen President.”

“They do.” Fouquier-Tinville's voice dropped, soft and dangerous. “But in my experience, they happen rather more often to the guilty than to the innocent.”

The silence that followed was absolute. Lise could feel the weight of every eye in the chamber upon her—the judges, the clerks, the curiosity seekers who had crowded in to watch a woman try to outwit the Tribunal's head. She kept her face still, her hands steady, but inside she was scrambling for footing.

“I understand that an inquiry has been opened regarding a document presented to this court,” she said, forcing the words to come calmly. “A document concerning my father's execution order. I wish to state, for the record, that I had no knowledge of this document until my father's case was brought before this body. I am a seamstress, not a forger. I lack the skill and the inclination for such deception.”

Fouquier-Tinville's lips curved into something that was almost a smile. “A curious thing for a witness to volunteer. I did not ask you about the document.”

Lise's blood ran cold. She had walked into his trap without even seeing it—her urgency to distance herself from the forgery had only confirmed that she knew more than she should.

“I merely wished to clarify, Citizen President. Given the timing of your questions.”

“Indeed.” Fouquier-Tinville turned to the judges on his right. “I believe we have heard sufficient testimony for today. Citoyenne Marchand's account raises as many questions as it answers, and I believe further inquiry is warranted.”

Lise's grip on the witness rail tightened until her knuckles went white. “Further inquiry?”

“A formality. You will remain at your residence until such time as the Tribunal has completed its investigation. You are not to leave Paris. You are not to contact anyone connected with your father's case. And you will present yourself here each morning at eight o'clock for questioning.”

House arrest. The words fell on her like weights, binding her hands when she most needed them free. Hébert was sick and hidden. Jean-Luc was in custody. And the ledger—the ledger that could expose everything—was still in Orleans, waiting for a password stitched into her dress hem.

“I understand, Citizen President,” she said, forcing the words past the tightness in her throat.

“See that you do.” Fouquier-Tinville waved his hand in dismissal. “You may go. A guard will escort you home.”

The guards were on her before she could breathe again, two men in blue uniforms flanking her as she stepped down from the witness stand. The crowd parted, faces swimming past her in a blur of curiosity and suspicion. She kept her head high, her pace even, refusing to show them the fear that clawed at her insides.

At the door, she paused and turned back. Fouquier-Tinville was already conferring with his judges, his voice low and urgent. He did not look up, but something in the set of his shoulders told her he knew exactly what she had done—and that he intended to make her pay for it.

She was escorted through the Palais's marble corridors, past the busts of revolutionaries and the plaques commemorating the Republic's victories. Every step felt like a sentence. Every glance from passing officials felt like an accusation.

It was only when they reached the street that she allowed herself to think clearly again. House arrest meant guards at her door, watchers in her windows. It meant she could not go to Hébert, could not reach Orleans, could not do anything to save her father or Jean-Luc.

But it did not mean she was powerless.

Her dress shifted against her leg as she walked, and she felt the hidden something her father had sewn into the hem. The seed of his message, waiting to be read when the moment was right.

Perhaps that moment had come.

Back at her workshop, she closed the door on the guard who took up post outside and stood in the silence of her sewing room. Bolts of fabric leaned against the walls like old friends. Spools of thread hung in neat rows. The thimble sat on her worktable where she had left it, gleaming dully in the afternoon light.

She crossed to the table and picked it up, turning it over in her hands. It was an ordinary thimble, at first glance—scratched, worn, the kind any seamstress might own. But she knew its secret, knew the false bottom her father had crafted into it years ago.

She twisted the base. There was a click she had not heard before, a second click that came after the first, and then—

The thimble split open in her hands, revealing a compartment she had never known existed. Inside, nestled against the metal, was a miniature portrait of a woman with dark hair and piercing eyes.

Lise's breath caught. She knew that face. She had seen it staring down at her from her father's desk for years, hidden beneath a pile of papers, too worn to have been a recent addition.

But who was she? And why had her father hidden her portrait in a second compartment, one he had never told Lise existed?

She set the thimble down carefully and looked at the portrait again. On the reverse, in her father's cramped handwriting, was a single line:

*She knows where the rest of it is buried.*

The rest of it. The ledger. But the courier was in Orleans with the ledger in hand—unless her father had been speaking of something else entirely. Something that this woman, whoever she was, had been entrusted to protect.

Lise stared at the portrait, her mind racing. She needed to find this woman. Needed to ask her what her father had meant.

But first, she needed to get out of her own apartment. The guard was at her door. The Tribunal expected her at eight the next morning.

And somewhere beneath the Palais, Jean-Luc was waiting to be questioned.

She looked up at her window—the one that opened onto the alley behind the workshop, the one she had used as a girl to slip out and meet her friends when her father thought she was asleep.

The latch had been rusty for years. She crossed to it, tested it, and found it still moved.

Some things, it seemed, never changed.