Read Chapter 21: The Monastery

The nun’s habit itched against Lise’s skin, the rough wool a penance she hadn’t asked for. She kept her eyes lowered beneath the white coif as the cart rattled along the rutted road, the driver a taciturn old man who asked no questions and expected no answers. Victoire had arranged everything with the efficiency of a woman who had spent a lifetime learning how to disappear.

The Abbey of Saint-Benoît rose from the morning mist like a grey stone prayer. Its walls had seen two centuries of weather and one of revolution, and they bore both with the same patient indifference. Lise climbed down from the cart, her nurse’s satchel heavy on her shoulder, and pressed a coin into the driver’s palm.

“God keep you, sister,” he said, and spat into the dirt before flicking the reins.

The abbey gates were unlocked. That surprised her until she remembered that the sisters here had already been stripped of their wealth and their influence; there was nothing left to guard but a handful of old women and their prayers. A portly sister with a face like a wrinkled apple met her in the courtyard.

“You’re the nurse from Paris?”

Lise inclined her head. “I was sent to tend the sick. There is a man here—a patient who was brought from the city.”

The sister’s eyes narrowed, then softened. She had seen enough of the world to know when questions were unwise. “This way.”

They passed through a cloister where three ancient nuns knelt at their devotions, hands like dried leaves folded in supplication. The infirmary was a low-ceilinged room at the rear of the abbey, its windows shuttered against the cold. Five cots lined the walls, but only one was occupied.

The man on the cot was barely more than a skeleton. His hair had gone white since Lise had last seen him—but it had been three years, and she supposed three years and a prison cell could age a man more than a decade of peace. His eyes were closed, his breathing shallow and even, and his hands lay on the blanket with the stillness of carved stone.

Lise turned to the sister. “Leave us. I will examine him alone.”

The sister hesitated, then nodded and withdrew, pulling the door closed behind her.

Lise crossed to the cot and sank to her knees beside it. She reached out and took her father’s hand. The skin was cool, the bones fragile beneath it.

“Papa,” she whispered.

His eyes opened. For a moment there was no recognition in them—just the distant wariness of a man who had learned that every face could mean danger. Then his gaze sharpened, and his mouth fell open.

“Élisabeth?”

“Yes.” The word came out broken. “Yes, it’s me.”

He tried to sit up, but his arms gave way, and Lise caught him, easing him back against the thin pillow. His hands found her face, tracing the lines of her cheeks as if he were reading a letter from another life.

“You’re alive,” he said. “I dreamed—I thought perhaps you were dead.”

“I’m alive. I’m here.” Tears were running down her face now, and she didn’t bother to wipe them away. “I thought you were dead. The list—I saw your name on the list.”

“Ah.” He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, there was something fierce burning in their depths. “Fouquier. He’s been trying to kill me for six months. He would have succeeded, too, if I hadn’t had friends who knew the tunnels under the Conciergerie better than he did.”

“Victoire told me. She said you saw him taking bribes from an English agent.”

Her father’s jaw tightened. “Not just taking them. Soliciting them. I was in the antechamber when a messenger came to his office—I was supposed to be cleaning the floors, but I slipped into the alcove behind the tapestry. I heard everything. Fouquier demanded payment for every name he was willing to send to the guillotine. English gold, French lives. He had a price list, Élisabeth. Five hundred livres for an ordinary citizen. Two thousand for a noble. Five thousand for a politician whose silence he needed.” His voice cracked. “Your mother’s cousin—the banker Aubry—he was ten thousand livres. Fouquier laughed about it.”

Rage and horror moved through Lise in equal measure, hot and cold together. She had known Fouquier-Tinville was a monster. She had not known he was a merchant as well.

“And you recorded it,” she said. “The names. The amounts.”

Her father nodded. “Every name. Every amount. Every date. I wrote it in a ledger I kept hidden in my mattress, and when they finally came for me, I got it out before they searched my cell.”

“Where is it now?”

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “Do you remember the ship *Marie-Ange*?”

Lise frowned. A childhood memory surfaced—her father standing at the docks, pointing out a three-masted merchant vessel berthed in the Seine. *“When I was a boy, I dreamed of sailing on her,”* he had said. *“My father worked those decks. Now she belongs to a trader from Rouen.”*

“You hid it on a ship.”

“Not just any ship. The *Marie-Ange*. She’s still moored at the Quai de la Tournelle, under a false name—the *Volonté*. Her captain is an old friend of mine, a man named Brousse. He owes me his life, and he doesn’t ask questions.” Her father’s hand tightened around hers. “The ledger is in a waterproof oilskin pouch, wedged behind the loose timber in the captain’s cabin, beneath the bunk. If I had died, Brousse would have delivered it to the Committee of Public Safety himself. But I didn’t die, and now it’s still there, waiting.”

“Why didn’t you retrieve it before you were captured?”

He laughed, a dry sound like leaves skittering across a courtyard. “Because I was captured. Fouquier’s men took me two hours after I watched the ship come into port. I never had the chance.”

Lise’s mind was already racing, already mapping the streets from the abbey to the Quai de la Tournelle, already imagining the guards who would be watching for a woman in a nun’s habit with a satchel full of forged documents. She was under house arrest. She was supposed to report to the Tribunal at eight o’clock that morning. By now they would know she was gone.

Her father read the calculation in her eyes. “You can’t go back to Paris. Fouquier will have every post watched.”

“I don’t have to go back.” Lise released his hand and stood, pacing the length of the infirmary. “I can take a boat from the abbey’s river gate down to the Seine. I can reach the *Volonté* before dark.”

“Élisabeth, it’s too dangerous.”

“Papa.” She turned to face him, and she felt the shift inside her—the girl she had been three years ago, the woman she was now, standing in the space between them. “Fouquier has Jean-Luc. He has already tried to kill you. If I don’t retrieve that ledger and bring it to the Convention, he will kill us all, one by one, and no one will ever know what he did.” She knelt beside him again. “I sewed the gowns of two hundred people who went to the guillotine because of men like him. I will not let you become one of them.”

Her father studied her for a long moment. Then, slowly, he nodded.

“You have your mother’s stubbornness,” he said. “I always loved that about her. I always feared it in you.”

He sat up a little, reaching for her hand, and his grip was stronger now than it had been when she first took it. “When you find the ledger, do not read it alone. There are names in that book that will burn your eyes. Names of men who call themselves patriots but who sold their neighbors for English coin. If Fouquier discovers it is missing, he will know who took it.” He paused. “And he will come for me again.”

“I won’t let him.”

“You cannot stop him.” Her father’s voice was gentle, so gentle. “But you can make sure his crimes are witness to his fall. When you have the ledger, take it to Robespierre himself. He is a fanatic, but he is not corrupt. He will not tolerate treason in his own ranks.”

Lise squeezed his hands, then leaned forward and pressed a kiss to his forehead. “I will come back for you.”

“No,” he said quietly. “I will find my own way out. I have survived the Conciergerie and Fouquier-Tinville. I can survive a monastery.” He smiled, and for a moment she saw the father she remembered, before the prisons and the fear. “Go, my daughter. Finish what I started.”