Read Chapter 19: The Watch's Secret

The priest, Father Antoine, was already at the cell door when Moreau called him back. The man turned, candlelight catching the deep lines of a face that had aged more in prayer than in years.

"One more thing, Father."

Moreau reached beneath his shirt and unclasped the chain that held his watch. It was a plain thing, tarnished silver, the face cracked and the hands frozen at a quarter past two. He had carried it through three campaigns because it was the only object his mother had pressed into his hands when he'd marched away from their farm at seventeen. She'd sold her wedding ring to buy it.

"Take this," he said. "If I die in this place, see that it reaches my mother. She lives outside Verdun. Her name is Marie Moreau. Anyone in the village can point you to her house."

Father Antoine took the watch and turned it over in his palm. His fingers were thin, the knuckles swollen from years of gripping rosary beads. He studied the tarnished surface with the careful attention of a man who had learned to read truth in small things.

"Your mother will not want this," he said quietly. "She will want her son."

"Then tell her her son died with the watch she gave him still beating against his chest. It will be some comfort."

Father Antoine nodded and slipped the watch into his cassock. But he hesitated, and Moreau saw something flicker in his eyes—the same look the man had worn when they'd first met, twenty years ago, when Antoine was a regimental surgeon and Moreau was a green recruit with dirt still on his boots.

"What is it?"

"You spoke of the watch as if it were a simple thing," the priest said slowly. "But it is not."

He drew the watch back out and held it to the candlelight. Moreau watched as the priest's thumb found a seam along the edge—a seam Moreau had never noticed, though he had handled the watch every day for a decade.

"You knew it opened?"

"No," Moreau said. "I did not."

Father Antoine pressed gently, and the back of the watch swung open on a hinge no thicker than a fingernail. Inside, nestled against the inner casing, was a miniature portrait painted on ivory. The paint was old but preserved by the seal of the compartment. It showed the face of a woman—perhaps thirty years old, dark hair piled in a style that had been fashionable before the Revolution. Her eyes were grey and direct, and there was a faint smile at the corner of her mouth, as if she knew a secret she had no intention of sharing.

Moreau stared at the portrait. He had never seen this face in his life. His mother had given him the watch, and his mother had never owned anything so fine as a painted miniature.

"I don't understand," he said. "I've had this watch since I was seventeen. I've never opened it. I didn't know it had—"

"Where did you get it?"

"My mother gave it to me. She bought it from a traveling merchant, or so she said."

Father Antoine turned the portrait toward the candlelight. His hand trembled slightly. For a long moment, the only sound in the cell was the sputter of the flame and the distant drip of water through stone.

"Do you know who this woman is?" the priest asked.

Moreau shook his head.

Father Antoine's jaw tightened. He looked older now, suddenly, as if the portrait had drained twenty years from his strength and left him only the weight of what he knew.

"Her name was Isabelle Lefebvre."

The name hit Moreau like a sabre cut. He stepped back, his shoulders meeting the cold stone wall of the cell.

"Lefebvre's wife?"

"His late wife," the priest corrected softly. "She died nine years ago. Fever, they said. I was not in Paris then, but I heard the reports. She was young. Theirs was said to be a love match, though I never saw them together that I would have called loving."

"How do you know her face?"

Father Antoine set the watch down on the cell's small wooden stool, careful as if it were a holy relic. "I was a surgeon in the army before I took orders. I served with General Lefebvre in Italy, years before he became your colonel. She came to the camp once, with the other officers' wives. She was unforgettable." He paused. "But more than that—I was there, years later, when word of her death reached the regiment. I saw Lefebvre's face when he read the letter. I have seen men take cannon shot and not look the way he looked that day."

"Then why would her portrait be inside my watch?"

Father Antoine shook his head. "I cannot say. But I will tell you what I know of her death, since you are a man who is about to die and deserves the truth."

Moreau stepped closer. "What truth?"

"There were questions. Her illness came on suddenly. She was young and strong, and the fever took her in three days. But there were whispers—just whispers, mind you—that she had written to her family in Lyon asking for help to leave her husband. That she had discovered something about his dealings. Something that frightened her."

"Dealings with whom?"

"That, I was never able to learn. The letters were suppressed. Her family was told she died of natural causes, and they had no power to argue. Lefebvre was already rising rapidly. He had friends in Paris. The kind of friends who could make inconvenient questions disappear."

Moreau looked at the portrait again. The woman stared back at him with those grey eyes, and in the candlelight, he thought he saw something in her expression that had not been there before—or perhaps he only imagined it now that he knew.

Fear.

He had carried this watch for years. He had held it in his hands through every campaign, every bivouac, every night of cold and hunger and waiting for dawn. He had thought it was a piece of his mother, a tether to home. But his mother had given it to him, and she had believed it was a merchant's trinket.

But merchants did not sell portraits of dead colonels' wives inside hidden compartments.

"Who gave my mother that watch?" Moreau said aloud, more to himself than to the priest.

"I cannot answer that." Father Antoine studied him. "But I can ask you a different question. Do you still believe your colonel's crimes are limited to falsifying reports and selling secrets to Austrians?"

Moreau said nothing. The watch lay on the stool between them, its hidden door open, the woman's face small and impossibly old.

"Take it," Father Antoine said. "Hide it again on your person. If you are executed, I will retrieve it and see it reaches your mother. But I will tell her the truth of what it contains."

"And if I escape?"

"Then you will have time to find the truth yourself." The priest's hand closed over the watch, and he pressed it back into Moreau's palm. Gently, Moreau closed the hidden compartment and tucked the watch beneath his shirt, where the metal sat cold against the skin over his heart.

"Isabelle Lefebvre," Moreau repeated, testing the name on his tongue.

"The late wife of a man who sent your squadron to die, who accuses you of treason, and who will hang you within the week if his justice is done." Father Antoine gathered his cassock and moved to the door. "I will take your evidence to Marshal Lannes. But whatever you do, Étienne—do not let Lefebvre know that you know her name."

"Why?"

"Because her family was never found. The letters were never recovered. And the man who asked too many questions about Isabelle Lefebvre was found in the Seine with his throat cut." The priest put his hand on the iron bars. "Pray for yourself in here, Étienne. Because out there, there is worse than prison waiting for you."

The door closed. The lock turned.

Moreau stood in the dark with the watch cold against his chest and the dead woman's face burning behind his eyes.