Read Chapter 18: The Trap Springs

The knock came at half past two in the morning—three short raps, then two long ones. The signal from old Marcel, the cooper who slept above the cellar entrance on Rue du Temple.

Élise had been dozing at the composing table, her cheek pressed against a tray of fresh-set type. She was awake in an instant, her hand already reaching for the lantern. She doused the flame before her eyes had fully opened. The cellar went black.

She counted her breaths. Ten. Twenty. Thirty.

The trapdoor creaked. A whisper of boots on the wooden stairs. She pressed herself into the gap between the press and the wall, her heart slamming hard enough to feel in her throat.

"Mademoiselle Moreau." The voice was not Marcel's. It was flat, official. "We know you're here. Come out, and we'll make this easy."

Inspector Beaumont. She'd heard that voice only once, in the shop two weeks earlier, but she would never forget it. The sweet civility of a man who believed himself to be merciful.

She did not move. The press beside her—her father's great iron beast, the one he'd smuggled out of Lyon in pieces—stood cold and silent. The type trays were packed. The ink was cleaned. The pamphlets, the ones that were to become Pierre's third in the series, were stacked in the false bottom of the paper trough.

She'd decided to move the press the day before. A whim. A feeling in her gut that would not leave her alone. She had told no one but the cooper, and only so he could help her wrestle the iron plates onto a cart in the dead of night.

Now the cellar stood empty of everything but her and the echo of boots moving across the floor above.

"There are papers here," another voice said, muffled through the boards. This one she did not know. A subordinate, perhaps. "Ink stains on the floor. Someone's been working."

"Search the building," Beaumont said. "I want every room. And find out who this Marcel fellow is."

Élise moved. She crawled toward the back wall, where the old coal chute had been bricked up a decade ago—except for the lower course, which her father had loosened with a chisel and fitted back so precisely that you'd have to be looking for it to see the seam.

She pulled the bricks out one by one. Each one a small act of violence against her own lungs, which wanted to gasp, to sob, to run.

The chute opened onto a narrow alley behind the building. She'd used it twice before, both times as a child playing hide-and-seek with Jean-Luc. He'd always found her.

The thought of her brother—locked in a work camp in the south of France, not even the prison she'd been told—gave her arms the strength to pull herself through the opening and into the cold, wet night.

She did not run. Running drew attention. She walked with the brisk, purposeful stride of a woman on an errand, her shawl pulled tight, her head low, her heart a drum that only she could hear.

The streets of the Marais were quiet. A night watchman nodded to her as she passed, his lantern swinging. She nodded back. Somewhere a cat yowled. The Seine was close; she could smell it, wet and dark and old.

Her shop was on the Rue des Rosiers, in the old Jewish quarter. The building had been in her family for forty years. Her father had raised her and Jean-Luc in the rooms above the press. Now the press was no longer there—it was in Authier's cellar on Rue du Temple, for now—but the shop was still hers. Why did Beaumont know about the Rue du Temple cellar? How did he even know it existed?

The question followed her all the way home. It slipped the key into the lock alongside her own. It climbed the stairs with her. And when she stood in the doorway of her brother's room, staring at the space where the journal press had been—the small, nimble one she used for Le Courier des Femmes, now hidden in the bookbinder's attic on Rue de la Verrerie—she finally asked it aloud.

"Who told him?"

The room had no answer. Only the ghost of her brother's absence, the bed stripped and cold since the day the soldiers had come.

She was shaking. She hadn't felt it until now—the tremor that ran through her hands and legs and jaw like a low fever. She sat on the edge of Jean-Luc's bed and pressed her palms to her thighs, hard, to stop the shaking.

Think. Think.

She had told only three people about the move to Rue du Temple. Pierre had helped her relocate the press twice, but he was gone—his pamphlets lost, his whereabouts unknown since the raid. Authier had given her the key to the cellar; the old printer had been her father's friend for years, and he had refused any payment.

And Antoine.

Antoine had come with Inspector Beaumont to her shop the day they'd raided her brother's room. But Antoine did not know about the Rue du Temple cellar. He knew she was hiding something about the prison, yes. He had lent her five hundred francs and told her he would help her print proof of Beaumont's corruption. But he did not know where the press was. She had been careful. She had been so careful.

Marcel. The cooper. He was the only other one who knew.

The thought was acid in her mouth. Marcel had known her father for thirty years. He had carried the iron plates down those stairs with his own hands, groaning at the weight, drinking her watered wine afterward, telling her about the good old days when they'd printed satirical sheets together in secret.

Generous Marcel. Loyal Marcel. Poor Marcel, who was probably at this very moment being beaten in a police station for information he did not have.

She was going to be sick.

She stumbled to the washbasin and vomited into the dirty water—acid and bile and nothing else, because she hadn't eaten in almost a day. When she straightened, her reflection stared back at her from the small mirror above the basin: a pale, wild-eyed woman with ink-stained fingers and a shawl slipping off one shoulder.

She looked like her mother. That was the worst part. She looked exactly like her mother, who had died of a fever when Élise was nine, who had always told her that cleverness was a kind of armor but that armor could not protect you from everyone.

A piece of paper lay on the floor near the door. It must have been slipped under it at some point in the night.

She picked it up. It was a single folded sheet, the paper cheap and rough. The handwriting was cramped, hurried, the hand of a man who wrote fast because he feared being caught.

_Mademoiselle—_

_A man from the police came asking about you today. I said I knew nothing, but he didn't believe me. He'll be back. I write this because I know who you are. I worked for your father in '42, before I went to the Thames. I know what it is you print, and I think it is good. But be careful. The new clerk at the print shop—the one your father took on just before he died—he is the one. He was with the police officer today, drinking together at the café on the corner. I did not know he was hers until I saw them laugh like old friends at a joke about les femmes who think too much. Take care. I will write again if I can._

_The old one_

The new clerk. She almost laughed. She almost screamed. There was no new clerk. Her father had never taken on a clerk. He'd been too ill, too weakened by the winter, to work at all. There was only her. There was only Élise.

So the note was false. Or the note was garbled. Or—

She read it again. Slowly. Line by line.

_A man from the police came asking about you today. I said I knew nothing._

The cooper.

The note said the man was asking about her. In the cellar. Where a trap had just been sprung.

She looked up from the paper, and the thought crystallized in her mind like ice on a window. If Beaumont had known about the Rue du Temple cellar because of a mole, he would have raided it the moment they'd moved in. But he'd come at half past two in the morning, after the press was gone. After she'd moved the equipment. After she'd told only Marcel.

There was no clerk. No informant. There was only a very clever trap, and she had walked into it, and the only way Beaumont could have known to set it—

She folded the note carefully, square by square, and pressed it into the pocket of her dress.

The lantern in the window across the street flickered. Her hand went to her chest, where the locket hung beneath her shirt. The miniature inside was nearly worn smooth from years of her thumb brushing over it—a man with a serious face and dark, deep-set eyes, the only picture she'd ever seen of the father she'd lost before she was born. The man who had printed the pamphlets that would have freed them all, if Jean-Luc had only managed to deliver them. The man who had been betrayed by someone he trusted.

She closed her eyes and felt the floor of the shop beneath her feet, felt the whole precarious structure of her life—the payments, the secrets, the brother in the work camp, the journal she'd built from nothing, the man who watched her with such troubled intensity from across a room full of enemies—settle and creak and hold.

She wasn't going to give up the press. She wasn't going to give up the journal. She wasn't going to tell Antoine about her brother—not yet.

But the next issue of Le Courier des Femmes, she thought, as she carried the lamp to her father's desk and sat down in his chair for the first time in three days, was going to have an editor's note.

It would be addressed to the Inspector.

And it would be signed with a name.