Read Chapter 5: The Moneylender's Ledger

The knock came at half past eight, just as Élise was wiping the last of the ink from her fingers. She had not lit the lamps—better to work in the grey half-light of the shuttered shop, better that no one see the glow of a press running in a house of mourning.

The knock was not tentative. It was the knock of a man who expected to be answered.

Élise pulled off her apron and smoothed her hair into its pins before unbarring the door. The man on the step was small and neat, with a velvet collar on his coat and a gold watch chain stretched across a prosperous belly. His eyes moved past her shoulder, into the darkened shop, with the quick assessment of a man pricing everything he saw.

"Mademoiselle Moreau." It was not a question. "I am Monsieur LeFevre. Your father and I had business together."

She felt the cold before she understood it. The cold of an iron collar, of a trap closing.

"My father is dead," she said. "Perhaps you did not hear."

"I heard." LeFevre smiled with his mouth only. "That is precisely why I am here. May I come in?"

She could have refused. She should have refused. But she was her father's daughter, and a Moreau did not cower on the threshold. She stepped back and let him pass.

He walked through the shop slowly, his heels clicking on the plank floor. He touched the lead type, ran a finger across the platen of the press, and stopped before the cabinet where her father had hidden the locket and the pamphlets. Élise felt her heart seize, but he did not open the drawer. He only turned, producing a folded paper from his breast pocket, and held it out.

"A promissory note," he said. "Dated November of last year. Your father borrowed five hundred francs against the security of these premises."

Élise unfolded the paper. The hand was her father's—she would have known those tight, disciplined letterforms anywhere. *I, Henri Moreau, printer of the Rue de la Harpe, do promise to pay to the order of Monsieur Claude LeFevre the sum of five hundred francs, due on the first of March, 1848, in consideration of which said premises are pledged.*

The dates did not match. She saw that at once. The note said March, and the first of March was a week gone.

"This is overdue," she said carefully.

"Alas." LeFevre spread his hands. "A week's grace was the least I could offer a grieving family. But I must be practical, mademoiselle. Money does not wait for grief."

"Five hundred francs." The number was absurd. The shop cleared perhaps forty francs a month after paper and ink. Five hundred was a year's work, and more.

"Your father was always prompt in his interest," LeFevre went on, as if she had not spoken. "I should like to think his daughter inherited his sense of obligation."

The word landed like a slap. *Obligation.* She thought of the men who had killed her father, the police who had called it an accident, the pamphlets waiting in the hidden drawer, and now this small neat man with his small neat cruelty, closing in from another side entirely.

"I will pay," she said. The words came out before she had decided to speak them.

LeFevre's eyebrows rose a fraction. "Will you? I confess myself relieved. The sum is due in full—"

"I know what is due." Her hands were steady. She made them stay steady. "I ask only for time."

He was quiet a moment, studying her as he had studied the shop. Then he gave a small nod.

"A week," he said. "One week from today. You will bring me the sum in full, or I will take possession of these premises and sell them to pay the debt. I trust this is clear."

"Perfectly clear."

"Good." He smiled again, and this time there was something almost like pity in it. "You are braver than your father, mademoiselle. He borrowed from me four times over the years and never once looked me in the eye when the note came due."

He let himself out. The door clicked shut behind him, and Élise stood alone in the grey shop with her father's note crumpled in her fist.

Five hundred francs. She had perhaps eleven in the locked box under the floorboards. Marcel would have something saved, but not that much. The presses were worth more than the debt, but she could not sell them—without them there was no paper, no pamphlets, no purpose to any of it. And LeFevre would not wait.

She was still standing there, trying to think, when Marcel came in through the back door. He carried a loaf of bread wrapped in cloth and a small pot of honey, and he stopped short at the look on her face.

"What is it?"

She held out the note. Marcel read it, his lips moving over the words, and then set it down on the table with a respect she had not expected.

"That man is a bloodletter," he said. "He loans to printers and bakers and seamstresses because they cannot refuse him, and then he takes their shops when they cannot pay. He has done it to three men on this street alone."

"He told me I have a week."

"A week." Marcel was quiet a long moment. "There is nothing in this shop worth five hundred francs to a man who is patient enough to sell it at auction. But you will not come to that."

"How do you know?"

"Because I will not let it happen." He met her eyes, and for the first time since her father's death, she saw something other than grief or guilt in his face. She saw purpose. "Henri Moreau saved my life in forty-eight. That was two years before you were born, and I have never forgotten it. I will not see his daughter turned out of his shop by that vulture."

"Marcel." She had never asked him what he owed her father. She had never asked a great many things. "What else do you know that you have not told me?"

He was silent, and in that silence she felt the distance between them open like a wound. He knew something. He had known something since the day she found the locket, and he had chosen to keep it hidden.

"There is time for that later," he said at last. "There is a more immediate problem. We have no money, and we have a debt that will strip us bare. But we have a press." He tapped the frame of it with one gnarled finger. "We have ink. We have paper. And we have a city that is starving for words."

"You mean to print more pamphlets."

"I mean to print whatever pays." He pulled a sheet from his pocket—a notice, dry and official, offering a prize for the recovery of stolen silver. "There are men in this city who will pay for a handbill with their name on it. It is not noble work, but it is honest work, and it will fill the box while we think."

Élise looked at the notice, then at the note still lying on the table. Five hundred francs. A week. And beneath it all, the police who had killed her father and might yet come for her, the pamphlet she had written in her own words and sent out into a city she did not fully understand.

"One more thing," Marcel said. He had moved to the cabinet, and now he held the locket in the palm of his hand. She had not seen him take it out. "I told you I did not know the man in this portrait. That was a lie."

She went still.

"His name was Armand," Marcel said. "Your brother Jean-Luc brought him to the shop five years ago, before the troubles. He was a student, and he was in love with your father's cause—and perhaps with something else. They hid him here when the police came looking."

"Who was he to my father?"

Marcel closed his hand around the locket. "I think you know the answer to that. But it is not a question of blood. It is a question of what Henri was building, and what he died for." He set the locket back in the drawer. "You will need to know the answer before this is over. But not today."

Today there was a debt. Today there was a press to run and a city to reach. Today there was five hundred francs to find, and a brother she had almost forgotten she had, and a man whose face she could not stop seeing when she closed her eyes.

"Marcel," she said, and he turned. "We will find the money. But we are not doing it with handbills for stolen silver."

He raised an eyebrow.

"We are doing it with the truth," she said. "We are printing the truth, and we are selling it to the one man in Paris who will pay to have it told." She picked up the promissory note and folded it carefully, deliberately, into a square. "Who is the largest newspaper in the city?"

Marcel smiled, slow and rueful, and for an instant she saw the ghost of her father in his face.

"Le National," he said. "But you will not get through their doors without a name. And you have no name."

"Then we will make one." She set the folded note on the shelf above the press, next to the hidden drawer, and looked out through the grimy window at the grey roofs of Paris. "We will make one together."