Read Chapter 7: A Conservative's Eye

The café was called Le Charbonnier, and it smelled of burnt coffee and cheaper tobacco. Élise had chosen it because it sat across the street from the printing house of Le National, and because the window gave her a clear view of who came and went. She had been sitting there for nearly an hour, nursing a cup of chicory that had gone cold, watching the comings and goings of the men who set the words of Paris into type.

She had not yet worked up the courage to cross the street.

The pamphlet she had printed on her father's press was folded inside her coat, its ink still sharp, its words hers alone. Eleven copies. Ten were with Gabrielle, circulating through the market like seed in wind. The eleventh she had kept, and now her thumb traced its edge beneath the wool of her coat, as if she could draw courage from its pages.

What would she say to the editor of Le National? That she was a printer's daughter, that the words on the page were her own? Men did not publish women. Men did not even read women, except in the way one reads a letter from a foolish cousin. And yet—her father had taught her that the press did not care who pulled the lever, only what the lever produced. The machine was blind. It was the men who ran it who had opinions.

A chair scraped across the floor across from her. Élise looked up, startled. A man was sitting down at her table, uninvited, his coat the color of wet slate, his collar starched white enough to make a nun proud. He was younger than she had first thought—thirty, perhaps, or a young-looking thirty-five—with a neat beard trimmed to follow the line of his jaw and eyes the color of a cold winter river. He set down a cup of coffee and looked at her with the mild, unconcerned expression of a man who was used to being looked at, and not used to being refused.

"Mademoiselle," he said, tipping his hat slightly. "You appear to be reading something that gives you great concern."

Élise pressed the pamphlet flatter against her chest. "I appear to be minding my own affairs."

"So you do." He smiled, a careful, practiced thing. "Forgive me. I am a journalist. I observe. It is a professional affliction."

She felt the weight of his attention like a hand on her shoulder. "Then observe someone else."

"Impossible." He took a sip of his coffee, unhurried. "There is a young woman in a café across from Le National, who has been staring at their front door for an hour without crossing the street. She holds a document inside her coat that she touches with the reverence of a prayer book. And she has ink on her hands."

Élise felt her breath catch. She looked down. The ink was there—a smudge along the side of her index finger, born of pulling proof sheets straight from the chase, dark as a bruise. She had scrubbed her hands with lye that morning, but typesetter's ink was stubborn, and it had worked itself into the grooves of her skin like a confession.

"It is a stain," she said flatly. "From a pen."

"It is a printer's stain," he corrected gently. "Pens do not leave such marks. Trust me. I have seen both."

She made a move to stand, but his next words stopped her.

"I am Antoine Lefèvre," he said. "I write for La Presse. And I have been tasked with investigating the source of certain, ah—revolutionary pamphlets that have recently appeared in the markets of this district."

Élise froze.

"Eleven copies," she said, without thinking. Then she could have bitten her tongue off for the slip.

Antoine's eyebrows rose a fraction. "Eleven. That is a precise number. And one I had not yet heard." He set his cup down with deliberate care. "Tell me, Mademoiselle—"

"Moreau," she said, because it was too late to lie, and she had not yet thought to invent a name.

"Mademoiselle Moreau." He repeated the name, tasting it the way one tastes unfamiliar wine. "You are not, by chance, related to Henri Moreau, the printer of the Rue de l'Éperon?"

Her father's name in the mouth of a conservative journalist was like hearing a prayer spoken by a blasphemer. "He was my father."

"Was?"

"He died. Last month." The lie sat heavy in her mouth, and she swallowed it down. "Of illness."

"I am sorry for your loss." He said it automatically, the way men did, and then he leaned forward, and his voice grew softer, more serious. "But your father's press has continued to produce work. Permit me to speak plainly, Mademoiselle Moreau. We are both adults, and I find I do not have the patience for the coyness required to conduct a proper conversation in this city. There is a press in this quarter that is printing seditious material in small, careful runs. The style is too polished to be the work of a common hand. And the words—" He paused, and his eyes flicked to her coat. "The words have a particular voice to them. A voice that speaks of the rights of workers, of the dignity of labor. How interesting that a printer's daughter, alone in a café across from a newspaper office, should have ink on her hands and a look of guilt on her face."

Élise's heart hammered. Her hands gripped the edges of her seat beneath the table, and she willed her voice to stay steady.

"You mistake me, Monsieur. I am guilty of nothing but a cold cup of coffee." She forced herself to meet his eyes, and found them unsettlingly calm, watching her the way a cat watches a mouse that has not yet decided to run. "My father was a printer. I grew up in his shop. Ink is in my blood, I cannot wash it out. But I am not the person you are looking for. I am merely a girl who inherited a machine and is trying to sell it, and I came to this café to gather my courage to offer it to the gentlemen of the press."

"Sell the press?" His eyes gleamed with interest. "A shame. A well-run machine is worth keeping in the family."

"The family is no longer what it was."

For a long moment, he studied her. The café hummed around them—the clink of cups, the murmur of conversations, the distant cry of newspaper boys in the street. Élise felt as though she were standing on a cliff, and below her, the sea was churning.

Then Antoine smiled, a genuine thing that transformed his face for a moment, and leaned back.

"You know, Mademoiselle Moreau," he said, "I find myself strangely inclined to believe you."

She felt the relief wash over her, but she did not let it show. "Because I am innocent?"

"Because you are too clever to lie in the way you just did." He picked up his cup and drained it in a single motion. "But I will tell you what I will tell you, and you may do with it what you will. There are men in this city who are looking for the source of these pamphlets. Not men like me, who are merely curious. Men with uniforms and pistols and the authority to search whatever premises they choose. And when they find the press that is producing these words, they will not ask questions about inheritance or illness. They will take the printer, and they will take the machine, and they will not leave either of them intact."

He stood, adjusting his coat. He looked down at her, and for a moment his face lost its professional glare, and he seemed almost to pity her.

"I hope for your sake, Mademoiselle, that you truly are merely a girl trying to sell her father's machine." He paused. "Because if you are not—I do not know what I will do then. But I suspect I shall read your continued work with great interest."

He tipped his hat and walked out of the café, leaving Élise alone at the table with her cold coffee and her pamphlet burning a hole in her coat and the certainty, deep in her chest, that she had just met a man who would recognize her ink no matter how many times she washed her hands.

She looked down at her fingers.

The stains were still there.

And she had exactly six days left to pay her father's debt before she lost everything.