Read Chapter 31: The Verdict of a Crowd

The tribunal sat in the open air, beneath the skeletal ribs of a half-built colonnade that stank of lime and wet stone. The crowd pressed in from all sides, a living wall of sweat and wine-breath and righteous fury. Alex stood at the center of it, his hands bound behind his back, his weight sagging onto his good leg while the other threatened to give way beneath him.

The infection had spread.

The dagger wound in his shoulder throbbed in counterpoint to the deeper ache in his leg, and the fever was curling through him like a fog. He could feel the heat of it behind his eyes, could taste the metallic film of it on his tongue. The red-coated hunter had done more than mark him. He had opened a door for the corruption already working its way through Alex's blood, and now the room was spinning in slow, lazy circles.

Before him, a table had been thrown together from planks and barrels. Three men sat behind it, their faces flushed with the authority of the moment. The man in the center—a baker by the look of his flour-dusted forearms—was the one who had led the charge against him. He had a voice like grinding stone and a conviction that needed no evidence.

"You have heard the testimony," the baker said, spreading his hands to the crowd. "This man, who names himself an American secretary—who speaks our language with a foreign tongue and knows our streets too well—has been found among the papers of the Bastille's armory. Found with royalist documents. Found in the company of a noblewoman."

The crowd growled its assent. Alex could feel the weight of their eyes on him, the animal expectation in their faces. They had come for a verdict, and they would have one.

"I am not—" Alex started, but his voice cracked. The fever had stolen his strength; his words came out thin and reedy.

"You are not what?" The baker leaned forward. "Not a liar? Not a spy? We have seen your kind before. Men who smile at revolutionaries by day and write letters to Versailles by night."

"I fought with you," Alex said. "On the fourteenth. I was at the Bastille."

"And yet no one here knows your face."

"I came to Paris days before. I—"

"You came to Paris days before the uprising, with papers that placed you in the service of the Crown's agents." The baker's voice rose. "You were found in the tunnels beneath the fortress with the niece of a royalist general. You are either a conspirator or a fool, and we do not have time to determine which."

The crowd surged. Someone threw a rotten cabbage that splattered against Alex's shoulder, mingling with the dried blood of his wound. The pain lanced through him, and he swayed, catching himself on the guards who flanked him.

"A rope," someone shouted. "A rope for the spy!"

"A lantern post will do," another voice cried.

The baker raised his hand, and the crowd fell into a gutter of anticipation. Alex watched the man's face, looking for the flicker of doubt that might save him. He had read about these tribunals. The swift justice of July 1789. The way a man's life could be decided in the time it took to fill a pipe. He had taught this to his students, had spoken of the crowd's hunger for certainty in the chaos of revolution. But he had never imagined the taste of that hunger from this side.

The baker opened his mouth to speak, but before the words could come, a voice cut through the murmur from the edge of the square.

"Hold your judgment!"

The crowd parted, and a figure stepped forward. He was young, barely older than Alex's own students, with a shock of dark hair and the pale, thin face of a man who lived on ink and agitation. Camille Desmoulins. Alex recognized him from the engravings in his textbooks, though the reality was more raucous than the illustration had suggested. The man had a fever of his own, but it burned in his eyes rather than his veins.

He walked to the center of the square and turned to face the crowd, spreading his arms like a preacher at a pulpit.

"I know this man," Desmoulins said, his voice carrying across the stones with practiced ease. "I have seen him with my own eyes, in the chaos of the fourteenth, when the Bastille was taken."

The baker frowned. "You vouch for a stranger?"

"I vouch for a patriot." Desmoulins pointed at Alex. "On the day the people rose, this man was at the fortress walls. I saw him among the crowd at the first courtyard, when the garrison fired upon us. I saw him drag a wounded woman from the line of fire and carry her to safety while others fled."

A murmur rippled through the crowd. Alex blinked, trying to summon the memory. There had been a woman. In the confusion of the first volley, he had pulled someone—he hadn't thought to remember the face. He had been too focused on the gates, on the possibility of reaching Camille before the chaos consumed them both.

"He was there," Alex said, but the words came out wrong, slurred by the fever.

Desmoulins continued, unbothered by Alex's interruption. "I am a man who has been called an enemy of the people before. I have been denounced by those who fear what I have written. And I have learned to look into a man's eyes before I judge him." He turned to face the tribunal, his voice dropping to something quieter, more intimate. "This man is not a royalist agent. He is not a spy. He is a stranger in our city, yes. A man of strange accent and strange habits. But when the guns fired, he did not run. And that is more than I can say for many who now call themselves patriots."

The crowd shifted. The anger in their faces was beginning to curdle into doubt.

"Perhaps," the baker said slowly, "you are too easily convinced by a man who sheds his blood with yours."

"That is possible," Desmoulins conceded. "But I ask you, citizens—what do we stand for, if we condemn a man for courage? What do we build, if we tear down every stranger who stands beside us in the fight?" He held up his hand, a gesture of supplication. "I do not ask you to trust him. I ask you to spare him. Let him leave this city and take his strange tongue elsewhere."

The crowd's energy was shifting. Alex could feel it, the way a sailor feels a change in the wind. The cries of "rope" and "lantern post" had faded. In their place came a low, murmuring consideration. The baker exchanged glances with the men on either side of him, then turned back to the crowd.

"We have heard the voice of a patriot," he said. "And we are not so far gone that we ignore the testimony of one who shed blood at the Bastille."

He looked at Alex, and there was something in his eyes that was not mercy but calculation. A revolutionary's pragmatism. The careful weighing of political cost.

"You are spared," the baker said. "But you are not welcome. You will leave Paris by nightfall. If you are seen within the city walls after the bells ring vespers, you will be taken to the lantern post, and no patriot will speak for you again."

The guards cut the bonds at Alex's wrists. He staggered forward, catching himself on the edge of the tribunal table. His leg buckled, and he went down on one knee, gasping.

Desmoulins was beside him in an instant, his hand beneath Alex's arm.

"Can you walk?" he asked, his voice low and urgent.

Alex nodded, though it was a lie. The fever was pulsing through him now with a new intensity, and his leg felt like a foreign object attached to his hip. Desmoulins helped him to his feet, and together they moved through the parting crowd. The people made way, their faces a mixture of curiosity and contempt. They had spared him, but they had not forgiven him.

They reached the edge of the square, where the crowd thinned and the streets opened up into the warren of alleys that led to the river. Desmoulins steered him into the shadow of a doorway and released his arm.

"You have debts to pay, it seems," Desmoulins said. "I do not know what brought you to Paris, or what you did at the Bastille. But I do not believe you are a royalist." He studied Alex's face with an intensity that made the fever feel small. "You are something else. Something I have not seen before. I will not ask what."

"Thank you," Alex managed. "I am in your debt."

"Forget it. I did not speak for favors. I spoke because I saw you at the fortress, and I believed in what I saw." Desmoulins turned to leave, then paused. "If you are leaving Paris, where will you go?"

Alex leaned against the wall, closing his eyes. The answer was in his mind already, a single word that carried the weight of everything he had lost and everything he still hoped to find.

"Versailles," he said.

Desmoulins nodded slowly. "Then be careful. The court there loves a stranger even less than we do."

He vanished into the crowd, leaving Alex alone in the doorway. The fever was pressing down on him now, and the world was swimming at the edges. He needed to find Camille. He needed to reach the tunnel, to get out of Paris before the bells rang vespers.

But first, he needed to stand.

He pushed himself off the wall, grinding his teeth against the pain in his leg. The wound in his shoulder had opened again, and he could feel the blood tracing a line down his arm. He pressed his hand to it and began to walk.