Page 88 of Beyond the Lavender Fields
Gilles knew that face. It was Père’s bosun onle Rossingol. The bosun raised one brow and dipped his head.
A signal?
The man turned his back and extracted himself from the gathering. Gilles soon lost him in the dark.
It had to be a sign. Père was telling him the Daubins were safe. Gilles wouldn’t allow himself to believe anything else.
“I will look for them.” He tapped Martel’s shoulder. “You go on to the factory. I’ll meet you there with the Daubins when I’ve located them.”
His friend snarled. “Good luck finding them in one piece.” After a moment, Martel nodded slowly. “You go, and I will see you at thesavonneriein sixty minutes. They need to be questioned. Imbeciles. Who takes off with prisoners before they’ve been questioned?”
A rabid crowd fueled by zeal and alcohol. “I’ll do my best.” There were a dozen streets that led back to the Panier district, if that’s where Père was taking them.
“I don’t want your best,” Martel growled. He snatched up a torch from someone beside him and whirled on the house. Noise billowed from the home like smoke, as though the lust for all the riches of a hard-workingbourgeoisefamily had ignited. “I want it done.”
His friend marched toward the house, and before Gilles could shout, Martel threw the torch at the white-painted exterior of the Daubin home.
“What are you doing?” Gilles’s voice rang shrill in his ears.
Flames leaped up from the toppled torch. They flew over the grass and licked their orange tongues up the well-maintained walls. Martel fixed him with a glare, but Gilles could only watch with eyes the size of capstan wheels as the fire spread.
“Que diable, are you insane?”
“Sixty minutes, Étienne.” The young man turned his back and stomped off.
Gilles didn’t wait for Martel to leave. He sprinted for the house. The fire, fueled by some accelerant in the paint, had streaked up the wall. He stomped at it to no avail as it rose. How many people remained inside?
Martel was no patriot. He was hardly a Jacobin. Some irrepressible monster had taken up his mind, urged on by a hate Gilles would never understand.
He bolted for the front door. “Everyone out. Fire! Get out.” Shrieks sounded as the acrid smoke stung his nose. Men and women who a moment before had rejoiced in their destruction now scrambled for the doors and windows. Like rats scurrying from a disturbed nest. Some brought what they could carry. Others dropped everything to run.
Gilles swerved to avoid them as he made for the stairs to warn those left inside. Whatever dream Martel and the other Jacobins had for a new France, if it included this sort of mindless waste, he wanted no part of it. Candelabras were knocked over in peoples’ flights, and tiny new blazes erupted up and down the house.
“Get out! Fire!”
The hellish glow soon permeated the interior of the house, and smoke thickened the air. Though Caroline was safely sheltered beneath his bed at home, he saw her livid face everywhere he turned. This was what she’d always feared and criticized about therévolutionnaires.
France was pressed between the anarchy of Jacobin mobs and the tyranny of Bourbon kings. He continued to shout for people to run to safety as he flew up the stairs. Did they truly have no other option? Unless they found one, France, Marseille, his family, everything and everyone he loved would be swallowed in the flames of grand ideas.
Dawn fizzled through the curtains on the other side of the bedroom as Gilles hauled himself through the door. Soot stained his white shirtsleeves. He’d lost his jacket somewhere. Asans-culottemost likely took it.
He dropped to his hands and knees to check under the bed. Caroline lay curled up with his pillow, her back to him. Though his bed called to him with a siren’s song and his limbs ached from a night of combatting arson, he dared not lie down on it. He couldn’t remember how long it had been since they had tightened the bed ropes. No need to wake Caroline by squishing her into the floor.
Splinters, burns, and scrapes on his hands protested as he crawled to the wall. Nothing serious. The physical hurting paled to the pain and confusion that rattled his core. The Daubins’ house was gone. Thesavonneriewas gone in a similar fire, its smoke blanketing the city. And heaven only knew where its owners had gone.
Père hadn’t returned. Maman paced downstairs waiting for him, though she claimed to be waiting for Florence to start their wash day. Gilles had never seen so many lines about her eyes, despite twenty-two years of watching her wait for her mariner’s safe return.
Gilles sat against the wall, letting his head fall back until it rested on the bare wood. His hands slid useless from his lap to the floor, and he could not keep his eyelids from drooping. He allowed sleep’s enchantment to overcome him, if only for a moment. With the growing light slowly illuminating the room, Caroline was sure to wake soon.
When she did, he would have to tell her how her entire world was no more.
11 September 1782
Panier Quarter
Marseille
Gilles,
