The French House Helen Fripp (the two towers ebook txt) 📖

back. It looked like agony, but Xavier didn’t wince and Nicole was glad.

‘Apologise to Mademoiselle Ponsardin, you stinking little ruffian.’

The Comte pulled Xavier’s arm higher until Xavier turned ashen with pain. Nicole was scared he’d wrench his shoulder right out.

‘Sorry,’ he said, grimacing.

‘And you. Act like a lady, not a street urchin.’

Street urchins beat ladies any day. ‘Let him go. He was helping me,’ she said.

‘Know your place and assert your natural authority, young lady, or this rabble will imagine they are the deserving poor and demand justice. How old are you?’

‘Eleven.’ She refused to add ‘sir’.

‘You’ll learn. Give an inch and they’ll take a mile.’

He stomped off and Nicole pulled a face behind his back to impress Xavier, but he was already returning to the stall to stuff a rabbit in his sack. The butcher didn’t ask for any money and Xavier looked ashamed. Then she understood – the rabbits were alms for the poor. She wished she hadn’t called her friend a grape-eater.

Around the square, the red geraniums in the urns were neglected and withered, the houses were crumbling and the paintwork was peeling. Crops were dying in the fields again this year. Nicole couldn’t remember a year when there’d been a celebration at harvest time, nor a big creamy moon lighting a magical evening of dancing, like she had heard about in the old days. Every week, the whole town prayed for a good harvest, but God wasn’t listening. This was why they were rioting in Paris, her father had told her. The aristocrats were stuffing themselves while the workers starved. Queen Marie Antoinette was so stupid, she’d offered cake to the poor instead of bread.

But Papa hadn’t told her the most gruesome part. Xavier had told her about that in graphic detail. The workers in Paris were going to rise up and round up all the aristocrats, take them to the Place de la Revolution and chop their heads off with a gruesome new thing they’d invented called the guillotine. It could efficiently kill ten aristocrats an hour, Xavier had told her, a big blade that slid down a frame and did the dirty deed, with aristocrats lining up one after the other, witnessing the death of their fellows and family before getting the chop themselves. Nicole had shivered, wishing he hadn’t told her, and hoping it wasn’t true.

She looked down at her dress, almost the same red as the Comte’s jacket, coloured with the kind of rich dye that the people in the square could never afford. Would she herself be counted as an aristocrat? But it was a fact that the king and queen weren’t in charge any more. The world was different and she felt frightened, even here, in her square.

She wished she’d gone to school after all, but the cathedral bell began striking. She would be too late and the nuns would tell Papa, so she might as well make the most of the trouble to come.

On the ninth toll of the bell, crowds of people filed into the square to queue at the rabbit stall. Most were country people, too poor to be regulars in this part of town. The butcher doled out one rabbit each. Some had sacks, others wrapped them in their aprons, a few didn’t have enough fabric to spare and held the meat by the ears. She watched for a while, then ran to the bakery.

‘Nicole! No school today?’ said Daniel, the baker.

‘The coin landed on tails,’ she lied.

‘Again? Tut tut. The nuns will cane the skin off your knuckles. Let me see?’

She held out her hand and showed him the welts from the last market day she had played truant.

He handed her a religieuse, a big, round choux pastry with a smaller one on top, filled with cream and topped with chocolate to resemble a nun. ‘Here, you can pretend you’re biting their heads off.’

She bit hard.

Daniel’s wife, Natasha, gave her a snowglobe to shake, a world of glittering frost and gilt ballrooms. Natasha was willowy and dark, with sallow skin and knowing brown eyes. She wore dirndl skirts edged with stitched patterns and symbols, like a Romani, and best of all she was from Russia, a world away from the little town of Reims. Nicole loved her stories of far-away icy wastelands and golden domes.

‘Delicious.’ Nicole grinned with her mouth full, when something splintered the boulangerie window and shattered it to the ground.

‘Ach,’ screamed Natasha, tracing figures of eight in the air as the patisseries were pierced with shards.

Daniel scooped a rock from the bakery floor and stormed out, waving it in the air. ‘Who the hell threw this?’ It was the stone hat from the king’s statue.

Outside, the old widow was on her hands and knees scraping spilt onions back into her baskets and the jam lady screamed vengeance for her smashed jars.

Three men straddled Nicole’s lucky statue of the king and the horse, bashing at it with hammers. They knocked off the easy bits first – the horse’s ears, the king’s foot, a length of his sword, egged on by a gang of men who were using the spoils as missiles.

‘Not the horse!’ Nicole yelled.

‘Hush! Get back here, you’ll get hit!’ Natasha urged, ushering her behind the counter and wrapping her in her skirts.

Amidst the chaos, the queue at the rabbit stall was still going. Muddy workers from the field, widows in black headscarves, barefoot, skinny children with grown-up, scabbed faces. The square was so busy now that she’d lost track of where Xavier and his friends had got to.

A gunshot ricocheted around the square. The queue froze, a child howled and the butcher dropped the rabbit he was holding. The three men slid down off the statue and slinked behind its broken flanks.

‘Nobody move!’

The Comte d’Etoges was back in his flashy silk jacket, this time at the head of a battalion from his private army, who fanned out into the square, blocking all the exits. A group of soldiers wrestled the three