A Sharpness On The Neck (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 9) Fred Saberhagen (free ebook reader for iphone txt) 📖

some sane authority to whom it would be possible to appeal. It was out here in the hinterlands that people had turned utterly into savages.

      When Philip asked Melanie when she had last visited Paris, her replies were somewhat vague.

      “I seem to remember your father telling me, once, that the Romains had relatives there?”

      That is true; I have a cousin.” With Old Jules listening solemnly, an anxious expression on his face, she gave Philip the address.”

      She did not share Philip’s hope that they would find the new government more moderate in the city. But she was willing to go there, or anywhere, on the chance of being able to help her father. In that effort she had nothing to lose.

      Marguerite, a quiet and timid girl, expressed no wish to go with the party to Paris, and Philip thought that the girl’s grandfather would have sternly discouraged the idea if she had.

      In any case Philip packed essentials—blankets for sleeping out, powder and ball for his pistols, matches, razor, a change of linen, a little food and money, a clay pipe and some tobacco—in a couple of saddlebags, and tied the reins of his horse to the back of Melanie’s light carriage.

      Turning back for a last look, when he was already seated in the carriage with reins in hand, Radcliffe sighed. The house would have to be abandoned to its fate—there was no one to defend it, or the barns, which were now standing empty, prey to wind and weather, or any of the rest of the property. Besides, as an American in the revolutionary tradition, he was more than half-convinced that peasants who had been so long and viciously oppressed had some just claim to the land and other wealth of France. As for himself, he had no time or effort to spare in trying to assert a claim on property. He could expect nothing but more trouble if he stayed here, and therefore decided to evacuate the place while he still had a chance.

* * *

      Once on the road, Philip and Melanie encountered little other traffic. They discussed the question of which revolutionary leader they should try to see first when they reached Paris. Tom Paine seemed a logical choice, though Melanie was doubtful about how much influence the American actually possessed.

      Other possibilities were Robespierre himself, or the chief prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville. A few months ago, Melanie would have chosen to put her case before Danton, but Dan-ton himself had lost his head in April.

      Another subject kept intruding: their recent strange encounter with the wounded man, now almost miraculously healed, who called himself Legrand. Melanie had an idea that this morning’s change in the behavior of the servant girl, Marguerite, was somehow connected with the man’s presence.

      Radcliffe frowned. “But the fellow was three-quarters dead when he arrived. You don’t suppose he—?”

      “I don’t know.” But never mind, there were plenty of other things to worry about.

* * *

      Of course the main subject of the travelers’ thoughts, whether they spoke of it or not, was the fate of Dr. Romain. As far as Melanie knew, her father was still alive, but he could easily have been beheaded this morning, or yesterday, or the day before, and she, at this distance from Paris, would be none the wiser.

      “Philip, for the first time I am glad that my mother is dead. At least she was spared this torture.” And with that, Melanie fell into a long silence.

      Philip could only admire his companion’s courage in bearing up as well as she did.

* * *

      The more time Philip spent with Melanie, the more she intrigued and sometimes irritated him. She was of course vastly, delightfully changed from the child he remembered—yet in some delicious sense she was still the same girl. A remembered trick of tossing her hair to one side, with a quick motion of her head. His small female playmate of those days, now transformed into womanhood.

      Melanie and Philip considered stopping at the house of Melanie’s family in the nearby village to get some of her things, but she decided that would be taking an unnecessary risk; the local Committee of Public Safety might decide at any time to resume operations. The house in town would be deserted anyway. Her mother had died years ago, and all her other relatives were either dead or absent.

      Melanie was reluctant to give a firm estimate of the number of days it would take them to get to Paris. In these troubled days, travel times were hard to estimate.

Chapter Sixteen

      For some five years now, ever since the fall of the Bastille, Paris had served France and the rest of the world as a seemingly limitless source of news. Tremendous events were reported from the capital almost every day—and the passage of time proved that some of them, including many of the most improbable, had actually occurred. For example, it had to be accepted as a matter of sober, historical fact that the king and queen—or rather, the individuals who had formerly borne those titles—had indeed been arrested, bullied, and locked up by mere commoners. And that some months later, by decision of the people, the royal couple were both dead. Their heads had rolled into the basket as easily as those of ordinary criminals.

      Yes, it was still hard to credit. Citizen Louis Capet—the man who had once been called by the title King Louis XVI, who had been the ruler of all France by divine right, anointed by the Church and all but worshiped by vast numbers of the people—that man had been beheaded, slaughtered in public like an animal, in January of 1793. His queen, Marie Antoinette, had followed him to the scaffold in October of the same year, after she had been proven (at least to the satisfaction of her enemies) to be in treacherous league with the rulers of her native Austria, sworn enemies of all revolutions.

      Once everyone understood that those events were really true, it was hard