“No?” André said quietly. “The consequences, I assure you, are very, very real.”

Delaroche trod on André’s foot in his eagerness to get to the prisoner. “Have you looked out the window? You will find something there that might interest you.”

The window was little more than a rough square hewn in the wall, lined with closely set bars that did little to keep out the elements. Frigid night air whistled between the bars, and with it the sound of activity in the courtyard below.

There was a scaffold already built in the courtyard. A man in a ragged wool vest was spreading fresh sawdust across the boards.

André saw the muscles in Querelle’s throat work as he swallowed. To hear that one was condemned to death and to see the instrument of it, oiled and ready for use, were two very different things.

The Ministry of Police was nothing if not efficient in its work.

“That is for me?” Querelle asked hoarsely. He had to clear his throat before the last word.

“Not just for you.” Delaroche folded his arms across his chest, giving the prisoner a superior look. Not hard to look superior, thought André critically, when your opponent was in chains and hadn’t been allowed fresh linen in nearly a month. “Did you think you were the only soul in Paris with more pride than sense? Some of your comrades made the same mistake . . . and will pay the same price.”

The prisoner looked at Delaroche uncomprehendingly. A sort of dull trepidation could be seen in his expression, as though he had some inkling of what was to come but knew himself to be powerless to ward against it.

“‘Price,’” Querelle repeated. “Price?”

“Picot and Le Bourgeois have also been condemned to death,” said André, ending with brutal simplicity what otherwise would have been at least ten minutes of ominous innuendo.

The two men had been part of the same Royalist network as Querelle, but they had been less fortunate in their captors. Kept in close confinement in the Temple Prison, they had been put to the question in fine medieval fashion. They had begged for death and in the end been granted it, not out of any impulse of mercy, but because Fouché had found what he hoped would be a weaker link: Querelle.

“Condemned,” confirmed Delaroche, rolling the word lovingly on his tongue. “Condemned to an end on the guillotine. They, too, refused to cooperate with the officers of the Republic. Last night, they were taken before a military commission, tried, and”—Delaroche allowed a brief pause, during which time his gaze went meaningfully to the window—“sentenced. To death.”

Querelle licked his lips, as though they had gone dry. “So fast?”

“Justice is swift, Monsieur Querelle. Ah, and there we see it in action. Shall we?”

It was a command rather than an invitation. In the courtyard, the torches burned sullenly in their brackets against the wall. The rain and wind made the flames sizzle and crackle. The flames cast an eerie red glow over the proceedings, like a medieval painter’s rendition of hell, the red light lapping at the raw wood of the scaffold and glinting off the blade that hung so ominously suspended above.

From the lee of the building, a man stumbled forward, his hands bound behind him just as Querelle’s had been. His head, too, was bare to the elements. The rain slicked his shirt to his skin. From the second-story window, they could hear him shudder, although whether with cold or with fear was unclear. He swayed as the wind buffeted him, his head and shoulders hunched against the stinging rain.

There was to be no grand state execution, no glorious death for his cause. Any speech made at the scaffold would be lost in the howling rain, blunted against the bored indifference of the detail of soldiers who were his only audience. They were prepared to dispatch the man as any farmer might dispatch vermin caught poaching on his crops, without mercy or regret.

It wasn’t Picot. Both Picot and Le Bourgeois had been killed the night before. Tried, sentenced, executed, all within the space of an hour. This man was someone else entirely. A thief, a murderer, a rapist. Expendable fodder from Paris’s overflowing prisons.

Querelle, of course, was not to know that.

In the rain, in the dark, one bound and hunched man looked much like another. It was necessary, for the sake of the charade, that Querelle think it was one of his comrades, that he see in the arc of the ax the intimation of his own mortality. To be told, at a remove, in simple, whitewashed words that his comrades were dead would not have at all the same effect.

It all made André sick.

“Such brave defiance,” purred Delaroche, his chin practically resting on the prisoner’s shoulder. “Such unwavering insolence. But, as you shall see, Monsieur, Madame la Guillotine will not be defied, not for all the bravery in the world.”

Despite the freezing air gusting through the window, sweat beaded Querelle’s forehead.

André spoke, his calm voice unnaturally loud in the waiting hush. “There is, of course, still a chance for a pardon.”

Outside, two soldiers helped the bound man to kneel. With rough efficiency, they settled his head in the hollowed trough designed for just that purpose.

“A pardon?” croaked Querelle, never taking his eyes from the figure of the man on the block.

“A pardon,” repeated André quickly, as Delaroche opened his mouth to say something, undoubtedly taunting, pointless, and time-wasting. “I have a pardon with your name on it. All it lacks is the First Consul’s signature.”

Querelle’s nails scraped against the stone of the sill as his hands opened and closed, seeking some sort of purchase. He cast an agonized glance out the window, at the man kneeling on the scaffold. He looked back, uncertainly, at André.

“Should you choose to change your mind, Monsieur Fouché himself would personally obtain the First Consul’s signature on your behalf.”

Delaroche pushed his way forward. “A throat is made to be used, Monsieur. And, if not, it must be . . . cut.”

Querelle looked from André to Delaroche and back again. “How do I know you won’t kill me anyway?”

It was an excellent question.

“Do you doubt the word of the Minister of Police?” demanded Delaroche.

Since that was precisely what the man was doing, there was no easy answer to that. Insulting one’s captor might make good theatre, but it made very poor sense.

André looked quellingly at Delaroche. “Should you do nothing,” he said sensibly, to Querelle, “you will most certainly take your place on that scaffold at dawn. Should you change your mind . . .” He held up the rolled piece of paper, tied with an official-looking red ribbon, letting Querelle’s eyes and mind rest on it and the possibilities it implied.

The condemned man’s eyes darted back and forth, to the window and back again, like an animal in a snare. André could see the wild thoughts going through his mind. The still man on the scaffold, the knife that hadn’t fallen, the offer of pardon . . . What if it were all a sham: trial, condemnation, execution, all of it? What if it were only a bluff? A gleam of cunning lit Querelle’s bloodshot eyes, gone glassy with fear and a desperate man’s desperate hope. If they were bluffing, he could continue to refuse.... He had held out this long against Fouché, why not longer? They might be lying about Picot and Le Bourgeois. If they killed him, they would never know what he had to tell. They wouldn’t kill him, not now—nor that unfortunate dupe of a decoy in the courtyard, all done up to look like a prisoner. It was a bluff, a sham, it had to be....

André only wished it were.

“And what if I don’t?” Querelle said belligerently, just as the low rumble of a drumroll sounded in the courtyard below, like a swell of thunder in the night.

“Ah,” said Delaroche, his eyes lighting with a feral glow. He turned to the window, leading the others to follow suit. “If that is your choice . . .”

With a shrill whinny of sound, the blade swooped down, slicing through flesh and bone before landing, with a moist thunk, on the wooden block below.

Delaroche watched with unmistakable pleasure as the soldiers went about their grim business.

André could see fear and disbelief warring on Querelle’s torchlit countenance.

The soldiers on duty barely looked at the head as they picked it up by the hair and tossed it into a waiting basket. Another grabbed the dead man by the legs, making a crazy pattern through the matted sawdust as he dragged the headless torso from the block. There was no roar from the crowd; there was no crowd to roar. This was nothing more than routine.

In the cell above, the condemned man’s complexion, tanned from years on shipboard, turned an unfortunate shade of green, like an unripe olive.

“There were five of us,” Querelle blurted out, levering himself away from the window with both hands.

“Five what?” prompted Delaroche, leaning forward.

Querelle took a deep breath, his lungs laboring as though he had been running. “Five of us who landed in October. In the service of the King.”

André nodded to the deputy at the table, signaling him to begin writing. There would be an official report of Querelle’s testimony prepared later, one that left out such inconvenient little details as the means employed in obtaining it.

Pushing away from the window, Delaroche advanced on the prisoner. “I take it this means that you are, at last, prepared to talk to us?”

Through the bars could be heard the terrible sifting sound of sawdust being swept with a long-handled broom, clearing the scaffold to make it ready for its next occupant.