Fauvel rakes through it and shakes his head. I cannot do this anymore, he says. Do not ask me.
Please, Fauvel.
He picks up the bracelet, examines it.
Twenty of your best rockets. The finest you’ve ever made. Fine enough to shame the stars.
Still he says nothing.
Please, Fauvel.
He pockets the bracelet and the coins and kisses my cheek. And I know what’s coming. I know. But he can do no differently now. And neither can I.
In the end, at least, I got what I wanted—a stage to stand on, an audience to applaud. For all of Paris watches me now. They talk of nothing else. In the Assembly, in the coffeehouses, in the laundries and factories and market stalls, they talk of the fireworks. The broadsheets are full of my doings, every one. No player has ever managed that, not even the great Talma himself.
But there is only one in the audience I care about now. Only one.
It’s for him I move through the night streets. For him I climb the steep rooftops. For him I run away after, only one step ahead of the guards. It’s for him I scramble and hide, nurse my oft-burned hands, sleep with the dead.
I know it cannot last. I know my time comes soon. My treasures dwindle. Bonaparte rages. Fauvel beetles off to the guard.
But still I go forth with my rockets.
For oh, how it grieves me to think that Orléans might be right.
How it grieves me to think that the world always wins.
58
I turn the page. There’s one more entry. Only one. The last one. It’s dated 1 June 1795.
And it has blood smeared across it.
“No,” I say. I slap the diary shut. “No.”
What a fool I was to hope. The ugly smear is blood. Alex’s blood. Something terrible happened. The guards got her, I know it. She was cornered or wounded, but survived long enough to write one last entry. What does it say? That she died in agony? Alone? That she died for nothing?
As I look at the smear, I realize that the diary is shaking. No, it’s not the diary. It’s my hands. My whole body. The Qwells I took when I got up aren’t working. I go to my bedroom, grab the bottle, and take another one, then pace around waiting for it to kick in.
Ten minutes later, I feel worse. The pills are doing nothing. I look at my hands. They’re still shaking. There’s a rumbling inside my head, a roaring. It sounds like an earthquake. The pain is seismic. It’s going to shake me until I crumble and fall to pieces. I have to walk. Somewhere. Anywhere. I have to stay ahead of it.
As I’m standing in the entryway, deciding where to go, I hear footsteps on the landing and voices and then a key in the door. It’s Dad and G.
“Hey,” I say, trying to sound normal.
“Hey,” Dad says.
“Hello, Andi,” G says.
G looks awful—tired and rumpled and bleary-eyed. A strange guy walks in behind him. The guy’s wearing a dark suit, an earpiece, and sunglasses. He’s huge. I can see his biceps bulging under his suit jacket. He nods at me. Doesn’t smile. Dad tosses some folders on the table in the hallway, drops his briefcase on the floor. Pulls his sweater off and drops that on the floor, too.
“Um, Dad? Who’s—”
“This is Bertrand. From the French secret service,” he says, yanking the door to the hall closet open.
“The secret service? I don’t understand. What’s going on?”
He pulls a blue blazer out of the hall closet, shrugs into it. “We finalized the results. On the heart. Just this morning,” he says. “And then somebody leaked the damn data. In another hour or so it’s going to be all over the Internet. Everything’s screwed up.”
“The president wants a briefing,” G adds. “Immediately. He doesn’t want to get the info from CNN. His office sent a car for us. After we finish that, we’ve got to do the press conference at St-Denis. The Trust is scrambling like hell to pull it together.”
“Wait … how did you even get here, G?” I ask. “The airports are closed.”
“I drove.”
“All the way from Germany?” I say in disbelief.
“I started out yesterday morning. The trains were impossible, so I rented a car.”
“Andi, have you seen my yellow tie anywhere?” Dad asks.
“It’s here,” I say, grabbing it off the back of the sofa. He takes it and flips his collar up. G runs into his bedroom and reemerges a minute later, also wearing a jacket and fumbling with a tie.
As I watch them race around, I try to work up the courage to ask what I need to know.
“Dad?”
“Mmm-hmm?” he says, looping his tie into a knot.
“Is the heart his?”
“Yes,” he says.
No, I think. Please no.
“Are you sure?” I ask him.
Dad messes up the knot, swears, and starts over. “We—the two other geneticists and I—looked at the sample’s mitochondrial DNA … you know about mtDNA, right?” he says. “It’s inherited only from the mother and passes down the maternal line unchanged—making it easier to follow than DNA that might’ve come from either parent.”
“Yeah, I know that,” I say impatiently.
“Well, we compared the mtDNA from the heart to mtDNA taken from living relatives of Marie-Antoinette’s and it was an exact match. We also compared the heart’s information to the D-loop sequences of mtDNA taken from a strand of Marie-Antoinette’s hair and hair samples from two of her sisters. We looked at two hypervariable regions of the D-loop—HVR 1 and HVR 2—and found matches for HVR 1 in all three samples.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that the heart belonged to a child maternally related to the Habsburg family—that is, to Marie-Antoinette’s family.”
“That’s, like, your opinion?”
“That’s, like, scientific fact.”
“But Marie-Antoinette had several children. How do you know it didn’t belong to one of the others?”
G answers me. “Because the heart is too large to have belonged to Sophie-Béatrix, who died shortly before her first birthday,” he says. “It is too small to have belonged to Marie-Thérèse, who was eventually released from the Tower and who died in adulthood.”
“What about Louis-Joseph? Louis-Charles’ older brother? He died in childhood,” I say.
“He did, yes. But he died before the Revolution, and so was given a royal funeral. As tradition dictated, his heart was removed for embalming. It would have been cut open and stuffed with herbs. The heart we have here was not thus embalmed. It cannot be Louis-Joseph’s.”
My last hopes are flickering and dying like the flames on burned-out candles.
“What about cousins? Didn’t Marie-Antoinette have sisters? They probably had children, didn’t they? Couldn’t the heart have belonged to one of them?”
“There were Habsburg cousins, yes,” G says slowly, looking worried. I think he heard the desperation in my voice. “They were all royal children and they lived in foreign countries. The idea that somehow a heart from one of them was stolen, and preserved in the same way and smuggled into Paris, and that everyone involved in the different stages of the heart’s journey to St-Denis was lying … well, it’s simply impossible, Andi. Nothing in history even suggests—much less supports—such a thing occurring. The heart is that of Louis-Charles.”
“You’re sure, G … absolutely sure?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Dad?”
“As a scientist, I cannot—”
“Just pretend for a minute that you’re not, okay?” I say. We all hear the desperation in my voice. Only it’s hysteria now. And I can’t keep it down.
“That I’m not what?”
“A scientist. Pretend you’re a human being. Just this once.”
“Andi,” he says. “Is something wrong? What’s—”
“Are you sure?” I ask him.
He looks at me silently, understanding dawning in his eyes, then he answers me. “Based on
the history alone, I would not be sure, no. As you and G both know. Based on overwhelming scientific evidence combined with history’s circumstantial evidence, I would say, yes, I believe this heart belonged to Louis-Charles. As a scientist—and a human being—that’s what I believe. I’m sorry, Andi. I think maybe you wanted a different answer.”
I feel hollowed out. Gutted. Totally empty.
“Dr. Alpers, Professor Lenôtre, if you would be so kind,” Bertrand says.
G grabs his briefcase and hurries out. Dad’s behind him. He turns back to me before he leaves and says, “I’ll be home after the press conference. Around seven or so. I’ll see you then. Maybe we can get some dinner.” The door slams. He’s gone.
I go get Alex’s diary. There’s one more page, and inside me, there’s one tiny candle still burning, just one.
Maybe she made it. She would have stopped setting off fireworks after he died. Stopped risking her life. Stopped running. Maybe the blood on the page is from an injury, that’s all. She was injured but survived, like she did once before. And somehow, she got out alive.
I open the diary for the last time and start to read.
59
1 June 1795
Why, sparrow?
It’s Orléans.
I open my eyes, but cannot see him. The pain in my side is blinding. I’m in the catacombs. Sitting against a wall in a puddle of my own blood. I’ve been shot by a guard.
Why did you do this? he asks me. They have killed you.
Because … because once…
I want to tell him. To write down the truth. While I still can. The truth of the revolution. Not the one they made in Paris in 1789. The one they made in me. But I cannot speak. The pain will not let me.
Orléans laughs softly. I can see him now. Blood and silk. Eyes as dark as midnight. He bends low to me. His breath smells like rain.
Because once, what? Once upon a time? Once upon a time kings fought dragons and kitchen girls danced in glass slippers. Because once upon a time, princes escaped from their dungeons.
No. Listen. Please, listen to me.…
He clucks his tongue. The fables have failed you. Once upon a time never was. There’s no kindly huntsman. No fairy godmother. There’s only the wolf. Grown so bold now, he strolls the streets of Paris picking his teeth with an infant’s rib. Nothing changes, sparrow. Can’t you see that? The world goes on, as stupid and brutal tomorrow as it was today.
And though I am shuddering with pain, and twisting with pain, and sobbing with pain, I laugh. Because I know now. I know the answer. I know the truth.
Oh, dead man, you are dead wrong, I tell him. Can’t you see? The world goes on, stupid and brutal, but I
And then the writing stops. It just stops.
And whatever she wanted to tell me isn’t there.
There’s no answer. No explanation. No truth. Nothing.
I don’t know if she lived or died. I don’t know the end of her story and I never will.
All I know is that a little boy died in Paris, long ago, alone in a dark, filthy cell. And another boy died on a street in Brooklyn, his small body bloodied and broken.
I touch my fingers to the stain. Blood always turns dark. On paper. Or clothing. Or asphalt. And then I close the diary.
I thought this was all for something. I thought there would be more in these pages than sadness and blood and death.
But there isn’t. And the despair that’s always there, rooted deep inside me, suddenly blooms into something so huge, so black and thick and suffocating, that I cannot breathe.
I stand up, put the diary back in the old guitar case, and leave the case unlocked on the dining room table, where G will be sure to see it. Then I get my things. My jacket and bag. My own guitar.
Turns out, I do know the end of the story.
Alex’s. And mine.
I’ve known it all along.
60
It’s late and dark. The Eiffel Tower is lit up and so beautiful. I’m sitting on a bench by some trees in the Champ de Mars looking up at it. I’ve been here for hours. In the dark. In the cold. I tried to play my guitar, but couldn’t. I can’t find the music anymore. Can’t find that one note.
Now I’m listening to other people play. I can’t see them but I can hear them. They’re somewhere nearby. I hear a guitar, a mandolin, horns, a girl’s voice.
I’m tired. My head’s a bit hazy from all the Qwells I took. My feet ache. I’ve walked all the way here from G’s.
But that’s okay.
I don’t have much farther to go.
Only one step.
61
I’m in line for the tower. It’s a good choice, a sure thing. It’s better than the river. People sometimes survive the river.
Around me, tourists are talking and laughing. Guys are hawking fake Rolexes, scarves, and key chains. The music I heard earlier sounds closer now. It’s raw and wild and beautiful. I look for the musicians, squinting into the darkness, but I can’t see them.
The line moves and I move with it. The music stops. After a few more minutes, I’m at the ticket window. I get my money out but the guard tells me I can’t go—not with my guitar. I’ve got to get rid of it if I want to go up, he says. I ask him where I can check it. He says this is not an airport, there’s no baggage check here. He motions me away from the window. The people behind me start grumbling. The man taking money tells me to step aside. A couple pushes past me.
And then I hear another voice: “Hey! Hey, Andi!”
I turn around. Virgil’s standing there. He’s breathless. Jules, and two more guys, and a girl, are standing at a distance, watching us.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” I say.
“Weren’t you supposed to fly home yesterday? What are you doing here? You a tourist tonight?”
I force a shaky smile and ignore the first two questions. “Yeah. I’m a tourist tonight. What are you doing here? Why aren’t you in your cab?”
“Monday night’s my night off,” he says.
“Miss, will you please step out of the line?” the guard says.
I do, feeling jittery and hassled.
“We just finished playing.”
“Was that you?” I ask. “You sounded good. I liked the horns.”
“Thanks. I wish the tourists thought so. They aren’t in a giving mood and we’re too cold to stay out here any longer. We’ve got a gig soon anyway. A paying one. At a party.” He nudges my foot with his own. “Come with us. We’ll pass the hat. Get even more money with another girl in the band.”
“Virgil! Come on!” one of his friends shouts.
“In a minute!” Virgil shouts back.
I don’t want to talk anymore. I want to go. Now.
“Take this for me, will you?” I say, handing him my guitar. “I can’t take it up with me and I don’t want to … to just leave it here.”
“I can’t. I have to go.”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to wait here. Just take it.”
“But how will I get it back to you?”
“I don’t know. Somehow.”
I’m looking off in the distance, not at him, but he gets in my face and makes me look at him. He’s not smiling now. “You’re not serious, are you?”
“Come on, man,” somebody says, tugging on Virgil’s sleeve.
They’ve all come over, Virgil’s friends. There’s more he wants to say to me—I can tell by the look on his face—but someone says “Who’s this?” so he makes the introductions. There’s Constantine, rumpled and thin, with big white teeth. Charon, who’s holding a trumpet. Khadija, the beautiful girl from Rémy’s. I already know Jules. I mumble a few hellos. The pain is eating me alive.
“You coming?” Charon says.
“In a minute,” Virgil says, still looking at me.
“That’s it!” the guard bellows. “We’re full. No more.”
I spin around. He’s closing the gate to the elevator.
“No! Wait!” I shout. I c
huck the guitar at Virgil and run to the ticket window. I slap my money on the counter. “Please!”
“We are closed,” the ticket man says.
I look at my watch. “But it’s only eleven o’clock. The tower doesn’t close until eleven-forty-five. The sign says so.”
“The tower closes at eleven-forty-five, yes, but the last elevator goes up at eleven.”
“Please, just one more,” I say, pushing my money through to him.
He pushes it back. “I’m sorry,” he says.
I run to the gate, my money in my hand, and ask the guard to let me on. The guard holds his hand up like a traffic cop. He shuts the doors to the elevator.
“I’ve got to get on!” I shout. I’m pleading now. Begging. Holding out my money. Offering him more. The people in the elevator are staring at me. I start to cry.
“Don’t be ridiculous. The tower isn’t going anywhere. Come back tomorrow,” the guard says.
But I can’t wait until tomorrow. The pain is too much. It never gets better. It only gets worse. The guard hits a button and the elevator rises. I’m weeping now. Sobbing. I sink to my knees and bang my head against the gate.
“Stop it! Right now! Or I’ll call the police,” the guard warns.
I feel hands under my arms. Lifting me up. It’s Virgil. He gets me to my feet and walks me away from the gate. His friends are with him. Their eyes are large in their faces.
Constantine takes a brochure from the rack by the ticket window. He walks up to me, smiling uncertainly, and offers it. “The Louvre is also good,” he says. “Many, many artworks there.”
Charon says, “Sacré-Coeur is most excellently beautiful.”
Jules says, “You must visit the Place des Vosges.”