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across to Elizabeth.

‘Mistress Fitzgilbert,’ he pleaded. ‘You must tell them. It was for Nancy’s own good. The Devil was in her. You know that.’

He gestured to the crowd.

‘Tell them,’ he said, ‘that the Devil possessed you both. But now he has been driven out and you commit yourself to God.’

Elizabeth was staring at him, grief burning in her green eyes.

‘I can save you,’ nodded the vicar. ‘From your unnatural desires.’

Elizabeth’s lips parted. She stood a little straighter.

‘Untie me,’ she said quietly. The executioner came towards her and cut free her hands. Elizabeth stepped from the pyre.

Then she turned and addressed herself to the crowd.

‘My maid Nancy,’ she announced, ‘was the best sort of girl. With a blameless love for her friends. And this man,’ Elizabeth raised a hand to point, ‘murdered my Nancy. Whom we all loved.’ Her voice faltered and she drew a gasping breath. In the crowd women were wiping away tears.

‘I implore the justices,’ concluded Elizabeth, ‘to hang him for his crime.’

The request was caught up in a whisper. Then it raised to a chant. And soon the assembled mob were baying for the vicar’s sentence.

‘String him up!’ shrieked a balding laundry woman.

The prison guard stepped forward and clapped a burly hand on the vicar’s shoulder.

Elizabeth turned to her husband. Fitzgilbert stepped forward clumsily and embraced his wife.

She extricated herself after a moment and turned to Charlie.

‘You came to prove my innocence,’ she smiled. ‘You’re a better man than you pretend.’

‘I came for the silver thimble,’ he said, ‘and my fee.’

Elizabeth took a step closer to him.

‘Do you still believe God doesn’t like London?’ she asked.

‘We’re not in London,’ Charlie pointed out with a grin. ‘Tyburn is outside the City. But I’ve a new manner of understanding miracles,’ he added. ‘And if I’m ever in need of one, I’ll come to you.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Twenty-Five

 

 

 

 

 

 

Enjoyed this short story?

Turn the page for a free sample of CS Quinn’s latest full-length novel, The Bastille Spy …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Twenty-Six

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Bastille Spy

 

CS Quinn

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Twenty-Seven

St Petersburg , The Winter Palace, 1789

 

The day I killed the Cossack was when it all began. If I think carefully, I can trace everything back to that slave market in St Petersburg - an illegal affair trafficking mostly Persians and Kurds foolish enough to cross the badlands of Khiva.

The dusty square bore a resemblance to other livestock markets in Russia. There were enclosures, merchants shouting their wares and buyers haggling, examining the goods. A good deal of vodka was being drunk and a few traders were filling their bowls from a cauldron of cabbage soup bubbling over a wood fire. Despite the sultry heat of the St Petersburg summer, most buyers wore thick fur-lined leather coats and boots.

In contrast, I was dressed in Turkoman rags that barely covered my body, with a metal cuff heavy around my neck and chains at my wrists and ankles.

The fellow slaves in my consignment were similarly clothed and bound, heads bowed low with the discomfort of their bonds, bodies wasted from their weeks dragged starving through the Russian countryside.

In the middle distance stood the fate of many people trafficked here. The magnificent Winter Palace was being extended for Catherine the Great; the boxy Hermitage annexe wrought brick by brick from the sliding marsh. Her Imperial Majesty had ended slavery. But she doesn't involve herself in building works. This square palace, with its endless gold columns and bride-cake green-white façade, is built on the bones of spent slaves, flung carelessly into the foundations.

Even now if I close my eyes I can see and feel that fateful day as if it's happening all over again. A bushy-bearded man steps forward and ushers our little group into a fenced enclosure. He wears a tricorn hat with red fur edging, jammed down low over his greasy dark hair. This is the man who bought us, the unseen buyer who paid the dead-eyed Khiva tribesman who herded us to the city gates. At his side stands a giant Cossack with a plumed turban, a studded-leather jerkin and a whip in his hand.

'Let's see what we have,' says the fur-hatted merchant in heavy St Petersburg Russian, with a humourless grin, 'in our Kurdish soup.' This is a derogatory term for a job lot of slaves bought cut-price from Khiva - like the cheap stew made in Kurdistan, where each ladle holds differing amounts of miscellaneous meat.

The slave merchant shoots a dark smile at his Cossack henchman.

'Those pig-ignorant slave-hunters wouldn't know if they caught Empress Ekaterina herself,' opines our owner with a sneer. 'My last batch had two Russians, worth fifty roubles each.' He eyes us greedily, assessing, whilst the Cossack stares stoically at the Winter Palace. 'Mostly Kurds,' he decides, disappointed. 'Perhaps some Persians if we're lucky.' He points. 'Separate those at the back.'

The Cossack moves among us, driving the slaves apart. He looks resigned and I wonder how he came to this position, hired muscle for a slave buyer.

Our owner's eyes land on me.

'Well, well,' he says, licking his lips. 'What have we here?'

I've tried my best to disguise myself, spreading mud over my skin, matting my long dark hair and arranging it over my face, but there's no hiding my height.

The owner lifts a chunk of tangled hair, and I blink, scowling.

'Could be something,' he decides, turning to his hired thug. 'See the eyes? Blue-grey.' He spits on his finger and rubs away a little of the dirt on my upper arm.

'Dark, but not too dark,' he says. 'What think you? An African half-breed?'

'Too light. Maybe Moorish,' says the Cossack. 'The eyes are too savage to be Russian.'

'Maybe,' decides the owner. He prods his sharp stick into my chest.

'You,' he barks. 'Where from?'

I mutter a few words of frightened Kurdish. He shakes his head.

'Kurdish,' he says contemptuously. 'Hardly worth the chains that hold her. She's only good for the street brothels.' He indicates towards the back of the market. 'Put her in with the other whores.'

They drag me along, the chain weighing around my neck, my hands bound, to a stinking shack partially roofed with mouldering reeds. A door of sticks is dragged open and the stench of despair wafts out. A huddle of frightened girls look up as I'm pushed to the ground and fastened to a metal hoop on the floor.

The door shuts and I begin to free myself, working fast. I reach up, tugging a hidden lock-pick from my filthy hair. I unlock my chains and the manacle at my neck, rubbing my wrists in relief as the restraints fall.

The other slaves are watching me shed my bonds, their eyes like saucers. I scan the little hut and my eyes land on a single scrawny man, huddled in the corner. Without his rigid aristocratic clothing, he reminds me of a soft pink crab slipped from its shell. His head was once close-cropped for a wig, but now his hair grows out untidily in clumps of black and grey, to match his unshaven face. Bare knees are drawn up to his chin, the naked legs ageing and liver-spotted. There is a deep bruise on his cheek just below his haunted eyes. My heart aches for him.

I drop to the ground near where he sits.

'You are Gaspard de Mayenne?' I ask. He flinches, features twisted between confusion and fear.

'Who are you?' he whispers, his gaze trying to reconcile my light-coloured eyes to skin that isn't white enough to fit, in that way Europeans do.

'My name is Attica Morgan,' I say, speaking in French. 'I'm an English spy. I'm here to rescue you.'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Twenty-Eight

In my experience, men offered rescue by a woman fall in two camps: those who refuse the possibility and those who try to take command of the escape themselves. To my relief, Gaspard is in the first group; these are the ones who cause the least trouble.

He makes a little half laugh, then stops when he sees my expression.

'You have the wrong person,' he says. 'I was exiled here by King Louis XVI. I'm of no use to the English.'

'Revolution is in England's interest,' I explain. 'We like what you're doing in France. Your pictures. We want you to keep doing it.'

Gaspard considers this. I wonder how much of his spirit has been broken in his hard months of slavery.

I move to unlock his chains but he pulls away, eyes furious.

'No!' he hisses. 'I don't need your kind of help. They will blind me and worse.' My thoughts flick back to the mutilated people in the market. Slaves who tried to run. Gaspard's eyes burn with boundless terror.

'Even if I could return to Paris,' says Gaspard, 'the King would boil me alive as a warning to others who seek democracy.'

It's then I notice a raised ring of branded flesh on his ribcage, ill-concealed by tattered slave garments. The Bastille guards must have tortured him before sending him to Russia. He sees me looking and rearranges his rags.

I grip his thin wrists tightly and look straight in his eyes.

'France is closer to change than its King wants you to think,' I say steadily. 'Your rescue will show the French people they needn't be afraid. I give you my word as an Englishwoman. You will be free and you will be safe. I have done this many times.'

I've been unlocking his chains as I speak, and they fall to the dusty ground. His mistrust fades and he starts shaking, tears running down his cheeks.

'It's true?' he whispers. 'The French people might have liberty?'

I nod.

'What about the others?' he manages, swallowing a sob. 'The other slaves. The things they do to them ...' He is trembling. I hold his shoulders.

'Every last one of you,' I promise, 'will have your freedom today.' Quickly I start unchaining the other girls, careful of their injured wrists and bruised necks. They are Kurdish and I speak to them softly in their own language. Without chains they seem even more vulnerable.

I snatch a glance at the low sunlight slicing through the rickety door. Our means of escape will come soon. I work faster. There are more slaves here than I thought possible. But at last each sits unbound on the dirt floor.

There's a sudden flare in the far distance, visible even through the slats of our wooden door. Flames, the sound of gunfire. It's time.

I throw open the door. The slave merchants have been thrown into panic, believing their illegal trade is being raided. We've worked to give the illusion our limited troops are from the Palace and large in number.

I kneel and move aside a little dirt on the ground. My knife is where I buried it last night, before I hid myself in