A/N: I'm back-and will be zipping out again till next week. But yes, I will update more regularly once I swing back into town. Thanks to talinxship for inspiration regarding the title.
Chapter 25: In Which Last Summer's Misdeeds Become Known
With the question of the charter finally settled, Enjolras' life finally resumed some semblance of a routine. He still found himself rising early, usually in time to share breakfast with either Combeferre or the Thenardier siblings. He spent much of his day preparing his notes on the Valjean case and other similar precedents to be reviewed, helping clarify implementing regulations for the ratified constitution, or doing paperwork on small cases he'd taken on in partnership with other lawyers. On many occasions he was able to finish up his work in time to join his friends for the evening repast, whether it was at a cafe or in someone's lodgings. Had Enjolras been a less wary man, he might have been lulled into believing that at last he had found a sort of lasting peace there in Paris.
'Yet that isn't going to happen, not with the upcoming hearings and elections,' he thought one December evening as he sat at his tiny desk in the Hotel de Ville. He was going through his correspondence, including a letter that had just arrived from Aix:
My dear Antoine,
Greetings and how have you been? You will be pleased to know that the charter has been well accepted in Aix; a few debates here and there, but none of the rioting that some of us were worried about. I hear though that the situation in Paris has not been as easy. How does it go, really?
I understand that you are so busy in Paris such that you have no time to spend the holidays with us in Aix. Yet I must remind you that you have not been home in so many months; you did not even spend last Christmas here. Please reconsider this plan of yours to stay in Paris for the New Year. You know that your father and I cannot make the long trip to Paris, not with the many things we have to deal with as far as your uncles, aunts, and cousins are concerned.
You write a good deal about your friends, but you speak so little of what you yourself do outside of your work. Do you still practice your fencing and single sticks? Are you still eating well even with the hours you keep at your work? And indulge me for asking, has there ever been any young lady who has caught your fancy? Surely there must be someone-a neighbour, a friend of a friend? At your age-
The young man groaned as he put the letter down. It had been some time since his mother had ever brought up his lack of a romantic involvement, but he felt that such queries could not have come at a worse occasion. 'She's only wondering if she will ever have grandchildren,' he reminded himself as he smoothed out the creased missive with the pad of his thumb.
A knock sounded on the door. "Enjolras, are you still there?" Prouvaire's lilting voice asked.
"Yes-" Enjolras began before the poet barrelled into the room. The younger man's purple tailcoat was askew and the cockade he usually had in his hat was now torn to shreds. "What's happened, Jehan?" he asked worriedly as he guided his friend to a chair.
Prouvaire took a few moments to catch his breath. "A rather strong reaction to a verse some friends and I were reading, that's all."
"Exactly in what manner were you reading?" Enjolras asked cautiously. He knew enough of his friends to understand that sometimes it wasn't exactly their convictions or views per se that outraged their neighbours, but rather more of the form of presentation.
Prouvaire shrugged. "Walking up and down the Rue Clocheperce carrying skulls on pikes-"
Enjolras sighed deeply. "I understand that drama is necessary but perhaps it would do better to evoke a different image of 1789?"
"It did produce some effect...not the desired one I understand but it is better than inertia."
"While terrible for your personal safety."
The poet nodded sheepishly. "Well hopefully you might find a reading of Dumas' latest venture to be less dangerous? He'll be over at Citizenness Doulcet's salon next week, at the Rue de Bac."
"I may have to be a little delayed; I have to submit a preliminary report to the court then, summarizing all these cases," Enjolras said, pointing to his papers.
"So much for that. Citizenness Doulcet's acquaintances have been waiting to talk with you regarding the upcoming legislature elections," Prouvaire pointed out. "For one, rumor has it you're returning to Aix to help lead the Courgarde?"
"Not in the foreseeable future. As for the Courgarde, they already have an established chain of leadership, which of course I have distanced myself from," Enjolras replied in a matter-of-fact tone. Aside from the fact that he had much work to do in Paris, he was confident that his comrades and old friends from Aix would have little trouble working with the reforms being instituted by the new government. 'It may be where I begun, but I doubt I'll consider it home,' the thought occurred to him as he carefully folded his mother's letter and slipped it in his waistcoat pocket.
Prouvaire smiled with relief. "Good. We'd hate to see you summoned away. I don't know how long all of us will stay in Paris, now that many things have changed," he admitted.
"I believe we go where we are needed, but that does not mean we will not meet where we wish to meet," Enjolras replied, clasping Prouvaire's shoulder reassuringly. Partings would be inevitable, whether in the next months or in the more far-off future, but inwardly he liked to believe that some of them would still stay in touch. After clarifying with his friend the exact address of their gathering, Enjolras took his leave and headed back towards his home.
As he passed the alley right next to his home, something collided with the back of his head, sending him sprawling on the muddy ground. Through the haze of pain he felt himself being dragged into the alley, and he could see what appeared to be three pairs of muddy shoes in front of him.
"Told you this was him. He's the only one who could have done it," a strained, breathy voice said.
"The tapissier's daughter didn't say anything," a more rumbling voice retorted.
"Because she's gone soft, and it's probably for him!" a third, but rather more familiar voice, snapped. "Besides there is the other one."
Enjolras tensed for a moment on feeling the cold chill of a knife's edge against his throat, but before his attacker could press the blade down, he grabbed the assailant's arm to wrest the weapon away. The attacker swore and struggled, giving Enjolras enough room to kick his feet out and send another man sprawling before he got to his feet. Before he could take another step though, someone grabbed him again, this time by his neck, and pinned him up against the wall of a nearby house.
"You didn't say this one would fight back, Montparnasse!" the first voice shouted irately. "Gueulemer, you have him, now finish the job!"
Enjolras' vision was starting to go dim around the edges but he still pushed against Gueulemer in an attempt to find enough leverage for him to get away from the wall. Before his vision went completely black he heard running footsteps and a voice yelling at the men. Gueulemer cursed before loosening his grip and letting his victim fall to the ground. Enjolras' throat felt as if it was on fire as he coughed and gasped for breath, but he was vaguely aware of a hurried argument happening somewhere nearby, followed by a loud scream for help, the sound of a fist meeting flesh and the crash of another body slamming against the wall.
He felt someone shake his shoulders frantically. "Enjolras! Wake up!" Eponine shouted.
"Wasn't-" he tried to say before pain stabbed through his throat again. He looked up and saw Eponine crouched next to him. Her hair was slightly dishevelled, her eyes were wide, and a red mark was rapidly forming on her right cheek.
"Can you stand up? I don't know if Combeferre is here now, but maybe Citizenness Leclair can help somehow," she rambled on as she grabbed his arm. "I can't believe it, to use a lingre on you right here?"
"A lingre?" He coughed and managed to get to his feet. He gestured to her cheek. "Did they-"
She shook her head. "Montparnasse's doing. He'd never use his lingre, I mean knife, on me. No worry about Babet, he'd never hit a lady."
Enjolras wanted to ask more about that, but it hurt to speak again. Instead he let Eponine guide him back to the house and to a chair outside the concierge's lodge, which was locked. "Don't you move," Eponine said before rushing upstairs.
As Eponine's footsteps faded, Enjolras checked himself over. Aside from the bruises he was sure to have on his neck, he also had some cuts on his face and a nasty gash on his arm. 'It probably wasn't Gueulemer who had that cudgel, otherwise I'd probably be dead,' he thought just as he saw Combeferre on the stairway.
"Good heavens, Enjolras, what has happened to you this time?" Combeferre asked as he went to his friend. "Wait, don't answer that just yet; I can imagine it hurts. You're lucky your neck isn't broken," he said as he began his examination.
Enjolras pointed to the back of his head, where he'd been hit. "No blood?" he asked.
"No, but there might be a nasty lump. I wouldn't go to sleep just yet if I were you," Combeferre said. He clucked his tongue on seeing the gash on Enjolras' arm. "We'll have to stitch that up, I'm sorry. I know you hate having to deal with that."
"It's necessary," Enjolras said, already feeling dread at the impending procedure. Although he knew that Combeferre had a gentle hand and was proficient with stitching up injuries, he still had that natural distaste for the idea of having a needle poked in his skin.
He turned as he heard Eponine rush down, looking more frantic than ever. "Azelma and the boys aren't around. I don't know where they could be and I know that she'd never take them out to dinner," Eponine said breathlessly. "She's probably taken them somewhere, to some friend of Magnon's!"
"Magnon?" Enjolras asked confusedly.
"She used to have my brothers with her. I think I might have mentioned that before. She's in Saint-Lazare now, since the Rue Clocheperce got raided."
Combeferre sighed deeply. "I'm sorry to hear that. Is there anything we can do?"
Eponine bit her lip. "I will look for them."
"Not at this hour," the doctor said.
She laughed bitterly. "I'm not so afraid of this dark you know, or what else might be in it. I used to wait for Citizen Pontmercy outside the Rue Plumet. I'd go on the old Boulevard Hospital where the cognes could catch me. I always ran faster."
"Where would you begin?" Combeferre pointed out. "Have you got some stout thread in your room, Eponine? I need to stitch up Enjolras' wound since bandaging it simply will not suffice. That was a good knife Montparnasse had with him."
The girl bit her lip and nodded before dashing off upstairs again. Combeferre looked at Enjolras knowingly. "Of course it's just meant to keep her from doing something drastic once again," Combeferre said in an undertone.
"Perhaps but this time I think she does know what she's doing," Enjolras said, wincing again at the raw feeling in his throat. He knew that Eponine's search would probably be in a roundabout or weltering fashion, but it would produce results nonetheless. 'Feuilly and Bahorel can help her here, they also know their way about,' he thought as he saw her run down the stairs again, carrying some thread. He watched with bated breath as Combeferre cleaned the string and threaded a needle.
"As always, keep still," Combeferre warned Enjolras. "On second thought, Eponine, please hold his arm down. It would make it faster."
"A man like you, scared of a small thing like a needle?" Eponine teased even as she lightly grabbed Enjolras' wrist. For a moment it occurred to Enjolras that she wasn't actually holding him down, not till he felt one of her fingernails digging into his skin. He scowled at her but she signed for him to keep still. It was all he could do to look away as he felt the familiar sensation of Combeferre's needle poking into his skin, followed by the pull of the thread. At least Eponine's hand around his wrist distracted him somewhat from this otherwise uncomfortable scenario.
"There, I have it done. Please hold this cloth down over the wound," Combeferre instructed Eponine as he knotted off and cut the suture, leaving five snug stitches in the wound. "Don't stop pressing till the bleeding stops."
"Will he have those strings in there forever?" Eponine asked.
"I'll have to cut them out when the wound heals," Combeferre said. "It shouldn't be long," he added before going off to clean his instruments.
After a few moments Enjolras heard Eponine tapping her feet, as she sometimes did when she was impatient. Before he could reprimand her, he saw that she was looking at him with a questioning, almost disbelieving expression. "By the way, thank you for helping me," he said, hoping to break the awkward silence.
She bit her lip. "They told me you killed Claquesous," she said hollowly.
"Claquesous?" He could not remember any such name among those fighters at the Rue de la Chanvrerie. "Part of Patron-Minette?"
She nodded. "I knew him, somehow. You must have seen him die. Was it you?"
'That porter though, the one who shot at that old man..." he recalled after a moment. "I had to."
"Why?"
"He killed an innocent man. There was a doorkeeper who refused to open a house nearby. Le Cabuc-that was how he introduced himself-simply fired on him." He realized that Eponine was still silent, her face somewhere between horror and dismay. "I couldn't allow that sort of action at the barricade, so I had to execute him."
She let go of his wrist. "So you murdered him, over that?"
"Executed. He was no innocent."
She laughed bitterly. "So you'd give me a bit of a chance, but not him?" she retorted before picking up her shawl and heading to the door.
Enjolras stared after her in surprise. "Where are you going?"
"I have to find my brothers. And I'm not afraid," she snapped before slamming the door.
'She's going to get herself into some sort of trouble!' he thought as he went out after her. "Where will you start? You cannot possibly go through all of Paris in one night!" he asked as he tried to get in front of her.
"I don't know but I simply have to try!" she yelled as she pushed him away. She stepped back and took a deep breath before speaking again, but more softly. "Enjolras...you shouldn't follow me. They have come after you, and they...the others, won't be happy to see you."
"By this time, the same might be true for you," he pointed out. He suspected that Eponine's recent upturns in life would not be so well received by her former friends. "You have to go to the Prefecture—"
"And they will put Azelma in Les Madelonttes, and where will that bring us?" Eponine shot back. "You'd better cover up your neck, Enjolras, those bruises there look awful," she added breathlessly before turning to run.
"Eponine, wait!" he shouted but she had gone around the corner. He followed her in time to see her push past a line of fiacres and cross the street before hurrying down an alley. When he finally crossed towards the alley, he saw that she was gone from sight, as if she had melted right into the shadows.
'So much for her being sensible,' he thought irately as he looked around but saw no sign of her. He thought he heard something clang in the alley but he saw it was just another stray cat. He gritted his teeth as he walked back to his apartment, knowing that it was futile now to search for her and that going to the Prefecture was out of the question until he could get more of the particulars of the matter.
Combeferre met him at the door. Judging from his grave expression, there was no need to ask how much of the argument he'd heard. "I doubt she can get very far at this hour," he said reassuringly as he picked up a clean cloth to continue putting pressure on the wound on Enjolras' arm. "She'll probably be back soon."
"I'm not entirely sure about that," Enjolras pointed out, remembering all of Eponine's excursions to the Marais. 'Especially since her care for her brothers is probably more compelling than whatever she had for Marius,' he realized. He was not about to speculate how matters would play out between Eponine and Azelma once the two chanced to talk again, if ever.
Combeferre shrugged. "Of course you cannot expect any friend of Claquesous to receive that sort of news well," he said.
"I'm not proud of what I did," Enjolras said. The idea of a necessary evil was like bile in his throat nowadays, but he could not see any other way for that particular scenario to have concluded. "I'm surprised though that it took Patron-Minette this long to figure it out."
"No use trying to ferret that out now though," Combeferre replied. "But this business with the Thenardier boys and Magnon, we cannot let this simply slip past."
'Short of shaking the truth out of Azelma, we're still in the dark on this,' Enjolras realized grimly. "Eponine will have news when she returns," he said.
"I hope she'll be in a better state than you are," Combeferre pointed out, checking the now dry wound. "You have to be careful with that arm for the next week or so, to lessen the risk of it suppurating."
"Understood," Enjolras said before letting Combeferre dress the wound with another clean cloth. After this he went to the kitchen for some bread before going upstairs to finish some reading while Combeferre took his leave in order to report for another night shift at the Necker.
It must have been hours later when Enjolras heard some impatient meowing from the Thenardiers' side of the hall. 'I forgot about the cat,' he thought as he went to let out the feline. As he had suspected, Eponine had left the door unlocked, so he had no trouble with this task. The slender cat, who had somehow acquired the name 'Camille', yowled up at him and stretched on the floor.
"Go on downstairs. You won't want to be up here when your mistresses get back," he said, ushering the animal in the general direction of the kitchen. Camille meowed again, this time in protest, before springing right on Enjolras' shoes.
A step sounded on the stairs. "How does a statue talk to a cat?" Gavroche asked.
Enjolras rolled his eyes at the boy's quip. "He hasn't been fed. You'd best take charge of him. Where are your sisters?"
"Waking up the street," Gavroche said, gesturing towards the sound of arguing in the front hall. "Azelma has given the momes to another English friend. Not to Mamselle Miss, but another stouter friend of hers," he added in a worried voice.
"Where?"
"Azelma said that Panchaud won't give her the address. It was all by postillon, so there's not much use in finding that letter."
"But we'll find them," Enjolras said adamantly. He didn't want to make any promises with regard to this matter, but he knew that he and his friends would do their best to help the older Thenardiers. He picked up the cat and handed it to Gavroche, who lost no time in running downstairs in time to meet Azelma halfway on the stairs. The girl swore at him and nearly shoved him down but at the last moment relented before running up to her room, pausing only to mumble a 'Good evening' at Enjolras before slamming the door.
A few moments after, Eponine walked into the hall, her face flushed with fury. "I can't believe it! She had the nerve to hand me this!" she hissed, throwing a bag on the floor. "All of it in five franc notes, good for how many months. She did it without asking me, without even knowing who the woman really was! .I can't believe she'd be so stupid!"
Enjolras picked up the bag of money. "You plan on giving this back, I hope?"
Eponine nodded furiously. "I have to, don't I? I might have to give more if I want Neville and Jacques back. I don't know how I'll do it." She looked at her door and bit her lip. "I can't stand to see her."
"Did she ever say why she did it?" Enjolras inquired.
"Because we needed the money, like we did when Maman gave the boys to Magnon. That was different. We had nothing. Now I work, Azelma can work if she wanted to, and we have a good room, and I can take care of the boys properly..." she trailed off before biting her lip again. "The money is a lot, it's good, but it's not...you know what I mean."
"You mean to say, what should be done?" Enjolras finished.
She nodded. "I s'pose I'd say it differently." She glanced again at her room. "I'd love to shake Zelma out of bed, but that would awake the neighbourhood if we started screaming again."
'Unfortunately the neighbourhood is already awake,' Enjolras wanted to say but he checked his tongue. "We'll start looking for your brothers tomorrow."
"We?" She shook her head. "Oh no. Not you, Combeferre, and the rest! They'd kill you."
"You think you're the only one who knows your way about?"
"You're bourgeoisie! Not Feuilly, but still he's different!"
Enjolras smirked, knowing better than to reveal his friend's past. "Feuilly and Bahorel know people. So do I, but yes, my connections are more tenacious at times. Still it is better than nothing."
Eponine sighed resignedly. "At least they are still in Paris. They can't go very far."
"For now," Enjolras said. He knew that he and Eponine were in need of rest, but there was still a matter that weighed heavily on him. "About Claquesous-"
"Oh him? I knew him, but he was no good friend of mine. You won't want to know why," Eponine said, sounding ashamed. "I was angry you know, it's never nice to know that someone you know is dead by any way. I just didn't think that you of all people would kill him."
"You know I have been at the barricades, twice. I'm far from an innocent too," he pointed out. "So yes, you are justified in being furious."
She snorted. "You're different. You...well I don't think you've ever robbed a house or had to do with a girl like me in an alley."
"Not those things in particular, but I've had to deceive people and do other things, out of necessity."
"Because you had no choice, like I did. That doesn't make us very much different."
"In a way," Enjolras said firmly. He noticed Eponine yawning and he steadied her with a hand on her shoulder. There was no point now in continuing such a convoluted discussion. "You'd better get some rest. Tomorrow may be a long day."
"I s'pose. Good night, Enjolras," the girl said with a half-hearted smile.
Enjolras waited for a moment to make sure that no signs of conflict broke out in the Thenardiers' room before he retreated to his own quarters. "First to Prouvaire's, then to Feuilly's atelier to ask for help, then to the Marais again,' he thought. Perhaps he and his poet friend would be able to learn enough English to be able to make the necessary inquiries in time to save Neville and Jacques.