This is a Scarlet Pimpernel fic; it is set during Where's The Girl, a stunning, heartbreaking, wonderful song that I have fallen in love with. This is what Marguerite may have thought during those beautiful, soul-wrenching moments that I watched, enthralled, from the wings of the theatre every night. It is also based entirely on the musical; to anyone that has read the book, it will not coincide, because the book is still being circulated around a ring of other people that have not yet passed it on to me, and I am more than vaguely irritated. But some knowledge of the musical is required to understand this, I believe.
Anyway.
Disclaimer: The Scarlet Pimpernel and songs and lines belonging to said musical, of course, are not mine, and neither is the stunning actor I drew Chauvelin from, although I wish to God he were; he played that part to perfection. Otherwise, everything is mine. I think.
Credit must also go to Nita, aka She's A Star, because I was reading her absolutely lovely one-shots, of which there are many, concerning Auriga, Severus, Hermione, Ron, Harry, and Ginny, and…yes, well, this ficlet was born. Not that I think she should be proud of that, because this is not a great work of writing, but credit should still go to her.
Now that that's finished, you may begin reading. ;)
Watch where you stand
"What do you know, Chauvelin? You and I never loved each other! Now go! Leave me!"
I lied. I loved him once, in Paris. Paris—that city of dreams, of excitement, of slums and palaces and prisoners and freemen, of shouts and cries and laughter and song, of the theatre and of soldiers, of political turbulence and life and beauty…
I remember days full of restlessness and fury
I remember nights that were drunk on dreams
I remember someone who hungered for the glory
I remember her, but it seems
She's gone…
The day we stormed the Bastille…
July 14th, 1789.
The day I met him.
The first time I saw him, he was glorious, though I doubt he'd think so—he towered above me, he had thrown off his doublet and his shirt was sticking to his back. It was hot; it was July, and the mass of crammed bodies in the streets did nothing to help the scorching, breathing, pulsing heat that crept through us and streamed out through our hearts and our eyes. I was caught up in that whirlwind of hope, of revenge, of freedom, of fierce loyalty—
And then a rifle was fired directly beside my ear.
It hurt, let me tell you. It burnt and stung and I could taste sulphur, and I could hardly hear on my right side. I shook my head several times, but that echo of the gunshot kept resounding inside my head, growing louder and louder and louder—
"Parbleu, mademoiselle, watch where you stand!"
I turned, blinking, and he was standing there. He was no vision, no spectacular god on a pedestal, but he was stunning. Eyes dark as France's hatred for the monarchy, dark hair slightly disheveled, and without his doublet or coat—it was blazingly hot outside, and I shivered.
No—that isn't the word. I didn't shiver. It—it was something; some tingly feeling that caught at my chest and made it ache for no apparent reason at all. It was as if I had been trapped in the freezing ocean for days, and that I was just starting to regain feeling. It was like the twinges that I always feel when my foot falls asleep and then wakes up. And yet it was like none of those things; it was new, entirely different, and I could put no name to it.
And he was looking at me. Mon Dieu, yes, he was looking at me. His grip on the rifle loosened, and he let the butt of it fall to the ground, raising a cloud of dust as it struck the cobblestones.
Where's the girl?
Where's the girl with the blaze in her eyes?
I turned away before he did; I looked down at the ground, trying to keep from staring at his boots, picked up my skirts, and tried to push my way through the crowds. But we were packed too tightly; either there were too many of us or the streets were too small—probably both. I shoved my way past an older man, hobbling along with his cane and shouting words against Louis XVI that would have made his dead parents want to disown him, and a hand fastened itself around my upper arm, a hand that had to belong to a practiced fencer; it was strong, sure of itself, precise, and practiced.
It was him. I turned around, and he tightened his grip and pulled me towards him, off of the street and onto the pedestrian's walk; I almost stumbled, but he kept me upright. I was not frightened; then and now, he could not frighten me—but certainly, I was startled.
Where's the girl with that gaze of surprise?
Then, just a hapless second after he touched me, another loud shot rang through the air—but this one was deeper; it boomed with a much lower pitch, and it sent a cannonball through the crowd of people that had taken up the small space where I had stood. It did not explode, but a young man, about my age, crashed to the ground on top of a fattish little merchant as the oversized bullet careened his way and struck him directly in the chest. His face contorted; he touched his ribs gingerly, and I realized that some of them had broken.
"Pardieu," I whispered.
My newfound savior gave a short smile. "Watch where you stand, mademoiselle."
"St. Just," I blurted out, without rhyme or reason.
Now he was the startled one. "Pardon?"
"St. Just," I repeated. "Marguerite St. Just."
I saw a line of wonder crease his forehead, and, fleetingly, his eyes had that look in them again, that bone-crushing, longing stare.
"Paul Chauvelin," he answered. He still had not let go of my arm.
Now and then I still dream she's beside me
We separated quickly after that. We had to; already people were shouting at us to move, damnable bastards, and, at the same time, he let go of me and I jostled my way back into the body of the crowd.
In the next hour, I surged into the Bastille with at least two or three hundred others; we broke locks on cell doors and pulled out the prisoners into our midst; we killed unfortunate guards that had been left behind and small groups of soldiers that had either dared to fight us or been ordered to stop us. We were invincible, we were the conquerors, we were freedom personified.
When we spilled out of the prison, we found group of about fifty soldiers there to meet us—we had made them throw down their rifles and swords earlier, but they had apparently taken weapons from their dead comrades, and the sharp points of bayonets glistened in our faces.
They fired suddenly, and at least ten of us fell; one woman dropped and crushed my foot with her shattered skull. I fought back the urge to vomit—I would not, I would not!—and I pulled a short sword from the belt of the man behind me and raged forward, slashing at anything in my path. I had never held a weapon before, not really—I had fingered Armand's pistol before we set off on this mad rampage and he asked me to hold it while he got out his store of bullets, but that wasn't the same. I had never wanted to attack anyone before and done so, and done so with something deadly in my hands, no less.
The white-wigged soldier I ran towards was disconcerted at first, but he gathered himself quickly—likely he had no mercy to spare for any rebel, woman or no. I lashed out at him first; the tip of my sword tore his collar off, and I hadn't meant that; I had meant to strike lower than that; to hit him in the breast. This fencing thing was a lot harder than I had previously imagined, then, and I had known it was not easy.
The soldier faced me, en garde, and I realized just how stupid I had likely been, but I was not giving up. Marguerite St. Just, thank you, cannot be petrified into letting her garters flash as she runs away simply because a very well-trained soldier, in all deadly seriousness, prepares to duel with her.
…All right, yes, I was frankly terrified. But I was not backing down, and if he wanted to kill me, he would do so only after a fight, albeit one that did not promise to be lengthy.
His sword beat mine out of the way quickly, and it took all my reflexes to bounce back and parry his thrust; I had never thought that swordplay required that much strength. Not that it wasn't fun, either, in a threatening-of-certain-death kind of way.
I ducked once, and overbalanced, falling to the ground. I landed so heavily that, had my head hit the pavement, I would likely have had a mild concussion, and, what was worse, my sword fell from my hand and was kicked about ten feet away. Infuriated and quite helpless, I glared up at the soldier, and Armand knows only too well that I can produce very ferocious glares.
Suddenly, the soldier shuddered, his eyes rolled back into his head, and he clawed madly at his shirtfront before pitching sideways. As he fell, the menacing, familiar, violent, entrancing figure of him—Chauvelin—Paul—blocked the sun, and he stood there before me, a beautiful shadow outlined in light.
He drew his sword out from my adversary's body, wiped it clean on the dead man's waistcoat, and returned it to its sheath. Then he came for me; he reached out a hand and I took it, and he pulled me to my feet. It was a distant memory that I had been furious at something just a moment before; that anger faded away into a meaningless, chaotic dream as I looked at him.
Where's the girl
Who could turn on the edge of a knife?
"I could teach you how to use that," he said casually, patting his sword. Around us, the noise had died down, the dust was settling on top of dozens of corpses, and the storming of the Bastille was over; we had won. We had won.
And now it was my turn to ask, "Pardon?"
"I can teach you to duel," he repeated. "You might need to know—for some other time. The Revolution isn't nearly over yet."
"All right," I said faintly. "Yes. I—thank you."
"De rien," he countered, taking my hand in his, lightly, certainly, gently, and strangely. Never before has such a surge of life run through my veins. Never before have I breathed life so wholeheartedly.
"Dine with me tonight," he asked suddenly.
I said yes. Of course I said yes. If he had asked me to follow him into a volcano I would have said yes.
"I will be at the Pont Neuf at eight o'clock," I replied, probably blushing wildly. I had just done the unthinkable—agreed to go to dinner with a man I had met not even two hours before, without a chaperon—for I had no intention of letting Armand know where I was going—and with not an idea as to what his objectives were. And I did not care. I did not care one bit.
Where's the girl who was burning for life?
I hurried home as quickly as I could, and I spent the rest of nearly three hours getting ready for that night, my heart pounding a brisk tattoo all the while, a memory of the soldiers' drums mixed with a newfound thrill of delight. I have never worn a wig, except at the theatre, where I work; I have hair long enough to curl profoundly, and women of my class do not wear the two-foot-high mansions of towering white curls and feathers and flowers every day.
I wore my best dress that night: blue, with silver ribbons framed in sea-green. And the moment I stepped out of the carriage and saw him there, waiting for me, I was glad I had; he looked at me with such awe, such deep, spinning lack of breath, that I suddenly felt powerful and at the same time terribly weakened.
He was beautiful, too. His dark hair was pulled back more neatly now, and he had changed his shirt for one with thin lace on the collar. The buttons on his black overcoat were blacker than ink; they were captivating, darker than night and more alluring than thoughts of Heaven, just like his eyes. Self-assured, poised, languidly elegant in the manner of a relaxed panther, he offered his arm, and I took it.
I can still feel her breathing beside me
We did go to dinner that night; he took me to a small café on the other side of the river, which was entrancingly thoughtful, as he must have known that I could not eat much after that afternoon. Afterwards, we walked along the Seine, finally coming back to the bridge and slowly crossing it. We had talked of millions of things, of nothing and everything, of petty feelings and distant dreams, of childhoods and present lives; of everything except the most important.
Then we fell silent. There was no need to say anything; no need to know anything but the moonlight on the rippling water and my hand through his arm; when, impulsively, I leaned my head on his shoulder, he rested his own on my hair, and then I knew that I loved him, as simply as that.
His hand rose to touch my cheek, and he did so, melodiously, before I reached up and took his hand in mine. I have never been shy, perhaps unfortunately, and I could not bring myself to be reticent now; everything I did seemed right; everything about him was so yearningly true.
He kissed me then, turning up my chin to look into my eyes, and I was flooded by his and by the feeling that he would not let escape, until he did kiss me, and my ears filled with the rushing of a lightning storm gone awry as I felt his hand around my waist, the other sheltering my cheek and burying itself into my hair, and the wind pulling us into a timeless dance.
And I know she remembers how fearless it feels
To take off with the wind at her heels
She and I took this world like a storm
Come again!
Let the girl in your
heart tumble free
Bring your renegade heart home to me
He shook me, gently, the next morning, and I almost wept; he was the perfection of my dreams, merged into one marvelous being who, miraculously, loved me too; loved me so truly that years, age, words, actions, and thoughts could not diminish what he felt. I know that, now. I never grasped just how much he loved me then, but I sensed most of it, and I loved him back. I loved him.
In the dark of the
morning,
I'll warm you
I'll rouse you
He knew me better than anyone else; knew what I was capable of, what I could feel, what I was thinking. But he did not know, I think, how much I loved him. We never told each other that we loved one another; we just thought that we knew, and needed no verbal reminders. Which is why, now, I can tell him that I never loved him, and that I no longer need him. But I did, I did, I did love him, so much that if he had been killed, I would have died the second I had heard the news.
Marguerite, don't forget I know who you are
We were cut from the same surly star
Like two jewels in the sky sharing fire
Like the diamonds I wore, the inheritance from my mother; those two teardrop pendants that caught his eye one night. He fingered them gently, and asked about them. I told him they had belonged to my mother, and that the two stones had been cut from one single diamond. He never said anything else about them, but he always touched them when I wore them, until they were the only ear-rings I wore with him.
Where's the girl
So
alive and still aching for more?
We had dreams that were worth dying for
We were caught in the eye of a storm
Come again!
Let the girl in your heart tumble free
Bring your renegade heart home to me
In the dark of the morning,
I'll warm you
I'll rouse you
He's standing in front of me now, one hand raised in that familiar gesture to brush my hair back from my face, and I feel myself falling again, falling, falling—and Percy is fading into the distance. Percy—that pampered British ass, whom I thought I knew before I found myself married to a fop who refused even to talk to me seriously…
Where's the girl?
Is she gazing at me with surprise?
Do I still see that blaze in her eyes?
Am I dreaming, or is she beside me now?
He bends his head down slowly, assuredly, and yet with a tense of hope and fear and—and of love. Of love.
Love. Something stirs in my mind, and I remember.
Love.
I remember looking at Percy and knowing that I would die on his command. I remember knowing that I would die for him and that I wanted to live for nothing else but him. He was home, he was love personified, he was gentle and sweet and perfect and handsome and friendly and funny and I fit so easily into his arms, as if I had been born to do nothing else but to embrace him and to love him, and it felt more right than my love for Paul, more beautiful, more tender, more lasting, more welding.
No, I think. I cannot give that up! That man is still inside Percy, somewhere, and if I do this now, I throw away any chance of ever finding him. And Paul knows it, the bastard! He knows that he can make me forget Percy, because I am on the brink of falling in love with him again.
"No!" I hiss, pulling away from him. "Get out!"
He obeys, pulling away as if I had hit him, looking at me with a hard, shuttered gaze, and then walking past me, out of the rose garden, overcoat billowing. But he knows. However much I may have hurt him, he knows that I could love him, and the mocking, self-assured, suave voice floats through the air of my memory.
"Watch where you stand, Marguerite."
LA FIN