Chapter 25 - What We Don't Talk About
Enjolras did end up selling the amethyst necklace.
And the purple dress, again.
Grace came back from a walk with Eponine one day to find them both gone from underneath his bed. She would have screamed at him, had she not committed herself to a vow of silence around him.
Instead, she gave him the most disgusted look she could muster, and went back to reading the day's Mort Feuille on her bed. Had Enjolras been the slightest bit bothered by her contempt, he hadn't shown it.
The cholera epidemic was now spreading beyond the borders of Paris. In the Mort Feuille, Grace read about the villages and small towns, some as far as twenty miles away from the city, who now reported sufferers of the Blue Death.
She thought about going back to Provins with her tail between her legs. Now she'd declared herself out of the ABC gang, she was at a loose end in Paris. But something roared at her from deep within to stay. It was a deep and intrinsic instinct. Like whatever the opposite of the will to run away from danger was. Something was coming, and she felt it stirring her blood, amassing in the sky above her, pooling in her stomach…
And she didn't like how it made her feel.
Whatever was looming in the future, it didn't feel good. And she wished, she wished desperately, that she could feel his safety again.
Grace hadn't gone to the Pont au Double for weeks now. Four, if anybody was counting. And she was. But she just couldn't bring herself to prostrate herself before Javert like a grovelling tenant before a landlord. Even after her tearful realisations with Eponine, on top of the Elephant, she couldn't bring herself to forgive Javert for what he'd said to her. To use her friend's pretty phrasing from that night: she was able to begrudgingly admit to herself that she had grown feelings for The Inspector, but she hoped that the sky, wherever he was. was raining on him just a little…
But when the guns started arriving, piled in the corner of her and Enjolras's shared room, she ached to smell his gunpowder and sage scent. Anything that made her feel safe. And the rifles, slowly amassing in the corner, ignited a sense of anxiety deep inside her.
Grace looked up over the day's paper and saw Enjolras returning with three more guns.
She scowled at him and slammed the sheet down.
"Your mother would faint if she knew what you'd bought with her necklace."
Enjolras turned to look at her, but ultimately turned away and remained in serious silence.
Grace ground her jaw. She'd broken her vow of silence only to find that Enjolras was giving her the silent treatment too. She knew that her leaving his great revolution was an ego-blow to him. Enjolras was probably used to people wanting to flock to his side, not leaving it.
She wasn't sure how he'd explained her exodus to the other boys, but their faces had been mostly absent from the cafe these past few weeks. They were off around town drumming up support, sourcing more weapons or hiding from the Préfecture. On the few occasions where she'd passed maybe Bahorel or Feuilly downstairs in the cafe, they'd looked at the floor and given her a sheepish half-smile. Like she was the bad kid in school that their Mums had said to stay away from.
She resented Courfeyrac and Combeferre a little too, for not telling her about their plans for the chandelier. But Grace knew that if Enjolras had sworn them to secrecy, then they would have sewed their own mouths shut before they said anything to her.
The cafe was empty that morning. Not even Gavroche and his little gang of boys had come to visit. It was dismally wet, with the rain coming down hard outside. It beat a gentle and arrhythmic tune on the roof above her. Cold and soothing. Back home, she always liked playing soft and slightly melancholic music when it was raining. Eva Cassidy, Debussy, Leonard Cohen, Camille Saint-Saens, Morrissey… From dying swans to "double-decker buses", she flicked from sad song to sad song.
But somehow, her hands kept wanting to play Javert's new tune.
She'd be halfway through 'Time After Time' and suddenly find that she'd stopped playing the tune a while ago, and was instead gently tapping out that steady and beautiful melody…
The third time it happened, she slammed the lid of the piano shut and got up with a huff.
When she turned around, Marius was there in the doorway, frozen in place and soaked to the skin.
Grace stared at him, her cheeks flushed with embarrassment, and he looked back, shivering and cold.
"I can s-see I interrupted…" he said, pointing a shivering finger at the piano. "I'll l-leave you to your c-composing..." His voice was trembling with the ferocity of his shaking, and he struggled to get the words out.
"Marius, just come in…" she said shortly.
Grace strode for the door and grabbed him by the arm. The young man was pulled inside the cafe before he could muster a word of protest. He tried to argue back, but one fiery look from Grace had him clamping his shivering mouth closed.
"Good Lord, Enjolras will have you all catching pneumonia, forcing you to be out in weather like this."
"T-there's no 'forcing'. I want to b-be out."
"Mmm-hmm." Grace said sceptically.
"Enjolras says that t-the time for action is n-near. W-we all feel it, Degas. You should see the crowds we draw now. So many poor and angry people. It's like music, and the crescendo is close."
"I didn't see music or songs the other night. Just flames and violence."
Grace scowled and handed Marius a spare rag. He took it gratefully and dried his face.
"Listen…" Marius said seriously. "I'm not saying all of us condone what he did at the Opera House, but-"
"But what? You still follow his lead, regardless?"
"Enjolras's mind sees farther through time than any of us. He's willing to blacken even his own name for the sake of France's future. One day, the world will forget the fire, but they won't forget the revolution it helped to spark."
"I'd love to see you tell that to the people whose homes were burnt to ash."
Marius went quiet again. He hunched his shivering shoulders and stared at nothing in particular.
Grace sighed deeply and tried to drop the issue.
"Are you 'tea' cold, or are you 'brandy' cold?" She asked him.
"Brandy cold." He replied, teeth chattering.
Grace laughed and got up to pour him a strong, large glass. He took it on both hands, taking a long swig and smacking his lips.
"God, you are soaked through." Grace said, looking him up and down.
"I stopped feeling my toes about an hour ago…"
"And I don't suppose you have any spare clothes."
"At my lodgings, yes. But the landlady keeps such cold rooms, they always feel damp to me when I put them on."
"Classic student." Grace mumbled, rolling her eyes. "Mine aren't much better, but at least they're not sodden. Come on."
She pulled Marius up and led him towards the stairs. He didn't protest as Grace walked him, wet feet squelching behind her, to her and Enjolras's shared room. She pointed towards her bed and made for the modest set of drawers on the other side of the room.
"Don't sit down." She said, as she rummaged through her clean clothes. "I don't want you making my duvet wet."
When she turned back to him, she held a fresh shirt, some socks and a pair of trousers in her arms.
"These are all Enjolras's father's." She said, laying them on the bed beside Marius. "All my clothes are."
Marius eyed them up carefully. "Enjolras never talks of his family."
"Apart from when potential money is involved." Grace said darkly.
"No, I…" Marius said hesitantly. "We don't talk about things that hurt us to each other. Feuilly doesn't talk about his childhood, Combeferre doesn't talk about the patients he loses, I don't talk about my Grandfather, and Enjolras doesn't talk about his parents."
Grace shook her head sadly. "They love him. They miss him…"
"And what son doesn't love their parents?" Marius said with a shrug.
Grace swallowed down a retort and silence fell between them.
"What don't I talk about?" She asked suddenly.
Marius bit his lip and thought for a moment. "Home."
A lump raised in Grace's throat. She turned away from Marius with tears in her eyes. It served her right for asking, but the old wounds of homesickness and her abandoned life in Oxford seemed to reopen in a heartbeat. She'd been so embroiled in the here and now, that she'd almost forgotten that her primary aim was to get home.
To her flat, to Wilf, to her Mum, to 2023.
Something had changed along the way that made her inner monologue change from 'I want to go home' to 'I want here to be alright'.
She heard Marius moving behind her. His wet coat dropped to the floor and the smell of rainwater brought her out of her speculations. Turning around, she saw him fiddling clumsily with the buttons of his shirt, hands still shaking. He fumbled a few buttons and sighed in exasperation.
"Do you need help?"
"My fingers are frozen…"
Grace moved before him and began unclasping the buttons on his shirt.
"We'll light a fire downstairs in the cafe. Warm you up."
"Thank you, Degas." Marius said, throwing her a half smile.
She was four buttons down when she heard someone rushing up the steps.
"Gavroche stole a whole wheel of brie! He's got bread and rye too! Come on, or it'll all be gone soon!"
The door burst open. And in ran Eponine.
She saw Marius, she saw Grace, with her hands on his chest and unbuttoning his sodden shirt.
And her face dropped into a mask of pain.
"Eponine…" Grace breathed.
Eponine's dark eyes filled with tears. She turned and rushed back down the steps.
"Eponine, wait!" Grace called after her.
She abandoned Marius's shirt and went running after her.
But she could hear her friend crying as she ran down the Rue Hyacinthe. Each sob she heard tearing chunks out of her heart. But Eponine was gone. She knew this city better than Grace, and had slipped off into some unknown alley or backroad, away from her.
Grace was crying now too. Deep, ugly sobs that had her lungs burning. The rain beat down mercilessly on her. A thousand sharp and cold needles pricking into her skin. Images of David and Natalie tangled together in that supply room came flooding back to her. As did all the shock and excruciating pain she'd felt when she'd seen them. A hurt so bad that it had killed a little bit of her.
And Eponine believed that she'd done it to her.
The man she'd spoken to Eponine about, that night on top of the Elephant, she thought it was Marius.
Marius!
And even though it wasn't true, that didn't make the situation any better. Grace had smothered and stamped on the only sunshine in Eponine's life: Him.
She wept, tears mingling with the rainfall on her cheeks, as she realised that she'd most likely just lost another anchor in this world.
Javert hadn't slept well last night.
He hadn't slept well for the past month or so.
It was the fifth week in a row that Grace hadn't come to the Pont au Double.
The first time she'd not come, he'd waited an hour. The second, he'd waited forty-five minutes. The third, half a turn of the clock. Last week, until his hands caught the chill. Today, he hadn't even bothered getting off his horse.
Sickness broiled in his stomach as he rode away from Notre Dame.
Five weeks. Five weeks he'd been stuck in this hellish limbo. Unable to rest, unable to sleep, unable to function as a man should.
The men had started to notice his erratic behaviour too. He had fallen asleep on his horse whilst out on patrol a few times. Slipping out of his saddle, arriving late to their inspections, eyes red, and shoulders slack…. He had even started to hallucinate in recent days. Seeing that purple dress disappear around street corners, following it only to find the empty air.
But no matter the depth of his exhaustion, when it came time to rest and lay his head down on the pillow, ugly, festering guilt would keep him awake.
It ate away at his heart like the mould on his chamber's ceiling. It had him treading signs of wear into the floor as he paced at night. It had him dreading the toll of the bells each time they passed one, two, three in the morning, shrinking away from their rings as if they were gunfire. Sometimes, sleep would find him, but only to be jolted awake when he felt the brush of her lips in his dreams. A lingering, searing brand of desire tingling on his mouth.
When he had been a boy, in Froid's house, he'd been too afraid to touch himself. Somehow frightened that the old man would discover his sin and beat him for it. Occasionally he had woken up to find his simple sheets stained with his seed, and he'd rise extra early from his bed to scrub them until his raw hands pounded with pain. The army, too, had rarely granted him the privacy to be able to indulge himself.
But now, it seems that the only way to be rid of the memory of that kiss was to delve his hand down his trousers. At first, he'd not known what to do. But the ache in his groin and the fire of those memories allowed nature to take its course. Pumping himself with a frantic need that almost frightened him. The feel of her tongue, matching his stroke for stroke. The expanse of her naked shoulders as she leant over the balcony. The purse of her lips around the neck of the champagne. The memories burned bright in his mind, they sent his blood humming inside him, they set his whole world on fire, and only when he was spent and limp did the fire die down to an ember.
When it was an ember, then maybe he could let himself doze, only to be jolted awake again when the touch of her mouth ghosted over his once more.
Little else mattered in his waking world, other than the drive to see her once more. He walked through the mess hall like a lost phantom, he barely spoke, barely ate, and detested all the human contact that was not absolutely necessary to the performance of his job. If he were able to leave his own body and see himself now, he would have found a very poor soldier and an abysmal leader. Malloirave had stepped up to guide the men during Javert's sleep-walking days, giving out orders, praise and guidance to their soldiers when all Javert could muster was a bad-tempered grunt or two.
He knew he had to speak to Grace soon. Otherwise he would simply fade away and become some kind of restless spirit of remorse and shame. That's why he continued going to the Pont au Double, even after weeks of her absence. He had to continue to hope that she would come, one day. He had to continue to hope that she would eventually forgive him. Otherwise, he was doomed.
There was nothing to stop him from going to the address that she had given him. Once or twice, he had ridden his horse perilously close to the Rue Hyacinthe, but had stopped himself. He had promised Grace, given her his word as a gentleman, that he would not abuse the information that she had given him. And if all else faded away from him, at least he still had his honour.
He also feared that if he forced a confrontation with her, then it would be explosively destructive. Just one thought of her enraged face, after she'd slapped him on the stairs of the Opera House, had been enough to deter him. He never wanted to see that expression marr her face again, nor ever to cause that expression to show on her face again.
But he had. And the shame of it smouldered away inside him. A poisonous black cloud of ignominy that might soon leave him stained beyond recognition.
He rode his horse through the streets of Montmartre, winding through the dark and quiet roads as the rain turned the pavements silver. Even with the abysmal weather, whores and their pimps still leant out of their brothel doorways, calling out to any other souls who passed by. They shrank away from The Inspector with a gasp when his shadow passed them by. He had been in Paris for long enough now that they knew his face on sight. Knew who he was and what hell he could reign down upon them if he so chose. They hurried back inside and slammed the door before Javert could arrest them, the rhythmic banging of their shutters and windows sounding off like regulated canon fire as he rode down the street.
He approached one particular hovel and dismounted from his horse, rapping his gloved hand on the wood and waiting as the sound of a poor babe's cries filled the air. Angry words and shouts soon joined the noise, and Javert heard the commotion within.
"You shut that fucking creature up now!"
"How am I meant to do that?! We ain't eaten for two days, my milk's gone dry!"
"Shut it up, or I'll hurl it against the fucking wall!"
The door swung open, and Javert stilled as the hovel's inhabitant peered out into the gloom at him.
"Oh, Inspector…" the man said, bowing his head low to grovel before him. "What a wonderful surprise!"
Javert looked the man up and down. Thénardier was just as repulsive-looking as the last time they'd met. He flashed Javert a grin of half-rotted teeth and laughed nervously under The Inspector's withering gaze.
Javert hadn't amassed as many informants as he'd have liked, but the few he had cornered so far had served him well. He'd gained Thénardier after he'd caught the vagabond red-handed, trying to loot the abandoned houses near the Opera House on the night of the fire. In exchange for a lessening of his sentence, down to a few days in the Préfecture's cells, the scoundrel had agreed to pass on any valuable information that Javert might ask for.
"I've come for a report, Thénardier." he said stonily.
"Oh, at… at this hour, Inspector?"
Javert glowered at him, and Thénardier almost began trembling.
"What…" Thénardier paused, clearing his throat of the nervous lump that had risen there. "What do you want to know?"
"The leader, Enjolras, what have his movements been recently?"
He had to start vague. Dancing around the question he really wanted to ask. Just in case Thénardier cottoned on to his real motives.
"He comes an' goes. Isn't at the cafe for longer than a night's rest. They say he's recently come into some funds. The pawnbrokers down on the Place du Tertre say he's recently bought up all their rifles…"
Javert raised a brow at the man.
"Shocking, isn't it, Inspector." Thénardier said with a feigned tut of contempt.
"And what of the others?"
"They run around the city doing his bidding. The doctor one, he's been up in the Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine region seein' to the ill. But the others 'ave been up to all sorts…"
"All sorts? Explain."
"Well… up to no good, Sir!" Thénardier added unhelpfully. "That meat-head with the rolled-up sleeves was the one who put the brick through poor old Monsieur Claret's bank. Did you hear about that, Sir?"
"I heard about it." Javert grumbled impatiently. "What else?"
"Well…" Thénardier said, rubbing the back of his neck with a hand. "My eldest is the one who hangs around them the most, and she…"
"She what?" Javert pressed, sensing something important looming on the horizon.
"She's had a bit of a falling-out with 'em recently. Came back 'ere in an awful state a few days ago. Woke up the baby with her sniffling, she did! Cor! I could have tanned her hide red raw!"
"What was the nature of this 'falling-out'?" Javert asked, eyebrow arched.
"Dunno, Sir. But if I 'ad to bet, it'll be somethin' to do with that Marius boy that she's been stuck to, like a fly sticks to sh-"
"Yes, thank you, Thénardier." Javert interrupted swiftly.
"Well, or that other one that she 'angs about with all hours of the day."
Javert went still. "The other one?"
"The prickless one. Degas." Thénardier snarled. "Doesn't know when to shut 'is mouth and keep 'is opinions to himself."
Javert tried to hide his intrigue. Grace had never told him the assumed name she took when she was masquerading as a boy, but from the description Thénardier had just given him, that sounded a lot like her…
"And what about him? You've never mentioned this 'Degas' before." Javert asked.
"Not been much to say. I don't think 'e 'as a lot to do with them since the night of the fire. Just 'angs about in their little cafe, playing the piano."
Javert stiffened and drew himself up straighter. So 'Degas' was Grace. He thought about asking Thénardier more about 'Degas', but if the wretch realised that his interest was solely fixed on them, it showed a little too much of his hand to the repulsive man.
At least he knew that Grace was alive and still keeping the company of her foolhardy cousin's little gang. That would have to be enough for now.
The Inspector nodded his head and delved a hand into a pocket. He flung a small purse of coins at Thénardier and made to leave.
"Please, Sir!" the scoundrel called after him. "My wife and child, they ain't eaten for four whole days. Oh, it pains me as a father, shames me so dreadfully, to see them suffer like that!"
Javert frowned hard at the man, peering beyond him for the first time, into the hovel. He just about glimpsed Madame Thénardier, peering around a doorway with her baby tucked in close to her chest. She gasped and shrank away, out of his sight.
Javert marvelled at just how effortlessly Thénardier could lie. But in the end, he decided not to make him aware that he'd definitely heard the woman say 'two days' before he'd answered the door. He reached back into his pocket and flung an extra sentime the man's way.
"Oh, thank you, Sir! Thank you!" Thénardier crooned after him.
Javert mounted his horse again, turning back to the hovel with a hard look on his face. "I will expect more information pertaining to these men in the future, Thénardier." he said firmly.
"I will try, Sir."
"Try is not good enough, Thénardier." he replied harshly. "If you wish to continue expecting me to turn somewhat of a blind-eye to your… activities, then I suggest you find a way to give me what I want."
Thénardier's face soured and he swallowed hard. He gave The Inspector a meek nod.
With that, Javert kicked the flanks of his horse and rode off into the streets of Montmartre.
It pained him to be forced into dealings with men like Thenardier and his gang of thugs, but he would have made a deal with the Devil himself if it meant that he might see Grace again.
And it sounded like all was not well and rosy in her garden; Thenardier had spoken of arguments and disagreements amongst the revolutionaries. He even thought that Grace was somehow out of Enjolras's organisation altogether. Javert had to admit that the latter pleased him somewhat, but the former, less so.
Either way, it meant that Grace may be on her own. Alone, lonely, perhaps even frightened. And he knew from experience that this was when most people tended to act rashly, or be more susceptible to being taken advantage of. Even if she still hated him, he couldn't allow that to happen to her.
Even if her forgiveness never came his way, he would still do all he could to protect her.