Tannhauser 02: The Twelve Children of Paris Read Online Free PDF Page A

times . . .’
    Tannhauser frowned. He cursed the wedding.
    ‘We can keep your gear safe for you,’ said Pascale.
    ‘Pascale,’ said Flore.
    ‘Of course we can. You trust us, don’t you?’
    Strangely enough, he did.
    ‘I hope I may insist on paying you for that good deed.’
    ‘You may,’ said Pascale.
    ‘Where would you store the gear?’
    ‘At our home. No one would ever find it and it’s not far.’
    ‘There’s nothing of great value. Except for a spare shirt. And a pound of Persian opium. And the guns. The guns are the problem.’
    ‘The guns?’ said Flore.
    ‘I doubt I can wander about the Louvre carrying a rifle and a pair of pistols. So with your father’s permission, I’d count your offer a very great boon.’
     
    Outside the Red Ox stood four buckets of water in a row, watched over by an urchin boy. It seemed that in Paris buckets were worth stealing, too. Pascale gave him a double handful of leftovers from the chickens, which the boy thought more than fair payment. Pascale and Flore each hefted two buckets and set off.
    They turned the corner and came upon a brawl in the street. Four young men were kicking and punching a fifth, who knelt clenched and bloody by a wall. A jeering crowd egged the assailants on. Tannhauser plotted a course that would take them clear of the melee. He herded the girls and their buckets across the road.
    ‘Please!’ The beaten youth screamed, all dignity stripped. ‘Please!’
    His entreaties were only an incitement to greater violence. It was a fact strange to contemplate that a man who begged for mercy made the job of his tormentors all the easier. Tannhauser felt disgust, for the victim as well as the brutes.
    ‘Can’t you stop them?’ said Pascale.
    The brawlers concerned him not at all. The crowd did.
    ‘He’s no friend of mine.’
    He looked in the direction of Pascale’s backward glance. A double crack rang out as a boot smashed the victim’s head into the wall. He slithered to the cobbles where the stomping continued unabated, the aggressors grabbing one another’s arms for balance, like revellers in some monstrous dance.
    Pascale shouted. ‘Leave him alone, you bastards.’
    Heads turned and obscenities flew back.
    Tannhauser ushered the sisters onwards, their buckets sloshing water over his feet. He sensed Grégoire at his heels. They cleared the hurly-burly and reached a cross street and turned right. He was relieved. Both sisters were white-faced, Pascale more with anger than with fright. They set down their buckets to catch their breaths.
    ‘Where is the Huguenot neighbourhood?’ asked Tannhauser.
    ‘Protestants are spread all over the city,’ said Flore, ‘but there are more here, in the sixteenth, than in most others.’
    ‘If they don’t keep their heads down,’ said Pascale, ‘they get them kicked in.’
    He looked at her. Her opinion of him had fallen, he could see, though why this should matter to him as much as it did, he could not fathom.
    ‘I salute your courage,’ said Tannhauser, ‘and even your compassion, but the world is as it is, not as you might like it to be. Helping that fellow would not change the world, it wouldn’t even change the street. It would only change our own circumstance, for the worse.’
    ‘I will not call you a coward, for that I do not believe, but if the world can’t be changed by small acts of virtue, it can’t be changed at all.’
    ‘No doubt, Pascale. Again I salute your ideals. But a mob can’t be predicted. It might have shown me its throat, but, had it turned, there is no beast so fierce. And then I might have been forced to kill them all.’
    Pascale stared at him. It took her a moment to realise he was serious; another to believe him capable of the deed. She blinked, unwilling to abandon her outrage.
    He said, ‘From such small acts of virtue are wars born.’
    ‘Huguenots are killed every day in Paris. They’re beaten and robbed and insulted. No one is ever punished. No one