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Gendarmerie Nationale in their blue uniforms herded people toward the main gates. Ever since the court had been forcibly moved back to Paris so that they might be accountable to the people, the grounds had been open to the public. The hoi polloi dressed in the working-class fashions of 1794—the men in wide-legged trousers and clumsily made boots, the women in aprons and caps with coarse fichus thrown about their shoulders, roamed the grounds. But it wouldn’t have taken the clothing to tell her it wasn’t the twenty-first century anymore. No smell of diesel from tour buses or hot asphalt from parking lots. The crowd chattered and laughed. Children screamed because they were tired but there were no ring tones insisting on attention, no angry car horns.
    Frankie took a breath, blinking. She’d done it. Or rather Leonardo’s machine had done it. She was in 1794.
    A feeling of nausea cascaded over her. Her knees felt weak. She put her hand out to the marble basin of the fountain to steady herself and hung her head, breathing slowly and deeply. What was the matter with her? She almost chuckled. I mean, besides just having traveled through time? Besides being in revolutionary France, where being an aristocrat is grounds for beheading?
    Or that I’ve come here to kill Henri Foucault, vampire extraordinaire?
    She blinked and gathered herself. She couldn’t fail, no matter how repugnant the task.
    Frankie took a breath and started down the path around the pool that surrounded the great rock supporting the statue of Apollo.
    She made for the main gate, through hedges once neatly trimmed in fantastic shapes now going back to nature, shoots and errant leaves obscuring their design. The flower beds were clogged with discarded revolutionary tracts, and here and there some muddied piece of clothing. Public access was hard on the place. There must be no money for upkeep these days, and no desire to keep up the ultimate symbol of aristocracy.
    Now for the village. There would be coaches leaving to take the picnickers back to Paris. And she’d be on one of them.
    Frankie stumbled from the diligence among a hail of other bodies and took a deep breath. The stench of Paris might be bad, but anything was better than the body odor inside that coach. Would she get used to this again? The coach held eight comfortably, but there had been twelve inside and about twenty clinging outside. Frankie had been crushed between a woman with a crying child and a man with roaming hands. Only when she gripped his wrist hard enough to leave bruises and deposited his hand back into his lap did he cease and desist with a sputtering protest. Respectable young women didn ’t travel alone. That thought made Frankie smile grimly. If the man only knew how unrespectable she really was, he would probably shit a brick.
    She looked around the busy yard of the posting inn. Carriages clattered as they wheeled around, jockeying for position, horses snorted and whinnied. The air smelled of soot and night soil. People shouted for coffee and toasted bread. She was close now. If only she knew exactly in what moment in her previous life she’d arrived. If she’d come too late—if even now, across town in the Marais district, he was infecting her then the whole thing had been for naught. If she was early enough, she might even save her employer and friend, Madame LaFleur, from arrest. She’d force the old lady to leave Paris before Robespierre and his bitch -
    mistress got to her.
    Somehow she had to avoid her former self, the one that was living through this whole disorganized, dangerous mess for the first time. Time travel stories always said meeting yourself was a bad thing. If she succeeded in killing Henri, she would probably cease to exist as Frankie, vampire. Maybe she’d just blink out, leaving only the innocent girl she’d once been. She refused to get lost in the conundrums of whether, if her vampire self ceased to exist, she would be there in the twenty