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about him that wasn’t quite right. He was all . . .
show
. He was an Assassin, the hidden blade was proof of that. But I wonder, was he a
true
Assassin?”
    “We need to find him, ask him.”
    “Indeed we do.”
    “Tell me, what did he look like?”
    Mother gave him a description of the doctor.
    “. . . and there is something else.”
    “Yes?”
    She led us to the hedges. Last night as we escaped the alley she had scooped up the doctor’s bag to take with us on the carriage ride home. Before arriving back at the château, she had me run and hide it, and she handed it to Mr. Weatherall now.
    “He left this, did he?”
    “Indeed. He used it to carry a blade but there’s nothing else inside.”
    “Nothing to identify him?”
    “There is something . . . Open it. See the label inside?”
    “The bag was made in England,” said Mr. Weatherall, surprised. “An English Assassin?”
    Mother nodded. “Possibly. Very possibly. Do you not think it plausible that the English might want me dead? I made it plain to Madame Carroll that I favored a change of monarchy.”
    “But also that you oppose bloodshed.”
    “Quite. And Madame Carroll seemed to think that was enough for her Order. Perhaps not, though.”
    Mr. Weatherall shook his head. “I can’t see it myself. I mean, putting my own national loyalty to one side, I can’t see what’s in it for them. They see you as a moderating influence on the Order as a whole. Killing you risks destabilizing that.”
    “Perhaps it’s a risk they were willing to take. Either way an English-made doctor’s bag is the only clue we have as to the identity of the Assassin.”
    Mr. Weatherall nodded. “We will find him, Madame,” he told her. “You can be sure of that.”
    That, of course, was three years ago. And of the doctor there has been no sight or sound since. The attempt on our lives has disappeared into history, like paupers swallowed up by the Paris fog.

13 A PRIL 1778
    i
    I want her to get better. I want there to be a day when the sun shines and her maids enter to open her drapes only to find her sitting up in bed, “feeling quite revived,” and I want the sun that floods through her drapes to crowd its way into the hallways of our darkened home and chase away the grief-ridden shadows lurking there, touch Father, restore him and bring him back to me. I want to hear songs and laughter from the kitchen again. I want an end to this contained sadness and I want my smile to be real, no longer masking a hurt that churns inside.
    And more than all of that I want my mother back. My mother, my teacher, my mentor. I don’t just want her, I need her. Every moment of every day I wonder what life would be like without her and have no idea, no conception of life without her.
    I want her to get better.
    ii
    And then, later that year, I met Arno.

E XTRACT FROM THE J OURNA L OF A RNO D ORIAN

    12 S EPTEMBER 1794
    Our relationship was forged in the fire of death—my father’s death.
    For how long did we have a normal, conventional relationship? Half an hour? I was at the Palace of Versailles with my father, who had business there. He’d asked me to wait as he attended to what he had to do, and while I sat with my legs dangling, watching the highborn members of the court pass to and fro, who should appear but Élise de la Serre.
    Her smile I would come to love later, her red hair nothing special to me then, and the beauty over which my adult eyes would later linger was invisible to my young eyes. After all, I was only eight, and eight-year-old boys, well, they don’t have much time for eight-year-old girls, not unless that eight-year-old girl is something very special. And so it was with Élise. There was something
different
about her. She was a girl. But even in the first seconds of meeting her I knew she wasn’t like any other girl I’d met before.
    Chase me.
Her favorite game. How many times did we play it as children and as adults? In a way we never stopped.
    On the