Fire leaped in a yellow-orange-red wave, devouring the canvas.
14
The Théâtre Patriotique
‘Ihope your girlfriend knows what she’s doing.’
Al elbowed his way through the crowd and Ada followed in his wake. Around them students mingled with fishmongers still smelling of the catch brought upriver from Le Havre; gentry, wigless in simple dresses, rubbed shoulders with tailors and shopkeepers.
‘Camille always knows what she’s doing,’ Ada said with more confidence than she felt.
Al snorted. ‘Our glorious infallible leader.’
‘Why do you always have to be so hostile?’ she snapped. ‘If you don’t like how we do things then you don’t have to stay in the battalion.’
‘My dear, the right of any worker is to complain about their employer. Isn’t that what this revolution’s all about? Rights for the proles?’
Ada rolled her eyes. ‘Al, darling, I don’t think you could manage to pass as proletarian for five seconds.’
Even in scruffy clothes, with a cockade hastily pinned to his lapel, Al struggled to look anything other than well-bred. Ada wasn’t sure if it was his sneer or the tilt of his jaw or the arrogant look in his eye, but he made it unnecessarily easy to be disliked. He might have been disowned by his rich family, left behind when they fled their arrest warrant, but that didn’t make a difference to the people around them. One aristocrat was as bad as the next.
‘Oh, I don’t know. I think I’m quite a man of the people. Look, I eat street food.’
He stopped by a girl selling herring and nuts from a tray slung around her neck and bought a bag of chestnuts. As the orchestra tuned up, he leaned against the wall picking off the shells.
He caught Ada’s eye. ‘What?’
‘We’re on the run from a monster with a knife and you’re stopping for a snack?’
‘Absolutely. This is my version of Camille’s great plan. Lie low. Blend in. Wait till the interval and then get Léon to let us out through the stage door.’
She joined him against the wall and scooped chestnuts out of the paper bag.
‘You know, my mother always loved the theatre,’ he said. ‘She’d be in a box, of course. Decked to the nines in half the silk output of Lyon, skirts so wide she’d have to go through doors sideways so every dull socialite in Paris could see how rich and important she was. She would stage little scenes at home with her friends, sometimes even a slice or two of opera. She had a lovely singing voice. She would sing us to sleep as children. No one sings to you when you grow up, do they? But my point is getting away from me – the point is, this,’ he gestured around them, ‘was the one thing we had in common. The lights, the costumes, the drama. The fiction onstage always felt far more appealing than whatever was happening in real life.’
Ada’s hand closed over her father’s letter still in her pocket. Not yet. She wasn’t ready to read it yet.
The orchestra drew to a single, piercing note. The players took the stage, and then the score swelled into the opening bars. Ada’s breath caught in her throat at the spectacle, despite herself. The stage was split horizontally into two levels, so two scenes could be shown to the audience at once. It was like floors of a house, decorated to the taste of a middle-class merchant or lawyer. It looked the same as their house in the Marais district when she had still lived with her father. Paintings hung on the walls of the parlour with a rococo mirror above the fireplace and second-hand harpsichord in the corner. Two men stood at the table, examining plans spread before them. On the second tier, the space was set up as a bedroom, complete with four-poster and a zinc bathtub ready for use. Scandalously, a woman was in the tub being attended to by her maid.
The first scene had only just begun when Ada saw a wisp of smoke curling from the backdrop. It thickened, growing grey-black, and then at once like a lightning flash, a large orange flame licked through the fabric, jumping to the second tier of the stage, lapping around the lathe and plaster walls.
For a beat, the audience was stunned, as though no one could understand what was happening in front of them. Someone applauded.
Then chaos erupted. The crowd surged to the back where Ada and Al were standing. People were screaming and pushing each other out of the way. The pit was a heaving tide of faces and wigs and hair merging and scattering like a school of fish. Ada saw several people disappear underfoot before she could move. Al grabbed her arm and held on tight.
‘Let the horde go past,’ he said, eyes darting. ‘I’m not being trampled to death in a third-rate venue like this.’
She flattened herself out of the way. Above them the balcony shook from hundreds of stampeding feet. Onstage, the fire spread quickly to the portraits in the parlour, alighting its fingers on the back of the settle. It was speeding across the set like rats on a corpse, curling flakes of paint off the walls, frothing over the upholstery. The heat was like an amazing inferno.
The initial mass of people pushing towards the exits had stopped. Now they were bunched, clamouring and yelling, pressing forwards – but going nowhere. Al met Ada’s eye.
‘Well, that’s not good.’
At the other end of the pit, flames chewed through set and props alike, throwing out billowing swells of black smoke, toxic with paint and metal fumes. The theatre interior was a nest of dry wood and rope and cloth, seeped in paint and oils. A deathtrap. But before anyone burned, there was a good chance half the crowd would be trampled. Nausea washed over her. They’d come to get lost in the crowd. Camille could be somewhere in it, and she might never find her.
Digging her nails into her palm, she turned to Al. ‘Come on. Something must be blocking the way.’
They skirted the crowd, stopping to check on the few people on the floor. Three dead, five with injuries, but still mobile after Al and Ada helped them to their feet. The crush hadn’t let up at either door. Some of the people at the rear had fallen away, scouring the auditorium for another exit, but the smoke drove them back. Countless more were trapped in the middle, squeezed between the lobby and doorway.
