Falcon in the dive, p.1
Falcon in the Dive, page 1
Contents
Praise for Falcon in the Dive
Also by Leah Angstman:
Falcon in the Dive
Copyright © 2024 Leah Angstman. All rights reserved.
Dedication
If God did not exist,
Maps
Part I
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Part II
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Part III
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Glossary of Dutch Translations
Acknowledgments
Praise for Falcon in the Dive
“With as many twists and turns as an eighteenth-century Parisian alley, Falcon in the Dive draws readers into the dark, beating heart of the French Revolution. From the dank mines below Nord-Pas-de-Calais and cellar hideouts crowded with ordinary Parisians to the exquisite palaces of the nobility, Leah Angstman tells the story of one remarkable woman whose courage and complexity changes—and saves—lives. There is no one writing today who can approach Angstman’s ability to blend profound erudition with a rollicking plot and indelible characters. A compelling page-turner, Falcon in the Dive will challenge everything you thought you knew about the French Revolution.”
—Ashley Shelby, author of Muri, South Pole Station, and Red River Rising
“Entrenched in historical detail, Leah Angstman’s Falcon in the Dive is the kind of book most authors wish they had the stomach for. No one is lucky in Angstman’s Paris, and the realism with which she crafts her tale will have readers white-knuckling the book, cringing and cheering on the same page. Falcon’s daredevil protagonist, Ani, is no exception to the rules of the world, and her losses are as tragic as her victories triumphant. Ani’s courage is without bounds, and in her, Angstman has realized a heroine as vital to today’s reader as she is to Falcon’s gritty, riotous France.”
—Eric Shonkwiler, author of Above All Men, 8th Street Power & Light, and Moon Up, Past Full
Also by Leah Angstman:
Out Front the Following Sea
Shoot the Horses First
Falcon in the Dive
A Novel of the French Revolution
Leah Angstman
Regal House Publishing
Copyright © 2024 Leah Angstman. All rights reserved.
Published by
Regal House Publishing, LLC
Raleigh, NC 27605
All rights reserved
ISBN -13 (paperback): 9781646034338
ISBN -13 (epub): 9781646034345
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023934867
All efforts were made to determine the copyright holders and obtain their permissions in any circumstance where copyrighted material was used. The publisher apologizes if any errors were made during this process, or if any omissions occurred. If noted, please contact the publisher and all efforts will be made to incorporate permissions in future editions.
Cover images and design by © C. B. Royal
A timeline of the major events of the French Revolution, a Dutch-language glossary, a breakdown of the major political and miliary factions involved, a glossary of terms used in this book, a conversion of 1792 French currency to 2019 (pre-pandemic) U.S. currency, and an extensive glossary of the real-life named individuals mentioned in the novel can be found on the author’s website at https://leahangstman.com.
There are many real-life historical figures named in this book. Although some of their dialogue comes from their own verbal and epistolary words, the characterizations are fictional.
Regal House Publishing, LLC
https://regalhousepublishing.com
The following is a work of fiction created by the author. All names, individuals, characters, places, items, brands, events, etc. were either the product of the author or were used fictitiously. Any name, place, event, person, brand, or item, current or past, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Regal House Publishing.
Printed in the United States of America
Dedication
For Lafayette, in sleep, and Mike, awake.
For Heidi, who never let the stairs slow her down.
If God did not exist,
we should have to invent Him.
—Maximilien Robespierre, after Voltaire
When the government violates the people’s rights,
insurrection is, for the people
and for each portion of the people,
the most sacred of the rights
and the most indispensable of duties.
—Marquis de Lafayette
The time has come that was foretold,
when people would ask for bread
and be given corpses.
—Madame Roland
Maps
Part I
The Past Is
Fragments of
Chapter One
An introduction; or, an exposition
Your People, sir,
is nothing but a great beast.
—Alexander Hamilton
Now, Paris, mid-July 1792
The National Razor glittered above the roture like a jewel of monarchies past, a proud member of the Assembly, of the courtier, of Parlement, of the Bourbon. It was a veritable head of state, a baron, a marquis, a viscount, a bishop—as much an unelected supreme and autocratic ruler of divine right as any individual in the Versailles or Tuileries aristocratic noblesse, and well-oiled to lop any head into the arms of a regal Madame: the guillotine.
It was the year of Someone Else’s Lord, Seventeen Ninety and Two. Six-hundred-thousand citizens from borel to baron crowded every livable corner of Paris in manufactured caste. Starving or highbrow, taillable or upper class, gabelled or bestowed with appointed seats. Those who held loftier societal positions would scarce confess it to a passing stranger wearing laces instead of buckles, pantlegs instead of culottes.
Ani could see the glistening metal of the blade from where she stood at the edge of the Seine. She’d once watched this very river freeze solid to the bottom. Three years prior, during the severest winter of the century, when epidemics of murrain ran rampant and deadly. When famine held true autocratic rule of the land. When financial heads collapsed banks in their wake as they were deposed one by one, and the country bankrupted itself. When nine-thousand famished citizens had rioted through the city, and guns came more abundant than bread. Between black and white were factions of gray in so many shades one daren’t count them.
Devastation knew no class bias; rich and poor alike were swept into the anthem of those riots past, when mobs fled toward the fork that closed travel from the eastern mouth of Paris to the faubourg Saint-
Antoine, where had stood the medieval dungeon with a personality, a life, a birth and death all its own: the Bastille. A building steeped in legend, a symbol of oppression for the starving and overtaxed Third Estate—the commoners. Built as a fortress in the fourteenth century, it had since been used to imprison men arrested in accordance with the lettres de cachet, men who were not guilty of any offense that law could punish but who’d offended the king or his royal cabinet. The prison’s destruction had meant the acquisition of countless barrels of gunpowder. The lower borel needed only munitions to propel its way upward; thus fell the Bastille and Hôtel national des Invalides, and thirty-thousand muskets therein were granted the common man through means of force. Paris now stood armed, but in the three years since, it had gained no bread.
Her father had been in that prison. That infamous Bastille. Her father—rotting away on a piss-covered mattress.
Thus, an aristocrat now swinging by his neck from a pont over the Seine shouldn’t have given her pause. It was common enough these days. Yet, Ani found it hard to stomach sometimes—a man, a life, no matter what he’d done. But some things…some things that men did were unforgivable. She knew this too well.
Keener to the discomfort as she hurried, exposed and vulnerable, across the bridge, she lamented wearing a dress too elegant to be skirting the Palais Bourbon and the Jardin des Tuileries in this milieu. The color stood out, even under the dark cape that wrapped her. Her wooden shoes thumped each step mercilessly. She clutched her satchel, kept constant watch over both shoulders.
She wasn’t used to a dress like this. Its cumbersome petticoats hindered her gait—a detriment if she had to run. Past the outer edges of faubourgs Saint-Germain and Saint-Honoré, a body might have to run. Footfalls behind her, crowds at the rear and off in some nearby courtyards. A cane clicked on the pont. Tallow lamps popped to life where a lamplighter lit th
That’s what she’d been hired as—a glorified butler, a counter of wall hangings, wine casks, and heirlooms. Well, some young man had been hired. She was simply going in the young man’s place. He’s indisposed, she was supposed to say, quite likely the pox.
Steps grew louder behind her, and she quickened her pace. Nearly off the bridge, nearly off the bridge, nearly…standing over the dead body swinging below it. Her gut tightened. The decaying flesh stung the back of her throat, a scent so potent she could taste it. But she couldn’t show an inkling of repulsion—not here, so nicely dressed—or she’d stand out even more. She knew many people in the city, but she certainly didn’t know everyone. Falling into the wrong hands might mean she would join the swinging man on the bridge, even if she wasn’t one of them, one of the ’crats, one of the bourgeoisie, one of the gentry, one of the…
A woman in a cluster of women at the end of the bridge made eye contact with her, and Ani glanced down quickly, but it was too late. She heard the suspicions, saw stances shifting, foot to foot. She couldn’t afford a confrontation. She wadded a piece of yellow paper she carried, a missive, and threw it into the Seine. The Tuileries palace loomed on the opposite bank, its hordes of red-clad Swiss Guard mercenaries like paintstrokes on the gray shore. Off to the north, throngs of mob and shopkeep and market women waited to pounce on anything that seemed out of place, and to the south, scouts and patrolmen, a herd of young men with dogs, walked across the bridge at her back. She squeezed by the women at the end of the pont, but the one who’d made eye contact knocked into Ani’s shoulder. The woman opened her mouth to shout something, but Ani didn’t wait around to hear it.
Ani bolted from the bridge toward Champs-Élysées, avoiding the puddles, her skirt hiked to her waist. Past the quay, she swore aloud at her wooden shoes and stopped to remove them and carry them beneath her arm. She’d always been better at running barefoot, or in shoes with soles so rotten that she might as well be barefoot. Crowds of people yelled, threw stones. Some pursued in chase. New menacing figures materialized from hedgerows and followed.
Ani kept running, her lungs heaving until they gave way to a wretched cough, and she tucked into an alleyway at Grande rue du Chaillot. Curse her weak lungs. She bent over, her hands on her knees, until the cough subsided. Catching her breath, she checked around the corner, but the mob had lost interest. They were fickle in chase and thankfully as fickle in giving up the chase.
She leaned her head against the wall. Lightheadedness momentarily overtook her, but she breathed, breathed. The danger of what she was doing came fully to her, but she pushed it away and stood upright, composed herself. Assessed. So she’d been mistaken for one of them, so be it. That had always been a gamble of the plan, and she knew the risks. But sweat now coated her hairline, and mud stained the bottom trim of the dress that Dr. Breauchard had paid someone to clean and flounce the hems. Perhaps no one would notice. Oh, whom was she kidding, she groaned—of course they’d all notice. She closed her eyes, and when she next opened them, she faced the Chaillot—a district that did not belong to her kind.
***
Now, the Chaillot on the outskirts of Paris
Noon came and cast its heat onto Grande rue du Chaillot, running between the gardens of l’Étoile and the Champs-Élysées. Hunger tugged at Ani’s insides, but she kept walking, her shoes rubbing painful blisters into her heels. The lightheadedness was gone, but the uncertainty remained. She took a deep breath and looked around her. Anchored her bearings. Counted the mansions. Saw the nameplates. Took a longer breath and steadied her racing nerves.
There were no alleyways now, no marketplace mobs. The upscale townhouses, chateaus, and small palaces were shelters of gentry. She was out from the center of the city toward the Chaillot, where the niceness of the properties ran contrary to the niceness of their proprietors. But one modest palace—if such a word could describe a palace—was the right one. The right one. A pit formed in her stomach. When she spotted guards lined inside the front gate, indicating the possibility of a fortified stone garrison, she hesitated, then walked toward them with all the confidence she could muster.
Palais d’honneur was pounded into an iron plate, capped with what she figured to be solid gold. Beneath it: Beaumercy. The words, the name, that name, sat like a cannonball in her stomach, but she moved forward through the weight. Of course his palace looked like this. Of course the plate was capped in solid gold. Bile rose in her throat. The neoclassical palace was marbled stone, smoothly faced in an enormous rectangle with four picture windows along the front ground level, five picture windows along the second story, and a third three-quarter-story along the roofline with four gabled windows protruding from it. A marbled Beaumercy coat of arms leaped from its own gabled centerpiece at the front roof. Orchards lined each side, ending at the street. Across the front, a stone-and-iron gate separated the property from the marshy, crowded lands of faubourg Saint-Honoré and northern Paris.
“Pardon me,” Ani called, leaning against the wrought-iron gate. “Please.” She squeezed her hands through the bars and waved the guards down.
“Who enters here?” one of the red-coated soldiers said in a heavy Swiss accent. “Alert Mademoiselle Journeaux.” The guard kept his musket drawn and moved toward Ani. “What business have you with the palace?”
Ani curtsied, but she was clumsy at it. “I am your clerk, your figurer for the palace accounts.”
“Our clerk, scheiße.” The man laughed. His eyes went to the mud on her dress hem. “The clerk is a boy.”
“He’s indisposed,” she said as she’d rehearsed, “quite possibly the pox.”
The soldier’s face reflexively contorted, but he kept his musket on her.
“Please,” she said, holding her satchel behind her back, “I have an appointment with his lordship the Marquis de Lourmarin, and as you can imagine, I’ve no desire to be late for my first day in his employ. I beg of you, kindly withdraw your weapon and grant me entrance.”
“Lourmarin?”
“Yes, his lordship.”
“The Lord Lourmarin’s not—”
“Please, sir, I don’t mean to be rude to such an honorable man as yourself,” she stepped closer and whispered, “and might I add handsome,” and she watched him fight a smile as he blushed to his collar, “but I cannot be late, please, sir.”
He cocked his head at another guard, and two of the blue-and-white-coated soldiers ran through the front door. As the man unlocked the front gate, Ani counted the number of guards, the windows, gauged the distance between the fence and the front door, the outer walls and the inner, listened to how sound traveled the expanse.
***
Now
The soldiers’ cries heralded down the interior hallway. “Marquis, my lord! There is a lady at your gate.” The men yelled, tripped over one another to be the first to inform the nobleman.
“Ah, is there not always a lady at my gate?” the marquis said, walking down the hall toward the commotion. He hastened to the door to see his soldiers stepping cautiously toward the young woman with their bayonets drawn. “Has she a weapon?”
“None that I can see, my lord. She says she’s your new clerk.”
The marquis laughed heartily, then stopped when the soldier’s face stayed blank. “Oh, you’re serious.” The marquis looked back at the woman. “My clerk is a gentleman, a scholar from Montreuil. Most certainly not a girl.”
“She said he is indisposed with the pox,” the second soldier said.
“The pox, huh. An unfortunate thing to be indisposed of.” He studied her closer. Shapeless and petite, but shoulders straight, bearing solid. Her dress was fine enough, though clearly not even gentry, let alone noble, and the hem was splattered in mud, indicating that she didn’t know how to walk with any grace. “Instruct them to lower their bayonets, Monsieur Porcher.”
