"Perry, Anne - The One Thing More" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Anne)

HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING

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To June Wyndham Davies With thanks for turning dreams into reality

But if you knew the one thing more .

Chapter One

Celie Laurent stood in the crowded darkness of the public gallery of
the Convention. The deputies had been debating the sentence on the
King since 14 January three days now. Tonight they were returning
their verdict, each emerging from the shadows to climb the rostrum for
his moment in history.

She watched the man who stood up there now, the candlelight shining on
his face as he stared out at the packed room, exhausted after hours of
argument. He said only the one word, "Death', then scuttled down the
steps, feet clattering on the wood, and disappeared.

His place was taken by another. It may have been midwinter outside,
but in here the press of bodies and the excitement made the air close
and heavy. This next man's skin was pallid and sheened with sweat. He
hesitated a few moments, disregarding the faint rustle of impatience
from the men sitting squashed in the front rows.

"Death!" he said huskily, then stepped down. His feet slipped and he
snatched at the rail to steady himself, before reaching the bottom and
being swallowed by the shadows again.

Celie cared intensely what happened. She was not a royalist. All her
life she had heard of the idleness and profligacy of the court at
Versailles. Her father had spoken of it with anger and disgust, her
mother with the passion she had devoted to causes all her life. Celie
remembered her mother's pale-skinned, beautiful face always alight with
zeal, gazing at her father, seeing only him, listening to his every
word. She remembered her own loneliness, and how she had been shut
out, even from the disillusion that had followed.

But that was in the past. They were both dead now. She was
twenty-nine and it was all too late to repair.

There was much in the revolution that Celie believed in. She had not