Chapter 30: The Chase
THE noisy mob filled the church and gathered round their bound figures in its nave. Having discovered no other person in the entire building, some other people had gone after the hooded monks and could be heard scouring outside for signs of these men.
“Matthew, I’m scared!” Stephanie whispered behind her foster brother.
“I don’t like the look of this, either!” he assured her. The people had formed a circle around them. “Just keep calm!” he added as an afterthought.
“How?” She was hysterical. Their new audience had suddenly tightened the circle’s circumference and looked even more threatening. “How am I gonna do that?”
A dirty, grumpy man pushed his way through the crowd and stopped before the two children to look them over, frowning. He smelled of fresh fish and had an old-looking musket slung over his left shoulder. “Bourgeoisie?” he demanded in French. “Royaliste? Anglaise?”
“Yeah, English!” Matthew agreed, nodding.
“Anglaise! Anglaise!” the man called out to the cacophonous men, women and children behind him and they piped down.
“Would you be so kind as to free us?” Matthew wondered.
The man glowered at him. “Anglaise! Enemie!” he shouted and the people resumed their noise making.
“Anglaise! Guillotine!” someone proposed in an angry voice and Matthew’s heart skipped.
Stephanie shut her eyes.
“Non! Non!” the lead rebel refused and the crowd fell quiet again. “Anglaise souffrir!” he declared like a king. “Anglaise souffrir!”
“What’s he saying?” Stephanie asked Matthew, her eyes still tightly shut.
Before Matthew could reply her, he felt their bonds being loosened. Some dirty fellows forced him up, and others pulled up his adopted sister. Disregarding the neatness of their rich clothes, the people dragged them along the nave and out of the church, chanting behind them and shouting, “Anglaise souffrir! Anglaise souffrir!”
“Where’re we going?” Stephanie shrieked, her eyes wide open, but her voice was lost in the din emanating from many other throats. The people started throwing rotten fruits and mud at them and she tried to protect herself. “Why are they doing this to us?”
“Dunno!” Matthew confessed. Nora never had time to explain all this before Marcos bundled her off, but he’d observed that the rioters were mostly poor and had no elegant garments like the ones he and Stephanie were putting on. Why the authorities allowed that fellow to escape from Elba he couldn’t tell, but that sure looked like a mistake if this riot was a direct result of that!
Out of the church compound they were dragged, and into a ghostlike building they were carried, its walls blackened by coal and soot from the many coal furnaces lined up inside it. Both kids were taken down a flight of steps while majority of the peasants continued clamoring and chanting outside, and pushed into a room full of wretched-looking children who, on closer inspection, appeared to be richly dressed.
“What now?” Matthew asked himself as the door to this room slammed shut in his face.
“We . . . go after them?” Stephanie suggested.
“Go after who?”
“Cardinal Marcos and Nora?”
“Steph, we don’t have the book,” Matthew pointed out.
“Yes, we don’t,” she agreed, “but at least we can try with this.” She revealed something in her hand to him.
“What’s that? A torn sheet from the . . . black book? Stephanie, how did you . . . ?” Matthew hugged his foster sister with emotional happiness.
“Get it?” Stephanie was beaming. “It fell off in France when you weren’t looking and I’ve always wanted to go back with it, but couldn’t do so without you and Nora.”
“But. . . How. . . How would you have done that? Go back with it?” Matthew asked her. “Your name’s not even on it.”
“Yeah, but I would’ve written it down if I’d wanted to.”
“Yeah, sure.” Matthew took the piece of papyrus from his adopted sister and looked around him at the hungry-looking children lying about the place. Who knows how long they’d been there, he thought. “Now, what to do.”
“If we write our names on it,” Stephanie said, “we’ll go further backwards, right?”
“Right.”
“Feared as much,” she confessed.
“But then we can touch our names to move forward,” Matthew reasoned, frowning in deep thought. “It’s worth trying.”
“What if we write Nora’s name?”
“Remember we were forced here,” he told her. “She may not appear in here with us for all we know and we can’t afford to start looking for her, can we? Besides, we need to also retrieve the black book from Marcos before he does something bad with it, and . . . and Nora may not be holding him when we try to do what you’ve just said.”
“It’s all so confusing, Matt,” his little sister complained.
“I need a pen.”
“Or a feather and ink?” Stephanie corrected. “Where can we get that?”
“Must it be feather and ink?” Matthew asked her, his head directing hers to a charcoal heap near a black fireplace.
The French children kept staring at them as they shuffled wonderingly to the furnace lest they be suspected of being up to no good, and Matthew grabbed a piece of charcoal and scribbled his name on the paper with it. Stephanie was holding him all this while, and as they slowly became transparent, their fellow young prisoners started gathering round them with interest.
“Haaaaa!” the French kids suddenly shouted, drawing back with fear when the duo vanished and their muddy clothes fell to the ground.