Sir Percy Leads the Band
Baroness Emma Orczy
Historical/Romance Adventure
Published 1936
Synopsis
We return to the French Revolution in early 1793 and follow another daring rescue by Sir Percy Blakeney and his League. To outwit revolutionaries and protect the innocent La Rodière family from execution, Sir Percy disguise himself as the leader of a shabby group of wandering musicians, infiltrating a tavern near the Château de la Rodière. With Citizen Chauvelin in pursuit, Percy’s elaborate masquerade allows him to misdirect his adversaries and position his allies. However, growing suspicions of betrayal within the League complicate their mission during the tense winter following King Louis XVI’s execution. Loyalty and ingenuity during a period of extreme political danger deepens the mythos of Sir Percy’s courage and ingenuity.
Novel Excerpt
The streets of Paris on that morning were silent as the grave: only at the gate of the Temple prison, when the King stepped out into the street, accompanied by the Abbé Edgeworth, and entered the carriage that was waiting for him, were there a few feeble cries of “Mercy! Mercy!” uttered mostly by women. No other sound came from the crowd that had assembled round the Temple gate. All along the route too, there was silence. No one dared speak or utter a cry of compassion, for every man was in terror of his neighbour, who might denounce him as a traitor to the Republic.
The windows of all the houses were closed, and no face was to be seen at them, peering out into the street. Eighty thousand men at arms stood aligned, between the prison and the Place de la Révolution, where the guillotine awaited the royal victim of this glorious revolution. Through that cordon no man or body could break, and at every street corner cannons bristled and the cannoneers stood waiting with match burning, silent and motionless like stone statues rather than men.
Nor was there sound of wheel traffic along the streets, only the rumble of one carriage, in which sat the descendant of sixteen kings about to die a shameful death by the sentence of his people. Louis sat in the carriage listening to Abbé Edgeworth who read out to him the Prayers for the Dying.
At the angle of the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle and the Rue de la Lune on a hillock made up of debris from recent excavations, a short stout, florid man was standing, wrapped in a dark cape. It was the Baron de Batz. He had been standing here for the past three hours, trying vainly to keep himself warm by stamping his feet on the frozen ground. Two hours ago a couple of young men came down the narrow Rue de la Lune and joined the lonely watcher. There was some whispered conversation between the three of them, after which they all remained silent at their post, and from the height on which they stood, they scanned the crowd to right and left of them with ever increasing anxiety.
But there was no sign of any of the five hundred accomplices who were to aid de Batz in his crazy scheme of saving the King. As a matter of fact de Batz didn’t know that in the early hours of the morning most of those five hundred had been roused from sleep by peremptory knocks at their door. A couple of gendarmes had then entered their apartment with orders to keep them under observation, and not to allow them outside their houses until past midday. De Batz and the two friends who were with him now had spent the night talking and scheming in a tavern on the Boulevard and thus escaped this domiciliary visit.
They could not understand what had happened, and as time went on they fell to cursing their fellow-conspirators for their treachery or cowardice. Time went on, leaden-footed but inexorable. From the direction of the Temple prison there had already come the ominous sound of the roll of drums, soon followed by the rumble of carriage wheels.