The Last Private Act

5 October 1792

près d’Arras, Northern France

We came to the orchard because it was still standing. Everything nearer the town had been taken by men, by lists, by the call of drums that never stopped long enough for silence to feel like peace. The apples had spoiled where they hung. Sweet, useless things rotting in the grass beneath trees too old to care, and when I stepped among them, my boots left dark bruises in the soil.

I arrived before dawn, as promised. I knew already that whatever honour I had come to defend would not survive the morning.

Fog clung low beneath the branches. The cold had settled early—damp autumn chill that seeped through wool and lodged in bone. I listened for hooves or voices, but there was nothing. Only the quiet pulse of the Revolution, muffled by distance yet never far enough to forget. The orchard had not burned. That, I think, is why we chose it.

A place history had not claimed yet, just outside its gaze.

He came with the light.

No apology. No haste. He crossed the grass as though he had arrived first and I were late to my own summons. His coat was a new uniform, blue, crude, and ill-fitting, with a red ribbon neatly pinned at the breast. Patriotism, made decorative. His boots were polished. His face was thinner than I remembered, jaw sharp, cheeks hollowed. But still my brother.

He did not offer his hand.

I did not expect him to.

“You came,” he said.

“You asked.”

He glanced past me at the trees. “Nothing’s changed.”

I said nothing. He did not mean the orchard.

Something in his eyes no longer belonged to us. Resolve, perhaps. Or its performance. I found myself searching him for what had been stripped away, the small signs of kinship, the shared glances and unfinished smiles. All gone, replaced by posture and purpose. Ambition, maybe. Or its imitation.

We stood in silence. That had never troubled us. Father taught us there should be space between words at the table, in the fields, stretched across years. Silence had once been our language.

But this silence was colder. It belonged to neither of us.

“I thought you’d be in Paris,” I said.

“They sent me north,” he replied. “Collecting names.”

Of course. Names were currency now. Written, crossed out, rewritten. Men remade by ink.

“And the girl?” I asked because it would surface eventually. “Is that why you called me here?”

He paused only a breath, but I caught it.

“She wrote to you, too.”

“She did.”

“Then you know what she said.”

“I know what I read.”

His jaw tightened. “She chose me.”

“No,” I said. “She chose neither of us.”

“That’s not what she meant.”

“You saw what you wanted.”

“And you didn’t?” he snapped.

The anger was thin now. Practiced. Smoke where fire had once lived. As he spoke, I saw him already gone, not from the world, but from us. Split at the roots, rebuilt with ideology chiselled where blood had been. He wore it openly and carried it deeper still. The Revolution had taught him how to speak like a man with no use for doubt.

“You brought pistols?” I asked.

He nodded. “In the satchel.”

I did not move to take them. I looked instead at the trees. Dead leaves crunched beneath my boots. Above us, the apples had shrivelled into hard knots.

“She loved us both,” I said. “And she left us both. That’s the only truth left.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Then tell me where she is.”

He shook his head.

There was his answer. No address. No certainty. Only the letter held plain, decisive lines of ink. Marie had let us go. Refused the weight we tried to hang on her name.

“She left,” I said quietly. “Because she saw what we were becoming.”

He would not meet my eyes. He unshouldered the satchel instead, drew out a plain wooden box, and set it on a rock. Inside: two pistols. Clean. Ready.

There was no ceremony. War had stripped the country of that.

We armed ourselves. Each movement was deliberate. He tested his stance, chest squared. I mirrored him out of habit. If I no longer believed in the purpose, I still believed in the form. Ritual, at least, had once meant something.

“Last words?” he asked. The bitterness sounded like humour worn thin.

“You’ve already said yours.”

We faced each other.

My arm was steady. My heart did not race. It beat slow and even, echoing the distant drums now rolling closer from town.

He fired first.

The shot cracked wide, splintering bark just left of my shoulder, a miss, perhaps deliberate.

I raised my pistol. He stood framed between the trees, breath fogging the air. His coat was too blue against the pale sky. Too new. Too clean.

I lowered the weapon.

Not dramatically. Not in apology. Just enough to miss, and pulled the trigger.

The shot struck the earth near his boots.

He stared at me. “That’s it?”

“Yes.”

“You came all this way to give up?”

“I came to finish it.”

He stepped closer, searching for something—pride, meaning, proof. He wanted blood to justify the morning. One of us had to bleed for the story.

“You can’t just walk away.”

“I can.” I slid the pistol back across the stone. “And I will.”

“You think this makes you better?”

“No,” I said. “It makes me done.”

Behind us, the quiet broke. Hooves. More than one. A patrol.

“They heard us,” he said.

“They’re yours.”

His eyes flicked to the orchard’s edge, to the glint of metal in the rising sun.

“They won’t be pleased.”

“Then don’t let them see me.”

For a moment, something crossed his face. Not trust. Not affection. But recognition. A shadow of the boy who once stood beside me.

He nodded once.

Then he turned away.

I left the orchard through the thicker brush where no apples grew. I did not run. I did not look back. The ground was slick beneath my boots; the path was uncertain, but it existed, and I followed it.

By the time the drums reached the trees, I was gone.

I did not go home. That had burned away long ago—not with fire, but with change. The past could not be preserved by hiding in its ashes.

My brother would serve. He might live. He might die. His name would be spoken on lists, perhaps carved in stone.

Mine would not.

I would fade. Become nothing.

And that, at last, I could accept.

We once believed letting go was a failure, surrendering what mattered. I know better now. Letting go is the last act that still belongs to us.

No one will remember the orchard. No one will ask who missed or why.

But I will.

And that is enough.

The Revolution will claim my brother. History will take our father. Marie will disappear into choices of her own making.

And I will walk out of history unarmed and whole.