Madame Two Swords

Aged fourteen, the narrator, in an unnamed French city, finds an old book in a second-hand shop. It's a slender volume, but remarkably well persevered; the narrator wonders who could have allowed such an exquisite artefact to end up amid piles of unwanted, unremarkable books. Surely it must be valuable? The book, she finds, contains writings of the revolutionary, Lucien de Ceppays, who lived and died in the city two centuries before. As she examines the book, she finds a small watercolour s...