Page 48 - A Tale of Two Cities

‘They are killing the prisoners,’ Mr Lorry said to the doctor.
A Tale of Two Cities

‘If you really have the influence you think you have with these
people – which I believe you have – go to La Force now. I hope that
you will not be too late.’

Doctor Manette took his old friend’s hand for a moment and
then hurried outside, while Mr Lorry went to find Lucie and her

daughter, who stayed in his room that night, terrified for both
Charles and the doctor.
Mr Lorry could not keep Lucie and her daughter at the bank’s

office, and the next day he found them a safe house nearby that they
could stay in. That evening, a messenger brought two notes, which
Mr Lorry took to them at once. The first was from the doctor, and

said simply:
Charles is safe, but I cannot safely come back to you yet. I have a short
note from him for Lucie.
The second was in Charles’s writing:
Dearest, be brave. I am well, and your father is doing everything he can
for me. Kiss our child for me.

Doctor Manette did not return for four days. When he had
arrived at La Force, the doctor had found a people’s court judging
the prisoners and sending them to be freed or executed. He had
explained to the court that he had been a prisoner in the Bastille,
without trial, for eighteen years, and that he had returned to France
to save his daughter’s husband, Charles Darnay. Although the
judges of the court would not let Charles go, they agreed, for this
man of the people, not to harm him.
During these four days, the doctor saw the most terrible cruelty
in the streets. When he told Mr Lorry about it, his old friend worried
for a moment that the terror of it all might make him ill again. But
there was no sign of this. For a long time, the doctor’s suffering had
made him weak, but now, for the first time, it gave him power –

power that he believed he could use to free his daughter’s husband.
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