Fires of Delight (29 page)

“Back out of here!” she cried to Hugo. “Fast!”

Martha, yapping away gaily about going to Versailles, looked around, stunned. “What—?”

“There’s a rich noble bitch!” someone yelled.

“I can’t back up,” shouted Hugo, over the rising din in the avenue. “Our way is blocked.”

“Look at her furs and jewels! Get her!” shouted a hideous, one-armed beggar. “Pull her bloody eyeballs out!”

“They’re…they mean
me!
” wailed Martha, hunching down in the buggyseat.

Down the street came the sounds of glass shattering, people cursing and screaming, and the wrenching shrieks of doors being ripped from their hinges. Furious, maddened faces, twisted and terrible, appeared all around the buggy.

“You take the old woman and her finery,” yelled a bearded young ruffian, shirtless in the heat, his chest hair glistening with sweat, “I want the young one with the yellow hair…”

Me!
Selena knew.

A thick arm reached inside the buggy and closed around Martha’s wrist. In an instant, one of her gold bracelets was gone. She didn’t even have time to cry out before another rioter seized her hand, scratching and clawing, trying to get the rings off her fingers. She kicked out helplessly at her assailant, and the beautiful eye-shaped ring was gone, lost forever in a human tide of want and greed. Selena thought, in a flashing second, of the jewels and sovereigns in her greatcoat at Martha’s house, and wondered how long it would be before mobs like this invaded the homes of the wealthy. Then a hand closed around her ankle. Someone was trying to drag her from the buggy. She fought, catching a glimpse of a long, red, lantern-jawed male face, mouth open in a grimace of yellow, protruding teeth. She kicked out with her free foot. Broken teeth and blood hung in the air, and the grip on her leg was loosed. She stood up in the carriage. Sebastian was out in front of the horse, which the mob had decided to steal, and Hugo was striking every which way with his whip. The melee around the buggy was as great as that in the looted shops along the street. Selena did not know how so many people could occupy such a small space, nor how so many could be so maddened.

For a moment, just for a moment, the tide seemed to turn. Martha’s fur piece was gone, true, and she had scratches on her arms and hands where the rings had been pulled from her. But Sebastian had the horse under control, and Hugo’s whip drew hellish cries of agony from those who felt its hiss and fire. The mob surrounding the buggy drew back for a moment.

But after gathering new resolve, incensed by the resistance, the assailants came forward again, this time with incomparable frenzy. Men seized the wheels of the buggy, pressing forward in unison, snarling, shouting, lifting the little vehicle right off the cobblestones. It felt to Selena as if she had been transported suddenly to the deck of a pitching sloop. Buildings along the street swayed and tilted dizzily in her field of vision. The buggy was turning over onto its side and she was falling.

The very mob that seemed intent upon tearing Martha and Selena limb from limb saved them, although not deliberately. Had there been only a few thugs engaged in upsetting the carriage, the two women would have been slammed down onto the paving stones. Instead, they were tossed through the air upon the heads and shoulders of the massed crowd. Selena tumbled and ricocheted above a sea of people, who pressed toward the overturned buggy, apparently in the belief that great treasures must be concealed therein. Hands tore at her dress, somebody scratched her face, but she was no longer the object of the crowd’s wrath. She slid down between the shoulders of rioters and came to her feet, gasping, pressed against the wall of a ruined breadshop. She could not see Martha Marguerite, but Hugo and Sebastian were mounted on the horse, trying to fight their way through the mob.

Hugo saw her. “Selena!” he cried. “Over here!”

“I can’t. I’ll be all right. Save yourselves.”

The buggy collapsed like a child’s toy beneath the stomping frenzy of the mob.

Then in the distance, everyone heard the thunder of iron-shod hoofs upon stone.

“Gendarmes! Gendarmes are coming!” someone yelled. And the rioters, seeking to save themselves, poured down Rue St. Stephen, carrying Selena along with them onto a broader avenue she did not know, joining another great throng of people moving eastward through Paris. Flags of red, white, and blue fluttered above their heads. Many of them wore the cockade, symbol of the
revolution, a small button with three circles of color, also red, white, and blue. Red and blue were the colors of Paris, white the color of the Bourbons, but Selena recalled another country with a flag of similar hues.

The only thing to do is to pretend I’m one of them
, Selena decided. She’d lost sight of Hugo and Sebastian as well as Martha Marguerite. She would have to survive on her own, and they as well. Fortunately, with her torn dress and the blood on her face, she looked at least as disreputable as anyone in the mob. Pausing for a second, she ripped a piece of cloth from her skirt and bound it around her head.

“To the Bastille!” people were chanting. “Down with the monarchy.”

A decrepit, shambling giant of a man grabbed Selena around the shoulders and stared into her eyes. He was a frightful sight. Selena was certain that he was mad as a loon.

“Gold!” he cried, spying her cross, shaking his huge, longhaired head in triumph. “What have we here, a poseur?” But then he read the words on the cross and drew back a bit. “Ah!” he said. “You stay with me and all will be well.”

With his great arm around her, Selena had no choice but to rush on.

“Down with the Bourbon tyrants! To the Bastille!”

She noted that, even in this mob, people around her and the giant gave way a little to make room for them.

“Citizen, you are bleeding,” said the man, not unkindly. “Pray, are you all right?”

“It’s only a scratch.”

“Good. You stay with me. I think we’ve been expecting you.”

Marc Moline must have been right about the motto on this cross
, Selena thought. But if it were protection to be in the grip of this gigantic, lunatic-looking creature, she thought that the word
protection
must surely have different meanings for different people.

At length, with the sun burning hot overhead, the mob came out of the avenue and swarmed about a squat, ugly, brooding fortress. Here was the Bastille, once a prison for political opponents of the monarchy and still a symbol of tyranny, guarded by a small garrison of royal troops and a contingent of Swiss mercenaries. Some of the officers, arms at the ready, stood before the fortress; the troops were inside.

To her surprise, because she and the giant who held her captive were far back in the mob, Selena saw the crowd suddenly part before them, and the huge man, still holding her tightly around the waist, strode forward like a lord toward the fortress gate.

“Mirabeau! It’s Mirabeau!” the people cried, and sent forth a great, bloodthirsty cheer.

Mirabeau
, Selena thought. Vergil Longchamps had said that this man was in league with Pierre Sorbante. Mirabeau’s father, a marquis, had had his son jailed time and again in an effort to save him from his own excesses, but the only result had been a greater hatred of all authority.

Obviously, this revolution had many actors. She made a tentative attempt to twist away from her lumbering captor, but he tightened his grip on her. They reached the front of the mob, where Pierre Sorbante stood facing the officer in charge of the fortress.

“Pierre!” chortled Mirabeau. “Look what I have found!”

Selena felt herself caught and held by Sorbante’s ruthless, triumphant eyes.

“So we meet again, mademoiselle,” he said. “But wait. We will confer later. I have business to attend to now.”

He made an abrupt, peremptory gesture. Two young warriors wearing headbands bearing the cockade stepped forward. One of them grabbed Selena’s right arm, the other her left.

“You just stay with us,
cherie
,” ordered the man at her right.

Mirabeau and Sorbante turned to face the Bastille’s governor-general, who was attempting, unsuccessfully, to control his mounting terror. The great crowd howled and cursed.

Mirabeau turned to glare at them. Sorbante raised his arms. A wave swept through the mob like wind in wheat. Silence fell.

“In the name of the people of France,” Sorbante began, his fine, resonant voice rising on the air, “in the name of the Paris commune and of the National Assembly, formerly the benighted Estates General, we are here to liberate this accursed fortress!”

The crowd howled, then became silent. Selena felt the iron grip of hands around her wrists. But her own tension was as nothing compared to that of the mob, nor that which existed between Sorbante and the governor-general.
The poor man has been left alone to deal with this
, she realized.
He is defending the monarchy with a handful of men, but the king whose interests he serves is
lounging at Versailles, or perhaps crouching behind a windowsill waiting for a deer to stroll by
.

“Liberté! Égalité! Fraternité!”
bellowed Mirabeau, and again the crowd howled and fell silent. The very air crackled with bloodlust and mayhem held barely in check, awaiting only a word to be unleashed.

And the word was given.

If the governor-general expected demands, negotiations, any of the give-and-take of bargaining, he was wrong.

“Onward!”
cried Mirabeau, and of an instant the mob, as one, surged forward. Centuries of French history and culture, of society and manners, of order and struggle and gain, poised once and forever on a delicate precipice of time, and plummeted. No one on earth knew what would happen.

The governor-general did not live to find out. He was run through by a pitchfork as soon as the wild crowd moved forward, and decapitated by a peasant’s scythe a few seconds later. Soldiers within the garrison began firing on the crowd. The tumult and din, the small white puffs of smoke from the weapons, the flash of scythes and hoes and forks: these rendered strange and surrealistic all that was happening. Within minutes, the vanguard of the mob had broken down the Bastille gates. Blood-stopping cries of agony from the Swiss mercenaries filled the air. Millennia turned upon one hour; rent flesh and spilled blood sounded the death knell. Oh, Louis XVI was still king. He was safe at Versailles. But his days were numbered now.

Pierre Sorbante had gone into the fortress with his followers, but Mirabeau remained outside, giving orders, exhorting the mob. Presently, he turned to the men who held Selena.

“Take her to the place,” he snapped. “We’ll be along when this is finished.”

Before she had a chance to question, much less to protest, Selena found herself led away from the whirling chaos in front of the fortress, back among the alleys of Paris, and suddenly through a gate, down a long stone stairway, and into abrupt darkness. She heard the sound of dripping water, smelled musk and mold. It reminded her of the prison in New York Harbor.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked, when the men stopped for a moment.

“Don’t worry,” said one. “You’re safe. We’re to take good care of you.”

The other found a torch that stank of oil and lighted it, revealing before them what appeared to be an ancient tunnel, which led into another and then another until Selena could see no farther. She heard the scraping skitter of claws upon stone as rats fled the flickering light of the torch.

“The sewers of Paris,” said one of the men. “But out of these sewers will come power. Let’s go.”

Walking single file, with Selena between her captors, the three moved along a stone walkway alongside a channel of water and murky sludge. She tried to remember how far they proceeded, what turns they made, but very soon she’d lost her bearings completely. Finally, when she thought they would never stop, the man with the torch turned into a cavernous room and slid the torch into a sconce embedded in the stone. He then lit candles and she saw a subterranean meeting place—how far beneath the city she did not know—with a table, some benches, and even a few cots. There were several nearly empty wine bottles on the table. A rat, chewing on a crust of bread in one corner, glared malevolently at the interruption, then fled, red-eyed and squeaking in outrage.

“Make yourself comfortable,” said one of Selena’s captors casually, checking the wine bottles and finding one that had not yet been drained. He hoisted it and helped himself to a swig, then passed the bottle to his comrade.

The man, just about to drink, looked over at Selena, who had taken a seat on a bench.

“Wine?” he asked.

She shook her head. In the gloom, they seemed older and more experienced than she’d thought, hard-muscled, tense men who looked as if they hadn’t eaten properly in a long while.

“Who are you?” she asked hesitantly, as they settled down beside her on the bench, passing the bottle back and forth. It did not appear as if they intended her any harm, and this fact emboldened her somewhat.

“I am called Citizen Marat,” said one.

“Edmund Danton,” replied his mate.

“What do you want of me?”

Danton looked her up and down. “Surely you know!” he scoffed. “You wear the cross of Erasmus Ward.”

So the cross
is
a symbol or a signal of some kind
, thought Selena.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “It is Ward’s cross, I admit that, but—”

“Come now,” said Marat. “We certainly did not expect that you would be the courier, but all the same, you are. Now before we are joined by Mirabeau and Sorbante, why don’t you just tell us where our treasure is?”

Treasure? The jewels and sovereigns?
She imagined her greatcoat hanging inconspicuously in the back of the closet in her room at Martha Marguerite’s house. Marat had referred possessively to the “treasure.”
But how could he know of it?
Somewhere in the great, obscure series of events that had begun with Royce Campbell’s mysterious leather pouch and that had led to this Parisian sewer, there were conduits and consequences she could not fathom. But one thing she did know: she had no intention of admitting anything to these shadowy men. At the rate Martha was spending the money Jean Beaumain had given Selena, and with France in such an unsettled condition, the jewels might well become her only ticket to safety.