For Our Liberty (48 page)

“You are not so very hurt then?” she asked, as she wrung out the cloth.

“I could be at the very gates of heaven and I would still return to the land of the living at your gentle touch,” I said, struggling to sit up.

“I would remove your hand from my skirts or it isn’t the gates of heaven you’ll be knocking on,” she replied as she gently but firmly made me lie back and abandon any amorous thoughts, much to the relief of my battered body.

We were back in the small and very cold rooms I had rented on the Rue Saint-Honoré near the Palais Royal for our last assignation. This time Dominique looked distant and anxious. Paris was filled with rumour and suspicion. The net was tightening around the few conspirators left at liberty. Our time was running out.

“Any news of your brother?” I asked.

“Yes, he is not well. He has a fever.” She looked desperate.

“Then we must hurry,” I said as I grasped her hand, hopefully reassuring her but I wasn’t certain I did. I have often found kind words are more designed to make the comforter lessen their own sense of inadequacy than to actually reassure the comfortee. I would have done anything then to ease her pain.

She just nodded and reached into the valise she had carried with her. She pulled out a folded piece of paper and handed it to me. It was a letter authorising the release of her brother, it had all the proper seals and signatures.

“It looks very convincing,” I said.

“It should be, it came from the office of the Consul himself, we just had the name changed. Somebody will stay in gaol so that my brother can go free.” She sat on the bed, drew her legs up and rested her head, very gently, on my chest. Her hair flowed over my skin and I stroked the back of her neck and then gently pushed her away.

“I’m sorry,” I said as I sat up stiffly and took her hand. “It won’t work. I watched the damn place for days. The guards check all papers against a list of those that they are expecting. I’ve seen people turned away, even gendarmes.” I hadn’t really appreciated the meaning of the word crestfallen until that moment. All the life seemed to drain out of her.

“I will still try. I have to,” she said.

“No you don’t. I have another plan. I just need to get a few things in place. I should be ready tomorrow.” I then outlined what I had in mind, and no, dear reader I am not going to enlighten you now because that would spoil the surprise, and also I don’t want you to know just how far we ended up departing from my half-baked plan.

“Will it work?” she asked, when I had finished.

“Don’t worry,” I said, somewhat pointlessly, “we will soon be in England with your brother, and you will both be safe.” When I said it I believed it, which just shows how wrong you can be.

We stayed in those rooms all that day whilst the search for me died down and we finished our preparations for the task ahead. Dominique was quiet and withdrawn, I was stiff and bruised. We did not make love. We would lie in front of the small fire with the sheets swirled around us, tastefully covering our naked bodies like something out of a more modest Rubens. We didn’t even talk much. We did not talk of the future, or even the past. Dominique went out to buy us food, and to get me some clothes. She also procured me a brace of pistols and a dagger, and she rented us a carriage. When she returned I kissed her gently but she turned her face away and just held me tightly, as if she was afraid I would leave.

In my life I have left many women in the face of far less adversity. I have deserted them when I heard their husbands knocking on the door. I have run a mile when they mentioned love or any kind of more permanent arrangement. I even left one because a friend had said she was ugly, even though I knew she wasn’t and had lain with her and marvelled at the perfection of her body. Lucy said I ran because I was a coward, scared of love. She was wrong. I was scared of not being worthy of love. I loved them all but could not see why they should love me. It was different with Dominique, I knew why she loved me. I was all she had. That is why she clung to me so desperately, like a shipwrecked sailor holding on to a broken spar. If she let me go she would sink, and that need awakened something in me I did not feel again until I held my first child in my arms and looked down at his small, squashed, red face and those pure blue unfocussed eyes looked back at me. I realised that what I had been missing all these years was to be needed. I had been a diversion, a light relief from a husband’s grunting demands, a bit of rough to annoy an over-protective mother, a desperate bid to prove that my lover’s charms had not vanished with age, and even on one occasion a failed attempt by a lady to deny her Sapphic predisposition, but I don’t think I had ever been really needed before.

It is easy to look back now and make more of what we had in that small, cold room. I dare say I wasn’t content to hold her and be glad that I was needed, I think I do remember a few occasions when she had to slap my hand away from the myriad of distractions her body offered.
 

Fortunately we had plenty to keep us busy. I had a long shopping list of things I needed if my plan was going to work. I tried tapping some of my contacts from the few Royalist conspirators still at large and Dominique did the same but they were thin on the ground and in the end I had to turn to the one man I knew could help us, for a price. I left the room at midnight whilst Dominique slept. I did not want her to run the risk I was about to. I walked the short distance to the Palais Royal and stood outside the Salon de la Paix, watching the customers come and go. Most were foxed and staggered as they entered, all those leaving had the look of disappointment I knew well. I gathered my courage and crossed the road. One of the tarts who hovered about the door looked hopefully at me and then recognised that my purposeful stride was unlikely to lead me to her bed. I entered through the green door, no skulking around the back for me tonight. If this place was being watched I was done for, whichever entrance I used. I nodded to the doorman, who nodded in return before looking slightly puzzled as he placed my face and realised I should be either in Verdun with the rest of the English prisoners or back across the Channel.

The Salon de la Paix was as busy as ever. True its clientele had changed, the English lords had been replaced with army officers and politicians, but the girls were all familiar. The candlelight and the haze of tobacco smoke hid the tawdriness I had seen on my last visit. The clutches of the desperate around each table groaned and laughed and cried with each roll of the dice or cut of the cards. I watched a captain from a voltigeur regiment place a bet and then try and mask the look of desperation when the cards did not fall in his favour. I could recognise myself in a dozen faces around the room. I spotted Henri standing silently by the door to the kitchen, surveying his kingdom with quiet satisfaction. His stomach had grown fatter and his hair had grown thinner. He saw me and nodded towards the door to his office. I followed him and he closed the door behind me, shutting off the noises from the salon. The office was sparsely but finely decorated. There was none of the tawdriness here. The walls were panelled, the desk bright red mahogany, the chairs rich green Moroccan leather.

“Ben, it is good to see you,” Henri said, shaking my hand and grasping my shoulder warmly.

“And you Henri. Business looks good,” I said as I sat.

“I cannot complain. My customers now have smaller fortunes to lose but that does not seem to dissuade them from losing them anyway.” Henri poured us both a generous measure of Cognac before sitting down himself.

You may wonder why the greeting from Henri was more effusive than the last time when I was running for my life. Well, all will be revealed in a moment. I took a list from my pocket and laid it on Henri’s desk.

“There are a few things I need,” I said.

Henri took the list, his eyebrows raised higher and higher as he read down the piece of paper until they had almost caught up with his receding hairline.

“It is an expensive list,” he said.

“You can take a third of what I deposited with you,” I said. He shook his head.

“I think not, I read the papers, I hear things. Helping you could be bad for my health. I’ll take all of it.”

“Half?”

“All of it, Ben.”

“Two thirds?”

“All of it, Ben”

“Three quarters, please?”

“All of it, Ben”

“All of it,” I finally agreed and guessed my expression now matched that of the Captain who had lost at the tables. All of what, I imagine you are asking. You don’t really expect that I could carry a chest full of gold, notes and banker’s drafts into Paris and not, how shall I put it, take a commission? As soon as I had entered Paris I deposited a portion of the Alien Office’s funds with Henri. It was not a unreasonable amount considering the risks I was running and I had a feeling that I might need a strategic reserve to fall back on. I had hoped to come out of it with something left for my old age but I would have to settle for simply reaching my old age instead. I shook Henri’s hand on the deal and he had the good grace to look slightly apologetic that he had fleeced me so comprehensively, he even offered me a free game on one of the tables but I wanted to leave without any new debts to repay. I felt confident I could trust Henri to deliver the items on the list, after all he had a reputation to maintain as a man who could get anything. I walked back through the Salon without a second glance. I returned to Dominique and slipped into bed beside her, she muttered that my feet were cold and rolled away from me.

I lay awake thinking through the plan, trying to see where it could go wrong, which was almost everywhere. The one last stumbling block I kept coming up against was how to get out of Paris after the initial escape. The city gates and roads around Paris were still heavily patrolled and we had no friends or contacts we could count on. Our one ally was Dominique’s uncle. He would be helping us and then escaping with us. He’d said that suspicion would fall on him as soon as all those arrested were interrogated. He might have been able to arrange our exit from the city but I still didn’t entirely trust him. I wanted a solution of my own making. Eventually I came up with something. It would be risky but it could work, given a healthy dose of luck.

I woke Dominique before dawn and told her to get dressed. We skulked our way through the darkened city down to the river and the Quai Saint Bernard. Lovers should always stop on a bridge over the Seine and watch the moonlight glimmer on the waters but as we passed over the Pont de la Tournelle we had no such romantic thoughts. Once across the river and through the arches of the Porte Saint Bernard the wide, flat and now deserted river bank took on a more sinister nature. As clouds flitted across the moon, shadows danced amongst the shacks and jetties. Small pools of light were cast from barges tied up in the river or from the occasional watchman’s hut, the odd red glow could be seen from someone pulling on a pipe to keep away the chill of the night but if anyone saw us they paid us no regard.
 

 
On our trip back to England I had talked to Robert Fulton at length about his inventions, or rather he had talked and I had pretended to listen avidly. He told me how his underwater boat worked, and how steam propulsion would change the world. I ignored most of it as drivel but enough had sunk in to form the germ of an idea on how we could escape. After all, if I could escape Paris in a balloon I could open my mind to other means of travel.

Most of the invasion barges had left for the coast, there to rot and never be used, thank God, and the boatyard had an abandoned feel to it as Dominique and I walked quietly through it. It was a cold and the frost glittered in the predawn light as we searched. It took me a while to find Fulton’s workshop but eventually I saw the strange shape of the plunging boat listing even more severely than when I saw it last. I walked up to it and gave it a gentle kick. The dull thud echoed around the small inlet and a piece of the copper sheathing dropped off and skittered across the thin film of ice that edged the water.

“Ben, you cannot seriously expect me to trust the life of my brother to such a ridiculous contraption?” hissed Dominique, truly alarmed. I turned to look at her and frowned.
 

“I once said the same thing about a balloon, if you remember,” I said with a slightly hurt tone.

“Yes, but, but, this thing is, is...” I let her flap like a landed fish for a few moments before I put her out of her misery.

“Dominique, do not be ridiculous. After flying in that balloon I am more than content to leave the air to the birds, just as I am more than happy to let the fishes swim underwater undisturbed by such monstrosities as this. Fulton is a genius, but the gap between genius and insanity is a narrow one. With his plunging boat he crossed that divide, but with this he may be on to something.” I stepped quickly across the plunging boat and stepped on to the steam launch still tied to its side. There was a tarpaulin covering the boiler and I whipped it away with a flourish. Well, it would have been a flourish if it hadn’t been stiff with frost and I hadn’t almost overbalanced into the icy black water.

“But I thought...” Dominique was looking confused, and slightly annoyed, so I plunged on with my explanation.

“Fulton may well be right about steam power changing naval affairs. If our navy could sail when there was no wind, or even when it was blowing in the wrong direction, England would always be safe from invasion. Not that those dunderheads in the Admiralty will see that. In our case if we use this launch we could quickly leave Paris and our pursuit behind.” I almost convinced myself. I looked at the myriad of valves and gauges, remembered what Fulton said about how long it took to get steam pressure up and realised it was hopeless. I think Dominique came to the same conclusion at the same moment. She looked at me expectantly.