Read Surrender to a Stranger Online
Authors: Karyn Monk
Surrender to a Stranger
Contents
To my dearest Philip,
who has always made me feel like I can do anything,
and to Lorraine,
who has wrapped me in the warmth of her love
all my life.
November 1793
She stood tall in the dock, her hands resting lightly on the polished surface of the bar that separated her from her accusers. The wooden rail was warm despite the chill of the room, it sent heat into the icy flesh of her fingers, and Jacqueline wondered if the prisoner before her had gripped the bar in fury or in desperation. As she faced her five judges, who were yawning and shifting with weariness and boredom while the charges against her were read, she decided it was easy enough to feel both.
“Citizeness Jacqueline Marie Louise Doucette, daughter of the convicted traitor Charles-Alexandre, former Duc de Lambert, you are charged with being an enemy and a traitor to the Republic of France….” read the public prosecutor. He went on to list the charges against her. Viciously attacking a member of the National Guard and thereby interfering with the execution of his duties. Engaging in counterrevolutionary activities, including the hoarding of gold, silver, jewels and food, and the illegal transfer of said money and jewels out of France. Assisting with the illegal emigration of members of her family, and conspiring with enemies of the Republic. Corresponding with émigrés and writing counterrevolutionary propaganda. The list went on, some of the charges accurate and some purely fictional. It did not matter. The trial was merely a formality. Her sentence was inevitable.
She pulled her gaze away from the judges, who instead of listening to the public prosecutor were busy arguing over how many cases they had yet to hear before they could retire for the day. Her eyes swept over the audience. The rough men and women who packed the courtroom were obviously enjoying the proceedings immensely. They shouted at her as her indictment was being read, calling her a traitor, a whore, demanding that she lose her head for her crimes. They laughed and jostled each other as they yelled at her, some spat on the floor to show their contempt, while others drank and ate and knitted as if they were watching an amusing piece of theater. She stared at them, dressed in their rough, greasy clothes with their red woolen caps and their tricolor sashes looped about their chests and waists. She was not upset by their hatred of her. She simply wondered how they could believe that her death, and her father’s, and her brother’s, could possibly make their miserable lives any better. Tonight, when she was lying stiff and cold in a pit of dead bodies, they would not have any more bread or wine on their tables than they had before.
“Citizen Barbot, would you tell us if this is the woman who attacked you as you were attempting to perform your duties to the Republic of France?” demanded the public prosecutor, Citizen Fouquier-Tinville.
“It is,” replied the soldier in the witness box. He looked at Jacqueline and smiled. She could see the dark hole in his mouth where she had knocked out two of his teeth.
“And before she attacked you, did she make antirevolutionary statements?”
“She did,” affirmed the soldier with a nod.
“Would you tell the Revolutionary Tribunal and the citizens of this court exactly what Citizeness Doucette said to you?”
The soldier paused and cleared his throat. “She said the National Guard was an outfit of thieves and pigs and that we could all go straight to hell.” It was obvious even repeating such an antirevolutionary statement made him uncomfortable.
“It’s that bitch that’s going straight to hell,” shouted a man from the back of the courtroom.
“Carrying her head in a basket,” added another. The crowd in the courtroom burst into laughter.
Citizen Fouquier-Tinville waited for his audience to settle down before continuing. “And is it not true, Citizen Barbot, that Citizeness Doucette attempted to prevent you from entering her home, even though you showed her you had a legal warrant for the arrest of her brother, Citizen Antoine Doucette?”
“She slammed the door in my face,” admitted the soldier, looking somewhat irritated by the memory.
“And what did you and your men do?” asked Fouquier-Tinville.
“We smashed the door down,” the soldier replied proudly.
“What happened then?”
“We began to search the château, looking for the Marquis de Lambert, and any incriminating documents. We found Monsieur le Marquis in his room, in bed. He was evidently ill,” the soldier explained.
“Made sick by his father’s greed,” called out a woman in the front row.
“Hiding under the covers,” cackled another. Jacqueline fought the urge to step out of the dock, walk over to the woman, and slap her soundly across the face.
“And what did you do?” demanded the prosecutor.
“We informed the former marquis of his arrest and ordered him to get up. And he refused.”
“He was sick with fever and barely knew you were there!” objected Jacqueline.
“Silence!” thundered the judge president. “The prisoner will not speak to the witness.”
“What did you do when Citizen Doucette refused to comply with your orders?” asked the prosecutor.
The soldier shrugged his shoulders. “I had my men drag him from the bed and force him to his feet.”
“Good for you!” shouted a spectator.
“He is a true republican,” commented another.
“Is that when Citizeness Doucette attacked you?” asked Fouquier-Tinville.
The soldier nodded. “She came into the room carrying a dagger and told my men if they wanted me to live they should unhand her brother. My men laughed and let go of her brother, who collapsed to the floor. And that was when she attacked me.”
“Weren’t your men armed?” demanded the judge president.
“They were,” replied the soldier. “We carried muskets and sabers.”
The judge president appeared to ponder this for a moment.
Citizen Fouquier-Tinville continued with his questioning. “And what injuries did you sustain before you were able to restrain Citizeness Doucette?”
The soldier looked somewhat sheepish. “She lodged the dagger into my shoulder before I could strike her to the ground. And when I grabbed my shoulder to stop the bleeding, she got up and knocked out two of my teeth.” He looked at the jury and wiggled his tongue through the ugly black gap in his mouth. The jury gasped in sympathy.
“Did she strike you with her fist?” asked the judge president, evidently amazed.
“No,” replied the soldier. He shifted in his seat uncomfortably.
“With what then?” persisted the judge president.
The soldier scowled. “She hit me with Monsieur le Marquis’s chamber pot.”
The jury and the audience laughed.
The judge president rang his bell to silence the room, but Jacqueline could see even he was smiling.
“After Citizeness Doucette was restrained, you and your men made a thorough search of the château, did you not?” asked the public prosecutor.
“We did,” confirmed the soldier. “We found several incriminating documents in the form of letters to Citizeness Doucette’s sisters, who have either illegally emigrated or are in hiding. These letters denounced the Republic of France and called for a return of the monarchy. We also found that all of the former Duchesse de Lambert’s jewels were missing, as were many valuables from the château. These undoubtedly have been transferred out of France to finance a royalist plot.” This last statement was said with grave authority, as if merely making the accusation was proof enough that it was true.
“She’s a spy!” screeched a woman in the audience.
“The whole family must be found and made to pay for its crimes!”
“Take her head as the first payment!”
The judge president rang his bell to silence the room. Citizen Fouquier-Tinville dismissed the soldier from the witness box and turned his attention to the prisoner.
“Jacqueline Doucette, is it true you attacked Citizen Barbot while he was performing his duties as a captain of the National Guard?”
Like many prisoners, Jacqueline had chosen to represent her own defense. When her father had been arrested earlier that year, he had engaged a lawyer to prepare his case. The man had charged a fortune and done virtually nothing to help him in his fight for his life. Jacqueline knew many lawyers were becoming rich on the assets of their unfortunate clients. Even though the Château de Lambert and its contents would be seized by the state after she was condemned, she had no desire to pay someone for the charade of a defense.
“I was trying to help my brother,” she replied.
“Your brother was being arrested. You were interfering with an official act of the Republic of France,” Fouquier-Tinville informed her.
“Was it an official act of this Republic that he be savagely kicked after he collapsed to the floor?” she demanded furiously.
“You noblesse have been kicking us for years,” shouted a voice.
“Maybe he needed a good kick to get him up again,” added another.
Fouquier-Tinville smiled and faced the jury. “Citizeness Doucette, the measures which the National Guard is forced to take as they bravely struggle to protect our Republic are not at issue here. What is at issue are your actions, which clearly demonstrate that you are a traitor to your country.” He paused and turned to look at her. “Where are your two younger sisters, Suzanne and Séraphine?”
“They are staying with friends,” Jacqueline replied.
“Are these friends in France?” demanded the prosecutor.
“No.”
“You realize, of course, that makes your sisters émigrés, and therefore traitors to this Republic?”
“I realize that makes them far away, and therefore safe from bloodthirsty murderers like you and the members of this tribunal,” Jacqueline calmly told him.
The audience and the jury gasped. Even the weary judges straightened up in their chairs. The prosecutor looked slightly disconcerted. He was obviously not accustomed to being called a murderer. He cleared his throat.
“So you admit that you arranged the escape of your sisters across the border of France?” he persisted.
“That’s exactly what it was,” agreed Jacqueline. “An escape.”
Fouquier-Tinville smiled. “Where are the jewels that belonged to your mother, the former Duchesse de Lambert?”
“I sold them earlier this year.”
“Then where is the money?” he persisted.
“I spent it.”
The prosecutor looked at her in disbelief. “All of it?” he asked incredulously. He shook his head. “The De Lambert jewel collection was worth a fortune. Do you expect us to believe you could go through so much money in such a short period of time?”
Jacqueline looked at him with contempt. “In a country where the currency is not worth the paper it is printed on? Where the maximum prices fixed on grain and flour mean you have to pay ten times the legal amount to get someone to sell you what they are hoarding?”
Disgruntled murmurs of agreement could be heard from the audience.
Fouquier-Tinville interrupted them. “You cannot expect the members of this court to believe you went through what must have been an extraordinary amount of money over a period of just a few months. You transferred the money out of France, didn’t you?” he demanded.
“Either way, I don’t have it anymore,” she replied indifferently. She knew the revolutionary government was in appalling debt, and relied heavily on the money and properties confiscated from émigrés, condemned criminals, and the church to help finance its massive war effort and ailing economy. She would not leave them one more
livre
than necessary.
“Did you write these letters Citizen Barbot found in your home when he was arresting your brother?” the prosecutor asked as he waved several sheets of paper in her face.
“No.”
“Come, come, you have not even looked at them,” he protested. He held one up for her to see. “In this one, which is to your sister Suzanne, you lament the loss of your father and pray for the death of the revolutionary government. In this one, to your sister Séraphine, you call France ‘a great scaffold which is sustaining itself on the blood of the weak and the powerless, all in the name of the law.’ You speak longingly of the day when the royal family will be restored to the throne. Do you deny that you wrote these?”
Jacqueline reached out and took the letters. They appeared to be documents in progress and were not signed. She examined the writing. She was relieved to see it was not Antoine’s. She handed the letters back to the prosecutor.
“I would never be so stupid as to put such comments into writing for your esteemed National Guard to find,” she told him. “Also, I do not find the subject matter suitable for correspondence with eight- and ten-year-old children. Do you?” she asked sarcastically.
Fouquier-Tinville was not disturbed by her denial. “If they are not yours, Citizeness, then they must be your brother’s. Thank you for confirming this.” He turned to place the documents back on his table.
“Antoine would never write something like that!” she burst out furiously. “And he has been too ill these past weeks to hold a quill to paper!”
“Citizeness Doucette, these letters were found in your home. If neither you nor your brother wrote them, pray tell us who did?” asked the prosecutor with mock curiosity.
Jacqueline glared at him. She did not know who had drafted those letters and planted them for the National Guard to find. As former aristos and the family of a condemned traitor, she and her brother had many enemies. And the Château de Lambert with all its holdings was a fine prize for the state, so anyone who sought to improve their status with the revolutionary government might be only too willing to denounce them. That was all it took to make an arrest. There was no need for any proof. Just someone else’s word against your own. But the arrest warrant had only been for Antoine, not her. If she had not attacked that odious captain, who tramped through her home giving orders for his men to tear the place apart as they searched for Antoine, and then laughed as his soldiers each took a turn kicking her poor brother on the floor, she might never have been arrested. These letters were meant to be found as evidence against Antoine, and the fact that someone had taken the trouble to write them meant they wanted to be sure he would not return.