The Sparks Fly Upward (27 page)

In the overnight inns—and they were awful; not a patch on England's—she shared a communal bed with women on their way to join husbands and sons to become part of the immense train of camp followers that provided the army's nurses and, quite often, its sutlers. One woman, running a farm in her husband's absence, had secured a contract with the army to provide it with barley—and was actually being paid in cash, not assignats.

 

 

MEMBERS of the National Guard checking papers at the barriers were men too old or disabled to fight, too tempered by age and experience to be high-handed. Only one insisted on searching her bag and he was mainly teasing. ‘It's the young innocents we got to watch, eh, Berthold? One as came through on this coach went and stabbed poor old Marat. No knife? Pass, then, citizeness.'

By this time she had been invited to sit beside Berthold, the elderly, taciturn driver. ‘Did Charlotte Corday really travel to Paris in this diligence?'

‘No.' He spat. ‘She was on Georges's run. Quiet, respectable little thing Georges said she was.'

They traveled on, the hood over the driving bench protecting them from the sun. After a mile he added, ‘Never liked Marat anyway.'

She knew she was seeing the results of the Revolution at their best; it would be different in Paris.

She wasn't sure, either, whether what she saw was having its effect on her spirits or whether she only saw what was reflecting her own emotions, but she was aware of a sense of liberation overlaying the frisson of danger. She was cut off, alone, responsible to nobody; the Channel had been her Rubicon and it was too late to go back. The intricacies of relationship had been left behind; she barely thought of them. She felt oddly clean, as if her mind had been swept of years of accumulated dust.

And it had been so easy.

When she'd disembarked at Gruchy, Jean Fallon, the man who ran both the manor and the smuggling business while de Vaubon was in Paris, had looked on her American passport and old
certificat de civisme
with disfavour.

‘I should get through to Paris with these, shouldn't I?' she'd asked.

‘Perhaps, perhaps not.' Not a talkative man, Fallon, his face resembled a piece of wood that had been twisted and hardened by the sea before being cast up on a beach.

He'd left her then and she spent the day shrimping with his grandchildren on the long white sands, their ears buffeted by the noise of surf and sea birds.

Even in the days when it had been legal to visit France, she had always used the smuggling route from Babbs Cove to Gruchy. For one thing, it avoided bustling immigration officials at the ports, for another, she'd liked the idea of slipping into another country unnoticed even then. Most of all she liked Gruchy and its people. Its harshly democratic relationship with its lord of the manor, de Vaubon, reminded her of that of Babbs Cove's with Makepeace. If you wanted respect for your class or position, it was not the place to come to, but if you accepted and gave friendship, you were home.

She often thought that, with nothing except sea between them and America, these people's ferocious love of independence had been carried across the Atlantic to be breathed in, like an infection on the wind which, when it had done its work, had been blown back again to be caught by all of France. Not that Gruchy had been affected much by the Revolution; it hadn't been affected by the Bourbons much, either. The only notice it took of the doings in Paris was pride that de Vaubon was now involved in them.

In the evening Fallon came back but said nothing until the family had sat down to a vast tureen of
soupe de poisson
and a plate the size of a wheel containing
fruits de mer
—a bland description for a plunge into battle with crustacea from which she emerged bespattered, exhausted and replete.

Only then, having lit his pipe, did he toss a new
certificat de civisme
into her lap. ‘Jeanne Renard, schoolteacher, Rue de la Tour, Néhou, Normande.'

‘How did you get this?'

He merely shrugged and she was left to gather that even commune committees consisted of local people and therefore of men who, Revolution or no Revolution, owed their living in this area to the smuggling trade.

It was strange. The name had changed her. The woman who was being carried southeast towards Paris was not the one who had left England. She was more cunning, careful, more hungry for her objective than Philippa Dapifer. Jean Fox had emerged from an earth in Néhou—a Cotentin village so far off the beaten track that even its nearest towns were unaware of it—as a creature which, though hunted, was also a predator.

She needed to be. She was entering Paris.

 

 

ENTRANCE from the west should have taken them along the Rue Saint Honoré but an overturned dray was blocking progress at that end so, with the rest of the traffic, they had to make a diversion in order to go around and return to it.

Without her being aware of it, the stink had been bothering her for some time, not because she didn't know what it was—she'd smelled it hundreds of times—but because it didn't belong here in what had been, and still seemed to be, the most expensive and sophisticated area of the city. It was like being in Saint James's Palace and coming across a cowherd fresh from the byre—a momentary displacement.

Then she recognized the huge and impressive open space they'd turned into, the Place de la Révolution, and knew why it stank of a slaughter house.

Even now, and it was evening, there was a man going back and forth to a bowser on a cart and throwing bucketsful of water onto the stones before sweeping a rusty result into a drain. It made no difference; a thousand men with a thousand brushes couldn't have swept it clean.

Dr Guillotin's invention had been in keeping with enlightened thinking; if there must be capital punishment, it should be a grim enough deterrent but also mercifully quick and efficient. So it was.

What they hadn't catered for was the amount of blood contained in the human body. Blood jetted from the necks when they were severed, splashing Sanson the executioner, spotting the uniform of the guards and the front row of the watching crowds. It permeated the boards of the scaffold and dripped between them, forming pools, then rivulets, then a river oozing its way down the Place's slight slope to the northeast towards Rue Saint Florentine, sinking into cracks, soaking into moss, feeding weeds, drying, impossible to dislodge.

She'd heard that local residents had complained of the smell so that, for a while, executions had been moved to the Place de la Grève but there, in the poverty of the city's east end, the spectacle had lacked the shock and awe accorded by the former place of kings, so the guillotine had been trundled back to it again.

And there it was. The enormous female statue of Liberty quite dwarfed it where she sat outlined against the Champs d'Elysée, her eyes directed above the scaffold and into the middle distance like a lady trying to pretend the dog shit steaming away near her shoes wasn't there.

The machine itself had been covered for the night in what appeared to be a giant black leather fingerstall, so that it seemed the more terrible for looking vaguely silly, as if it was a poorly finger stuck up for attention that nobody was giving it.

Nobody was. The place was almost empty. The sweeper whistled as he worked. A couple holding hands walked by the thing, their eyes only for each other. A woman who had earlier been selling something to the crowds was shutting up her stall.

In the old days, the river edge of the Place had been part of the view from the Pont Royal. She had always stopped on her way to or from the Left Bank to catch her breath at the color and proportion between the palaces behind her and the palaces ahead, where various builders through the centuries had passed down a congenial sense of symmetry, one to another, where the bridges were like ropes of stone holding the great ship of the Ile de la Cité to its moorings between the banks.

It would never be the same now. It had been overprinted in red by a machine, lethal and ridiculously small against the plaster statue that loomed over it, an accepted part of the scenery.

Berthold didn't want to let her off at the stop for the Palais Royale which, he said, was a place of
la vie dissolue
, always had been, still was, even if the Puritan Robespierre did eat in one of its cafés.

She pointed north: ‘I go that way. My sister-in-law lives in the Grange Batelière section.'

‘Take care, little one.' He'd grown protective. She was glad they'd taken on passengers at Neuilly or he'd have insisted on driving her to the door.

She waved until the coach was out of sight then turned south to slip into Rue Saint Honoré like a fox resuming cover, becoming immediately indistinguishable among the crowd. She'd taken the precaution to put a red, white and blue cockade in her cap and had dressed cheaply in case good clothes put her under suspicion but, amazingly, it was still possible to guess a person's class from their dress. Most working women had resumed the close caps, wide petticoats and aprons they'd worn before the Revolution, though a few, with a Phrygian cap and a ferocious expression, found it worthwhile to look as if they'd just paused in doing the washing to pull down the Bastille.

The rest, even in dowdy colors, mannish hats and a respectable fichu ensuring no part of the bosom was exposed, retained that very Parisienne
je-ne-sais-quoi
which had to do with confidence—that whatever the rest of the female world was wearing, they wore it better.

At the old church entrance to what was now the Jacobin Club, men in sober, high-collared coats were rubbing shoulders with what she supposed were the enragés all straggling, greasy hair and stained carmagnoles—as if patriotic fervor demanded that they be as unprepossessing as possible.

On those terms the shop, when she found it, was downright unpatriotic and would have caused perturbation in Chelsea. Its window frothed with lace-trimmed corsets and waists but, again, nobody seemed to mark it; the French had always been open about ladies' underwear, nor would a mere revolution change its frilliness.

In the corner of the display, under a branch decorated with garters, was a small, neat sign. PORTRAITS PAINTED, it read.

Inside, conversation came from behind the curtain of a booth that billowed with the efforts of a customer trying something on.

‘I've a parcel for the portrait lady,' Philippa said to it.

‘Upstairs. Fourth floor.'

Another curtain revealed a twisting staircase. Philippa went up it, counting the landings. The noise of the street quietened. No sound came from the apartments she passed and it was too dark to decipher nameplates. The stairs finished on the fourth landing where a dirty skylight enabled her to read the notice hanging on a nail in the unpainted door. PORTRAITS PAINTED BY CITIZENESS SOPHIE. ENTER.

It was a large attic, full of the light from another, bigger skylight and the window overlooking Rue Saint Honoré, bare and rather chilly now that the sun was going down. It smelled of oils and turpentine.

The far end was sectioned off by a red velvet, gold tasseled curtain; its twin hung as a backdrop to the dais by the door on which a soldier was standing in martial attitude. Opposite him, facing the door, a woman was applying paint with a long brush to a canvas on an easel that had been positioned to catch the light. The soldier didn't turn and the woman didn't look up. ‘What is it?'

‘I've come with a parcel for Citizeness Sophie,' Philippa said.

The brush stilled.

After a long moment and with only a flicker of the eyes in her direction, the woman resumed painting. ‘Please to wait.'

Carefully, Philippa perched herself on the side edge of the dais so that she was out of the soldier's view—not that he was paying attention to anything but his stance—and tried to make herself believe that the woman opposite was Sophie Condorcet in the flesh and that she'd found her.

It wasn't that she didn't look the same, though she was much, much thinner, but, for Philippa, these last weeks had turned her into something fabulous, a rare bird, a statue that only myth said existed. Such traveling as it had taken to get here had been a journey of hard choices as much as distance, hacking through a jungle of the mind to reach a lost city.

Bless her, she looked so small in an overlarge powder dress which served as a painter's apron. There were lines around the mouth that made her seem older than her thirty years whereas, before, she'd always appeared young for her age—perhaps because of the snub nose that belied her aristocratic ancestry.

Charm had always overlaid Sophie's intellect—she could speak Latin, Greek, English and Italian, had done a translation of Marcus Aurelius's
Meditations
. People had never believed she was as fervid a revolutionary as any sansculotte in the Rue Saint Antoine, yet she and her husband had been republicans long before the Revolution got under way.

Once, when Condorcet had been verbally attacked by a monarchist, he said, ‘It's my wife's fault, she persuaded me. Would you disturb domestic peace for the sake of one king more or less?' And he'd only been half joking.

As she watched her friend's intent little face, Philippa saw tears creeping down its cheeks. She had tears on her own.

Sophie Condorcet put up her brush and raised an arm to blot her face. ‘The light is going, citizen. If you can return tomorrow, we will finish.'

‘Let me see.' The man jumped down from the dais to look at his portrait. He was very young and very dashing, with an ostrich feather in his hat. His uniform coat was velvet and fitted perfectly, crossed by a tricolor sash.