The Sparks Fly Upward (34 page)

 

So far, the name of the man who'd written those things and had come to France to help transform it into that world, wasn't on the list. She didn't know if she had the courage to look for it again tomorrow.
Oh, God, how could they kill
him?

She brushed Citizen Marcoz's boots until her elbow ached, polished them off with a soft cloth and took them back to the lodge door. In a moment—and she still had trouble believing this—Marcoz would set off for the National Convention of which he was a member, the same Convention that had condemned to death and proclaimed outlaw the man who was hiding across the courtyard from his own lodging.

‘Do you think he knows you're concealing Nicolas?' she'd asked Mme Vernet. It seemed incredible that he did not, although he never entered the house itself.

And Mme Vernet said calmly, ‘If so, he has not betrayed the fact.'

He was a dour-looking man, with black up-curled eyebrows, living alone, always frowning—unsurprisingly, Philippa thought, considering the things he was asked to approve in the Convention. Perhaps, by not betraying Condorcet, he was salving some part of his conscience. He'd asked no questions about her sudden arrival and employment at Number Fifteen, didn't talk to her at all, merely grunted on the one occasion when he'd opened his door as she was putting his boots down.

He was rigidly courteous to Mme Vernet if they met in the courtyard but, Philippa thought, the devil himself would have been polite to Mme Vernet.

She went back to the house and prepared three breakfast trays, balanced them one on top of the other and carried them carefully upstairs. On the first landing she put the trays on the hall table, lifted one to put it outside Mme Vernet's room, knocked to let her know it was there, and took another to the next door behind which slept M Sarrett, Mme Vernet's distant cousin.

There was a connecting door between the two rooms which, according to Sophie, allowed the two to be less than distant, a liaison Philippa at first found somewhat shocking and then didn't. Both were widowed, at any moment they could go to the guillotine for helping Condorcet. The Terror was no time for middle-class morality.

If they
were
having an affair, it was decorously conducted. Everything Mme Vernet did was decorous. That first day she had invited Philippa into her parlor, sat her down in one of its uncomfortable chairs and listened, her hands neatly folded in her lap.

It was an ugly little parlour, typical of the French bourgeois; heavily furnished and dark, though very clean, smelling of beeswax and lavender sachets. But it was surprising. Other such rooms Philippa had known in the past had displayed a large and gruesome crucifix, this one had a statue—work of the late M Vernet, an artist who'd belonged to the affrighted nymph school of sculpture. Adding to the overcrowding, she stood in a corner, her marble hands up-raised as if in horror at the hideous chiffonier next to her.

Sophie had called Mme Vernet an angel but it took time to recognize her seraphic qualities. She was angular, late fortyish, dressed in black, her thin hair pulled severely back under an equally harsh cap. The most celestial thing about her was her calm. If it had not been for the loud tick of the ormolu clock on the mantelshelf, Philippa could have thought that time stood still, her own voice merely going around and around in the face of Mme Vernet's stillness.

Her explanations and intentions finished, the tick of the clock took over while Mme Vernet considered them. When she spoke at last, her mouth made prim little pecking motions, like that of her own hens.

‘Eight months ago when my doctor, Dr Cabanis, asked me take in the gentleman now residing upstairs, I asked only one question: “Is he virtuous?” Dr Cabanis assured me he was. “Then let him come,” I said. I have had no reason to regret that decision. The gentleman is not only virtuous, he is a man of genius engaged on a great work.'

‘Yes,' Philippa said, slightly mystified at this departure from the matter in hand. ‘But now we can get him to safety. May I see him?'

Later, she realized Mme Vernet was warning her.

As if she'd been making a social visit, she was left waiting while Mme Vernet went upstairs to establish that Condorcet would receive her. His permission having been given, the maid who had let her in was called to escort her to his room on the third floor.

Half an hour later Philippa had returned to the parlor, angry. ‘He won't go.'

‘No,' Mme Vernet said. ‘Not yet.'

‘There is no
yet
, madame.' Philippa's fury pitched her voice above the damn clock. ‘He's in danger, you're in danger, and he wants to finish a
book
.'

‘It is a great book,' Mme Vernet said quietly. ‘I have been privileged to read its chapters as he completes them.
The Progress of the Human Mind
. It is a work of optimism. Mademoiselle, can you not admire the spirit that can envisage such a book at this time?'

‘No,' Philippa said. ‘Frankly, I can't. He can finish it in England without endangering everyone around him. Point it out to him, madame. He'd listen to you.'

‘He has. He has wished to leave many times for fear of endangering myself and M Sarrett. “Where will you go?” I ask him. “The Convention, sir, has the right to place you outside the law; it has not the right to place you outside humanity. Stay and finish your book.” That is what I tell him. I set no limit to his stay. Will you take some tea?'

Even sentences, no more weight attached to one than the rest.

So she drank tea, not knowing then that it was the last of Mme Vernet's precious store, gulping cup after unnoticed cup as her resentment built—after all this trouble, all this way, progress of the human mind, progress of human cowardice more like, battening on this poor woman, stupid, stupid, obstinate man.

Mme Vernet questioned her gently. How was Mme Sophie? And the little girl? Would she return to England now? Had she somewhere to stay the night? Useful domestic questions made Philippa realize she was cross and hurt on her own account. Nobody had asked her to come. She had as good as erupted into this place yelling, ‘Fly, fly,' nudging the wire on which Mme Vernet maintained her balancing act, carrying her household with her.

The prosaic little woman opposite her, she saw, was as magnificent as the man upstairs who wrote of hope while bloody death rampaged around him. Of course he must finish the book. Why should he drop a work of hope—and, God, if the world ever needed hope it was now—to accompany Philippa on a journey that he knew, and she knew, could be the death of them both?

She knew something else; she couldn't go home without him.
Yes, I was in France. I went to rescue somebody but he was too busy, so I came home.

Another humiliating failure to add to a long list.

Somehow, during the course of that afternoon, it was arranged. She was to stay at Number Fifteen to await the completion of Condorcet's manuscript. She was to be its new maid—partly to explain her presence in the house and partly because Mme Vernet wanted to send the old one to safety and could not manage on her own.

The maid's name was Manon and she'd been in Mme Vernet's employment for twenty-seven years and this, the occasion of her dismissal, was probably the first time they had ever quarrelled.

Manon's denunciation of her sacking was loud; everybody heard it and the little punctuations of quiet, which were Mme Vernet's loving but obdurate insistence.

‘I will not go. Why should I go? . . . You think I am afraid? . . . We will go to the guillotine together ... But that chit (
gosse
) cannot care for you properly. Can she starch your caps? Make M Sarrett's tisanes? . . . I am not going, you cannot make me.'

Mme Vernet could and did. The two of them embraced in the courtyard, Manon still weeping and pleading, while M Sarrett carried her luggage to the cart that was to take her to the Rouen diligence and the Normandy village of her birth.

Until then, Philippa had not been sure that Mme Vernet was fully aware of how great a danger she ran in hiding Condorcet. But the woman stood at the gate until the cart was out of sight; when she turned her face was that of one who had bidden an old friend good-bye for ever.

So the name of Manon Bercot disappeared from the prescribed list of residents at Number Fifteen, Gravediggers, and that of Jeanne Renard took its place.

The new maid and her mistress went together to register the change.

Philippa was frightened from the moment they left the house. The walk down the hill to the church of Saint Sulpice, now the administration headquarters of the Luxembourg Revolutionary Section, was like walking into jungle with nothing to protect her from its beasts. She could hear them baying.

In a sense, the noise in the church provided cover. It bounced off marble and stone to bewilder the ears; everybody was too busy and too harried to be on the watch for counterrevolutionaries. At the entrance, women were sorting a small mountain of donated shoes and boots awaiting shipment to the battalions fighting in the Vendée. A ‘Down with Tyranny' flag was draped over a confessional box, swathes of tricolor ribbons hid such icons as hadn't been already chipped away. An out-of-date poster that hadn't kept up with the thinking of Robespierre declared, ‘Liberty is the only form of Worship.' Others, more usefully, gave the names of the months and days in the new revolutionary decadal calendar for those still confused by it—practically everybody.

In a side chapel a choir of children was rehearsing the ‘Hymn to the Republic,' while a small boy on a chair delivered the
Declaration of the Rights of Man
to the lines of people waiting at one side of the trestle tables for papers, permits, food and fuel stamps,
certificats de civisme
, destitution relief. Clerks, questioning and scribbling, sat at the other.

It seemed to Philippa, trying not to shake with nerves, that people would notice Mme Vernet, so neat, so cool, an eye of calm in this hurricane of hubbub and anxiety; composure like hers
must
be unpatriotic.

But Republic or monarchy, the Mme Vernets of France were eternal factors; anyway, most of the Luxembourg—an area she'd lived in since she was married—seemed to know her. The clerk who dealt with them called her ‘Madame,' without being dragged off to prison, or anyone even noticing.

They returned home without incident, Philippa on legs left weak with tension.

The work at Number Fifteen was hard, made harder by shortages and Mme Vernet's refusal to deal with the black market. At first Mme Vernet did most of the shopping and cooking—miraculously stretching rations to include her unregistered guest—Philippa most of the cleaning and laundry. At nights she dragged herself up to her attic room almost too tired to undress. Yet living by Mme Vernet's immutable routine was her safeguard against fear; inside these walls, she could almost believe that God's purpose still ran and that, sooner or later, the jungle outside would achieve the harmony existing within. It was only in her dreams that reality broke through the defenses in a flood of blood, mingling terror and a horrible desolation; I don't want to die among strangers.
I want to go home. I want Ma.

Curiously, if escaping the havoc of loving Andrew Ffoulkes had been one of her reasons for coming to France, she had achieved it. The love was there and always would be, but it had retired to the horizon, a crazy sweetness of adolescence to be remembered with nostalgia.

That much had been achieved, then.

But the best reason was Condorcet. She set his breakfast tray on the floor while she knocked on the door of the third floor room—and waited. After a while a voice said: ‘Seven to the power of n . . . Come in.'

She smiled. So he was between chapters and relaxing his mind with mathematical problems the way other people took a walk, or a bath. It had been a foible of his, to speak his last thought before everyday life intruded on him, like putting a bookmark between pages. Still was.

The room was thick with the smell of tobacco smoke, books and bad feet. Philippa crossed it, put the tray in the fireplace—every other surface was covered with papers and his manuscript—planted a kiss on the head of the man sitting at a writing table and raised the window to allow air in.

He'd aged dreadfully. He'd hardly left this room in eight months and lack of exercise had made him flabby. His right leg had become ulcerated but he refused to allow Mme Vernet to send for Cabanis to treat it, saying it was too dangerous for the doctor to come, and anyway the discomfort was nothing.

‘I'll be seeing Sophie today,' Philippa said and saw his eyes shut in happiness, though automatically he said, ‘No.'

He feared for her; she brought him newspapers and he was therefore more aware of the jungle's dangers than she was—she didn't have time to read them. But if Philippa had a purpose here now, it was to provide the link between two great souls who loved each other and whom she loved.

His letters to Sophie made no mention of his discomfort; they spoke of plans for their future, drawings to make Eliza laugh, a small miracle of a book he'd written on a simple method to teach her mathematics.

Sophie's letters to him ignored her poverty and gave descriptions of her sitters, gossip, tales of their child and love, always love.

Oh, God. Philippa remembered that today she must deliver to him the letter on which Sophie was spending blotched, agonizing days of composition, telling him she must divorce him.