The Sparks Fly Upward (39 page)

War, the threat of the guillotine was as nothing compared to the everyday desperation that had reduced all of them to animals. Philippa Dapifer would have kept quiet and given way; Jeanne Renard could have torn the bitch's throat out. Nor would she have been sorry that she'd done it; she too had a child to think of. Sophie Condorcet was sick and Philippa was foraging for her and Eliza as well as those at Number Fifteen. Good manners and propriety belonged to those whose food arrived regularly on the table and in Paris you either abandoned them or returned home with an empty basket.

One of the reasons these women had welcomed the Revolution in the first place was that they'd had to spend their lives worrying about the price of bread while watching gilded carriages pass them by, seeing the
poudré
-ed wigged heads of lord, lady, coachman and outriders whitened with flour that could have been used to feed their children.

There was no regret for the old days; nobody wanted the king back. They were a republic and would stay a republic—but they were still hungry and even now they suspected that somewhere there was a cornucopia of brown-crusted, milk-white bread that they weren't getting and somebody else was.

The queue for the baker's went down the length of the court and out into the Rue de l'Egout. Philippa had joined it at dawn and was still well down the line. She and the others had seen the flour cart arrive and deliver pitifully few sacks, waited while the baker prepared and pounded the dough and endured the smell from his ovens. Would he sell out before she got to his counter? The bastard was known for having his favorites.

In the early days of the Revolution, a gathering of women like this—it was always women who queued—would have provided an occasion for some other woman to harangue them.

Sisters, this is our opportunity, come with us as we march with men to liberty. We, too, are entitled to the new world. Join the Society of Patriotic Dames/Women Friends of Truth/Citizenesses of Republican Revolutionaries.
There had been a club for everything; women's education, divorce, hospitals, child benefits, political rights. Condorcet had spoken at nearly all of them, advocating not only female suffrage but that women should be eligible for election to governing bodies—a step too far for most of them.

All gone now. Too revolutionary for this Revolution. The Convention had banned them and the heads of women who'd spoken for women had fallen into Sanson's basket. Reason had gone with them; the only oratory now was the cry of the enraged. Kill the hoarders, kill the black marketeers, give us bread. Just kill.

And I don't care
, Jeanne Renard thought.
I'm too bloody hungry. Somebody's got to pay.

‘Oh blessed Mother,' shrieked a voice ahead of her. ‘The cunt's shutting up shop.'

M Raspail, the baker, was bolting his shutters as quickly as he could. The next minute his perspiring face appeared from the safety of an upstairs window—more than one baker had been hung from the lantern by angry women.

‘No more, citizenesses. I'm sorry.' The National Guardsman had been joined by another and both were standing before the shop door, pikes at the ready.

How to say, ‘Nothing to eat today,' to the faces waiting at home? There was no way out. Like seeing lions pad into the arena, nothing between you and their jaws.

There was some screaming. And clattering—a couple of women were venting their frustration on the ironmonger's goods. The terrible Mme Mabillon was sitting on the stones, her head in her hands, weeping.

Philippa made her escape before the riot developed. It would have to be the black market, then—she still had a couple of louis d'or that she'd brought with her from England. Mme Vernet would not approve; it was not honorable for those who had money to buy on the black market; it was a betrayal of the women in Dragon Court; their food was being held back and sold to the privileged, a betrayal of the Republic itself.

But Mme Vernet didn't have to listen to Sophie Condorcet cough and watch Eliza grow thinner and tireder by the day. As for the Republic, the hell with it.

She began to go down the hill, heading for the Saint Germain market. According to the gossip she'd picked up during her days in the Dragon Court queue—and it was amazingly well-informed about things that mattered—there was a bastard in the market who, as long as people had cash, not assignats, but
real
money, could procure anything from a churn of fresh milk to an abortion.

‘Why don't you inform on him?' she'd asked.

Well . . . but why bother? He's the Hydra. Cut off his head, there'd be a dozen to take his place. The high-ups didn't care, they probably took a cut anyway. The explanation had been accompanied by a shuffling of feet and she'd realized that in these terrible days—if you could beg or borrow enough—an abortionist sometimes came in handy.

It was a grubby transaction. She made it in an old, enclosed and empty slaughter yard behind the market with a thin-faced young man whose eyes were never still but whose assurance suggested that the local militia had been well paid to ignore what was going on. He would survive the Terror a dead man or a rich one; he was prepared to gamble. She had to show him her
certificat de civisme
, but she'd expected that; he'd need to know who she was so that if she betrayed him for profiteering, he could betray her for buying with cash. They balanced each other nicely on the scales of illegality.

She also had to lift her skirt to get at the coins sewn into her garter. ‘Don't look,' she hissed at him. He shrugged; he'd seen legs before. Queue gossip said that if you didn't have cash, he'd let you whore for him.

Oh, a grubby transaction and it took one of her louis. But as she hauled herself up the hill with a basket containing a ham, a cheese, some leeks, two five pound loaves and a tin of tobacco she'd made the man throw in as makeweight, her only concern was that someone might ask her why it was so heavy.

Stooping through the wicket in the gates of Number Fifteen, she felt like a penitent regaining salvation; order and calm flowed from the house into the courtyard as into a convent cloister. In the kitchen she lifted the basket onto the table and collapsed over it, waiting for the mother superior's rebuke.

She felt Mme Vernet's hand rest for a moment on her shoulder before it took the ham out of the basket and started to saw it in half. ‘And leeks, too,' Mme Vernet said. ‘I'll make a broth.'

Gratefully, Philippa took the tobacco up to Condorcet's room; he was an inveterate pipe smoker and had been suffering withdrawal.

‘Marvellous,' he said when she gave it to him. ‘Where did you get it?'

She didn't tell him, though she was in a mood to say,
I sold my soul for it.

We protect him
, she thought.
He sits here writing his book, like a scribe in a monastery, fed and watered by others' hands, with no idea how dirty those hands have to be. Does he know what a danger he is to us all? Does he care? And that woman downstairs won't tell him, won't let
me
tell him, either. Oh, no, he's a virtuous man and must be protected.

Sharply, she said, ‘How's the
Progress
going?'

His beautiful smile. ‘Still progressing. Not long now.'

She stumped downstairs and into the kitchen. ‘He's never going to finish that damn book.'

Mme Vernet looked at her, then cut the crust off one of the loaves, sliced a piece of cheese to put on it and gave it to her. ‘Sit down, my dear. Eat. Slowly.'

She tried to chew each mouthful but gulped most of them, feeling the sustenance soak up her resentment like blotting paper. ‘I was cross,' she said.

‘Of course.'

She had no right to blame Condorcet for putting the household in danger when her own presence in it had redoubled the risk. Though her hostess gave no indication of it, she was here on sufferance. True, she might one day be the means of getting rid of the millstone around its neck but in the meantime she added to its weight.

She watched Mme Vernet's long freckled hands as she chopped the leeks. The ham was already boiling on the stove, releasing the smell of bay leaves picked from the tree in the back garden. ‘Don't you ever get angry, madame?'

‘Indeed, I do.' Mme Vernet did not elaborate, just as she had not expounded on her definition of ‘virtue,' the quality which had endeared Condorcet to her in the first place. Whether it was political, moral or religious goodness, Philippa still didn't know. Mme Vernet gave the word a standard that Condorcet had met, thereby qualifying him for her hospitality and, if it came to it, her life.

Just general goodness
, Philippa decided.
And she's right.

Resuscitated, she went back upstairs and planted a kiss on Condorcet's head. He looked up in surprise and then smiled. ‘You've changed,' he said. ‘France is having a bad effect on you, you're becoming demonstrative.'

‘I know.'

She looked round the stuffy, overcrowded room with appreciation. In here, among the tobacco smoke, Condorcet's hands twisted the world first one way and then the other to reveal aspects she hadn't known it possessed, sometimes giving it the rarified atmosphere of the moon. At one side of his table, there were neat piles of paper tied with ribbon—a work on a universal language, a mathematical primer for schoolchildren, wonderful things written in between chapters of
The Progress of the Human Spirit.

The man was a geyser of knowledge; without a library at his disposal, the first nine chapters of the book itself dealt with the advance of the human race from the primitive, the hunting and gathering groups, the beginning of towns, on to the genius of the Greeks, the coming of Christianity, Islam and the thousand years between the fall of Rome and the invention of printing.

Philippa found his view of Christianity rather shocking—a superstition spread by priests to increase their authority he said it was, like all religions. The inevitable march of men and women towards happiness and truth did not need it.

In his view, advances in hygiene, medicine, science, the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, the ideas of Descartes, Locke and Leibniz, universal education, must inevitably lead to a world of peace. National hatreds would end. People would learn they could not become conquerors without forfeiting their own liberty, that permanent confederations alone could maintain their independence and that their aim must be security, not power. Commercial prejudices would gradually disappear and the mercantile interest would lose its capacity to cause war and ruin nations on the pretext of enriching them.

He was watching her. ‘Will you be seeing Sophie today?'

‘Yes.'

‘Only I have a letter I wish her to have in reply to hers.'

That would be the one in which Sophie'd told him she had to divorce him. Philippa had given it to him and left the room, unwilling to see him read it.

Delivering the reply wouldn't be fun, either. Even less amusing was
when
she must deliver it. Midmorning. When the death carts lumbered down Rue Saint Honoré towards the waiting guillotine, when she used them as her cover, walking beside them on the other side of the street from the agent who watched the lingerie shop, when his eyes, like all eyes, were on the tumbrels' occupants.

She did it regularly now, every time it was necessary to take food and messages to Sophie. It had to be done if she was not to be questioned, or followed, but each time she felt like a vulture flapping along beside the soon-to-be-dead.

‘And then tomorrow I want you to return to England,' he said.

‘Not without you.'

He smiled. ‘ “With your shield or on it.”'

‘Yes.'

It was a regular exchange. She weighed terribly on his conscience; he told her to go every day.

When he was ready to leave she would have to, but in her mind—and, she sometimes wondered, perhaps in his—his book had become a Penelope's shroud which would never be finished; he would go on writing it until some cosmic Ulysses stepped in, swept France clean of its quarrelling suitors and put everything right again.

Curiously, for all the privation, she was content that this should be so. With death as a near neighbor, life narrowed down to an awful simplicity that was in itself a purpose. She was useful to people she cared for and who cared for her. England existed on a remote horizon, beautiful but also complicated by entanglements and emotions that it was a relief to be free of.

Had she been in love with Andrew Ffoulkes? She hardly thought of him. Had she been going to marry Stephen Heilbron? It took an effort of will to remember why. Children, of course; she'd wanted children. But here, now, with death so close, motherhood was an option she was hardly likely to be offered.

In any case—and this made her smile—Heilbron wouldn't marry her now. Even if he could forgive this foray to France, he would find her unsuitable. Jeanne Renard was not at all his kind of woman and Jeanne Renard, having emerged from the box, could not be put back in it again.

Strange, she thought, that in one of the most restrictive cities in the world she had been liberated; the ridiculous coconut shell had broken. Whatever the future held and however short it was going to be, she wasn't going to spend it hiding the things she felt and not saying the things she thought. If she felt like swearing—and how often poor Philippa Dapifer had—she'd bloody well swear.

Oh hell
, she thought,
I've become Ma.

Briskly, she went downstairs to see if Mme Vernet had made the broth.

Unless somebody famous was going to the guillotine, Rue Saint Honoré had lost interest. People looked up, of course—it was always worth seeing how others faced death—but crowds no longer lined the route. Even the number of National Guard that marched alongside had been reduced; there were no rescue attempts, people were too numb. Civilians, now allowed to accompany the carts on their way, were either the usual ghouls or family, friends and lovers who didn't care that their tears were noted. To begin with, Philippa had been ashamed to be thought of as one of the former and equally embarrassed at assuming the tragedy of the latter. Now she tried not to think at all and just kept to leeward of the tumbrels, blessing a lack of height that kept her hidden from the other side of the road.