The Sparks Fly Upward (45 page)

Ffoulkes rolled his eyes. She glared at him; she was nervous. It was necessary to her that the two most important men in her life should like each other—and she didn't see how they could. Ffoulkes was of the opinion that Condorcet was a dangerous weakling hiding behind women's skirts. She'd made it a condition of his tenancy in Number Fifteen that he be polite. ‘If Mme Vernet is content with the situation, and I am, then it is nothing to do with you.'

As they went in, she had to admit that Condorcet did not show to his best. He was sitting in his
bergère
with his bad leg up on a stool, puffing at his pipe, for all the world like an idle old man with nothing better to do. Only the slate on his lap, covered with mathematical symbols in chalk, suggested a busy mind.

He was superb. ‘Lord Ffoulkes, how charming. We've met before, of course. At the de Staëls', wasn't it? Sit down, my dear fellow. Forgive me for not getting up. I believe you know my old friend, Philip Stanhope. How is he? We were masters of our respective mints during the same years.'

Ffoulkes said he did indeed know the Earl of Chesterfield and that, last seen, he was well.

Philippa left them cantering together through fields of high-born acquaintances.

The two men remained talking until supper. Condorcet's was taken up to his room as usual; Ffoulkes would have been happy to have supped with him but as a matter of courtesy came down to be introduced to M Sarrett and to eat with the household.

It had been decided he should remain a soldier for the time being; if by chance Citizen Marcoz should discover him the story would be that Mme Vernet was employing this army veteran and had not yet had time to register him.

With his beard and worn carmagnole he looked outlandish in the small, cluttered and essentially bourgeois dining room but he'd regained his energy and manners and set himself out to make amends. He complimented his hostess on her beans, her hidden guest and her courage. ‘Which shall be tested only a little longer, madame. M Condorcet tells me that he will be ready to leave in a week.'

‘I told you not to harry him,' Philippa said. ‘You promised.'

He swallowed a mouthful hurriedly. ‘I did not harry him. For your information, he brought the subject up himself. The book's nearly finished, apparently. I'm going to read it.' An explanatory fork was waved at them, like an admonition. ‘He's damn clever, you know. I was telling him, no good talking to me about mathematics, I said, they tried beating sums into my backside at Eton and failed. So he gave me this little book he's written for his daughter,
A Sure Method of Learning to Count
, he's calling it. I tell you, one chapter and I've mastered the decimal system. Lucid, that's what it is, lucid. Man's a genius.'

Mme Vernet's eye sought Philippa's and, amazingly, winked.

It's effortless
, Philippa thought;
Nicolas doesn't even know he's doing it.

For a moment she wondered what was wrong with her, then realized that for the first time in years she was . . . content. For that moment she was relaxed in body and mind.
I can enjoy the next seven days. And the journey home.

Then, of course, it would stop. There she must pay duty on him and let him go. She, once the great planner for the future, would not think beyond that; perhaps she would return to England, perhaps she wouldn't. It didn't matter; what mattered was the next seven days.

In fact there were only five but they were the best of her life so far.

It was as if he had been enlarged. He'd always known that he was privileged and tried to alleviate the unfairness of that position by making life better for those who were not. He was a Rockingham Whig, even though Rockingham was dead and his radicalism out of fashion. His love for Makepeace, who'd become his unofficial guardian when he was seven, had introduced him to a wider philosophy, undreamed of by his fellow barons.

Nevertheless, he was rich, a peer and a man; his education in all those capacities had been to reinforce them. He'd recognized the need for improvement in France but the Revolution, when it came, had concerned him by, in his opinion, throwing the baby out with the bathwater; the masses needed good leadership, not equality. The Terror had only confirmed his fears.

Again, though Makepeace had given him a high opinion of women, his male friends formed the preserve in which he breathed most easily. The League had only made closer a bond that had been welded by the rigours of Eton and the depravities of university. Philippa, whom he counted his best woman friend, had known that she, along with his wives and the rest of the world, was merely peering over a fence at a Garden of Eden where Eve wasn't a problem because she wasn't there.

The serpent Blanchard, however, had been.

She watched him grapple with the knowledge, becoming grimmer but at the same time humbler. It was as if the breaking down of the fence had not only proved that it wasn't Eden in the first place but had allowed entrance to ideas and people that it had until then excluded.

Constancy became more valuable to him—in whatever form it took and whatever the class of person who displayed it. She realized he must be comparing Blanchard to Mme Vernet and her refusal to betray a man who was yet a comparative stranger to her; Blanchard to Condorcet, who had stayed loyal to a principle and would not vote for Louis's death though it meant his own; Blanchard even to herself who, though he might think it wrongheaded, was risking her head for a friend. Suddenly, those who'd been outside the magic fence were proving more valuable than one who had existed within it.

What he would
not
do was change towards her. It wasn't that she expected him to fall in love with her—there was no chance of that— but she wanted some recognition that she was a woman of twenty-six and he a man of thirty-four.

She puzzled him; she knew that. She'd gone up in one part of his estimation but she'd come down in another. The tough speaker of her own mind, who called a spade a bloody spade, was not the composed and reticent girl he'd known, even less the clinging, delicate flower that was his ideal of femininity. Yet to him she remained his goddaughter, to be teased, placated, a child he wanted to stay on friendly terms with. It was as if he refused to let go of the old Philippa to recognize the new, finding some sort of safety in it, even a taboo.

Well, that was up to him; it was an irritant but she could do nothing about it. Being what men wanted her to be was another trammel she'd left behind in England. He could take her or leave her but damned if she'd be forced back into the mold he'd made for her; she hadn't come to France to be his pet dog.

‘And you can make yourself useful while you're here,' she told him. ‘There's the boots to clean and the silver needs polishing and while I'm out I'd be obliged if you'd take the clothes out of the washtub and put them through the mangle.'

‘What in hell's a mangle? And what are you going to do?'

‘I queue.'

In fact, Ffoulkes had brought money with him, sewn into his knapsack, and, while she queued in order not to arouse suspicion in those who'd shared queues with her in the past, she bought extras on the black market. It was a risk but the gain in everyone's health was not to be forgone.

When she got back it was all done, though the mangle—a monstrous and modern machine of which Mme Vernet was exceedingly proud—had given him trouble. ‘Tried to eat my damn fingers,' he said. He pretended exhaustion and shame. ‘Oh that I, a peer of the realm, am cleaning revolutionary boots. They'll never let me back into The Lords.' He tapped the pair belonging to Citizen Marcoz. ‘You say our esteemed convention deputy knows Condorcet's hiding here?'

‘Yes.'

‘And hasn't given him away?'

‘No. But you'd better make his boots shine.'

Ffoulkes found M Sarrett another oddity. He was a retired surveyor and a poet
manqué
who kept irregular hours and roamed the house in a fez, a velvet smoking jacket and turned-up Persian slippers, muttering and posing as the muse took him. Philippa liked him; he was kind.

He bewildered Ffoulkes. ‘Is he a . . . you know?'

‘No.'

‘Oh.' That was a relief. ‘Then are he and Mme Vernet . . . ?'

‘Probably.'

‘Oh.'

It was M Sarrett who went out for the newspapers every day and read them aloud to the company after dinner. The
Vieux Cordelier
was particularly hopeful that night. Desmoulins was advocating an end to the Terror.

‘
Mon Dieu
, listen to this.' Sarrett had to get up to read it.

 

He clasped the paper to his chest. ‘That is Danton speaking. Desmoulins writes but it is Danton.
En avant, mon brave
. Let us begin the march towards sanity.'

He started to dance. Mme Vernet's eyes were closed and her hands clasped as if in prayer. Philippa made no bones about it.
Please
, she thought,
please, God.

Then she noticed, because she was aware of every move he made, that Ffoulkes wasn't joining in; he'd picked up one of the other newspapers and was reading it.

As they went up the stairs together that night, he said, ‘I didn't say anything, but don't expect too much. They've challenged Robespierre; it's a straight fight now, Danton versus Robespierre. Robespierre will win.'

‘But everybody loves Danton, even Robespierre. They're friends.' She saw his mouth twist and remembered the friend called Blanchard. She said, ‘He's like de Vaubon, Ma's old partner; he's
human
, he makes people laugh.'

‘The other papers have got a new word for him,' Ffoulkes said, ‘“
Indulgent
.” It's code for anyone opposing the Terror. Danton's a human being, you're right, but, like the missus's smuggling friend, he's got human weaknesses. He's been lining his pockets with public money since the Revolution began. Robespierre can throw him to the wolves any time he finds it necessary. If the Paris mobs keep shouting for blood, it
will
be necessary. Desmoulins and de Vaubon'll go with him.'

She sat down on the stairs. ‘I don't understand all this, I don't
understand
. Is it going to go on forever and ever?'

‘Not according to our philosopher in there.' Ffoulkes jerked a thumb towards Condorcet's door. ‘Sooner or later the mobs must quieten, the guillotine'll be packed away in lavender, Pitt and Robespierre will kiss and make up and we'll all live happily ever after. God, he's a fool.'

It was a new bitterness and, while she knew its cause, it had a clang of truth that sent her to bed in a hopelessness against which there was only one appeal.

She knelt on the bare floorboards of her room.
Let him be wrong, Lord. Let Condorcet be right. Let something wonderful happen. And, Lord, spare my mother's good friend, de Vaubon. Spare everyone in this dear house.

The silence contained a negative. When she pinched out the rushlight and opened the window to let in the night air, He sent her His answer through the cries of the prisoners in the Luxembourg.

She knew then that they weren't going to get away.

 

 

NUMBER Fifteen revived. It had become tired from the strain of keeping its secret; every sound of marching boots echoing down Gravediggers Road, coming closer, had stilled movement, stopped breath, until they went past. A sideways glance in the queue set the heart jumping, a word out of place from a neighbor had to be analysed.

Ffoulkes's energy fed it like a drooping plant. He tackled house-work like a military maneuver, expounding theory and practice once he'd mastered them as if nobody had discovered the secret before. ‘Look, you've got to allow the polish to
dry
first—comes off better then.' ‘See, glasses need
very
hot water. By God, the house-maids better look out when I get home.' He made Mme Vernet laugh and she introduced him to the mystery of omelette making—he watched them eat the result with the ferocity of a midwife unsure that the baby's parents appreciated it.

For all that the man amazed and horrified him, it was Condorcet who intrigued him most and he spent the spare time between his duties and Condorcet's writing in the smoke-filled room.

‘What do you two talk about?' she asked him.

‘You, mostly. He's got a high regard for you, thinks you're as insane as I do. Women in general, really. Oh, and rights—got a lot to say about rights.'

Condorcet told him the Revolution had finally failed when the Convention closed down the women's clubs. ‘It negated women's rights without seeing that it had negated its own,' he'd said. ‘Rights must be universal and extended to every living soul—that is the meaning of the term. They cannot be delivered to one group and not another. If they are, they are not rights but privileges, and the purpose of the Revolution, my revolution, Philippa's Revolution, was to rid the world of the privilege of the few and extend rights to all.'

‘Mad as May butter,' Ffoulkes told her. ‘Do you know he wants women to have a vote?'

‘Yes.'

‘You do? But let's face it, old thing, what do you need it for? You ladies have all the power as it is, look at Mme Vernet, rules the roost here, don't she? And the missus? God help the man who tells her what to do. Look at Félicie, leads me around by a ring in my nose. What would you do with the vote?'