The Sparks Fly Upward (51 page)

‘It was a confusion by the National Guard, Citizen President. Both the girl and her mother are called Marie.'

‘And I daresay both are guilty of disrespect to the Republic,' said the president. ‘Let the charge stand. Too much damn paperwork otherwise.' He rang his bell to drown out the prosecutor's protests and the girl's scream.

Fouquier-Tinville sat down, scrabbling among his papers. M Sarrett had said of him that he'd once been a conscientious lawyer. His work now meant he was lucky to get three hours' sleep in twenty-four. The previous week he'd been found standing on the Pont Neuf, staring at the river and muttering: ‘Red, red, red.'

One by one the prisoners were led forward to hear the charge against them. The general lassitude smothered indignation, even fear, like a blanket. Waiting for her turn, Philippa knew that, like each of her fellow accused, she would declare herself innocent but not as if there was any point to it, because there wasn't. When he asked each if he or she had anything to say in his or her defense, citizen president tapped his fingers on the table, occasionally yawning.

The
ci-devant
Countess and Madame de Galles didn't even bother; their titles were their condemnation. Both said, quietly, ‘Vive le roi.' The priests, too, were guilty by profession, knew it and merely invoked God.

The baker afforded a momentary change of tempo by saying truculently that he expected nothing from ‘a load of crooks and idiots like you lot.'

The shop girl was the only one who showed energy; she became hysterical and had to be taken away to the Tribunal hospital.

The Vendeéan farmer began to explain that he and his son had been forced to lodge rebel soldiers in their house or have their crops burned, but he went on too long and citizen president became impatient. ‘Yes, yes, it's noted. Next.'

This was Ffoulkes. The charge was conspiracy against the Republic. Any doubt that Blanchard had supplied the information against him was dispelled by its detail. They even gave his name and title in full. ‘Andrew Christopher Elphinstone Ffoulkes, so-called Baron of Wulford.'

Around the court one or two heads were raised from interest.

Perhaps they won't kill him
, she thought.
From their point of view he's a spy and an aristocrat, but he's an
English
spy and aristocrat. They can use him as a bargaining counter. Isn't that what sides do in war? Exchange a valuable one of yours for a valuable one of ours?

He didn't look much against the splendor of the chamber and the judges; too shabby, too many cuts on his face.
So valuable
, she thought,
so valuable to me.

Citizen president was unimpressed; he'd tried aristocrats, spies and Englishmen before; here were merely the three offenses combined. He repeated the formula without emphasis: ‘What have you to say in your defense?'

‘Nothing, really,' Ffoulkes said. The easy voice seemed to be issuing from somebody else. ‘One would just like to point out that the woman there'—a dismissive wave of the hand in Philippa's direction—‘the one supposed to have conspired with me is a stranger as far as I'm concerned. Just another female who's mislaid her papers. Saw her being arrested and waded in on impulse. Nothing to do with me. Sorry.'

He was pushed back into line.

Citizen president's eyes had closed, he opened them. ‘Next.'

Philippa stepped forward.

‘No papers,' Fouquier-Tinville said, on sure ground. ‘Gives her name as Bettine Gagnon but believed to be Philippa Dapifer, English, associate of the previous accused.'

Blanchard had been thorough.

‘What have you to say in your defense?'

‘Nothing.'

The elderly couple from Saint Omer were put forward after her but, like the rest of the court, she'd expended her attention on other things and never did find out what they were accused of.

The jury was directed to an anteroom to consider verdicts and to be quick about it.

‘God Almighty, I gave you a chance, blast you,' Ffoulkes hissed. ‘Why in hell didn't you take it? It might have worked.'

‘Oh, shut up,' she said. ‘If I can't die for you, I might as well die with you.'

He became remote again.

I've done it now
, she thought.
I've told him I love him.
It seemed a much more momentous utterance than any made in court so far.
Well, he might as well know.

When the jury didn't appear within fifteen minutes, a National Guardsman was sent to fetch them back.

Every defendant was found guilty—except the two farmers.

‘But they're from the Vendée,' citizen president said with ominous patience, ‘The Vendeé's in revolt against the Republic.'

The jury foreman was flustered. ‘We know, Citizen President, but we decided they were coerced and . . . well, farmers. Paris needs supplies.'

‘Look,' said the president, ‘they're from the
Vendée
.'

‘Ah,' said the foreman. He turned round to peer at his fellow jurymen. ‘Guilty, then.' He sat down. He got up again. ‘But we did think . . . the defendant who's going to have a baby . . . we did think execution ought to be delayed . . . until she does.'

Citizen president had come to the end of his tether. ‘Of course it will, you dolt. Do you think we're in the Dark Ages?'

The prisoners were lined up and led out by guards carrying lanterns. It was a long walk, mostly through a labyrinth of passages. Philippa was two behind Ffoulkes. She heard the
ci-devant
Countess ask him: ‘Do you know where one is going, M'sieu?'

‘The Conciergerie, Countess. The two palaces are connected.'

‘The Conciergerie. Where they held the Queen before they murdered her?'

‘Yes, Madame. We'll pass her cell.'

‘That is something, then, God give her mercy. To suffer where she suffered.'

How does he know all this? Philippa wondered. She listened to the two chatting as they went along; they had acquaintances in common. She heard Ffoulkes say, like someone discussing the points of an inn, ‘If one can pay for it, one can procure a cell to oneself. Otherwise it's the common hall.'

‘I have . . . ' The Countess's voice sank to a precautionary whisper.

‘I'll see what I can do for you tomorrow,' Ffoulkes promised her. ‘Bit late for haggling tonight.'

The Countess, an elderly woman, gave a deep curtsey as they passed the little iron door behind which Marie Antoinette had spent her last hours. Ffoulkes raised her and gently hurried her on; the priests had fallen to their knees and guards were kicking them to their feet.

Past open courts. An exercise yard. Downwards along passages with gilded vaulting. ‘But they are taking us into the bowels of the earth,' the old man from Saint Omer complained.

‘Bowels certainly got something to do with it,' the baker told him. The smell was becoming thicker as they went, like fog settling on lowest ground.

All at once they were in a great space, the Hall of Arms with its thirty-six blond, branching pillars amongst which Philip the Fair's men-at-arms had waited on their king's orders in the fourteenth century and where hundreds of men and women now passed the time until their execution. It was hot and dark, with a ferocious communal silence, like a lair occupied by sleeping animals.

There was light at its far end where a jailer sat at a table in the entrance to an ogival-roofed corridor. He took their names. ‘I ain't separating you women tonight,' he said. ‘It's too late, you'll have to bed down here with the men. Get yourselves some straw. Any of you's got chink, I'll see to you tomorrow.'

Bedding straw had been swept into a ceiling-high pile at one end of the corridor and new arrivals from the other tribunals were picking it up in armfuls.

Ffoulkes gathered a great heap for the Countess. Philippa had to gather her own but when she'd have made her bed next to the woman, he picked up enough for himself and nudged her along the corridor into the hall away from the light of the jailer's lantern. ‘Here. More private.' She could just see him patting straw into place at the foot of a pillar.

He settled her on the bed he'd made, a cushion of straw between her head and the pillar, then sat down beside her. They talked in whispers.

‘We'll get out,' he said. ‘I've been in and out of more French clinks than you've had hot dinners. There's always a jailer with a palm to be crossed with silver.'

‘Have you
got
any silver?'

‘In my boot. Bloody uncomfortable. I'll see about it tomorrow.'

‘Will there be a tomorrow for us?' she asked.

‘Good God, yes. They'll have announced tomorrow's quota for the tumbrels already, they call out the names the evening before. Plenty of time to work the oracle. Go to sleep.'

He's lying
, she thought. Even if it was true that he'd escaped from prisons before, it had been with the connivance of The League and its money, safe house, identity papers. But the lies, his very voice, were the rope she clung onto to stop herself slipping into black fear and drowning in it. Now that she was part of it, the silence wasn't silence at all; it was whimpers, snores and rat-infested rustling. Somewhere, in another part of the building, a baby was crying. A jailer's child? A prisoner's?

The pity of it enveloped her. Women loving men as she loved this one, men loving women, children loving parents, father and mother desperate with love for their child, son, daughter torn from loved parents, brothers, sisters . . . the irreplaceable web people spun to keep each other safe ripped apart. For what?

‘Ma's going to be so mad,' she said, just to keep talking and not drowning. ‘Do you think she'll know what's happened to us?'

‘We'll tell her,' he said. ‘Go to sleep.'

‘You shouldn't have come after me,' she said. ‘I could bear anything if I hadn't got you into this.'

‘For God's sake, go to sleep.'

‘I can't.'

There was a jerking cry in the darkness; someone waking from a bad dream into actual nightmare, then someone else's voice gentling whoever-it-was until they were quiet again.

‘Look,' Ffoulkes said, ‘since you insist on flagellating yourself . . . I wasn't going to tell you this, hardly decent considering everything, being your godfather and married and all, but I didn't try and save you out of bloody chivalry ...'

Somewhere a golden sun rose and melted everything in its path as it crept towards her.

‘Fact is, something happened on that bloody bridge when they were marching you across.' He paused. ‘You didn't look your best, you know, hair all over the place, black eye ...'

‘That was later,' she said, happily.

‘Was it? Well, you weren't Venus rising from the waves and I thought: “Leave it, Ffoulkes, it's her own damn fault. You've got better things to do than get your head chopped off for a scarecrow like that ...” '

‘But you didn't.'

‘No, I didn't. That was the moment I realized that if they took you down to hell, I'd follow you. Now in the name of God, let me get some sleep.'

She leaned her head back against the pillar and allowed sunlight to penetrate the marrow of her bones.

‘Ffoulkes,' she said.

‘What?'

‘Do you think they'd provide a cell for two?'

 

 

IT was against the rules for male and female prisoners to lodge together but the Conciergerie's rules were crumbling and he arranged it the next morning, he could arrange everything except their freedom. They were to live
à la pistole
by paying twenty-seven
livres
in advance for accommodation for two. He even carried her over the threshold. The cell had two iron beds with mattresses. They only needed one.

She made him blink by undressing the moment he shut the door and she guessed that his wives and other women had shown more modesty. There wasn't time for modesty; they made love immediately and after a rest they made love again. And again.

‘How long do you think we've got?' she asked.

‘Not long if we go on like this. I won't make roll call.' He rolled off her. ‘We'll send out for luncheon, I think. It looks as if I'm going to have to keep up my strength. What would you like to eat, Mrs Fox?'

She thought he was joking. ‘A little foie gras, perhaps.' But he'd already got a jailer at his beck and call, and foie gras with toast was what she was presented with an hour later. And a bottle of respectable Burgundy.

‘You can get anything brought in if you know the right people,' he said. ‘And have enough chink.'

This was apparent; apart from the food, he'd ordered shaving things and new clothes for himself and, for her, a basque, a shift and a muslin gown to go over them.

It is typical of him
, she thought,
that we must both look nice for the guillotine.

The jailer who brought them was a wheezing fat man with the strawberry nose and broken veins of a heavy drinker, name of Albert. ‘Anything you want, citizen,' he said as Ffoulkes pressed coins into his hand. ‘Anything at all.'

‘I have hopes of compromising young Albert in time,' Ffoulkes said after he'd gone. ‘Blackmail him into letting us out.‘

It was a fiction he indulged in for her; he said there were identity papers they could use stashed in his safe house in Neuilly. He knew, she knew, that Blanchard had supplied the Comité de Securité with details of every
certificat de civisme
he'd ever issued. They'd get out only to be caught and brought back again.