The Sparks Fly Upward (52 page)

But fiction was all they had, fiction and love. What they didn't have was time.

She watched him shave and got out of bed to put her arms round him, squashing her breasts against his bare back, her eyes just able to look over his shoulder at their reflection in the small looking glass he'd hung from a nail in the wall.

He grinned at her. ‘Are you sure this isn't incest?'

‘I don't care.'

They'd been given a tiny sliver of life separate from everything they'd known; his marriage, their old relationship, the past, no longer mattered.

It worried him, mainly on her account, that he wasn't being gentlemanly. It didn't worry her; a sentence of death was a rebirth for them both. Almost unconsciously, he'd given her a new name, Mrs Fox. She liked it; it changed her status to that of his mistress.

‘I'm an abandoned woman,' she told him.

But even here, he couldn't stop being busy. She had to let him go to make arrangements for the Countess and her daughter. Somewhat resentfully, she wandered out into the Hall of Arms after him.
Hurry, hurry, we've only got today. And it's nearly gone.
It was evening.

The place was fuller than she'd expected, its pillars like great trees in a forest in which the undergrowth was people. Flames from torches streamed up from the holders, lighting the vaulting and giving more life to the gargoyles sculpted on the cornices than the faces of the men and women below. The noise of conversation was nearly deafening.

She stood on the steps and looked around them, dreading to see someone she knew. Was Condorcet here? How could they kill so many?

There was a tug on her sleeve. ‘Can I stay by you, citizeness? I don't know anyone else.' It was the shop girl, the one who was pregnant, the one called Marie like her mother. Her full name was Marie Mounier.

They sat together on the steps to talk. Either nobody had explained to her or, in her terror she hadn't understood, that her execution would be delayed until her baby was born. ‘Four months, then,' Philippa said, patting the small swell of belly in an otherwise sticklike frame. ‘A lot can happen in four months.'

Marie sagged with relief. ‘Papa will have time to explain to Citizen Robespierre.'

Her father was on a section committee in the Marais, a good revolutionary, she said. ‘Maman supports the Revolution, too, very strongly, but her tongue runs away with her and she said, you know what she said, because she was cross we didn't have enough to eat.' Marie Mounier the Elder, Philippa gathered, had a tongue that did her no favors with her neighbors, one of whom had probably reported her. On the Sunday of the arrest, she'd been out of the house but her daughter had been in.

‘She used to be cross because Jean-Philippe won't be able to marry me until he comes home from the war,' Marie the Younger said, ‘but now she'll see what a good thing this baby is.'

‘Do you want a boy or a girl?'

‘A boy, of course. To fight for the Republic.'

Philippa went off to find Ffoulkes. ‘If it's the last thing we do, we've got to get that girl out of here before she loses the baby. She's too thin as it is. Could we get a letter to de Vaubon or Danton, somebody who cares, tell them she's here by mistake?'

‘I'm afraid not.' He took her hands, frightening her. ‘They've just told me. De Vaubon and Danton went to the guillotine this morning. Desmoulins, too.'

She closed her eyes. De Vaubon strode across their lids, swaggering, noisy, full of heart. ‘He has a son.'

‘They all had children,' Ffoulkes said. ‘They died well, apparently. Danton told Sanson to show his head to the crowd when it was off. He said it was worth looking at.'

‘Ma will be stricken.'

‘I know.' He'd gained a handkerchief from somewhere and wiped her cheeks with it.

‘They were here last night, then,' she said. ‘I could have talked to him.'

‘No. When your name's called you spend the night in special cells downstairs. You wouldn't have been allowed to see him.'

She was suddenly furious. ‘Don't you tell me they died well. You can't die well, it's a contradiction in terms.'

‘Hang on, Mrs Fox.' He put his arms round her. ‘We'll go back to our cell in a minute.'

‘Now,' she pleaded. ‘Let's go now.'

‘In a minute. Hang on to me.'

More prisoners were emerging from the tributary tunnels and staircases leading into the Hall of Arms, jailers herding them from behind.

There was a drumroll.

‘Here it comes,' a man next to them said.

Oh God
, Philippa thought,
here it comes and I'm not ready.

People were forming into groups, some on their knees, some clinging to family or those they'd faced trial with. One lot, aristocrats to judge from their ornate clothes and hair, formed a graceful frieze. There was a boy no older than sixteen among them. The old man who stood next to him looked out of place, like a small-town apothecary in his old brown coat and black hose, but the resemblance between him and the boy was strong.

First they were counted; jailers and National Guard pushed through the crowd, lanterns swinging, fingers stabbing, lips shaping numbers, swearing at anybody who moved out of place

Fouquier-Tinville stood on the steps in the light, waiting but paying no attention except to a portable writing desk held by a clerk. He scanned papers, scribbled alterations, signed. When this was over he had to report to the Committee of Public Safety with the list, arrange the necessary number of tumbrels, tell Sanson how many to expect . . . God knew when he'd get to bed.

The clerk found the right piece of paper for him and he read from it without looking up, speaking into the only moment when the prison was totally silent.

‘The following will report to the clerk of court's office. For the males: Chateaubriand, Duboeuf, d'Eprémesnil, Huel, Chrétien Malesherbes and Louis Malesherbes, Thouret, Dard father and son, Brun.

‘For the women: de Châtelet, Chateaubriand, de Grammont, de Lubormirski, Malesherbes, Valois, Lupin.'

He turned and hurried off.

‘All of them,' Ffoulkes said softly. ‘Jesus Christ.'

A woman nearby fainted; it turned out her name
hadn't
been read out. Philippa's own knees were weak with relief. They could live another day.

The frieze of aristocrats moved as the old man stepped out of it, took hold of his grandson's hand, patted it and led his womenfolk on the walk to the clerk of the court's office and the cells reserved for those dying tomorrow. The boy was blinking hard in case tears showed. The women glided without expression, except when one of them smiled and held back, waiting for another to catch up.

Ffoulkes stepped out and said something to the old man who paused and inclined his head graciously before walking on.

‘Who is he?' she asked.

‘Malesherbes.'

She watched the old man go. He'd defended Louis XVI at his trial and Marie Antoinette at hers. Condorcet, who'd loved him, called his brain encyclopedic. ‘He is also the greatest gardener in France,' he'd said.

‘What did you say to him?' she asked Ffoulkes.

‘I don't know. An honor to have known him or something. Went to his chateau once, it was like one vast potting shed. Christ, they're killing the whole family. The whole family.'

She took him back to their cell and closed the door.

 

 

IT was like living in a bubble that had alighted to wobble on some protrusion in hell. Inside it was beautiful, iridescent, but with a transparency that showed the horrors outside and a fragility that would be popped any moment by the tip of Fouquier-Tinville's pen.

Daytime was the best; they could wedge the door and make love and play like adolescents—they teased each other a lot. ‘
Elphinstone
?'

‘As bestowed on all eldest Ffoulkes's and I'll thank you not to broadcast it.'

‘I won't. You're not bestowing it on our eldest.' The bubble extended into a future in which they ruled a coral island inhabited by happy, obliging natives; they were still arguing over whether its women should have the vote.

He broke the rules. ‘I'd have liked children.'

‘So would I. It was why I was marrying Stephen.'

‘I wondered why it was. Think what that poor devil's been saved.'

His hunger for her was as sharp as hers for him. What light came through the tiny, barred window gave her skin an olive sheen that excited him almost to madness. He made her spend most of the day undressed. ‘Not at all what I'm used to,' he'd say, ‘I like blond and voluptuous as a rule, not twiggy and small-breasted.'

‘It doesn't seem to worry you.'

‘Just bein' polite.'

She had no artifice. She couldn't set out to delight him because she didn't know how; she was just delighted
with
him. She had no trouble reaching the climacteric, nor did he, but she wondered if she compared badly with his other women. At one point she tapped him on his back. ‘Am I doing this right?'

‘Good God,' was all he said, which was satisfaction in itself.

He never mentioned Félicie, nor did she want him to. She knew that if, by a miracle, they returned to their old life, she would have to give him back to his wife and walk away; to be his mistress would be something neither of their consciences could tolerate. As it was, they were stealing nothing.

He never mentioned Blanchard, either.

The nights were bad. There was a death roll call every evening except Saturday's, or Nonidi's—whatever the Revolution called that day of the week now—because Sanson insisted on Sundays off. They'd be dressed waiting for the jailer's rap on the door, he'd take her hand and say, as he always did and
why
she'd never fathomed, ‘God Bless the Duke of Argyll,' and they'd march out to the hall to hear whether or not they were going to die next morning.

Not hearing their names read out was a ferocious schadenfreude and then an equally ferocious guilt, as if she'd been saying to those taken away: ‘Die
for
us.'

The resultant scenes were awful. On the evening they read out the name of Countess Hervé Faudoas but not her daughter's; Mme de Galles clung to her mother's knees and had to be pulled away. One of the priests, Father Hédé who'd been tried with them, was taken, the other left. The couple from Saint Omer went quietly, hand in hand, still unaware of their crime against the Republic.

They'd go back to their cell and shut the door against the screams and lie down, merely to hold each other.

Gradually, they were drawn into the life beyond their door, Ffoulkes by the helplessness of Mme de Galles, Philippa by concern for the pregnant Marie Mounier for whom Ffoulkes had provided a cell—then, inevitably, for others. They drafted letters of appeal to the Convention and Robespierre for those who couldn't write their own or didn't know how to phrase them.

Ffoulkes bullied the jailers into a fairer distribution of rations. Philippa demanded, and got, a supply of linen to be torn into menstruation towels—something the prison authorities hadn't thought of and other women had been too embarrassed to mention.

For this she was made much of in the Women's Court where the female prisoners did their laundry, a stone-flagged, mossy little place with a fountain set in one wall. Camaraderie was high there and, despite being a foreigner whose country was at war with their own, she was accepted by the common women more warmly than were the female
ci-devants
.

‘Well done, English. How did you do it?'

‘Pity you had to, though, considering we're all trying to get pregnant. '

It would have horrified the virtuous Robespierre to know that sexual nicety had been abandoned in the Conciergerie. A scrawl on the chimney breast of the Hall of Arms read: ‘Fuck Virtue.'

Nearly everybody did—and each other. It wasn't just that pregnancy granted women a reprieve but that few saw any point in going to the guillotine without having tasted what life had left to offer. Prostitutes of both sexes did a roaring trade that earned them money to spend on luxuries, male and female maidens took the opportunity to shed their virginity before they shed their heads, some nuns and priests refused to relinquish their celibacy, others decided not to go to their death wondering.

By day, before the sexes were separated for the night, the Hall thrummed with life in the raw. Saturday nights, when there was assurance of a deathless Sunday, were a Saturnalia. As Ffoulkes said, ‘You can't turn a corner without stepping over somebody's bobbing arse.'

‘As opposed to the rich bobbing arses in the cells,' Philippa told him. ‘This is democracy, this is.'

Extraordinary
, she thought,
how we become used to the extraordinary.

She'd even begun to have her hair done—she liked to look nice for him. Her
coiffeur
was a young man known in the prison as ‘Lulu.' Ffoulkes loathed him. He was outrageously unpatriotic with flapping silk lapels to his coat and breeches tied at the knee with bows. His hair was heavily powdered and turned up at the back with a comb—
‘à la guillotine, cherie'
—with two curls hanging down on either cheek like dog's ears. He tottered about the salon he ran in a corner of the Hall on a pair of women's shoes, which, he said, Mme du Barry had given him before her execution and which were so small that only his toes stuck inside.

He was a commoner but an aristo-lover
par excellence
, a simpering, scented snob who genuflected outside Marie Antoinette's cell every night and considered ‘Let them eat cake,' to be the ultimate in wit. He was also one of the kindest people in the prison; he took young Marie Mounier under his wing and, as Ffoulkes's money began to run out, bought fresh milk for her and did her and Philippa's hair for free. ‘One must keep busy, dear,' he explained, ‘One doesn't want to become
merdeux
.'