The Sparks Fly Upward (54 page)

From a tumbrel nearer the gates a woman shouted that she wanted to pee. A jailer told her to do it where she stood.

The crowd outside was becoming denser by the minute and the jailers inside the court more nervous. Somebody came out with pikes and handed them round, but the faces at the gate weren't so much hostile as . . . Philippa didn't know what it was; curiosity, perhaps, intentness, as if waiting for some promised spectacle.

They have
, she thought,
they've come to see Ffoulkes go to his death.

‘Something
is
up,' he said suddenly and turned his back on her. ‘Get these bloody knots untied.'

‘How?'

‘Use your initiative for Christ's sake. And your teeth.'

She turned so that they were back to back and felt the rope round his wrists with her fingers. It was tight. ‘Unclench your fists.' When he did, she realized his hands were shaking. ‘Don't,' she said, ‘Don't hope.'

‘Just get the sodding thing off.'

She worked at the knots. Beside her two men, back to back, were trying to release each other as well. The jailers were taking no notice of them, their eyes were on the gates behind her. She heard a kerfuffle. ‘What's happening?'

‘Two horsemen coming in. Keep working.'

She kept working, craning her neck to catch a sight of the newcomers. Their horses clopped by her towards the group at the arcade and she saw that one of the men was very large. Both wore big slouch hats with red, white and blue plumes. They were accompanied by a troop of armed men on foot; she didn't recognize the uniform. The two men dismounted and joined in the discussion with Fouquier-Tinville.

Ffoulkes was shifting so that he could look at the gates and then the arcade and she kept losing her grip on the cord round his wrists.

She stopped as the two men approached the carts. Fouquier-Tinville came with them. As usual, he had papers in his hands and was splaying them like cards to show to the smaller of the newcomers. ‘. . . nor this one, nor this one,' he was saying. ‘Citizen Robespierre signed none of them. All of them,
all
, bear the authority of the Tribunal. I don't care what's happened, these are legally authorized and must be obeyed.'

‘I don't think you understand your position, citizen. Forty-eight went to the guillotine yesterday who shouldn't have . . . Forty-eight.'

‘I was obeying orders.'

‘. . . you don't want to add this lot as well. Who are they? Anyone special?'

Fouquier-Tinville sorted through his papers.

Philippa found that their conversation was failing to reach her brain in any sort of order; they might have been speaking Chinese. Instead she watched the big man stroll to the first cart and draw his sword, beckoning its occupants to come to the cart's edge so that he could reach them.
They're going to stab us.

Instead, the man was cutting the prisoners' ropes. He went along the line doing it. The carts tilted as their occupants rushed to the side nearest the man and turned their backs, bending forward to extend their bound hands behind them—a posture that looked vaguely naughty.

Nobody's stopping him
.

‘Ah, yes,' Fouquier-Tinville was saying, still consulting paper, ‘there are two English. Here we are: “Plotting to overthrow the Republic, enemies of the State.”' He was relieved. ‘I think you'll agree on those two at least. We must set an example.' He looked up and saw the man cutting the prisoners free. ‘No, no. Stop that.'

‘We've been setting an example for ten bloody months,' the other man said, ‘The people are sick of it.' He pointed to the crowd at the gates. ‘Who'd you think they're going to cheer to the guillotine? This lot? Or Robespierre?'

The man with the sword had reached her cart. Obediently, she lined up with Ffoulkes to turn her back and hold her arms out. She felt hardly a pull before her hands were free.
Must be a very sharp sword
, she thought.

Fouquier-Tinville was pestering her liberator. ‘You shouldn't do that.'

‘Ah well,' the big man said. ‘They might as well be comfy.' He looked up at Philippa. ‘Miss Dapifer, is it?' He gave a slight bow. ‘I'm a friend of your mother's. You might say I'm here on her behalf.'

‘Oh,' she said. He spoke French with an Irish accent and his face was as round as it was amiable. She found herself saying, ‘And how is Mama?'

‘She's well, very well.'

Wiping the sweat from his face, Fouquier-Tinville had turned back to the other man. His head kept nodding as if attached to a spring. ‘Citizen, I've only been obeying orders ...'

‘I know,' the man said. ‘You can tell them that at your trial.' He was casually dressed, despite his splendid hat, and his cravat was orthodox in its grubbiness but he had authority and his face might have shown humor if Fouquier-Tinville hadn't been trying him to the limit.

He spoke to the clerk of the court, who'd come up. ‘We'll have to release the prisoners in batches,' he said. He jerked his head towards Fouquier-Tinville who was poring over papers that were shaking too violently to be read. ‘Let them go en masse and they'll lynch him. Get these people down and free them. We're going to need the carts.'

Next she found herself and the others milling around the clerk of the court's office while a harried official scratched their names off a list. The little fat prisoner, almost affronted at the anti-climax of his release, wanted written assurance that he wouldn't be arrested again.

‘It's over?' the prostitute kept asking. ‘The Terror's over?'

Nobody answered her, nobody knew or, if they did, their brains wouldn't absorb the alteration.

Philippa seemed to be in one place and then another without any physical effort in between. She was back in the Court of May now and caught sight of Ffoulkes. He was angry, furious. He marched up to the man who'd said he was a friend of her mother's and was questioning him, looking slight but aggressive against the man's bulk, like a dog yapping at a lazy bull.

Don't
, she thought. Somehow a massive dome that had bricked them in was blowing away as lightly as if it had been constructed from feathers.
Don't.
The wind might change and reconstruct it before they could get out.

The little fat prisoner said, ‘I can go then?' Nobody answered him and he began sidling towards the gates. The prostitute slipped through them and into the crowd like an eel returning to water. The chief jailer was trying to shoo the new intake of prisoners out into the Quai de l'Horloge. ‘You can go home,' he was saying, ‘Go home to Brittainy.' They stared at him and one of them asked, ‘How?'

Philippa went up to Ffoulkes and took his arm to try and lead him away. He shook her off. ‘Tell me what's
happening
.' He spoke in English. ‘I've a right to know.'

The Irishman said, ‘Well, no, not at the moment ye haven't. Ah, here's Citizen Deputy Barras. Be polite now.'

Citizen Deputy Barras was the man he'd ridden in with and his authority was growing by the minute; jailers, officials were beginning to jump to his orders; only Fouquier-Tinville, still leaning against the cart and leafing through his papers as if El Dorado might be in them somewhere, was paying no attention.

‘What's going on here?' Barras asked.

‘I was explaining to this citizen that he was to make himself scarce,' the Irishman said, ‘for reasons that you and I have discussed.'

‘Hello, Vicomte,' Ffoulkes said.

Deputy Citizen Barras stared at him before turning away. ‘Get him out of here.'

The big Irishman took Philippa and Ffoulkes by the arm and scooped them towards the gates. ‘Now's not the time.'

They had to wait while jailers sallied out onto the Quai to clear a path through the crowd—not for them but for a procession arriving from the Right Bank. Riflemen were among a large contingent of National Guard trying to march in, none of them able to keep step for the push of people looking to see what they were escorting.

A boy who'd climbed up onto one of the gateposts shouted, ‘It
is
him. That's his blue coat.'

The column edged through the gates. In its center men were carrying a stretcher. The figure lying on it was clutching a bandage that wound around his face, like a child with mumps, obscuring most of it and seeping blood. His stained coat had been a pretty blue and his stockings were rumpled round his ankles, showing bare calves of an almost greenish whiteness.

‘Christ Almighty,' she heard Ffoulkes say. ‘It
is
Robespierre.'

The stretcher bearers laid their burden on the stones and went back to help the rest of their column through the press.

The little fat man edged up to the stretcher and looked down at the figure of Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre before guards shoved him out of the way. ‘So there
is
a God,' he said.

Other men were being escorted in and the crowd chanted their names as they passed.

‘
Saint Just
.' A calm, point device man.

‘
Couthon
.' In a wheelchair, groaning.

‘
Robespierre Le Petit
.' Maximilien's younger brother, Augustin, hopping on his one uninjured leg.

‘
Dumas
.' Hatless, still attempting to give orders. He'd been the president of the tribunal that had tried her and Ffoulkes.

Someone shouted, ‘Give me back my father, you bastard.'

It was a war cry and the crowd answered it in a roar that was taken up along the quay, then the island, crescendoing across the bridges to Right and Left banks as if all of Paris had been orphaned and wanted the dead returned to it. The guards were having to fight against hands and fists in order to get the rest of the prisoners through, dragging in the human detritus that had once ruled France. Two of them were corpses.

As each was hauled past the gates, he was put straight into a tumbrel. Robespierre was already in one; Philippa saw his bandage trailing over its side. The crowd was trying to get in to reach him. It would tear him to bits.

It was the Irishman who prevented a massacre. He placed himself in the middle of the gates and shouted, ‘Patience, now, patience, citizens. They'll be on their way soon.' An enormous voice, trained to carry, caught the attention of the people trying to get through the gates and silence spread. ‘You can accompany them to Madame La Guillotine,' the Irishman said. ‘Her most justified feast and, by Jesus Christ Our Lord, let us hope, her last.'

There was a collective sigh, a sound like a huge beast satisfied. ‘And now, if you'll excuse me . . .' The Irishman looked round to see that Ffoulkes and Philippa were behind him and used his body like a battering ram to make a path for them out onto the quay.

He led them quickly to a corner of the Pont Neuf overlooking the Left Bank where there was a tiny park off what had once been the Place Dauphine and sat them down on a bench under a chestnut tree. It was a quiet place; the noise from the Quai de l'Horloge came to it reduced to a beat, like far-off machinery.

‘May I know your name, sir?' Ffoulkes asked.

‘At the moment I'm Citizen
Deus Ex Machina
as far as you're concerned. Sir Mick, for short.'

‘We appear to have much to thank you for. And now, perhaps you'd tell us what's happened,' Ffoulkes said. He was still angry. She realized he'd been angry all the time, suppressing it only to be brave for her; angry at his humiliation and powerlessness, angry at the banal, bungling, viciousness of it all. She wondered where he found the energy.

At the river's edge an angler was hunched over his line, incurious about all but fish. A woman had set up an easel on the grass and was painting the view, watched by some children. Philippa rested her eyes on them.

‘. . . and then, as far as I can gather, he made a mistake,' the Irishman was saying. ‘He went to the Convention and accused unnamed deputies of . . . I don't know what it was—lack of virtue, maybe. Said he'd unmask them on the morrow. Not a bad man, Robespierre, a good one actually, so good he was sure he only had to sweep France of its sinners and how happy a little Republic it would be. That's what a monster is, d'ye see, a man who knows he's infallible. Thought he was a political Messiah, so he did. But what he didn't understand and what Jesus, God love um, knew is that we're all sinners. So when he accused unnamed deputies of sin, each man-jack of them thought: “Is it me? Will it be my skeleton he pulls from the cupboard?” And they had to do something about it.'

‘Is it over?' Philippa asked, ‘Is the Terror over?'

The Irishman leaned forward to look past Ffoulkes at her. ‘Ah well ...'

‘What happened then?' Ffoulkes snapped.

‘Barras happened.' The Irishman leaned back. ‘Citizen Deputy Barras, a man with whom I've had dealings in the past.'

‘Vicomte de Barras,' Ffoulkes said. ‘We've met before.'

‘So I gather, but since he's your passport home, I don't think we'll drag up his title at the moment.'

They're both angry
, Philippa thought.
How can everybody stay so angry?

‘Anyway, he's renounced it,' the Irishman said, more gently. ‘And he was the one with the bowels to organize against Robespierre, so he was. Took command of the troops, ordered the arrest of our Maximilien and his cohorts. He expected to have to fight, thought there'd be alarums and excursions, calls to arms. There weren't any. Not so much as a whistle against him.'

One of the children with the woman who was painting wandered towards them, a little girl, her head to one side. ‘Hello,' she said.