The Blue Rose

by Kate Forsyth

  One evening, Pierrick and Viviane were walking home from the theatre with Luna when the bells of Paris began to sound the alarm. A man galloped past, hatless, his face set in a fearsome grimace. Soldiers ran down the street, sabres drawn.

  Pierrick drew Viviane into a doorway. ‘Something is happening. Best be careful.’

  The clangour of the tocsin rang from every steeple and bell-tower. Men began to form into lines in the street, pistols in their belts, pikes in their hands.

  ‘It’s something bad,’ Pierrick said. ‘Let’s get home.’

  They hurried through the streets, Luna kept on a tight leash. On the corner was a frightened-looking boy, selling the evening newspaper. ‘Robespierre accused!’ he shouted.

  Pierrick and Viviane ran the rest of the way home, then locked themselves into the garret. They only unlocked it to let Ivo in an hour later.

  ‘Have you heard the news?’ he cried.

  ‘Is it possible?’ Pierrick responded.

  They all gazed at each other in amazement and fear. Maximilien Robespierre, the architect of the Terror, the man who had sworn to release a river of blood to wash away France’s enemies.

  ‘Robespierre will never permit them to arrest him,’ Viviane said. ‘There will be terrible reprisals.’

  ‘I heard he made a speech accusing the National Convention of being full of royalist spies and conspirators, but refused to name them,’ Ivo said, ‘and so now all the deputies fear he means to purge them all. So they ordered his arrest!’

  ‘I can understand why,’ Viviane said. ‘He has turned on so many of his old friends! No-one is safe anymore. It is as if his thirst for blood can never be quenched.’

  ‘What prison would dare lock him up?’ Pierrick shook his head in disbelief. ‘He will be free in a few hours, I guarantee it, and then those deputies who ordered his arrest will be sorry.’

  The three friends clustered at the window, watching anxiously for any clue to what was happening in the city. Bells rang, drums throbbed, marching feet rang on the cobblestones. Then they heard distant gunfire.

  At some point long after midnight, a man ran down the Rue des Rosiers, carrying a flaming torch. He hammered on doors and windows, shouting, ‘They have him! The Incorruptible is in prison. Madame Guillotine shall drink his blood this day. Robespierre to die!’

  By dawn, the streets were seething with people. No-one knew whether to rejoice or be afraid. Rumours flew about. Robespierre had shot off half his jaw trying to kill himself. No, no, someone argued, he would never be so cowardly. He was shot by a gendarme trying to arrest him. One of his supporters had shot himself; maybe he had tried to shoot Robespierre too. No, it was suicide, someone else insisted. To escape the guillotine.

  No-one knew the truth.

  The guillotine was moved back to the Place de la Révolution that day. The streets were swarming with people, every doorway and window crammed. The crowd mocked and jeered at Robespierre and his supporters, jolted along in tumbrils.

  ‘What a lovely king!’

  ‘Are you suffering, Your Majesty?’

  ‘Death to the tyrant!’

  Once again, Viviane knew the exact moment of his death by the roar of elation from the crowd.

  The day after Robespierre’s execution, gilded carriages were once again seen on the streets of Paris.

  The Jacobins and their supporters were arrested or banished, and those Brissotins who had survived the purge were recalled to the National Convention. The prisons were opened, and those who had somehow escaped the guillotine released. Boards were torn off the windows of wig-makers and silk-weavers, and young men wearing skin-tight culottes and ragged satin coats roamed the streets with bludgeons, looking for sans-culottes to thrash. They laughingly called their clubs their ‘executive power’.

  Pierrick joyously adopted the dandified dress of these Incroyables, as they were called, though most insisted on pronouncing it ‘incoyable’, as the letter R – as in Revolution – was no longer to be pronounced.

  He brought Viviane a severe black dress to wear, and high-heeled red shoes, and a red velvet ribbon to tie about her throat. She put her hand up to it, not entirely understanding.

  ‘You escaped the guillotine,’ Pierrick told her. ‘You are most fashionable now.’

  Viviane looked at herself in the mirror. Sunken cheeks, corpse-white skin, hair hacked à la victime, and that scarlet slash about her throat.

  She felt giddy, disorientated. ‘I don’t think … I don’t want …’

  ‘It’s a new world,’ Pierrick said, ‘and we need to survive it.’

  It was a strange, feverish new world. Balls every night, with women in sheer chemises, like those worn to the guillotine, dancing with men dressed as long-dead kings. Pink satin, gold lace, embroidered stockings, tottering heels, huge plumed hats, cravats so stiff with starch the wearer had to gaze towards heaven. Suddenly, tall wigs like Marie-Antoinette’s famous pouf were seen everywhere. Women wore a purple wig in the morning and an orange one in the afternoon, and gilded their nipples and their toenails. Green – a colour that had been dangerous to wear since poor Charlotte Corday bought a hat with green ribbons to assassinate Marat – was the shade of the season.

  Most nights Viviane went dancing with Pierrick and Ivo, whirling from the arms of one stranger to another. At dawn she went to queue up outside the bakery with the other women, hoping for bread. Often the women curtsied to her, seeing the thin red ribbon bound about her throat, and offered to show her to the front of the line. Viviane always refused, even though it meant she missed out on bread that day.

  It was strange and unsettling to be called ‘mademoiselle’ once more. She had grown used to ‘citoyenne’ and could not help but fear danger and entrapment, no matter what term of address was used.

  One night, the three of them sat drinking cheap gin in a café on the Seine, watching the world pass by and arguing about the revolution.

  ‘Was it worth it?’ Viviane said. ‘So much death, so much horror.’

  ‘Could it have happened any other way?’ Pierrick demanded. ‘Hundreds of years of repression cannot be dismantled easily. If the king and his nobles had their way, we would have been crushed under their heels for another thousand years.’

  ‘Evil times attract evil men,’ Ivo said. ‘Did you hear about the drownings of Nantes? Priests, nuns, women and children, anyone who dared speak out against the madness, all were drowned in the Loire River. They say more than four thousand died. Including babes in arms! How could murdering little babies serve the revolution, tell me that?’

  He leaned forward, his eyes burning with pain and passion. Viviane thought – not for the first time – how lucky she had been that day, when Ivo had come to her rescue and given her a job and his friendship. It gave her great joy to see how Pierrick nodded and put out his hand to grasp Ivo’s, and considered his answer more thoughtfully than ever before.

  ‘You’re right,’ Pierrrick said. ‘When we dreamed of changing the world, we never imagined such bloodshed. If we had known … would we have gone ahead? At what point did we lose control? Could anyone have stopped it, once the machinery was put in motion?’

  Viviane remembered Alouette, the laundress at the Temple prison, and how her black eyes had smouldered with hatred as she had cried, ‘Vengeance at last!’

  ‘I feel so guilty,’ she said with difficulty. ‘All those years, I tried so hard to be good, I tried so hard to help. Yet I was born with blue blood, I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I had no idea what it was like to be poor and sick and starving, with no hope of ever escaping …’

  Ivo took her hand. ‘At least you tried.’

  Pierrick grinned at her, and seized her other hand. ‘And now you know! We couldn’t be poorer or hungrier if we tried.’

  The three of them sat, gripping each other’s hands, an equilateral triangle of love and connection and remorse.

  ‘What is done is done,’ Pierrick said at last. ‘We cannot help what happene
d. Right or wrong, the revolution has swept everything away. What are we going to do to rebuild our lives?’

  A long silence.

  ‘I’d like to go home,’ Viviane said, at the same time that Ivo said tentatively, ‘We could go back to Bretagne.’

  They laughed and looked at each other and squeezed each other’s hands, then looked rather nervously at Pierrick. He seemed to love Paris so much. He was throwing all his energies into being one of the jeunesse dorée, or gilded youths, who laughed and danced and drank and gambled as if they would never see another dawn.

  ‘We will need money. Quite a lot of it.’ Pierrick grinned at them impishly. ‘Viviane, my dearest darling sister, what of our father’s estate? Surey there is something we can sell?’

  With her throat and Luna’s bound with scarlet, and Pierrick and Ivo dressed in white wigs and powder-blue livery, Viviane went to see lawyers and demanded restitution of her father’s property. Most of the estate was entailed, of course, and so his debt-encumbered château and townhouse were to be inherited by a cousin she had never met. It was agreed, however, that Viviane had a right to his personal effects. She was given the keys with low bows and many apologies.

  The marquis’s townhouse was still secured with the Commune’s seals and padlocks. As she opened the door, Viviane smelled musk perfume, dead mouse. She walked through the shadowy rooms, stared at her father’s collection of three-hundred-and-seventy-eight gilded snuffboxes – many with lewd paintings under the lid – and Clothilde’s chests full of beribboned shoes and fans and gloves, many unworn. Pierrick exclaimed in delight, caught up a fan of white ostrich feathers and began to mince about, mimicking Clothilde and her high-pitched breathless way of speaking.

  Ivo was soberer. ‘It is ridiculous, the expense, the waste!’ he said, looking at drawers full of quizzing glasses and jewelled watch-fobs. ‘No man could ever wear all this!’

  ‘What shall I do with it all?’ Viviane asked.

  ‘Sell it, of course,’ Pierrick said, waving the ostrich feather fan lazily. ‘The gaudier the better, these days.’

  Looking through her father’s desk, Viviane found a packet of letters written in a round, childish, awkward hand that she recognised at once. It was Briaca’s. Troubled, she turned them over. One letter fluttered to the ground. Bending to pick it up, Viviane read: she spends much time with the English gardener …

  An awful sick thudding of her heart. Viviane sank down into a chair and began to read.

  Briaca had written down every single one of Viviane’s misdeameanours, small and well-meant as they had been, and sent them to her father the marquis to read. Her tone was cringing, ingratiating, eager to please. Viviane could not bear it.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Pierrick asked her, coming in with a crate piled high with fans, gloves, parasols, vinaigrettes, quizzing-glasses and snuffboxes.

  Mutely she showed him the letters. He dumped the crate on the couch, and began to slowly scan the lines, frowning a little, for reading was not his forte. His frown deepened.

  ‘I always knew someone was writing to Monsieur le Marquis,’ she said. ‘I did not think it was Briaca.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Pierrick said. ‘She loved you. And she was afraid of him.’

  ‘Sometimes fear wins out over love,’ Viviane said.

  Pierrick nodded, sombre as she had ever seen him.

  ‘I knew she wrote to him,’ he said. ‘I carried the mail to Rennes to post. I thought it was the kitchen accounts. Maybe a plea for more money. I did not know, I promise you.’

  Viviane felt faint and giddy. ‘I don’t want …’ She paused, fighting the choke in her throat. ‘I don’t want fear to win over love anymore.’ She looked up at him, tears beginning to spill down her cheeks. She dashed them away. ‘Pierrick, Monsieur le Marquis was your father as well as mine. If the world was a fair place, you would inherit just as much as me. I’d like to split it all, half and half. What do you say?’

  Pierrick put his arm about her and gave her a little squeeze. ‘Much as I hate admitting that bastard was my father, it’s worth it to have a sister like you.’

  ‘It’s yours to do with as you wish,’ Viviane said. ‘You don’t need to come back to Belisima if you don’t want to.’

  He smiled at her. ‘I’ve always wanted to have a go at making a weaving machine powered by the water-mill. And Ivo would love the kitchen at Belisima. All those ovens and spit-roasts! Positively medieval.’

  ‘So we’ll go home?’

  Pierrick nodded, with a sweeping laughing gesture. ‘As soon as we’ve sold all these bloody snuffboxes.’

  32

  To Invent a Rose

  6–22 September 1794

  ‘Good luck, Davy boy,’ Scotty said. ‘I hope you find her.’

  ‘So do I! If I do, I’ll invite you to the wedding.’

  ‘That’d be grand.’ The two men shook hands, then – as David began to walk away – Scotty cried, ‘Hey, Davy, I don’t suppose she has a sister?’

  David turned back, grinning. ‘No, she doesn’t, but I do. Two, in fact.’

  ‘Then I look forward to meeting them.’

  David waved farewell, then set off to look for a boat willing to take him to Saint-Malo. Britain was still at war with France, but there was always someone willing to run the risk for profit. French silk and wine and brandy were harder to get than ever.

  At last David found a boat willing to take him onboard. He oversaw the disposal of his precious cargo, then went to walk around Portsmouth, enjoying the first decent cup of tea that he’d had in a long while. It was good to stretch his legs, to see wild clematis, red haws and elderberries in the hedgerows, and to hear the English tongue spoken all around him. He had a game pie and a beer in a pub on the waterfront, and went out to smoke his pipe and watch the waves.

  The news from France was worrying. The death of Robespierre had not brought peace. There were still clashes and confrontations between royalists and republicans all through the country. But David had no choice. He had to find out what had happened to Viviane.

  He sailed on the evening tide, on a three-masted lugger called the Osprey. It began to spit a few hours later, and rained for the seven days it took to reach Saint-Malo. At last, though, he was on French soil and arranging to hire a cart filled with straw to protect his precious blue-and-white ginger jars.

  The only nag he could buy was a poor old broken-down thing with a shaggy mane and forelock, and hooves the size of dinner plates. David bought him some oats, and set off to walk the fifty miles to the Paimpont forest.

  Each step, he hoped, brought him closer to finding Viviane.

  She stood on the lake shore, gazing across the serene waters to the château. Three towers were still standing, but one was a scorched tumble of stones.

  ‘It’s not as bad as I feared,’ she said to Pierrick.

  ‘You haven’t seen inside yet.’

  Viviane stood still, her hands clasped tightly. Nerves fluttered in her stomach. ‘It will have been good for the fields to have lain fallow so long.’

  ‘Shall we go in?’ Ivo asked, looking about him in interest.

  Viviane nodded, and led the way across the arched bridge and through the gatehouse. The iron gates stood askew. One had been wrenched off its hinges. Luna dashed around, sniffing all the new and exciting smells. Viviane had to pull her away from a rat that lay decomposing on the cobblestones.

  The courtyard was a mess. Dead leaves lay in damp piles, and the windows were all broken and filthy. The parterre garden was a mass of weeds. The château, however, rose into the blue sky, seemingly untouched. A knot inside her chest loosened.

  She went up the steps and tried the door handle. It was securely fastened.

  ‘I locked the doors,’ Pierrick reminded her, ‘and threw the key in the well.’

  ‘Then you’re the one going down the well to retrieve it,’ she said, laughing.

  The château well was in the courtyard outside the kitchen. On this side,
Viviane could see broken and blackened windows above her, and gaping holes in the the slate tiles on the spire. Weeds grew over the cobblestones, and the honeysuckle on the wall had run rampant.

  Pierrick leaned over the well, which had a pointed slate roof that mimicked the château towers. ‘It looks deep. I can’t see the bottom.’

  ‘We’ll lower you down on the rope,’ Viviane said. She gave the rope a sharp jerk and it snapped in her hand. ‘Maybe not.’

  She went to look for more rope in the kitchen garden. The nasturtium and pumpkin vines had grown wildly, but she was heartened to see a few herbs and vegetables had survived. All three were very hungry. Food had been scarce indeed on their journey.

  Despite all the treasures of their father’s house, she and Pierrick had not managed to raise a fortune selling them. There were too many impoverished aristocrats, too much stolen loot. They had managed to gather together only a few heavy bags of silver, Pierrick having wisely refused to accept assignats, which were now worthless. They had dressed like beggars, the silver hidden in their rags, and somehow managed to get home. A boat had given them free passage down the Seine in return for free labour, and then they had walked from Honfleur, sleeping in haystacks or under trees, and begging for food in return for work.

  Some days, they got nothing. But there were always hazelnuts and blackberries and mushrooms to be foraged, and Pierrick devised a clever trap to catch birds. Filthy and footsore, they had come at last to the château, standing eerily quiet and half-ruined on its island in the lake. Viviane hoped that the hidden bags of silver they had carried would pay for repairs, and flax seed, and new looms, and labour.

  ‘Here’s some rope!’ Viviane called. ‘It looks stout enough.’

  She retrieved the coil of rope from the garden shed, and then Ivo tied it securely to the well handle. They lowered Pierrick down and listened to him splashing about and cursing. Then came a cry of triumph. ‘Got it!’ he shouted and they hauled him up again, the huge rusty old key clutched in one wet hand.