The Silver Blade (Bk. 2)

by Sally Gardner

  Sido is like me, he thought. Why have I doubted her? She is my strength, not my weakness. She is my desire. We are bound by the golden threads of light.

  Ahead lay a dense wall of fog. It rolled in off the sea, taking with it all the surrounding scenery, swallowing up the horizon. Hidden somewhere in its folds was the faint sound of waves rushing in on the pebbled shore. ‘This is as far as we go,’ said Yann.

  The Duke looked worried as he dismounted. Holding Louis tight, he shouted, ‘There’s no way down the cliff here. It’s an almost sheer rock face.’

  Yann took no notice of him. He gathered the reins and walked the horses a little way off.

  ‘I tell you . . .’ The Duke stopped what he was saying. He was watching Yann whispering to the horses before letting them go. ‘I thought gypsies were the only people on God’s earth who could talk to their animals like that.’

  ‘So I’ve been told,’ said Yann.

  He went over to Didier. ‘I think we might find a reception party waiting for us down there.’

  Didier took out his pistol. Yann nodded. ‘We’d better hope the boatman hasn’t left.’ He looked back at the Duke. ‘Are you ready?’

  Yann went first, edging his way along a narrow path at the top of the cliff, and then dropping into a crevice. There, hacked out of the rock, well hidden from view, was a flight of precarious stone steps leading to the pebble beach.

  ‘It was a smugglers’ cove, I believe,’ said Didier. ‘Still is, more than likely.’

  They could hear the roar of the sea close by. Out of sight, hidden in the pocket of fog, the tide had begun to turn. It wouldn’t be long before the cove was under water and all hope of rescue gone.

  Suddenly they heard voices.

  ‘Soldiers?’ whispered Didier.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Yann. ‘Half a dozen, I think. No doubt waiting for the butcher, to make sure they’re not swindled out of their money.’

  ‘Where do you think they are?’ asked Didier.

  ‘Hard to tell, but we must find the boatman before he’s forced to leave.’

  They set off along the beach. Even the sound of the foaming waves failed to mask the noise of their feet ringing loud like bells on a Sunday.

  ‘Halt! Who goes there?’ shouted a disembodied voice. ‘It’s Sergeant Berigot. Is that you, Citizen Loup?’

  ‘That’s right,’ growled Yann, as Didier continued down to the sea, relieved to see their boatman rowing with difficulty towards the beach. He waded into the sea to greet the sailor. Holding the prow of the boat, like Gulliver he hauled it towards the shore, as if it were a child’s play-thing, then carefully put Hugo in it. The boy sat quietly. He seemed in a trance.

  ‘Have you got Tull with you?’ shouted the sergeant from the beach.

  Tull, thought Yann, shocked. That old rogue is in on this. He called out, ‘Yes. Where are you?’

  ‘Over here. Where are the goods? Have you got them down on the beach? My men are waiting to help.’

  The Duke, certain he was about to be arrested, pushed past Yann and began wading towards Didier and the boat.

  ‘Tull, where are you?’ Out of the white fog a blue-coated soldier appeared, pistol at the ready. He stared at Yann, amazed. ‘Who the blazes are you?’

  Yann’s answer was to rush at him. The pistol went off. The Duke, turning to see who was firing, lost his footing, and he and Louis disappeared beneath the waves. As Didier let go of the boat to try to save them, the Duke emerged from the water.

  ‘Louis has gone! I had him in my arms and then—’

  By now Yann had another Bluecoat down on the pebbles. Sitting astride him he knocked him unconscious. In the distance came the sound of more feet crunching along the beach towards them. He stood up, tore off his coat, and ran into the sea.

  ‘Get out of the water, Didier! You can’t swim; the weight of your coat will pull you under. Just keep these soldiers off me.’

  Didier did as he was told and waded towards the shore, pulling a knife.

  ‘Get into the boat!’ Yann shouted to the Duke.

  Hugo had woken from his trance and was standing in the boat crying, while the sailor tried his best to stop it from capsizing.

  Yann dived. Instantly the freezing water blinded him. He could feel his skin shrink on his head, the coldness of the water snatching his breath. He came up, then went down again, everything so dark, time running out. His mind was whirling.

  ‘Don’t use your eyes. Your eyes can’t be trusted.’ The words of Tobias the gypsy came to him in the misery of the icy water.

  He could sense the child being buffeted one way and another by the strong current that slowly but surely was sucking him out to sea. Yann grabbed the threads of light. They were losing their living zigzag quality. He knew the child’s life was ebbing, and pulled as hard as he could, coming up for air again as he did so.

  Didier was still battling with the soldiers when the fog cleared sufficiently for them to be distracted by the sight of a child emerging from the sea as if being reeled in on a giant’s fishing line. It was the last image the soldiers saw, for in that moment Didier delivered his final knockout punches.

  Yann climbed into the boat, lifting Louis up and instinctively breathing into him.

  ‘Oh Lord,’ wept the Duke, ‘is he dead?’

  Gradually Yann felt life coming back to the child as Louis began choking and spluttering.

  ‘Quick, a blanket!’ he ordered the sailor, and wrapping Louis up tight gave him to the Duke. He climbed out of the boat into the sea.

  ‘When you arrive in Brighton, ask for Mr Laxton.’

  ‘I owe you my life, sir,’ said the Duke, ‘and that of my son. God bless you.’

  Yann waded back to shore and, picking up his coat, draped it over his soaking clothes; he watched the boat disappear into the fog.

  Didier looked at the prostrate bodies of the sergeant and his men, all knocked out cold, sprawled on the shingle like flotsam and jetsam.

  ‘I wish we could leave silver blades pinned like medals to their coats.’

  ‘Come on, Didier.’

  ‘Don’t you think they deserve them?’

  ‘I think I should never have done such a foolish thing in the first place.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it could easily have given us away. Anyway, Têtu has forbidden it.’

  Didier sighed. ‘That’s another story.’

  Yann didn’t reply. He walked wearily towards the cliff steps. Both of them were soaking wet and shivering, water squelching in their shoes. Up on the cliff top Yann whistled for the horses.

  Didier mounted and rode off, imagining Sergeant Berigot’s face when he came to.

  Yann sat for a moment in his saddle looking over the Channel toward the English coast and asked the wind how long it would be until he saw Sido again.

  Chapter Six

  A notice had been posted at the front of the theatre of the Circus of Follies. It read:

  BY ORDER OF THE COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC SAFETY

  the show The Harlequinade will reopen tonight.

  The whole company knew exactly what that meant and how much danger they were all in, for Yann and Didier had not returned from Normandy, and without Mr Margoza there was no Harlequin.

  Basco, the Italian fencing teacher, was at his wits’ end and he had good reason to be. Since the success of The Harlequinade, Citizen Aulard had let it be known that the star of the show was Aldo Basco, the great Italian clown from Naples.

  ‘But I am a fencing master from Sicily,’ Basco protested.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Citizen Aulard firmly, ‘that’s our little secret.’

  ‘What if I have to act?’

  Heaven help us if that day arrives, Citizen Aulard thought, but said, ‘Don’t worry; as long as we keep Yann’s true identity from the authorities all will be well.’

  These were the days of conscription when young Frenchmen like Yann were expected to fight for their country. The trouble was t
hat although Basco looked the part, he had been completely honest when he said he could not act his way out of a paper hat. Now, with less than an hour before the curtain was due to rise, the poor man was feeling sick to his stomach. Clutching his rosary, he prayed with all his might that the Virgin Mary and any other saint of wayward and lost travellers would hear his prayer and bring Yann back in time, before they were all sent to the Tribunal and the death carts.

  Upstairs in his office, Citizen Aulard was pacing back and forth, his nails chewed to the quick, while Têtu sat on the edge of a chair with Iago the parrot perched on the back.

  ‘I suppose Basco could come in on crutches and limp through his part. After all the theatre has been closed for five days on account of his supposed sprained ankle. Mort bleu, I wish now I’d said he’d broken a leg.’

  ‘It would have made little difference,’ said Têtu, looking sadly at his friend. ‘We would still have been ordered to put on a show.’

  ‘Five days I’ve been rehearsing Basco,’ said Citizen Aulard, who looked tired, ‘and there has been no improvement, none. He’s a wooden doll, a puppet. What are we going to do?’

  ‘I’ll work the magic,’ said Têtu, ‘and make it look as if he’s performing Yann’s tricks.’ He got out of his chair. ‘I’m teaching Yann a new one.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  Têtu handed Citizen Aulard a piece of paper.

  ‘Where did you get this from?’ asked the theatre manager.

  ‘Get what, my friend?’

  ‘Why, this bill! Who spent this money?’

  ‘Look again.’

  Citizen Aulard stared in amazement. Nothing. Just a plain piece of paper.

  ‘Why, that’s marvellous, quite extraordinary!’

  ‘Then I will do the magic tonight.’

  ‘It’s not the magic that worries me,’ said Citizen Aulard. ‘He’ll give the game away the minute he appears on stage.’ He threw up his arms and exclaimed, ‘We are lost. What will become of Iago?’

  Much had changed since the days when Citizen Aulard had managed the Theatre of Liberty in the rue du Temple, and one of the main transformations started with the theatre manager himself. He had become passionate about the real-life drama that was happening outside his proscenium arch; the appalling tragedies played out daily, seasoned as always with the pepper of pathos, in the court rooms of the Tribunal.

  The injustice of it all had struck Citizen Aulard like a bolt of lightning, for what is liberty, what does liberty stand for if it is not the right to free will, the right to free speech? The right to come and go as one pleases? More important still, what did it say about the leaders of the Revolution if they cared so little for their fellow men that they argued there was virtue in terror? Surely that way lies the end of the world?

  Têtu agreed wholeheartedly with his sentiments.

  ‘Fine words are what all actors want,’ he replied, ‘but only the few and the brave are called upon to act.’

  To Têtu’s astonishment Citizen Aulard had acted, and Têtu had been genuinely moved by this newly courageous man, a sheep in borrowed lion’s clothes, who was determined to play his part helping citizens escape, even if it cost him his life.

  Yann, Têtu and Citizen Aulard had set about gathering a small company of trusted actors, an eccentric menagerie of misfits. Every one of them had his or her reasons for joining such a dangerous venture; all of them knew their lives were at stake if it failed.

  The decision to move to new premises had arisen due to Citizen Aulard’s realisation that the theatre on the rue du Temple was too open to prying eyes. After all, this was the age of spies, of busybodies and nosy neighbours, of flapping ears and loose tongues. There was no choice but to find another venue with easier access to the road to the coast.

  The Circus of Follies, as it was known, was on the south bank of the Seine situated in a muddle of streets off the rue Jacob, hidden in an undistinguished square. There, squashed in between the crowded tenement blocks with a few wretched shops and one grubby café to keep it company, it looked ill at ease with its surroundings, desperately waiting to be found.

  And Yann had found it, not from above but from below in the catacombs, while he was trying to find a way out of Paris that bypassed the barricades and gates. Down in those ancient Roman limestone quarries, long since abandoned, was a honeycomb of tunnels and caves and passages. This is where Yann began his search.

  In between shows, he would disappear for days, carrying with him enough supplies to last up to a week. On these journeys he started mapping the routes, helped by work carried out before the Revolution, when the catacombs had been reinforced to stop Paris from subsiding into the abyss. The workers, afraid, Yann supposed - as he was himself - of getting lost, had written on the walls the names of the corresponding streets above.

  To begin with Yann was disorientated by the darkness, a sensation he wasn’t used to, for the dark had never bothered him. Yet here, where no sunlight had ever been, the darkness had an altogether unfamiliar texture. No dawn would break through these shadowy corridors. This darkness would never remember the light of a lantern; it would be nothing more than a pinprick in the liquid heart of eternal night. So powerful was this absence of light that for the first time Yann experienced the sensation of being blind.

  After a while, he began to find in this strange subterranean world a place of peace where he could think, without the lights and noise of Paris to distract him.

  Over the weeks he refined what he needed to take with him. A hammock was essential, so when exhaustion played havoc with his sense of direction he could restore it by sleeping.

  The beauty - the underground streams, the cavernous chambers, the mysterious writing on the walls - began to work a magic on him. The discovery of an abandoned shoe touched him deeply. A memento weighted with all the desire for life, made more poignant still by the bones brought from Paris graveyards and arranged along the walls.

  It was one day, one night - he didn’t know - after many hours of exploring when Yann finally stopped, knocked some nails into the walls and climbed into his hammock. He was drifting off to sleep in a twilight between dreams and reality when he thought he heard whispering.

  ‘Damask and death,

  Velvet and violence.’

  The Sisters Macabre were singing to him.

  He was out of his hammock in a flash. Lighting his lantern, he lifted it high and looked behind and in front. Nothing, just a long passage that disappeared into blackness. Was it a dream? They had appeared to him before in nightmares, the Seven Sisters Macabre, the tragic automata Kalliovski had created from the corpses of his most beautiful victims.

  ‘Calico and corpses,

  Taffeta and torture.’

  By the light of his lantern Yann saw a passage hewn out halfway up the wall. He knew now that he was awake. He crawled into the dank space, pushing his knapsack ahead of him. He emerged in a high-ceilinged room. It was empty. Shining the lantern he looked up and realised he was staring into a shaft: an escape route. Yann took out his map. He had found many such escape routes, but for various reasons none were usable. They were too exposed or just plain unsafe. He needed one that came up into the city out of sight. Carefully he clambered to the top of the shaft where an old, rickety spiral staircase protruded into the void, and cautiously started to climb, uncertain if it would collapse under his weight. It was sturdier than he had thought and he found himself in a cellar. At one end was a narrow wooden door which needed all his strength to open. It led into a derelict building that was home to hundreds of startled pigeons. As far as he could make out it was a small playhouse that looked as if it were about to come tumbling down.

  Next day Citizen Aulard made enquiries into who owned the building and with the financial backing of Charles Cordell and Henry Laxton he bought the rundown theatre.

  Citizen Aulard oversaw its restoration, organising carpenters and scene painters to repair the stage and generally make the place more appealing. On the
opening night the show, a pantomime, went well. Magic was what nearly all the citizens of Paris hungered for, anything to escape what was happening day by day. Those faithful few in the audience who could remember Topolain and his talking Pierrot were in agreement that Basco’s Harlequin outshone even the great magician.

  With a stage full of actors, and many changes of scenery, there was so much to distract the eye that one hardly noticed there were extra players on some nights: a portly clown, or Colombine’s charming maid, or two butcher boys, who were in reality a merchant and his family in disguise, waiting to be taken to the catacombs and then out of Paris and to the coast.