The Flood-Tide

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Well, both well. Flora misses you, of course, but the bairn flourishes. She will tell you all in her letter. But we have had sadness at home. William, where is William? He should be told as soon as possible.'

  ‘I can send for him in a moment. But what is it? Is someone ill?' He went to the door of his cabin and said to the sentry, 'Pass the word for William Morland.' By the time he had closed the door and turned to face Charles again, he had deduced the nature of the bad news. ‘Charlotte? Ill?'

  ‘She is dead,' Charles said quietly. Thomas shook his head slowly.

  ‘Poor little girl. I can hardly believe it. She was well and strong when I saw her last.' Charles told him briefly what had happened.

  ‘He will feel it terribly, I'm afraid,' Charles said. 'He was devoted to her.'

  ‘I will see he has a little time to himself. His watch will be called in half an hour, but I'll excuse him. He'll want to be alone, I expect.’

  *

  William's impulse to flight sent him up to the foretop, his second home, and, when the men were not at quarters, a place of solitude - a rare commodity in the Ariadne. Above him the fore topmast described slow and erratic circles against the blue sky as the ship rolled a little at anchor; beside him the topmast shrouds hummed delicately in the light wind that brushed his face and ruffled his hair. Far below him the life of the ship went on, and beyond the wooden walls of his little world the life of the harbour went on, but he turned his eyes away from both, and looked outward, towards the open sea.

  Charlotte, dead. He tried to think about it, but his mind baulked like an overfaced horse, refused to grasp the notion. She had always been there, commanding and protecting him, from the first moment she had stood upright on her strong legs, and pulled him up, weak and tottering, beside her. As the steady swing of the foretop lulled and mesmerized him, he imagined that he could remember her even before that, when they sucked at the same breast, when they lay curled together in the same womb. He remembered when he had seen her last, that last morning, when she had forgiven him for breaking away from her, and given him her most prized possession, the lock of Mouse's mane, in token of it.

  And now he would never see her again. He would not bring her gifts from the West Indies. The letters he had written to her, telling of his progress and feelings, would not be read. She would not grow handsome and turn up her hair and marry and produce little nephews and nieces for him. She would never again be scolded for being rough or untidy or disobedient. All her rebellion was at an end. She was dead. He stared out at the endless blue sea, fading mistily into the paler blue sky, and forced himself to think about, drove his mind to tackle the thought of his beloved twin's death.

  I'm free, he thought. All my life I have lived in her shadow, been measured against her and found wanting. All my life I have been 'poor William', who should have been a girl, because Charlotte would have made the better boy. Now I can be myself, and be judged only as myself, not as the lesser, the worse half of a pair. He folded his arms tightly around himself, and rocked in an agony of grief for her, because he had loved her, and she ought not to die unmourned, betrayed by the one closest to her, whom she had needed most. He grieved because part of him could not grieve; because his freedom gladdened him; because what he had felt that first moment in the captain's cabin when he heard the news had not been sorrow, but relief.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Rue de St Rustique was hardly more than a narrow cobbled alley, running up the shoulder of the hill Montmartre to debouch under the walls of the convent, and made dark and damp by the high walls of the houses on either side. No. 7 was a small, square house, with a tiny courtyard, too dark to grow even the hardiest of flowers, hemmed in by a high wall pierced only by one forbidding iron gate. The walls had been painted rust-red, but the paint was flaking off in patches. Inside the house was dark too, only the second-floor windows being high enough to receive light.

  It was by one of these windows that Aliena customarily sat. She had never minded the darkness of the house, the single gate, the high walls, the sense of being shut in, for a great part of her life had been spent in a convent, and it was to be near the convent that she had chosen this house from amongst those she could afford. But she missed the flowers and gardens and woods of Chaillot. There had been gillyflowers outside the window of the Mother Superior's parlour, which in the summer had filled the room with their scent. Aliena had always loved flowers, and birds. Her comfort here was the sparrow which had built its nest under the roof above the window where she sat. The cheerful, noisy life of the little birds was a background to her thoughts.

  She had little to do now but think, for her eyesight had dimmed to a point where she could not work or read, and her strength was such that she could only with difficulty go downstairs. The priest who said Mass at the convent came to her three times a week to give her the Sacrament; otherwise, she had no visitors. She listened to the sparrows, and the bells, and dozed a little, and thought her thoughts.

  On 8 September 1775, the birth feast of Our Lady, she had had her eighty-eighth birthday. Patiently as she had endured her life, she hoped it would be her last.

  In the pretty house in Clichy, which Allen Macallan had bought for her and the baby so many years ago, she had thought often of Chaillot and St Germain; but since coming here to the Rue de St Rustique she had found her thoughts returning to England and Yorkshire, and the years she had spent there with her mother, Annunciata, and her daughter Marie-Louise. So much wrong, and so much sorrow, the one, she felt, following on naturally in consequence of the other; and the baby, Henri Maria, a baby no longer but a full-grown, full-blooded man of nearly thirty, going on with the wrong, and perpetuating the sorrow.

  He was at Versailles today; last night he had been at the opera in the party of the new little Austrian Queen, Marie-Antoinette, who loved pleasure and dressing-up and gaiety as the lark loves the air; afterwards to a private party at the Palais-Royale for drinking and card-playing amongst the fashionable set who surrounded the Duc de Chartres. Henri always came and told her about his activities, and she enjoyed hearing about them, about the Court world she had once known so well and was not so far from; but she listened always with the strained attention of one who awaits a secret message of bad news. The vice was in him; he did wrong; and though he loved her, she believed, as much as was in him to love, it was not enough to persuade him to virtue. It was her fault - it must be her fault; she had brought him up from babyhood. How had she failed? She sometimes thought she had not loved him enough, half her mind being always on the life she had had to leave behind. How could she warn him for the future? What would happen to him when she was gone? She had left word for him to come up to her room when he returned home, but the evening passed without him. Her maid came to change her candles before going to bed, and Aliena sat on, waiting; night and day were all one to her now. The sky was paling, the birds beginning their morning racket, when he finally came in, homing at dawn like a roving tomcat, she thought. But she must greet him before scolding, or lose his confidence.

  ‘Well, Grandmama, have you not been to bed? You are as big a reprobate as I,' he said cheerfully, coming to kiss her cheek and bringing the reek of stale tobacco and wine and women's scent with him. Smelling of his iniquity, she thought, but she did not speak it, nor reprove him for his loose talk.

  ‘What need have I of going to bed?' she said instead.

  ‘True,' Henri said, sitting down on the stool beside her couch. 'You do not need it for either of the things I use it for. Now, don't scold! I come home in good spirits today, and in a position to swear I have not increased your debts by one sou. In fact, I am weighted with ill-gotten gold. The cards were with me last night, and you shall have it all - all but the price of a new suit for me, that is; and one or two trifles that I have been in need of; and - in short, you shall have most of it.'

  ‘Some of it,' Aliena corrected, and was not so blind that she could not see the smile that broke across his face like the rising
sun. If he had such charm as that, he could not be past redemption, could he?

  ‘Some of it,' he agreed. 'How well you know me, Grandmama. You have spoilt me for other women, you know. Where could I ever find a wife to match you for loyalty and understanding, or for beauty and intelligence, if it comes to that?'

  ‘Henri, please don't speak in such a way. You know it distresses me,' she said.

  ‘Ah, I sense a reprimand on its way. This is the moment, Grandmama, at which I claim to be overwhelmingly tired, and in grave need of sleep—'

  ‘Sit down, Henri. I must and will talk to you,' Aliena said, and Henri hesitated in the act of rising, and then sat again, stretching out his legs and trying to look nonchalant. ‘Who is it you have been with tonight?' she asked him, by way of opening. He didn't answer, but she had known he would not. 'A new perfume, I detect,' she said. 'My eyes may be failing, but my nose is good. Another, different woman, Henri - and how many does that make?'

  ‘Really, Grandmama, how can I possibly—'

  ‘No, I don't mean in your life, child. Even I would not expect you to have kept such a tally. But in a week? In a month? This year alone? There was the fishmonger's wife—'

  ‘How the Devil—!' Henri cried explosively, and controlled himself as quickly. 'I beg your pardon,' he said smoothly. 'Honour where honour is due. I suppose the odour of Poissonnieres is rather clinging.'

  ‘He came here, Henri,' Aliena said. 'The fishmonger himself came here, angry and grieved, looking for you. I managed to calm him and send him away.’

  Henri looked pained, genuinely sorry that she had been forced to engage in such a scene. 'I'm sorry that you should have been troubled. Not for the world would I have had you face—' He hesitated.

  ‘Face what? Your cuckold. Or rather, one of your cuckolds?' The use of such a word by her shocked him. ‘But his sorrow, Henri, was as strong as his grief. Can't you understand that? What you do is not a sin because it is forbidden, but because of the harm it does.’

  He felt a little ashamed, remembering how Madame de Murphy had chided him with taking the wives of men who minded when there were so many complacent men that he might cuckold; and shame made him surly.

  ‘I assure you, madam, that the fishmonger was an aberration. The vast generality do not mind in the least, and if they do not mind, who is harmed?'

  ‘You are,' she said. There was a moment of silence, in which she heard the sparrow outside the window chipping away at the dawn with its territorial call. 'You harm yourself, not only with your adulteries, but with your gambling and drinking. You harm your soul, Henri.' She saw him turn his head away with an exasperated movement at the word, and sadness welled up in her. 'You are not entirely to blame,' she said. 'You are the child of sorrow and sin, and it is in your blood. Perhaps I have been in error in not telling you more about yourself. I hoped to keep you isolated from the infection, but I should rather have alerted you to it.’

  He looked at her with dawning interest. 'You are going to tell me now?' She was silent a moment more, marshalling her thoughts.

  ‘My mother,' she said, 'was an Englishwoman of gentle birth, a Countess—'

  ‘The Countess of Strathord,' Henri supplied, nodding. She shook her head.

  ‘No, that title was given to your mother, created for her by King James III. My mother was Countess of Chelmsford by marriage. She was royally descended, but illegitimately. That was the first snag in the thread, and from that one, followed all the others. She had—' where was a long pause, for it was hard to say the words, 'she had an incestuous relationship with her stepson. I was the child of that union. The second snag. I produced your mother, Marie-Louise—'

  ‘The King's daughter,' Henri said.

  ‘The King's bastard. She produced you. From an honourable stock - the Morlands of Morland Place in the County of Yorkshire - there came forth this rogue shoot, and like many a rogue shoot, it proved almost stronger than the parent plant. With a rose bush, the gardener cuts out the sucker, so that it does not drain the true stock of strength; but the family did not cut out this shoot. They honoured it, and it has gone on growing, stronger and stronger, carrying the evil with it, keeping it alive. Don't you see, Henri, what you are? Unlawfully got, as was your mother, and her mother, and her mother before her. And how many more bastards have you fathered to carry on the line?'

  ‘None that I know of,' Henri muttered sullenly. Aliena heard the tone of his voice, and controlled herself. She folded her hands in her lap, and drew on her reserves of strength.

  ‘Don't sulk,' she said sharply. 'Sit up straight, and attend to me. I must be practical. I cannot turn you out of your own nature. I cannot persuade you to chastity—' She could not see the small smile of irony at the word, but she sensed it. ‘—and therefore another way must be found. Henri, you must marry, get your children lawfully.'

  ‘Grandmother, how can I marry? I could not afford to, even if I wanted to, and I am sure I do not want to. What nobleman is going to bestow his daughter on a man whose wealth consists in this dreary house and a handful of debts?'

  ‘I did not say you were to marry a noblewoman.' ‘What? Marry a commoner? I am the Comte de Strathord.'

  ‘That worthless title! I wish I had never told you about it. In my folly, I thought it would help you, but it has only betrayed you into error. Forget it, Henri, remember what your mother was.'

  ‘And my father?' Henri said silkily. 'What was he?' She was silent. 'You never will tell me.'

  ‘To what purpose? I say again, marry some good, sensible, pretty girl and use your energies to keep her and your family.’

  He shook his head. 'It's too late, Grandmother,' he said, but gently. 'I have lived for too long as the Comte de Strathord, however worthless you deem the title, to become plain Monsieur Morland. You don't understand society, living outside it as you do. The two worlds are separate, and cannot intermingle. Nothing can change that.'

  ‘You are too high,' she said, clenching her fist in her anger and frustration. 'You think too well of yourself. I tell you you must marry, give up this life of dissipation before it is too late.'

  ‘We shall quarrel if I stay longer,' Henri said, standing up. 'I am going to my bed now. Shall I wake your maid? No? Then goodnight, Grandmother,' he said coldly. 'I am sure you mean for the best, but you don't understand how things are.’

  His footsteaps went to the door, the door opened and shut, and Aliena was left alone with her thoughts again.

  *

  Henri slept soundly through the morning, and woke in the afternoon hungry and cheerful. The conversation with his grandmother seemed far away, and had acquired in his mind the unreality of the hour before dawn. He dismissed it easily as an old woman's fancy. Talk of retribution and sin indeed! And inherited taints? Foolish nonsense! Like all good Catholics, like all his friends, he intended to be virtuous, to repent and be forgiven and live a pure life -when the time came. Virtue was for old men, who could do no better and had the grave before them for a warning. He dressed himself, dismissed Duncan, and slipped out of the house in search of amusement and dinner.

  Paris was spread below him as he came to the precipitous edge of the hill, where a long flight of steps would take him down between the crowded crooked dwellings to the plain below. His heart lifted as he looked out over the smudged and rosy city, lifting a thousand church spires above its chimney smoke, hedged in by dark green woods and bisected by the silver snake of the Seine. It was the place to be, the only place to live! He trotted down the steps, eager and unconcerned as a ranging dog, sniffing at the smells from the houses he passed - here was bread baking, here a brief rapture of coffee, there the heartbreaking smell of frying onions. At an upstairs window, a pot of scarlet geraniums flamed in a patch of sunshine; from inside a dark and odorous house, a canary sang as though pleading for release; an old woman, dressed all in black, sat at her door on a broken chair and called out to him as he passed; a young girl came toiling up the steps with a basket on her arm, filled with onions
and giant radishes and a scrawny-necked boiling fowl, and blushed deeply as she incautiously caught Henri's eye.

  The whole city, the whole of life was his, he felt, that sunny autumn afternoon. He wondered where to go. He thought of Madame de Murphy, his good friend, but suddenly could not bear the thought of intelligent conversation. He wanted something as uncomplicated as that shiny-faced girl going home from market with her radishes. He wandered on, simply enjoying the day and the city, until he came to the river, where the Pont Neuf crossed it. Suddenly he was too close to his usual life. There was the Old Palace on one side of him, the Palais de Justice in front of him, the homes of the rich all around. He hastened across the river and dived for shelter into the maze of alleys and courts and tenements that crowded the left bank.

  The awareness that he was very hungry impinged upon his senses at the same moment as the delicious smell of roast mutton, and he realized that he was standing outside a café called the Cheval Bleu. Not the sort of place he would normally patronize: a common café, frequented by lawyers' clerks and students and working men of the craftsman class. But it looked clean and decent, and the memory of the girl with her basket was fresh in his mind. It was an adventure. He looked down at himself, removed the obvious marks of his rank, and decided that he would not be too badly out of place, unbathed and unshaven as he was. He went in.

  The silence that fell over the place told him that he had been too optimistic about his appearance. But the proprietor came hurrying forward, beaming a smile, his old-fashioned wig and blue coat immaculate, his white napkin over his arm like a badge of rank.

  ‘Well, well, sir - my lord - welcome to Le Cheval Bleu. Let me show you to a table - the best table of course, for m'sieur - milord—'

  ‘Just plain Monsieur Ecosse,' Henri said hastily. 'That table over there will do very well.'

  ‘But of course, m'sieur. We have not had the pleasure of seeing you here before. I am M'sieur Homard, the proprietor. Lobster by name and lobster by nature, that is what they say of me, for I furnish a man with an excellent meal! Such is my fame, and my pride, M'sieur Ecosse. This table? And what can I get you, dear sir?'