by Diana Norman
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Author’s Note
Readers Guide
“Diana Norman has a passion for history . . . Undoubtedly it’s this passion coupled with her perpetual thirst for knowledge that has made her one of the bestselling historical novelists of today.” —Bristol Evening Post
“Norman . . . is very good on serious social issues.”
—Sunday Herald (Glasgow)
Praise for Diana Norman’s previous novels
“Resplendent with historical details, filled with beautifully crafted characters, and kissed with a subtle touch of romance, Norman’s tale is historical fiction at its best. Makepeace is so irresistibly indomitable, readers will relish every moment of her unforgettable adventures.” —Booklist
“A Catch of Consequence moved at a cracking pace . . . Diana Norman creates an exhilarating sense of those times and their possibilities.”
—The Daily Telegraph (London)
“Diana Norman is, quite simply, splendid.” —Frank Delaney
“Drama, passion, intrigue, and danger. I loved it and didn’t want it to end ever.” —Sunday Times (London)
“It’s all good, dirty fun shot through with more serious insights into the historical treatment of women and perhaps, in its association of sex, sleaze, greed, and politics, not so far removed from present realities after all.” —The Independent on Sunday (London)
“A riveting novel, full of interesting characters and a ‘page turner’ of a story. Where Diana Norman scores is bringing history to life, highlighting lots of interesting details so you can really picture what life must have been like.” —Belfast News Letter
“She captures the feel of the period with wit, verve, and emotion.”
—Woman’s Own
Titles by Diana Norman
THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD
TAKING LIBERTIES
A CATCH OF CONSEQUENCE
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Berkley trade paperback edition / September 2006
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Catherine and Alice,
with love from their aunt.
Chapter One
IT had been a mistake to use the alleys rather than the main thoroughfare of Rue Saint Antoine but she’d wanted to avoid the patrols. Since the Charlotte Corday business, the National Guard was as likely to search a woman for an assassin’s knife as a man. Not that she was carrying a weapon, but the letter to England up her sleeve was a death sentence in itself.
It was a mistake, though. Instead of losing her pursuer in the traffic, she’d made it easier for the man to follow her; he knew the back ways better than she did and she hadn’t been able to throw him off.
On the other hand, it was the quiet of the alleys, out of the wind, that had alerted her to the fact that she was being followed at all. There’d been a persistent and sibilant echo to her own footsteps through the slush.
She kept going, trying to keep her pace, not to give way to the fear that was affecting her legs by transmitting the impression that they had become very short.
Think rationally. Reason precludes panic. Most likely, the man’s orders were to discover where Nicolas was hiding and he’d do nothing until he found out where she was going. If she could gain enough distance she’d lose him once she reached the alleys beyond the wallpaper factory.
Keep walking. Reason precludes panic, Nicolas always said. Stay rational, that’s it. Nicolas would have tried to analyze the phenomenon of one’s legs; why, now, she felt she was plowing the snow with her knees when, in the first three years, she and the rest of France had seemed to walk on a cloud, as if the Revolution had literally cut the ground from under everybody’s feet and released an entire population into the air.
Terror and joy effect displacements in the mind, Nicolas would say. Joy and terror, both are delirium.
That’s where the Revolution went wrong, she thought, it had ventured too far in its joy; it had abolished the familiar. North and south had been spun to different headings, it had shaken the world so that men and women, tumbling weightlessly with nothing to hang on to, had chosen despotism as the only certainty.
Jagged outlines against the moon told her she’d reached the Place de la Bastille. It was empty—people were saving on light and fuel by going to bed early. The great rounded emplacements where cannon had once been trained on the people of Saint Antoine were now reduced to rubble, most of their stones gone for souvenirs. In daytime the stalls that sold the little carved replicas were tricked out in red, white and blue and, despite the weather, still carried on a brisk trade with sightseers up from the country. Tonight they were stacked high under a tarpaulin, one corner of which had come loose and was flipping energetically in the wind with a sound reminiscent of a face being slapped. Terror again. It distorted things so that all noises were alarming and
all images ugly.
Suddenly, she couldn’t bear it that she was frightened here, of all places. How dare they. This was where tyranny had been brought down in one glorious crash so that nobody should be frightened or cold or hungry anymore.
She turned round to face her pursuer. Do you think I’d lead the likes of you to him?
There was nobody there. Moonlight shone on empty, snow-furred ruins.
Then she saw a tiny trickle of steam issuing from behind a broken pillar, and knew it was the man’s breath as it vaporized in the air. His mouth was open while he hid, perhaps smiling.
Unnerved, she began to hurry. Slush had soaked through the cardboard covering a hole in her left shoe and was numbing her toes so that her stride was lopsided.
If she couldn’t throw him off, if he arrested her and she was searched . . . Eliza would be left alone, her baby, in a world where even children went to the guillotine. Before she’d left the apartment she’d agonized for their daughter’s sake about whether to set out at all. ‘I have to deliver a letter, darling. I won’t be long. Be quiet as a mouse.’
A very little mouse. Five years old and left alone.
I can’t do this again, not even for him. He’ll understand I can’t leave her again.
She’d reached the Saint Antoine Faubourg, that vulgar, vibrant highway. She’d loved it; now it menaced her. Only the munitions factory poured out noise and light, giving a glimpse as she passed it of frantic, gleaming bodies outlined against the furnaces, like an advanced vision of hell. Everywhere else was closed. The little man on the corner who used to sell and mend umbrellas had shut his shop for good; afraid, so he’d told her, that umbrellas were suspect—as if a desire to fend off the rain was counter-revolutionary. Across his shutters was scrawled LIBERTY OR DEATH. It was on every door she passed.
On the other side of the road, moonlight shone onto the cold frontage of the Visitandes convent and the steps she’d climbed so often in the glorious years. When its nuns had been evicted, she and the other republican women had used it for their club. They’d cut their hair and worn red phrygian caps and danced the ça ira. Wonderful, noisy meetings, shrill with previously undreamed of possibilities.
‘Citizenesses of the Revolution, women are entitled to have rights, too.’ A right to fight alongside the brave men of Paris against the royalist enemy, a right to education, a right to divorce, a right to equality of inheritance. They’d greeted each one with exhiliration, put it down on paper and sent it with a deputation to be argued before the Assembly.
She remembered the silence when Nicolas had got up to speak and told them they must also have the vote. For a moment they were stunned; even they hadn’t considered Utopia. Then the cheering broke out.
Robespierre had closed them down, of course. Well, if nothing else, they’d won the right to divorce and equal inheritance before they were suppressed.
Oh, Christ. She’d been maundering. The factory was coming up, the empty tops of the pillars that had once carried the arch of gilded letters, REVEILLON WALLPAPERS, stood stark against the moon. Beyond them was the bend she’d hoped would allow her to swerve to the left unseen.
She bent to fumble with her bootlaces and risked a peek behind her. A shadow whisked into a doorway. He was too close, she needed to gain ground. Gathering the front of her skirt, she stood up, prayed to the God she didn’t believe in—and sprinted.
She took him by surprise; she’d gained fifteen meters by the time she heard the splash of running feet at her back.
Reveillon’s gates were coming up. She was tiring; slow starvation had weakened her. The brute behind would be well fed; the Committee of Public Safety kept its agents loyal with extra rations.
Past the gates and into the bend, its side alleys were like rat holes in a river bank. Rat holes with high-sounding names—Impasse de Montmorency, Rue de Venise, Passage Taillepain; holes infested with rats who could read, who’d stood up and torn down the Bastille with their paws.
She was just past the bend now and had to risk it. She flung herself to the left. Instantly, she was in stinking blackness. The alley was so narrow she could touch the wet, leprous walls on each side. When her fingers found a doorway, she pressed into it, pulling her skirt tight against her body.
He went past. She heard the curses as they grew loud then diminished. Even so, going on, she trundled her feet through the snowy sewage rather than stepping in order to make no sound.
Along here somewhere. Please God, let it be along here.
Sweet Jesus. He was coming back, sniffing for the trail. She stopped breathing; he was outlined against the mouth of the alley. ‘Come back, you bitch.’
Then he was gone and she heard his shout of ‘I’ll catch you’ echoing down the next passage to the left.
She crept on until her right hand touched nothing. She was at the edge of a courtyard dimly lit by a glow coming from a grating set low in one of its walls and, with it, like fresh breath in a graveyard, she could smell the scent of baking bread.
Taking the letter from her pocket, she went up to the grating and bent down to listen. She could hear Bercy swearing to himself as he beat the next batch of dough. Not a sight for the squeamish, as she’d learned when Nicolas insisted they watch in action ‘this most essential and noble of industries.’ By the time Bercy had finished punching and stretching the twenty-pound chunks, so much sweat from his face and hair had flicked into the dough that she’d put herself on a breadless diet for days.
A good man, though. An even better friend.
She rattled the grating and the swearing stopped instantly.
She looked around to make sure that all the court’s shutters were closed. They were, but who could tell that there weren’t ears pressed to them? One word could compromise her and the baker onto the guillotine’s steps.
She poked the letter through the bars of the grating and let it sway downwards out of sight into the warm, yeasty interior.
There was a pause and then his voice. ‘Yes.’
Done.
Thanking the God she didn’t believe in, Sophie de Condorcet made for home.
Chapter Two
ON the curlicued dais of Lord Ffoulkes’s London house in Saint James’s Square, thirty wigged and liveried musicians played in ravishing three-quarter time to those guests, the French and younger English, who swirled like blown flowers beneath the blaze of a thousand candles burning in ten gigantic chandeliers made of the best Venetian glass.
The rest of the company, those of a certain age and all of them English, clustered about the gilt Louis Quinze tables and chairs around the walls, and stared at them in something like shock.
‘It’s a what?’ asked Makepeace.
‘A waltz,’ Philippa said. ‘Don’t start, Ma.’
‘I’m not starting. But in my day you did that sort of thing in private.’
The circling dancers were grasping each other all the time. White female hands lay on male shoulders and masculine hands pressed intimately into the small of feminine backs.
From the next table, Lady Gladmain called: ‘What ye say, Makepeace? A French thing, so they tell me. Popular with Marie Antoinette, wouldn’t you know it.’
Philippa winced. Lady Gladmain had a voice that could drill pig-iron, and there were two elderly French marquises at the table beyond hers.
‘Small wonder they cut her head off,’ Makepeace called back.
‘Ma.’
‘Well.’ The severe American Puritanism of Makepeace’s youth had been dissipated by an adventurous life and two English husbands but occasionally it pulled itself together and said something. At the sight of supposedly well-brought-up men and women publicly pressing their bodies together, it was positively strident.
The fact was that her Puritanism had been nagging since the ball began. Even in small numbers those French exiled by the Revolution were irritating; en masse, like they were here, the emigrés exasperated the daylights out of her. A decadent load of wasters, in her opinion.
<
br /> However, as guest of honour, she could hardly walk out.
One of the guests of honour, at any rate. Andrew Ffoulkes was killing a lot of birds with this ball; his one stone was having to ricochet between honoring herself—it was her fiftieth birthday; introducing his young French wife to his English friends; and, to please her, smuggling down from Scotland the Comte d’Artois who was not only the bride’s kinsman but, as brother to the late Louis XVI, the highest-ranking Frenchman in Britain.
Andrew had gone to a good deal of trouble, especially with regard to Artois, whose attendance had necessitated a word with the prime minister in order to release him from virtual incarceration in Holyrood Palace, as well as a promise that he would be returned to it immediately afterwards. That the count had to be smuggled out of Holyrood in an unmarked carriage was not so much due to his anomalous diplomatic position as to the bailiffs who hovered around the palace waiting to arrest him for debt.
The man’s emergence into the ballroom had occasioned incoherent joy among the other French exiles and an exhibition of bowing and curtseying and hand-kissing which, in Makepeace’s view, would have been more called for if the woman on Artois’s arm had been his wife and not his mistress.
The music was slowing, the dancers making a last regretful twirl. Judging from the calls for an encore, the next dance was to be yet another waltz.
A thin, pale young man had appeared in front of Jenny. ‘If you please to honor me, mademoiselle?’
‘And who may you be, young man?’ Makepeace felt the pressure of Philippa’s foot against her ankle. Don’t start. But if sixteen-year-old Jenny was to be clasped to a male bosom, her mother wanted to know whose it was.
