by Diana Norman
Mme Vernet’s eye sought Philippa’s and, amazingly, winked.
It’s effortless, Philippa thought; Nicolas doesn’t even know he’s doing it.
For a moment she wondered what was wrong with her, then realized that for the first time in years she was . . . content. For that moment she was relaxed in body and mind. I can enjoy the next seven days. And the journey home.
Then, of course, it would stop. There she must pay duty on him and let him go. She, once the great planner for the future, would not think beyond that; perhaps she would return to England, perhaps she wouldn’t. It didn’t matter; what mattered was the next seven days.
In fact there were only five but they were the best of her life so far.
It was as if he had been enlarged. He’d always known that he was privileged and tried to alleviate the unfairness of that position by making life better for those who were not. He was a Rockingham Whig, even though Rockingham was dead and his radicalism out of fashion. His love for Makepeace, who’d become his unofficial guardian when he was seven, had introduced him to a wider philosophy, undreamed of by his fellow barons.
Nevertheless, he was rich, a peer and a man; his education in all those capacities had been to reinforce them. He’d recognized the need for improvement in France but the Revolution, when it came, had concerned him by, in his opinion, throwing the baby out with the bathwater; the masses needed good leadership, not equality. The Terror had only confirmed his fears.
Again, though Makepeace had given him a high opinion of women, his male friends formed the preserve in which he breathed most easily. The League had only made closer a bond that had been welded by the rigours of Eton and the depravities of university. Philippa, whom he counted his best woman friend, had known that she, along with his wives and the rest of the world, was merely peering over a fence at a Garden of Eden where Eve wasn’t a problem because she wasn’t there.
The serpent Blanchard, however, had been.
She watched him grapple with the knowledge, becoming grimmer but at the same time humbler. It was as if the breaking down of the fence had not only proved that it wasn’t Eden in the first place but had allowed entrance to ideas and people that it had until then excluded.
Constancy became more valuable to him—in whatever form it took and whatever the class of person who displayed it. She realized he must be comparing Blanchard to Mme Vernet and her refusal to betray a man who was yet a comparative stranger to her; Blanchard to Condorcet, who had stayed loyal to a principle and would not vote for Louis’s death though it meant his own; Blanchard even to herself who, though he might think it wrongheaded, was risking her head for a friend. Suddenly, those who’d been outside the magic fence were proving more valuable than one who had existed within it.
What he would not do was change towards her. It wasn’t that she expected him to fall in love with her—there was no chance of that— but she wanted some recognition that she was a woman of twenty-six and he a man of thirty-four.
She puzzled him; she knew that. She’d gone up in one part of his estimation but she’d come down in another. The tough speaker of her own mind, who called a spade a bloody spade, was not the composed and reticent girl he’d known, even less the clinging, delicate flower that was his ideal of femininity. Yet to him she remained his goddaughter, to be teased, placated, a child he wanted to stay on friendly terms with. It was as if he refused to let go of the old Philippa to recognize the new, finding some sort of safety in it, even a taboo.
Well, that was up to him; it was an irritant but she could do nothing about it. Being what men wanted her to be was another trammel she’d left behind in England. He could take her or leave her but damned if she’d be forced back into the mold he’d made for her; she hadn’t come to France to be his pet dog.
‘And you can make yourself useful while you’re here,’ she told him. ‘There’s the boots to clean and the silver needs polishing and while I’m out I’d be obliged if you’d take the clothes out of the washtub and put them through the mangle.’
‘What in hell’s a mangle? And what are you going to do?’
‘I queue.’
In fact, Ffoulkes had brought money with him, sewn into his knapsack, and, while she queued in order not to arouse suspicion in those who’d shared queues with her in the past, she bought extras on the black market. It was a risk but the gain in everyone’s health was not to be forgone.
When she got back it was all done, though the mangle—a monstrous and modern machine of which Mme Vernet was exceedingly proud—had given him trouble. ‘Tried to eat my damn fingers,’ he said. He pretended exhaustion and shame. ‘Oh that I, a peer of the realm, am cleaning revolutionary boots. They’ll never let me back into The Lords.’ He tapped the pair belonging to Citizen Marcoz. ‘You say our esteemed convention deputy knows Condorcet’s hiding here?’
‘Yes.’
‘And hasn’t given him away?’
‘No. But you’d better make his boots shine.’
Ffoulkes found M Sarrett another oddity. He was a retired surveyor and a poet manqué who kept irregular hours and roamed the house in a fez, a velvet smoking jacket and turned-up Persian slippers, muttering and posing as the muse took him. Philippa liked him; he was kind.
He bewildered Ffoulkes. ‘Is he a . . . you know?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’ That was a relief. ‘Then are he and Mme Vernet . . . ?’
‘Probably.’
‘Oh.’
It was M Sarrett who went out for the newspapers every day and read them aloud to the company after dinner. The Vieux Cordelier was particularly hopeful that night. Desmoulins was advocating an end to the Terror.
‘Mon Dieu, listen to this.’ Sarrett had to get up to read it.
‘“Do you want to exterminate all your enemies by guillotine? But this would be madness. Can you destroy even one on the scaffold without making ten enemies from among his family and friends? Do you really believe it is women, old men, the feeble, the ‘egoists’ who are dangerous? Of your true enemies, only the cowards and the sick are left.” ’
He clasped the paper to his chest. ‘That is Danton speaking. Desmoulins writes but it is Danton. En avant, mon brave. Let us begin the march towards sanity.’
He started to dance. Mme Vernet’s eyes were closed and her hands clasped as if in prayer. Philippa made no bones about it. Please, she thought, please, God.
Then she noticed, because she was aware of every move he made, that Ffoulkes wasn’t joining in; he’d picked up one of the other newspapers and was reading it.
As they went up the stairs together that night, he said, ‘I didn’t say anything, but don’t expect too much. They’ve challenged Robespierre; it’s a straight fight now, Danton versus Robespierre. Robespierre will win.’
‘But everybody loves Danton, even Robespierre. They’re friends.’ She saw his mouth twist and remembered the friend called Blanchard. She said, ‘He’s like de Vaubon, Ma’s old partner; he’s human, he makes people laugh.’
‘The other papers have got a new word for him,’ Ffoulkes said, ‘“Indulgent.” It’s code for anyone opposing the Terror. Danton’s a human being, you’re right, but, like the missus’s smuggling friend, he’s got human weaknesses. He’s been lining his pockets with public money since the Revolution began. Robespierre can throw him to the wolves any time he finds it necessary. If the Paris mobs keep shouting for blood, it will be necessary. Desmoulins and de Vaubon’ll go with him.’
She sat down on the stairs. ‘I don’t understand all this, I don’t understand . Is it going to go on forever and ever?’
‘Not according to our philosopher in there.’ Ffoulkes jerked a thumb towards Condorcet’s door. ‘Sooner or later the mobs must quieten, the guillotine’ll be packed away in lavender, Pitt and Robespierre will kiss and make up and we’ll all live happily ever after. God, he’s a fool.’
It was a new bitterness and, while she knew its cause, it had a clang of truth that sent her to be
d in a hopelessness against which there was only one appeal.
She knelt on the bare floorboards of her room. Let him be wrong, Lord. Let Condorcet be right. Let something wonderful happen. And, Lord, spare my mother’s good friend, de Vaubon. Spare everyone in this dear house.
The silence contained a negative. When she pinched out the rushlight and opened the window to let in the night air, He sent her His answer through the cries of the prisoners in the Luxembourg.
She knew then that they weren’t going to get away.
NUMBER Fifteen revived. It had become tired from the strain of keeping its secret; every sound of marching boots echoing down Gravediggers Road, coming closer, had stilled movement, stopped breath, until they went past. A sideways glance in the queue set the heart jumping, a word out of place from a neighbor had to be analysed.
Ffoulkes’s energy fed it like a drooping plant. He tackled house-work like a military maneuver, expounding theory and practice once he’d mastered them as if nobody had discovered the secret before. ‘Look, you’ve got to allow the polish to dry first—comes off better then.’ ‘See, glasses need very hot water. By God, the house-maids better look out when I get home.’ He made Mme Vernet laugh and she introduced him to the mystery of omelette making—he watched them eat the result with the ferocity of a midwife unsure that the baby’s parents appreciated it.
For all that the man amazed and horrified him, it was Condorcet who intrigued him most and he spent the spare time between his duties and Condorcet’s writing in the smoke-filled room.
‘What do you two talk about?’ she asked him.
‘You, mostly. He’s got a high regard for you, thinks you’re as insane as I do. Women in general, really. Oh, and rights—got a lot to say about rights.’
Condorcet told him the Revolution had finally failed when the Convention closed down the women’s clubs. ‘It negated women’s rights without seeing that it had negated its own,’ he’d said. ‘Rights must be universal and extended to every living soul—that is the meaning of the term. They cannot be delivered to one group and not another. If they are, they are not rights but privileges, and the purpose of the Revolution, my revolution, Philippa’s Revolution, was to rid the world of the privilege of the few and extend rights to all.’
‘Mad as May butter,’ Ffoulkes told her. ‘Do you know he wants women to have a vote?’
‘Yes.’
‘You do? But let’s face it, old thing, what do you need it for? You ladies have all the power as it is, look at Mme Vernet, rules the roost here, don’t she? And the missus? God help the man who tells her what to do. Look at Félicie, leads me around by a ring in my nose. What would you do with the vote?’
‘Use it,’ Philippa said.
On the third day he remembered Heilbron. He was helping her fold the sheets she’d brought in from the washing line, a matter of leaning back at their different ends to pull them into shape, come together, fold, back, come together, fold. ‘Last time I saw you, madam, you’d just plighted your troth to a worthy gentleman. Did he sanction this little jaunt of yours?’
‘He doesn’t know about it.’
‘Pull, woman. This side’s not straight. I bet he does now.’
‘I bet he does,’ she said ruefully.
‘Ends together.’ They came close, transferred the ends and retired. ‘What’ll he say when I deliver you back to him?’
‘I’m afraid he’ll say I’m not a suitable wife for him.’
‘And I don’t blame him. Now, the next one, pull. It’s like a minuet this, ain’t it? What will you do then?’
‘Oh . . . find another wittol to marry me. There’s plenty of them about.’
He nodded. ‘Well, I can’t dance with you all day, I’ve got me cutlery to clean. It’s smeary. I’ve had to talk to Mme Vernet on the subject. ’ As he left for the kitchen, he said, ‘About Heilbron.’
‘Yes?’
‘He’d be an idiot.’
HE began to hate her leaving the house. ‘Where the hell have you been?’
‘I had to take Sophie some eggs.’
‘You didn’t have to take her anything. It’s too bloody dangerous.’
‘Oh, stop interfering.’ She was tired; the tumbrels had been more crowded than ever that morning.
Furiously, he lectured her; he had a right to interfere; she wasn’t to go again, not even to say good-bye. ‘You can write her a letter from England. And wipe your feet before you step on my floor.’
That night, it was the fifth, the two of them were tidying the kitchen after supper. Mme Vernet, who had a cold, had gone upstairs, M Sarrett had folded his newspapers and followed her.
They heard Citizen Marcoz come in from his day at the Convention and then, as she always did, Philippa went out into the courtyard to bar the gate for the night.
It was one of those summer evenings when light is reluctant to fade and a near-full moon showed against the clarity of the sky like a pale replica of sun.
As she passed the rose on the wall, Philippa dead-headed a fading bloom and put the petals in the pocket of her apron—Mme Vernet didn’t like them falling; she said it encouraged black spot.
She lifted the bar into its slots and turned to pick up the boots that Citizen Marcoz left outside the door of the lodge. And jumped—Citizen Marcoz was standing in the doorway.
‘Citizeness.’
‘You gave me a fright, citizen.’
He was in shadow and she couldn’t see his expression. He cleared his throat; it sounded like gravel shifting. She thought, he’s nervous. So was she; he’d never talked to her before.
He said, ‘Today I was vouchsafed a sight of the list of houses to be searched for saltpetre. This house was on it, for tomorrow.’ He cleared his throat again. There was a pause. Far away a dog barked. ‘You should inform Mme Vernet. It is as well to be apprised of these things.’
From the Luxembourg the first cry of the night traveled through the warm air. ‘Papa, Papa.’ An answering shout, quite clear. ‘I am here, my dear.’
‘The Republic has need of saltpetre, citizeness,’ Marcoz said.
She heard herself say, ‘Yes. Yes, thank you.’
He shut the door and she ran for the house.
Ffoulkes fetched Mme Vernet and M Sarrett down to the kitchen.
Sarrett was in his nightshirt, a pink crochet shawl clutched round him for decency; with his fez still on he looked oriental and absurd. Mme Vernet hadn’t undressed yet but her hair straggled over her shoulders; a hairbrush was still in her hand. For the first time since Philippa had known her she was distraught. ‘Shall we tell him? Shall we tell him?’
‘Of course, we’ve got to tell him,’ Ffoulkes said, then more gently, ‘The time’s come, Madame. You knew it would.’ He turned to Philippa. ‘When will they be here?’
‘I don’t know. Tomorrow was all he said.’
‘Is it just this house? Do they know about Condorcet? Or a general search of the area?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’
Saltpetre, that essential ingredient of gunpowder, grew in crystallised form in dank, dark places, on cellar walls, in outbuildings. The demand for it was pressing, and patriotic Parisians, finding it on their property, were happy to do their bit for the war by alerting the authorities so that it could be scraped off and delivered to the munitions factories.
Just lately, however, it had been made the excuse to break into any house under suspicion. It had happened to a bookkeeper living in the next street in an apartment so new that its walls had barely dried out, let alone developed a fungus. He’d been discovered to possess a snuffbox with the royal arms on it and had been taken off for questioning.
‘We’ll get him away tonight.’
‘You can’t. What about curfew?’
‘Tomorrow then, at dawn.’ Ffoulkes looked around. ‘I’ll go and tell him.’
‘No.’ Mme Vernet had recovered her poise. ‘That is for me.’ She put her hand on the table for a minute, to steady her
self before going quietly upstairs.
M Sarrett watched her go. ‘The poor dear,’ he said. ‘My poor, poor dear.’
There’d been a plan for this; Philippa had made it herself, though at that moment she realized that somehow she’d never expected it to be implemented; that something marvellous would happen to prevent the need of it. She’d intended Condorcet and herself to leave in the evening, mingling with the homegoing crowd of workers streaming out of Paris for the outskirts, to pass the night hidden among the trees of the curfew-deserted Bois de Boulogne—and board the northwest bound diligence at Neuilly in the morning.
With luck, its driver would be her old friend Bertholde. She’d tell him her brother had been killed and she was taking her distressed father back with her to Normandy.
Ffoulkes had approved the plan and improved it; they would all spend the first night at his safe house in Neuilly itself.
Now they would have to go against the stream of people coming into the city; they would not reach Neuilly in time to catch that day’s diligence but would have to spend twenty-four hours waiting for the next.
‘Can’t be helped,’ Ffoulkes said after they’d discussed it, raggedly. ‘It’ll be all right.’
Mme Vernet came back, very pale, but with her head now neatly capped.
Philippa thought, she tidied herself before she went to tell him.
‘He is prepared,’ was all she said. ‘I shall get some food ready for you to take with you on your journey. Jeanne, M Collet, go now and get some sleep.’
They left her and Sarrett filling the soup pail with provisions.
Candlelight came from the crack under Condorcet’s door as Philippa passed it but she didn’t go in; he’d be putting the finishing touches to his manuscript. They’d have plenty of time together on the journey. She wondered if he was in as deep a fright as she was.
