French Passion

by Briskin, Jacqueline;

  “The leader said they would kill all of us … if …” My voice trailed away. I couldn’t give words to the terrifying and shameful bargain I had agreed to.

  “Killing don’t be the worst that can happen to a young girl. Get you back to Madame Thérèse. She be the one to explain it.”

  I mopped the old man’s dirt-smeared face with the lining of my cape, touched to tears. Tonight, when his life—all our lives—were at stake, he feared most for my so-called honor.

  He was correct about Aunt Thérèse making explanations. She’d been huddling against the broad tree trunk. As I returned, she pulled herself erect.

  “Manon,” she said, “you shouldn’t have run off like that, alone. You must always keep near Jean-Pierre and me.” For three long seconds she was silent. Raindrops gathered on leaves, plopping onto mud. “That man, the young brigand … you mustn’t let him touch you.”

  “I’ll kill him!” cried Jean-Pierre.

  “Jean-Pierre!” My voice rose in alarm. “Promise me you’ll try no such thing.”

  “You’re my sister.”

  Even in the dimness I could see the angry set of his delicate eyebrows. I could see the blood soaking through my fichu. They killed the Baron.

  “Promise you won’t. Jean-Pierre, promise! Please.”

  “How can I let you be dishonored?”

  At this Aunt Thérèse said, “If you are, the Comte de Créqui won’t have you.”

  “That’s the one silver lining in this whole ugly cloud. A chance not to be the Comtesse de Créqui.” I held my hand over my lips to stifle the laughter that bubbled hysterically in my throat.

  Aunt Thérèse’s plump face creased up like a worried child’s. “Manon, Manon. If the Comte doesn’t marry you, what will we do? We are destitute, and now we don’t even have our clothes—”

  She was interrupted by a sudden shout from the carriage.

  They had found our secret drawer. A filthy claw held up the opal necklace that had been in the family for over two hundred years. The great polished gems caught the feeble light, gleaming. My spirit deserted me and I had to fight back tears. To me that necklace symbolized past generations of the d’Epinay family, those gleaming white opals represented the bleached bones of my ancestors, bones entombed under chapels that now belonged to others. A gnarled fist shook the necklace.

  “Damn, damn them.” Jean-Pierre’s voice shook. “May they rot in hell for eternity.”

  Someone had undone our money pouch. Hoots of disappointment. “Five paltry francs!” Then the men in turn jumped down until only the highwayman remained inside. The old man splashed noisily to us, his arthritic hand grasping my arm. “Now, pretty little pullet, our business be done, and he be ready for his reward.”

  Old Lucien’s thin shout came through rainy darkness. “Stay away from my young lady!”

  “Manon,” Aunt Thérèse quavered, “don’t go.”

  I ached to throw my arms around her, ached to cling to her. But I could see the proud yet desolate angle of Jean-Pierre’s head. They killed the Baron.… Cold determination grew inside my skull.

  I must do whatever the highwayman ordered. I must not put up a fight. I must rely on his promise that my brother as well as Aunt Thérèse, Old Lucien, and I would be alive tomorrow. His promise was all I had.

  They were crowding around to escort me to my fate, lustily shouting how they would pleasure me, the young boy’s treble echoing every obscenity.

  Terrified yet determined, I stepped ahead of them, picking my way swiftly around shadowed puddles to the looming, box-shaped old carriage.

  Chapter Three

  As I opened the door, the taper by the rear window flickered and the highwayman shifted, as if to rise, then checked himself, remaining seated on the bench, his muddied black knee boots planted on splinters of our secret drawer. He had thrown off his cape and his loose white shirt gleamed.

  My thighs weak with fear, I sat opposite him. Rain drummed on the roof, he pulled the leather curtains shut, and we were cut off from the world, alone.

  He was twenty, no more. As he gazed at me, the tension around his full, well-formed lips softened, and he looked younger, like the boys who danced with me and stole kisses on fête days. A momentary warmth spilled through me, an echo of that earlier excitement in the pit of my stomach, then a rain-muted shout of lechery pierced our solitude, reminding me that I was about to be taken with as little dignity as our undergarments had been exhibited. I was an object. Booty. I clasped my cold, shaking fingers in my lap.

  “This is the first time, isn’t it?” he asked.

  There was a sympathy in his tone that made me want to blurt out my fears, beg to be spared. However, my impulsive pride acted against me. I found myself mustering the coldest expression I could, straightening my spine, lifting my chin.

  “Of course it is,” I replied, ice in my voice. “We’re on our way to Paris where I’m to be married.”

  “To someone you love?”

  “Respect,” I said in that same cold, level tone. “He’s financial adviser to King Louis.”

  “What a corrupt regime! A girl trading her youth and loveliness for wealth. Is she your grandmother?”

  “My mother’s aunt. We’re orphans, my brother and I.”

  “Then your brother’s the one who’s selling you.”

  He spoke scornfully. This roused me from my terror, banished my false hauteur. He might be my captor—but nobody, nobody could speak ill of Jean-Pierre.

  “Jean-Pierre’s helpless in the matter!” I snapped. “I have no dowry, and the Comte is our guardian!”

  “If I were your brother, I’d find some way, do anything to prevent the marriage. And as for this”—he glanced around the dimness at strewn, rejected loot—“I’d have been killed before letting you in here.”

  I refused to hear any more uncalled-for insults to my brother. “You offered me our lives in exchange for my body,” I said, my voice filled with icy rage. “Shall we get on with our bargain?”

  “So that’s the way you want it,” he said. The carriage shook as he moved to my side.

  My mouth went dry with terror.

  For all my knowledge of what animals did, I had no true idea of what a man did to a woman. Aunt Thérèse never had explained—maybe she, kindly old spinster that she was, didn’t properly know. I had absorbed the information that the act for a woman was painful, caused pregnancy, and unless sanctified by marriage vows was the deepest of shames. As Old Lucien had pointed out, a woman should die rather than submit. And, as Aunt Thérèse had pointed out, premature submission ruined chances of matrimony. To have such consequences, the carnal act must indeed be monstrous.

  Inwardly, I had vowed not to fight. Still, I could put off the horrible moment. Gulping twice, I said, “I just don’t want to discuss my brother. You can understand, surely. You’re a gentleman.”

  He flinched as if I’d jabbed a raw nerve.

  “My father was high born,” he replied, and I’d never heard such contempt as he packed into that one brief, honorable sentence. “And, as you said, you’re selling yourself. So do your job.”

  I shuddered with fear. Then I thought of Jean-Pierre’s mouthlike wound, of Aunt Thérèse, her neck athrob with terror, of Old Lucien tied to a tree. I reached for the top one of the steel buttons that went down my cape. The holes damp, my fingers nerveless, I had to take off my gloves to work the large buttons loose. It took me a long time. I pushed back the cape, the hood fell away, and my hair, silken and very pale, spilled over my shoulders. Without the fichu my breasts were bared to just above the nipples, the pink merino wool of my bodice cutting into the delicately rounded curves.

  Candle flame touched the highwayman’s face into dark planes. As he gazed at me, his expression changed to musing, as if he were trying to recall a line of poetry.

  My emotions began to whirl until I could neither think nor remember clearly. I still feared sexual initiation. I still held dear honor, religion, family. My brother’
s bleeding forehead was ordering me to submit. Yet … it was stronger than that. Once I’d fallen into the river Aube and the springtime rapids had tumbled and carried me, and this was how I felt now, vitally alive, heart pounding with fear and excitement, my body racing along with forces beyond my strength to control.

  The handsome young brigand shook his head, as if he, too, were trapped in the same currents.

  Then, abruptly, his arms went around me, drawing me into an embrace that was hard against my drowning weakness. His warm lips pressed down on mine. None of the fête-day kisses bore the least resemblance to this. Nothing ever had been like this. He bent my neck back against his forearm, kissing me with increasing intensity until I was near fainting. My arms went around him, my lips opened, and his tongue penetrated my mouth.

  My promise to him had freed me of the normal constraints of society. The thud of my heart loud in my ears, I felt as must a bird soaring, as a silvery trout diving in a clear pool. In this stranger’s hard arms I was utterly in my element. His fingers traced the curves above my bodice and the pleasure was so exquisite that I gasped aloud.

  At this sound of my own passion, a flicker of reason came back to my reeling mind.

  I pushed at his muscular shoulders, a feeble protest not against him but against my own rapture.

  But he was pressing me onto the leather, pinioning both my hands in one of his, bracing himself with one knee on the floorboards, his other leg flung over my thighs as he unlaced my bodice. The masculine odors of his body, his forceful strength, acted as a yet wilder aphrodisiac. He bent to kiss the throbbing swell of my nipples. There was no rain, no musty carriage, no cold leather, nothing in the world except pleasure, the rapturous fear, the imperative that my body be joined to his.

  He pulled up my skirts and petticoats, untying the ribbon of my nether garment. My trembling thighs were bared, and he undid his breeches. He lowered himself onto me. For an instinctive moment I bucked like an unbroken colt, then he pressed into me.

  The pain was sharpest pleasure.

  I opened my eyes. His thick, dark lashes moved up, I gazed into his gray eyes, and in some way I cannot explain, I understood all there was to know of him, that he was decent, sensitive, faintly embittered, yet incapable of cruelty or evil; I had a mysterious sense he was joined to me in soul as well as body.

  He moved inside me. Though it was no longer pain, I blinked, and he bit small kisses around my mouth, and my passion grew until I thought I would surely die if he didn’t move within me, there was only the sweet savage need for him to drive deeper and faster and suddenly my nails dug into the muscles of his back and I was clutching at him, holding onto him because he was the only stability in the universe and I was falling into some dark eternal pleasure, falling with oh such unimaginable delight, and all around swirled his breathing and my voice cried out, “Love oh love love.”

  We lay entangled, glowing, and he reached for a quilt taken from our trunks, wrapping it around us.

  “I’m lower than the low,” he said. “Despicable.”

  To deny this, I held him closer. I was unable to speak or to think beyond this moment of happiness.

  “Never, never did I intend to force you. I’ve never taken any woman by force. I tried to stop myself, but ever since I stepped into this coach, I’ve wanted you. No. More. When I saw you I had a peculiar sense this was fated between us. I couldn’t help myself.”

  I had shared his sense of destiny, I remembered.

  “Saying it was out of my control sounds like an excuse for the wrong I’ve done you. I’m wholly to blame.” His voice went yet lower. “But as you undid your cape, the end seemed already written in some great book outside of time and the world.”

  He is a poet, I thought, touching his shoulder with my lips.

  He went on, “I never would have harmed your brother more. So you see, I duped you.”

  “I was terrified. And I had ordered myself not to fight. But—”

  “But I raped you,” he interrupted bitterly.

  “I … no … I wanted you, too … it was very sweet.…” The admission came out with a hesitant shyness rare for me.

  “Truly?”

  I nodded.

  He stroked back my hair, tender. “Darling.”

  “How are you called?”

  “André.”

  “André what?”

  “It’s best if you don’t know. And you?”

  “Manon.”

  “Manon, you’re too beautiful and brave and fine to be sold to some old man.”

  “André.…” A surge of warmth caught his name in my throat and I repeated it. “André, you shouldn’t be part of that rabble out there.”

  “I belong with them.”

  “How so?”

  “You care about the old coachman,” André said. “You bargained to save him as well as your own family. Why?”

  “Old Lucien’s been with us all our lives. He used to squirt milk from cow’s udders into our mouths. How could I let him die?”

  “I can’t let them starve.”

  “Are they your serfs?”

  “I have no serfs. Nor any land with peasants.”

  “Yet with them you’ve robbed and killed.”

  “We’ve never killed anyone. And as for robbery—you might say we’re getting back a small part of what their landlords have stolen from them.”

  I had seen this credo in illegal pamphlets. Aunt Thérèse was too old-fashioned to read anything revolutionary. Jean-Pierre smiled at the crude printing. As for myself, I never could condemn or praise people in groups. What I mean is, I loved Old Lucien yet hated Cosette, the squat, ill-tempered kitchen wench. I was very fond of our neighbor, sweet and wispy Baronne du Parc, yet despised her fat, lecherous-eyed Baron.

  “As you passed through the countryside,” André was saying, “did you notice the fields?”

  As darkness fell, Aunt Thérèse had pointed to wheat bowing rotten under rain. The peasants here, she’d said, are too lazy to reap their crops on time.

  “Aunt Thérèse thought the local peasants shiftless.”

  André’s deep-set gray eyes were haunted.

  “Not shiftless,” he said. “Their lord takes pride in entertaining the hunt. King Louis and the Court arrive from Versailles, sounding their hunting horns, their horses prancing, dogs on the run, liveried servants abustle. A magnificent sight.” He paused angrily. “Except to the peasants.”

  “André—”

  “Last year and this, game has been scarce. So by the lord’s decree there’s been no harvest that boar and deer may forage in the crops. Normally, the peasants get half of what they produce. Everyone in the nearby village has starved, except for a few young girls who drifted into cheap cribs—them and my friends. The five men outside.” He paused. “Manon, is there any greater depravity than to fatten game while humans starve?”

  I shook my head. The outrage I’d sensed in him was directed at the regime.

  “So then you are a … revolutionary?” My hesitation came from not wishing to hear his answer. Revolutionaries were hounded.

  “If you mean would I give my life to bring justice and equality to France, yes.”

  The rain was muted now, an enveloping hush. And suddenly I was aware that danger or not, I wanted to be with André, to go with him, to share his tribulations, starve with him, if necessary climb the gallows scaffold with him.

  I love him, I thought.

  It was as natural as that. No doubts, no questions.

  “I love you,” I said, and heard the certainty that came from a deep knowledge within my heart. “André, never feel guilt for what we’ve done. I love you.”

  I held my breath, praying he would tell me that he loved me. Instead, kissing my forehead, he shifted his weight from me.

  Bereft of his warmth, I rearranged my clothing. I’ll never see him again, I thought. Never again, never. I wrapped my clammy cape around me, desolate.

  “Go down the road three miles,” he said
. “You’ll be at the inn. The Hôtel de la Poste.”

  “Then,” I said over the lump in my throat, “you’re taking the carriage?”

  He didn’t meet my eyes. “No. But we need your horses. Manon, I’m sorry. We must have horses to keep ahead of the dragoons.”

  Jean-Pierre had mentioned this road was patrolled.

  Alarmed, I cried, “They’re just farm animals! Very slow. André, you must start!”

  He gazed at me as if imprinting me on his memory, then he was handing me something wrapped in linen. “A gift,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I replied, numb, pushing the cloth into my pocket.

  He opened the door. Cold rain swept in. He climbed down, lifting me. “Don’t look back,” he said quietly.

  I couldn’t, for the rain had become a kind of swirling cloud. After three steps mist engulfed me.

  Old Lucien, untied, waited under the oak with Aunt Thérèse and Jean-Pierre. The invisible chains of convention again shackled me, and I was too ashamed to look any of them in the eye. Wet, bedraggled, we stumbled through penetrating rain and darkness. Aunt Thérèse sobbed continuously, Jean-Pierre was silent, every once in a while Old Lucien would mumble something about bad ’uns. A faraway wolf howled. Aunt Thérèse burst out, “The Comte de Créqui must never learn of this. Manon, Jean-Pierre, do you hear?”

  Mud pulled at my low shoes. Soon my left heel was a throbbing blister. I love him, I thought, I love a stranger called André, and I’ll never see him again. A stranger is the one I love. With each painful footstep the words formed a different combination.

  It was after midnight when, finally, we reached the Hôtel de la Poste. The landlord helped me off with my sopping cape. As he hung it to dry in front of the fire, linen fell from the pocket.

  Onto the slate hearth clattered the d’Epinay opals. Here was the proof of love I’d hungered for. Yet with these gems André could have bought fast horses, he could be safely away.

  Picking up the necklace, clasping it between my breasts, I began to weep.