Fires of Delight

by Vanessa Royall

To her surprise, because she and the giant who held her captive were far back in the mob, Selena saw the crowd suddenly part before them, and the huge man, still holding her tightly around the waist, strode forward like a lord toward the fortress gate.

  “Mirabeau! It’s Mirabeau!” the people cried, and sent forth a great, bloodthirsty cheer.

  Mirabeau, Selena thought. Vergil Longchamps had said that this man was in league with Pierre Sorbante. Mirabeau’s father, a marquis, had had his son jailed time and again in an effort to save him from his own excesses, but the only result had been a greater hatred of all authority.

  Obviously, this revolution had many actors. She made a tentative attempt to twist away from her lumbering captor, but he tightened his grip on her. They reached the front of the mob, where Pierre Sorbante stood facing the officer in charge of the fortress.

  “Pierre!” chortled Mirabeau. “Look what I have found!”

  Selena felt herself caught and held by Sorbante’s ruthless, triumphant eyes.

  “So we meet again, mademoiselle,” he said. “But wait. We will confer later. I have business to attend to now.”

  He made an abrupt, peremptory gesture. Two young warriors wearing headbands bearing the cockade stepped forward. One of them grabbed Selena’s right arm, the other her left.

  “You just stay with us, cherie,” ordered the man at her right.

  Mirabeau and Sorbante turned to face the Bastille’s governor-general, who was attempting, unsuccessfully, to control his mounting terror. The great crowd howled and cursed.

  Mirabeau turned to glare at them. Sorbante raised his arms. A wave swept through the mob like wind in wheat. Silence fell.

  “In the name of the people of France,” Sorbante began, his fine, resonant voice rising on the air, “in the name of the Paris commune and of the National Assembly, formerly the benighted Estates General, we are here to liberate this accursed fortress!”

  The crowd howled, then became silent. Selena felt the iron grip of hands around her wrists. But her own tension was as nothing compared to that of the mob, nor that which existed between Sorbante and the governor-general. The poor man has been left alone to deal with this, she realized. He is defending the monarchy with a handful of men, but the king whose interests he serves is lounging at Versailles, or perhaps crouching behind a windowsill waiting for a deer to stroll by.

  “Liberté! Égalité! Fraternité!” bellowed Mirabeau, and again the crowd howled and fell silent. The very air crackled with bloodlust and mayhem held barely in check, awaiting only a word to be unleashed.

  And the word was given.

  If the governor-general expected demands, negotiations, any of the give-and-take of bargaining, he was wrong.

  “Onward!” cried Mirabeau, and of an instant the mob, as one, surged forward. Centuries of French history and culture, of society and manners, of order and struggle and gain, poised once and forever on a delicate precipice of time, and plummeted. No one on earth knew what would happen.

  The governor-general did not live to find out. He was run through by a pitchfork as soon as the wild crowd moved forward, and decapitated by a peasant’s scythe a few seconds later. Soldiers within the garrison began firing on the crowd. The tumult and din, the small white puffs of smoke from the weapons, the flash of scythes and hoes and forks: these rendered strange and surrealistic all that was happening. Within minutes, the vanguard of the mob had broken down the Bastille gates. Blood-stopping cries of agony from the Swiss mercenaries filled the air. Millennia turned upon one hour; rent flesh and spilled blood sounded the death knell. Oh, Louis XVI was still king. He was safe at Versailles. But his days were numbered now.

  Pierre Sorbante had gone into the fortress with his followers, but Mirabeau remained outside, giving orders, exhorting the mob. Presently, he turned to the men who held Selena.

  “Take her to the place,” he snapped. “We’ll be along when this is finished.”

  Before she had a chance to question, much less to protest, Selena found herself led away from the whirling chaos in front of the fortress, back among the alleys of Paris, and suddenly through a gate, down a long stone stairway, and into abrupt darkness. She heard the sound of dripping water, smelled musk and mold. It reminded her of the prison in New York Harbor.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked, when the men stopped for a moment.

  “Don’t worry,” said one. “You’re safe. We’re to take good care of you.”

  The other found a torch that stank of oil and lighted it, revealing before them what appeared to be an ancient tunnel, which led into another and then another until Selena could see no farther. She heard the scraping skitter of claws upon stone as rats fled the flickering light of the torch.

  “The sewers of Paris,” said one of the men. “But out of these sewers will come power. Let’s go.”

  Walking single file, with Selena between her captors, the three moved along a stone walkway alongside a channel of water and murky sludge. She tried to remember how far they proceeded, what turns they made, but very soon she’d lost her bearings completely. Finally, when she thought they would never stop, the man with the torch turned into a cavernous room and slid the torch into a sconce embedded in the stone. He then lit candles and she saw a subterranean meeting place—how far beneath the city she did not know—with a table, some benches, and even a few cots. There were several nearly empty wine bottles on the table. A rat, chewing on a crust of bread in one corner, glared malevolently at the interruption, then fled, red-eyed and squeaking in outrage.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” said one of Selena’s captors casually, checking the wine bottles and finding one that had not yet been drained. He hoisted it and helped himself to a swig, then passed the bottle to his comrade.

  The man, just about to drink, looked over at Selena, who had taken a seat on a bench.

  “Wine?” he asked.

  She shook her head. In the gloom, they seemed older and more experienced than she’d thought, hard-muscled, tense men who looked as if they hadn’t eaten properly in a long while.

  “Who are you?” she asked hesitantly, as they settled down beside her on the bench, passing the bottle back and forth. It did not appear as if they intended her any harm, and this fact emboldened her somewhat.

  “I am called Citizen Marat,” said one.

  “Edmund Danton,” replied his mate.

  “What do you want of me?”

  Danton looked her up and down. “Surely you know!” he scoffed. “You wear the cross of Erasmus Ward.”

  So the cross is a symbol or a signal of some kind, thought Selena.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “It is Ward’s cross, I admit that, but—”

  “Come now,” said Marat. “We certainly did not expect that you would be the courier, but all the same, you are. Now before we are joined by Mirabeau and Sorbante, why don’t you just tell us where our treasure is?”

  Treasure? The jewels and sovereigns? She imagined her greatcoat hanging inconspicuously in the back of the closet in her room at Martha Marguerite’s house. Marat had referred possessively to the “treasure.” But how could he know of it? Somewhere in the great, obscure series of events that had begun with Royce Campbell’s mysterious leather pouch and that had led to this Parisian sewer, there were conduits and consequences she could not fathom. But one thing she did know: she had no intention of admitting anything to these shadowy men. At the rate Martha was spending the money Jean Beaumain had given Selena, and with France in such an unsettled condition, the jewels might well become her only ticket to safety.

  If, in fact, she ever managed to get out of this underground lair.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know nothing of any treasure. I do have—not with me, but I do have—paper money. French, British, Spanish. Even American. Just permit me to leave and you can have all of it.”

  “She’s lying,” Danton said to Marat, without heat.

  “We’ll wait and let Sorbante dea
l with her. He knows more about the situation than we do.”

  It was just an idle remark, but Selena gave it some consideration. Either Royce had known from the start that the jewels had a special significance or he had somehow acquired—legally or illegally, by accident or design—a fortune mysterious and fraught with ambiguous importance. And if the pouch was indeed the “treasure” to which these men referred, what connection might it have to the little cross? Perhaps it was all like a great puzzle in which each of the players—Royce, La Valle, Sorbante, even she—played a limited role, held but a single piece in the grand design.

  But who held the master piece? Who knew the parameters of that overriding plan?

  If, indeed, there was one.

  I’m stumped, she concluded. But I’m not about to blabber away before I have a clearer understanding of what I’m dealing with. Then another thought came to her: she knew that her possession of the jewels was due completely to mischance, her ownership of the little cross scarcely less so. Royce would never have placed her deliberately in danger. He would have explained things to her first.

  But they had become separated unexpectedly, fleeing Lieutenant Clay Oakley in New York. And then Royce had been killed by the cannon of HMS Prince William.

  So Selena had to be, unwittingly and unknowingly, a piece in a dangerous puzzle.

  She knew nothing about the nature of that puzzle.

  Except that perhaps when she had given up the jewels, willingly or by coercion, she would have served her purpose.

  And her physical existence, not to mention her knowledge of the puzzle, would no longer be required!

  I am getting out of here right now! she decided.

  There was about a half an inch of wine left in the bottom of the bottle. Danton offered it to her. “Go ahead, cherie. It’ll ward off the chill. Did you know that rheumatism has ended more revolutionary careers than the guillotine has? We have to hide and even sleep in places that are no good for the bones. Here, for example.”

  Selena murmured her sympathies, but declined the wine. Danton finished it off.

  “Have you ever heard of Lieutenant Clay Oakley?” she asked the two men.

  They looked at each other grimly. “It’s Captain Clay Oakley now,” Marat said. “He’s the new chief of secret intelligence in London. I have never heard of a man to whom monarchy is so sacred. You would think that every little prince was Jesus Christ. He captured, last week, one of our men who was in Britain, seeking to gain editorial support for our cause. Oakley had him beaten to death. Why, do you know the monster?”

  “Yes,” Selena said. She told her story about interrogation in Oakley’s cork-lined room of paintings, of her surprise at the coexistent ugliness and beauty within him.

  “His parts are too disparate,” Danton decided. “They will never fuse. He will come to an evil end, and I hope to have a part in it.”

  “As do I,” said Selena.

  The conversation, their agreement about Oakley, their isolation here beneath the streets of Paris: these softened the tension among them.

  “Where in the devil’s name is Sorbante?” Marat wondered, getting up and pacing about. “We had the Bastille in our hands even before we came here.”

  “He is probably giving another speech,” snickered Danton. And for the first time, Selena sensed in these men the hint of a belief that they could outshine the luminous firebrand, perhaps even surpass him. If given the opportunity. And she recalled something that her father had told her long ago, while he was tutoring her in the history he loved so much and understood so well. “Selena,” he’d said, “war is fairly simple. It kills everyone in its path. But a revolution eats its young, like a tomcat or a boar hog who does not recognize his own.”

  The swish of the blade.

  Marat paced. Danton fretted and looked about. Selena began to fidget. Then she began to fidget more.

  “Something wrong with you?” asked Marat.

  Selena cast her eyes downward. “I’m sorry, but…but I must…relieve myself soon…”

  The two men laughed. “Well, you are certainly in the right place for that!” Danton said.

  It was agreed forthwith that Selena should go just outside the cavernous room and do her business on the stones alongside the sludge-filled channel.

  “Here,” said Danton, “take a candle with you. We may be radicals, but we are Frenchmen first. No woman should slip into the muck.”

  They laughed again. Selena, taking the candle, tried to look as embarrassed as possible. “Please don’t look, will you?” she pleaded.

  “On our honor,” chortled Marat.

  Selena knew that she had only minutes, at most, to get a decent head start.

  The candle, while inadequate, was better than nothing. Selena slid along the wall of the tunnel as fast as she could go, holding the candle before her. She could hear the voices of the men diminish behind her, and she barely heard her name when one of them called her. There were various crevices and nooks alongside the stinking channel, places in which she might hide for a time, but her larger problem was the trackless labyrinth of the sewers. First things first. When she heard one of the men shout, his voice echoing and re-echoing off the stones, she pressed herself into a cranny and blew out the light.

  Then she waited.

  Danton and Marat cursed energetically and seemed just about to come searching for her when other voices joined theirs. Mirabeau and Sorbante had arrived. There was more cursing then, as the men debated what to do. “If she wants to die down here, that’s her affair,” one of them said, “but I’m not about to.”

  She heard footsteps on the stones, uncertain whether they were coming her way or not. Finally, there was silence.

  But now her plight was worse than it had been before. She was alone, and her candle was out. In her mind’s eye, Selena pictured the whole vast spinning globe of earth, and all the people upon it, and all the cities and mountains and plains. Then she saw herself, all alone, huddled beneath one of those cities, in the bowels of the earth. There were three possibilities. She could make her way back to the room and wait for someone to come, which might take days. Or she could move on in the opposite direction.

  Or she could die there and let her bones be found untold years from now.

  This last possibility was unattractive. She dismissed it, and stepped from her hiding place. The channel of sludge gurgled a few feet away, moving on, moving toward…the Seine. Yes, it would lead to the river. In complete darkness, she got down on her hands and knees, began to feel her way along the stony chasm. The most oppressive part of this strategy was that she did not know how far she’d have to go, and soon her hands and knees were bruised and bleeding. When she was tired, she lay flat against the cool stones and waited until her energy returned. But then she moved on again. Several times, misjudging the way, she cracked her head on a rock, and once she almost slipped into the slimy sewage. But the foul channel, distasteful and stinking as it was, gave her a measure of cheer. Because judging by the sound of its flow, she knew she had to be heading toward the Seine.

  And then, at last, the wet stones reflected a bit of faraway light, a dim, phantasmagoric ray of hope. She allowed herself a long rest to celebrate, and then moved on. The channel flowed into a culvert which emptied into the river. Pulling up her skirts, which were by now incredibly tattered and filth-ridden, she sloshed through the sewage-filled culvert, swung herself out over the water and onto the riverbank, panting as if her lungs would explode. The sun was rising in the east. She’d been underground for almost eighteen hours. The day was already hot.

  15

  Invitation to Versailles

  Stumbling toward the LaRouche mansion in the eerie haze of morning light, all too conscious of her matted hair, tattered dress, and still-bleeding cuts, Selena looked like an apparition from hell itself. She was glad that no people were in the streets, but just when she grew confident that she’d reach the house safely, a uniformed guard stepped through a gate in front of
one of the neighboring homes and confronted her. The rich, terrified by yesterday’s riot, had stepped up their defenses.

  “Get out of here immediately, you filthy old hag!” he cried, unable to conceal his own disgust at her appearance.

  He wore a pistol at his belt and carried a riding whip, which he lifted to strike her.

  “Please!” she cried, raising her arms to ward off the blow. “I am a guest of Madame LaRouche’s.”

  “Like hell you are.”

  “No, it is true. I was caught in the mob yesterday. I am a foreigner, unfamiliar with Paris, and only now have I managed to find my way back.”

  The guard lowered his whip. “You’re Selena?” he asked doubtfully.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, my God. Come with me. I’m sorry. Madame has been beside herself with worry about your fate. She is at home now, under doctor’s care. Which you ought to be as well.”

  He shrank from touching her, and in fact walked several paces ahead of her as he led her to Martha Marguerite’s home. Selena did not blame him for his squeamishness; the awful stench of the sewers was upon her and she was unsure if it could ever be thoroughly washed away.

  Hugo and Sebastian, half-awake, were sitting on the floor in the foyer, drinking coffee.

  “Jesus, Selena!” they exclaimed, leaping to their feet when the guard brought her in. “We thought you were dead for sure.”

  “Maybe I am…” she managed to say, and collapsed onto the floor.

  When she awoke, Selena was lying in bed, clean and cool. Old Stella and Martha were seated on chairs next to the bed.

  “How do you feel, Selena?” asked Martha, who did not look any too well herself.

  Selena tried to sit up. The effort was unsuccessful. But she was able to move her arms and legs. A good sigh.

  “The doctor washed you as well as he could, and dressed your cuts,” said Martha. “His orders are that you rest completely in bed for several days at least.”

  “He will get no resistance from me,” Selena groaned. “But I need a real bath right away. I want to soak for hours.”