“Edgar Allan Poe,” he corrected. Skaggs shut the door behind him. The gust from the street doused the lard lamp on their table.
From his pocket Duff pulled a match safe—a tin box in the shape of a tiny pistol—and struck a lucifer to relight the lamp.
“My dear Miss Lucking,” Skaggs said as he approached, touching his hat and nodding. “How good to see you again.”
“Sir,” she said, pleased for the pretext to end Duff ’s evening tutorial—and pleased, too, to be engaging in this charade with Skaggs, whose arms and creaky studio couch she had left hardly more than an hour ago. Was she not an actress, after all?
4
the next afternoon—February 24, 1848
Paris
WHEN BEN AWOKE in Ashby’s studio, a blanket covered him. He had had the dream of flying, of being a balloonist without a balloon, swooping as usual over green hills, but the euphoria mingled with panic because in the dream his vision had been magnified, as if both eyes were telescopes, making navigation precarious. He wiped the crusts of dried tears from his eyes and cheeks.
On the little chest next to him he saw that Isabelle had set out a glass of wine and a plate with some smoked duck and a piece of cake. He yawned. He listened. He heard animated chatter and a friendly shout or two in the street, but no chanting mob. A few gunshots in the distance, but no more cannon fire or drummers beating nervous tattoos. Ben assumed the insurgents had been put down, and order restored. He picked up a scrap of purplish duck meat with his fingers. It tasted fatty and delicious.
IN FACT, DURING the last few hours a kind of order had been restored. While Ben slept, King Louis-Philippe, shocked by his army’s massacre of forty-seven of his subjects the night before, and no less by his troops’ refusal to cheer when he appeared before them, had announced his abdication. He fled Paris in a hired one-horse carriage, using the alias “Mr. Smith.” The palace guards, each man wearing an enormous white X strapped across his chest, like a gunner’s target, scattered. The mob arrived and, as the story required, ransacked the palace. From the windows came showers of satin undergarments and silver cutlery and porcelain trinkets. The throne was hauled outside and, with wads of gilded lace drenched in tallow for kindling, set afire.
Some of the mob had marched across the river to the Palais Bourbon, where they smashed open the great oaken doors to the Chamber of Deputies and there beheld an unimaginably arousing scene: the nine-year-old Louis-Philippe, whose grandfather the king had named to be his successor, stood with his mother, awaiting ratification by Parliament. The insurgents swept into the chamber, where they waved flags and bellowed slogans.
They crowded in close around the little princeling and his mother, actually jostling them—a tanner’s sooty woolen shirtsleeves rubbed the duchess’s organza, a hem of flawless Tuileries velvet wicked the sweat from a wheelwright’s forearm—finally forcing this last remnant of the dethroned royal family to run, literally, for their lives.
No Parisian was not astounded by what had occurred, and how suddenly. It was like a dream; it was like a nightmare. During the last several hours, the monarchy had ended, the military capitulated, a republic was proclaimed, the revolution won. History had lurched in Paris.
BUT OF ALL this Ben Knowles knew nothing. His tongue flicked at a strand of duck wedged between two molars, and he poured a dram of the bittersweet Italian liquor into his water glass, watching the cloud of pink slowly roil and sink.
Ashby’s death was so entirely pointless.
Further, Ben thought, it had been stripped even of its particularity, the irreducible dignity attending almost any death, by its freakish proximity to the massacre.
He started, like the jerk between consciousness and sleep, at the sound of a knock.
“Sir?”
It was a man. His accent was French.
Ben grabbed the Chinese knife from the trunk and crawled to the vestibule as fast as a rodent. If it was the sergeant from last night, Ben intended to avenge Ashby’s murder, or die in the attempt. He slipped the weapon from its leather wrapper. He squatted near the door.
“C’est Mademoiselle Levy!” It was the voice of the concierge. Had she betrayed him? “Isabelle Levy. Nous avons des nouvelles!”
He had no idea what she was saying. He stood. He gripped the knife tight in his hand and held it near his head, like a red Indian laying an ambush in the Leather-Stocking Tales. With his free hand he threw open the door and made a low, guttural animal cry.
Before him were the concierge, dressed in a heavy cloak, and a flush-faced stranger about Ben’s age. His eyes had a kind of lunatic brightness. He was dressed entirely in black, including his wool scarf. Ben’s wild-man pose and yell had made the man smile fondly, as if he were accustomed to such greetings.
Ben lowered the knife and nodded politely to the man with whom he had, a moment before, expected to engage in mortal combat.
“I am Théodore Surville, the friend of Lloyd Ashby,” the Frenchman said. “Mamselle Levy told to me he has become one of our heroes—one of our many martyrs.”
“You are not with the army, or the Municipal Guard? Not an agent of the government?”
He laughed. “No, no, no, no. A fool. A lazy poet. And as well,” the Frenchman added, “a man of the barricades. ‘The government,’ now it is ours. The king has run away.” He made a silly running motion with two fingers of his free hand. “The Garde Municipale is already—congédiée, terminated, disbanded. It is a revolution. We are now all of us citoyens.”
“Oui,” Isabelle said. “Oui.”
Ben stared. Standing there in the doorway looking at two strange French citizens, he was, for the second or third time in the past twenty-four hours, revising completely his picture of the world. He felt his spirits lift.
“You saw the corpse of Lloyd?” the Frenchman asked.
“I wrote his name on the sole of his boot,” Ben replied.
Theodore frowned and then smiled again, apparently savoring this fact.
“Good. Good, my friend. We will see to him now.” He motioned to Ben to follow him out. “You shall come with us in the streets now.”
Ben breathed deeply. “He did not die in vain. Did he?”
“Lloyd? No!” Théodore said. “No.”
“Qu’a-t-il dit?” asked Ashby’s concierge and model.
The Frenchman translated. “Si Lloyd est mort en vain.”
“Non!” she exclaimed. “Il est mort pour la patrie.”
“She says he died for our fatherland. So to speak. Except, of course, we all of us die always in vain, do we not, eh? Come with the two of us. Witness the new world.”
What a queer man. “I need my boots and to gather my things,” Ben said, glancing at the penguin as he walked away in his stockings to finish dressing.
“You seem not very English, Mr. Knowles. I believe you are the forgery of an American, like Lloyd.”
Ben smiled.
The weather had turned mild and the drizzle had stopped. The streets were filled with people, every one of them gay. Stranger greeted stranger, delighted to call each other citoyen again and again, like boys repeating an obscene word they had just learned. Ben saw no soldiers or police. The eyes of nearly every person were red, whether from crying or sleeplessness or drink or all three, he could not be sure.
One gang of old drunkards marched past arm in arm behind a young drummer, all of them shouting “Vive la République!” at the tops of their voices. When one of the old men vomited on himself, one of his companions shouted “Vive le vomi!” Which Théodore repeated without smiling, raising his fist in the air as he did. “One must be drunk always,” he said a moment later to Ben, “drunk in all meanings. This revolution is metaphysical also. Lloyd knew this.”
A young woman strolled along waving a calf ’s leg in the air like a club.
A brown-and-white spaniel wearing a straw bonnet appeared from an alley and joined the marchers, darting back and forth between their legs like a shuttle in a handloom.
>
Wine was being poured for free by the patron of the Café Cuisinier.
An unharnessed coach horse wandered past, without a driver in sight, followed by a gaggle of honking geese. The feathers of one goose, apparently uninjured, were splattered in blood.
As a sprinkling of white dust cascaded onto Ben’s hair and shoulders, he looked up and spotted a little girl on her balcony, half hidden behind a red flag, grabbing handfuls of flour from a tin and tossing them gaily into the air. He thought of Wordsworth’s famous lines, about the revolution of 1789—“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/But to be young was very heaven! Oh! times,/In which the meager, stale, forbidding ways/Of custom, law, and statute, took at once/The attraction of a country in romance!” Never had the sentiments of any poem seemed quite so true to Ben. His own nature seemed to him born again.
The red banners, the riderless horse, crowds, ferocious high spirits, white powder drifting down like snow…the scene was oddly familiar. Then he recalled: a year earlier almost to the day, he had been a tourist in a different smug and exquisite Catholic metropolis gone temporarily mad, during Carnival in Rome…
HE REMEMBERED RIDING out of St. Peter’s Square in a huge carriage with his fiancée and her parents. They had watched a delegation of Jews kneel before the pope and present him with a bag of gold ducats—the 480th and final annual Carnival degradation of Rome’s Jewish population. “I thought we would see them wear their red Jew cloaks, and ride donkeys backwards,” Lydia’s mother had complained. “Not in the present century, Mrs. Winslow,” Ben had replied.
When they turned down the Via del Corso, he had been happily agog. Nearly every window and door and balcony had been draped with red and gold fabric. From upper stories householders had poured bags of plaster dust onto the crowd, or aimed lime-powdered papier-mâché balls at particular vehicles and pedestrians. Ben had never seen so many candles outside a church, candles set on the sills of every window and in almost every promenader’s fist, dancing reflections of candles in windows, reflections of those reflections in windows across the way.
Just when Ben had attempted to direct their driver toward a spot in the Piazza del Popolo from which they might watch the evening Carnival race—riderless horses galloping down the corso—one of the little balls flew through the carriage window, struck Lydia Winslow’s cashmered breast, and fell onto her besatined thighs, marking each with a sparkling white spot of lime. Ben had picked it up from her lap with two fingers, careful not to touch Lydia herself, and tossed it from the carriage. An instant later, Satan thrust his face through the window, and then his red-painted hand, holding the discarded ball, followed by Jesus, whose wig of long hair whisked Lydia’s cheek. Without a word, she slammed the palms of both hands against the faces of Christ and Lucifer, crumpling the papier-mâché forehead of the former, breaking a papier-mâché horn of the latter, and provoking the masker who wore both faces, one on each side of his head, to threaten to set the carriage afire with his candle. Then Lydia felt a stinging speck of lime in her eye—“some deadly Italian poison,” she cried.
Later that evening, Lydia Winslow had taken his hand in hers and mewled, “Benjamin Knowles—I wish never to leave Great Britain again. Promise me!” He declined to make the promise. In fact, it was that evening during Carnival in Rome that he had decided to end their betrothal.
“MONSIEUR KNOWLES!” ISABELLE Levy shouted. Ben had, in his reverie, walked several paces past them. He was watching a group of Parisians wedging loose cobblestones beneath a surrendered artillery piece in order to tilt the barrel downward toward the Seine, as if they planned to fire it into the water for sport.
“You are still sleeping, Mr. Knowles,” Théodore said, a little teasingly, then pointed to his right. “We have arrived. L’Hôtel de Ville. The town hall. And now our morgue. You understand? The deadhouse for the martyrs.”
Hundreds of people milled about the building, inside and out, meeting, strolling, arguing, speechifying, laughing, crying.
Ben and his companions entered a sort of ballroom as big as a railway station. It smelled like a Catholic church. Two men, each grasping the chains of an incense burner, paced the floor randomly, like altar boys adrift among the martyrs. The censers’ smoke masked the smell of putrefying flesh. The hall was filled, end to end, with three neat long rows of camp bedsteads, two hundred in all. In each bed lay a corpse. The orderly lines of absolutely still cots reminded Ben of the rows of paint tubes on the bench in Ashby’s studio.
Ben waited while Théodore and Isabelle went off to speak with a functionary about retrieving Ashby’s body and shipping it back to England. They seemed to be arguing. Théodore had told Ben he was friendly with an embalmer at the medical school, but Ben said he thought embalming was unnecessary, given that London was only twelve hours away by rail and steam ferry. “Ah,” the Frenchman had replied, “now hearses by steam”—and then embarked on a rant about “the contest between modern machine and modern chemistry to serve Death,” and how Paris was being “murdered by all of the new iron tracks and steam monsters at five railway stations now!” Ben had ceased to find this man amusing. The truth was, Ben could not bear the prospect of allowing a surgeon to cut open Ashby’s belly, scoop out his intestines like a taxidermist, and stuff his empty gut full of spices and turpentine.
“It seems Ashby is nowhere,” Théodore said when they returned from the attendant’s desk. “He is not in this place.”
The nightmare had become farce. The French murdered Ashby, and now they had misplaced his remains. What was it he had said yesterday about how the insurrections would end? As tragicomedy.
“They have some confusion,” Théodore said. “It is the revolution.” He shrugged. “A few of the dead were put out for the north already this morning, by coach, with ice, to Normandy. Lloyd is perhaps among them, I think.”
“Vers l’Angleterre,” Isabelle said.
“Yes, toward England. You named him, you wrote on the shoe, yes?”
Ben nodded.
“Therefore,” Théodore shrugged, “we shall wish for the body to arrive home.” He seemed almost to enjoy the fact of Ashby’s disappearance. “Perhaps he shall arrive even before you on the train.”
It had come time for Ben to continue his own journey.
Outside in the square they found him a cab. At the Hôtel Diderot he would bathe and dress before going to Mary and the Count de Tocqueville’s for dinner. Next morning he would try to attend to his Knowles, Merdle, Newcome & Shufflebotham business with the sewing machine manufacturer, as planned, and then head back to England.
He sighed. He looked at his father’s penguin standing on the seat opposite. The bird was vibrating in a lifelike fashion as the carriage rolled along. Its glass eyes stared directly at him. Now that he was face-to-face with it, he noticed that its mouth was fixed in a kind of smile, and a smudge of blood remained on the underside of the beak. The wrapping around its body looked like a little straitjacket.
He had spent less than an hour yesterday at his hotel, but it now looked to him like the one familiar place in this alien city, a refuge. The door was blocked by a servant girl outside on her knees, her back to Ben, intently polishing the brass with a rag. He stepped close. She continued polishing. He cleared his throat. She did not notice.
As he mentally rehearsed the word and his accent—Mademoiselle? Mademoiselle?—a man on the pavement behind him said, “Bonjour, mon citoyen anglais.”
Ben glanced back and saw the fellow, tall and unsmiling. He was evidently a workman come to make repairs at the hotel. But he was holding a book in his left hand, and the cover was open.
“Votre livre,” he said, reading from the endpaper, “Monsieur Ka-nole.”
“I am afraid, sir, that I am not Monsieur Ka-nole…”
But then Ben realized that the book was the guidebook he had dropped in the street, that “Kanole” was a French mispronunciation of “Knowles,” that the man’s right hand was bandaged. At first Ben had not recognized him,
dressed in ordinary clothing. But it was the sergeant from last night.
Ben reached into his coat, unsure if he had pocketed—yes—Ashby’s little Chinese knife. In a single motion he drew it out and stabbed into the bandaged hand, and hurled the penguin at his face, then shoved past the girl into the hotel, slammed the door, and twisted the latch shut.
Just ahead he spotted a darkened cloak closet and leapt inside. He stood very still, gripping the knife close against his chest. He heard two violent knocks on the front door of the hotel, wood against wood. He heard the sergeant shouting at the girl. He heard the clicks of a key working its way into the lock, and the door open. He felt the heavy thump and shuffle of boots just a few feet away. He imagined he could feel the heat of the sergeant’s breath. Then he heard raised voices inside the hotel, and the clatter of wheels from the street.
A moment and an extra moment later, he tiptoed from his hiding place—and encountered the servant girl, looking shocked. Ben held his forefinger to his lips. She held his penguin in her arms like an infant, its neck now broken and head bobbling, and offered it to him. He shook his head and placed the knife back in his coat pocket. The front door was open.
He dashed out, and away, to the west.
He ran with all his might for five minutes, ten minutes, on the pavements and in the gutters, toward the sun. He had no hat to wear, no penguin to lug, no companion to abide, nothing but the stuff in his pockets; he was sweaty, uncombed, and nearly squalid; he was free. He moved so fiercely that the dogs and celebrating drunks and barrow boys dodged from his path.
As he approached a modest barricade, he did not turn away, or stop for a reckoning: he leapt up onto the rubble heap, and before his first stepstone slipped away he leapt left onto an overturned barrel, and then back into the street ahead, making straight for the Gare Saint-Lazare.
Heyday: A Novel Page 9
