“I am sorry.” She smiled, sitting effortlessly upon the straw before him. She'd grown accustomed to the floor during her years of imprisonment and now found it far more satisfactory than the confinement of any chair.
“Are you...?” He looked up with mild shock to see her on the floor.
“I’m fine,” she said quickly.
He nodded once and looked briefly about the small cell, his eyes taking it all in, the dank red-brick walls, low ceiling, one cot, one table on which rested one candle. “My Godl” he whispered in reaction to the cell.
She nodded and tucked the soiled gray prison skirt about her legs and drew her knees up. “I know.” She smiled. “It isn’t Saint George’s Street, and certainly not Eden.”
He looked down sharply on her for a moment, as though he didn’t appreciate her poor attempt at humor.
“How... long,” he began, “have you... been here?”
“Here?” she asked, not certain if he meant this prison or this particular cell. “Here about four months, since the trial. Before that I had a lovely cell upstairs with a high window, even. You could see the sky...” Recalling such luxury, she smiled nostalgically. Unfortunately his face bore quite another expression.
“How... long have you...?” he began, and could not finish and let a weak gesture which encompassed the small cell complete the question for him.
“Been in prison?” she asked. And smiled. “Too long, I’m afraid,” she said, evading the question.
“Elizabeth, look at me,” he commanded. “How long?”
In a curious way, she felt reassured. So long as everything in the world did not change all at once, she would find it easier to deal with her last days here. To see John subdued and ill was bad enough. To have found his mind and spirit as changed would have been too much.
“I worked for the movement three months after I arrived from London...”
“And then?”
She shrugged, still unable to believe he was here, that they were chatting so casually of such matters. “A group of us were arrested, some deported. Louise Michel was sent to New Caledonia. You remember Louise...
She couldn’t tell if he did or not. There was on his face still a splintered expression of stunned disbelief. “What... year?” he stammered, apparently trying to put a time sequence together. For what reason, she had no idea.
Time meant so little to the prisoners of La Rochelle. It never behaved as properly in confinement as it did in freedom. Here, she’d observed, it either went too slowly, never moving forward at all, or moving far too rapidly, like November 15. Once — only yesterday — she'd had four months left. Now she had seven days.
‘The year was 1870, John,” she said quickly in answer to his question. “The same year that...” She broke off, aware too late of what she was about to say. See? There was a hazard in isolation. One tended to forget how to conduct oneself socially. She was about to say, “the same year you drove everyone away from Eden.”
“The same year Mary and Burke sailed for America,” she substituted, hungry for news of everyone, but of these two in particular.
“Come along,” he commanded absurdly, as though he'd seen enough of everything and now it was time to move on.
As he struggled to his feet, she gaped upward, still eager for news from the outside. “John, please tell me about - ”
“I'll tell you about anything you want to hear,” he said gruffly, breathing heavily from the exertion of standing, “but not here. Let's get the hell out of here.”
As he made his way to the open cell door, she still found she was incapable of doing anything but gaping. Did he really think they were going to just walk out of here? Oh, dear Lord, how often she had dreamed it. But didn't he know...?
“Come, Elizabeth,” he scolded again, more sternly this time, as though she were a stubborn child.
“John, I don't...”
Then he was standing over her, awesome from this angle, extending his hand downward, indicating without words she was to take it.
“John, please, I can't - ”
“Get up!” he whispered fiercely, high color rising on his face.
Stunned by his ingenuousness, his apparently sincere outrage, she took his hand and felt herself almost airborne as he pulled her upward. Still grasping her wrist in a viselike grip, he started back toward the open cell door, moving at high speed now, both hands fully occupied, one grasping her wrist, the other the walking stick.
But John managed only one boot over the line that separated her from her nightmare. All at once the four soldiers who had been softly chattering a distance away suddenly sprang to life, all shouting at once, all moving at once — ironically, not toward John, who had initiated the bid for freedom, but toward her, who had only followed.
As they descended simultaneously, they pushed John to one side, as though he didn't exist. As she felt the full weight of their hands on her shoulders pushing her down into the straw, she was sorry John would have to see her manacled. It would have been easier for him if he had not. She closed her eyes as she felt the prison skirt lifted, felt the cold iron band clamped shut on one ankle, the black iron chain pulled taut as the second iron was shut over her other ankle. All the time, the French soldiers were chattering, half in anger, more in annoyance, as though she were simply a child who had disappointed them. One held up wrist manacles...
Dear God, no.
But the others shook their heads and pointed toward Madame Charvin's arrangement of wax flowers.
Thus given the freedom of her arms and hands, she closed her eyes and heard them in retreat, still muttering in anger, and wondered where John was and what he was thinking — and was he strong enough to endure?
For several moments she refused to open her eyes, unable to face the answers to those questions. Then she did, and instantly regretted it and saw him flattened against the bars of the cell, his face even more bloodless as he stared down on her manacled legs.
She must speak to him. She was accustomed to the irons. She'd worn them day and night the first two months of her imprisonment after sentence had been passed. They could be dealt with.
“John, you mustn't - ”
“I... am so... sorry...” But he couldn't finish and apparently felt instead a need to touch her, for all at once he was at her side, his arms about her.
She lost track of how long he held her. It didn't matter. The guards had closed and locked the cell door after them to prohibit any future escape attempts. And John, having seen their quick action where she was concerned, seemed to have momentarily surrendered in this battle of wills.
Gradually the tension seemed to ease in him, and thus in her. It had always been so. John had always set the emotional pace for all the family.
But for now nothing mattered except they were together, after she had thought she never would see him again in this life. While she wondered precisely how long they had, even that didn't matter.
“Is it true, then?” he asked.
“Is what true?” she asked, nestling closer into his arms against the day when he would be gone from her.
'They told me you were under sentence of... death.”
She closed her eyes, appalled at how it sounded when spoken aloud. “Yes.”
Did she want a blindfold, or did she want one last look at the miracle of blue sky?
“Would you tell me about it?” he asked, his voice as kind as she'd ever heard it. If only he'd discovered that becoming and soothing tone sooner, his empire and family might still be intact and she would not be...
She commenced speaking of the night months ago when she'd been sewing late with Eugenie Retiffe, when she'd heard the footsteps at a time of night and in a place where there should be no footsteps. It wasn't as difficult to tell as she'd imagined. Even the humiliation and degradation that had followed were bearable. It was almost over. Even memory then would be obliterated. She concluded with the magistrate's pronouncing the death sentence by firing squad, and then realized s
he had nothing else to say.
Just when she thought how good he was being in not interrupting, she heard him groan.
“Don't, John, please.” She held him now, her arms tightly enclosed against the horror she'd lived with every moment of every day for the last four months. It could be accommodated, the sure and certain knowledge of one's imminent death. But the most stoic will could be undone with one brief expression of pity.
“It can be endured, John,” she whispered, pressing his head close to her breast. “I assure you it can. I saw so much bravery during the revolution, women who — “
“Damn the revolution!” he exploded, and pushed away from her comfort.
And she knew that expression and regretted what it meant — more will, more inhuman effort expended in a futile cause. How much better it would have been to spend the last moments talking quietly about their rich past.
“The fifteenth, the bastard said,” John announced.
She nodded and sat up straight, tried to stand and remembered the manacles were back in place, and instead curled her legs to one side and smoothed the prison skirt over them. Strange, but in his presence they were more of an embarrassment than usual.
“I... don't...” she began, watching the process she knew so well, having witnessed it off and on throughout his life since he was a little boy, the dynamo that controlled his spiritual center beginning to build a head of steam. On his feet, he retrieved the walking stick and commenced pacing the small cell. Four steps in one direction, three in the other …
“John, please,” she begged, watching him, wishing he would hold her again and say nothing.
“No,” he said sternly, shaking his head, still pacing, studying the floor as though the clue to the future was there, had been there all along and all he had to do was find it.
“Tell me of Eden,” she begged, still trying to cut through the monumental energy building within him. “John, please tell me of Eden. There isn't much time...”
“You're right,” he snapped, and for the first time looked down on her. She saw the new strength, the new resolution falter, as though each time he looked at her, he suffered a new shock.
“Seven days,” he said, speaking rapidly, “but we can do it.”
“Do... what?” she asked, almost fearful he would tell her.
And he did. “I'm not alone, you know.”
“Who...?” she asked eagerly, hoping it was a member of the family. Of course they wouldn't have let him come alone. “Who, John? Richard? Is it Richard?”
“Of course not,” he scolded. “I haven't seen Richard. It's Bates. You remember Bates...”
Bates? Yes, Pencil-thin, arrogant, and proper. She'd always suspected Bates didn't quite approve of her as a member of the Eden family. “Where...?”
John shrugged and smiled, the first she'd seen on his face since he'd arrived in the dimly lit cell. “He was in Mortemouth and appeared when I needed him most. He's upstairs at this very moment with General Montaud...” He broke off and stopped directly in front of her. “Do you know the general?” he asked, his voice weighted with innuendo.
She did. Madame Charvin had brought him down once not too long ago to show him her wax flowers.
“He's a bastard,” John pronounced solemnly, “and a madman.”
She smiled at the innocent assessment. “They are all mad, my dearest,” she said. “The world has gone mad. I was able to judge that at the end of my first day on the barricades.”
Slowly, almost wearily, he backed away until he found the security of a wall and leaned against it. “What... possessed you?” he asked, almost childlike.
For a moment she had no idea what he meant. “What... possessed? I don't under - ”
“To leave England, me, Eden, and come... here.”
She'd known all along she'd have to address herself to this sort of accounting, though for a moment she resented it. “I did not think of it as leaving England or you or Eden,'' she said, and realized she was lying — at least in part. Had life at Eden been different, she might have stayed. But there had been so much death and destruction and tragedy, the very air had seemed heavy with grief and she'd felt a strong need for fresh air, different horizons.
“It was Louise, primarily,” she went on, not looking at him, easing the heavy iron ring around her left ankle where the flesh was being pinched. “You remember Louise Michel,” she went on. “She spoke in London on several occasions. I held a salon for her once. She was a most eloquent woman, like no one I'd ever met.”
She closed her eyes and enjoyed a precise image of Louise Michel, the close-cropped brown hair, a soul burning in dark eyes the chill of prison could never extinguish. Recovering quickly, she opened her eyes from the torture of memory and saw her arrangement of wax flowers awaiting finishing touches. For one instant she deeply resented John's presence and wished — God forgive her — he had not come, had left her alone to face what had to be faced.
“Did I...?” he began, and broke off. “Did I...?” he began again. “Was I responsible for... driving you away?” he managed at last.
Again she was shocked by the ingenuousness of the question. Of course he was. “No,” she lied. “I would have gone anyway. I had to. I believed so intensely in what Louise was preaching, the right of every woman to select her own destiny, to spend or waste her life.”
“Did you have it so bad?” he asked, that small-boy quality to his voice again, clearly indicating he didn't understand her or the movement any more now than he had on that last terrible day in the Eden library years ago when, like a deranged man, he had shouted, “What did any of you want that I was not able and willing to give you?”
“Freedom,” she'd answered then, and started to repeat the word, and decided: No. She was through explaining herself.
“Come, John,” she invited, extending a hand to him with the thought of guiding him back down on the straw. It would be easier for both of them to sit than to stand. And she was weary of postmortems and what-might-have-beens.
“In addition to Bates,” he said, ignoring her gesture, “there is a young man from Mortemouth who is serving as my coachman.” He looked down on her with a curious expression, part smile, part astonishment. “He said he wanted to serve me.” The soft astonishment grew, as though he were so accustomed to being hated that a desire on the part of anyone to serve him came as a shock.
“I don't doubt it,” Elizabeth said, still amazed at how important it was for this complex man to know he was loved. “I imagine everyone in Mortemouth rejoiced at seeing you well and - ”
She started to say more, but suddenly he interrupted. “Prepare yourself,” he said with almost amusing melodrama.
She tried to match the new soberness in his face, and looked up. “Prepare myself... for what?”
“I'm leaving now to dispatch Charley Spade back to England on the fastest horse I can purchase in this godforsaken place. I will send with him a personal letter from William Gladstone - ”
“No-”
“Hear me out. As prime minister he can intercede on your behalf-”
“No, John, I beg you...” She was on her knees, suffering fresh agony, the duress of this latest threat. Not Willie. He owed her nothing, and she was fearful a bid for help would be interpreted as payment due on an ancient debt. No! John had no right...
“John, please,” she begged, still struggling up against the confinement of her manacles. Halfway up, in haste she lost her balance and fell back to the straw.
Just then the guards appeared, key in hand, and unlocked the door. John passed through it immediately. “If Charley Spade moves quickly,” he called back through the bars, “I'll have you released well within the limit of time — four days, no more. And Gladstone will intervene, I'm certain of it. In the past he has quarreled with me, but not with you.”
“John, no, I beg...”
Either he couldn't or wouldn't hear her protest and backed away from the bars, as though relieved to be outside the cell. She sta
rted to call to him again, but saw the single-mindedness on his face that she'd first observed when he'd been a boy of three.
With characteristic imperiousness he waved the soldiers forward as though they took orders from him. To her astonishment, they fell into precise formation and led the way down the dark, narrow corridor. Without another look in her direction, John followed. She sat frozen, listening to the cadence of their step, and found herself counting it off under her breath, and realized she passed a large part of her day in silent counting. Counting the bars which fronted her cell. Counting the number of candles on the low bench which must be transformed into flowers by next Tuesday.
Tuesday.
The word stopped her.
November 15.
*
All the way back up the long staircase, he purposefully kept his mind busy. Yes, they would go immediately to the stables he'd spotted not too far from their wretched boardinghouse in Rue Saint Jacob. While Charley Spade and Bates were selecting the best animal, John would pen a hurried though careful letter to William Gladstone, England's prime minister, informing him in clear terms of the barbaric indignities being heaped upon a British citizen who had been unfortunate enough to get herself caught in this latest example of French instability and hysteria.
The French soldiers led him upward at a fast pace. Twice they had to slow down as, with one backward look, they could see that he had trouble keeping up. He made himself hurry. Yes, he would write to Gladstone. What had she against that? John was certain the old man owed her a great deal, for the number of times she'd permitted him to...
The thought was like poison in his system, threatening both his breath and his balance.
The three soldiers in the lead drew farther and farther ahead, isolating John with the one man who continued to hover solicitously, supporting his arm, a gesture of kindness that baffled John but which he accepted gratefully nonetheless.
When they were less than fifty feet from the top, when he could see the first faint patch of gray day and smell the first whiff of fresh air, the soldier trailing behind reached out a hand — not in support, but in restraint.
Eden Rising (The Eden Saga Book 5) Page 26
