A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  She would go back to her daughter now. Lucile was still quite cheerful; that was because she didn’t know how bad it was going to get. She thought, could I have saved her from this? Of course she could. She could have followed her inclinations seven years ago; in that case, she would now be remembered by Camille, if he ever thought of her at all, as just a woman in his past, a woman he’d had to work extra hard for; and he would no longer be part of her life, he would be someone she read about in the newspapers. Instead, she had clung to her precious virtue, her daughter was married to the Lanteme Attorney and was now in labor, and she was observing daily—shuttling between the rue Condé and the rue des Cordeliers—the sort of sickeningly destructive love affair that you only read about in books. Of course, people could call it different things, but she called it a love affair. And she thought she had lived long enough to know what she was talking about.

  “We must have you out of here,” she said. “Go for a walk. Get some fresh air. Why don’t you go and see Max? He’s full of reassuring good sense and homely wisdom.”

  “Mm.” Camille looked ill with tension. “Bachelors always are. Send to me immediately, won’t you? The very minute?”

  “Annette said I must go away, she said I disseminated panic. I hope you don’t mind my arriving at this hour.”

  “I expected it,” Robespierre said. “We should be together, you and me. I have to go and get the day under way, but I’ll be back in an hour or two. The family will look after you. Would you like to go down and talk to one of the girls?”

  “Oh no,” Camille said. “I’ve given up talking to girls. Look what it leads to.”

  It was hard for Robespierre to smile. He reached forward and squeezed Camille’s hand. Odd, that; he usually avoided touching people. Camille divined that some kind of psychic emergency was taking place. “Max,” he said, “you’re almost in a worse state than I am. If I am disseminating panic, you are communicating disaster.”

  “It will be all right,” Robespierre said, in a tone deeply unconvinced. “Yes, yes, it will be, I feel it. She’s a healthy girl, she’s strong, there’s no reason to believe, is there, that anything could go wrong?”

  “Desperate, isn’t it?” Camille said. “Can’t even pray for her.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “I don’t believe God listens to those sorts of prayers. They’re selfserving, aren’t they?”

  “God accepts all kinds of prayers.”

  They looked at each other, vaguely alarmed. “We are here under Providence,” Robespierre said. “I am sure of that.”

  “I couldn’t say that I’m sure of it. Though I do find the idea consoling.”

  “But if we are not under Providence, what is everything for?” Robespierre now looked wildly alarmed. “What is the Revolution for?”

  For Georges-Jacques to make money out of, Camille thought. Robespierre answered himself. “Surely it is to bring us to the kind of society that God intends? To bring us to justice and equality, to full humanity?”

  Oh good heavens, Camille thought. This Max, he believes every word he says. “I wouldn’t presume to know what kind of society God intends. It sounds to me as if you’ve gone to a tailor to order your God. Or had him knitted, or something.”

  “A knitted God.” Robespierre shook his head, amazed. “Camille, you are a fount of original notions.” He put his hands on Camille’s shoulders. In a cautious way, they hugged each other. “Under Providence, we shall go on being silly,” Robespierre said. “I will be back in two hours, and then I will sit with you and we will discuss theology and whatever else will while away the time. If anything happens, get a message to me.”

  Camille was left alone. Conversations do take the most amazing turn, he thought. He looked around Robespierre’s room. It was plain, quite small, with an insomniac’s hard bed and a plain whitewood table that served as Robespierre’s very tidy desk. There was only one book on it—a small copy of Rousseau’s Social Contract—and he recognized it as the one that Robespierre always carried with him, in the inside pocket of his coat. Today he had forgotten it. His routine was broken; he had been overset.

  He picked up the book and looked at it closely. It had some special magic, which had communicated itself to Robespierre; this volume and no other will do. An idea struck him. He flourished the book before an imaginary audience. He said, In Robespierre’s Artesian accent: “Victim of an assassin’s musket ball, this copy of the Social Contract saved my life. Remark, fellow patriots, how the fatal bullet was deflected by the immortal cheap cloth binding of the immortal words of the immortal Jean-Jacques. Under Providence—” He was going to go on to speak about the plots that menaced the nation, plots, plots, plots, plots, plots, but he felt suddenly weak and jittery and knew that he ought to sit down. He pulled up to the table a straw-bottomed chair. It was exactly like the chair he had stood on when he spoke to the mob at the Palais-Royal. I don’t think I could live with such a chair, he thought. It frightens me too much.

  He had a speech to write. What stupendous self-control, he thought, if I could write any of it, but I don’t suppose I will. He got up and looked out of the window for a while. Maurice Duplay’s workmen were fetching and carrying in the yard below. Seeing him watching them, they raised hands in greeting. He could go down and talk to them, but he might meet Eléonore. Or he might meet Mme. Duplay, and she would trap him in that drawing room of hers, and expect him to make conversation, and eat things. He had a dread of that room, with its vast articles—you could only call them that—of mahogany furniture, and its dark red draperies of Utrecht velvet, with its old-fashioned hangings and its enameled stove that gave off a fume-laden heat. It was a room for hopes to die in; he imagined picking up a crimson cushion, and placing it decisively over Eléonore’s face.

  He wrote. He tried a paragraph. He deleted it. He began again. Time passed, he supposed. Then a little scratch at the door: “Camille, can I come in?”

  “You may.”

  Oh, why be like that? On edge.

  Elisabeth Duplay. “Are you busy?”

  He put the pen down. “I’m supposed to be writing a speech, but I’m not concentrating. My wife—”

  “I know.” She closed the door softly. Babette. The goose-girl. “So would you like it if I stayed and talked to you?”

  “That,” Camille said, “would be very nice.”

  She laughed. “Oh, Camille, you are sour. You don’t really think it would be very nice, you think it would be a bore.”

  “If I thought it would be a bore, I would say so.”

  “You have such a reputation for charm, but we don’t see much of it in this house. You’re never charming to my sister Eléonore, Although—I must admit—I’d often like to be rude to Eléonore myself, but I’m the youngest, and in our family we’ve been brought up to be polite to our elders.”

  “Quite right,” Camille said. He was perfectly serious. He couldn’t understand why she kept laughing. Then suddenly he could. When she laughed she was quite pretty. She was quite pretty anyway. An improvement on her sisters.

  She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Max talks about you a lot,” she said. “It would be lovely to know you better. I think you’re the person in the world he cares about most. And yet you’re very different—so why do you think that is?”

  “It must be my charm,” Camille said. “Obvious, isn’t it?”

  “He’s very nice to us, you know. He’s like a brother. He stands up to our father for us. Our father’s a tyrant.”

  “All children think that.” He was struck by what he had said. How would he treat this child of his, when it grew a will of its own? The child in its teens, he in middle age: there seemed something unlikely about it. He thought, I wonder what my father did while my mother was having me? I bet he worked on the Encyclopedia of Law. I bet he did a bit of indexing while my mother screamed in agony.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  He couldn’t suppress a smile. How well was
she suggesting she might get to know him? Women had a special time for that question, usually after the sexual act; but he supposed they had to rehearse it, even as schoolgirls. “Oh, nothing,” he said. (She may as well get used to the usual reply.) He felt uneasy. “Elisabeth, does your mother know you’re up here?”

  “You should call me Babette. That’s my pet name.”

  “Does she, though?”

  “I don’t know whether she knows or not. I think she’s gone out for the bread.” She ran a hand over her skirt, sat further back on the bed. “Does it matter?”

  “People might wonder where you are.”

  “They could call out, if they wanted me.”

  A pause. She watched him steadily. “Your wife is very beautiful,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Did she like being pregnant?”

  “She liked it at first, but then she found it was tedious.”

  “I expect you found it was tedious too.”

  He closed his eyes. He was almost sure he was right. He opened them again. He wanted to be sure that she didn’t move. “I think I must go now,” he said.

  “But Camille.” Her eyes became round. “If you leave, a message might come about the baby. You’d want to know right away, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes. Yes. Then perhaps we ought not to stay here.”

  “Why not?”

  Because I think you are trying to seduce me. Short of taking your clothes off, you couldn’t be much more plain about it. And you will probably do that in a minute. “You know damn well why not,” he said.

  “People can have conversations in bedrooms. People can have whole parties in bedrooms. Whole conferences.”

  “Yes, of course they can.” I should be gone by now.

  “But you’re afraid of doing something wrong? You find me attractive?” You can’t say, I didn’t say that. She might weep, become permanently diffident, die a spinster. All right, you can’t say that, but there are worse things that you can say. “Elisabeth, do you do this often?”

  “I don’t come up here often. Max is so busy.”

  Oh, a neat wit, he thought. This is a sort of standard-bearer in the army of round-faced, middle-class virgins, the sort of girl you got into a lot of trouble over when you were sixteen. And might again.

  “I don’t want you,” he said gently.

  “That’s not the point.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said that’s not the point.” She jumped from the bed and came towards him; her little slippered feet made no sound at all. Standing over him, she rested a hand lightly on his shoulder. “You’re here. I’m here.” She put a hand up, pulled at her hair, releasing it from its pins and shaking it out. Mouse-brown hair, disheveled now. And color in her cheeks …“Want to go now?” she said. Because then she would crash downstairs after him, and there would be (he knew these awful assemblies) Eléonore and the nephew and Maurice Duplay—as he stood up he caught sight of his face in the mirror, and saw that it was irate, guilty and confused. She moved backwards and leaned against the door, laughing up into his face: no longer the least significant member of the household.

  “Oh, this is ridiculous,” he said. “This is incredible.”

  She watched him narrowly. She had a poacher’s face, inspecting the early-morning traps.

  “No romantic interlude you had in mind,” he said. “You just want to see the blood.”

  “Ah,” she said, “then have we nothing in common?”

  She was a little girl, but she was built on solid lines; she made herself into deadweight resistance. As he pulled her away from the door, the fichu that covered her shoulders slipped and unknotted and floated to the floor. I wonder, he thought, what Mme. Duplay’s dressmaker thought she was about. Such a quantity of white swelling adolescent bosom. “Look,” she said, “at the state I’m in.” She caught his hand and held it at the base of her bared throat. He could feel the pulse quiver beneath her skin. “You’ve touched me now,” she said. Her face invited violence. He wanted to hit her. Then she would scream. Dear God, I must warn people about her, he thought. He made a mental list of the people he must warn.

  “You might as well, now,” she said. “We’re quite safe. There’s a lock on the door. Might as well go a little bit further.”

  He scooped up the fichu from the floor, slid it around her shoulders, held her tight while he did it, his fingers digging into her arm above the elbow. “I shall call your sisters,” he said. “Perhaps you are not well.”

  She gaped at him. “You’re hurting me,” she said faintly.

  “No, I’m not. Pin your hair up.”

  Strange, the expression he had time to notice on her face—not hesitation or anger, but disgruntlement. She tore herself out of his grip and lunged towards the window. Her face was flushed and she was taking deep breaths, great gulps of air. He came up behind her, shaking her a little: “Stop it. You’ll make yourself ill, you’ll faint.”

  “Yes, then you explain that. Or I could call out now. No one would believe you.”

  In the yard below them, the sound of sawing had stopped, and the men were looking up at the house. Their faces were a blur to Camille, but he could imagine every furrow on their brows. Maurice Duplay was walking slowly towards the house, and a second later he heard a woman’s voice raised, sharply questioning: Duplay’s voice, muffled but urgent: a sharp little feminine cry: the advance of footsteps, footsteps climbing the stairs.

  He went cold. She can say what she likes, he thought, they’ll believe her. Below the window now, something like a small crowd. All of them Duplay’s people, and all looking up; and their faces, he thought, were expectant.

  The door was flung open. Maurice Duplay filled it; energetic master, shirt-sleeves rolled up. He threw out his arms, the good Jacobin Duplay, and formed a sentence totally original, something which had never been uttered in the history of the world: “Camille, you have a son, and your wife is very well, and is asking you to be at home, right now.”

  A sea of smiles in the doorway. Camille stood fighting down his fright. You need not speak, a voice said inside, they will think you are too pleased and surprised to speak. Elisabeth had turned her back to them. With deft unobtrusive movements, she was straightening her clothes. “Congratulations,” she said lightly. “What an achievement for you.”

  “Maximilien has a godchild,” Madame Duplay said, beaming. “Please God one day he will have a fine son of his own.”

  Maurice Duplay locked his arms about Camille. It was a horrible, brisk, patriotic hug, Jacobin to Jacobin, Camille’s face pressed to the beefy flesh of Duplay’s shoulder. He rehearsed this sentiment, to the dampish white skin barely veiled by coarse linen: your youngest daughter’s a practicing rapist. No, he thought. It really won’t do. The best thing to do is not to mention it to anybody, they’ll only laugh. The best thing to do is to get home to Lucile and after this be very very careful and very very good.

  The first consolation was that it had taken less time than people feared—twelve hours from when it began; the second consolation was this tiny, black-haired child, lying along her arm. She felt such an access, such a purity of love that she could hardly speak; they warn you of all sorts of things, she thought, but no one ever warns you of this. She could hardly speak anyway; she was weary, deadly weary, hardly able to hold up her head.

  What different opinions people had! Through each contraction her mother had held her hands, wincing at the strength of her grip saying, be a brave girl, Lucile, be brave. The midwife had said, you have a good scream, flower, you scream the ceiling down if you feel like it, I’m sure your husband can afford the plaster. You can’t please everybody. Every time she’d thought of trying a scream, the next crashing pain had knocked the breath right out of her. Gabrielle Danton had leaned over her, saying something—something sensible, no doubt—and surely at one point Angélique had been there, too, muttering spells in Italian? But for minutes at a time—whole strings of seconds, anyway—sh
e had not known who was there. She had been living in another world: an unyielding world, with crimson walls.

  Deliberately, consciously, Camille set the morning’s other events to the back of his mind. Holding the fragile scrap of being against his shoulder, he breathed promises: I shall be very very nice to you; whatever strange or stupid sorts of things you want to do will be all right by me. Claude peered at the baby, hoping that Camille would not offer to hand him over. “I wonder who he will look like,” he said.

  Camille said. “There’s a lot of money on that.”

  Claude closed his mouth on the heartfelt congratulations he had been about to offer his son-in-law.

  “Why don’t we overthrow Louis on July 14?” inquired the ci-devant Duke of Orléans.

  “Oh-hum,” said the ci-devant Comte de Genlis. “You’re so fond of the sentimental gesture. I’ll speak to Camille and see if he could trouble to arrange it.”

  The Duke did not spot sarcasm easily. He groaned. “Every time you speak to Camille these days it costs me a small fortune.”

  “You don’t know where rapacity begins. How much have you given Danton, over these last three years?”

  “I couldn’t say. But if we fail this time, even a small riot will be beyond my means. When Louis falls—you don’t think, do you, that they’ll cheat me out of the throne this time?”

  De Sillery would have liked to point out that he had thrown away his chance once already (by listening, he would have said, to my wife Félicité, the procuress); but Félicité and her daughter Pamela had left for England last autumn, seen safely across the channel by the ever-useful, ever-obliging Jérôme Pétion. “Let me think,” he said. “Have you bought up the Brissotins, the Rolandins, the Girondins?”

  “Aren’t they all the same?” Philippe looked alarmed. “I thought they were.”

  “Are you quite sure that you can offer Georges Danton more than the Court can? More than he stands to make out of a republic?”

  “Has it come to that?” The Duke sounded disgusted; he quite forgot for a moment his own part in bringing it there.