Praise God Adkins took Fanny and Antoinette to his own house, a shuttered narrow structure at the end of a muddy narrow street near Lloyd’s Coffeehouse. They walked up from the river because there were no chairmen out in the rain, and by the time they reached the door Fanny’s skirt was heavy with mud. No fire burned in the grate. The hall was draughty and damp, with rain blowing against the windows and people trudging by outside as slowly as sleepwalkers.
“We will die of a chill,” Antoinette said, shouting because Praise God was an Englishman. “Someone must make a fire.”
Praise God was surprised by Antoinette’s vehemence. Fanny could see that he thought that it was wrong to speak so loudly so soon after Henry had been buried.
“I don’t know if there’s anything to burn,” he said. “Go find Royce. He’ll know.”
Antoinette took Fanny’s dripping cloak and disappeared toward the back of the house. She returned with Royce, Praise God’s aged servant, who carried two cups of brandy and hot water on a tray that trembled in his hands. Antoinette had found a few faggots of wood, and she kneeled down in her black dress to place them in the fireplace.
“Poussiere!” she cried in disbelief, flailing with one of the sticks of wood at the dust kittens that had accumulated between the andirons.
Praise God, oblivious, handed Royce his dripping cloak and hat and the servant gave him a nightcap, which Praise God placed on his bald head.
Suddenly Fanny was able to imagine her father as he had looked in life, grinning and quick to tell a story. Praise God had not worn a wig since the year of the Great Plague. Because Henry had often told her the story, Fanny knew why. A man had tried to borrow money from Praise God to finance a scheme to make wigs from the hair of the dead.
“There’s lovely hair just lying about all over London for the taking,” the man had said. “It’s a chance from heaven.”
Henry had called the wigmaker the hairy wretch. Drinking her rum and hot water, Fanny began to smile. Then other pictures came into her mind—her father lying in the mud on the football field, lying in the mud at Montagu’s feet in the street outside his ruined house, and now lying under the mud in Saint Andrew’s churchyard.
Fanny realized that Praise God was speaking to her. Huddled in front of the tiny fire that Antoinette had lighted, he drank his grog and looked at Fanny with sad eyes.
“We must find a better place for you,” he said “Greenwich, perhaps, or some town even farther off. Oliver’s house isn’t safe.”
“To hide myself from Montagu? What more can he do?”
Praise God gave her a severe look. “Remember what has happened. Remember the kiss, Fanny.”
Fanny did remember it—the lips wet with wine, the ringed fingers with their yellow nails sliding up her calf.
“You’ve no one to protect you,” Praise God said.
“I have Oliver.”
“Oliver? Of course, Oliver. He would gladly die for you, you’re everything in the world to him and always have been.”
Praise God shook his head. “But this is not a case for Oliver. Oliver is a strong fellow, but he’s muscle only, Fanny. It’s not enough. What’s needed against Montagu is brains.”
“My father wouldn’t have hidden me away from the likes of Montagu.”
“Perhaps not. But none of us is Henry. We don’t have what he had to fight with. Not the cleverness, not the friends, not the Pamela.”
Fanny waited for a moment. Then she said, “But we still have the Pamela.”
Praise God sighed. “I fear not. Montagu will have the Pamela and her cargo seized at the docks.”
Fanny’s voice did not rise, but she leaned forward a little in her chair to be certain that Adkins heard her words. “I’ll burn her first,” she said.
“Burn the Pamela, Fanny? Come, come.”
He gave her a melancholy look. The girl was distressed by her father’s death, but why could she not accept the good advice she was being given? She did not know what lay in store for her otherwise. Montagu would steal her, debauch her, let his friends use her, and then throw her into the streets. Praise God closed his eyes against these thoughts and the images they conjured.
Fanny spoke to him. “How much ready money did my father leave?” she asked.
“Ready money?” Praise God said. “Whatever was in his pocket. Your father lived on moneylenders, Fanny. He borrowed to buy you dresses, he borrowed to loan money to Oliver, he borrowed to give him a wedding feast. He was going to borrow another fifty guineas from me yesterday. He owed six hundred pounds against the Pamela’s next cargo. That is more than enough to buy another house just like the one Montagu … the one in Catherine Street.”
“Oliver?”
Praise God shrugged. “Oliver owes Montagu two thousand pounds and he owed your father a thousand. He has his house as long as Montagu lets it stand and his wife’s new ring, worth half what he paid for it if he’s lucky. He inherited a wilderness in America when his uncle died. Even Montagu can’t want that.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Fanny said.
Praise God reached across the mounds of paper to squeeze Fanny’s hand. But she moved it away before he could touch it. Her face was calm.
“What if the Pamela never comes home?” she asked.
“Not come home?” Praise God said. “What nonsense. She has a cargo and crew, Fanny. She must come home.”
“Yes,” Fanny said. “But what if she sailed not to London but to another port in England? Could the cargo be sold there without Montagu finding out?”
“It’s possible,” Praise God said. “But how can we arrange such a thing? We don’t know where the Pamela is, do we?”
“What if we do know?”
Suddenly Praise God’s eyes were not wounded but interested. “Are you saying that your father told you where his ship is?”
Fanny did not answer his question.
Praise God leaned forward. “Where is the Pamela?” he asked.
Fanny kept silent. If she was alone, whom could she trust? She was counting days in her mind. She knew how long it took to go to Honfleur in good weather: a day to Dover, a day to Calais by packet boat, a long day from there down the Channel. Then two or three days from the coast of France to an English port.
“What if the Pamela came into Portsmouth?” she asked. “Could we sell her cargo there? Is that far enough away from Montagu?”
“Yes. But you’d have to be quick.”
“Will you loan me fifty guineas?”
“What for?”
“In case I need it.”
Fanny had watched her father deal with Praise God Adkins a hundred times. That was what Henry had always said when asked why he wanted to borrow money: “In case I need it.”
Any proposition that mixed profit with friendship was irresistible to Praise God. He got out his purse and counted out the coins in ten stacks of five each. He still believed in the Harding luck.
“When will I get my money back?” he asked.
Fanny paused, as if she had to do the mental arithmetic she had already done.
“Today is the sixth of May,” she said. “You’ll have your fifty guineas, and every shilling my father owes you, in Portsmouth on the fifteenth of the month.”
15
“Honfleur, Fanny!” Antoinette said as the town with its steep roofs and slender steeples came into sight across the estuary of the Seine. Even in the steely light of afternoon, the town had more color than Henry had said. The gray slate houses stood along the waterfront just as he had described them, but he had left out the stone castle and the big royal flags in front of the Lieutenance and the yellowish thatched cottages marching up the hill-side beyond the town. White cows grazed in green fields along the riverbank and pale blue fishing boats bobbed on the rising tide.
“Does it look the way you thought it would?”
Because Antoinette was speaking French, her voice was gentle and happy. She was dressed in black and so was Fanny. They were heavily veiled,
and on the packet boats that had carried them across the Channel and then down the coast of Normandy to Honfleur, Antoinette had said that Fanny was a French girl called home by a death in the family. At night Antoinette had barred the doors and sat up in a chair to guard Fanny against Montagu. In the holy pocket of her petticoat, along with her religious objects and the two hundred gold sovereigns she had saved in her twenty years in England, she carried a dagger.
“If he finds us he will turn his back on me in order to feast his eyes on you,” Antoinette said. “And then!”
Now, however, Honfleur had captured Antoinette’s whole attention. Puffing a little in her happiness, repeating herself for the hundredth time, she told Fanny her plans. She was going to live in her sister’s house in the rue aux Chats. She had never seen her nieces and nephews. She would give them their presents and speak English for them. She could hardly wait to see the looks on their faces. Perhaps she would invest her savings in a tavern. She might even marry—a widower by preference because he would be a steady help at the tavern and, besides, she hated the jealousy of young men. She was only a bit more than thirty, young enough still to have a child. She had her virginity; she had a certain mystery. And, after all, she was not poor.
She looked at the town again, making a gesture that seemed to say that she gave it as a gift to Fanny.
“Well, is it not just as I said?” she said.
“No,” Fanny said. “It’s different from the stories.”
“Certainly it is different,” said Antoinette triumphantly. “It is even better than you imagined. One cannot describe France, so near to England and yet so much more beautiful.”
Antoinette’s round bosom rose and fell as she breathed in the damp air of France. Fanny smiled, her first smile in days, and hugged her. A tear ran down Antoinette’s cheek. How French Fanny was; no French person on the packet boat had suspected that she had a drop of English blood in her veins. She was so pretty and good. What English girl could possibly be like Fanny? See how she drank in the sight of France, her eyes sparkling! Antoinette stroked her gloved hand.
“Notre chèrie France,” she said. Our darling France.
Fanny threw back her veil. There was pallor beneath the gold of her cheeks and her eyes were tired. Sadness made her prettier, Antoinette thought. She murmured a prayer of thanks that they were safe in France.
“Look, Fanny, you can see the spire of Saint Catherine’s.”
But Fanny’s eyes were elsewhere. She was looking for the Pamela, and as the packet boat tacked around the end of the breakwater she saw her, her silhouette unmistakable among the bulbous square-rigged French naval vessels moored all around her. She rode low in the water, a heavy cargo obviously still aboard.
The packet boat sailed so close that Fanny could hear the hiss of its passage echoing off the Pamela’s planking and see the faces of the men on board.
Joshua Peters stood on the quarterdeck talking to two Frenchmen. One of them, younger and more plainly dressed than the other, turned and watched the packet as it sailed by. He looked like a soldier—dark blue coat neatly buttoned, plain sword, hat square on his head, watchful eyes. His eyes met Fanny’s. His windburned, beardless face was utterly without expression.
Then, just before the view was obscured by the hull and masts of the next moored vessel, Fanny saw a fourth man aboard the Pamela—a tall, thin figure dressed in a bright yellow coat and hat with a white plume that rippled in the offshore wind.
“Look,” Fanny said. “Montagu.”
Antoinette gasped and looked. She pulled down Fanny’s veil.
“It can’t be,” she said, “God wouldn’t permit such a thing.”
There were no formalities at the pier. Fanny simply stepped ashore and watched while Antoinette bustled about, casting fearful glances over the water at the Pamela and finding men to carry the baggage. The pleasure of being back in her own country, speaking a language in which she could say exactly what she meant and have it perfectly understood, very nearly overcame Antoinette’s terror of Montagu. Crossing the Channel, Antoinette had searched the boat over and over again, looking into every passageway and into every face in case he should have disguised himself and crept secretly aboard. Now, just when they should have been safe, just when Antoinette should have been beginning her own life at last, he had reappeared.
Fanny read the mixture of fear and anger and resentment in Antoinette’s face. When all the baggage had been piled up and Antoinette had stopped bustling about, Fanny touched her arm.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Fanny said. “He has no power in France.”
“He had no power in England except lies and thievery,” Antoinette replied, “and he pulled down the house while we slept.”
The porters stood nearby with the luggage already balanced on their shoulders.
“Come,” Antoinette said. “We must hurry.”
Looking into this sharp-nosed face that she had known better than any other except her father’s, Fanny could only think of the Pamela.
“I must go out to the ship,” she said.
“Go out to the ship? That monster is aboard the ship.” Fanny still had her hand on Antoinette’s arm, and she squeezed the plump flesh.
“You’ve done all that you can for me,” Fanny said. “It’s enough. Go to your sister’s. I’ll be along soon.”
Across the harbor, the two Frenchmen in their uniforms and Montagu in his brilliant coat climbed down the ladder of the Pamela and settled themselves into a boat.
“You’ll be captured like a fly,” Antoinette said. “Come. You will hide for a few days—he’ll never find you in the rue aux Chats, nobody will speak a word of truth to him—and then he’ll go away. After that, you can be happy again.”
Fanny put her veil down. The thick lace concealed her features entirely and even muffled her voice.
“I didn’t come to Honfleur to be happy,” Fanny said. “I came to find my ship and sail her back to England.”
The boat from the Pamela, rowed by four French sailors in striped shirts, was moving rapidly on the tide toward the dock. Montagu lolled in the stern beside the older Frenchman, who was also splendidly dressed, while the young man stood up in the bow.
“Fanny, please,” Antoinette said.
“Go,” Fanny said. “If Montagu sees that we have baggage he’ll know that we came on the packet boat. He’ll ask questions. We will be discovered.”
Antoinette hesitated, sighing. She wanted to see her sister; she never wanted to see another English person.
“You’ve given me years and years that really belonged to you,” Fanny said. “Go. Peters is aboard the Pamela. I saw him. I only have to go out to the ship to be safe.”
Through the veil, she could see the look of temptation on Antoinette’s face.
“Go, you’ve done enough,” Fanny said.
“You have no sense,” Antoinette said. “You’re like your father, not French at all. I’ve always known it when nobody else could see it”
She lifted Fanny’s veil and kissed her on both cheeks, rubbing her tears onto the skin.
“Before they dry,” she said, “you will have forgotten me.”
“No,” Fanny said. “Never.”
Antoinette shook her head emphatically. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I know the English.”
Fanny smiled at her and for an instant the pallor and exhaustion left her face.
“Put down your veil,” Antoinette said. “Speak only French. If you need help, tell anyone the rue aux Chats, the family Marie. Remember, the French help the French.”
Antoinette put down her own veil in case Montagu, by some trickery, should intercept her. She ordered one of the porters to bring Fanny’s small bag to her. Then she led the men into the twisted streets that she remembered from her girlhood, and disappeared.
Fanny walked out onto the pier. Montagu’s boat was quite close now. The fishermen who had come in with the tide were selling their catch and the air was raucous with th
eir cries and saturated with the odor of chilly mackerel and flounder and cod.
The boat came into the dock with a flourish and the oarsmen leaped ashore and helped the older Frenchman to debark. He wore an elaborate uniform; clearly he was a personage. The fishermen took off their hats and bowed as he passed by and called him monseigneur, the form of address used for a prince or a cardinal. Striding across the pier among the gleaming heaps of fish, he held his body as if it were a house or a jewel or a beautiful wife, a possession in which his rights could not be challenged. Montagu, following along behind, seemed tawdry by comparison. He had lost his scornful smile.
The older Frenchman stared at Fanny. Inside the veil, she did not lower her eyes. He stopped and asked a question in a low voice.
Fanny did not hear him—did not understand him. Apart from the people on the boat who had said good morning to her and how-do-you-do, she had never heard anyone except Antoinette speak French.
The soldier came a step closer to Fanny and bowed slightly.
“Mademoiselle, listen,” he said. “The Count of Vallier asked if you have suffered the loss of a relative.”
He stood quietly in his neat clothes, heels together, boots polished, sword held firmly in the left hand, right hand behind his back. Fanny had never seen such a quiet man so near her own age. He was no more than twenty-two or twenty-three. He spoke in a boyish voice, forming each syllable very precisely, and this went oddly with his solemn demeanor.
Fanny understood every word. But she did not wish to reply in case her voice should be recognized. Montagu stood a few paces away, gazing at Fanny in her black clothes with elaborate disinterest.
She nodded her head. The young Frenchman gazed into the folds of her veil as earnestly as he might have done had he been looking into a face.
“A parent?” he asked.
Fanny nodded again.
“Your mother?”
Fanny shook her head no.
“Your father, then. Our condolences.”
The older Frenchman spoke again. This time Fanny understood him without difficulty.
Bride of the Wilderness Page 12
