by Hunter, Seth
Yankee Doodle went to town
A-riding on a pony,
Stuck a feather in his hat
And called it Macaroni . . .
He started on the next verse but faltered over the words and the piper ceased his piping and sang them in a confident tenor, waving the whistle as if it was a baton:
Yankee Doodle keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy
And Sara swore he caught her eye and winked. Then he put the whistle to his lips again and did a jig, and there was something so wild, so mad, so infectious about it, he had them all joining in, dancing and singing along with him in a crude approximation of the words.
A sorcerer, she thought, a magician. And then the crowd was moving again, their shadows dancing on the walls and their corpse bouncing along behind them like a lucky rabbit’s foot on a piece of string and they were left standing there looking at each other like guests at a party whom no one has thought to introduce.
“I believe I owe you my life,” said the man. It seemed to embarrass him a little.
“Never go out without the tricolour in your hat,” said Imlay primly. “It is a sentence of death.”
“I protest,” said the man. “I did have a tricolour in my hat. But it must have fallen off. And now I have lost my hat.”
Sara saw it lying by the side of the street and ran to pick it up. She felt like a schoolgirl as she presented it to him.
“Thank you.” He appeared to notice her for the first time. She was conscious of her drab appearance and the vomit on her shoes but he did not look down at them. “My name is Turner,” he said, looking from her to Imlay. “Nathaniel Turner, from New York.”
Sara detected a guarded look about Imlay’s countenance but he introduced himself and his two companions . . . “My wife, Mary, and our friend Madame Seton.”
“Imlay?” the man repeated. “But you are the very man I have come to Paris to see. I was waiting for you on the step.” He half turned towards the house behind him—Sara’s house. She saw the bag lying at the bottom of the steps, very like the kind that seamen carried over their shoulder. “The maid said you would be returning shortly. Thank God you did.”
“Wretched woman,” said Imlay, glaring at Sara as if it was her fault, “to leave you standing on the street.”
“Do you not think it better that we do not stand here now?” said Mary coolly. “Especially since it is become a slaughter yard.”
The man suddenly seemed to notice the pool of blood and guts on the cobbles and the flies already gathering in a cloud above them. He looked a little shocked.
“Welcome to Paris, Mr. Turner,” said Sara to cover his confusion and her own. “Were you planning to stay long?”
Chapter 10
the Hyena in Petticoats
It was not the welcome I had anticipated,” Nathan confided as he sank into the soft cushions of the sofa in what he took to be the Imlay’s drawing room, “but I am very glad to have found you at last, even with a rope around my neck.”
“Good, good,” nodded Imlay, though Nathan detected an underlying suspicion in the look he gave him. “Unless, that is, I owe you money, ha ha.”
His wife shot him a glance that made Nathan wonder if this was not an entirely implausible supposition.
“Not at all,” Nathan hastened to assure them both, attempting a smile whose effect was rather ruined by the jab of pain from his cut lip. “In fact I have something for you. Only I have left it in Le Havre.”
This elicited an even sharper glance from Imlay.
“You have come from Le Havre?”
“Directly. Except that it is not called Le Havre, apparently, but Port Marat in honour of a gentleman who was unfortunate enough to be stabbed to death in his bath in the cause of Revolution—or so I was informed—and the street names have been changed which made it difficult to find the address I was given and when I did it was only to learn that you had departed for Paris with no immediate prospect of return so . . .” He took a quick breath. “As I had instructions to deliver my cargo into your hands and no other and dispatches marked for the urgent attention of the American Minister in Paris, and as I was led to believe the journey would take no longer than a day in the diligence, I determined to set out for the capital. Though it has taken me three days rather than the one, the route being more bog than road and most of the horses at the relays taken for the war.”
He paused again, aware of how he was babbling. He was not feeling at all himself and indeed a part of him was hanging from a lamppost or being towed at the heels of the inconsiderate mob. He was aware that the Imlays were staring at him in silence.
They were a handsome couple, older than Nathan by about ten years—the man possibly more though there was a youthful air about him. He was tall and thin and distinguished-looking in the American way—which was to say there was more than a little of the frontier about him for all his grooming; a man more used to being outdoors than in. Nathan sensed a kind of constrained energy or restlessness there. Gilbert Imlay, American shipping agent in Le Havre. And what else besides? Nathan wondered. As for the wife, she was strangely familiar though surely it was not possible that they had met. He scanned his memory but it was as scattered as his speech.
Imlay found his voice first.
“My cargo?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You said ‘my cargo’?”
“Ah, yes. Forgive me. Tobacco. Five hundred chests. In the Speedwell barque. Of Salem.”
Imlay’s eyes shot across to his wife and then back to Nathan.
“Tobacco?” he repeated, as if it were a species of wild animal not previously seen in Europe.
“Tobacco, sir,” Nathan affirmed. “Best Virginia.”
Further discussion of the mysterious cargo was prevented by the entry of the other woman carrying a basin of water and followed by the maid with towels. Nathan protested that she must not put herself to the trouble but she said something in French he did not catch and applied herself to the matted blood above his right ear while the maid spread a towel to catch the drips.
“What did they hit you with?” demanded the lady, in perfectly good English, dabbing gently at the wound with some liquid out of a bottle—possibly alcohol; certainly it stung like it.
“I am afraid I was not looking too closely at the time,” Nathan confessed, “but it felt like a club.”
His memory of the encounter was confused; the mob had been on him so quickly. One moment he had been sitting on the step watching them advance up the street as if it was a parade and then they were all around him, snarling like wolves and waving butchers’ knives and steel hooks in his face. They seemed to have something against his hat.
“My hat,” he had said, “what about my hat?” And his hand went up to it and he realised he was no longer wearing the tricolour. Then they started pulling him down the street and shouting something else he did not understand.
“À la lanterne, à la lanterne!”
Then he saw the street lamp and the man hanging from it and knew. He winced at the memory.
“I am sorry if it stings a little but it is not as bad as it might have been,” said his pretty surgeon. More than pretty: her face was strong but not in the least masculine, her lips full, her complexion flawless. What was her name? He had forgotten already. “Press this towel to it until the bleeding has stopped. And perhaps you might like to use this.”
She handed him a damp flannel and he wiped it over his face with one hand while holding the towel to his head with the other. He felt absurdly like a child tended by his mother after taking a tumble. In fact she rather reminded him of his mother though she was a good few years younger. He could smell the freshness of lavender about her and something else more elusive,
less innocent.
The flannel when he took it away was stained with blood, presumably from the wound on his head. He must have looked a sight. He squinted down at his collar and thought there was blood there too. He hoped there was none on the sofa. He reached for another towel from the maid but her mistress took it and dried his face herself. He blushed for shame but with pleasure too. He caught her eye as she removed the towel and the pleasure increased. But she left without a backward glance, taking her basin and her towels and her maid with her.
There was an exchange of glances between husband and wife and after a moment—and a small but forceful jerk of Imlay’s head—the wife stood up and followed the two other women out of the room, closing the door a little forcefully behind her.
“This . . . cargo?” Imlay prompted Nathan. “If you feel well enough to . . .”
“Oh, I am quite well, thank you,” Nathan assured him. “Yes. Tobacco. Were you not expecting it?”
“I was expecting it some months ago,” declared Imlay with an odd look. “In fact I had given it up for lost.” He appraised Nathan thoughtfully. “I assume it does not come by way of Salem.”
“Not directly,” Nathan prevaricated. He did not know how much he was at liberty to disclose.
“And it is now in Le Havre?”
“Aboard the Speedwell, sir, awaiting your instruction.”
Imlay nodded. “If you are feeling up to it,” he said, “we will set off first thing in the morning and I will make arrangements for its storage. But of course . . .” He indicated the towel which Nathan still had clamped to the back of his head.
Nathan removed it with some delicacy so as not to set the wound off bleeding again.
“Oh, I am perfectly up to it,” he said. “In fact, from my point of view, the sooner it is disposed of the better.”
“Quite so.” Imlay’s tone made it clear he saw no need to discuss the matter further. He paused a moment. “You said you came with dispatches for the American Minister . . .”
“I did.” Nathan was prepared to be as terse about these as Imlay had been about the cargo, though in fact had they met in Le Havre he would have been perfectly willing to hand them over for the agent to deliver.
“So you have met Mr. Gouverneur Morris?”
There was something in the way he uttered the name that indicated a measure of, if not disapproval, then a certain reserve.
“I have. In fact he told me I might find you here.”
You will probably find him at number 188 Rue Condé, Morris had said. He tends to stay there when in Paris.
Probably. Tends. The suggestion of a curl about the lip. And nothing about a wife.
A brief knock and she was at the door again, looking only a little less displeased than when she had left.
“Sara says that Mr. Turner must stay the night,” she said, looking at Imlay and not at Nathan. Her tone was neutral. “And dinner will be served in a few minutes.”
Nathan opened his mouth to protest but no words came, though his mouth stayed open rather longer than was polite. He had just remembered why Imlay’s wife seemed familiar to him. He had met her before—at his mother’s once when he was on half pay. Only her name had not been Imlay. It was Wollstonecraft. Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The woman Horace Walpole had called a hyena in petticoats.
“So what does America make of the present situation in France, Mr. Turner?” inquired Mary Wollstonecraft or Imlay or whatever name she was presently trading under.
There was a note of irony in her voice and in the look she gave him across the dinner table but Nathan supposed it to be with reference to America rather than himself. There had been no indication that she remembered him from their one brief encounter; it had been at one of his mother’s soirees about two years ago when her book had just been published and she was for a time the most famous—or notorious—woman in London.
“There is some concern about the violence,” Nathan replied cautiously, though it was a safe enough assumption. He found himself in some awe of the woman—as he had been when last they had met. He had not read more than a few pages of her book—it ran to more than three hundred which was a little too much for him to digest at one sitting—but he understood from the title and such criticisms as he had read or heard spoken of that its singular proposition was that women should be treated as the equals of men. Nathan had no particular difficulty with this. He had always considered his mother to be the equal of his father in most things and his superior in the rest, except possibly the command of a ship of war which she had not yet attempted. And farming sheep. But conventional society had refuted the suggestion of female equality as outrageous—and its proponent as a monster. I am the first of a new genus, she had proclaimed; and as far as society was concerned the first would be the last.
She did not look like a monster. In fact she looked quite attractive: though a little on the large side and with a slight droop to one eyelid that made you think she was winking at you, but there was a fine, bold, be-damned-to-you look about her that he rather approved.
“Ah the violence,” she said now. “Yes, well, we are all concerned about the violence, Mr. Turner.”
Though she had instructed him to call her by her first name she continued to address him as “Mr. Turner,” with what he took to be a slightly mocking formality, as if he was not quite mature enough to be deserving of the title. He found that he did not care to meet her level gaze and looked instead at the dish that had been set before him by the maid—some sort of stew, mostly vegetable but with some bits of meat in it and dumplings with herbs. It tasted good though his lip called for careful navigation. He feared it might have swollen.
“I had thought the violence exaggerated before I came to Paris,” Mary continued, addressing the room in general. “After all, London is not immune from riot. And as for the executions, I cannot approve them of course but I dare say there are as many hanged or transported for the stealing of a sheep at any county assizes in England. But there is an ugly mood on the streets and I cannot help but suppose that it is encouraged by those in power—or seeking it.”
There was no immediate response to this. Imlay was consuming his stew as if it was the first meal he had been permitted in days and the other woman, Sara, was trying to catch the eye of the maid and making motions as of pouring something from a bottle. She had changed her nondescript dress and shawl for a silken gown, remarking that she might have to wear rags in the street but in the privacy of her own home she could wear whatever she liked; an assertion that Nathan for one was not inclined to dispute for though it was a restrained mauve in colour it had a neckline that showed her bosom to its best advantage. Unless of course she wore nothing at all. With his senses now more or less restored, he found her perfectly seductive. She was older than he, possibly by four or five years, but this only added to her attraction. She had dressed her hair high and added some colour to cheeks and lips but she used very little powder. He could barely take his eyes off her.
“Who exactly is in power?” he inquired politely when the silence had stretched a little longer than was comfortable.
“No one is in power,” said Imlay, without looking up from his dinner. “That is the problem. There is a vacuum.”
He filled his own with a slurp.
“Nonsense,” said Mary. “Everyone knows who is in power, even if he pretends not to be.”
“The Incorruptible,” Imlay murmured mysteriously over his stew.
“Robespierre,” Sara informed Nathan kindly.
Imlay shook his head. “Robespierre has no official position . . .”
“Except that he is the voice of The Committee,” put in his wife.
“The Committee of Public Safety,” Sara added for the benefit of her student, “which is nominated by the National Assembly to oversee every aspect of g
overnment.”
“He owes his power to the mob,” Imlay asserted, “and the mob is notoriously fickle.”
“The mob is the real power in Paris,” Sara explained. “And there are those like Robespierre who aspire to control it.”
“Or Danton,” put in Imlay.
“If only he would stop drinking and chasing women,” added his wife.
“Oh, he has stopped chasing women,” Sara corrected her mildly.
“Even you, my dear?” Imlay interrupted with a naughty schoolboy grin. There was much of the naughty schoolboy in him, Nathan reflected, despite his height and his distinguished appearance. One who would forever be playing tricks on his fellows—and his masters—and thinking he could charm away the consequences.
“Even me, sir, since he has taken a new young wife. But I fear our friend is bemused by our conversation.”
This was true. Nathan knew of both Robespierre and Danton—much lampooned as demagogues in the English press—but he was reeling under a broadside of information. Clearly their hostess moved in interesting circles. Like his mother? The thought came unbidden and was a disturbing one.
“The situation in Paris is such that no authority can exist without the support of the mob,” Sara declared, “but it is like riding a whirlwind, or rather a monstrous beast, and if you fall . . .” She opened her mouth and clashed her teeth together in a biting motion. Nathan found himself wondering what it would be like to have her biting on him. He was nodding intelligently as if he were following the debate but in truth he found himself rather more interested in the situation of his hostess than that of the French Republic.
This appeared to be her home and not the Imlays’ as he had first supposed, though he gathered that Gilbert Imlay occasionally stayed here while in Paris, despite the fact that Mary appeared to live in a small village on the outskirts. So was there something between Imlay and Sara? Nathan could detect no frisson between them while Mary seemed to look upon her husband with genuine fondness.
And what of Sara’s husband? Thus far there had been no reference to such an item though Mary had mentioned a child—a boy called Alex—who was asleep somewhere in the house.
