Time of Terror

by Hunter, Seth

He clutched the rail and fumbled in his pocket. It was still there, the crumpled piece of paper he had taken from Imlay. He stared at it but the names were swimming before his eyes. He rubbed them and looked again.

  And then he saw it.

  Turenne, they had called her. Madame Raymond de Turenne.

  He had been looking for Paine earlier and he had not seen it.

  “What happened?”

  “She was found guilty. They took her to the Conciergerie and from there to the . . . She was in the last batch.”

  “But the executions were suspended. They sent an order—”

  Imlay was shaking his head. “The Tribunal had already adjourned. And Fouquier said the executions must continue.”

  “No.” Nathan whispered. The blood had drained from his face. “No, it’s not true.”

  “I have just heard from Hélène. Her maid. She was there. She saw her . . . in the . . .”

  “It’s not true,” said Nathan again.

  But he sat down on the stair and put his face in his hands because he knew that it was.

  Chapter 47

  the Time of Terror

  He walked alone through the gardens of the Tuileries where he had met her after art class. The sun was back, flitting between white clouds, but the air was fresh as if newly laundered by the rain. He had been up all night and walking most of the day, not noticing a great deal. Around him Paris went about its ugly business. The guillotine had been moved back to its original site on the Place de la Révolution so that Danton’s prophecy might be fulfilled and Robespierre would follow him to his death. The tumbrels had paused for a while outside the home of the Duplays on the Rue Honoré while people brought a bucket of pig’s blood from the market and threw it over the door. They pulled the bandage from Robespierre’s shattered jaw just before they slid him under the guillotine and he screamed like an animal.

  “It’s over,” people kept shouting, “it’s over.”

  It was the tenth day of Thermidor, the Time of the Heat.

  Chapter 48

  the Homecoming

  A night run across the Channel and a misty dawn that shredded visibly in the rising sun to reveal the untidy scrawl of coastline on the Speedwell’s starboard bow. A raucous gallimaufry of gulls come out to greet them and the Seven Sisters rising from the fleeing wraiths of mist like the sails of a distant battle fleet.

  “Is that England?” said the boy.

  “That is England,” said Nathan lifting him up beside the belfry at the bow, with the spritsail bobbing in courtly homage and the salt spray stinging his cheeks like tears.

  He sought the break in the cliffs where the Cuckmere came down to the sea, remembering the fight between the dragoons and the smugglers on the shore and the black lugger against the white sisters in the moonlight.

  “Will we see your house?”

  “No. Not from here. It is farther back, up the little river you can see there coming down to the sea. But you will see it later today.”

  “Will we see the horses?”

  “Yes. You will see the horses. I might even let you ride one if you are not too tired.”

  “I won’t be tired.”

  He had told Alex about Windover House and his father and some of the servants he would meet there and the animals. He had told him about his own childhood in Sussex, about fishing in the Cuckmere and hunting rabbits on Hope Point and sailing his boat in the haven, and he had told him he would be able to do all these things and more. He sat him on the bow rail with his arm round him, and the boy looked at him gravely.

  “Will they want to fight me because I am French?”

  “No, they will not want to fight you. Will you want to fight them because they are English?”

  “No. Because it would not be polite. Maman said I must not fight people when I am a guest in their house.”

  “Did she? Well, it will be your house, too, you know.”

  He was glad Alex talked about Sara, though it turned a knife in his heart. Mary had told the child what had happened to his mother. She said it was better that he knew now than that they lied to him or told him some fairy tale. But Nathan was not sure that he had understood it. Sometimes he thought that Alex did not believe his mother was dead; or that he expected her to turn up suddenly and say it was all a mistake. Perhaps that was no bad thing. Sometimes he thought it himself.

  It was Mary, too, who had suggested he take the boy to England.

  “He will be safer there, at least for a while,” she insisted. “Until things settle down. If they ever do.”

  Besides, she said, he had no one now except for Hélène and herself and she thought she would soon be joining them there for she did not see much future for herself in France.

  Nathan wondered if she meant much future with Imlay.

  “I will take him to my father’s,” he said, expecting an argument about it for Mary was his mother’s friend, but she had been surprisingly docile, simply nodding and saying it would be good for him in the country.

  But he wondered now why it had seemed such an obvious choice. Did he expect the boy to have exactly the same childhood as he had? To have the same sense of security, the same careless adventures?

  “I think I will like it here,” said the boy, nodding solemnly to himself as if he had come to a carefully considered conclusion. “But I would like it better if maman was with us.”

  “So would I,” said Nathan. He held him a little tighter.

  “And will you stay with me?”

  “I will stay for a while,” said Nathan, “but then I must go back to sea.”

  He knew it was the only life he could bear and there would probably be no other. And if he still had only a vague idea of what he was fighting for he had a much clearer notion of what he was fighting against.

  The boy leant forward and tugged swiftly at the bow tying Nathan’s hair and it flew about his face in the wind.

  “You look like a girl,” he said, laughing.

  “Thank you,” said Nathan. “There is nothing wrong with being a girl.”

  “Do you think she is happy, my maman, where she is now?”

  “Where do you think she is now?”

  “In Heaven,” said the boy, looking at him in slight surprise. “That is what Hélène says. Where do you think she is?”

  “I think she is in a place called Tourrettes,” said Nathan, stroking the boy’s hair gently back from his eyes, “sitting in the market square drinking lemonade and eating little cakes made of oranges and waiting for us there.”

  History

  On the subject of research . . . while many of the events and characters of The Time of Terror are fictitious others are rooted in history and it might interest readers to know where the lines are drawn.

  The arrest, trial and death of Georges Danton and the events of 9th Thermidor are all based on recorded history. Robespierre is widely believed to have shot himself but I have seen the document he was signing at the time with the first three letters of his signature—Rob—and then bloodstains. It is possible, of course, that a man will pause in the middle of signing his own name to blow his brains out but I think it is more likely that someone else saved him the trouble.

  The counterfeiting operation is part of the secret history of these times but enough is known about it for me to feel confident that it happened much as described in the novel. I first came across the story while making a film about a similar operation during World War II and I was lucky enough to meet John Keyworth, curator of the Bank of England museum, and the paper historian Peter Bower, who both know a great deal about it. The assignats were forged at several English mills including Haughton Castle in Northumberland and smuggled to France by Pitt’s secret agents where they had a significant effect in wrecking the French economy.

  Whether or
not Gilbert Imlay was one of these agents is pure conjecture. He and Mary Wollstonecraft are real enough and so was their relationship; much of their circumstances at the time are taken from her letters to him and others. Imlay was a shipping agent in Paris and Le Havre during the time of the Terror and made his money from running goods past the British blockade. But he was also suspected of being a secret agent, working for either the Americans or the British or both.

  There is no evidence that the American Minister, Gouverneur Morris, was involved in the counterfeiting operation. However, his activities in Paris are so cloaked in mystery and intrigue I felt this conferred a degree of license. He helped to fund the attempted escape of King Louis and Marie Antoinette in 1792 and after he left Paris in the summer of 1794 he was exposed as a British agent.

  The account of the bombardment of the sloop Nereus in the mouth of the Somme is based on a similar incident involving the sloop Childers at the entrance to Brest harbour in January 1793 while the account of the Glorious First of June is taken from various personal recollections of the battle.

  The story of Tom Paine’s arrest at White’s Philadelphia Hotel, his internment in the Luxembourg and his extraordinary escape from death are based on his own account of these incidents while the details of prison life are corroborated by the writer Helen Maria Williams who was there at the same time.

  The Catacombs are real enough—and they are still full of skulls. You can visit the Empire of the Dead legally at certain times of the year through a black hut very like Dr. Who’s Tardis near the Porte d’Enfer. But the entire system is far more extensive: an ancient labyrinth under modern Paris. The tunnels have been used by outlaws and dissidents throughout history, notably by the French Resistance during World War II, and they continue to have some curious uses today.

  The Trouanderie, or the Grand Villainy, was a secret organization of thieves, beggars and smugglers similar to the medieval Cours des Miracles. It has since made way for grander villainies.

  And Marie Grosholtz was the maiden name of the woman who later became known to the world as Madame Tussaud.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to Pat Kavanagh and to Martin Fletcher at Headline for getting this into print; to Michael Ann and Martin Tullet for their knowledge of the English Channel and the boat to test it; to Square Sail at Charlestown and the captain and crew of the Earl of Pembroke; to Bill Cran, Brian Lavery and Colin White for the pleasure of working with them on Nelson’s Trafalgar and the knowledge I gained from it; to Cate and Nash Olsen of Much Ado Books in Alfriston for digging out such a wealth of publications, especially the details on smuggling in Sussex, the journals of Helen Maria Williams in the Luxembourg Prison and the love letters of Mary Wollstonecraft to Gilbert Imlay; to my daughter Elesa for helping me with the research into Paris during the Terror; to my father for inspiring me with a lifetime of novels, films and his own stories of the sea; and to the English Arts Council for awarding me one of their literary grants so I could do the job properly.