‘It is not what you might think. He and I, we are too different to—’
Hannah gave up. It was no use. Everything was overturned. In the space of ten minutes the life she’d crafted in Paris had been irreversibly altered. Jean-Jacques had found out that she’d misled him and had glimpsed the troubles of her past. The Danton regulars, her supposed friends, would be extracting all they could from poor Clem; they’d probably discover even more than Jean-Jacques had. She’d been exposed. Whatever chance she’d had of being taken on her own merits was gone. She might as well walk back to the Danton and surrender herself to Elizabeth. Her mother had won. She leaned against a wall, pressing her damp palms against her forehead. She was finished in Paris.
‘Hannah,’ said Jean-Jacques. ‘Look there.’
Lucien and Benoît, two of the painters she’d been talking with when Clem had appeared, were strolling past the alley mouth: thin men smoking short cigars, sharing a drunken laugh as they headed towards the place Saint-Pierre. Octave, a sculptor, was a few feet behind. Hannah straightened up. Clem might be with them. She strode past Jean-Jacques, back out onto the rue Saint-André. There was no sign of her brother; the painters, however, gave a ragged roar of salutation.
‘Why, Mademoiselle Pardy,’ Lucien proclaimed, twisting his moustaches, ‘what the devil is going on? You leap from the middle of a really quite stirring account of Courbet’s decline to converse with a young gentleman who, from the brilliant yellow of his hair …’
‘The delicacy of his nose and brow,’ inserted Benoît, who fancied himself a portraitist, ‘the fullness of his lips …’
‘… can only be your brother. And then, even though this fellow has come all the way from the soot and smoke of London, you run from him after a few seconds, grabbing the fine Monsieur Allix for a – a turn beneath the stars, I suppose I should call it, for the sake of decency …’
‘… leaving your brother entirely alone: a whiskery Anglais in an old suit, adrift in the Danton, too scared even to bleat for help.’
Lucien’s cackle would have curdled milk. ‘So we wave him over. What else could we do for the brother of such a dear friend? I have a little English,’ he confessed with a modest shrug, ‘sufficient, at any rate, to learn that he is not the only member of the Pardy family in Montmartre tonight. There is a mother also, standing at the bar. A woman who, although undoubtedly mature, is still worthy of the attentions of any man who—’
‘Enough.’
Jean-Jacques didn’t speak with any force or volume. His tone was that of an equable schoolmaster who’d let his pupils run loose for a while, but had reached the limit of what he would allow. The half-cut painters were halted – stopped dead. Lucien looked off down the street; Benoît, frowning slightly, fiddled with his cigar.
A smile crossed Hannah’s face. It had been six weeks now since Jean-Jacques had first walked into the Danton, but these Montmartre artists had yet to accept that their blonde Anglaise was theirs no longer. Although Jean-Jacques was always cordial, he made them both jealous and nervous; when quite sure that he wasn’t around, Lucien would sometimes refer to him as ‘the killer’.
‘What has drawn you gentlemen from the Danton?’ Jean-Jacques asked them now. ‘Surely you still have wine to attend to?’
Octave, the least waspish and inebriated of the three, spoke up. ‘Everyone is coming outside, Monsieur Allix. They say that the forest of Saint-Germain is burning – put to the torch by the Prussians.’
Jean-Jacques was starting for the place Saint-Pierre before Octave had finished his sentence. Hannah and the artists fell in behind. Her immediate impression as they reached the square was that Paris had somehow circled the Buttes Montmartre – that the central boulevards, normally seen glowing in the south, had been rearranged to the north-west. This light was different, though, a shimmering, acidic orange rather than the flat hue of gas; it was alive, expanding, slowly draining the darkness from the night sky.
The once-distant war had reached them. Hannah’s pace slackened; her hands hung at her sides. She was not afraid. Jean-Jacques had prepared her for this. A magnificent resistance lay ahead. There would have to be sacrifices, of course, but the result would be a better Paris – the beginnings of a better world. It brought her relief, in fact, to see these fires. Over the past few days, as the city’s anticipation and dread had mounted, a part of her had grown impatient for it all to begin.
A restless crowd filled the place Saint-Pierre. People squabbled and brawled, and shook their fists at the tinted horizon; scattered individuals raved and railed, predicting doom; mothers gathered up their children and hurried off in search of shelter. It felt like the moments before a riot. Jean-Jacques was a good distance away from Hannah now, pressing onto the merry-go-round in the square’s centre – which was little more than a gaudy shell, its horses stowed away somewhere and its brass poles bound in sackcloth. Around him the appeals had already started.
‘How bad is it, Monsieur Allix? Tell us what you’ve heard!’
‘My saints, will the city really be next?’
A lantern was hoisted up onto the merry-go-round. Jean-Jacques climbed into its light and faced the place Saint-Pierre. Word went around; dozens turned, then hundreds more. The Alsatian was assured, unflappable, with a speech at the ready that needed only to be unfurled on the sharp evening air. He lifted his hands and the multitude fell quiet.
Jean-Jacques Allix had been speaking in bars and cafés since his return from the fighting in the east. That he was a veteran of some renown had all but guaranteed him an appreciative audience. Across the northern arrondissements, his persuasive, uncomplicated eloquence had soon resulted in him being adopted as a spokesman and leader – roles he seemed to relish. Paris was glutted with paper tigers; its halls resounded with bold claims and pledges that were wholly without substance. Jean-Jacques Allix, however, had acted. He had struck at the invader and bore the scars of conflict. He knew of what he spoke. He would not disappoint them.
‘It is true,’ he began. ‘We have the evidence of our eyes, do we not? The Prussians are burning our ancient forests. Trees that have withstood the passage of many centuries – that are as much a part of our brave city as the buildings around us now – will tomorrow be but smouldering stumps. It is another shameful crime to add to the Kaiser’s tally.’
‘They mean to do the same to Paris!’ someone shouted. ‘Reduce her to ashes!’
‘A fiery death!’ wailed another. ‘Oh Lord, a fiery death!’
‘Do not be afraid, citizens,’ Jean-Jacques instructed. ‘Be angry. The reason for this burning, for this obscene devastation, is to deny us an escape route through the woods. They want to keep us here, every man, woman and child, to weather their assault. That is the nature of our enemy.’
There was a surge of profanity, every conceivable curse crashing and foaming between the bar-fronts.
Jean-Jacques raised his voice. ‘But what they do not understand – what they do not understand and what we will demonstrate to them very clearly in the days to come – is that we have no wish to escape them. That we welcome their arrival and the great chance it gives us for revenge. Our bloodthirsty foe is blundering into a trap. Kaiser Wilhelm and his soldiers have travelled hundreds of miles to be destroyed at the gates of Paris. They will face the wrath of the workers – a million French souls – a mighty citizen army hardened by labour and united by a single righteous purpose!’
The crowd’s fearfulness had departed. ‘Vive la France!’ they cried, lifting their flags once again; and the Marseillaise, banned under the Empire, swelled up powerfully from the back of the square.
Hannah, stuck on the fringes, was quite light-headed with pride and love; she struggled to keep Jean-Jacques in sight as he dropped from the merry-go-round into the throng. He was making for a nearby hut, built to stow Nadar’s spotting balloon – the contraption itself, a common spectacle during the last week, had been deflated and packed away at sunset. Before this crude, windowless cabin Hannah
could see a group of Jean-Jacques’s political associates. Dressed largely in black, these ultras ranged in appearance from thuggish to almost professorial. Another orator, meanwhile, had taken to the merry-go-round, a National Guard captain who set about urging every able-bodied man who had not already done so to enlist for service in the militia. In seconds, an entire division’s worth of would-be recruits was pushing forward across the place Saint-Pierre, rendering it impassable.
At the balloon hut, Jean-Jacques was shaking hands and sharing embraces. His comrades were proposing that they all leave the square, no doubt to attend some red club or debating hall. He looked around, running his gaze over the crowds. Hannah waved and he saw her at once. His eyes could have held yearning, an apology, a promise; she was too far from him to tell. The next moment he was gone.
Hannah was not upset. Their partings were often like this. True ultras frowned upon romantic attachment; they were supposed to give themselves completely to the revolution. That Jean-Jacques chose to stay with her regardless, despite his deepest convictions, brought her a shiver of delight whenever she thought of it.
The balmy late-summer afternoon had cooled to an autumnal night. Hannah hugged herself, wishing for the coat and cap she’d left behind in the Danton. She couldn’t think of returning for them now, though – not while her mother might still be inside. The despairing fatalism of earlier had passed. She was not going to surrender to Elizabeth. She would find a way to continue. Uprooting again, finding a room over in Les Batignolles perhaps, might be the answer.
Lucien and Benoît were talking across Hannah with exaggerated nonchalance, as if unimpressed, knowing that they had been rendered yet more minuscule by Jean-Jacques’s address. She wouldn’t be any the worse, frankly, for leaving these fools behind. Both were members of the same radical naturalist school as Hannah – committed to an art founded entirely in their experience of the modern world. Benoît, however, was more notable for his May-queen prettiness and estranged millionaire father than any picture he’d produced; while the stooped, liquor-soaked Lucien, although possessing a touch more intelligence than his friend, was scarcely more capable with the brush. Octave had talent, at least, but the cost of stone had prevented him from ever properly expressing it. Of late, in fact, the taciturn sculptor had been reduced to making plaster angels to sell to tourists.
Recalling Lucien’s claim to be able to speak English, which he’d definitely never mentioned before, Hannah wondered if he could be responsible for the letter Clem had shown her. Straightforward envy would be the motivation, complimented by a desire to punish her for neglecting them and becoming involved with Jean-Jacques. She quickly dismissed this theory. Lucien was not genuinely spiteful, for all his caustic posturing; and in any case, he had struggles enough of his own – high-minded ones against the artistic establishment, more basic ones with bodily need – to embark upon such a painstaking prank.
Consideration of the letter led Hannah back guiltily to Clem. She asked the artists if they knew what had become of him. They looked at each other.
‘As we were stepping out of our booth,’ said Benoît, ‘Mademoiselle Laure was stepping in. Pretty smartly, I have to say.’
‘Heart the size of a houseboat, that girl,’ Lucien declared. ‘Handsome lad like your brother – he couldn’t be in better hands. I watched them, actually, for a short while. Neither has much knowledge of the other’s language, but some kind of communication was being achieved. If you catch my meaning.’
Hannah swore. Laure Fleurot was a cocotte, a dancer and gentleman’s companion, exiled to Montmartre from the central boulevards – not a whore, not exactly, although she was said to have accepted money for her favours in certain situations. Hannah knew to her cost that she wasn’t to be trusted for an instant. What could such a woman possibly want with Clement?
Interest in the Pardy family dwindled, thankfully, the well-oiled artists moving onto discussion of their own siblings. Benoît had four sisters, it emerged, who insisted that he dine with them every week; whereas Lucien had a brother in Lille who he had not seen for more than a decade. Octave declined to contribute.
It proved a rather sobering topic. Lucien, seeking to reverse the tide, suggested another drink. Hannah glanced over at the mouth of the rue Saint-André, aware that she should extricate her brother from the Danton – and that she wasn’t going to. The risk of encountering Elizabeth was too great. It wasn’t as if Clement was actually in danger, after all; he was a grown man now, surely capable of fending off a hard-bitten Parisian tart. Like many ashamed by their selfishness, Hannah sought solace in swearing later action: I will write to him in London, she vowed, the letter I never wrote him when I first fled – a long letter that will explain everything. I will write to him as soon as this war is done with and our new lives have begun.
‘Somewhere downhill,’ she said, starting to walk. ‘On the boulevards.’
The knocks shook the shed, rattling the paintbrushes in their jars and sending the Japanese screen toppling to the floorboards. Hannah woke; she was curled up on an old wicker chair, fully clothed, off in a shadowy corner. The morning was full-blown, lines of sunlight slicing between the slats of the warped window-shutter. Gingerly, she eased her stiff legs around and set about untangling her boots from the hem of her dress. Down in the city a bugle sounded, distant and mechanical, playing out its call and running through an immaculate repetition.
The second round of knocks, even louder than the first, dragged Hannah from the chair into the middle of the room. Staring at the door, she imagined the person who was surely on the other side: head cocked, hair and hat just so, listening intently for any movement within. The moment had arrived. Elizabeth Pardy had come back to the rue Garreau.
Returning home in the blue gloom of two o’clock, filled with cheap wine and belligerence, Hannah had actually been disappointed to find the shed empty. She’d decided to stay awake and wait. Elizabeth had journeyed all the way from St John’s Wood; she would never admit defeat so easily. Hannah had lit her lamp and scoured the shed for any sign of her mother’s earlier inspection. None could be found, not even a whiff of face powder, yet everything had seemed altered somehow – diminished by her scrutiny. The shed had looked smaller, dirtier, more wretched; the paintings inadequate, dull, lacking a critical element. Hannah had barely managed to prevent herself from taking up her canvas knife and scraping them clean.
Instead, she’d attempted to amend a scene of the midday crowds promenading on the Quai de la Conférence, to put in what was missing. Luckily, next to nothing had actually been done; but she’d been drunk enough to forget her smock, and as a result there was paint smeared on her sleeves and front. In the pocket of her dress, also, was a flat-headed brush, one of her best, its bristles encased in a hard clot of yellow pigment. She’d plainly sat down to assess what she was going to do and stumbled immediately into sleep. There wasn’t any money to replace this brush. Cursing her stupidity, she started to pick at the dried paint with her thumbnail.
The third salvo was impatient, with emphatic pauses left between each knock. Hannah consigned the ruined brush to a jug of soft-soap. Her will to fight was utterly gone; her eyes were raw, and her head ached a little more with each movement she made. She wondered if she could hide, pretend to be elsewhere – or perhaps slip out of the window.
‘It’s me,’ said Jean-Jacques. ‘Open the door.’
Hannah snapped back the bolt and he rushed in on a gust of fresh, cold air; his kiss was hungry and tasted of strong coffee and aniseed. A hot, unthinking joy flooded through her, washing away her tiredness and her pain, fizzing in her toes and fingertips. She kissed him again, more passionately, trying to unbutton his jacket; but he moved around her and carried on into the room.
It was obvious that Jean-Jacques hadn’t been to bed and didn’t intend to now. Some of his usual self-possession was absent, lost in exhilaration. A lock of black hair had escaped his hat, curving across his brow – connecting, almost, with the line of th
e scar on the cheek below. He went towards the mattress and reached for the black coat he’d left hanging on the wall.
Hannah watched him search through its pockets – and realised that her mother and brother were sure to have seen this coat when Madame Lantier showed them the shed the night before. She recalled the speed and certainty with which Clem had identified Jean-Jacques in the Danton. They’d worked it out. They knew everything. She shut the door; so let them know, she thought. Let them form whatever conclusions they please. How can it possibly matter now?
Jean-Jacques had taken a small notebook from the coat and was attempting to make an entry inside. Writing posed a steep physical challenge for him. The hand within his right glove was a mottled, broken thing, missing both the index and middle fingers, torn to pieces several years ago and clumsily reassembled. He’d told Hannah that this terrible injury had been inflicted at the same time as the slash to his cheek, while he’d been fighting in America against the Southern Confederacy. Assisted by the wooden digits sewn into his glove, he’d managed to develop a scrawl that was just about legible. That morning, however, his distraction proved too much; he’d dropped his pencil before a single word was complete. Kneading the crippled hand, he asked for her assistance.
Hannah gave it gladly. Jean-Jacques dictated a list of names, dates and directives, rapidly covering three pages. It felt unexpectedly intimate. He was trusting her with the ultras’ secrets, their plans, the lifeblood of their campaign; whereas she hadn’t even been able to reveal the most basic facts of her life before Paris, leaving him to discover them by accident the previous evening. Hannah longed to explain how badly she’d needed to flee from London – to shake off her tired role as the oppressed daughter and begin again – but she knew that this would have to wait. She closed the notebook and handed it back.
‘What’s happening?’
Illumination Page 5
