A Shot Rolling Ship

by David Donachie

  The guard grunted as he read, trying to give the impression he understood every word, but merely confirming Pearce’s suspicion that he was illiterate. What the man said next, about the necessity of the holder of this letter needing to wait until his officer came on duty, underlined that. When Pearce enquired, only to be told that the officer might or might not come by next morning, he began, first to plead, then to sob, informing all the guards of the parlous state of his father’s health and of his deep need to see him before he expired. It was a telling tale to a Frenchman, for Pearce knew how they felt about family; that they had an almost mystical attachment to blood relations and a passion, almost amounting to morbidity, regarding attendance at the point of death. Taking his interlocutor a little away from his fellows, Pearce explained that there was an inheritance to protect as well, working on the other subject for which the French had a mystical regard. It was hardly surprising, in the light of such a thing, that he was willing to pay to avoid being delayed, and the expert way the National Guardsman palmed the half-guinea coin from Pearce’s hand was sound evidence that it was not the first time he had accepted a bribe.

  The barrier was lifted without further ado and John Pearce, passing a rather limp and forlorn liberty tree – that symbol of Revolution imported from America – walked through to the low, thatched inn that was the Auberge d’ Ardres, where he could eat lobster and wait for a coach, leaving the quartet of guards to split his douceur and laugh at the way they had dunned their officer.

  Public travel had to be given up when he got close to Paris; Abbeville had been tricky, Amiens worse, for all the talk on the coach and at each stop was of trouble in Lyon and a Royalist uprising in the Vendée, so suspicion, never far away, was heightened. Now, near the capital, there were too many stops, too many interrogations, too many officials with sharp eyes and the temperament to hold him up indefinitely until his papers could be checked. So he first saw the windmills that covered the hill of Montmartre from the back of a farm wagon, having cadged a lift from a farmer heading in to the vegetable market to sell his produce, winter greens that had that smell of over-used and never washed stockings. Hat, cloak and coat buried under the produce, and grimy from three days of travelling, he looked and felt like a peasant. The driver was a garrulous soul, who wished his passenger to know that he had a wife he hated, a useless sod of a son and two daughters he would gladly give away if he had the money for a dowry. This chatter suited his passenger, who wanted to avoid thinking of his reasons for being here.

  Almost the whole three-day journey had had him gnawing at the conundrum of how he was to effect the removal of his father and get him home. A second note from Horne Tooke, delivered in Sandwich, had told him that he was in the Conciergerie, an old medieval royal palace on the Ile de la Cité that had been a prison for four hundred years. The place had been over-crowded before John had left and was hardly likely to be less so now, well guarded because it held the supposed enemies of the Revolution. The easiest way to get him out of there was intervention by a higher authority, the other way, a bribe, would need to be so massive it was probably beyond his means to pay; indeed he wondered just how much he would have to expend just to get to see him. If he occasionally toyed with the idea of a daring rescue it was only that; he knew the place too well, towering as it did over the river, and plainly visible from the opposite bank. Tell himself as he might that continual deliberating on it would produce no solutions, that he would have to wait until he was actually in the vicinity to decide, did not stop him from doing so, and the closer he got to the city gate, the worse it became.

  The walls of Paris, surrounded by endless rows of housing, looked imposing, but they were of another age. Yet they still preserved their function, and the Porte de St Denis was no exception; it had a full complement of National Guards, properly uniformed and armed, and imperious in their authority, none more so than the officer who commanded them, a choleric looking individual, with an outrageous cockade in his hat, who strode around with his sword scabbard slapping his highly polished boots, all to create the impression that he was ensuring the men under his command examined properly anyone who wished to enter or leave the city. At least Pearce did not have to guess this time; he knew for certain just how venal this lot were, knew that like every fellow who manned the numerous gates that surrounded Paris, the high coloured officer had probably paid a lot of money for this posting, funds which could only be recouped in one way. This was not the National Guard of the now fled Lafayette, but the successor, manned by rapacious rogues, not honest citizen soldiers. They were on the Belgian border or the Rhine, fighting the Prussians and the Austrians.

  So every trader paid their dues, and passed the cost on to the citizens of a capital that seethed with fear of speculators. Quite likely émigrés, should there still be any, could get out of Paris as long as they had the funds and made the proper arrangements in advance, the sum based on their need and their implied crimes, which was why the men who now ran France, and suffered from the delusion as to the number of their enemies, tried to make sure they were locked up before they could escape. Enemies of the Revolution entered Paris even more easily, for the fonctionnaires who manned the gates saw it as no part of their duty to protect anything other than their investment. There was a risk; every so often they would ostentatiously apprehend some individual, almost certainly someone without the means to pay a bribe, and march him off to the nearest prison. Guilt or innocence mattered less than appearances; the gatekeepers of Paris had to be seen to be doing their duty.

  Pearce got through for a bundle of paper assignats, the heartily disliked currency of the Revolution, money which went down in value on a daily basis, a stack of which he had exchanged for one golden guinea in St Omer. Another couple of guineas had got him some pre-Revolutionary coinage, which he needed to buy food, and was useful where an inducement, most in his case, was not worth the expenditure of more than silver or copper. His vegetable grower lost two boxes of cabbages from the back of his wagon, and though he cursed the robbing bastards who taxed him, he did so in a very soft voice that they could not hear. In fairness, Pearce gave him some of his assignats to alleviate the loss.

  Near the vegetable market, still north of the Seine, he retrieved his garments from their hiding place and parted company from the grateful farmer, disappearing into the maze of narrow streets that constituted the Marais section of the city. From there he made his way down the Rue du Temple to the river, and looked with a creeping sense of despair at the walls of the Conciergerie, at the constant stream of people coming and going through the great gate, before crossing the twin parts of the Seine by the Pont Neuf, past Notre Dame, and heading for the Quartier St Généviere behind the University of Paris, where he and his father had lived for two years.

  At the house which contained the apartment his father had rented, three floors up in the Rue St Etienne de Gres, he found a broken lock on the street door, with whatever the place had contained, furniture and possessions, looted. The two lower floors, occupied by a maker of coach lamps and his plump wife, had been comfortably furnished, better than that with which he had endowed the floor he rented. Now, what had not been taken had been smashed or wrecked, not that there was much of that, some broken chairs, torn drapes and the shards of a mirror; they looked as if they had suffered in the rush to steal rather than been left for lack of value. Up the stairs he went, knowing that he would, likewise, find his own and his father’s possessions gone.

  It saddened him to stand at the open door and survey what had become of the place in which he had so recently lived. It had been cold in winter and too damned hot in summer, but it represented the only home he could truly say he had shared with his father, for in Paris their travelling existence had stopped, and even if Adam Pearce had things to do, he was, for the first time in many years, free from responsibilities. Regardless of what was happening outside the cracked panes of glass on the windows it had been a place from which a youngster might come and go knowing that t
here was some constancy in his life. Right now it was too painful to look at the bare floor boards stripped of oilcloth, the empty grate of the fire by which his father was wont to work in winter, oblivious to the smoke which never ever wholly made its way up the chimney or the missing desk by the window, which was flooded by daylight when the sun shone.

  Pearce turned, went back downstairs and secured the front door, jamming it shut with a sliver of broken timber, wondering about the owners. Had they fled, or been arrested, denounced for a trade that served the wealthy, or worse, caught up just because his father had been arraigned? Whatever, they were gone, so he had a place to lay his head, albeit on a bare floor with nothing but the rags of those torn drapes to cover him. The well in the backyard still functioned, a scoop still in the bucket. There was broken timber for a fire to heat water in, so using the shards of mirror he was able to wash and shave and that completed, and having hidden his pistol and other possessions in the rear courtyard, he set out to see what he could find. The result was depressing; most houses he called at were either empty or occupied by grubby strangers, who were happy to imply that the previous owner was sans tête.

  Others, people who had been friends to Adam Pearce in the past, refused to open their doors to the son of a man in prison, lest some sharp eye spotted the connection and denounced them. The church house in Cluny where his tutor, the Abbé Morlant, had lived, was a gutted, burnt out shell, with no one passing willing or able to tell him why or how it had happened. The old Abbé had, of course, refused to take the Oath to the Constitution demanded by the state, and had thus earned the dubious honour of becoming what was called a non-juring priest, a man loyal to Rome, not the Revolution. He crossed the river to the Hotel de Ville to see if he could find anyone who might intercede, only to find his way blocked by a crowd of supplicants, all with a grievance, a complaint or seeking a favour from the men who held the power in Paris Commune.

  It was impossible to miss the fear that permeated the entire citizenry. Paris had been a city of laughter, the streets as full of costermongers, jugglers, fire-eaters and hucksters as it was of beggars, pickpockets and thieves. Now it seemed full of the destitute. Nowhere was this more obvious than around the Palais-Royale, home to the one-time Duc d’Orleans, now the self-styled Philippe Egalité who had voted for the death of his royal cousin. The colonnaded passages that surrounded the palace had been home to all sorts of whores and pimps, pornographers, writers of scurrilous pamphlets, silver and goldsmiths, purveyors of luxury goods, and charlatans passing off everything from useless patent medicines to false religious relics. It was from the Café du Foy that Camille Desmoulins had started the riot that led to the fall of the Bastille.

  The Palais-Royale had not only survived the fall of that Royal prison, it had seemed to thrive on it, its cafes and restaurants and walkways filled to overflowing. Only the pornographers were left now, selling tales old and new of the supposed debauchery of the Queen and the ladies of the court; they, the whores, the pimps and the vendors of the dozens of news sheets which flooded the city, spewing forth bile. Most had long since ceased to be purveyors of news if you excepted listing, as they did, those who had been condemned to the guillotine, and had become organs for the various ranting editors. Denunciation stood at the core of their polemics, of anyone remotely tainted by their own less than objective standards, that and demands for more radical reforms to the way the nation was run, in reality a plea by those who penned them to be elevated to a station where they could put their ideas into action.

  Further on along the Rue de Faubourg St Honoré lay the Jacobin Club and Pearce stopped to look at the message above the door; a mockery, for there was no Humanité, Indivisibilité, Liberté, Egalité or Fraternité that he could feel, only the kind of naked power that reduced the people to beggars after justice. He turned away from that, momentarily debating the worth of making for the National Assembly, housed in the Tuileries Palace, when a voice addressed his back.

  ‘Young Monsieur Pearce, is it not?’

  John froze, turning slowly, not knowing whom he was about to encounter. The man looking at him had a handsome if somewhat florid face, thick red lips and, as he placed the name, a dark colouring that betokened his southern upbringing. He was well dressed, almost dandyish in burgundy silk, which seemed a dangerous thing to be in such times when black was the colour of choice, but he also seemed to have an assurance that such display, in his case at any rate, was acceptable. The lips were smiling and there was no animosity in the dark brown eyes.

  ‘Monsieur de Cambacérès.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  He had met Régis de Cambacérès many times, because he was a man who frequented the same salons as those which welcomed young Monsieur Pearce, though John had always tried to avoid too close an association with the man, because, although interesting in a firebrand sort of way, he was a well known and quite open pederast. That he had gravitated, in those salons, towards a handsome young fellow and engaged him in conversation was to be expected, but it was under no circumstances, however enlightening, to be encouraged.

  ‘I was given to understand that you had left Paris.’

  ‘You know about my father?’

  ‘Sadly, yes.’ That was examined for hypocrisy, but to Pearce it seemed genuine, as Cambacérès added, ‘Walk with me. It does not do these days to be seen standing and talking in the street. Suspicious minds, of which we have an abundance, see conspiracy everywhere, even in innocent conversation.’

  ‘You have come from the Jacobin Club?’

  ‘I have,’ Cambacérès sighed. ‘I swear the place becomes more tedious by the day.’

  As they began to walk, John remembered a conversation he had had with his father about this man, with old Adam wondering how the one time deputy to the Legislative Assembly had survived when so many of his contemporaries had fled. Régis de Cambacérès had been an original electee to the States General in ’89, had taken the famous oath in the Tennis Courts, had been, if not at the forefront of the Revolution, a leading light. Vain, highly intelligent, not given to holding his tongue when he saw political chicanery, he had become a member of the National Assembly as well, voting openly for the death of King Louis, yet not afraid to denounce those who shared the odium of that ballot if he felt they were less than true to the revolutionary purity he saw as essential. The man, in short, was a survivor.

  ‘It was unwise of your father to publish his views.’

  ‘Nothing would stop him,’ Pearce replied. Cambacérès obviously detected the slight weariness in that reply, for he looked at his young companion keenly. ‘It has been his way all his life, and at least he has been in prison before.’

  ‘I doubt even an English jail would prepare him for what he faces now?’

  ‘What does he face?’

  ‘It is small consolation,’ the Frenchman said, avoiding the question, ‘to observe that he is in excellent company. I daresay with the quality of mind that these rabid dogs have incarcerated, the highest level of debate in Paris today is in its prisons.’

  Pearce thought it not the sort of remark you made at a time like this if you wanted to be safe. Indeed it was exactly the kind of expression of opinion that had probably seen his father arrested. ‘Are you still a member of the Assembly, monsieur?’

  ‘I am, and of the Committee of Public Defence, which is supposed to be the guardian of the Revolution.’

  ‘Can my father be got out of the Conciergerie?’

  Cambacérès stopped, and looked at the younger man. ‘You are asking me if I have the power to intervene?’ ‘I am.’

  ‘Alas, I fear not. Indeed at this very moment Danton and my pretty young friend St Just are conspiring to edge me off the aforesaid Committee, since they find the way I disagree with them so frequently unpalatable. They are in the process of forming a new body, of which I suspect I will not be a member.’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘Danton could do it, but you must understand, young Jean, that he has Ma
yor Pache and the beasts of the Paris Commune at his heels, watching his every move, who want to cut off the head of everyone in France with either blue blood or a brain. Quite apart from that the air is full of treachery. No one trusts our generals not to surrender to the Austrians or Prussians, Lyon and Marseilles refuse to accept the writ of Paris, and there is a full scale effort to restore the monarchy in the Vendée.’

  ‘I believe he was denounced by a man called Fouché.’

  The reply was non-committal. ‘Was he?’

  ‘Could I appeal to him?’

  ‘He is not in Paris. Fouché has been sent to Lyon as a Representative on Mission.’ Seeing the look of confusion on John Pearce’s face, Cambacérès explained about this new revolutionary office. ‘They carry with them the power of the Committee of Public Defence, soon, I believe, to be renamed Public Safety, and they have the power to impose the Revolution by whatever means are necessary. But I am bound to say, even if he was here, he is a loathsome creature, to whom I doubt any appeal would be successful.’

  ‘I need help.’

  ‘I can offer you hospitality, food, a place to lay your head, but not more. I desire to keep my head on my shoulders and pleading for someone denounced by a fellow member of the Jacobin Club, however odious, is not the way to achieve that. There are too many voices in the Assembly looking for victims, so that they may prove the purity of their own revolutionary credentials.’

  ‘It is kind of you, but no.’

  The slight smile on Cambacérès’ thick red lips was wet and unattractive. ‘You fear for your virtue?’

  Pearce did not want to offend this man, it being a bad idea to do so when he had no notion what tomorrow would bring. ‘Let me just say that, with all the other things I have to worry about, I would not want to add that to the list.’