Authors: Matthew Plampin
‘Hannah.’
He was standing in the doorway to the bedroom, ducking slightly to fit his head within it. She stopped on the oval rug, caught between the portrait and actual man. One seemed scarcely more real than the other. He couldn’t have slept, but you wouldn’t know it; that serious, handsome face was freshly shaved and formidably alert.
‘You’re alive.’
His expression was one of deep joy, mingled with a trace of puzzlement. Hannah went cold; he was
in character
, as an actor might say. It was unspeakably sinister. He was watching her closely, plainly intending to let her reactions show how much she’d discovered during her time outside the wall. Hannah thought about attempting to fool him – pretending she had no notion of what he really was and then using this to steer him into some kind of ambush. To work such a trick, though, she’d have to go to his ambush, return his kisses and hear his false words of concern. She couldn’t do it.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.
‘I was out in no-man’s-land last night,’ he told her. ‘I heard a Prussian patrol talking of an escape in one of their villages – a
vivandière
, they said. I could only hope it was you.’ He looked around the room. ‘I had a feeling that you’d come here first.’
Dear God, he was so damned
obvious
. This was almost an admission. A wince pinched at Hannah’s brow; she tried to hide it, glancing at the rug, but it was too late. She’d given herself away. He was walking over to her, the joy and the puzzlement quite gone. She darted for the door and he lunged to intercept her, scooping her clean off the carpet. She struggled and his grip became unbearable, stopping her breath; she went limp and he loosened it by a tiny fraction.
‘Who have you told?’
Everything was changed. The arms around her were those she’d yearned for in the storeroom at Gagny. Never, though, had they held her like this; it felt as if her ribs were about to snap. His smell was the same, tinged still by the scent of the irises in the windmill, yet what had once been intoxicating now revolted her. This man clenching her to him was not her beloved Jean-Jacques; indeed, Jean-Jacques could not even be his real name.
‘What do you mean?’ she gasped.
‘Don’t make this difficult. Who have you told?’ His voice, at least, sounded different now, the accent a degree harder – Alsatian shifting to Prussian.
Hannah stared at the ceiling. He didn’t know about Laure. She herself was finished, at the mercy of an enemy spy; that which she’d fought to prevent out in the woods was now the best she could hope for. She wasn’t going to give this man a chance to escape from Paris and disappear into the Prussian line. Elizabeth would just have to rely on her wits.
‘No one,’ she said.
His hold relaxed further; then he dropped her in an armchair and went to a window. Hannah couldn’t tell if he believed her or not. She looked to the door. There was no hope of her reaching it before he caught her again. He appeared to be weighing his options: a professional adapting coolly to a shift in circumstances. Hannah dug her fingers into the chair’s upholstered arms to stop them from trembling. She was determined to keep silent, to match his composure. She would not scream about the love he’d betrayed – faked for the purposes of conquest. She would not level any of the livid accusations that were heaping up inside her mind. And she most certainly would not allow a single tear to be shed.
It was no use.
‘How could you?’ she asked him, rather more loudly and angrily than she’d intended. ‘What
are
you
?’
He turned, standing calmly in the grey light. Hannah had gazed into those dark eyes so many times, convinced that all manner of noble feelings could be seen within. Now they seemed inscrutable, beyond divination, malign in their blankness.
‘Everything I have done,’ he said, ‘has been to end this war.’
Hannah almost laughed. ‘How you can say that misleading us all, that – that
lying
will bring about—’ She stopped. This was pointless. ‘What now, then? Do you intend to shoot me? Return me to one of your prisons?’
‘No.’ He flicked back the curtain to broaden his view of the place de l’Opéra and the boulevards that bordered it. ‘We are going to wait for your mother.’
Elizabeth rose from the empty ammunition crate she’d been perched on for much of the afternoon. ‘We’ve seen enough,’ she announced over the shell-fire, lifting the hem of her dress to nudge Clem with her boot. ‘Brandy at the Grand, I think.’
Clem knotted his curtain-scarf and climbed to his feet. There had been a thaw that morning, melting the frozen ground to sludge, but as the sun sank it was turning arctic again. The prospect of hard liquor – of the good stuff from Elizabeth’s private supply, imbibed in the comfort of her sitting room – was welcome indeed.
‘Hear, hear,’ he said. ‘Right behind you.’
They left the western terrace of Mont-Valérien, picking their way around its outer wall to the track that led to Paris. The fort, largest and best-loved of the fourteen that encircled the city, loomed beside them in the misty twilight. General Trochu’s idea had been that it would serve as an anchor to the sortie, providing the soldiers with a symbol of French steadfastness and strength. In this it had most certainly failed.
The day’s action had been focused on the Buzenval Ridge, the natural barrier between Paris and Versailles and the site of numerous unassailable Prussian positions. It had been a thoroughly depressing spectacle, bloody and futile. From the western terrace Clem and Elizabeth had watched the French battalions slog up the muddy slopes, through the remains of farmsteads and orchards; grind to a halt under a punishing barrage, dropping in their dozens, unable or unwilling to advance any further; and then eventually start to break apart, drifting back down, defeated once more.
As a sign of Parisian desperation – or perhaps in line with Besson’s theory about the government’s plan to prune the city’s reds – the National Guard had been allowed a much greater role than in previous attacks, accounting for nearly half the total force. In addition to their usual heavy drinking, cowardice and insubordination, the citizen-soldiers had also displayed a panicky impulsiveness with their rifles that had led to the accidental killing and wounding of scores of their own countrymen. Clem had even witnessed a band of stragglers blast away at General Trochu’s staff after mistaking the mounted officers for a party of Uhlans; at least one had died in his saddle, slumping onto his horse’s neck as it galloped off towards Saint-Cloud.
Neither could the militiamen be convinced to remain on the ridge overnight, abandoning footholds for which so many of their comrades had fallen without a thought. To the rear of Mont-Valérien Clem and Elizabeth encountered a swollen river of deserters, inching through the ruined village of Puteaux to the Pont de Neuilly. Elizabeth was soon recognised and the Leopard remarks began. Once again, her Monsieur Allix had been a vocal advocate of a large-scale sortie, with the National Guard as its spearhead; and once again he’d been conspicuous by his absence when the fighting had actually started. Elizabeth put on her usual show of faith. She’d made excuses for him on previous occasions, supplying suitable tales of derring-do to explain why he’d removed himself at the critical moment, and she did the same here. On she chattered, her hands working through their repertoire of Gallic gesticulations, trying to stay genial in the face of queries that ranged from amused and faintly indignant to downright hostile.
‘Good Lord,’ she murmured to Clem at one point, ‘I am not
responsible
for the man.’
Civilians thronged around the gate at the head of the avenue de la Grande Armée, lining the road down to the place de l’Étoile and beyond. They were genuinely shocked to see the heroes they’d cheered out that morning returning to the city with nothing to show but a long list of the dead and maimed. These people, drunk on their own patriotic bombast, had plainly expected the day to close with the National Guard singing the ‘Marseillaise’ in the courtyard at Versailles. Many women were anxiously inspecting the soldiers as they passed, asking after missing husbands and sons. Clem felt a keen longing for his bed; he’d burrow down among the sheets like a mole, pull the eiderdown over his head and not come out until there was a train waiting to convey him directly to Calais.
‘Mrs Pardy! I say, Mrs Pardy!’
A corps of newspapermen was standing in the greenish light of a petroleum lamp, casting questions into the returning militia in an attempt to gather details of the battle. Montague Inglis was on the margins of this group, bent over slightly with one long arm raised into the air. The Pardys stopped and he came to meet them, giving Elizabeth a bow and Clem a quick nod. Little remained of the smooth, adversarial, slightly suspect fellow who’d met them in the lobby of the Grand the previous September. His beard was reaching mad hermit proportions, and his clothes bore evidence of heavy repair. There was a nervousness about him, also – Elizabeth had obviously cut him loose rather against his will.
‘Mr Inglis, did you not venture outside the wall today?’ she asked. ‘Whatever will the readers of the
Sentinel
do, deprived of your first-hand observations on the sortie?’
The journalist laughed, a sad croak from somewhere in his beard. ‘That is more your style, Lizzie, than mine. Besides, the outcome of this piece of idiocy was never in doubt. The rabbit, for some unknown reason, decided to leave his hole and scamper about before the stoat.’
Even with everything they’d seen that day, Elizabeth could not let this stand. ‘How very like you to pour disdain on the sacrifice of those—’
Inglis lifted a palm. ‘My dear woman,’ he interrupted, ‘I really don’t want to run through this debate again. I came to speak with you with a particular purpose in mind – a warning, if you like, to impart to one I still consider a friend.’
Elizabeth’s stare said:
Well?
‘There is talk,’ Inglis glanced back at the newspapermen, ‘of something building up in the northern arrondissements. They say the rappel is being beaten from Montmartre to Ménilmontant.’
‘Hardly unusual.’
‘Perhaps not, but several of the ringleaders are apparently naming your man – your Leopard. They are claiming that he is a traitor.’
Clem tensed. He’d all but given up on Jean-Jacques Allix. Besson had seemed indifferent to the discovery he’d made in the Jardin des Plantes. Clem got the feeling that he’d already guessed Allix was the author of the letter – that he’d been sure of it from the beginning. Clem himself had not seen Allix since that meeting before the leopard cage, nearly a month ago now. He was beyond reach, beyond investigation, popping up unannounced at the odd ultra rally, but existing principally in the sensational paragraphs of Elizabeth’s reports. Clem had imagined many different motives for Allix’s mysterious behaviour. Outright treachery, though, alleged by his own people – this was new.
‘Inevitable, I suppose,’ Elizabeth sighed. ‘There is no medium in this blessed city between the Capitol and the Tarpeian Rock: if you do not exist in a state of continual triumph you must be enacting a betrayal. They will rage and rant until he returns from his mission – and then none of them will even have the backbone to repeat their baseless slander to his face.’ Her features softened very slightly. ‘But I thank you for your concern, Mont. It is always helpful to hear of these little stupidities.’
Inglis bowed again. Clem attempted to learn more about the accusations against Allix, but the journalist had nothing to tell. It became increasingly clear, in fact, that he was in a state of some distress; the Marquis de Périchaux, an old friend of his from the Jockey Club and a colonel in the loyalist militia, had been killed that day near the Château de Buzenval. Inglis had seen the marquis’s body being borne into the city, off to his mansion on the boulevard Haussmann. The sight had plainly staggered him. Although capable of great hardness, Elizabeth Pardy was not a hard soul; laying her fingers on Inglis’s forearm, she asked him to the Grand for a glass of brandy. He accepted at once, and the three of them carried on towards the centre of the city.
They were walking along the Champs Elysées, almost at the place de la Concorde, when the opening shots of that night’s bombardment rumbled through Paris. The Buzenval sortie clearly hadn’t affected it at all; it was a different, entirely independent part of the Prussian siege machine. The atmosphere was already turbulent, thousands of civilians and militia thronging in the near-darkness, jostling, arguing and sobbing. As the barrage settled into its bludgeoning rhythm the people let out an enormous, weary groan. Some began to wail uncontrollably; others scaled lampposts and Morris columns, screaming slogans or launching into tirades.
‘It really does beggar belief,’ said Inglis over the noise. ‘These Prussians must have lumps of deuced granite where their hearts should be. They are deliberately aiming for our hospitals and churches, you know. Towers, domes, steeples – the blackguards are using them as targets.’
‘It’s a crime, Mr Inglis,’ Clem agreed. ‘A bloody crime.’
The Pardys, of course, had undertaken a full journalistic tour of the bombarded arrondissements. Elizabeth had insisted on it, both to assess the destruction being wrought and to experience what it was like to be under fire; and Clem, reinstated as the default assistant, had been obliged to accompany her. Despite the smashed paving stones in the place du Panthéon and the single hole punched in the golden dome of Les Invalides, the general level of damage had struck Clem as surprisingly light – but the mad fear he’d felt when a salvo of shells had shrilled overhead, cracking and rattling in an adjacent street, had definitely been great enough. It had been another hour, however, an endless, nerve-racking hour, before he managed to persuade his mother to stop conversing with the dazed-looking locals and return to the safer side of the Seine.
‘Little wonder that they’ve murdered so many innocents,’ Inglis continued with uncharacteristic feeling, ‘so many damned
children
. I went to the funeral, Lizzie, of those poor little fellows from the Lycée Saint-Nicholas. I knew one of their fathers – a big name at the Bourse. The anger at the graveside, the sheer
incomprehension
… it was beyond words. That Kaiser is a Herod, a blood-soaked modern Herod, and History will judge him accordingly.’