Authors: Anne Perry
‘Citizen St Felix,’ she said softly.
Silence. She could not even hear him breathing. Surely he was here!
‘Citizen St Felix!’ In spite of herself, her voice trembled. She could hear the fear in it.
‘What is it?’ His answer came out of the darkness, sharp-edged with alarm. ‘Célie?’
She remained where she was, leaning against the closed door. She did not want to move and trip over anything. She had not been in his room before. Amandine always returned his clean linen.
‘Yes,’ she replied, steadying herself, breathing deeply. Her heart was pounding. ‘I must speak with you. Bernave’s death changes a lot of things. We need to ... to reconsider.’
There was a sound of movement in the dark. She was shivering. He must be frozen. Was he searching for his clothes? A moment later there was the scrape of tinder and a flame sprang up. She saw his hands, strong and fine-boned. He lit the candle and the flame burned up, showing his face, his grey-green eyes and the halo of brown hair. In this yellow glow he was gaunt rather than handsome—she would even have said he was beautiful.
‘What is it you want to say?’ he asked. He was not angry, but there was a remoteness about him and she knew she had unquestionably intruded.
It irritated her, because she found herself embarrassed. This was even more difficult than she had foreseen.
‘I went to see Georges Coigny—’
‘When?’ he interrupted. Then he looked away. ‘It doesn’t matter now anyway. Bernave is dead. I wish we could tell Coigny, but Menou wouldn’t let us leave the house until he finds who killed him, and arrests them.’ His voice was tight with strain. ‘I expect he’ll hear ... from someone.’
‘I saw him just now!’ She said it more sharply than she had intended. ‘He heard it from me.’
His head jerked up, staring at her. ‘What do you mean “just now”? You couldn’t have—’
‘I went over the roof,’ she said flatly. It sounded preposterous, and yet it was the simple truth. ‘If I’d gone in the street they’d have stopped me. I had to tell him.’
He looked at her more closely, his eyes narrowed. She could see in his face that he was beginning to understand that there was something intensely important to her, beyond anything she had said so far.
It made her feel in some way naked. Remembered shame, never far from her mind, returned with dull, consuming pain. But that was all irrelevant now. She must tell him what Georges had said, persuade him to go on, to fill in the missing pieces, change the ones that must be changed.
‘I’m not sure it was worth the risk,’ he said with a sigh. There was no lift in his voice, no hope. He sat down on the bed and indicated the single chair for her. She tried to read his face. The candlelight made it more dramatic, etched deeper the lines from nose to mouth, the subtle curve of cheekbone and delicacy of brow, the sweep of his eyelid. It was a face of tragedy, too vulnerable to pain.
How different he was from Georges, who until tonight had always been so certain of everything. It was that wall of confidence around him that both drew her, and angered her. Now she had seen it breached, everything was different—at least for a few days.
‘He’s willing to go on,’ she said quietly.
‘Didn’t you tell him that Menou said Bernave was spying for the Commune?’ St Felix asked with amazement.
‘Of course I did!’ she snapped back. ‘That doesn’t mean it’s true. But if it is true, it doesn’t alter what will happen if we allow the King to be executed. It just means we’ve got to plan everything again, use different people, different places ...’
He leaned forward. ‘If it is true, Célie, it means he’s almost certainly betrayed us to Marat and the Commune! Didn’t you hear Menou say he was a loyal son of the revolution?’
‘Then why aren’t we all arrested?’ she challenged. ‘Maybe Marat is the one who’s duped! Of course we’ll have to change what we know—just in case. But we can, if we try hard enough. He never knew the safe houses, except in St-Antoine. He never knew the crowd Georges got for storming the carriage, so he couldn’t have given them any—’
‘But he knew there was a plan!’ he cut across her, bitterness in his voice. ‘Marat will be watching, waiting to catch us. He’ll be prepared.’
‘He’d be prepared anyway,’ she continued. ‘He’ll be expecting an attempt at the time of the execution, even if it was only the royalists. Isn’t it worth trying?’ She heard her voice rise, the intensity of her emotions pouring through the simple words—her rage and confusion over Bernave, and the compulsion to justify George’s faith in her that she could persuade St Felix, when he himself could not reach him. It was for the sake of everyone, all France, whether they understood a fraction of it or not. But it was passionately for herself as well, to claw back something from the guilt that swallowed hope inside her. It was not God she needed to find, it was the light inside herself, the beginning of the person she wanted to be, not the woman who had judged too soon, without knowledge, and let her grief turn to a rage which almost destroyed another person.
‘What else should we do?’ she demanded of St Felix. ‘Just let it all go? Then whoever murdered Bernave has beaten us all, just in that one act?’
He stood motionless. The flame wavered, lighting his eyes, but she could not read his thoughts in them and he was looking beyond her.
‘I don’t believe he betrayed us,’ he said at last. ‘I knew him a long time. There was much in him I never understood. I could be mistaken that he’s no traitor, but I’ll take the chance. As you say, the only alternative is to give in without trying.’ He shook his head fractionally. ‘But I don’t know anything about Georges Coigny, except that he is Amandine’s cousin. That’s not enough to trust him with all our lives.’
Célie tried to think what she could tell him of Georges so he would believe in his courage and dedication to the cause, and even more in his ability to accomplish what he said he would. But what did she know herself? She was lost for words, impressions filling her mind, memories of the heat and blood of September, of her own emotions, and Madame de Staël’s words in the coach as they left Paris.
St Felix was waiting, a spark of curiosity lit his eyes.
‘Bernave trusted him, and he has not betrayed us in anything,’ she said aloud. ‘That’s all you need to know. If I could tell you his life story it wouldn’t mean anything.’ She shrugged, perhaps exaggeratedly. ‘He could be a Lafayette, couldn’t he? Change sides at the last moment! Or he could die for his beliefs, like God knows how many priests.’ She grimaced. ‘Except I suppose they had rather put themselves into a corner, hadn’t they? If you make your career telling everyone that the goods of this life are nothing and heaven is all, when you are asked to make the leap yourself, if you decline, then you brand yourself a hypocrite of the first order.’ She gave a little grunt of disgust. ‘Not that that seems to have bothered Danton, or Hébert.’
‘What?’ he said sharply.
‘They both trained as priests,’ she reminded him.
St Felix swallowed. She saw his throat jerk. There was a spasm of pain in him, but she could not even guess what it was for. Everyone had lost something precious these days, someone they had loved. Célie did not ask.
He looked at her, searching her face for the first time.
‘Why do you care so much that you will climb over roofs at night to tell Coigny that Bernave is dead?’ he said gently. ‘And why are you trying so hard now to persuade me? Is it for Coigny’s sake? Do you love him?’
That angered her monstrously. It was patronising and grossly untrue. It brought memories of Therese, Amandine, and embarrassment. Her temper flared up, sending the blood burning in her face.
‘No, I do not!’ she retorted stingingly. ‘Do you go to the Faubourg St-Antoine and get hurt and stabbed, and carry messages at all times of the night no matter how frozen or exhausted you are because you are in love with somebody?’ She made it sound contemptible. ‘Or because you believe in the cause of the people of France, and are trying to stop us descending into chaos and hunger and war?’
‘Keep your voice down,’ he said calmly. ‘Do you want to have Citizen Lacoste in here asking what the devil we are doing?’
She burst into laughter, rough and painful. ‘In your bedroom, at this time of night? He wouldn’t be so tactless!’
Now it was his turn for the blood to flare up his cheeks.
‘You didn’t answer my question!’ she went on, speaking quietly again, and between her teeth. ‘Are you so arrogant you imagine only you can think beyond your own loves and hates to something greater? I can see what the countries around us will do if we execute the King. They are all monarchies. All related to one another, in interest if nothing else. They’ll descend on us as if we were a diseased thing to be got rid of, to save themselves. You don’t have to be an aristo not to want that.’
‘Where did you learn all this?’ He raised his eyebrows slightly, his composure regained. ‘You sound like Bernave. I can hear him saying exactly the same things.’
‘But you believed them from him?’ That was a challenge. ‘Why not me?’
He hesitated. She could see the indecision in his eyes, his mouth. He did not wish to be cruel. How many times had she seen in him that forbearance with others, with the wilfulness of the children, the prejudices of Monsieur Lacoste or Fernand, the ignorance of Marie-Jeanne, the cruelty of Bernave? She had admired it then, seen the beauty of a greater understanding. Now, because it cut across what she needed him to believe, it felt like condescension. She was aware of her own double standards, and it made her the angrier.
‘This is no time for politeness!’ she hissed. ‘Anything but the truth could send not only the King to the guillotine, but the rest of us as well!’
He shrugged very slightly. It was a graceful gesture, a gentleman’s resignation to the inevitable. ‘You are a laundress, certainly with some courage and imagination, and a great loyalty to Bernave, but a natural creature of the revolution,’ he said reasonably. ‘It is your people’s battle against the oppression of centuries. It is the justice you have starved for and died for, now at last within your reach. Do you ask me to believe that your loyalty to Bernave is so great that you will go against all that your nature and your life has taught you to trust, and throw in your lot with a cause that has so little chance, and at such great risk? Why should you? For love of what, if not a man?’
What could she answer except the truth? If she continued to protect herself, cover the wound, he would not believe her. It would mean opening it up again, but then it was only a pretence that it had ever healed.
There was no point in telling him about her parents. They had not been labourers, or oppressed, but they were ardent revolutionaries of the mind, of lunatic idealism, not reality. But instinctively she still concealed their weakness, their dreams and their failures which had cost so much. It was all irrelevant to anything St Felix needed to know, or would care about.
‘I was lady’s maid to Madame de Staël, from before the revolution,’ she began. He had to understand that much, or it made no sense.
His eyes widened a little. She was not surprised. Madame was the sort of woman St Felix would have admired intensely, as did so many others. Had there been time, she could have closed her eyes now and seen the wonderful months when night after night Madame’s salon had been filled with the greatest names in France. They had talked endlessly—wonderful, brilliant conversations of a vision to set Europe on fire with a new social order of justice and freedom. They had drawn from the learning of every subject to interest the mind of man, and with such wit, such laughter. She had to try harder to remember that ringing through the house.
Then the dreams of civilised and peaceful change had been broken one by one. Successive ministers had failed to control the economy, break the stranglehold of the Church on lands and wealth, or to reform the corrupt and chaotic taxation system. Necker, Mirabeau, Lafayette had all made promises they could not keep.
The King had listened to whoever was the last to speak with him, swearing to act, then hesitating till the moment was lost, and harsher and more radical demands were made, and he refused them, bewildered and stubborn.
Finally individual greeds and ambitions had divided them and, pointless quarrels had paralysed the men who might once have accomplished the beautiful, noble revolution the philosophers had spoken of with such high hopes, so short a time ago.
Charles had died of fever, leaving Célie alone with Jean-Pierre. The thought of him clenched her stomach till it ached almost beyond bearing. She hated St Felix for making her live it yet again.
‘My husband died.’ She dismissed that in a sentence. The surprise and the brief sense of dismay had long since gone. It was actually little more than a year ago, but it seemed another life. But then the brief illusion of love had burned out some time before that, and for Charles and herself it was over. She was sorry for the distress of his illness, for the waste of his life, but she did not grieve for herself that he was no longer with her.
She looked up and caught an expression of such desolation in St Felix’s face that if she had ever doubted that the darkness he carried within himself was for his dead wife, that moment would have dispelled it.
She looked away. That kind of pain could not be shared, and should not be witnessed by another. It was like seeing the soul of a man stripped naked of all its protection.
‘It wasn’t that which hurt.’ She had to explain, whatever he thought of her. ‘It was my son’s death ... my baby.’ This was even harder than she had expected. The words were torn out of her like pulling off skin, but she must go on with it now. ‘Usually I could care for him myself. Madame was very good to me in that. But sometimes it was impossible. That occasion I left him with Amandine. The reason doesn’t matter now.’ She must tell him this part quickly, without detail, and get past it.
He did not interrupt her, but she could feel his luminous eyes steady on her face. It was discomfiting, as if he could see the shame to come.
The words were still almost impossibly difficult to say. ‘While he was with Amandine ... he died. We don’t know why. Don’t ask.’ Why should he? But she wanted to prevent him anyway. ‘I wished I could die too.’ She must go on, reach the point which mattered, which would explain to him why she cared about the King, and would do anything necessary to help Georges Coigny, even risking her own life in this scheme.