Daughters of the Storm (54 page)

William had already given a sketchy outline of the situation regarding the Hôtel de Ville and his confiscated documents. He was surprised that he had got away for so long.

Turning to Louis, he said: ‘I gather from the news-sheet that the British fleet is mounting offensive operations in the Mediterranean. Paris will like its British visitors even less. Who knows, the authorities might even begin to arrest the British? I think it is possible.'

Louis shrugged.

‘You are right, my friend. Paris is no place for either of you.' His expression softened at the sight of Sophie's unhappy face. ‘Don't despair, Sophie. I promise you I will do my best for Héloïse.'

William refilled their glasses.

‘You are a brave man.' He spoke with feeling. ‘And I salute you.'

Louis raised his own glass in response.

‘It has been my honour to count you as my friends.' It was the courtier and army officer who spoke to Sophie and William. ‘There are many things that divide us. Our nationality, our politics – and our future – but we have shared much and I shall never forget you.'

He raised his glass.

Sophie grasped hers. ‘Until we meet again,' she said.

‘D'accord,'
Louis agreed.

William drank in silence. He had few illusions as to just how probable it was that they would meet again, and it saddened him. Yet, already he was busy formulating with his plans and he sent up a silent prayer that he would be equal to the task.

The three of them made their farewells after which Louis slipped out of the Hôtel de Choissy and disappeared.

*

He was back within the hour, carrying two bottles of wine. It did not take much to distract the bored and sleepy guardsman, who was only too glad to pass the time of day in a friendly drink with a well-disposed patriot. Before long, the two of them were roaring out songs into the street and howling with laughter. Out of the corner of his eye, Louis noted the drapes at the salon window twitch. He clutched his red Phrygian cap in his hand and waved it nonchalantly in the air. It was the signal.

Later,much later, he abandoned the snoring guardsman slumped on a bench and left the building probably for the last time.

The wine had given him a sore head, and his footsteps were not altogether steady as he bade the guard farewell and weaved his way along the river embankment towards the Ile de St Louis. He stopped at a street pump and plunged his face into the water, and willed the shock of it on his heated skin to restore his wits. Feeling more sober, he made his way through alleys and over mud flats, crossed waste spaces and threaded between rows of derelict houses and decaying huts, until he reached the Rue St Antoine. The Place Royale was only a minute or so away.

William had thought of everything. There was fuel by the fireplace. Wine and candles on the shelf and hard-tack biscuits in the cupboard. Louis dared not pull back the shutters and only lit the candles for minutes at a time. He opened the safe, and it was then he understood about William. The light was bad but he managed by working methodically to read the papers contained in it. Then he selected a couple of forged identity cards and a certificate of residence from the pile. The rest he removed from the safe.

Kneeling down by the fire, he began to tear the documents, one by one, into shreds and fed them into the flames.

Chapter 10

The fiacre deposited Sophie and William at Sir Robert's door. William ran up the steps of the house and sounded the knocker. The door opened at once to reveal a servant who showed no surprise at the visitors. He led them through the hall, obviously the floor given over to offices, and indicated they were to wait in the back study. Sir Robert arrived within minutes, his good-natured face more than usually anxious. He went over to Sophie and bade her welcome with his customary good manners. Sophie began to relax.

Over a glass of wine, the three of them discussed the next move. Sir Robert was adamant that they should leave that very afternoon, and assured them it was perfectly possible.

‘I fear your writing activities may have been exposed,' he said gently to Sophie, ‘and I think your name is on the section lists sent into the committee which deals with public safety. So...' He left her to digest the implication. ‘I am sorry that this has taken so long to arrange,' he continued. ‘I warned you that it might. It takes time and money to get up a chain of contacts and to brief them. However, all should now be well. Do you have your documents?' he asked William.

William patted his coat-tails.

‘I hid them in the stables, but luckily I retrieved them two days ago,' he replied. ‘Miss Luttrell and I are now word-perfect in our new identities.'

Sir Robert turned his attention to Sophie.

‘And you, my dear Miss Luttrell, are you strong enough for the journey?'

Sophie, acutely aware of how irregular her situation must appear, blushed. Nevertheless, she was not ashamed of her condition. ‘I had better be,' she said, in an attempt at gaiety. ‘Or, rather, the two of us had better be.'

Sir Robert laughed, and his face told her that he approved her spirit.

‘That reminds me, my friend,' he said, looking at William. ‘I have arranged what you requested and the person concerned can be here within the hour. You are fortunate. I am the one person in Paris who can oblige you in the matter!'

‘Good,' said William, smiling at Sophie's puzzled expression. ‘I have not as yet informed the lady in question, but I will now hasten to do so.'

Sir Robert tactfully withdrew at this point, in order, he claimed, to put the final touches to the preparations. William waited until he had left the room and then surprised Sophie by dropping to one knee.

‘Miss Luttrell,' he said, his eyes dancing. ‘Behold me! I am here to do the honourable thing by you and ask you to marry me. And all things considered' – he looked pointedly at her stomach – ‘it is about time.'

‘Marry me!' exclaimed Sophie. ‘Now?'

He nodded.

‘I have arranged it with Sir Robert. A Protestant priest is on his way over here.'

Sophie stared at him, the unexpectedness of William's plan leaving her breathless. Images jumbled through her mind – among them, her parents and the hotly protesting shade of Ned. Once again, she felt once the tang of English rain on her face and the sun in the brick-walled garden striking her flesh, and smelt the wet, leaf-strewn earth of the woods around High Mullions. She saw her room, a white sunny place for a virgin girl, and heard Miss Edgeworth's voice drone through the long afternoons when she longed to be outside. These things she was giving up, to live far away.

‘Sophie, please.'

William swam before her vision... and she knew he was jealous of whatever she was thinking. He frowned and his lips tightened. For a moment, his obvious bewilderment and baffled tenderness resembled Ned's. Then everything snapped back into focus and she knew for certain that William was nothing like Ned. The baby stirred inside her.

‘Sophie, answer me.'

Her face cleared. ‘Of course,' she said. ‘Of course I will marry you. Today.'

And so it was that Sophie Luttrell married William Jones in a grey stuff gown that strained at the waist in a dusty, paper-strewn room that did duty as Sir Robert's library. There had been no time to do anything except brush her hair and extract a clean fichu from her bundle of luggage, and if she regretted her abandoned piles of exquisite dresses and lacy chemises, or that she had no loving embraces of friends and parents to cheer her on her way, she showed no sign of it.

The disapproving voice of the pastor rose above the hurly-burly of the street. How lucky I am this is not England, thought Sophie; he would have run me out of the parish by now. The baby kicked forcefully and Sophie wondered at the strangeness of life that turned out so very different from what she had been led to expect. Who would have foretold that she would have stood, pregnant and shabby, on the run from the Parisian authorities, marrying a man who would take her over the sea and far away?

Not I, thought Sophie, and turned with a radiantly happy smile to kiss her groom.

Chapter 11

Louis hitched his belt higher, patted his waist where the roll of double
louis d'or
was concealed under his shirt, slicked back his cropped hair and straightened his coat. His well-made figure attracted some admiring glances, and one woman went out of her way to bump into such a handsome-looking patriot.

The Cour de Mai was crammed with men, women and children, and the refreshment booths were doing a brisk trade. The
tricoteuses
were already in place on the stone steps of the Palais, where they waited to pour down insults on prisoners being herded into the Conciergerie and to scoff at the condemned who, later in the day, would emerge from the prison to take their place in the carts. Louis looked at them with loathing. They were a hellish breed, and the idea that any one of them had shouted at Héloïse was more than he could stomach. Giving the steps as wide a berth as he could, he made for the prison entrance in the north-west corner and took up a position from where he could observe the goings-on.

Definitely, the turnkey was in a surly mood which meantLouis decided to wait until another took his place. Leaning against one of the pillars, he pulled out a lump of the bread with which he had taken care to bring and ate it.

The talk flowed around him. Over in one corner, a party of lawyers were disputing the merits of a case. To his right, the anxious relatives of a prisoner debated whom to approach first in their bid to get him or her freed. As he ate, Louis took careful note of the prison building layout, although from where he sat it was difficult to ascertain much. Somewhere inside them was Héloïse, and the very fact that she was there, unseen and unknowing, stirred up mad desires ... storm the gate ... carry her away to safety.

Careful. He bent his head, in case his face betrayed too much, and concentrated, instead, on what was being said around him.

Much of the gossip concerned the queen. When she would face trial and when she would die. That she would was taken for granted.

‘Oh, yes,' claimed one savant, ‘the widow Capet will feel the blade of
la mère guillotine.
And I shall be there to watch it bite into her neck...'

The prospect of these bloodsuckers gathering to watch the death of the queen set his teeth so on edge that he could listen no longer. Pulling himself upright, he walked over to the prison gate. Excellent: the turnkey had been changed. He waited until a fresh group of prisoners had been ushered through the door, caught up a couple of coins in the palm of his hand and entered into negotiations. It was as difficult and tedious as he had imagined. The man was suspicious of Louis' money and worried that someone dressed like him should have so much. But in the end the gold coins did their work and Louis was permitted to enter. He stepped through the
guichet,
which shut behind him.

‘Allumez le miston.
Take note of this one,' the turnkey sang out.

The clerk in the registry looked up from his work and flicked a questioning glance at his colleague. The turnkey gave a thumbs up and nodded. The clerk subjected Louis to a hard, searching stare and then held out his hand.

Louis placed two coins in it and said, in a low, deliberately hoarse, voice, ‘Until tomorrow. I will give you two more when I leave.'

The clerk jerked his head towards the prison interior and spat in Louis' direction.

‘If you last that long,' he remarked sourly, and returned to his papers.

Delighted that he had got so far, Louis kept his face expressionless as he followed the turnkey. Having shown him through two more doors, the turnkey turned to him. ‘You are on your own now,' he said. ‘Mind that you make no disturbance. If you do, I will denounce you and it's my word against yours.'

Louis nodded. ‘We understand each other...' He was as ingratiating as he could make himself. ‘You'll have your money, I'll have the woman. No questions on either side.'

The turnkey laughed. ‘A fuck before facing
la mère guillotine
is as good a way to go as any.'

Louis joined in... while he tried to precisely assess the geography of the prison.

With a shrug, the turnkey moved off. Louis blew a sigh of relief and leant against the wall while he planned his next move. This was not, to put it at its most basic, a reassuring place and the unsavoury closeness was unpleasant feeling. He needed to be careful, very careful. Taking off his red cap, he stuffed it into his pocket and wound a modest cravat around the neck. These simple actions, as he knew from practice, had the effect of turning him from a villainous
sansculotte
into something more respectable and therefore less noticeable.

Every second mattered.

Louis forced himself to remain motionless and his observations soon told him that the men's part of the prison lay to his right and the women's to his left. Through a couple of iron grilles at the end of the corridor there appeared to be a staircase that led up into the Palais interior, and the endless procession of clerks up and down it suggested that these were the steps to which the prisoners were led when the time came for their trial...

Where was she?

It was difficult for Louis to tell who were prisoners and who were not. Merchants and bankers paraded up and down with as much grave concentration as if they were at their places of business, priests offered their words of comfort, and flushed red complexions betrayed the rural origins of many. Dandies sang their modish songs and minced around to avoid the prostitutes. The prositutes accosted who ever they could with their come-on looks and reddened lips. There was every kind and variety of accent.

There was a feverish air to all this activity and noise, a frenzy of hope and despair, anguish and anger. Louise could smell it – a smell of humanity at bay, mingled with an odour of decay and illness which appeared to permeate even the stones, the walls, the air...