Daughters of the Storm (59 page)

Marie-Victoire felt quite calm as she got to her feet and gazed across the sombre room to the black-robed judges. The shaking that had afflicted her knees earlier had stopped and her heart beat in a regular pattern instead of in thumps. She stood quietly and waited.

The president listened to the indictment and a shudder ran through the waiting crowd. A murderess.

‘This is what you are accused of,' he pronounced. ‘You will now hear the evidence which is to be produced against you. Usher, call the witnesses.'

Marie-Victoire did not even move as Messieurs Montane, Théry, Souberbielle and Naury walked confidently into the court, followed by the plump doctor who had done so little to help her.

Under the questioning of the prosecutors, Marie-Victoire's story unfolded, the story of a mother driven to the brink of madness. The audience shuddered pleasurably, although one or two women wiped away tears and shouted out their encouragement to a sister in distress. Monsieur Théry's testimony was vivid, and gave in voluptuous detail the scene he had discovered that early morning. Listening to it, Marie-Victoire felt a veil interpose between her and the world. All that seemed so far away now, the passion and grief so old and distant, and she wanted no part of it any more.

The doctor stumbled over his words in his haste to condemn the prisoner.

‘She was mad,' he declared. ‘Battering on my door in the middle of the night and crying out dreadful things. She even threatened me – me, a respectable patriot – with denunciation. I knew no good would come of it. And all for a child who was already dead.'

Marie-Victoire's lawyer wasted no time on unnecessary words. He could see that the case was hopeless. He spoke briefly on the necessity for clemency and of the quality of mercy for a deranged girl and begged the jury to put themselves in her place. But that was all. He sat down and buried his head in his papers. The prosecutor addressed Marie-Victoire.

‘Do you deny this charge of murder?'

Marie-Victoire stirred and ran her fingers over her threadbare gown. Then she lifted her head and replied quietly. ‘No.'

‘Then, you agree you are guilty of murder. Worse, of the murder of a true patriot. Of parricide, in fact?'

What can I do, thought Marie-Victoire, to end this? To stop the torment. I am so tired and I long for peace and no more suffering.

‘I am guilty,' she said. ‘I killed Jacques Maillard. He deserved to die.' She raised a hand in a gesture of defiance. ‘He deserved to die,
messieurs.
No one is worth the life of a child. No one is worth the life of my child.'

Her country-accented voice sounded thin but clear. Amid the gasps of astonishment that greeted her declaration, she sat down again, and the hall erupted. The president fought to regain control. One of the prosecutors shot to his feet and shouted to the judges.

‘You have heard the woman,
messieurs.
She is condemned out of her own mouth. I demand death.'

Finish it.

With a supreme effort, Marie-Victoire climbed up on to the bench.

‘Vive le roi,'
she shouted above the tumult.

A frantic Héloïse leaned across the benches and pulled her down. ‘Don't,' she begged. ‘Don't be so stupid.'

It was too late. Marie-Victoire had created a sensation, and spoken words that could not be unsaid. ‘You do now know me,' she whispered. ‘Turn round.'

Héloïse sank back and order was restored in the court. She understood the impulse that caused Marie-Victoire to cry out, but it had been suicidal. Maire-Victoire had played into their hands – and the terrible, terrible thing was: she knew it what was Maire-Victoire wanted.

The passions only just reigned in below the surface had been sparked, the crowd had grown ugly with its demands for blood. No jury could fail to be influenced by its mood. Or its cries for death.

De Choissy dropped his head into his hands, and when he looked up it was with a look of despair. ‘How ill-considered,' he said under his breath.

Nothing so sensational greeted the examination of the remaining women, which was conducted at indecent speed. The jury coughed and scratched. Héloïse waited for her case to be called. It was then she realised, with a shock, that she was to be tried with de Choissy.

The first of the male prisoners was dealt with summarily, then the second, third, fourth and fifth. Two were ordinary journeymen, another a jeweller, yet another an engraver indicted for forgery. The last was a merchant, accused of trafficking in money and working for the counter-revolution. The witnesses came and went, each intoning their litany of damning facts. The judges' black plumes nodded and swayed. Of a surety, thought Héloïse wearily, there is no justice here, and because there was no point in listening, her thoughts turned to Louis.

‘De Choissy, Hervé Christian Louis and Héloïse Violette.'

Jerked back into the present, Héloïse rose to her feet, de Choissy beside her. He reached briefly for her hand and then released it in order to deal with his papers.

‘You stand accused of émigré status, of removing money from the republic and counter-revolutionary activities. Your wife stands accused as party to these crimes. Guilty or not guilty?'

‘Not guilty.'

De Choissy spoke clearly, his voice carrying easily over to the spectators' gallery, now electric with tension and excitement.

‘Not guilty.' Héloïse did not stumble .

A feeble sun struggled to penetrate the windows opposite. The judges presented a black line, unrelieved except for their tricolour sashes. The shadows in the room shifted with the light.

Héloïse was young and beautiful which made some of the onlookers visibly uneasy. Beside her de Choissy exuded the ease of his birth and breeding, but was clearly a figure from an age which was receeding... an age which was already almost impossible to remember. He appeared to have no fear but there was no compromise either in his hard, indifferent gaze. De Choissy, it seemed, was ready to fight.

The first witness was a clerk from the bank which the de Choissy family had patronised for years. In a halting voice, he gave chapter and verse of the sums the defendant had drawn out over the past two years. Amounts that made the spectators gasp. When asked what he was doing with such large amounts of money, de Choissy merely shrugged and said that his estates were in need of repair and his marriage had necessitated some expenditure. When asked to prove it, his eyes narrowed to slits.

‘Surely, messieurs,' he said, ‘the onus is on you to prove that it was not so.'

‘Citizens,' shouted the prosecutor. ‘Do you believe this man?'

An animal-like roar greeted his question. The prosecutor turned back to de Choissy.

‘You lie,' he said. ‘But we will leave it for the present. Do you deny that you have tried to leave the republic during the last nine months?'

‘I do indeed,' replied de Choissy. ‘I have documents to prove it.'

He held up a well-thumbed certificate of residence and passed it over to the prosecutor, who passed it to the jury.

‘I submit', said the prosecutor, ‘that this document is forged.'

He raised his voice so it carried to the end of the hall. ‘
Citoyens
, this document is forged. You know as well as I that there are certain persons who will stop at nothing to deny our republic its life's blood, and here is one of them. I can prove it.'

De Choissy grimaced and, in a muttered aside to Héloïse, said:'I trust they have not taken the forger. It says I have been living in Nice since March. Don't mention La Tesse.'

‘Bring on
mère
Bonnet.'

A large, untidy woman was led into the court. She was joking with the ushers and the grin on her face indicated that she was enjoying herself. She was going to milk this... and milk it she did. Waving to the public gallery, she flapped her apron over her face in mock outrage at a ribald sally.

‘Mère
Bonnet, tell us what you know,' the prosecutor instructed.

‘Mère
Bonnet leaned over the witness bar. ‘I keep the beer shop near the Palais Royal,' she stated, ‘and one evening in March when I had finished eating, this man walked in. He was already drunk, but he wanted more, so I gave to him. He was waving a fistful of
louis d'or
in his hand so I asked him where he had got so much money. He replied that he had just done a good turn for an aristo' and forged a paper to say that he had been in France when in fact he was planning to leave. I didn't pay much attention. I get all sorts, saying different things, but this one was so drunk that his tongue rattled in his mouth. I heard the name “de Choissy”, which doesn't mean anything to me. Why should it? Then I thought about it, and I grew angry at this terrible thing that had been done to our glorious country, so at the first opportunity I went to tell the authorities.'

The prosecutor executed a bow in her direction.

‘Thank you, citoyenne.'

Grinning broadly,
Mère
Bonnet acknowledged his thanks. The prosecutor turned to the jury.

‘
Citoyens
,' he said. ‘You have heard this good woman and what she has had to say. Now let us address the
citoyenne
de Choissy.'

Mère
Bonnet was led to the spectators' gallery, where space was made for her ample form. Héloïse waited.

‘Citoyenne de Choissy, can you swear that you knew nothing of your husband's financial affairs?'

Héloïse gave an affirmative.

‘
Citoyenne
, can you swear that your husband has been resident in France since August 1792 until now?'

‘As far as I know. My husband and I have not always lived together.'

‘Was he with you for any, or part, of that period?'

‘Yes, he was.'

‘When exactly?'

‘Until December 1792, when I retired to the country in order to convalesce after a serious illness.'

‘So you did not have exact knowledge of your husband's movements?'

‘I received regular letters from Paris... and from Nice.'

‘You think they were from Nice? Not from his château of La Tesse?'

‘Monsieur
, I know so.'

The prosecutor tried again. ‘Where was the prisoner from March of this year?'

‘He was in Nice. At an estate he has there. He quite often goes to oversee his lands.'

‘If that was so, why was he arrested on the German border?'

Héloïse said nothing.

‘You cannot answer that,
citoyenne?'

Héloïse waited for the noise to subside. ‘Surely,
monsieur,
' she questioned, ‘it is not a crime to travel the country?'

‘It is,
citoyenne
, it is – if you are a counter-revolutionary,' said the prosecutor with relish. ‘Consider,
citoyens,
what we have here. A former
comte
and his wife, whose father was a minister to the deceased Capet. A wife who cannot answer fully regarding the whereabouts of her husband. We have forged papers, and large sums of money which have disappeared. Consider well, are there not here two prime examples of the people we should fear, aristocrats who are determined to keep their wealth at the expense of the people, royalists who scheme to return a king... ‘

His skilfully chosen words worked. The gallery erupted into jeers and shouts of rage, drowning de Choissy as he tried to speak.

‘To the guillotine.'

‘Let them look through the little window.'

‘Try on
père
Sanson's necktie.'

The prosecutor-general rose and conferred with the president. The president signalled for the jury to depart who filed out and disappeared from view.

De Choissy turned to Héloïse and shrugged his shoulders. ‘All is up,' he tried to say, but she could not hear him for the noise.

Marie-Victoire tugged at her arm. ‘Madame, what is happening?'

‘The jury have gone to decide their verdicts.' Héloïse reached for Marie-Victoire's hand across the benches. ‘We must wait, but let us not hope.'

‘I cannot hope,' replied Marie-Victoire returning the clasp, ‘but perhaps you can, madame.'

The roar of the crowd rose in deafening bursts to the whitewashed ceiling. The prisoners huddled together on the
gradines.

Were they all counting the seconds like she was? It is such a short time, to seem so long, thought Héloïse, noting with some surprise that it was still only early afternoon.

The ushers strove to keep the spectators behind their partition and were forced to duck to avoid the missiles thrown by more adventurous spirits.

I am glad
, ran Héloïse's thoughts,
that you are not here, Louis.
It is the one thing that has kept me strong, the knowledge that you are out there in those anonymous streets
– still free.

The sound of the president's bell cut through the clamour. The jury returned and stood behind their benches, facing the president. One by one the names of the prisoners were called out, and one by one the jury returned their verdicts.

‘Guilty.'

‘Guilty.'

‘Not guilty.'

‘Guilty.'

‘Not guilty.'

‘Is Marie-Victoire Bonnard guilty?'

‘She is guilty.'

Marie-Victoire's pale face went even paler.

‘De Choissy, Hervé?'

There was a pause. ‘Guilty on all counts.'

‘De Choissy, Héloïse?'

‘Guilty on all counts.'

As at Versailles, de Choissy's arm stole round Héloïse's waist. In the dream into which she had been cast, she felt it circle her body.

The judges rose and settled their black-plumed hats on to their heads. The president asked for their judgements. Two prisoners were condemned to transportation. Five were acquitted. The rest – and that means Marie-Victoire, Hervé and me, thought Héloïse – were for death.