Season of Light (38 page)

‘If it’s more than a year old it will be out of date, they’ve changed so many of the street names. And if you’re going out alone again you take care. I’m not sure I like the idea of you wandering about the city on your own. I was telling a neighbour about you and she reminded me that if you get into trouble it will reflect badly on me. Of course, I don’t mind you staying, the truth is I need the money, but still …’

‘I’ve told you, Citoyenne Maurice, I only want to pay my respects and pass some messages to Didier Paulin, then I’ll be on my way.’

‘Well, don’t hang about or go down dubious alleys or side streets. It’s important to look as if you know where you’re going. And don’t say too much in that peculiar accent of yours. These are difficult times and nobody likes a stranger.’

‘I do know something of the city. I was in Paris five years ago, staying in the Faubourrg St-Germain. I shall never forget the weeks I spent there … I met someone …’

Sure enough, at the first sniff of romance, Citoyenne Maurice softened. ‘What happened?’

‘It came to nothing at the time, I was so young … But I can’t help hoping …’

‘Well, things are very different now, you’ll find. All right, let’s mark a route for you. A lot of visitors start at the Temple Palace, to see if they can catch a glimpse of the queen. That’s where people would expect you to go.’

‘My friend in Caen mentioned a church called St-Joseph.’

‘St-Joseph?’

‘It was attached to a monastery, I believe.’

‘You see, that’s what I mean about taking care. It’s not a good idea for us to be talking about churches; anyway, most of them have been put to other use. Now I come to think of it, there’s only one St-Joseph that I know of – Joseph des Carmes – and that’s a prison these days, so there’s no point going there. Pity. In the old days I’d have said it was worth a visit. I remember attending mass once and seeing a Bernini Virgin. Not that I mean the old days were better – don’t get me wrong – not at all. Just different.’

‘Even so, perhaps you could mark it for me on the map?’

Citoyenne Maurice turned the map around and hovered over it with a pen. At last she inserted two crosses, one for the Temple Prison, one for the former church of St-Joseph.

‘Citoyenne Maurice, are you sure that’s the one? Is that St-Joseph des Carmes?’

‘Why, certainly. It’s off the Vaugirard.’

A return to first principles is how Shackleford might have described Asa’s expedition that day. In 1788, Asa, Philippa and John Morton had begun their exploration of Paris by viewing the royal family’s residence at Versailles. Whereas Morton had manoeuvred himself into a royal levee, the sisters had had to wait for a visit to the opera before they glimpsed the queen in her jewelled satin skirts, her hair puffed and padded and curled under a headdress the size of a boat and adorned with waving ostrich plumes. What a tragedy, Asa had thought, that France’s destiny rested upon the flimsy mind of such a pampered doll.

Now, once again, Asa set forth to visit the queen, but this time, like the fairy-tale princess she had always wanted to be, Marie Antoinette was locked in a tower. The Temple Palace was a historic building of some importance and grace despite its small windows, steep roofs and little steeples. But in a far corner, narrow and imposing, and twice as high as the rest of the building, was a sinister structure with four turrets, like a miniature Tower of London. Beneath its steep walls a crowd had assembled.

Like everyone else, Asa stared upwards. No pale face appeared at the window. Everything inside the tower seemed to be quiet, though someone whispered that only last week, the queen’s last living son had been taken from her and imprisoned elsewhere in the building, so that sometimes you could hear him crying for his mother.

‘Why would they do that? It seems too cruel.’

The woman stank of raw onion. ‘Because the filthy slut insisted on treating him like a little king. At table he had to sit at the head and be served first. What sort of a mother would stuff a child’s head with that kind of nonsense?’

Asa felt she was being watched by certain members of the crowd – in this company, even the whiteness of her Normandy bonnet drew attention. Close by, a man threw back his head and yelled up at the empty window: ‘Show us your face, you fucking whore. We all know what you’ve been up to, fucking your own son.’

‘That too,’ said Asa’s neighbour, leaning closer. ‘Haven’t you heard? Sharing a bed, sucking his little prick. That’s what she did.’

‘You know what,’ said a young girl, ‘they say the poor lad can hardly walk any more because of what she’s done to him. Look at this.’ She smiled so sweetly that Asa, disarmed, took the card from her. It was a print of the queen in a sexual embrace with one of her ladies, mouth to mouth, grasping each other’s bodies.

‘Foreign bitch,’ someone screamed, and the crowd took up the chant, pressing forward and landing gobs of spittle on the wall.

Asa turned away. Surely Didier must be aware of these crude jibes; the evil that had been unleashed in his city? This was not what they had dreamed of in Madame de Genlis’s salon.

It was noon and the sun was high and scorching. She began the long trek south across the river under the great towers of Notre Dame (renamed the Temple of Reason) on to the rue de la Harpe, crossing the end of the rue des Cordeliers to the Vaugirard, the longest, straightest road in Paris. Try not to look so nervous, Asa kept telling herself. You only have to survive until tomorrow. But when a cart rattled by, too close, she leapt back. It turned the corner so aggressively a wheel jolted off the road, provoking a stream of curses from the driver.

Leading north from the Vaugirard was the rue Madame, which in turn led to the rue du Vieux Colombier, where Didier used to live. Asa knew that if she turned left at the top of the Cherche-Midi she’d reach the Hôtel Montmorency. And between these streets, adjacent to Vieux Colombier, Madame Maurice had placed the cross indicating the church of St-Joseph des Carmes.

Asa stood with her back to the wall, shaded by a tree that had extended its branches far over the street. There, on the opposite side, was the shabby green door that used to be Didier’s, through which she had passed with such excitement and fear and amazement at herself. Up the stone steps she had followed him, to the room where they had drunk strong, tepid coffee, served in a blue and white jug. There was the window where she had stood sometimes, in a preliminary to their lovemaking, pretending that she cared what was happening in the street or beyond the garden wall. And in this very spot she had stood after the hailstorm, a sodden note clenched in her hand, staring up at his window and willing him to return.

In those days Asa had known nothing of the garden opposite except that it belonged to a religious establishment. She might even have caught the occasional scent of herbs. Had Didier and Madame been living in this apartment last autumn, when the massacre occurred? Had Estelle Beyle left through that blue door, carrying a covered basket just like Beatrice’s, filled with food and clean clothes for her brother? If so Didier might actually have been able to glimpse his old friend Jean Beyle and his sister sitting in the prison garden.

Asa walked the length and breadth of the monastery walls, along the rue du Cherche-Midi to the Montmorency, which was no longer a smart hotel but a tired-looking set of apartments with grimy windows and weeds growing from the paving stones on the steps. Through those double doors, now tight shut, she had burst forth to explore Paris or to flee the Mortons so that she might reach Didier. Here, a few paces farther on, was the entrance to the courtyard where she had waited after the storm, longing for Didier to come. Today the smell of human waste was pervasive and, like the rest of the city, the courtyard panted for moisture. And there, on that corner opposite the Montmorency, Asa had glimpsed Shackleford as she raced out of the hotel to visit Didier. Ever afterwards, the taste of lemonade had reminded her of how she had sat with him in the lobby; he yearning for a kind word, she yearning to be gone.

She retraced her steps back to the monastery wall and south again, until she was outside the heavy door to the convent itself.

She knocked, a panel in the door slid back, and the sweating face of a warder appeared.

‘Excuse me. Might I have a quick look inside?’

‘Whatever do you mean? This place is a prison. Do you want to visit someone? What’s his name?’

‘Not exactly visit. Someone I knew was once here. Please, I just want to take a peek.’

His eyes were a bleary, Didier-blue, boring into hers and tracing the lines of her body under Madame’s dark dress. She clinked the coins in her pocket. ‘It’s just the garden I want to see. Won’t you let me have a look at the garden?’

‘For Christ’s sake, I spend my whole life these days doing guided tours as if this was a bloody museum.’

But in the end he opened the door, revealing a red cap stuffed into his breast pocket and keys on a ring at his waist. Glancing at the small heap of coins in Asa’s palm, he nodded.

The garden was overgrown and, unlike in Professor Paulin’s prison in Caen, nobody was strolling about. Lawns were indistinguishable from former beds, except where a patch had been cleared so that vegetables might be planted, although in the heat of summer nothing much would grow. Occasionally an oasis of green had survived in the shade, a suddenly verdant patch of daisies or nettles. Behind Asa rose the convent buildings, perforated by tiny windows. A voice shouted out: ‘Give us a smile, darling.’ She waved up and smiled though her lips ached with the effort, then walked on until she came to the back of the little church and by its side a locked gate against which another warder leaned.

Were there marks here of last September’s massacre? From Madame’s description on the journey home from Compton Wyatt there should at least be stains on the paving stones, a crushing of shrubs. To the right was the wall that bordered the rue du Vieux Colombier. Near the centre of the garden was a massive tree with gracefully extended branches beneath which the grass grew thick and mossy. Perhaps this was where Estelle and Jean Beyle used to sit, sharing their bread. And in the far corner, behind the stone hut, or oratory, that Asa used to see from Didier’s window, was the bolted door through which those youths must have burst, eyes blind with bloodlust.

Asa felt sick. She could not stand much more of this overlay of a violent narrative on what had seemed so perfect a landscape. As she left she asked the warden, ‘If someone were to die here, a prisoner … where would they be buried?’

‘In the cemetery, like everyone else.’

‘Which cemetery would they take the body to?’

‘If you’ve got a few hours to spare you could try the one right at the end of the Vaugirard. It’s a long walk, mind.’

Asa toiled in the blazing heat, past Les Invalides, where the arsenals had been invaded at the start of the Revolution, supplying the mob with thousands of muskets with which they’d laid siege to the Bastille. Here the intention was apparently to repair rather than demolish – labourers were busy working on the great domed church. Asa walked on between the austere Ecole Militaire and the Champs de Mars, the vast military parade ground she had once viewed from a carriage with the newly wedded Mortons.

And on, through the increasingly poor and desolate fringes of the city, heading towards open country on the far side of the Seine, until at last she reached the wall of a graveyard from which rose the gut-wrenching stench of human decay. The cemetery was full of newly dug plots and fallen stones, with women moving about, tending a grave or arranging wilting posies of flowers.

A couple of guards lolled in the shade of the wall, presumably to enforce the stipulation that it was forbidden to hold the wrong kind of funeral. ‘Is there a list somewhere or a plan of where people are buried?’ Asa asked.

The men were surly and indifferent. ‘You’ll just have to look, my dear, like everyone else.’

Asa pressed her scarf to her nose and began a search for Beyle’s name, but she soon realised it was hopeless. Although some of the newly dug graves had stones or plaques, many were unmarked. Sometimes a much broader heap of soil signalled a mass burial. In the end Asa chose any grave, put her hand to the soil and uttered the name Jean Gabriel Beyle.

‘A letter was delivered while you were out,’ said Citoyenne Maurice, who was noticeably stiffer in her bearing, ‘from England via Caen. Citoyenne Ardleigh, Professor Paulin is an old and trusted friend, but you do realise that every letter these days is liable to be opened and its contents used as evidence? We are all under suspicion, so I would beg you, please, no more correspondence, particularly from England.’

The letter was from Caroline Lambert.

Dear Thomasina
,

I am writing on behalf of your family as well as myself. Your sisters are at my shoulder. We received your letter this morning. While on the one hand we are more than relieved to hear from you, on the other, words can hardly describe your sisters’ consternation now that we know for sure not only that are you in France but that you have gone to Dider Paulin. Needless to say Mrs Morton blames her husband for not being more vigilant while she was ill in Paris. She feels that shame has descended on the family but she cares nothing for that, she says, if only she could be certain you are safe. Your father insists he will swallow his pride and that all will be forgiven and forgotten whether you marry a French revolutionary or not
.

Thomasina, I wonder if you understand how much you are cherished by your family, and how dearly they all wish you well. I am instructed to inform you that you may return in
any
circumstances, if you so wish, and in
any
condition. Nobody will reproach you. Your father rides between Morton Hall, Littlehampton, Portsmouth and Ardleigh as if he might discover that you have been hiding all along behind a hedge or in a ditch. Your sisters spend hour upon hour speculating upon what you are doing – you will be concerned to know that Mrs Morton is again with child, and therefore unwell. And lately, the burden on our household seemed to have been increased by the arrival of Mr Shackleford and his sister-in-law. However, Mrs Susan Shackleford, a reserved woman, I thought at first, but with whom I have since spent a considerable portion of my spare time, unlocked the piano in the music room, and by her extraordinary aptitude has saved us all. Even the children have been calmed by Mozart
.