The Danbury Scandals (27 page)

The woman
bobbed a curtsy. ‘Come into the kitchen. The rest of the house...’ She paused
to wipe a tear from her eye with the corner of her apron. ‘It is not fit to
see.’

They followed
the old couple into the house and were conducted round the empty rooms. They
inspected the broken plaster, the scuffed paintwork, the scorched fireplaces,
the staircases with their missing banisters and the chipped tiles on what had
once been an outstanding mosaic floor in the main hall.

‘What could we
do?’ Henri asked plaintively. ‘We are old.’

‘You did well,’
Adam said. ‘And we shall soon set it to rights, ready for
madame
, my
mother’s return.’

‘She is alive?’
Two pairs of eyes lit up with sudden joy. ‘She is really alive?’

Adam nodded. ‘I
believe so.’

The old woman
fell to her knees, to clasp his hand. ‘Praise be to God. Where is she? When
shall we see her?’

‘Soon,’ Adam
said. ‘Now we must go, but we will be back tomorrow. I want you to make a list
of all the repairs that need doing. I mean to lose no time.’

‘Yes,
monsieur
,
of course. God bless you.’

‘They were
overjoyed to see you,’ Maryanne said when they had returned to the carriage.

‘Yes.’ He
seemed preoccupied, as if he was not really listening, as if he could hear
other sounds, echoes of a past she could not share.

At the convent,
she waited in the coach while he jumped down to ring the bell. A nun came to
the grille and Adam spoke briefly to her, then the door was opened and he
turned and beckoned to Maryanne.

‘
Maman
is in the garden,’ he said. ‘We are to go and find her.’

‘Be gentle with
her,’ the nun said. ‘It will be a shock.’ She folded her arms into her wide
sleeves, smiled at them both and turned away.

They followed
the path she had indicated into a secluded garden where several women sat or
walked in the sunshine. They were all dressed in similar shapeless gowns and
Adam could not, at first, pick his mother out. ‘They are all so old and bent,’
he said. ‘
Maman
was...There she is!’

Maryanne
restrained him as he started forward. ‘Adam don’t rush, go slowly. I will wait
here.’ She sat down on a bench against the wall and watched as he approached
the woman he had singled out, took her arm and led her to a seat, talking and
smiling. He was rewarded with a blank stare of incomprehension; his mother did
not recognise him. He looked up at Maryanne in despair, his need for her
support obvious in his face. She stood up and went over to him.

‘
Maman
,’
he said, reaching out his hand to draw Maryanne forward. ‘This is Maryanne, my
wife. We are going to take you home.’

The blank eyes
looked up at him. ‘Home?’

Maryanne smiled
and sat beside her, taking her hand. ‘Yes, but not until you are ready. This is
your son. This is Adam. Don’t you know him?’

‘My Adam is a
child. The Committee of Public Safety took him. They killed him. They killed
Louis too.’ She spoke flatly. ‘You are one of them.’

‘No, I...’

‘Murderer!’ she
screamed suddenly. ‘Killer of little children!’

Adam groaned
and covered his face with his hands. Maryanne put out a hand to him as tears
squeezed themselves between his fingers. She became aware that his mother was
staring at him with her eyes wide and mouth open, as if something had touched a
chord in her memory.

‘You are
James,’ the older woman said slowly. ‘James Danbury. What are you doing here?
Go away! Go back where you came from!’

Maryanne turned
from her to Adam and then she saw plainly what had always been there to see -
his likeness to James. Adam was James’s son! Everything that had happened in
the last year flashed across her mind: the way they had met, his odd references
to the Danbury family, his refusal to fight Mark, the curricle race and James’s
strange reaction to the mention of Adam’s name. She remembered how she had felt
when Caroline had said she was James’s by-blow: shame and anger, but most of
all a vulnerability. Adam looked like that now and her heart went out to him.
No wonder he was bitter, no wonder he could not talk of it. Miraculously it did
not seem to have turned him against his mother, even if she did not want to be
reminded of it.

Maryanne put a
hand on his arm. ‘Adam, we can’t take her away from here today, the upheaval
would confuse her more than ever. We must come again tomorrow and every day
until she gets used to us.’

He seemed
incapable of speech and simply nodded his acquiescence. It was not until they
were in the coach and travelling to the Count of Challac’s chateau that he
spoke, and then it was in tones of despair. ‘What am I to do, Maryanne? She
thinks I am...’

‘I know, but
don’t you see, it is a good sign? It means the past is not entirely forgotten.
We can have no idea what horrors she lived through during her years of
imprisonment, but if she was incarcerated with revolutionaries, criminals and
ruffians and shut away from what has been going on in the world it is hardly
surprising that she is confused. Once your mother accepts us, whoever she
thinks we are, and we take her home, things will improve. We must have
patience.’

They stayed
with the Comte and Comtesse de Challac while
Les Cascades
was made
habitable. The Countess was a lively, bubbling person and Maryanne could easily
see why the Count was so devoted to her. It made her all the more aware of what
was lacking in her own marriage: a togetherness, an understanding that needed
no words, a devotion that all could see. They could not have been kinder, but
Maryanne could not stop herself feeling depressed and homesick. It would be
decidedly cool in England now and the leaves on the trees in Beckford woods
would be a glory of gold and red, falling to spread a soft carpet under the
boughs. In the rectory the fires would be lit and there would be roasted nuts
and wrinkled apples and the window-panes of a morning would be misted. Soon
there would be frosts. Did they have frosts in the south of France? They were
in a mountainous region, so she supposed they must, but now, in October, the
air was still warm and dry.

Did those at
home - she persisted in thinking of it as home - still think of her as a party
to murder? Or had they ceased to think of her at all? Did it matter? She had to
admit it mattered a great deal and she wished she could go back and show them
how wrong they were. But Adam never spoke of the possibility; all he seemed to
think of was
Les Cascades
, the state of the country and whether war
would come again.

He would not
bring his mother home until the repairs had been done, believing that the sight
of her home in ruins would make her worse, but by the middle of December they
had finished restoring the main rooms and, as she had shown signs of
considerable improvement and sometimes talked quite rationally, they had moved
out of the chateau and into Les Cascades and fetched her home.

There were
occasions when she seemed much better and others when she was as confused as
ever, and Adam was frequently in despair. Her behaviour varied from that of an
imperious aristocrat, demanding instant obedience, to that of a mischievous
child. Sometimes she spoke like a lady, sometimes like a gutter urchin.

The last of the
old year had gone by and they were two months into 1815 before Maryanne began
to catch glimpses of the woman Eleanor had once been and she could understand
Adam’s love for her. But by then Adam was not there to see it. She had once
asked him what he did when he was away, but he had turned the question aside
with some teasing comment which told her nothing except that her company was
not enough to keep him at home. He had been gone much longer than usual this
time and she was becoming concerned, though she said nothing of that to her mother-in-law.

The sun was
warm and the wind had lost its keen edge for the first time since Christmas
and, walking in the garden with
Madame
Saint-Pierre in the first week of
March, Maryanne felt the first faint stirring of spring.

‘He said he
would come back,’ Eleanor said, startling Maryanne, because they had been
walking side by side in silence for so long. ‘But I told him not to. "It’s
not fair on the child," I said.’ She appealed to Maryanne. ‘Was I right?
Should I have stopped him from coming back?’

‘Who are you
talking about, Maman?’ Maryanne asked gently.

‘James. I told
him to stay away from Adam. Adam was mine, he gave him to me. I didn’t want him
changing his mind and taking him back. Was I wrong?’

‘No, dear, you
were not wrong,’ Maryanne assured her. How could anyone censure this poor
muddled woman?

‘He has grown
into a fine man, has he not?’

‘Who?’

‘Adam, your
husband,’ she said sharply. ‘Who did you think I was talking about? He is just
like James was. Do you know, sometimes when I look at him I think he is James?
Foolish of me, isn’t it?’

‘Not at all.’
She paused; was this the long-awaited recovery? ‘Do you remember what
happened?’

‘No.’ The older
woman turned away abruptly. ‘I do not want to remember.’

Maryanne took
her arm. ‘You don’t have to if you don’t want to,
Maman.
Come, let us
finish our walk.’

‘James shan’t
have him back, I won’t let him go,’ she said vehemently. ‘And if anyone asks me
I shall deny everything.’ She gave a laugh that was almost a cackle; it
reminded Maryanne very forcefully that there were periods of the older woman’s
life it was better not to delve into.

She was almost
glad of Henri’s interruption. ‘
Madame,
I must speak to you,’ he said.

‘Of course. Is
something wrong?’

‘There is a
report.

‘Report of
what?’

‘The second
coming,
madame
.’

She had been so
immersed in her work in the house and looking after Eleanor that she had paid
little attention to what was going on in the outside world. Adam did. He wrote
and received letters and he sometimes spoke of his impatience with the Congress
of Vienna, which seemed more concerned with parties and balls than completing
its business, but he had expressed the hope that now the Duke of Wellington had
replaced Castlereagh as the British plenipotentiary things might begin to move
a little faster. He had also been extremely relieved to hear the Duke had left
Paris, where trouble between Bonapartists and Bourbonists made it a dangerous
place for him to be. The day he and Maryanne had left Paris a shot had whistled
uncomfortably close to his head.

She smiled.
‘Oh, that old rumour about Napoleon escaping from Elba. You don’t believe it,
do you?’

‘It is not a
rumour,
madame
. It has already happened. I was told by a courier who
stopped on his way to Paris to change his horse. Bonaparte landed at Frejus
with a thousand men a week ago. Since then he has marched, unopposed, past
Cannes, through Digne and Sisteron towards Grenoble, and will soon be at
Challac.’

‘Isn’t anyone
going to try and stop him?’

He smiled his
toothless smile. ‘I doubt it,
madame
. The army is on his side, even if
some of the officers are not, and the people have had enough of fighting; it
matters little who rules us as long as we can be left to live our lives in
peace.’

Her heart began
to beat uncomfortably fast at the thought of
Les Cascades
being, once
more, in the path of an army. Ought she to do something to defend it? But how
could she with only a handful of servants? ‘What should we do?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,
madame
.
He will be heading for Paris and will not step aside from that unless he is
opposed.’

She hoped he
was right. Until Adam returned, she had to pretend everything was normal for
Madame Saint-Pierre’s sake. She turned to seek her out, all too aware of the
heavy burden of responsibility she carried. If Adam did not come home soon, the
house, the servants and a confused, prematurely old woman would all have to be
taken care of. There was Eleanor now, kneeling on the damp grass with no
thought for the aches and pains which might result. Maryanne hurried to help
her up. ‘
Maman
, the ground is too wet to kneel.’

The older woman
turned to her with an expression of childish delight. In her hand she held a
small bunch of violets. ‘Look, Maryanne, look! Spring has come at last.’

Napoleon
Bonaparte had been the ogre of Europe nearly all Maryanne’s life; like all
English children she had been brought up to dread his coming. ‘Behave yourself
or old Boney will get you’, was as familiar a saying as, ‘If you are naughty,
you won’t go to heaven’. And now he was only a few miles away. Telling herself
he was only a man like any other did nothing to calm her fears. She longed for
Adam. Why could he not be content to stay with her? Why was he not fulfilled
unless he was chasing round the countryside on some secret errand? It almost
made her angry. Perhaps it was better to be angry; anger was easier to bear
than hurt.