The Sparks Fly Upward (28 page)

An officer? Did the army still have officers? Were they wearing mustaches now? His was very curly. He was bothering Sophie . . . A little more emphasis on the sword, perhaps, citizeness, and the gauntlets, one should perceive they were best doeskin . . .

Oh go
, she thought.

At last he did. The two women stayed as they were for a minute.

‘You're mad,' Sophie said. ‘You are a madwoman to come.' She ran into Philippa's arms. ‘I am so glad to see you, so
glad
.'

Four-year-old Eliza, the Condorcets' only child, was asleep on a bed behind the curtain. They lived there, she and her mother, cooking what they could over a fire in a miniature grate.

Every day Sophie went downstairs and into the street with two buckets. She emptied the one they used as a lavatory at a midden on the corner, washing it out at the pump and filling the other with water.

‘And they watch me,' she said.

‘Who does?'

‘The Committee of Public Safety. They want me to lead them to Nicolas.' She went to the window and closed the shutters fitted into its sides to the point where its bolt just met the corresponding eyelet. ‘Careful.'

Philippa peeped through the gap. Across the street was a café with small tables outside it. The man sitting at one of them was talking to an aproned waiter without taking his eyes off Sophie's window.

‘They watch all the time, everywhere I go,' Sophie said. ‘They've got notebooks. If that one saw you come in, he'll have written you down. But he has to go inside to empty his bowels, thank God, so perhaps he missed you, or perhaps, if he saw you in, he may think he missed you coming out. Poor man, when the café closes, he has to stand in the street all night.'

Philippa put an arm round her shoulders but she went on jabbering. ‘Getting the letter to you . . . the night I took it to Bercy . . .' She began to break down, as if she hadn't been able to cry about it before. ‘I was followed all the way. And Eliza left alone . . . if they'd arrested me ...'

‘They didn't,' Philippa said calmly. ‘And I'm here now. With the papers. Oh, and I've got this.'

It was an egg; one of the women on the diligence had given it to her. She'd wrapped it in every piece of spare clothing she'd had and prayed it wouldn't break.

‘Eliza!' Sophie woke her daughter up. ‘Look, look. Aunt Pippy's brought you an egg.'

Immediately, she began preparations to make an omelette of it while Philippa dispensed the other presents in her bag. She'd had to be careful not to arouse suspicion in a searcher but she'd been ingenious; paper and crayons were in keeping with her role as a schoolteacher, so was the picture book. There was also a doll for her mythical nieces, a plain wooden thing but some pretty clothes for it were hidden elsewhere.

It was pitiful to see the child in bliss from such things, pitiful, too, to see how thin she was, with a lassitude that sent her back to sleep when she'd eaten all the omelette.

‘She gets so little exercise,' Sophie said. ‘We go to the Tuileries when we can but I can't stay out long in case someone comes with a commission and finds I'm not here—there's so many of us doing portraits nowadays, competition is fierce. Mothers want a likeness of sons going into battle. Anyway, she's grown out of her shoes. And then . . .' her face tightened. ‘I don't want her in the street when the tumbrels go by.'

Rue Saint Honoré was part of the death route. The carts with their human cargo rumbled over its cobbles every day on their way to the Place de la Révolution.

Except Sunday, Sophie said. ‘Sanson won't work on Sundays, even though they've abolished them.'

She'd forbidden Eliza to climb up on the window seat to look out in the mornings, a penance for a child locked in an attic but better than chancing to see her father on the way to his execution.

‘I haven't heard from him for two weeks. Sometimes somebody brings a letter from him—I don't know who. They leave it with Mme Hahn downstairs but not regularly . . . oh, Pippy, I go distracted until the next letter comes. I never know if they've found him. I can't see him, I can't even write to him.'

‘You can now,' Philippa said.

‘I know.' Sobbing, she clutched at Philippa's knees. ‘I know. I can't tell you what luxury it is to go to pieces. I've been so brave.'

‘Yes, you have. It's all right now, darling. I'm here. I'll get him away.' She soothed back Sophie's pretty hair. ‘Will you be able to follow us to England?'

‘I don't know. I can't think.' She looked round the attic. ‘We can't go on like this. There's some property of my father's that I could claim and Eliza must have it; Nicolas and I haven't the right to take her to England to starve.'

‘She wouldn't.'

‘I know.' Sophie put out a hand to pat Philippa's cheek. It was as if by constantly touching her she was reassuring herself she wasn't conjuring up some phantasm. This, from a woman who had never been demonstrative, showed more than anything else how lonely she'd been.

She smiled; she was recovering. ‘But we can't put her in debt all her life—not even to you.' She took Philippa's hand and kissed it. ‘We're deep enough in that already.' She looked around helplessly.

‘And I can't even offer you a cup of coffee.'

‘Yes, you can. Have you any scissors?'

Using a tiny pair
à ongles
from a beautifully unpatriotic manicure set, Philippa started unpicking the hem of her thick, flannel under-petticoat. ‘You liked Colombian, if I remember.' Smirking, she held up a packet of tightly stitched oilcloth. ‘I was terrified somebody would smell it.'

‘Oh my God.' Sophie fell on the packet and, denied the scissors, began tearing it open with her teeth.

Philippa went on unstitching. ‘Sugar. Biscuits—oh dear, rather crumbled I'm afraid.'

Sophie hung a miniature kettle over the miniature fire, her head turned to watch packet after packet manifest itself from the petticoat.

‘Rice,' Philippa said, smugly. ‘Dried peas. I tell you, I was a walking grocery. I barely staggered from the diligence to the inns and back again. One dear old lady asked if I was arthritic. Tea. No milk, I'm afraid. A lemon, though, a bit hard but not bad. Here are the doll's clothes. Oh, and these.'

‘These' were a tube of leather containing five louis d'or. ‘I presume there's a black market where you can change them.'

Sophie nodded, past speech.

‘I didn't trust the papers to a petticoat,' Philippa said. ‘You'll have to wait to see those until I undress.'

Sophie had to be dissuaded from waking Eliza up again to regard the cornucopia; sharing everything, they'd been each other's only comrade. Philippa had already noticed that the child spoke with the gravity and awareness of one much older than four.

They sat on the edge of the dais drinking from delicate Sèvres coffee cups, two of a set that Sophie had brought with her from the Condorcet home in Auteuil. ‘I had to have
some
necessities.'

The old days were too painful a contrast to dwell on and she steered the conversation away from them. She asked Philippa about her circumstances, what was happening in England, but the outside world was too vast and terrible for her; she kept reverting to essentials—Eliza could have new shoes, a coat, as long as they were careful not to attract attention to their sudden wealth. They could pay Mme Hahn the back rent. She must buy Nicolas new shoes as well; his last letter said his feet had swelled with inactivity.

She frightened Philippa with her happiness; she had waited so long for the documents allowing her husband to travel that they had become a touchstone; everything would be all right now. The journey that he, in disguise, and Philippa would have to make to Gruchy had become merely a corollary to his successful escape.

‘Exactly what is he charged with?' Philippa asked.

Sophie shrugged. ‘What would you? With being Nicolas Condorcet, with being honorable, framing a fair constitution for the State that has been rejected, refusing to vote for the King's execution—he was the only one, you know. But they
knew
he would not, could not—he's always been against the death penalty. That he was a republican before they had teething rings meant nothing; he stood there in the Assembly and the rest of them saw how fouled they were in contrast. He is the humanity they've lost. Sweet Jesus, Pippy, Marie Antoinette's trial . . . I held no brief for the woman, as you know, but she loved her children . . . They accused her of teaching the dauphin to masturbate. And where is that poor child now? What have they done with him? Whatever he is, he's still only a little boy.'

It was dark; Sophie had run out of candles and been unable to afford more. Philippa heard her move towards the window and fold back the shutters so that she was outlined against the glow from flambeaux in the street below.

She hammered on the window. ‘What have you done to our revolution? What have you done?'

Philippa got up and took her away. ‘Time to sleep, I think.'

Sophie insisted her guest share the single and only bed with Eliza while she took the floor. The bedclothes smelled grubby, for that matter so did the child and her mother. Philippa recognized it; the same smell that pervaded the cottages of old women denied the luxury of cleanliness by the effort of fetching water and the price of soap.

She was almost too tired to sleep deeply; when she dozed she was on the driving seat of the diligence with Berthold but this time traveling at supernatural speed. Trees and oncoming vehicles came towards them at a rate that made him swerve to avoid a crash, jerking her into consciousness so that she had to soothe back to sleep the muttering child pressed against her.

At one point, the street flambeaux sputtered out and were not relit.

Sophie's voice came out of the darkness. ‘I have to divorce him, Pippy. They're going to condemn him as an outlaw and take Eliza's inheritance for the State. They can't if he's not my husband any more.'

She couldn't tell me while she could still see me
, Philippa thought,
there are things that can't be spoken in the light.
After a while, she said, ‘He'll understand.'

‘He will. That's the worst of it, he will.' Sophie's voice went high as it began to break. ‘But I don't know how to tell him.'

 

 

SOPHIE stood at her window, watching the man sitting outside the café over the road. Philippa stayed by the door, her eyes on Sophie. They were waiting for the spy's bowels to move, an activity that caused him to go through the café to the privy over the stream that ran through its back garden. His pissing was done in the road's gutter so this was the only time during the day that he left his post. ‘A very regular digestion,' Sophie had said of him.

Forty minutes went by. ‘Constipated today.'

Another five minutes. ‘He's gone inside.'

Philippa clattered down the stairs, nodded to Mme Hahn and left the shop. The man's chair was still empty. Even so, she took trouble to ensure that nobody was following her, turning into alleys, coming out again, dawdling before shop windows that gave an angled reflection of what was behind her.

She found a pleasure in it; her senses honed to a new sharpness—and a new hatred. If the fox could have turned on the hounds and killed them, it would have. She had tried to appear calm about Sophie's predicament for fear that her shock at it would, for Sophie, intensify the realization of how shocking it was. But it had made her very, very angry.

‘I didn't love him when we got married,' Sophie had said. ‘Admiration, reverence, all those things, but not love. And then one day—he was away—I suddenly knew I wanted him so much I could hardly wait for him to come home. Eliza was conceived that night, I know it. How to tell him I must divorce him for the sake of the child we made then? How to tell
her
?'

Listening to her, the Terror had seemed less terrible because it had become despicable. Condemning a man who had only ever ornamented his country was one thing, inserting its dirty fingers into his marriage another.

Its stupidity leaped out at her everywhere, tawdry against the towers of the city and the budding trees. Old and beautiful drain-pipes had been smashed where their ornamentation had included a fleur-de-lis or an escutcheon, gargoyles depicting the heads of cherubs had been torn off, only ugly ones allowed to remain. Above the list of occupants on every house door was scrawled, LIBERTY OR DEATH. Necessary, perhaps, if the householder was not to be suspect, but the graffiti's ubiquity made it not so much patriotic as ridiculous, a new way of keeping up with the neighbors.

Crossing to the Ile de la Cité, she paused in front of the cliff face of Notre Dame, because she always had. Axes had been taken to those saints whose niches were within reach but the doorway was still glorious, except for the almost overpowering smell of urine—as if every passerby had stopped to piss in it.

In the interior, under the great Gothic vaulting she could see that they'd set up a stage—Sophie said that Robespierre was planning some sort of Festival to the Supreme Being. A gimcrack structure of papier-maché was being erected in the resemblance of a Greek temple before which a lady in a toga was rehearsing a song about Reason.

Yes, she thought, the Church had oppressed them, taxed them, kept them in fear of hellfire for their misdemeanours, but their ancestors had built this out of passion and faith, harnessed themselves to carts to drag its stones into place. They had lived out their lives under its certainty. There was no certainty now. God had melted like wax under the command of a committee, his gaze replaced by the all-seeing eye of the
bureau de police
, the seven deadly sins multiplied into a confusion, last month's leaders becoming this week's traitors, yesterday's precepts today's shibboleths.