The Sparks Fly Upward (46 page)

‘Use it,' Philippa said.

On the third day he remembered Heilbron. He was helping her fold the sheets she'd brought in from the washing line, a matter of leaning back at their different ends to pull them into shape, come together, fold, back, come together, fold. ‘Last time I saw you, madam, you'd just plighted your troth to a worthy gentleman. Did he sanction this little jaunt of yours?'

‘He doesn't know about it.'

‘
Pull
, woman. This side's not straight. I bet he does now.'

‘I bet he does,' she said ruefully.

‘Ends together.' They came close, transferred the ends and retired. ‘What'll he say when I deliver you back to him?'

‘I'm afraid he'll say I'm not a suitable wife for him.'

‘And I don't blame him. Now, the next one,
pull
. It's like a minuet this, ain't it? What will you do then?'

‘Oh . . . find another wittol to marry me. There's plenty of them about.'

He nodded. ‘Well, I can't dance with you all day, I've got me cutlery to clean. It's smeary. I've had to talk to Mme Vernet on the subject. ' As he left for the kitchen, he said, ‘About Heilbron.'

‘Yes?'

‘He'd be an idiot.'

 

 

HE began to hate her leaving the house. ‘Where the hell have you been?'

‘I had to take Sophie some eggs.'

‘You didn't have to take her anything. It's too bloody dangerous.'

‘Oh, stop interfering.' She was tired; the tumbrels had been more crowded than ever that morning.

Furiously, he lectured her; he had a right to interfere; she wasn't to go again, not even to say good-bye. ‘You can write her a letter from England. And wipe your feet before you step on my floor.'

That night, it was the fifth, the two of them were tidying the kitchen after supper. Mme Vernet, who had a cold, had gone upstairs, M Sarrett had folded his newspapers and followed her.

They heard Citizen Marcoz come in from his day at the Convention and then, as she always did, Philippa went out into the courtyard to bar the gate for the night.

It was one of those summer evenings when light is reluctant to fade and a near-full moon showed against the clarity of the sky like a pale replica of sun.

As she passed the rose on the wall, Philippa dead-headed a fading bloom and put the petals in the pocket of her apron—Mme Vernet didn't like them falling; she said it encouraged black spot.

She lifted the bar into its slots and turned to pick up the boots that Citizen Marcoz left outside the door of the lodge. And jumped—Citizen Marcoz was standing in the doorway.

‘Citizeness.'

‘You gave me a fright, citizen.'

He was in shadow and she couldn't see his expression. He cleared his throat; it sounded like gravel shifting. She thought,
he's nervous.
So was she; he'd never talked to her before.

He said, ‘Today I was vouchsafed a sight of the list of houses to be searched for saltpetre. This house was on it, for tomorrow.' He cleared his throat again. There was a pause. Far away a dog barked. ‘You should inform Mme Vernet. It is as well to be apprised of these things.'

From the Luxembourg the first cry of the night traveled through the warm air. ‘Papa, Papa.' An answering shout, quite clear. ‘I am here, my dear.'

‘The Republic has need of saltpetre, citizeness,' Marcoz said.

She heard herself say, ‘Yes. Yes, thank you.'

He shut the door and she ran for the house.

Ffoulkes fetched Mme Vernet and M Sarrett down to the kitchen.

Sarrett was in his nightshirt, a pink crochet shawl clutched round him for decency; with his fez still on he looked oriental and absurd. Mme Vernet hadn't undressed yet but her hair straggled over her shoulders; a hairbrush was still in her hand. For the first time since Philippa had known her she was distraught. ‘Shall we tell him? Shall we tell him?'

‘Of course, we've got to tell him,' Ffoulkes said, then more gently, ‘The time's come, Madame. You knew it would.' He turned to Philippa. ‘When will they be here?'

‘I don't know. Tomorrow was all he said.'

‘Is it just this house? Do they know about Condorcet? Or a general search of the area?'

‘I don't know, I don't know.'

Saltpetre, that essential ingredient of gunpowder, grew in crystallised form in dank, dark places, on cellar walls, in outbuildings. The demand for it was pressing, and patriotic Parisians, finding it on their property, were happy to do their bit for the war by alerting the authorities so that it could be scraped off and delivered to the munitions factories.

Just lately, however, it had been made the excuse to break into any house under suspicion. It had happened to a bookkeeper living in the next street in an apartment so new that its walls had barely dried out, let alone developed a fungus. He'd been discovered to possess a snuffbox with the royal arms on it and had been taken off for questioning.

‘We'll get him away tonight.'

‘You can't. What about curfew?'

‘Tomorrow then, at dawn.' Ffoulkes looked around. ‘I'll go and tell him.'

‘No.' Mme Vernet had recovered her poise. ‘That is for me.' She put her hand on the table for a minute, to steady herself before going quietly upstairs.

M Sarrett watched her go. ‘The poor dear,' he said. ‘My poor, poor dear.'

There'd been a plan for this; Philippa had made it herself, though at that moment she realized that somehow she'd never expected it to be implemented; that something marvellous would happen to prevent the need of it. She'd intended Condorcet and herself to leave in the evening, mingling with the homegoing crowd of workers streaming out of Paris for the outskirts, to pass the night hidden among the trees of the curfew-deserted Bois de Boulogne—and board the northwest bound diligence at Neuilly in the morning.

With luck, its driver would be her old friend Bertholde. She'd tell him her brother had been killed and she was taking her distressed father back with her to Normandy.

Ffoulkes had approved the plan and improved it; they would all spend the first night at his safe house in Neuilly itself.

Now they would have to go
against
the stream of people coming into the city; they would not reach Neuilly in time to catch that day's diligence but would have to spend twenty-four hours waiting for the next.

‘Can't be helped,' Ffoulkes said after they'd discussed it, raggedly. ‘It'll be all right.'

Mme Vernet came back, very pale, but with her head now neatly capped.

Philippa thought, she tidied herself before she went to tell him.

‘He is prepared,' was all she said. ‘I shall get some food ready for you to take with you on your journey. Jeanne, M Collet, go now and get some sleep.'

They left her and Sarrett filling the soup pail with provisions.

Candlelight came from the crack under Condorcet's door as Philippa passed it but she didn't go in; he'd be putting the finishing touches to his manuscript. They'd have plenty of time together on the journey. She wondered if he was in as deep a fright as she was.

In her room, she washed, changed into fresh clothes and folded the ones she'd been wearing into the battered traveling bag. It distressed her terribly that she wouldn't be able to say good-bye to Sophie and Eliza; she'd tried to convince Ffoulkes that she could break away to deliver a farewell note from herself and Condorcet to them before rejoining the men at Neuilly.

He wouldn't have it. ‘This is going to be tricky enough without putting bloody frills on it,' he'd said.

When everything was ready she lay down on the bed, convinced she wouldn't sleep. In fact, she dozed in fits, waking up in a panic at having missed the dawn—only to find it was still dark. At one point she heard Mme Vernet and Sarrett go to their rooms but there was no sound from Ffoulkes's or Condorcet's.

The first lonely tweet of a blackbird woke her; the sky was still pretending it was nighttime, only a suggestion of gray lay beyond her east-facing window.

She went downstairs and made coffee for them all—Mme Vernet had left the cups ready on a tray—trying to find comfort in familiar movement, the thrum of the kettle. She took the tray upstairs, put it on the hall table, knocked on Mme Vernet's door, then M Sarrett's, took up one of the cups and carried it to Condorcet's room, knocked before entering . . .

He wasn't there. The room was neater than she'd seen it, every book was piled tidily, the bed made, the bergère's cushion plumped up, his misshapen slippers together by the small hearth. Manuscripts, exactly in line, were in a row on the table—the plan for a universal language, his treatise on the equality of women,
A Sure Method of Learning to Count
, an addendum to his work on integral calculus. His pipe lay in its
cendrier
which was clean of its ashes.

The Progress
was in the middle, facedown.

She picked up its last page. ‘. . .
independently of any power that would like to stop it, so long as our globe exists, the tempo may differ but we shall never go back.
'

The word
finis
was written large at the bottom.

Knowing what she'd find, she went downstairs and out into the courtyard. The bar to the gate had been lifted and put carefully to one side where nobody would fall over it. ‘He's gone,' she said. ‘He's gone.'

She turned round to see Mme Vernet and Sarrett behind her. Both were dressed and for a second it flashed across her mind that they'd been in a plot to keep her safe while Ffoulkes and Condorcet set out together. But Mme Vernet's face was hagridden and Ffoulkes was just emerging from the house.

‘He's gone,' she said.

‘Not long,' Ffoulkes said, ‘I felt his pipe, it's still warm.'

M Sarrett had opened the gate and was looking up and down the empty street.

‘He'll be making for the Suards,' he said. ‘I can catch him before he gets to the barrier.'

‘The Suards?'

‘Friends of his,' Mme Vernet said. ‘Fontenay-aux-Roses.'

‘Stay here, no point in dashing all over the compass,' Ffoulkes said. ‘He may have left a note.' He ran back to the house.

Mme Vernet looked at Philippa. There would be no note. His gratitude to them all lay in his going—alone. He wouldn't survive, of course; they all knew that. Not alone. Of all men he was least equipped with the cunning necessary to slink unnoticed through the jungle beyond the gate. That gentle, philosophizing,
valuable
sheep had trotted out into tiger country.

Philippa put her arms round her. ‘Perhaps he's going to say good-bye to Sophie. I'll run after him.'

‘No,' Mme Vernet said, ‘He won't have gone there.' Philippa heard her moan and, turning round, saw that Sarrett had gone.

Everything was shattering, but she
knew
where Nicolas had gone. One last glimpse of his wife and daughter, a note through the lingerie shop letterbox. She could catch him up—he'd be going slowly.

She kissed Mme Vernet's cheek and went out into the Street of the Gravediggers. She caught a glimpse of M Sarrett at the bottom before he disappeared into the shadow of Saint Sulpice. She turned left up the hill, running. When she reached the top, she stopped and peered round the corner.

The sentry outside the Luxembourg was nodding over his musket. She slowed so that her boots made no sound and started running again when she was out of sight. Curfew lifted at dawn but there were still very few people about.

She'd crossed the silent Ile de la Cité before Ffoulkes caught up with her, puffing, just before the Pont au Change. ‘Where the hell do you think you're going?'

‘He's heading for Saint Honoré.' She pointed across the river. ‘I can catch him.'

‘No.'

‘Just to the end of the bridge,' she pleaded. ‘He can't have got much beyond it. He'll be limping, it's amazing he's got this far.'

He looked around. The bridge was deserted. A few bait-sellers were digging for worms in the silt below before the tide came in. ‘All right, but no farther.'

She ran ahead, he followed more slowly.

As she got to the other side, two National Guardsmen emerged from behind a plinth that had once held the great equestrian statue of Louis XV.

‘Papers.'

She'd left them behind in the attic with her traveling bag.

A pike was leveled at her waist, she felt the length of the other one laid across her back.

‘What for?' she said. ‘There's no barrier here usually.' But she'd left it too late, she'd paused, and her indignation was marred by a catch in her breathing with which she was suddenly having difficulty.

‘There is now,' one of the guardsmen said. ‘Better come along.'

They turned her round and began marching her back across the bridge towards the préfecture. She saw Ffoulkes idling at the other end.

Go away
, she thought.
Please, God, make him go away.

As the procession came up, he stood in front of it. ‘What's up?'

‘Out the way, soldier,' one of the guards told him. ‘Nothing to do with you.'

‘You silly bitch, you've left your bloody papers behind again,' Ffoulkes said to Philippa. Then to the guard, ‘Let her go, mate. She's all right, been bedding down with me.'

‘And where's that?'

‘Over there.' He'd come up close now. Gently, he pushed the pike point away from her body then jerked a thumb towards the Ile Saint Louis, glimmering in the dawn. His voice went high to assume an aristocratic accent. ‘We've taken a room in the bishop's palace, my man.' Then grinned. ‘The bishop's gone but the fucking goes on. Come on, mate, let her go. I fought at Valmy.'