For Our Liberty (30 page)

“Mademoiselle, you appear to have changed your clothes,” I said. Her disguise as a boy had been intriguing. Her disguise as a lady of the night was every bit as convincing. Her dress was cut low, the skirt split, her face rouged.

 
Very gently we moved closer. There was a moment’s confusion where we decided who was going to twist their head to the left or the right and then our lips met, ever so softly.

“Hello, Ben,” she said after we paused for breath.

“Hello, Dominique,” I answered. The other girls drifted away seeing that I was someone else’s catch.

“Come along, sir. I know what you want,” she said loudly as she led me away. I wasn’t sure if she was playing her part or not but I wasn’t going to argue. Dominique led me by the hand slowly around the corner to the street and then we dashed out into the downpour. With the rain still coming down in buckets there were not many people about to see us and we were soon climbing into what I recognised as Calvet’s barouche. The driver, swaddled in a rain cloak, gave me a look that said he’d been waiting quite long enough. The horse though seemed to be enjoying the soaking. We settled ourselves into the worn and lumpy seats. The rain hammered on the roof, an occasional drip coming through a seam.

“How is your uncle? You must have seen him today,” I asked, thinking it only polite to enquire, since it was his coach. The blinds on the windows were closed and the interior was dark, damp and musty. Dominique thumped her hand on the roof and we lurched slowly into the road.

“He is still well, and sends his regards. How is Fauche?”

“We’ll talk later,” I said.

“Ben…” she started to say but I stopped her lips with a gentle kiss. The kiss grew longer and stronger. Our hands roamed over and under our damp clothes. Wet buttons were prised loose, bows untied and boots pulled off. Our clothes were heaped in a steaming pile on the floor of the rocking coach. Dominique sat naked on the leather bench. I knelt before her like a supplicant in some ancient religion, bowing before my goddess. My hands wandered over her body and my lips caressed her, pleased her, worshipped her. She said nothing, uttered no entreaties or endearments, she just clawed at my back and pulled me towards her.

There was a hunger and fierce longing to our love-making, almost a desperation. There was no one in the world but us. Time stood still. We whispered things in each other’s ears that we’d have never said aloud. Made promises to each other that we couldn’t possibly keep. Pleased each other, begged each other for more. And then we began to laugh so hard we cried.
 

Passion in a coach is all very well for the first few fumbling minutes but after that it becomes a clumsy and messy affair. One moment I was in agony from cramp. The next we giggled as she tried to stifle her screams, lest any passer-by think that anything was amiss. The roads in Paris have never been good but were worse that night. We slid and bumped our way in circles around the streets until we slumped exhausted together, falling into fits of laughter again when we realised one of my feet was poking out of the window. I kissed her, tenderly this time. I was about to speak but it was her turn to put her hand to my lips. She was right, there were no words that would suffice. We lay together for a long time, just holding each other.

The coachman must have heard that things had quietened down and we drew to a halt all too quickly. I lifted aside the blinds and saw that we were in the Rue Mazarine. Dominique was struggling back into her clothes and I did the same. Words kept poising themselves on the tip of my tongue. Platitudes were abandoned and further words of love died stillborn before they were spoken. He hair was damp with sweat and tangled, her skin flushed and her clothes disordered beyond repair but she looked more beautiful than ever before. In the end it was she who broke the silence.

“So, you will meet with Fulton in the morning?”

“Yes, I will,” I said, while trying to accomplish the almost impossible task of getting into my breeches in the confines of a coach.

“Be careful, please,” she said, putting a hand on my arm.

“I promise,” I replied, covering her hand with mine.

“I’ll see Duprez in the afternoon and see what he has to say about Fulton,” she said, withdrawing her hand and continuing to dress herself.

“You realise that if he is the traitor Fulton might be arrested, or at least watched, once Duprez lets his masters know of the Alien Office’s interest.”

“Yes, but we have to take the risk. I don’t think Duprez is the traitor, but we have to be sure.”

“Who do you think it is?” I asked, tucking in my shirt.

“Not Fauche.”

“No I agree. That leaves Montaignac.”

“Yes, but I find that hard to believe as well,” she said, turning around so I could do up her dress.

“It has to be one of them,” I said, taking the opportunity to kiss the nape of her neck. She shivered.

“Or it could be me,” she said turning and pushing me gently away.

“Yes, it could. I which case I surrender.”

“You’ve surrendered to me already tonight.”

“And I’d willingly do so every night.”

“Tomorrow. We’ll meet again tomorrow.”

“Where? When?”

“I’ll send word,” she said and leant forwards, put her hand behind my head and drew me towards her for one long last kiss.

“Good night, my love,” I whispered.

“Good night, mon cheri,” she replied softly.

I stepped out of the coach. The rain had stopped. I turned, expecting a final farewell kiss but the barouche had moved off already. The coachman’s whip hissing and snapping in the air as the two horses pulled Dominique away from me again. I sighed once more and looked up. Moonlight was struggling through the gaps in the black and grey clouds. I tried hard to put any thoughts of Dominique from my mind. If I was going to survive until the following night I would have to have all my meagre wits about me.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I left the house on Rue Mazarine well before breakfast the following morning and made my way up to the Seine. The day was cool, fresh and clear after the previous night’s rain. I missed Fauche’s promised feast partly so that I could observe Fulton’s workshop before contacting him but mostly because I still couldn’t face any more food, despite my strenuous exercise in the coach. Brooke had told me that Fulton worked in a small boatyard near the Quai Bernand, which wasn’t far and on the very edge of the city. A bit of observation to check that he wasn’t being watched by any of the various secret police and I could make my approach. I was naïve enough to assume it would be that simple but I had taken the precaution of carrying my travelling pistols, and my sword-stick clicked on the all-to-infrequent paving as I headed along the left bank of the river past the scene of my impromptu river crossing the previous spring and down to the Quai Saint Bernard. The sun was shining and I was filled with the improbable optimism that Paris all too often engenders. Oh, what a fool I was.
 

The city was waking and I had little trouble losing myself in the rapidly filling streets. I wove my way between hawkers, delivery boys, women with loaded baskets coming back from markets, and working men off to their employ. I left the white cliffs of the five story houses behind me and walked into the shadow of the towers that marked the point where the river stopped the march of the city walls. I walked under the twin arches of the Porte Saint Bernard and down to the river bank. The wide and muddy shore had been left alone here and not tamed as in other parts of the city. Wooden jetties, ramshackle and hazardous looking affairs, jutted out into the river’s flow. It seemed as though every kind of produce was being brought down the river to feed the appetites of the city, a fair portion bound for the Rue Mazarine, I thought. Pataches, wide and low river boats, piled with wood from the forests of Champagne queued in the river waiting to be unloaded. The air was heavy with the scent of over-ripe onions, rotting cabbage, butchered animals and other odours even less savoury. Any attempt my appetite was making to return was quickly thwarted.

Half-naked labourers sweated as they carried sacks and barrels from barge to cart. Dapper merchants occupied half their attention on checking that their goods were being loaded with the minimum of thievery and the other half in keeping their well-polished shoes out of the filth and mud. Here and there, a uniformed douanier was harassing a barge-master for some duty or other and I had seen two municipal guards walking slowly through the throng keeping a sort of order, but nothing had yet shaken my optimism.
 

I soon came to the boatyards. Long lines of flat-bottomed boats were dragged up on the mud, their sterns resting in the river and more were half completed, lying further up the wide banks and looking very like the ones I had seen in Boulogne. I noticed a soldier looking bored and scratching himself in front of a barrier ahead and guessed that the barges, destined for the invasion fleet, were being guarded against sabotage. This of course made it a logical location for Fulton to get up to his fanciful tricks. I knew that my masters in London took the threat from this American scientist seriously but I doubted then that his wild inventions could ever work. In my experience, if Americans achieved as much as they bragged about then they would be the most powerful nation in the world instead of us Britons.

As my papers said I was a wine merchant I decided to plead to the guard that a barge to carry my wine was being built in an adjacent yard and that I had come to see if the delays that the boat-builder was claiming were true. The story was lent added weight by the proximity of the Halle aux Vins wine market. It took several minutes and a couple of coins to convince him to let me through, and I suspected that he would spend the money on another poxed whore as I left him scratching his groin with the fervour of a dog with fleas.

The boatyard was a hive of activity. It was a temporary looking place with rough wooden shacks and tents making up the maze of workshops and smiths. Men were sawing, hammering and carrying wood all around me and I tried to look as though I knew where I was going. Fortunately, the workmen treated me with the disdain that men who earn their crust with their hands always treat those who don’t and they ignored me. I hunted for Fulton’s workshop and eventually found it near a tiny inlet of the river. It was no more than a couple of large sheds and I only knew I was in the right place because of the absence of any work being done. For some valuable river frontage not to be used to build Bonaparte’s precious barges must mean that something of equal importance was being done, or not done in this case. Two more very large clues that perhaps I had found my American engineer were tied up next to a small jetty. There was a long copper sheathed cylinder, of perhaps twenty feet in length and over six in width. A small barrel like protuberance had a metal hatch in it and there was a wooden rudder at the rear along with some strange shaped blades of its propelling apparatus rising out of the water. The copper was going green and the vessel had a sad, neglected feel about it along with a plaintive list to one side. Next to this strange craft was a more conventional wooden cutter of about seventy feet but in its centre was a chimney and some kind of boiler. On either side were large paddle-wheels. Both craft looked ridiculous so I knew I had found Fulton.

I ducked behind a pile of barrels and began to keep watch. For the first hour I saw no one. Behind me I could hear the sounds of the boatyard but this little inlet was quiet enough for a coot to scud across the water from the shelter of some reeds and for four fat rats to emerge from under one of Fulton’s sheds. Eventually I heard a merry whistle coming along the path and a moment later a tall, smartly dressed man came around the corner, jumped down from the dock to the copper craft and then walked up a precarious looking plank on to the steamboat. He removed his somewhat garish red coat and hat, and then rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt. He knelt beside the boiler and began to take it apart.
 

My position was cramped, damp and smelled foully of whatever seeped out of the barrels. Fulton spent an hour dismantling the boiler and then putting it back together. I don’t think that I have spent a duller hour before or since. No, that is not quite true, there have been those occasions when I have been dragged by women into all the emporiums of the Strand and Bond Street in a fruitless search for some item of apparel that they just had to have. The only high point was when he hit his hand with a hammer and I added a few Yankee curses to my vocabulary, something that seldom occurs on Bond Street. I should have watched until I was certain Fulton wasn’t being watched himself but I was getting cramp and the rats were getting overly inquisitive. I convinced myself that I’d seen enough and decided to act.

I waited until he was looking the other way and then emerged from my hiding place. I limped towards Fulton, the blood slowly returning to my legs.

“Good day,” I called in what I hoped was my best French accent. The last thing I wanted to be taken for was a foreigner. Fulton looked up irritably, wiping his brow and leaving a black oily smear across his forehead. “It is a pleasant day, is it not?” I continued, and instantly regretted it. Only an Englishman begins a conversation with a comment about the weather. Fulton put down his spanner and studied me for a few seconds. He had a long, plain, honest face with searching eyes and a soft mouth. He looked to be in his late thirties and his unruly brown hair had begun to leave his temples, a single wayward lock hung low in the middle of his high forehead.