French Passion (51 page)

We were hustled into the courtyard.

A flock of jackdaws rose from the ruined walls, sweeping the air with caws and rustling of wings. On the flattened, burned-out foundation grew pale, wintry weeds, and here stood a hay cart. The driver looked at me from under his round-topped hat. I paid no attention to him.

In this calm spot I saw that Izette's pitted face was the color of tallow, heard that her breathing was loud and labored. Rich red blood covered her magnificent bosom. Gently the women lowered her to sparse weeds.

I knelt by her. Strands of loose brown hair drifted over her pinched features. She's dying, I thought. I can't let her die. My hand pressed down against the spouting arterial blood.

“Get … in the cart,” she breathed.

“I won't leave you, Izette. I can't.”

“Hurry … ain't planned much time.… Club's got to … disperse.… You got to get away.…” Even now, even in this flat, almost inaudible tone, common sense laced her voice.

“Oh, Izette.”

“Always … pays my debts,” she whispered through white lips. “'Member, ma'am? I come back … done your ironing.… Done it good … didn't I?”

Tears streamed down my face. How proud she'd been of her skill with the fluting iron, how brave she'd been, that little girl under the gaudy streetwalker's hat, how worried about her crippled brother.

“Beautifully,” I said.

“After … Joseph … I owed you my life.…”

For years Izette had stood quietly in the background, my friend, my confidante, and when I was in the Bastille, she had nursed Auntie. On my return to Paris Izette had been my confederate in the doomed attempt to rescue my husband, she'd shared her quarters and her life with me, was giving me her heart's blood—and even now, dying, she felt this obligation.

Weakly tugging at my finger, she said, “I told … you when … we left … toolshed, 'member?”

“You've never owed me anything.”

“You … lost CoCo.… ma'am … till you're clear … of the guillotine … we ain't square.…”

“We've always been square.”

“No,” she said, and her eyes, though weary with death, were anxious. “Let me see … you in the cart.…”

“Izette—”

“Please?”

I stood, sinking my teeth into the soft flesh inside my cheek to stop from keening. My eyes, wet with tears, on her, I moved toward the hay wain.

She managed a hint of that old wide smile, then her head fell limp. Her eyes stared up at the gray sky. She was dead, and she had died repaying that most ancient of all debts, a life for a life.

In my grief I was hardly aware of André lifting me onto the wagon, or of the women piling warm, moist hay over us.

The lurching started.

André's hand clutched mine. A sharp point of straw stuck into one eyelid. There was no way to escape it, for to move could endanger André and the driver. Clenching André's hand, I attempted to find some sense in the past few minutes.

Goujon had tried to foil our escape. Why had he killed neither André nor me, but Izette? She was a woman of the people, the very type he'd desired to lift up, while André was of blood he'd sought to eradicate, and I was André's beloved. Why had he killed Izette? It made no sense.

I could only think, as I'd thought earlier, that this holocaust had unleashed devils in each of us, and Goujon's devil was stronger and more irrational than most.

How long we rode in that sweet, half-suffocating warmth, how long that straw tortured my eye, I don't know. My grief was too intense to note passage of time.

“Out!” called the jovial English voice. “Be quick.”

Sir Robert, in the round-brimmed hat and loose clothes of a wagoneer, was pushing aside the hay. He'd been our driver. We were in a dim stable, empty of horses, yet redolent of horses.

“These are for you,” said Sir Robert, handing André a pile of English clothes. “And those, Comtesse, are for you.”

In the dim corner I made out a basket. I went to it and found a dark traveling outfit. We changed, me at a little distance. Sir Robert kept ordering, “Look sharp!”

Placing a wig on Andrés dark, clipped hair, he announced in English, “You're about to be rechristened—again. I dub you Sir Robert Gill. You've lived among the rebels long enough to sound a true Englishman.”

He handed André folded papers.

André, who leaned against a manger, stopped drawing on his boot. “Are these yours?”

Sir Robert chuckled. “Who else's?”

“I won't leave you without identification,” André said.

Sir Robert paid no attention. He walked around the wain to where I was adjusting my brown wool skirt.

“Here, Lady Gill, are your papers. By the way, Izette found this among your things and decided it would come in handy. That scoundrel Goujon wrote it. Executive Council—bah!”

I remembered sitting in Goujon's Tuileries Palace office, praying against all hope that this note was a reprieve for André.

“It should get the two of you by the barricades—I hope.”

André was drawing off his boot. “
You'll
see Manon to England,” he said.

At his tone of level determination, anxiety prickled on me.

Sir Robert said, “You aren't making yourself clear.”

André replied, “Do you honestly think I'd leave you without identification? I've been a deputy too long not to know what
that
means.”

Sir Robert's chuckle made a lark of danger. “I'm an Englishman,” he said.

“That doesn't make you immune to punishment—if you break our laws. And having identification at all times is the law.”

“I know you rebel colonists don't think much of good King George. But he runs a most efficient government. Prime Minister Pitt's already dispatched duplicates.”

André's dark brows drew together. By now I recognized his brief, hot spurts of temper as part of his royal inheritance. “I take no gifts,” he said. “I endanger no man.”

My throat was dry. André had the strength of the decent, and was fully capable of remaining here to die that Sir Robert be safe. “André—” I started.

He cut me off. “This is between Sir Robert and me.”

Sir Robert's enthusiasm had changed to gravity. “You saw Izette breathe her last. Do you believe the poor girl died that Manon should leave France with
me
, when you're the only man she ever loved? Does the shedding of life blood mean so little to you as that?”

Sir Robert inadvertently had touched André's deepest faith, his belief in the sanctity of human life.

In the moment that André wavered, Sir Robert said, “The fresh papers will be here tomorrow, the next day at the latest.”

“I'll wait then.”

“By God, man, time is of the essence! Each minute counts. In a matter of hours the Duc de la Concorde will be the most hunted man in Paris—and even with these, you aren't clear of the country! Does the girl's sacrifice mean so little to you?”

Slowly André began pulling on his boots.

A minute later from the stables emerged a young English couple, he bewigged, she with a hood covering her hair. They walked a few steps to a rear entrance of the Hôtel des Anglais, emerging from the front door to the courtyard. A hired carriage waited.

We halted at the barrier. The driver got down, slowly circling the light carriage, telling us the wait would be short since most people had remained within Paris, at the Place de la Révolution, to watch the National Razor shave royalty. We stayed inside. I didn't dare glance at André. I feared he would change his mind. I feared a sentry might have been at the trial and would recognize us.

Most of all, though, I feared that word of our escape had already reached the barriers. In a frenzy of impatience I pressed two fingers hard onto the aching eyelid that had been scratched by straw.

A sentry thrust his mustachioed face in the window. “Papers?” he demanded.

Silently we handed them to him.

“Sir Robert Gill,” he read. “Where go you?”

“Home to London,” André replied in English. “My purpose here is accomplished.”

“And that purpose was?”

“To bring me back as his wife,” I replied in French. “See? Lady Gill.”

“Ah, a Frenchwoman.” The sentry stepped away to confer with two others and in a moment three faces pressed in the open window. The mustachioed sentry said, “Step outside, Citizeness.” He opened the door.

Forcing myself to curb my impatience, I replied “Questioning is your duty to the Republic, Citizen Sentry, and I'm delighted to oblige.” I held out my hand as if to let him help me down. Then, pausing, reached in my reticule.

“Citizeness, others are waiting.”

“A friend made this out for me … possibly, I'm not sure of course, but possibly it will assist you in identifying me.” Heart racing, hand steady, I held out Goujon's letter.

The mustachioed sentry unfolded it and read aloud, “‘Permit the bearer, female, age twenty-three, blond hair, green eyes, to pass this barrier. By order of Denis Goujon, Chairman, Executive Council.'”

The sentries exchanged swift glances.

My interrogator said. “Then you are a friend of Deputy Goujon?”

“For many years. Do you know him, Citizen?”

“Only by reputation, Citizeness.” Slamming the door, he saluted me with an expression of awed fear. “Proceed, driver,” he shouted. “Proceed!”

We were hastened through the barrier.

And we were galloping by little clusters of houses, the wind rushing around us. André reached to take my hand. He had fought for freedom, for equality, for bread that all might eat, and if this fight, through no fault of his, has lost all purity, it in no way diminishes him. I love him with all my heart, and I tell him so. The carriage rushes on, and soon it is night, and the dark countryside flies by us, tatters of dark clouds and the stars fly, André and I are flying, flying into the imponderable and unknown future.…

Chapter Seventeen

On the second day of April a breeze scudded white clouds across a bright blue sky. We had to hold our hats as we walked across the dock in Plymouth.

“There she is,” André said, pointing to a large three-masted schooner flying the American colors. “The
Joanna Lee
, out of Charleston.”

“No sane man—or woman—would set foot on that, my boy, much less travel aboard her for three months,” said Lady Gill.

We had been in England six weeks, arriving on a foggy, chill night, immediately starting for Foxwarren. We wanted to see Jean-Pierre and await word from Sir Robert. After a week fraught with anxiety, Sir William Pitt had forwarded a letter. Sir Robert wrote in his large round hand that he was in excellent health, his identification papers had arrived, and he enclosed this quite interesting picture. It was a badly printed line drawing of a young woman holding a smoking pistol over a great bearded corpse. The caption read: “Beauteous Comtesse de Créqui as She Slays Perpetrator of September Massacres.” Sir Robert wrote that Marat and Robespierre, fearing a counterrevolution, needed someone to take full blame for the massacres. Goujon, dead, was the perfect scapegoat. And once again I was wrongly portrayed in the news sheets, this time as avenging heroine.

Lady Gill, red-cheeked and warmhearted as ever, having gotten over her disappointment that I wouldn't be her daughter-in-law, had endeavored to get André, Jean-Pierre, and me to settle in the “Widow's House” at Foxwarren. The three of us, however, had determined to leave the Old World on the first available ship to the Southern states. And that ship was the schooner
Joanna Lee
.

Lady Gill had come to bid us farewell.

She never gave up. Linking her arm through mine, she drew me a little apart. “You can't really intend to breed your children amid savages, can you?” she boomed.

Jean-Pierre and André were trailing us around kegs and barrels.

“Now, Lady Gill,” said Jean-Pierre in his charming voice, “the United States has many who aren't savages.”

“You've never been there, my boy,” she said flatly.

“I have.” André laughed. “And believe me, Manon's worst enemy will be hard work. Now, come and see our berths. They're really quite comfortable.”

We had started up the gangplank when a voice called, “Countess! Countess!”

We turned to see a small bookish man churning toward us. It was Mr. Gerald Camberwell, the Comte's British solicitor.

He stopped, panting, at the foot of the plank. “Countess of Créqui, praise heaven I found you in time!”

“In time for what, Mr. Camberwell?” I asked, coming back toward him. Bowing, he removed his hat, baring his old-fashioned peruke.

“To avoid my journeying to the Americas,” he said. And sitting on a box, he opened his leather bag. “I have here the Count of Créqui's last testament.”

“But my husband's estates were confiscated,” I said.

“Those within the confines of France, to be sure. However, the Count was a man of large concerns,” said Mr. Camberwell respectfully. And in his dry voice he began listing the Comte's assets, which included timberlands in Quebec, tea plantations in Ceylon, sugar plantations in Martinique. Even without his French holdings, the Comte had been an enormously wealthy man.

No wonder I'd amused him in his cell with my babble of earning our keep by doing portraits.

He had made numerous bequests to servants and friends, many of whom were already victims of the guillotine. He had left Jean-Pierre, his ward, a very generous income for life.

“These sums make little dent in the principal, I'm glad to say.” Mr. Camberwell held the windblown papers firm on his lap. “Countess, one-half of the bulk of the fortune goes to you.”

I glanced at André. Expressionless, he stared at the ocean.

“I don't want it,” I said.