The Flood-Tide (15 page)

‘They've already taken some of our forts,' Thomas told Charles, 'and talked about establishing a navy. The trouble is that our generals are hampered by their orders. The King and Parliament don't want bloodshed because of the bad feeling it would create once the rebels are subdued. They want order restored, but without the use of force. The whole business has completely unnerved General Gage. You heard about the incident at Breed's Hill? The Patriots established themselves on a hill overlooking Boston Harbour, which would have given Gage enormous trouble if they were allowed to fortify it. So he sent a force to take it - two or three thousand men I believe - and lost half of them. Trained soldiers against ordinary citizens! You can imagine how the rest of the army feels.'

‘But surely if the Patriots are only an unruly element the loyal citizens will resist them?' Charles said.

‘The trouble is that the unruly element is drawn from the influential section. Those who are debarred from government in the colonies - religious minorities, those without property qualifications and so on - seem to have remained loyal, I suppose thinking they have more chance of protection under British rule. But they have no power or influence. The rich landowners and merchants are the ones who matter, and they are the very ones who make up the Patriot Party.’

There was a moment or two of gloomy silence, and then Thomas said, 'But tell me news of home! Have you any letters for me? How is Flora, and the baby?'

‘Well, both well. Flora misses you, of course, but the bairn flourishes. She will tell you all in her letter. But we have had sadness at home. William, where is William? He should be told as soon as possible.'

‘I can send for him in a moment. But what is it? Is someone ill?' He went to the door of his cabin and said to the sentry, 'Pass the word for William Morland.' By the time he had closed the door and turned to face Charles again, he had deduced the nature of the bad news. ‘Charlotte? Ill?'

‘She is dead,' Charles said quietly. Thomas shook his head slowly.

‘Poor little girl. I can hardly believe it. She was well and strong when I saw her last.' Charles told him briefly what had happened.

‘He will feel it terribly, I'm afraid,' Charles said. 'He was devoted to her.'

‘I will see he has a little time to himself. His watch will be called in half an hour, but I'll excuse him. He'll want to be alone, I expect.’

*

William's impulse to flight sent him up to the foretop, his second home, and, when the men were not at quarters, a place of solitude - a rare commodity in the
Ariadne.
Above him the fore topmast described slow and erratic circles against the blue sky as the ship rolled a little at anchor; beside him the topmast shrouds hummed delicately in the light wind that brushed his face and ruffled his hair. Far below him the life of the ship went on, and beyond the wooden walls of his little world the life of the harbour went on, but he turned his eyes away from both, and looked outward, towards the open sea.

Charlotte, dead. He tried to think about it, but his mind baulked like an overfaced horse, refused to grasp the notion. She had always been there, commanding and protecting him, from the first moment she had stood upright on her strong legs, and pulled him up, weak and tottering, beside her. As the steady swing of the foretop lulled and mesmerized him, he imagined that he could remember her even before that, when they sucked at the same breast, when they lay curled together in the same womb. He remembered when he had seen her last, that last morning, when she had forgiven him for breaking away from her, and given him her most prized possession, the lock of Mouse's mane, in token of it.

And now he would never see her again. He would not bring her gifts from the West Indies. The letters he had written to her, telling of his progress and feelings, would not be read. She would not grow handsome and turn up her hair and marry and produce little nephews and nieces for him. She would never again be scolded for being rough or untidy or disobedient. All her rebellion was at an end. She was dead. He stared out at the endless blue sea, fading mistily into the paler blue sky, and forced himself to think about, drove his mind to tackle the thought of his beloved twin's death.

I'm free, he thought. All my life I have lived in her shadow, been measured against her and found wanting. All my life I have been 'poor William', who should have been a girl, because Charlotte would have made the better boy. Now I can be myself, and be judged only as myself, not as the lesser, the worse half of a pair. He folded his arms tightly around himself, and rocked in an agony of grief for her, because he had loved her, and she ought not to die unmourned, betrayed by the one closest to her, whom she had needed most. He grieved because part of him could not grieve; because his freedom gladdened him; because what he had felt that first moment in the captain's cabin when he heard the news had not been sorrow, but relief.

CHAPTER SIX

 The Rue de St Rustique was hardly more than a narrow cobbled alley, running up the shoulder of the hill Montmartre to debouch under the walls of the convent, and made dark and damp by the high walls of the houses on either side. No. 7 was a small, square house, with a tiny courtyard, too dark to grow even the hardiest of flowers, hemmed in by a high wall pierced only by one forbidding iron gate. The walls had been painted rust-red, but the paint was flaking off in patches. Inside the house was dark too, only the second-floor windows being high enough to receive light.

It was by one of these windows that Aliena customarily sat. She had never minded the darkness of the house, the single gate, the high walls, the sense of being shut in, for a great part of her life had been spent in a convent, and it was to be near the convent that she had chosen this house from amongst those she could afford. But she missed the flowers and gardens and woods of Chaillot. There had been gillyflowers outside the window of the Mother Superior's parlour, which in the summer had filled the room with their scent. Aliena had always loved flowers, and birds. Her comfort here was the sparrow which had built its nest under the roof above the window where she sat. The cheerful, noisy life of the little birds was a background to her thoughts.

She had little to do now but think, for her eyesight had dimmed to a point where she could not work or read, and her strength was such that she could only with difficulty go downstairs. The priest who said Mass at the convent came to her three times a week to give her the Sacrament; otherwise, she had no visitors. She listened to the sparrows, and the bells, and dozed a little, and thought her thoughts.

On 8 September 1775, the birth feast of Our Lady, she had had her eighty-eighth birthday. Patiently as she had endured her life, she hoped it would be her last.

In the pretty house in Clichy, which Allen Macallan had bought for her and the baby so many years ago, she had thought often of Chaillot and St Germain; but since coming here to the Rue de St Rustique she had found her thoughts returning to England and Yorkshire, and the years she had spent there with her mother, Annunciata, and her daughter Marie-Louise. So much wrong, and so much sorrow, the one, she felt, following on naturally in consequence of the other; and the baby, Henri Maria, a baby no longer but a full-grown, full-blooded man of nearly thirty, going on with the wrong, and perpetuating the sorrow.

He was at Versailles today; last night he had been at the opera in the party of the new little Austrian Queen, Marie-Antoinette, who loved pleasure and dressing-up and gaiety as the lark loves the air; afterwards to a private party at the Palais-Royale for drinking and card-playing amongst the fashionable set who surrounded the Duc de Chartres. Henri always came and told her about his activities, and she enjoyed hearing about them, about the Court world she had once known so well and was not so far from; but she listened always with the strained attention of one who awaits a secret message of bad news. The vice was in him; he did wrong; and though he loved her, she believed, as much as was in him to love, it was not enough to persuade him to virtue. It was her fault - it must be her fault; she had brought him up from babyhood. How had she failed? She sometimes thought she had not loved him enough, half her mind being always on the life she had had to leave behind. How could she warn him for the future? What would happen to him when she was gone? She had left word for him to come up to her room when he returned home, but the evening passed without him. Her maid came to change her candles before going to bed, and Aliena sat on, waiting; night and day were all one to her now. The sky was paling, the birds beginning their morning racket, when he finally came in, homing at dawn like a roving tomcat, she thought. But she must greet him before scolding, or lose his confidence.

‘Well, Grandmama, have you not been to bed? You are as big a reprobate as I,' he said cheerfully, coming to kiss her cheek and bringing the reek of stale tobacco and wine and women's scent with him. Smelling of his iniquity, she thought, but she did not speak it, nor reprove him for his loose talk.

‘What need have I of going to bed?' she said instead.

‘True,' Henri said, sitting down on the stool beside her couch. 'You do not need it for either of the things I use it for. Now, don't scold! I come home in good spirits today, and in a position to swear I have not increased your debts by one sou. In fact, I am weighted with ill-gotten gold. The cards were with me last night, and you shall have it all - all but the price of a new suit for me, that is; and one or two trifles that I have been in need of; and - in short, you shall have most of it.'

‘Some of it,' Aliena corrected, and was not so blind that she could not see the smile that broke across his face like the rising sun. If he had such charm as that, he could not be past redemption, could he?

‘Some of it,' he agreed. 'How well you know me, Grandmama. You have spoilt me for other women, you know. Where could I ever find a wife to match you for loyalty and understanding, or for beauty and intelligence, if it comes to that?'

‘Henri, please don't speak in such a way. You know it distresses me,' she said.

‘Ah, I sense a reprimand on its way. This is the moment, Grandmama, at which I claim to be overwhelmingly tired, and in grave need of sleep—'

‘Sit down, Henri. I must and will talk to you,' Aliena said, and Henri hesitated in the act of rising, and then sat again, stretching out his legs and trying to look nonchalant. ‘Who is it you have been with tonight?' she asked him, by way of opening. He didn't answer, but she had known he would not. 'A new perfume, I detect,' she said. 'My eyes may be failing, but my nose is good. Another, different woman, Henri - and how many does that make?'

‘Really, Grandmama, how can I possibly—'

‘No, I don't mean in your life, child. Even I would not expect you to have kept such a tally. But in a week? In a month? This year alone? There was the fishmonger's wife—'

‘How the Devil—!' Henri cried explosively, and controlled himself as quickly. 'I beg your pardon,' he said smoothly. 'Honour where honour is due. I suppose the odour of Poissonnieres is rather clinging.'

‘He came here, Henri,' Aliena said. 'The fishmonger himself came here, angry and grieved, looking for you. I managed to calm him and send him away.’

Henri looked pained, genuinely sorry that she had been forced to engage in such a scene. 'I'm sorry that you should have been troubled. Not for the world would I have had you face—' He hesitated.

‘Face what? Your cuckold. Or rather, one of your cuckolds?' The use of such a word by her shocked him. ‘But his sorrow, Henri, was as strong as his grief. Can't you understand that? What you do is not a sin because it is forbidden, but because of the harm it does.’

He felt a little ashamed, remembering how Madame de Murphy had chided him with taking the wives of men who minded when there were so many complacent men that he might cuckold; and shame made him surly.

‘I assure you, madam, that the fishmonger was an aberration. The vast generality do not mind in the least, and if they do not mind, who is harmed?'

‘You are,' she said. There was a moment of silence, in which she heard the sparrow outside the window chipping away at the dawn with its territorial call. 'You harm yourself, not only with your adulteries, but with your gambling and drinking. You harm your soul, Henri.' She saw him turn his head away with an exasperated movement at the word, and sadness welled up in her. 'You are not entirely to blame,' she said. 'You are the child of sorrow and sin, and it is in your blood. Perhaps I have been in error in not telling you more about yourself. I hoped to keep you isolated from the infection, but I should rather have alerted you to it.’

He looked at her with dawning interest. 'You are going to tell me now?' She was silent a moment more, marshalling her thoughts.

‘My mother,' she said, 'was an Englishwoman of gentle birth, a Countess—'

‘The Countess of Strathord,' Henri supplied, nodding. She shook her head.

‘No, that title was given to your mother, created for her by King James III. My mother was Countess of Chelmsford by marriage. She was royally descended, but illegitimately.
That
was the first snag in the thread, and from that one, followed all the others. She had—' where was a long pause, for it was hard to say the words, 'she had an incestuous relationship with her stepson. I was the child of that union. The second snag. I produced your mother, Marie-Louise—'

‘The King's daughter,' Henri said.