The Price of Glory (29 page)

“Behold,” said Our Lady of Thermidor, gravely, “the Queen of Spades.”

Nathan felt the beginnings of hysterical laughter. He suppressed it with difficulty. Then Talma, with his fine sense of drama, began to applaud. An overloud noise in the silence. Ouvrard joined in and then Murat and finally Nathan—what else could he do?

But now what? Four fully dressed men, who hardly knew each other, and four naked women. An orgy, for all its appeal in Nathan's fantasies, was actually quite alarming when it presented itself as a genuine prospect. For all the delightfulness of Thérésa, in particular—fully revealed to him in all her nude magnificence—the idea of stripping off his own clothes and cavorting naked with her in the presence of others was really something he had rather not do. And what if it was not Thérésa? What if it was the Hamelin or de Coligny ? He would probably cope, a demon voice informed him. But what if it was Rose—the chosen one of Captain Cannon? If Buonaparte heard as much as a whisper of these proceedings, he would have Nathan's guts for garters.

Fortunately, there was a reprieve. At least, for the time being.

To Nathan's frank astonishment, all four women sat down again, at their original places at the table. Rose rang a little bell, and the servants entered with the next course. Not by a single look or a fumble did they betray that they had noticed anything unusual. Dishes were laid upon the table. Napkins shaken out upon naked laps. Then they retired. Nathan observed that the main dish was some form of fowl, possibly duck.

“Will you carve, sir, being a military man?” Rose requested Captain Murat.

Murat carved. His hands shook a little. The conversation flagged.

“I once played Agamemnon in a loincloth,” Talma declared, his voice a little more high pitched than it had been. “It was a little inhibiting at first, but I soon found it quite … liberating.”

This did not entirely break the tension. The women, having achieved the climax of the evening, as it were, did not appear to know where to take it from here. It would have been better, Nathan thought, to have waited until after pudding.

Thérésa rallied first.

“A glass of wine with you, Captain?”

Nathan, who had looked to Murat, quite forgetting his own rank, realised she was talking to him. He found himself blushing as he fumbled with his glass. Their eyes met. Her expression was unmistakable. My God, he thought, she's going to have me.

Their glasses clinked and then in the silence they heard the sound of a bell.

“Jesus Christ!” said Talma. It was the tocsin. The dread alarum of the commune, not heard since the time of the Terror, calling the people to arms.

In the silence that followed they heard the clatter of hooves in the cobbled courtyard outside. Voices were raised. Boots rang across the outer chamber and the door was flung open to reveal …

Paul François Jean Nicolas de Barras. Booted and spurred in his blue uniform and his plumed hat, with a great curved sword at his waist, looking every inch the former vicomte, victor of Toulon, hero of Thermidor. His immense frame seemed to fill the smallish room.

He stared at them in total astonishment.

“Good God!” he said.

Rose was on her feet, her expression one of shock and dismay. Her napkin slipped from her lap. She made a grab for it. Went for the tablecloth instead. Dishes slid to the floor. Murat stood to attention, saluting.

“Do come and join us, Citizen Barras,” said Madame Hamelin calmly. “We are having a little duck but there is plenty to go round.”

The tocsin rang again. Barras snatched off his hat.

“Do you hear that?” he said. “Do you know what it is? It is the tocsin. Do you know what it means? It is the mob, madam, out upon the streets with their muskets and their pikes and their blood rage, and here you are sitting bare-arsed naked in this, this … this bawdy house.” He waved his hat about the room. Nathan looked to Rose in sympathy. She was trying to wrap the tablecloth around her but most of it was still on the table, weighed down by dishes. Her eyes were filled with tears. He felt a sudden gush of affection for her, not un-mixed with lust.

“They are marching on the Convention,” said Barras, quietly now but with deadly earnestness. “Thirty thousand of them, at the very least, from every damned section in the city—and the Garde Parisienne with them. And if we do not stop them they will be marching back with our heads on pikes. So get your clothes on, you whores, and hide yourselves in the stables until it's all over, and pray to God or whatever deity you worship in those tiny brains of yours that you won't be wearing a different red stripe round your throats by the time the night is over.”

He glared at Murat who was still standing rigidly at the salute.

“Who are you, you ponce?”

“Sous-Lieutenant Joachim Murat, sir, 21st Regiment of Chasseurs.”

“Well, Sous-Lieutenant, get on your fucking horse and join your regiment at the Tuileries. You, too, Ouvrard, if you don't want to end up back in your grocery shop flogging lemons.” His eye swept round the table. “As for the rest of you, we need every man we can get, even half a man like you, Talma. If you can't shoot a pistol you can inspire us with your rhetoric.” His head jerked round to Murat again.

“Murat, did you say ?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Weren't you with that cunt Buonaparte at Toulon?”

“No, sir. That would be Sergeant Junot, sir. But I know who you mean. We have met on … on several social occasions.”

“Have you, indeed? Why does that not surprise me? And do you know where he is now?”

“I … I suppose he is in his quarters, sir.”

“His quarters? He has been struck off the army list, you whoreson. Where in God's name
are
his quarters?”

“I … I don't know, sir.”

“I've been trying to find him all day. I expected to see him here,” he snarled at Rose de Beauharnais as if it was her fault that he was not.

Nathan opened his mouth, perhaps unwisely. “I believe he lodges at the Hôtel de la Liberté,” he offered.

Barras looked at him. If he recognised him from the last time the tocsin had rung in Paris during the month of Thermidor he showed no sign of it.

“Then perhaps you would care to go and fetch him,” he proposed icily, “and bring him to the Tuileries. Tell him if he gets there in the next hour, he can have a new uniform and the Army of Italy. If he leaves it any later he can see what he'll get from the Royalists and hope it isn't a firing squad.”

And right on cue, from out of the falling darkness, they heard a ragged volley of musket fire and then, as the echoes died away, the steady beat of a drum. It sounded no more than a street away and it was getting closer.

T
HE
COUNTER-REVOLUTION
COULD
hardly have come at a more convenient time, Nathan reflected, as he walked briskly away from the sound of the drum. Unless, of course, one were a committed satyr. He admitted to some regret that he and Madame Tallien had not become better acquainted during the course of the evening and had they been alone he did not deceive himself that he would have remained inviolate. But he had discovered in himself a certain prim reserve when confronted with public lewdity and lubriciousness. Not that he had encountered a great deal of either in his short life, nothing like as much as he had hoped at one stage, but once as a young midshipman he had peered down into the lower depths of a 74 at its mooring in Spithead shortly after a horde of tarts had been let aboard from the bumboats and had been shocked to the core. It had become engraved upon his impressionable mind like one of Gillray's grosser caricatures. Ever since, the prospect of uninhibited mass copulation had possessed little attraction for him. Perhaps it was the Puritan in him, for though you would never have thought it from her own behaviour, his mother came from a long line of Huguenots, imbued with the convictions of John Calvin.

He began to wonder where he thought he was going. He had, of course, no intention of trying to find General Buonaparte, even if he had known where to begin looking, for he had no idea where the HÔtel de la Liberté was situated. When he had left the house, his only thought had been to head in the opposite direction from the advancing drum. His previous experience of Paris induced him to the belief that a drum was the herald of sudden, indiscriminate bloodletting. But now he began to recollect his true character as a British naval officer, in which capacity he had always understood it to be a summons to action stations.

He stopped for a moment, undecided. He did not wish to become involved in a street fight. Especially as it would be difficult to tell at a glance and in the confusion of the moment whose side he would be fighting upon. However, it was his clear duty to offer his services to the Royalists. The trouble was he did not know where to find them. Before he had left London he had been given the name and address of a certain lawyer near the Palais de Justice to whom he could pass on valuable information in the surety that it would make its way to England and who would, if it became necessary, secure Nathan's escape from Paris. He supposed he could try to find him, but it was a little late in the day to be scurrying around looking for lawyers. Besides, he was not entirely sure he wished to risk his life for the Bourbons. It was one thing when you were on a ship-of-war on the high seas, fighting in the company of your fellow countrymen, for the flag; for your family and friends; for your own advancement or survival. Quite another when you were in the streets of Paris fighting for the French—of whatever political allegiance.

Whilst so preoccupied, he had continued striding towards the centre of the city and now he found himself among the arcades of the Palais Egalité—or the Palais Royal as it once was and might shortly be again. The shops were all closed and shuttered but there were a few cafés still open, serving refreshments to those who had nothing better to do than sit around waiting for the next Revolution or counter-Revolution to take place. Nathan was passing such an establishment with his head down when he found himself hailed by a gentleman seated at one of the tables set out upon the walkway. Looking up, he saw to his astonishment that it was Captain Cannon.

He was with his hanger-on Junot, drinking coffee and cognac—surprisingly perhaps, given the amount of liquor he had consumed in the Procope. But he seemed perfectly sober now.

“Come and join us,” he said. “We have just come from the theatre.”

It was good to know that some aspects of Paris life continued uninterrupted.

He asked Nathan where he was going in such a hurry. Nathan considered. Several conflicting thoughts crossed his mind. Finally he said, “As a matter of fact, I was looking for you.”

“Oh.” Buonaparte eyed him without much interest. “And why is that? Have you got my hat?”

“No.”
His hat?
Then Nathan remembered he had left it behind at the Procope. The general's hair hung greasily about his shoulders, his complexion more jaundiced than ever in the light of the cheap candles. Nathan dropped his voice. “No, but Citizen Barras asked me to look out for you. I have just been having supper with him.” He glossed over the true circumstance of the repast, though he had a sudden vision of Rose de Beauharnais attired as the Queen of Hearts, just before her dramatic transformation into the Queen of Spades. He felt himself blushing. If Buonaparte only knew. “He wants you to report to him at the Tuileries.”

It could do no harm, after all. Indeed, it might do the Royalist cause some considerable good to have the preposterous Captain Cannon helping to direct the defence against them. And if the counter-Revolution turned into a damp squib, as Nathan half-expected it to, he would have covered himself with Barras.

“What does he expect me to do?” growled the general. “Has he forgot they took me off the army list?”

“Oh, he'll put you back on again,” Nathan assured him glibly. “And give you command of the Army of Italy. And a uniform. With a hat.”

“He said that?”

“He did.”

The general looked at Junot. “What do you think?”

“It must be worse than we thought,” said Junot. “He must be desperate.”

Not exactly the most diplomatic of responses from the aide de camp to a general, Nathan reflected. But Buonaparte did not appear to notice anything untoward.

“What forces does he have at his command?” he asked Nathan.

“I don't know. He didn't say.” Then he remembered Murat. “I think he has the 21
^st
Chasseurs,” he added impressively.

The general did not quite spit but he looked as if he would have liked to. “And did he make any estimate of those opposed to him?”

“Thirty thousand or so. But it was just a guess. Most of the sections, the Garde included.”

“And he wants us to join him?” Junot sneered.

Nathan shrugged, as if it did not bother him one way or another.

“If the Royalists would place me at their command they would have Barras grovelling at their feet by midnight,” declared Buonaparte.

“I was not sent by the Royalists,” Nathan felt obliged to inform him.

“You think we're so keen to die for Barras and his cronies?” demanded Junot, who had grown a little heated. “Those terrorists who only rose against Robespierre because he had them on his death list? Would
you
die for that lot?”

“I am an American,” Nathan pointed out. “It has nothing to do with me.”

“The Army of Italy,” Buonaparte mused.

“And a uniform.”

Buonaparte drained his coffee cup and rose to his feet.

Junot looked at him in surprise. “Where are you going?” he said.

“The Tuileries,” replied Buonaparte. “You are, too. Finish your coffee.”

Junot was astonished. “But why ?”