The One Thing More Read online

  She obeyed. Suddenly she was frightened. Her throat was tight, her heart jumping. What was he going to say? Was Georges going to have to flee again, leave Paris, maybe even leave France? Who were the safe houses for? Was Bernave himself going? That thought should not have hurt her; she had known him only a short time. But he had shown a kindness to her, a clean, hard honesty she admired.

  ‘Do you know what is going to happen when we kill the King, Célie?’ he asked, studying her face.

  She wanted to give an intelligent answer, one he would respect. But why was he asking? Testing her loyalty? To what, or whom?

  ‘We shall be a republic,’ she replied, a tiny thread of pride in her voice, barely detectable. ‘No more aristos, no Church, no more privilege of birth.’ It surprised her that she should feel it. She had thought all such emotions dead in her. And yet somehow she despised it, hated it for what it had taken from her, she felt a touch of her mother’s passion for a new order, for reform, justice at last.

  ‘And is privilege of birth so much worse than privilege of strength, or money, or cunning?’ Bernave asked curiously. ‘How about privilege of conquest?’

  She was confused. ‘I don’t know what you mean!’

  ‘No, I can see you don’t,’ he agreed wryly. ‘We are at war with Belgium and Prussia in the north, with the Austrian Empire in the east, and our soldiers have little food and even less ammunition.’ His voice was tight in his throat and she knew it was anger. ‘We are unhappy and frightened even here in Paris. How long do you queue for bread these days, Célie?’ He waved his hand in dismissal. ‘No, don’t bother to answer. I already know. And when we have killed the King it will get worse, because we will descend into civil war. We will have no government in control at the heart, so there will be risings in the provinces.’

  She wanted to argue, but she knew too little. And she thought Bernave must be right because she had heard people say things like that when standing outside the bakery and there was no bread left, or at the other shops when there was no soap, or no candles.

  ‘But surely once ...’ She tailed off, seeing his face and silenced by the emotion in it, even though she did not understand it.

  He leaned forward a little, his voice more urgent. ‘Célie, all those countries around us are ruled by kings: not only Austria and Prussia but England as well, and Spain! All the royal houses of Europe are allied, by blood and by common interest. If we cut the throat of our King like a criminal’s, and set in his place the rabble of Marat’s Commune who run around like blood-crazed animals, if we can’t feed our own people or impose any law except that of the tumbrel and the knife, then they’ll see us as a nation of madmen, a blight to be cut out at any cost, before the contagion spreads and all Europe is stricken with it!’

  His words sank on her like a lead weight, immovable because she could see they were true.

  ‘We are walking a razor’s edge, Célie,’ he continued, his voice dropping, ‘with corruption on one side, and anarchy on the other. England will use the death of the King as an excuse. It will give them easy cause.’ His eyes were clear and sad in the candlelight. It flickered faintly in the draught, and wavered on the shelves of leather-bound books.

  ‘You really have very little idea what we have done to ourselves tonight, have you?’ he said bitterly, searching her face. ‘You just see a people risen up against centuries of oppression and injustice, against an effete aristocracy playing games in palaces and gardens, preoccupied with fripperies of dress while the poor starve. You think the rage of people like Marat and his followers is justified, and that when it is answered with equality, this will all be over.’

  ‘It is justified,’ she whispered. She had never doubted it. Her heritage was her mother’s passion for the poor, the voiceless labourers who made the land rich, and reaped little from it.

  He smiled, as if her answer gave him a moment of humour. ‘Of course it is justified,’ he agreed. ‘That is hardly the point.’

  ‘What is the point then?’ she demanded, angry because he had threatened a certainty inside her, and that frightened her.

  ‘The point, my dear,’ he said steadily, ‘is that no equality will satisfy them now, except the final equality of the grave. Danton was the last sane man who had wants and needs like any of the rest of us: land, money, women, possessions, admiration!’ He picked up his wine glass and turned it slowly in his fingers, watching the light shine through it like rubies. His voice was low, echoing a faraway pain. ‘They are things you can get, and even hold on to, if you’re lucky. They are understandable. Stop any man in the street and ask him. If he were honest, he’d admit to liking them, even needing them.’ He tipped his glass and drank the rest of the wine. One of the candles guttered and went out.

  ‘Danton’s political ideals are simple: a roof over every man’s head and a chicken in every pot,’ he went on. ‘Equality before the law. Do away with the privilege of the Church, but probably not destroy the Church itself. His wife is religious, like most of the ordinary women of France.’ His eyes widened for a moment. ‘Did you know that? Above all I think he wants stability.’ His hand curled on the desk top. ‘Space for people to get back to a decent life. These are real things.’

  ‘Maybe he will take power in the Convention?’ she said, trying to make herself believe it.

  ‘He loves too many things too much,’ Bernave replied, his eyes distant, as if he spoke from his own heart. ‘He wants to drink deep of the wine of life, to enjoy all the beautiful artefacts he’s looted from Belgium, the fine linens by the wagonload that are pouring into Paris, the gold and silver chalices and reliquaries, and other such necessities of civilised living.’ There was laughter in his eyes but his voice was heavy with sarcasm. ‘At least he’s a patriot. That is our one hope of him, even if he’s also a fool!’

  ‘Isn’t Marat a patriot?’ The words were out before she thought better of them.

  Bernave gave a snort of derision. ‘Marat is half Swiss and half Sardinian. Why should he love France? Who do you think “redirected” the boots, the coats and the munitions meant for the army on the Austrian front, and had them brought to the Commune here in Paris?’

  ‘Redirected?’

  He shrugged sharply. ‘Stole, if you prefer.’ For a moment his anger was naked, raw-edged with pain. ‘And that idiot Pache hasn’t the power or the wit to prevent it. Our soldiers on the battlefields fighting to save us from invasion are freezing cold and defending themselves with few guns and less shot because their supplies have been taken by Marat’s “people’s army”—so we can fight each other here in Paris!’

  She said nothing. The cold and the darkness of the night outside seemed to press in on the room and the candlelight to be too frail to stand against it. Only Bernave’s will was strong enough to make her believe in the possibility of any kind of hope.

  But what did he want? Not the King back at Versailles with a crown on his head! France had already tried every kind of monarchy, and each time the King had failed them, gone back on his word, bent with every wind of fortune, lied and lied again.

  ‘Marat wants glory,’ Bernave went on, as much to himself as to her. ‘Revenge for all the years the Académie Française slighted him and refused him membership; and more glory—endless, boundless glory.’ He edged the word with a unique bitterness. ‘He wants his name to be immortal, as the man who released all Europe from the chains of slavery.’ He twisted the stem of his glass in his fingers. ‘And, of course, revenge in general,’ he added. ‘Plenty of blood. Rivers of it.’

  She stared at him. She had not realised until this moment how profoundly her own beliefs were affected by his. There was a core of belief inside him, a wholeness untouched by the fevers outside. He was the rock around which all else ebbed and surged. ‘Isn’t there anyone else?’ she asked desperately.

  ‘Robespierre?’ His voice startled her with its bitterness. ‘Him least of all. The “Virtue of the People”! What is that, for God’s sake? Do you suppose even Robespier
re himself knows what he means, let alone the rest of us?’

  ‘It probably means whatever he wants it to mean,’ she answered, meeting his eyes.

  A flash of appreciation crossed his face. ‘You’re right. Today one thing, tomorrow something else, and none of it real. You can’t work with a man like that. You can’t anticipate him, bribe him or make common cause with him for a purpose. There are no bargains.’ He was silent for a moment. The fine lines in his face were all downward, as if he remembered too much grief and too many old battles. He sighed. ‘And the King may have the soul of a grocer, but the Girondins couldn’t run a shop if their lives depended on it. Odd how anyone can be so provincial and yet at the same time so incompetent!’

  ‘Madame Roland writes wonderful letters,’ she said instinctively, speaking her mother’s words, her passionate admiration, and perhaps also because she wanted to defend the one woman she knew of who had been close to power.

  He gave her a withering look, his grey eyes bright. ‘As long as you have no sense of the absurd.’ His voice was thick. ‘“Letters from a Roman Matron”! We used to be the wittiest nation on earth ... and now look at us!’ His lip curled. ‘It’s enough to make the angels weep. Perhaps that is our greatest punishment? We’ve lost our sense of humour. What do you think, Célie?’

  She watched his shoulders, hunched a little, his arms stiff on the desk in front of him, and saw that his hands were clenched, the knuckles pale, the thick scars showing white. He had never said where the scars came from.

  ‘They were all too busy posing for history to see what they were doing,’ he went on, his voice heavy with disgust now. ‘God help us, there is no other answer. We must save the King, not for the throne, but from martyrdom. Get him away quietly to live out his life in some peaceful little town in England, or Italy, where he will be merely one more fat, middle-aged man who likes to tend his garden and play with his grandchildren.’

  Célie gazed at Bernave with incredulity, but even as words of disbelief formed on her lips, she saw the whole possibility with all its desperate logic and its insane danger. She knew the rumbling anger in the streets. She had seen it more than Bernave himself had. She was the one who went out for the few bits of shopping that were still available; she was the one who stood in queues for hours at a time. She had heard the rumours of war and felt the fear of it brush them all. She could remember the panic as the frontier cities had fallen.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ she whispered, as if even in this silent room she might be overheard.

  He looked at her steadily. ‘We are going to rescue the King on the way to the scaffold,’ he answered, ‘and get him out of France, to somewhere where we can see that he is safe.’

  It was staggering—preposterous.

  ‘It’s impossible!’

  ‘Not impossible,’ he replied calmly, ‘if someone else is prepared to take his place. They only have to think he is the King for a few moments. It will be enough.’

  She was appalled.

  ‘When they find he isn’t, they’ll kill him!’ she protested. ‘They’ll tear him to pieces!’ Her imagination was hideous with the vision of it.

  ‘I know. And he knows.’ His eyes did not leave hers for an instant. ‘But he loves France. He understands what will happen to us if we kill the King—civil war, hunger, violence on the streets, fear everywhere, and eventually foreign soldiers in our fields and villages, in our homes. All the gains we have fought for, the liberty and the justice destroyed under another monarchy, not even our own. He will do it, Célie. I know him.’ He leaned forward across the desk, his cheek and wide brow golden in the candle flame. ‘Now go and tell Georges Coigny to check the first and second safe houses! If you get wet or cold, what is that in the balance? I have letters to write. We have only three whole days!’

  The cold outside hit Célie like a stinging slap across the face, making her squint against the wind. She was shaking inside with fear and excitement. Suddenly all the errands she and St Felix had run for Bernave made sense. They were part of a harebrained conspiracy to rescue the King and prevent chaos from consuming all France, everything that was left of hope and humanity and the dream of a new age of freedom.

  She could not hurry because as soon as she was off the Boulevard St-Germain it was too dark to see. She moved along alleys which had become familiar only lately, and it would be easy to miss her way, easier still to slip and fall. The wind funnelled between the walls with a knife-edge, finding every gap between the cloak around her shoulders and the cap over her head.

  This was the Cordeliers District, where Danton lived with his wife and sons. Perhaps it was stupid ever to have pinned their hopes on him, but so many had—maybe once even Bernave himself. The people loved Danton. He was a natural leader, a man of gargantuan appetite for food, for money, for laughter, wine and life; but also a man passionate for justice for the poor, the ordinary people of both town and country, those who laboured for their bread.

  Now it was too late. If Danton had ever really tried to stem the tide of destruction, he had failed.

  Célie turned the corner carefully, feeling along the wall. It was more sheltered here.

  Marat was the real power behind everything. He lived near here too, on the Rue de l’École-de-Médecine, working every day on his newspaper with its headlines screaming for bloodshed and revenge for the centuries of oppression. The mobs followed him, listening to his every word, feeding on them, believing him.

  He had spent years in obscurity around Europe, consumed by his desire for glory in the academic world, and denied at every attempt. Bernave had told her that, late one evening when she had returned with messages for him. They had sat together in the book-lined room, everyone else gone to bed, the house silent except for the wind in the eaves. He had recounted with a wry, bitter amusement, and she thought a grudging respect, how Marat had espoused the cause of the dispossessed, written his book The Chains of Slavery, and found his true vocation. Now his rage, and the smell of victory, kept him alive in spite of the disease which was rotting his body.

  She crossed the Boulevard St-Michel, for a few moments seeing torch flares and hearing men’s voices, then she slipped between the buildings into the alleys again. She stopped until her eyes readjusted to the darkness. This was the perfect place to hide. It was here, Bernave had said, that Marat had lived in attics and cellars, sometimes crouched in a cupboard for days, surviving on drops of water, when he had been hunted by the authorities in the past. Lafayette had sent in three thousand soldiers to flush him out and kill him—and failed. The thought of that gave her acute satisfaction, not for any love of Marat, but for the farcical aspect of it, and the fool it made of the self-important Lafayette.

  She hesitated, uncertain of her way now she was almost there. The buildings were very old; they sagged and creaked in the darkness. Water dripped from the eaves, even though it was no longer raining. The damp made the cold eat into everything.

  Left. She must go left, into the courtyard, then up the tiny stair outside the wall and in through the top door, then up again to the attic.

  There was movement all around her, as if countless people were awake and listening. That was ridiculous! She must control her thoughts. She moved forward determinedly. Her teeth were chattering. Fear? No—of course not! Only cold. She had been here many times before, bringing food, candles, fuel, or news. Georges had no money now he was hiding from the National Guard. She tried to ignore the guilt that stabbed at her for that, and as always, it hurt just as much.

  With food scarce for everyone, every little neighbourhood was jealous of its meagre stores. No one welcomed a stranger—there was too little to share. Also someone might recognise his face from a poster. Turning in a wanted man was worth money. And apart from that, if one should get into trouble, to have gained a good name with the Commune might make the difference between release or the guillotine.

  She crept up the first flight, and then the second, hearing every board shift under her weig
ht. She started up the third. The steps were slippery with rain on top of the mould that covered them. At the top the door was unlocked. It was difficult to open but she was used to the eccentricities of the latch, and after a twist and jerk it pushed wide enough for her to squeeze through into the passage.

  It was completely lightless, but she knew her way: ten steps forward, then to the right, and there was another door. This time she lifted her hand and tapped very gently on the wood.

  It was opened and she stepped into a room not much bigger than a large pantry, lit by a solitary candle—tallow, of course, not expensive wax. There was no glow from the stove, and no warmth. It must be out. Georges Coigny was standing in the middle of the floor, his eyes wary, the blackness of his hair lost in the shadows. Then as he recognised her, he relaxed. As always, his smile was quick, warm. He smiled like that at everyone; it was a habit, a part of his nature.

  ‘Come in.’ He moved to close the door behind her. There was no furniture in the room except a table, one chair, a small cupboard and a straw-filled mattress on the floor by the wall. There were two or three blankets on it, and he passed her one of these now, holding it while she took off her wet cloak and cap, and then wrapped herself inside the blanket and sat down on the chair.

  He stood, waiting for her to speak.

  She shook her head fractionally. ‘Death,’ she told him, her voice a little hoarse. She saw in his face that he had known it would be, perhaps even known that Bernave would send her tonight, but also that he could not help having hoped.

  He blinked, and turned away for an instant. He breathed in and out slowly, then met her eyes again, looking for the last confirmation. ‘Even Danton?’

  She wished she could have said otherwise. She had a sudden urge to protect him from the truth, which was ridiculous—Georges of all people! He was not vulnerable, not afraid as she was. He was always certain of everything, most of all of himself. He had that kind of shining inner belief that even the present chaos could not shake.