The One Thing More Read online

  She squashed the feeling in herself. ‘I’m sorry ... he voted for death like everyone else.’

  Georges looked at the uncurtained window, the candlelight reflected sharp and yellow on the planes of his face. When he spoke it was quietly, as much to himself as to her. ‘He said he’d not sacrifice his own life in a lost cause.’ Then he turned back to the room and she saw the defeat and the anger in him. ‘And the Girondins couldn’t organise an evening soirée,’ he went on, ‘never mind an effective resistance to Marat and the Commune, and all the others who believe that executing the King will be the beginning of a new birth of liberty.’

  She shivered, even with the blanket around her. She must deliver Bernave’s message. She watched him as he sat down on the mattress opposite her, awkwardly, because it was too low. He pulled one of the other blankets over his shoulders. He looked tired, strained, but there was no surprise in him now. He had been expecting this.

  ‘When?’ he asked. ‘Did they say?’

  ‘The twenty-first.’

  His head jerked up, eyes wide. ‘In four days!’

  She nodded.

  His shoulders slumped. He put his hands up over his face, pushing his hair back, and there was immeasurable defeat in the gesture.

  ‘We’re still going to rescue him,’ Célie said in the silence. ‘Bernave has it all planned. We just have to be ... quicker ...’ It sounded absurd, crazier than anything even the Girondins would think of.

  He stared at her, incredulity slowly fading to amazement, and then a dawning hope. And he realised for the first time how far Bernave had trusted her.

  ‘Bernave says you must check the first and second safe houses,’ she said slowly. ‘He’s sending St Felix to the third.’ She waited for a response from him.

  He breathed in and out slowly, still absorbing the thought. ‘We’d never get him out of the prison of the Temple,’ he answered. ‘The only place will be from the carriage on the way to the Place de la Révolution.’

  ‘I know,’ she agreed. ‘Bernave told me that much. Put someone else in his place, just long enough to take their attention.’ She shivered as she remembered Bernave’s face in the candlelight, and the knowledge of what it would cost: not just death, but what kind of death. What sort of man was prepared to do such a thing? She wished she knew him! And yet it would break her heart if she did. ‘But how?’ she said aloud. ‘And what after that?’

  He took a deep breath. ‘The streets will be lined with soldiers, and they’ll be expecting trouble. All Paris will turn out to see it. After all, how often do you see a king ride to his execution?’

  She had no idea what to say. What was he feeling? What was there in him she could touch or understand? What had he lost in this terrifying change ... or found? Was the past sweet or bitter; lonely, or full of those he had loved and could never find again?

  ‘Do you know him?’ she asked. ‘The King?’

  He looked at her. His eyes were black in the faint light. ‘Not very well,’ he replied, and there was a trace of amusement that she should ask.

  ‘What is he like?’ she pressed.

  ‘Shy, very ordinary, like an actor playing a part for which he hasn’t been given all the lines.’

  It was not what she had expected. It did not sound like a king, still less like a tyrant. Against her will it drew from her a kind of pity.

  ‘Four days!’ His voice cut into her thoughts. ‘We’ll need a lot of people, simply to cover what we’re doing, but only say a dozen or so we can really trust. At least in Paris ...’

  ‘Can we do it in time?’ she asked, feeling it pressing in on her, all the complication of what must be arranged, uncertain what Bernave had already planned, what would need to be changed now time was so short. ‘Who can we trust?’ she went on. ‘Royalists? People who believe the King rules by God’s decree?’ She felt faintly ridiculous as she said it, but she knew such faith existed, or had done.

  Georges bit his lip in a derisory humour. ‘The royalists are a shambles. We’ve got rid of the Church and whatever priests there are still alive are in hiding ... like a lot of us.’

  She was painfully aware of his situation, and that she herself had brought it about, but there was no time for indulgence of guilt now, however deep. Time was urgently, desperately short. And yet Bernave had seemed so certain there was a chance!

  ‘Bernave has the drivers.’ Georges returned to the practical, his face concentrated in thought. ‘The safe houses can be taken care of. It’s really the crowd to find to seize in on the King’s carriage as it goes from the prison of the Temple to the guillotine, and then others to block the side streets with carts so they can’t be followed by the National Guard.’

  ‘Do you know enough for that?’ she asked, trying to imagine the trust it would take to ask someone to do such a thing, to tell them how and where, and, above all, why! Georges would be placing not only the King’s life in their hands, but his own, and those of everyone else who helped. And they would have to be men and women of great resource, ice-cool nerve even under the greatest pressure, incapable of panic, and willing to risk their lives.

  ‘I think so,’ he answered softly. ‘I ... think so.’

  ‘And after that?’ She watched his eyes, his face. ‘We’ll have to get him out of France altogether. Maybe to Austria? Or perhaps England? A lot of aristocrats have gone to England—at least that’s what I’ve heard. It’s quicker to Calais than to any other border.’

  And also more obvious,’ Georges pointed out. ‘It’ll be the first place they’ll look.’

  ‘Spain?’ Célie suggested. ‘Or Italy?’

  He hesitated. There was no sound in the room but the dripping of water off the eaves, and every now and then the faint flicker of the candle flame in the draught. She did not interrupt.

  ‘Perhaps it would be best if we didn’t know,’ he said at last. ‘Leave it to them at the time.’ A very slight smile touched his lips. ‘Bernave has connections. He’ll have planned it. His business stretches all over France, and he imports silk from Italy, and sells it out again to Spain, and wool and leather to England. At least he will until we are at war with them too!’

  He stood up, hitching the blanket around himself and shivering. ‘I’d offer you chocolate if I had any, and the stove were going. But since I haven’t, and it isn’t, how about a glass of wine?’

  ‘Thank you,’ she accepted, watching him as he went to the cupboard and took out a bottle and two glasses. He set them on the table, uncorked the bottle and poured, measuring carefully to see she had slightly more than he, then passed her the glass.

  ‘Thank you.’ She took it and sipped. It was rough, but at least the warmth of it sliding down her throat eased out a little of the cold knotted inside her. ‘Aren’t there any royalists we could trust?’ She had not meant her disbelief to be there in her voice, but she could hear it herself. He must also.

  His smile flickered back again as he sat down awkwardly, holding his glass in both hands.

  ‘No,’ he said simply. ‘They want him back on the throne, or the Comte d’Artois in his place. Either way they want a monarch. They haven’t learned a thing. They watch history and it’s like a parade to them, with all the commentary in another language. They understand nothing.’ There was contempt in his face and impatience as well, and she was not sure if she saw pity or not.

  She was sharply aware of knowing so little about him, except that he was Amandine’s cousin, and therefore like her, minor gentry from a once-noble family, in which the endless subdivision of lands had left them with hereditary rights, but little money.

  She looked at him sitting hunched on the mattress opposite her. What had he believed before the revolution had swept away all the old values, and the old safeties? She had no measure of his courage, or his essential humanity. She had seen only his superficial kindness and his loyalty to Amandine, and that reminded her too much of what she had done, and why he was crouched here now, and afraid to go out in daylight. The lines aro
und his mouth were deep in the yellow light, accentuating the weariness in him. He drank slowly from his glass and pulled his lips tight at the tartness of the wine.

  ‘The irony of it is,’ he went on with his train of thought, ‘I don’t think the King cares that much about the Crown himself. He’d have been far happier as a small farmer, or a grocer in some provincial town. That’s what he is at heart: a village shopkeeper; good-natured, small-minded, rather humourless, domestic, eager to please whoever he is with.’

  He was staring at the floor, his face turned half away from her, but she heard the sadness in his voice.

  ‘He’d have made an excellent grocer,’ he continued. ‘All his customers would have liked him. He would have swapped local gossip with them and given apples to their children, and grown old, well-loved and quietly prosperous.’ His tone changed. ‘Unfortunately he inherited the throne of France and never had that choice. So now in four days he’ll go to his death, unless we can save him—and ourselves.’

  She did not argue or question his judgement. The momentousness of what they were proposing filled her mind.

  He turned towards her. ‘Tell Bernave I’ll check the safe houses. I have at least ten people here in Paris we can trust to mob the carriage. We’ll find the coaches and drivers from the safe houses onwards out of Paris, and to their assigned border. But he’ll have to find the passes out of the city.’

  ‘I’ll tell him.’ She stood up, letting the blanket fall and drinking the last of the wine.

  He rose also. ‘Be careful,’ he said softly, picking up her cloak and cap and going to the door ahead of her. I wish I could see you at least as far as the Boulevard St-Germain.’

  ‘Well you can’t,’ she answered, while he helped her put the cloak on. It was her fault he could not, and she hated being reminded of it.

  ‘Go carefully,’ he repeated, his voice urgent with anxiety.

  She turned away, not wanting to face him. ‘I will.’

  His hand was on the door latch. ‘Tell Bernave we’ll succeed,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to. If we don’t, only a miracle will stop civil war.’

  ‘Do you believe in God?’ As soon as she had said it she knew she should not have. It was not a question one asked in France these days. But it was too late now, the words were out.

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘God? I don’t think I’ve much idea who He is.’ Humour lit his expression for a moment. ‘Would you settle for not believing in the Church? I can say that with a whole heart.’

  She wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. ‘Then it’s a good thing it’s gone!’ she retorted. She did not want him even to sense the confusion in her, far less see it. She hated the Church, its hypocrisy, its oppression and its greed. And at the same time, more than anything on earth, she needed its promises of a God who loved, who would have allowed her baby to have been baptised and taken to Himself, not buried in the cold ground where she could not even mourn him properly. She kept her face turned away.

  Georges pushed his hands through his hair, scraping it back off his brow. ‘It’s a hell of a thing!’ he answered. ‘At least it stood for some kind of order ... some recognition of ...’

  ‘Corruption,’ she finished for him bitterly. ‘Do you know how much land the Church owned, before we took it back?’ She remembered her mother working it out precisely.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And how much twisted morality, and how much unearned privilege and unnecessary guilt. But it still represented some kind of belief in a power greater than ourselves. It offered hope to those who had no other, and faith in a justice beyond anything there is here ... which is too often a farce, or worse. If we are all there is,’ he shrugged, ‘we haven’t got much, have we?’

  She was crushed by the emptiness of it. ‘If the best of us is the best there is, it’s not enough ...’ Unintentionally she turned towards him.

  He grinned suddenly, a flash of teeth in the flickering light. ‘But if the worst of us is the worst there is, it’ll do nicely, eh? Hell doesn’t need to be more than last September.’

  ‘And since we’ve done away with God, miracles aren’t very likely,’ she said drily. Then before he could add anything else, she slipped out of the door and down the narrow stairs into the darkness. She did not look back at his silhouette against the light of the fading candle.

  Chapter Two

  CÉLIE WOKE WITH A start, her head throbbing, her body hunched under the blankets. It was still dark outside, but that only meant that it was not yet seven. Amandine was leaning over her, a candle in her hand, her face pale with anxiety and lack of sleep, her soft hair a dark cloud around her head.

  ‘Célie, wake up! You’ve got to come and help me!’ Her voice was shaking with anger. ‘Bernave had St Felix out again all night! He’s just come in and he’s been beaten again, worse this time! Drunkards—Marat’s men—Marseillais, I don’t know. Get up and help me—please! He’s bleeding and he looks terrible. Sometimes I could kill Bernave!’

  ‘They’re going to execute the King,’ Célie mumbled, fighting off the remnants of sleep. She was so tired she felt drugged. Her throat was dry and the edges of her vision blurred.

  Amandine’s voice dropped. ‘Yes, I know. St Felix told me. In three days.’

  Célie sat up slowly. It was bitterly cold. There was no heating whatever in the room, and the air was like ice on her skin. At this hour probably no stoves had been lit anywhere in the house, except the kitchen. Amandine would have the stove going down there. Bernave’s household was one of the few that could afford to be warm, at least some of the time.

  She pushed her hair out of her eyes, and reached for her clothes. She put them on with clumsy fingers fumbling over buttons.

  Amandine looked dreadful. She was smaller and more rounded than Célie, her face more delicately boned. There were dark smudges under her eyes. She stood with her arms folded tight and her shoulders hunched.

  Célie tied a brown woollen shawl over her blouse and rough, full skirt. It was a sort of peasant garb, and she hated it, but that was what everyone wore in these days of ostentatious equality. The shawl was for warmth, not decoration. She would have liked a pink one, or bright yellow, something daring and individual, not a revolutionary colour. But that would be foolhardy, even if she could have found one.

  Amandine moved from one foot to the other impatiently. ‘Hurry, please! His clothes are torn and filthy, and there’s blood on them, and he can hardly speak. You know more about medicine than I do!’

  That was true. When Célie’s father had died, and then her husband, leaving her with a two-month-old baby, she had had no choice but to seek the best employment she could find. It had been a stroke of good fortune that someone as extraordinary and talented as Madame de Staël had accepted her as lady’s maid. She had several children herself, and had taken compassion on a young mother alone. In Madame’s service Célie had naturally improved her skills in sewing, laundering, millinery, writing a neat and graceful letter, reading aloud, and seeing that a table was properly laid. She had on several occasions overheard some of the leading philosophers of the age talking into the night in Madame’s salon, before that sort of civilised conversation had become impossible.

  And of course a little minor nursing and medicine was necessary. No one called a doctor unless there was absolutely no alternative, and surgery was needed. Certainly one went to hospital only if carried there unable to resist.

  Amandine was at the door, impatient, and Célie followed her downstairs and into the kitchen where half a dozen candles were blazing and the warmth of the stove engulfed her the moment she entered.

  St Felix was sitting slumped on one of the wooden chairs, his legs out in front of him, soft boots stained with mud and effluent from the gutters that ran down the centre of most of the smaller streets. His coat was torn at the top of the right sleeve, as if someone had tried to pull it off him by force, and there were dark stains of blood on it, as well as smears on his cheek. His fine-drawn, dreamer’s face was
ashen pale and his eyes were closed, but from the rigidity of his body Célie could tell that he was obviously conscious.

  Célie closed the door behind her to keep out any inquisitive Lacoste children who might be awake and think they could cadge some hot chocolate from Amandine, or any other titbit offered them. She went over to St Felix and regarded him closely.

  He opened his eyes, which were wide, grey-green and clear as the sea.

  He looked at her, keeping his arms folded across his chest, but she could not tell whether it was to hide a wound, or simply because he was cold.

  ‘Where are you hurt?’ she asked him firmly, as she would have a child. She was aware of Amandine behind her, watching and waiting. ‘Put the pan on,’ she ordered without looking round. ‘Make some hot chocolate.’

  ‘I’ve got wine—’

  ‘Chocolate’s better,’ Célie replied. ‘And get a little bread.’ She heard Amandine move to obey. She herself remained looking at St Felix. ‘Is that blood yours, or someone else’s?’ she asked.

  He blinked and looked down at his sleeve with slight surprise. ‘Oh. Mostly someone else’s, I think. I’m all right, Célie.’ His voice was beautiful, perfectly modulated, even now when he was frightened and hurt. ‘Just a knife scar on that arm, not deep, and a few bruises.’

  ‘What happened?’ She knew he had been across the river all the way to the slums and tanneries of the Faubourg St-Antoine, where Bernave had sent him, but Amandine would not know, and that was better so.

  He made a tiny, dismissive gesture with one hand, but when he answered his voice shook. ‘I ran into one of Marat’s mobs. They were celebrating the verdict on the King and were a bit drunk. No harm intended.’ His eyes betrayed the lie by omission. There was a fierce and terrible loneliness in him, as if he could tell no one the pain inside him.

  ‘You’d better take your coat off and let me see.’ Célie could not let the matter drop. He was beginning to shudder as the shock settled in him and she was not sure how much he might have bled or how deep the wound was. He might even have broken bones under the bruising.