Reign of Fear: Story of French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (Cantiniére Tales) (18 page)

Danton twitched and threw his hand around
my general direction. ‘She and her mother will die, Gilbert, so your infamy is secure and you need not worry about your future. But I won’t reward them with an unprofessional, sloppy death, the kind you would serve them. Invent a story of suffering and terrible end for them, and I will say it was so, but I will do the deed, and they won’t suffer. This will have to be enough.’ Danton’s voice was harsh and Gilbert, who was, in truth, still a boy, flinched. Gilbert hesitated, his hand on the dagger. Georges turned on him, imposing and influential, and opened his coat, where the two familiar pistols showed, both cocked. Gilbert glanced at them, turned his face away.

He pointed a finger my way. ‘
So it is done, cousin. In some small way, I am sorry for this, but now, my life begins anew. If I find you alive, if my master here dupes me, I will be terrible, Jeanette, like a Greek monster in those stories we enjoyed. I’ll kill you, then string your corpse up for the crows to feast on.’ He truly was the Revenant, a dead risen, malicious and ill willed. His own words had a queer effect on him, making him swell with unholy anger as he took a step forward and Georges stepped in front of me. My cousin hissed: ‘your siblings, Jeanette. I will find where they are. I will sacrifice them to the devil himself and make sure you find them, should I find you survived here. Just like I will wipe out all the people of our common past.’

‘Florian?’ I asked him carefully
and afraid for my friend. ‘You would kill him? He knows what you are.’

‘Florian?’ he asked, apparently having not thought about it, but shrugged, deep in his thoughts.

Then he left. I shuddered in fear.

Yes, I feared him
. I was terrified to the bone of him. Gilbert was not my friend, but my enemy. Tears filled my eyes as I slumped to cry. Georges sat down to gaze at me and I raised my eyes towards him, barely seeing him through my tears. He whispered, as if parting with a secret: ‘your cousin, I think, is a bit over dramatic. What do you think?’

I looked at him with my mouth open. I hated the man, but he did have the talent to lighten the mood, and I laughed until my belly hurt. He did too, and finally he lifted me up
on my feet. ‘Now, as for you.’

‘A shot or a rope?’ I asked him, beyond caring and strangely happy.

‘Neither. I have some men who serve the king. Andre and Pierre. They are jailers at the Temple.’

The Temple, the old fort of the
betrayed Templar knights, tall as clouds, coldly medieval, like Bastille had been. ‘I think it is fit you stay with them, and your mother. After all, you nearly robbed me of this fortune,’ his eyes went dreamy as he regarded the treasure amidst dust and stone, ‘so you get to learn about prison and it is better than what the mad critter would have done.’

‘Why put us in prison? Why won’t you just kill us, like you said?’

He shrugged. ‘Because I like you? Because, despite what you may think, I owe you. And, also, Gilbert will be strong. I see it. He will make friends beyond me, and I will have a hard time holding him in the leach. Perhaps you will be useful one day, to remind him of his place. Also, this is the only way to keep you alive. He might or might not believe you are dead. He will look, to make sure. He might be a child still, but he is not your usual child.’

‘Will
he find the siblings?’ I asked, worried over Gilbert’s threat. ‘They write…’

‘No. Camille will get the letters
from your relatives and will deliver them, when we are sure Gilbert is not looking. It won’t be often. None else will know, though I will spread rumor I hold the letters they will no doubt send, and so Gilbert will snoop around the wrong tree. Camille has some loyal men who guard him, and make sure he is careful, if you know what I mean. He drinks and can be careless.’

‘You don’t trust him.’

‘He is in love with your mother,’ he said thinly. ‘Did he sleep with her?’ I could not believe the question, but shook my head tiredly. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘One day, when I am finally in power, and all the others listen to me, I will make sure you are with your family in Lyons.’

‘When is that?’ I asked him.

He smiled happily. ‘With this coin, very soon. If we find ways to topple some obstacles, even sooner.’

‘Georges?’ I asked him as he stared at the money.

‘Yes?’

‘Gilbert is mad,’ I told him.

‘Yes.’

‘And he is desperate. He is a child who plays god, because he survived. He thinks he really is back from the dead.
He want’s nothing more than to bury his past. The people who knew the weak Gilbert are not safe.’

‘Maybe he is
dead,’ Georges mumbled.

‘Since we will be gone and he claims to slay all who knew him,
only you will be left. You know who he was. You are a threat to him,’ I told him.

He turned to look at me. ‘He has his uses. I have mine. We need each other. It is logical and sane. He will use his wits to hurt our enemies and he has a deed, one great, dark deed he and I have thought about. I have his back. We share secrets.’

‘It might be logical and sane,’ I told him with pity, ‘but madness and logic do not always work well together. Be careful.’

‘I will,’ he told me and I did not see him again for a long, long time.

CHAPTER 8

We were ushered into a closed wagon, gagged and tied. Gilbert was watching our progress, no doubt, but Georges made sure we were not followed. It was a dark, moonless night, and we saw nothing. The wagon was jumping up and down on the unsteady pavements, and we were thrown to the dirty floor of the wagon, where we wisely stayed after a few unsuccessful attempts at sitting. We heard how we crossed the Seine, the calls of the river dwellers harsh in the night air and we smelled the terrible rotten stink of Les Halles, as the wagon was wounding its way for the Temple. I had not seen the fort, but I knew it had a famous church, where the Templars used to meet and plot, a Great Tower, meaning the central keep and a Caesar’s Tower, a smaller one to the side of it. It had a bad reputation, Marie, appalling. It was haunted, they said, but then, Gilbert the Revenant haunted us already.

Finally, we heard the horse’s hooves clomp on
wet mud, then on wood as we slid to the back door of the wagon. We were heading steeply uphill, and heard yells as guardsmen of the Temple yelled instructions. Finally, we stopped, and heard voices outside as the doors were opened. Ugly face stared at us, hands reached for us, pulling us out to drop like sacks on the cold ground, and men laughed hollowly. They lifted us up, and pushed us resolutely forward, a man pinching Henriette’s bottom as she stumbled. Around us, a musty courtyard was full of discarded barrels and the high, dark walls seemed to close the sight of the sky from us.

A man, bushy bearded fellow in a thick leather tunic grinned
as many men stared at us. ‘These noble murderesses have a room with others of their doomed kind. The third cell, boys, top floor of the northeast tower. The nest it is for the birdies.’

‘Yes sir,’ said a younger guard who was hauling me forward.
He grinned.

I did not know what to expect.
Damp, lightless cellar, or a cell in the sky that was equally devoid of light and life? I was happy to find that it would not be so, and the stories I had so enjoyed, rarely spoke the truth.

As we were dragged up the stairs of a nerve wrecking, narrow staircase, we arrived at a level where a central
hall of the highest level of a squat tower was well light, full of chairs and tables and on the sides, barred doors to cell blocks. Reaching that hall, the bushy bearded man, and the younger one, clearly the brother to the first man, dismissed the other guards, and opened our fetters.

‘Welcome to the Temple.
I am Andre Carrabin. Formerly a sad excuse for a carpenter, as is my brother, Pierre. Now we serve the king and guard the many prisoners, and do favors to men of influence.’ They smiled as we ogled around the circular room. ‘Our wives Mathilde and Agnés are making the dinner. Here, in the central hall,’ he gestured, ‘you can spend time during the day. Evenings, you will go to the cellblocks. Yours is the third one,’ he pointed at huge door made of rusty bars. ‘There are mainly unlucky nobles here, and you are known as de Vienes. Terrible murderesses and extortionists! This is your cover, so act the part. I know, it is bad, very bad story, but you fill in the blanks. We are but guards, after all and you used to create books!’

They laughed hollowly as they opened up the bars, and shoved us in. What was behind the door surprised us.
It was not like facing a hungry bear, or a gang of hardened criminals about to teach you the most basic lessons of the pecking order. Instead happy faces greeted us, pale, but smiling benevolently. Here lay some twenty prisoners, men and women, and they had made it clear where each sex slept. That did not stop them from having sex, of course, but they seemed to be doing well and living in relative harmony. The problem, Marie, was, of course, that here they had to pay heavily for everything, the sad excuse for the food included, while their various crimes and the investigation into their charges could take years, and so, while we felt uncomfortable at first, we became popular.

Georges had b
estowed a handsome allowance on us.

That would have been enough, I think,
to make us lovable, but we had a cover and I was determined to play the role. De Viens! Murderesses. Playing a noble, Marie, is not very hard, especially since the people coming to greet us lacked most of the trappings of a high class and looked mostly like we did. They wore plain but good clothing, and had lost much of their airs. Act like you belong, and you do. Speak about shadowy, sibilant politics in a roundabout way, have surprising opinions. Play wolf even if you are a trembling sheep. Disagree on everything someone says, yet politely, agree on something else, no matter how foolish. Be confident, and that will curry you favor. I thought about these things. As I told you, I knew how to lie like a man.

.
   An older man with salt and pepper beard accosted us. ‘What did you do, Madame?’ he asked Henriette, scratching under his shirt, for lice and rats were the only ones in the Temple of their own free will.

We looked at each other
in confusion but only for so long. I sat down on the relatively clean straw and breathed a long, ragged breath. Mother rolled her eyes and crossed her hands under her breasts. ‘We were foully robbed, fellow prisoners. Robbed.’

‘Robbed?’ a spindly, thin woman in an ill-fitting satin dress asked.
‘By highway robbers or the judge? Where is your husband, Madame?’

I intercepted mother from answering. ‘
The judge robbed us, and so did a vile man. Father had to leave this quarrelsome country, like so many others,’ I said, sad, for many nobles had indeed left the country, and more would follow them.

‘The smart and the quick, that’s what they are, if they left already!’ said the old man
with an envious huff. ‘I am Robert de Dreux, by the way. A count.’

I curtsied like a fool and disguised my ineptness by a cough. ‘Excuse me; they kept us in a moldy dungeon for a week. We were to sell our house near the City
Hall, follow father. A wealthy, greasy merchant wanted it. He agreed to pay what we asked.’

‘But renegaded?’ the woman said he eyes glinting with amusement.

‘Yes, and the bastard said he would tell the sans-culottes we hoarded food, unless we agreed. It was hard.’ I mused as I slapped my leg in mock anger. Henriette was holding her face. She did not like the lies. I lowered my voice. ‘He also wanted to bed me.’ Henriette turned red from face.

‘And you are but a child still? Threatening...’ Robert said,
much angered, and the rest of the nobles were mumbling in agreement.

‘Yes. So, mother took a gun and placed it on his
meaty forehead, and told him to give us the money we were owed, or he would die.’ I mimicked the scene with my finger, and crossed my eyes to look at the imaginary pistol. ‘The judge said we had been found guilty of extortion and murder. What a lie.’

‘What happened?’ the thin woman asked, with a laugh, entertained.

Henriette, apparently feeling it was her duty to take part in the lie, cleared her voice and stammered along the way I had started, and I cursed her under my breath, raising my eyebrows at her. ‘Well, the judge sentenced us to be incarcerated. They found us guilty.’ I cursed her softly.

‘No, no,’ someone asked from the dark. ‘That is clear! You are here. What happened to the
bastard merchant?’

I
again clapped my knee in mock anger. ‘Oh! We did not extort him, only asked him kindly for our due, but when he did not pay, thinking mother weak, she did shoot him. He had it coming, didn’t he?’ I swept a lazy hand across our dresses. ‘We are paupers, and now we are here. In good company, finally!’

They cheered us, happy how we dealt with the situation, and it is surprisingly easy, Marie, to become a noble.

The time in the prison was not bad, on hindsight. We had plenty of food, for nobles set a good table, we had money to make it even a better one, and Andre and Pierre often found the food their wives had to prepare was not consumed, even if it was paid for, as we occasionally enjoyed fresh bread, juicy sausage, fairly good wine and ale imported from the outside. We played a lot of chess and backgammon, we read everything we could get, and the woman, who had asked us questions, Adéle d’Estoi, taught me to write, though in secret, for she alone had not been fooled by my lies, and wanted to reward the entertainment somehow. She knew we were not who we said we were, she knew I had lied, and did not care. I would scamper to the small woman with something she had asked me to write, and she would give me useful advice. ‘It looks fine,’ she said, ‘like a crow shat on the paper, and then hopped in the shit for fun.’ I liked her and she liked me. She was an infamous murderess as well, they said, but I did not fear her.

And she had books, Marie. Books. I read until I could not see well enough in the evening and nights.

Robert, the older noble, took an instant liking to mother. I liked Robert, who was a perfect gentleman and I know mother was happy with the slow flirt the gentleman was applying on her, for we had time.

Andre and Pierre watched us, even when we were let to the yard for two hours a week. There we sat on red, white, and blue painted chairs, things confiscated from some revolutionary craftsmen. It was a style to be very popular soon, Marie, for dresses and furniture all joined the revolution, as long as they had the three colors, the white of the king and red and blue of Paris.

A new arrival, a nobleman of Vendée came in at November. He told how the church had lost most it’s opulent property, and people who had been fed by the church, found themselves hungry. Violence, he told us, would spread like plague.

For us, this meant little. Andre gave us
the coin from Georges, taking, of course, a goodly portion of it. His pock-faced wife Mathilde took an instant dislike on Henriette for mother was a beauty, but Pierre liked to sit and chat with me. He was a young man, handsome in a ruffian kind of way, his ponytail bushy under his floppy hat and his grin was always present. Sometimes, he would play chess with me, though he was hopeless. Unlike Gilbert, he did not mind losing. His wife Agnés, a small, plump redheaded thing, started to hate me.

Andre, while t
echnically working for the king, brought the nobles some crumpled weekly publication of Histoire des Révolutions, a collection of latest political happenings and essays by Camille. From the newspapers, we learned that Paris had ordered new division of its areas, and Cordeliers district lost its name, which, Andre told us, just amused Georges. The Club was growing in subtle and real power and so was the Jacobins Club.

Noble titles
were declared obsolete and so we all became equal. There were just citizens, and we heard as people cheered across the town. The nobles in the tower only rolled their eyes and I understood that the nobility was not something that could be wiped out by silly declarations. Many more papers came to be, like that of Hébert’s and we got an occasional copy. The pope condemned the whole process of dismantling the church and even threatening the very core of religion, belief in God.

We spent
a merry Christmas with the nobles. One left us; others joined us and that Christmas I was blushing, for mother had given old Robert comfort. They were lying in a cell under a blanket, and Robert was kissing her lips tenderly, attentively asking her what she enjoyed. They were nude; I saw that, for Robert’s ass was bare under the blanket, hairy and moving with a surprisingly vigorous rhythm. That was the love I imagined as it might be when people cared for each other, and what Adam had done to her, was not. She enjoyed it, I saw, and I wondered at how well Robert knew her. Then, after a long spell of blissful enjoyment, she arched her back, her hands and nails scratching the wall in ecstasy, and Robert also reached a wonderful climax, panting and laughing at the same time, and I ogled at the display of mutual pleasure. I giggled; they saw me and I ran to the door, holding my hand over my face. I was happy for mother.

A hand grabbed me through the bars, and I nearly screamed as it turned me a
round. Pierre was smiling there, his eyes twinkling.

‘You bastard,’ I said, holding my chest.

‘Sorry, I could not help it. What is wrong?’

‘My mother, she…’ I started but shook my head.

He was fumbling with his clinking keys, alarmed. I waved my hands in panic. ‘No, no. She is very happy.’ Pierre’s eyes opened wide and he laughed.

‘Very good for her.
You are young, still, so keep far from the culottes!’ he said. The thought had not dawned on me and I blushed. He grinned his usual happy grin and hesitated and wiped some dirt off my chin. ‘How is it that such a terribly beautiful child is locked up in here, eh?’

‘You do not know?’ I asked him, while strangely enjoying his attention. I found myself leaning on the bar, my head tilted.

‘No,’ he told me. ‘They tell us very little. Only that you should be kept safe and silent.’

‘We have behaved, have we not?’ I asked him huskily and he shook his head.

‘Stop flirting girl,’ he grinned. ‘Agnés is a creature you do not wish to rouse.’

‘Not a happy marriage, then?’

‘She is,’ he confided in me, ‘not entirely happy with our present profession. And Mathilde bullies her. How did you end up here?’

‘I scratched the eye off my cousin,’ I told him proudly
like an idiot, ‘Gilbert Baxa.’