A Dark and Distant Shore (113 page)

It was everything he had hoped. People told him that the great days had gone, that the Gaslight Empire was dying, but he didn’t mind. Humanity was Francis’s passion – and when better to study it than when the barque of art and culture and civilization was going down, perhaps for the last time? The death of a civilization was, to him, more exciting than its apogee. He didn’t think of it quite in those terms, and he certainly wasn’t a vulture; it was just that people under stress were more interesting than when they were content.

There wasn’t yet any hint of what form the end would take, nor even any sense of waiting for it, except perhaps in a reckless undercurrent to the gaiety and sensation-seeking that were the hallmark of Parisian society. Never before had Francis experienced the heady delights of that special kind of pleasure that didn’t think about yesterday, or tomorrow, or anything but the here and now, and he settled down into it like a born voluptuary.

Rejecting all offers of hospitality, he took an apartment, a splendid place in one of the old houses on the fringes of Montmartre that was being given up by a struggling artist who hadn’t struggled hard enough. The decorations, the young man said, had been begun during a brief and all too fleeting period of affluence, and Francis was privately grateful that it
had
been brief. The salon was a nightmare in cretonne, with every available inch, walls and ceiling included, covered with vine leaves and parakeets, while one of the bedrooms was draped, tent-like, in cardinal red, with bed and lamps in the Turkish style, and a terracotta faun for company. The other company – a pet python – the artist took with him.

Then began the months of discovering the city. Francis wasn’t after facts but impressions, and he gathered enough to last him a lifetime. Moonlight on the Place Pigalle, and the dark shadows of the streets; student cafés where dinners were paid for in pictures, and others where one rubbed shoulders with thieves and housebreakers; grand restaurants on the boulevards; Hortense Schneider singing Offenbach; night entertainments in gardens, where the foliage under the gaslight was the essence of every green ever known; driving home through the soft, warm night in open carriages; and girls with ostrich feathers and inviting eyes. Francis, sometimes, might err on the side of formality, but he wasn’t a prude.

And always Paris’s own special smell, a compound of garlic and blue overalls, horses and tobacco, wine, and winds off the Seine. It filtered even into the bistro where Francis soon became a regular, the Nouvelle Athènes, blending with the morning bouquet of coffee and bad cognac and eggs frizzling in butter, with absinthe in the afternoons, and in the evenings with fragrant, steaming soup, and pungent cigarettes, and more coffee, and weak beer. Sometimes Francis sat quietly for hours at his little marble-topped table, his feet on the sanded floor, and a
bock
before him, watching the other habitués – the artist Manet with his square shoulders and his swagger; Degas, small of eye and large of necktie; the voluble novelist Villiers de l’Isle Adam; and Catulle Mendès, the great Parnassian with his high, febrile voice and his phrase-making. In time, they even awarded him a nod and a brief greeting. Francis didn’t want any more; he had no desire to talk, only to watch.

But although, in the course of half a dozen months, he found his way on to most levels of society, he found no trace of a pretty
écossaise
with big blue eyes and fair hair. It would have been easy if she had been an American. There weren’t more than four or five hundred of them in Paris; but there were five thousand British.

And then, on July fifteenth, war came, and after the first few jubilant weeks the dazzlingly beautiful French army, with its colour, its fanfares, its panache, discovered that Bismarck’s drab and stolid infantry and Herr Krupp’s cast steel breech-loading cannon were a great deal more than it had bargained for. Francis was there, watching, when Sedan fell and Louis-Napoleon surrendered, and he heard the whole Prussian army sing Luther’s ‘Old Hundred’ in thanksgiving and then begin to pack their gear to accompanying shouts of ‘
Nach Paris
!’

A sensible man, a man who was more interested in his own skin than in how other people behaved under stress, would have made for the coast. Francis didn’t. He went back to Paris to discover that the Third Republic had been declared and the city was preparing for siege.

He couldn’t decently spend all his time just watching people, so he volunteered to help with the American Ambulance, and since he had been involved with the auxiliary services during the Civil War, he was gratefully welcomed. When the siege began on September twentieth, there were thirteen thousand hospital beds in Paris, which wasn’t many in relation to the quarter million regular soldiers and National Guardsmen that the optimists claimed could be mustered to defend the city. But in a besieged city, unable to bring in extra doctors or equipment, there was little that the administration could do except allocate the worst cases to the established hospitals and farm the rest out to private charity, to the makeshift annexes known as
ambulances privées,
some of them located in religious institutions, some in railway stations, some in hotels, and some in the houses of the rich. Paris broke out in a rash of Red Cross flags, and tending the wounded became a fashionable occupation for her
grandes dames.
The only drawback to all this goodwill was that every time there was a battle or skirmish outside the walls the official conveyances of the
Intendance Militaire
became inextricably snarled up with those of the
ambulances privées
in anxious pursuit of customers.

The American Ambulance was something of a phenomenon. A certain Dr Thomas Evans, dentist to the hurriedly departed Empress Eugénie, had been intelligent enough to purchase all the up-to-date medical equipment exhibited by America at the Exposition Universelle of 1867. Further, America had discovered during the Civil War that the most effective way of combating septicaemia, which killed so many amputation cases, was by ensuring perfect ventilation – a concept that to the French, with their inbred horror of
courants d’air,
was entirely foreign. But it soon became noticeable that the Americans were saving four out of five amputation cases, while in the French hospitals the same proportion died. The defenders of Paris began carrying cards around with them saying that, if they were wounded, they would be deeply obliged to be succoured by the American Ambulance.

By the end of November, Francis Randall felt as if he and his ambulance cart, with its roll-up canvas sides and the Red Cross blazoned on it, had covered every inch of the countryside between the walls of Paris and the outlying rings of forts. He had even come to terms with his horses, a pair of ambling, hard-mouthed old nags that he suspected would ruin him forever for driving anything else.

It was on December fifth, when he was urging them, fully loaded, along the last lap of the rue de Rivoli, the canvas sides of the cart stained with blood that was not only today’s but yesterday’s, and the day before’s, because no one had had time to scrub them, that he found Juliana Telfer at last.

It was not the coincidence it seemed at first. For days, Paris had pinned its hopes on General Ducrot’s plan to break out through the surrounding Prussians and join up with Gambetta’s relieving force from Tours. But the Great Sortie had failed. Ducrot’s army had been beaten back, and so had Gambetta’s. Ducrot had lost twelve thousand officers and men, and Paris all hope of relief.

The wounded streamed back into Paris, some on their own feet, some in the ambulances, some in
bateaux-mouches
that dumped them on the quays of the Seine and sailed away again. The population of Paris rallied to help, and among its number was Juliana.

The salons of the Maison Worth et Bobergh in the rue de la Paix had been converted into an
ambulance privée,
and when the dreadful flood rolled into the city she went down to the nearest quay, at the Tuileries, to see what could be done. She had to leave the cart in one of the cross streets, and go on from there on foot. But she stopped when she saw what lay before her, and for a moment wondered whether she could go on. She had thought that nothing could be worse than Lucknow, and in some ways that was true. Nothing could match those awful, closed, oppressive months, with their sense of personal vindictiveness. But Paris was a great city, and its army was great, and so was the sheer number of its wounded. Not tens, or dozens, or scores, but hundreds. The weather was crisp and clear, so the smells were not too bad; but that was a minor dispensation. So many wounded – and so horribly! Not the clean wounds of rifle and bayonet that were familiar by now, but the damage that could be inflicted by the new Krupps artillery, nominal twenty-four pounders that threw projectiles weighing half a hundredweight, shells that exploded from their huge charge of black powder and threw great fragments of iron shrapnel to rip and tear through flesh and bone.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if the men had all been laid out in neat rows, but those who were capable of it – knowing, perhaps, that unless they moved others would be dumped almost on top of them – had begun to crawl over the splintered old timbers to a safer refuge. There was something obscene about the mangled wrecks of men, some of them half naked, wriggling laboriously on hands and knees between and sometimes over their comrades, leaving a dark, slippery, snail-like trail of blood behind them.

The private ambulances were strictly controlled, and Worth’s had been authorized to take only the lightly wounded. It meant that Juliana couldn’t help the men who needed help most, except by holding her flask of brandy and water to their mouths, or trying to staunch the bleeding with the bandages she had brought, and, later, strips of muslin torn from her petticoats. Somehow, she kept her senses under control as she tended gaping wounds with gold lace embedded in them, and tattered joints bound with filthy rags, and throats whose tendons glared white through stripped flesh. But after a time, she realized that even to relieve the crush by half a dozen men would be a help. There was one youth with a scalp wound, and another with the flesh sliced off his hip, and a third whose shoulder had been dislocated, and a fourth with a broken leg. All the time, as she helped them drag themselves towards her cart, there were hands clutching at her skirts, and despairing, agonized voices crying, ‘Madame!
À moi! À moi!
Help me. I need you more than they do!’

They were almost at the cart when she found, lying at the side of the avenue, a young National Guardsman, flat on his face, his limbs contorted and his hands clawing helplessly at the ground. None of the people hurrying to or from the jetty was paying any attention. Gently, she bent over him. He must have crawled as far as this, blindly, under some impulse to find his way home. He was only a boy, not more than sixteen or seventeen, and bleeding from a dozen places. Half his jaw had been shot away. Although she was almost fainting by now, Juliana couldn’t leave him. The rue de Rivoli was close by. Surely, since the journey was now so short, someone could find space for him in one of the ambulances that were making for the hospitals! She stumbled the few yards to the road, and there blessedly, among the stream of others, was an American Ambulance.

Running into the road, tripping, breathless, she tugged at the coat of the man who was driving. ‘Please!’ she gasped in English. ‘Help me! You must help me!’

Francis Randall looked down, and, perhaps because he was so tired, saw not the distraught expression, or the forgotten face, or the tangled hair, or the thin hands, but only the sapphire-blue eyes he had been looking for for months. With an explosive, ‘God almighty!’ he hauled on the reins and brought his ambling nags to a precipitate halt.

She was shy of him at first, and his intuition told him why. Taking her hand in his over the table at Chez Brébant, he said, ‘I won’t betray you, you know. I’m not family, only a distant connection. All I want to do is help.’

Looking back into the serene grey eyes, she was reassured. There was something about Francis Randall, something more than charming. Better versed than she had once been in the ways of men, she saw that he had an odd kind of spiritual purity that could have been sickly, but wasn’t. It didn’t, as it might have done, make him stupid, or naïve, or humourless. There was a word to describe what he had, but she couldn’t find it at first. And then she did. Integrity.

‘Thank you,’ she said, coughing a little, and then, in response to the change in his eyes, ‘It’s only the smoke, no more.’

Lyrically and inevitably, they fell in love. Against the rumble of Prussian guns outside the city, and Arctic cold inside, surrounded during the day by the sick and maimed, haunted at night by hunger and concern over what the next day would bring, they found in each other’s company an inexpressible delight. When, after two weeks, he took her in his arms and made love to her, it seemed as if they had been created only for each other. His tenderness was all she wanted in the world, a solace for the heartbreak, the numbness, the tears she had never shed, the loneliness of her adult years, and she warmed her tired soul at it. No one in all her life, except Richard for one brief year when she had been too young to appreciate it, had ever given her love so complete, so committed, so unstinting. Until Francis came, Juliana had thought that, alone with her little daughter, Christian, she had won through to contentment. Now she had more than that. She had happiness.

But Francis was in torment. She was so frail, and sometimes when he saw her with fresh eyes, after an absence of a day, it seemed as if she had lost substance even in the few hours of separation. He was in despair to know what to do. She needed care, and rest, warmth, and food, and all he could give her was love. With pain he looked at little Christy, three years old, pink-cheeked and smooth-skinned despite everything that the last months had done. All Juliana’s rations, everything she could afford to buy on the black market, went to the child, and had done ever since rationing began early in October.