Illumination (40 page)

The forest narrowed into a triangle, with a railway bridge at its apex where the Strasbourg line crossed a canal. Somewhere away from the tracks a light was burning. Hannah could see a low parapet of sandbags, but no soldiers.

‘We’ve got to go over,’ she said to Laure. ‘We’ll run – take it in turns.’

They drew closer, moving around a small headland. The source of the light came into view; a lamp was propped on one of the concrete supports beneath the bridge, illuminating a scene of striking stillness and symmetry, the mirror-like canal reflecting the massive iron lattice suspended above it. Standing on the bank, gazing into the water, was a tall, black-clad man. It was Jean-Jacques Allix.

Hannah and Laure laughed; they joined in an amazed, joyful embrace. Salvation was at hand. They were as good as back in Montmartre, telling their story over drinks in the Danton. It was a truly astonishing coincidence. The perimeter of Paris was more than forty miles long; the two siege lines and the no-man’s-land between them a tangle of ruins, trenches and redoubts. Hannah had imagined a chance encounter such as this, of course, during the hundreds of hours she’d spent alone in that storeroom. She’d concluded that it was beyond all likelihood, not worth hoping for – but there he was. He’d take them home. Their trial was over.

‘Quickly,’ said Hannah, ‘before he moves on.’

They had to clear a hundred yards of loose woodland and then descend an embankment to the canal path. Hannah began to run, lifting her boots clear of the undergrowth. She was nearly halfway there when Laure grasped hold of her arm, dragging her down into a bed of brambles. The cocotte pointed to the right: a detachment of Prussian infantry was trudging along the canal path, rifles on their shoulders, heading directly for Jean-Jacques.

‘Dear God!’ Hannah exclaimed, trying to shake off Laure’s hand and get back to her feet. ‘We must warn him!’

‘No.’ Laure was adamant. Her grip grew tighter. ‘
No
.’

Hannah fell quiet. Laure was right: it would be better if they didn’t intervene. This, after all, was the Leopard of Montmartre. A trap had probably been set. At any second he would make his move – draw a pair of revolvers and start shooting, or perhaps trigger a hidden bomb. Hannah had read her mother’s articles in the
Figaro
. She knew what to expect.

Jean-Jacques was cutting it very fine, though, standing there in the light of that lamp. He must be using it as a lure – the Prussians would approach to investigate, coming out of the darkness, laying themselves open to his attack. They were thirty yards away, then twenty, and still he didn’t shift. The soldiers disappeared behind one of the other bridge supports. Hannah realised that he wasn’t going to hide from them. He’s pretending to surrender, she thought, to get them close, too close to use their rifles – and then the bayonet will slide from his sleeve.

They were around him now, five of them in their helmets and brown coats. Surely he couldn’t hope to win against so many. Hannah tried to stay calm, but couldn’t help thinking that he might have misread the situation. Was she about to watch her lover die instead of their enemies?

But no; it was far, far worse than that. Jean-Jacques was talking to them. Even at fifty yards’ distance, Hannah could tell that he was speaking their language, and fluently. He was speaking German. Stepping back, he made a wide gesture with his arm, then pointed near to where they were concealed. Directions were being supplied; a route estimated.

Hannah blinked. Her beloved Jean-Jacques, the man she’d thought would prove their saviour, was assisting the search party dispatched to hunt them down. Deadness spread through her stomach, up into her lungs, closing around her heart. At her side, in the brambles, she could hear Laure muttering out furious curses.

‘It’s a mistake,’ Hannah said. ‘He’s – he’s tricking them. This is part of it.’

Jean-Jacques gave a couple of further instructions. When he’d finished, the men saluted and began fanning out into the woods.

‘There’s no damned
mistake
,’ Laure spat. ‘Christ Almighty, he’s
in charge
.’

The forest floor tipped away, pitching like the deck of a ship. Brambles scratched Hannah’s cheek; she struck against a tree trunk, crumpling among its roots. A hard, nauseous convulsion shuddered through her. She coughed, rocking forward, her splayed fingers crunching into a pocket of frozen snow.

Laure tore her greatcoat from the brambles and hauled her upright. ‘Come on,’ she said.

‘I – I don’t understand …’

‘You don’t need to
understand
.’ The cocotte spoke harshly. ‘He’s a damned
spy
. Can’t you see?’

Hannah shook her head. It was absurd. Spies were stooped men in strange hats who lurked around
mairies
and barrack-houses, trying to overhear the conversations of soldiers; or elegant ladies versed in seducing government officials, obtaining secrets in exchange for their attentions. They were not radical orators, or veterans of the American War, or committed socialists hell-bent on revolution. Jean-Jacques had gone into battle against the Prussians, for God’s sake – had killed dozens on those raids of his. How could he possibly be one of them? It was
absurd
.

‘That can’t be true,’ she said. ‘It can’t. I would have known. Otherwise I am the greatest fool to – to have—’

‘You’ve been
used
, Mademoiselle Pardy,’ Laure told her. ‘Lied to on a grand scale. It’s the way men are: they fuck us and then they knife us in the back.’ She peered towards the bridge. ‘Of course, this evil bastard of yours has knifed us all. And he’ll suffer for it, I promise you. But we have to go.’

Hannah realised what Laure was saying. She meant to expose Jean-Jacques – to throw him open to the wrath of the people. The revelation that a great popular hero of the siege was a fraud, one of the enemy no less, would cause wild outrage in the workers’ districts. There would be reprisals; the red leaders, Blanqui, Pyat and the rest of them, would be desperate for scapegoats. Hannah herself would top their list – was she not an untrustworthy foreigner, one of the loathed English no less? – but anyone who’d been close to Jean-Jacques would surely be in danger as well. His former comrades would turn rabid, eager to demonstrate their own lack of involvement and hatred of betrayal.

And then there was Elizabeth. Those articles in
Le Figaro
had plainly been based on falsehood, but they’d made Jean-Jacques Allix famous, transforming him from an obscure rabble-rouser into the Leopard of Montmartre. Mrs Pardy was one of his known allies. The reds would certainly come for her as well.

‘Wait,’ Hannah said.

Laure studied her, the old contempt returning. ‘You’re afraid for yourself,’ she declared, her voice rising slightly. ‘You’re afraid for your stupid old mule of a mother. This man has lied to you, to
everyone
, and you are thinking only of the precious Pardy family. Want to plan your way out, do you? How to get back to London?’

‘We must be careful,’ Hannah said. ‘We can’t just blunder in and—’

‘To the devil with that!’ Laure turned to leave. ‘This damned Leopard is Montmartre’s error, and he is Montmartre’s to correct!’

Hannah reached for Laure’s wrist, thinking to hold her in place for a second longer; the cocotte pushed her away and their whispered argument became a grapple. Any warmth that had developed between them evaporated. Laure dug at Hannah with a bony hip and then took a swing, her fist driving into Hannah’s left eye. It was a good punch; Hannah staggered and tripped, tumbling through a screen of dead ferns into a shallow ditch.

By the time she’d recovered Laure was gone. She looked through the ferns, flinching as she touched her fast-swelling eye. Mist hung among the trees, infused with pale yellow light from the lamp at the railway bridge. The Prussian soldiers were crashing about in the undergrowth somewhere off to the right. They might have heard something – Jean-Jacques might have heard something – and be coming to investigate. This thought made her sick with horror; collecting herself, she retied her bootlaces and buttoned her coat. She had to get out of this ditch. She had to keep moving.

The declaration, a day old and signed by a long list of provisional government ministers, was posted on every corner:

CITIZENS, the enemy kills our wives and children, bombards us night and day, and pelts our hospitals with shells. One cry – To Arms!’ – has burst from every breast. Those who can shed their life’s blood on the field of battle will march against the enemy; those who remain, jealous of the heroism of their brothers, will, if required, suffer with calm endurance every sacrifice as their proof of devotion to their country. Suffer, and die if necessary, but conquer! Vive la République!

Hannah walked on, her arms crossed tightly. This explained the lack of crowds in the avenues, the empty tenements and cafés – and her straightforward passage through the siege line she’d feared would be so impregnable. Another sortie was underway. She’d been alert for mention of the Leopard or any other sign that Laure had got through and started spreading word of their awful discovery, but the few people who stood on corners or outside the
cantines municipales
spoke only of this latest French attack. The sortie was being made westwards, towards the enemy headquarters at Versailles. The defenders of Paris had learned that at some point in the past week Kaiser Wilhelm had been declared Emperor of the Germans in Louis XIV’s Hall of Mirrors, to fanfares and great celebration; it was the reason, Hannah realised, for the triumphal tour of the line that had brought the king to Gagny. The Parisians saw this as a direct and deliberate insult, staged to display the continuing power of that which they’d just rejected with such earnestness. Honour demanded a mighty assault on Versailles, the old men on the corners agreed, to let Fritz know precisely what Republican France thought of his new emperor.

‘He’s done it now, that Kaiser,’ they told each other. ‘Oh yes, he’s pushed us too far this time. He’ll see what Paris is really made of!’

Hannah listened with acute disquiet. Jean-Jacques would have been calling vociferously for this sortie, as he had for the first one. His intention from the start had been to get as many Frenchmen as possible sent out before the Prussian cannon. The radical cause, the cause of freedom and the French people, had been exploited to bring about their destruction. And Hannah hadn’t seen it, not for a moment. She’d supported him openly and enthusiastically, accepting every unlikely thing he’d presented to her – cheering as this lunatic situation had grown steadily worse. She’d been revealed as what she’d always despised, what her detractors had so often accused her of being: a silly bourgeois girl playing at revolutions, striking a pose, her head as empty as that of any society miss or drawing-room habitué.

In the side streets of La Villette were the consequences. Hannah saw at least thirty children’s coffins, pitifully small and crudely made, being carried from the houses of the poor and loaded onto the handcarts that were to take them away for burial. Distraught mothers huddled around them, most too weak for any display of sorrow; sallow and desperately thin, they’d been left to manage as best they could whilst their men went to serve in the militia. These were the ordinary working families Hannah had wanted to help – to liberate from the impoverishment and brutalisation they had endured under the Empire – yet here they were starving, watching their offspring perish from hunger and disease whilst the radical socialists, their supposed champions, urged the continuation of the war at all costs.

Hannah paused on the place de la Rotonde, leaning heavily against a lamppost. She’d been up for more than thirty hours. Following the canal towards Paris, she’d crouched for much of the night at the head of a storm drain, waiting for a chance to sneak by a heavily guarded Prussian position. At dawn, however, the majority of the soldiers had suddenly departed, marching north – to assist with the repulsion of the westward sortie, as she now knew. Slipping into French territory, then convincing a gaggle of bored sentries that she’d escaped from a Prussian gaol and was on her way to rejoin her battalion, had been surprisingly simple.

This meant, of course, that Laure would very probably have got through too. Hannah considered heading to Montmartre to tell her side of things and protest her innocence – but she couldn’t honestly pretend that she’d succeed in swaying anyone. Without Jean-Jacques Allix, her influence was negligible. She’d only ever been tolerated by the working people; they’d turn on her willingly. All she could do was warn others who were at risk – warn her family. Clem was gone, thankfully, off with Besson in his balloon. This left her mother. Elizabeth would take Allix’s unmasking in her stride; she’d be issuing instructions and conceiving plans within minutes of her daughter’s arrival. Hannah was so reduced that this thought brought her relief rather than vexation. She straightened up and made for the Grand Hotel.

The centre of Paris was given over to the ambulance-carts. Perhaps a dozen of them were unloading outside the Grand. Casualties had already been coming in for several hours; Hannah passed through the bloody turmoil of the lobby entirely unnoticed. The door to her mother’s suite was ajar. Elizabeth’s sitting room was light after the murky hallway, and rich with colour – the kind of colour Hannah had longed for whilst locked up in Gagny. It was
her
colour, in fact: the room was filled with her work, more or less every painting she’d done since arriving in Paris. This was mystifying. Madame Lantier’s shed was quite secure. Why had Elizabeth thought it necessary to take such a step?

The portrait, hung in pride of place above the mantelpiece, made Hannah start so violently that she almost knocked over a chair. She took a few deep, steadying breaths, unable to look elsewhere. More than ever she was struck by the picture’s vacuity. It no longer seemed so strange. That which she’d been searching for, that which had caused her such frustration, simply hadn’t been there. It couldn’t be. Jean-Jacques Allix was not a person, not a human being with a mind and a soul and a heart, but a worthless counterfeit. Hannah strode towards the fireplace, flushed with rage, intending to break the frame over her knee and then tear the canvas into a hundred ragged strips.