Minuet (3 page)

“Your daughter
was
a girl, sir, if I recall,” was his stiff, embarrassed answer.

“But certainly I
was
a girl. How else does one become a woman?” she asked, with a contemptuous flicker of a glance toward Degan.

“How old is she?” Degan asked his cousin.

“Dix-neuf,”
she answered. “I can speak for myself, me. I was nineteen years old
le quinze Ventôse.”

“Eh? Your birthday is in March,” her father pointed out.

“We have a new calendar in France,” she told him. “Dating from 1792 we have the new calendar, twelve months with thirty days each, three
décadis.
Started to date from the proclamation of the Republic, on September 22, 1792, but not commenced till last October, we started in the year two. We missed year one.”

“That leaves five days over,” Degan said, listening with interest to this.

“Six in leap years,” she said. “They throw them in at the end of the year—
sans-culottides
they are called, for the
sansculottes.”

“Damned nonsense,” he muttered.

“Damned smart nonsense,” she answered knowingly, unaware of the widening of Degan’s eyes at her outspoken language. “The Sans-Culottes now work nine days in a row instead of six, with one day off each
décadi,
and pretend to love it. If they don’t, Sainte Guillotine convinces them.
Eh bien,
let us speak of other things.” She walked forward and sat down, disposing her long train in a heap on the floor, and sticking her stockinged feet into the pocket for extra warmth.

“What’s this? No shoes?” Harlock asked, with an admiring peep at a pair of trim ankles.

“I am the
sans-chaussure,
Papa, not a
sans-culotte,
I assure you.”

“But where are your shoes?”

“I have no clothes. None at all. I wear your curtain, and Miss Pringle’s petticoats, somebody else’s stockings, and the bureau’s scarf. You will buy me some lovely gowns, yes?”

“To be sure, my dear, I will.”

Degan sat on confounded and highly displeased at a discussion of a young lady’s undergarments. “We have matters of greater import than your wardrobe to discuss,” he said rather sharply. “We are eager to hear whether your mother and Edward are alive.”

“Of course they are! What do you think, that I sit here smiling, me, if my
maman
and
cher
Édouard are not alive?
Nom d’un nom,
he is
inhuman,
this one,” she said to her father.

Degan’s eyes flashed at her belittling manner of indicating his presence, but the father spoke up. “Why don’t you tell us all about it, Sal?” He was smiling so inanely at the girl that Degan saw he must listen closely to her story for inaccuracies. His suspicions were not wholly abated to discover the person was a female. She had very little in common with a
lady
in his view.

“I tell you everything, Papa,” she said, patting his knee in a fashion that bore, in Degan’s mind, traces of a streetwalker, though to be sure this was no more than an impression. He had no actual acquaintance with such low creatures.

“Where are they?” Degan asked.

She turned a white shoulder purposefully on him and addressed her remarks to her father. Over the back of her chair, he saw the shoulder and six inches of back, every inch of both naked. He had a fleeting sensation that she had lost her gown again, and arose to put her shawl around her nakedness. She looked up at him out of the corner of her eyes and smiled.
“Merci, monsieur,”
she said. He felt suddenly warm under his collar, and took up a seat at a good safe distance from this daughter of Satan.

“Maman and Édouard are at the Maison Belhomme in Paris,” she began. “It is an insane asylum just north of St. Antoine, on the rue de Charonne.”

“They’ve never gone mad!” he exclaimed, turning pale.

“Mad? Oh no, Mama is as sly as ever. It is not really a madhouse. Well, partly it is, but the doctor Belhomme, he is as clever as may be. He has the connections,
tu comprends?
It is where prisoners with money find safety. He has friends in high places.”

“I don’t understand. Is it an asylum or a prison?” Degan asked, focusing all his attention on her story.

“It
was
an asylum,” she explained, with very scanty patience. “After the Conciergerie was overfull, and Luxembourg Palace turned into another jail, also soon fall, and half the abbeys in France stuffed full of political prisoners, Dr. Belhomme had the idea to turn his asylum into a prison for patients supposedly too ill to stand trial.”

“What happened to his lunatics?” Degan asked.

“His business was falling off. He was not half full at all, which is why he started the prison. Others have died since or been taken home. Still a few remain, pushed off up to the attic, where they do not stay, but make a great nuisance belowstairs. In the autumn of ‘93 Belhomme opened his doors to prisoners. That was when things turned really bad, you must have heard?”

“We assumed your grandfather was executed with the Girondists last October,” Harlock said. “Did Armand get to Belhomme’s?”

“No, it was not open yet. He went to the guillotine. Right after the purge Belhomme opened his doors. The radicals enacted the Law of Suspects, virtually taking away any measure of safety for anyone. Mama and Édouard and myself were denied certificates of good citizenship because of Grandpère Augé. You can’t move without the certificate. We were required to appear before the Vigilance Committee, and thrown into the Conciergerie.”

“Good God, you were never in that black hole! They say there is no escaping the Conciergerie,” Harlock marveled.

“We escaped, Mama and Édouard and I, but it was very dear. Mama’s friends negotiated with Belhomme to accept us into his
maison—
at five thousand livres each!”

“How much would that be in our money, Degan?” Harlock asked.

“About three hundred pounds.”

“Each,”
Minou pointed out, “and the monthly charge half that again. And we have been there nearly ten months.
Imaginez un peu...”

“English, Sal,” her father reminded her.

“Where did you get so much money, with all properties confiscated?” Degan asked suspiciously.

“All
property was not confiscated,” she pointed out, disliking these interruptions to her story. “Grandpère’s lands and money—that was gone, but Mama had her jewels. If she had deposited them at the Assembly as a gift to the nation like the others we might have been spared, but she only left off paste replicas—Grandpère suggested it. We had done all the other things of the patriots, and thought we might escape. We quit wearing powdered wigs first, then gave up wigs entirely, and wore the hair unpowdered. The sans-culottes decided it was a waste of flour to powder the hair, when there was not enough flour for bread. We put off our panniers and took the silver buckles off our shoes to put on the tricolor rosettes like everyone else, and Édouard even switched from breeches to pants like a workman, hoping to be mistaken for a
sans-culotte,
but—”

“Just what is this
sans-culotte
you keep speaking of?” her father asked, his head reeling.

“Oh Papa, how ignorant you are in England!
Sans-culotte
is another name for revolutionary. A journalist, a royalist journalist
bien entendu,
made up the name as an insult, but the revolutionaries took it as their name, and soon the aristos were dashing out to buy up pants and suspenders to try to pass for what they were not.”

“So, what happened after you got into this insane asylum?” Degan prodded her on.

“Oh, it was charming there. No bars, no guards—a very nice establishment, with a garden and orchard for strolling, and music and cards in the evening, and the food not so very disgusting. There were no maggots in the bread, at least. But the greatest attraction chez Belhomme was safety. His ‘patients’ were never called to trial, you see. Their accusations became conveniently ‘lost’ in the public prosecutor’s office. Belhomme was in league with Fouquier-Tinville, of course, paying him I don’t know what huge sum to go along with the scheme. Except for the insane, who had a habit of escaping from their rooms and charging into the saloon, it was not at all bad. Visitors were allowed, and the inmates quite charming. The duchesse d’Orleans is there, Papa, carrying on an affair with Rouzet, the deputy—imagine! We had a lovely actress, Mademoiselle Lange, who would perform for us in the evenings. The comte de Volney was there—he wrote about ruined empires and things, rather a bore actually. And we were allowed company, but no balls.”

“Your mother and Edward, they are still there? They are safe?” Harlock demanded eagerly.

“Yes, they are safe enough, but the money runs low. The jewels are all gone, and the last payment is only good till the end of July. He uses the old calendar, Belhomme. Lots of people do. It is very dear—seventy-five hundred livres a month for the three of us. And he will not be put off, that Belhomme, who is not at all
bel.
The duchesse de Châtelet refused to pay, and was promptly shipped off to a real prison, where she was condemned to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal. It is all business with Belhomme. He is not amenable to flirtation. Mama tried that stunt,” the girl said frankly. “Of course, he has an archwife, who is every bit as sly as himself.”

“How can we get money to them?” Harlock asked.

“Mama said
you
would contrive, Papa,” Minou said, with a ravishing smile of trust.

“How does it come
you
escaped and the others did not?” Degan asked, mistrusting that innocent smile, and the father’s instinctive reaction to it.

“Oh, that Belhomme, he would do anything for money. One of his lunatics turned on a servant girl and stabbed her with a butcher knife. It was Édouard who had the very clever idea of pretending it was I who had been killed. The girl was about my age. Her body was taken away and identified as mine, and
I
am officially Agnès Maillard. We kept it from the servants there, who would have reported it in a flash, but a few of the guests knew—they saw what happened. I got her
carte civile,
the certificate of good citizenship you know, and left Belhomme’s to come to England to get you to help us, and here I am.” She tossed up her hands and smiled, considering her story all told.

“That sounds a perilous voyage for a girl alone. How did you manage it?” Degan asked.

She shrugged her impertinent shoulders in a dismissing fashion, while the gown slipped a trifle. “I walked. Oh, Papa, I must tell you! I saw Grandpère guillotined! It was
awful!
The head snapped off in a flash. At least it was swift. That’s why they call it to sneeze in the basket. It was just like a sneeze—one jerk and it was over. And now they have killed Hébert too, the Cordelier leader you know, and nineteen others executed at the Place de la Révolution. They say it was like a public circus. Someone had put up grandstands on the corners of the square, and sold seats at a terrific price. There was a larger crowd than for the king’s execution. He was a great nuisance to Robespierre with his writings—Père Duchesne, he called himself.”

Degan swallowed and looked hard at the girl before him, who spoke of twenty heads chopped off as a circus, yet as he looked more closely, he saw the big eyes were not laughing now. There was a shadow of fear, terror, behind them. “Try to put that out of your mind,” he said, in a more gentle voice than he had formerly used with her.

“No!” she said fiercely. “That must never be forgotten. It is Mama’s fate, and Édouard’s, if they are not rescued, or at least money got to them. You will do it, Papa? You can arrange it?”

“Yes, my love. I shall speak to Pitt tomorrow and see what can be done.”

The girl nodded her copper curls, but Degan sat wondering how anything of the sort would be done. Pitt had never been able even to discover what had happened to the family. How would he make this impossible arrangement?

“Surely you didn’t walk all the way from Paris to London,” her father asked, to divert her mind.

“Oh no, not across the water,” she said with a pert smile, her eyes clearing. She believed implicitly in her father, Degan thought. She imagined Harlock had some magical powers to make all right.

“How did you get here?” Degan asked.

“It was not at all difficult. I had the
carte civile
of Agnès Maillard. I had also her clothes. It was fortunate her family lived in Berck, not so far from Calais, giving me a good excuse for my trip. With my
carte civile
and my
bonnet rouge,
I had only to smile prettily at the
gardes
and show my cockade, and I was allowed to pass everywhere. But it was very far—about two hundred kilometers to Berck, and another hundred to Calais along the coast.
Comme j’
é
tais fatigué!”

“You walked three hundred kilometers!” her father shouted. “How the devil far is that in miles, Degan?”

“Roughly one hundred and eighty, but that only takes her to Calais.”

“Oh, but from Dover to London, that was nothing,” Minou assured them blithely. “I didn’t walk all the way either. I had a very nice ride in a farmer’s cart, on top of his
choux,
from Argenteuil to Chantilly, and there a boy lent me his ass for five kilometers, and at Berck the Maillards took me in their fishing boat to Touquet—only ten kilometers, but it was a rest from walking. Oh, and very useful! They loaned me boy’s clothing to wear after I got to England, so that the men would stop pestering me, you know. They are really dreadful flirts, those Englishmen.”

Degan’s head jerked sharply toward her at this speech, but she was unaware of it. “Best of all, they arranged for me to cross the Channel in a smuggler’s boat. An English one, Papa, so you need not worry I was in any danger. Though the revenuers nearly caught us. There was a good chase off New Romney. Luckily it was extremely foggy, and we got away without dumping the brandy.”

“You walked from Romney to London? Why did you not send word to your father?” Degan demanded.

“I tried to do that, but my money, he was no good. I had only
assignats,
you see. French revolutionary paper money that that old fox Belhomme sold me—at the black-market prices too. I paid too much for it, but in France it was acceptable. They prefer gold,
bien entendu.
It was pleasant walking in England—so peaceful, no
gardes
anywhere to hide from, no notices with crowds around worrying what the government would ration next, no angry mobs. I enjoyed it, and the bakers were very kind. One in Tenterden gave me
two
stale loaves for only sweeping out his shop and washing the pans. I never tasted anything so good. Could I have some bread, Papa?” she asked, suddenly remembering that she had dined on only a cold half of chicken.