One Thing More (26 page)

The thought of himself and Amandine as lovers was absurd; they were too close for that, almost brother and sister. But he could understand how Célie could have thought it. He had charmed enough women. He had always been able to smile with that easy brilliance and win almost anyone. His wit, his air of confidence had smoothed the path for him all his life, until this last couple of years when his home had gone, his father died and all the old certainties—the assumptions of safety, the natural arrogance of a man who was handsome, well born, rich enough, who needed no one’s favour or protection—were no longer hidden.

He had behaved as if he had courage because he wanted to be seen that way, and then found at the last that he had no alternative, and it had become real.

But he wished Célie saw him more as himself rather than the hero she needed him to be.

He was opposite Carichon’s house now. He hurried across the street and knocked on the door.

It was a moment or two before Carichon answered. He was still dressed in the rather affected clothes chosen by the Girondins. His jacket was overlong and loose, and his cravat too big.

‘Good evening, Citizen Carichon,’ Georges said quietly.

Carichon started, then caught his breath. ‘Coigny!’ He swallowed hard. ‘What are you doing out? Come in, before anyone sees you!’ He stood back and barely refrained from actually putting a hand on Georges to pull him over the threshold. The instant he was inside he closed the door. ‘What is it?’ he demanded. ‘Why are you here?’

He already knew a little of the plan, just the bare outlines. In any other circumstances Georges would not have trusted him with the heart of it because he told no one anything they did not need to know. But he was desperate, and Carichon held sufficient resemblance to the King to pass for him in a moment’s haste and emotion, if dressed the same and with a little powder in his hair to lighten it. He was the right height and had a rather long nose and heavy jowls and neck.

There was no choice.

‘Bernave is dead,’ he said quietly.

They were in a narrow, warm room with heavily patterned wallpaper and sparse furniture.

Carichon stared at him, his eyes wide. ‘What?’

‘Bernave is dead,’ Georges repeated. ‘He was murdered yesterday evening.’

‘Oh God!’ Carichon went pasty white, even in the yellow candlelight. ‘What about the plan?’

Georges did not answer immediately. Should he tell Carichon about Menou’s statement that Bernave was a spy for the Commune?

Carichon was staring at him. ‘We’ve got to save the King—it is the only way to avoid war! And there will be war! All the rhetoric on earth won’t help then!’ His voice was rising with his anger. He gestured wildly, only just missing the edge of the wooden desk with his fingers. ‘Tell the mothers of the dead, tell the wounded and the blind and the homeless that England shouldn’t have taken offence, or Spain shouldn’t have minded if we sent Louis XVI to the scaffold—because we were tired of kings!’

His voice was raw-edged, his body tight under its exaggerated clothes. He backed further into the room, which served him for study and dining room. There was a stove burning in the corner and it was that which made it so much warmer than outside.

‘God knows I tried!’ he went on, jerking agitatedly. ‘I did all I could to move the Girondins, to make them forget their own quarrels and act for France, but the blind futility of their ambitions is bleeding away what little hope there was left.’ He gestured wildly. ‘All around us Paris is crumbling into civil chaos, and we seem incapable of addressing the issues that really matter.’

‘I know,’ Georges agreed, moving down to the stove.

‘I tried to persuade them to face the Convention,’ Carichon went on with a bitter laugh, as much to himself as to Georges. ‘Stop following after them and lead, for a change! To hell with what Marat and the Commune want ... we’re the government!’ He moved closer to Georges. ‘France isn’t in any state to fight a war on all sides. If we didn’t kill the King, we might even make peace with Austria.’

He shrugged angrily. ‘But they parroted back at me: “We can’t abandon our principles, we have a far nobler vision than Marat and his followers.”’ He lowered his voice to little more than a whisper. His brows were drawn down, his eyes earnest and frightened. ‘Marat’s a lunatic, you know that, Coigny? You should have seen him when he burst in on the celebrations Talma gave General Dumouriez last year. It was a very civilised party.’ A smile lit his face for an instant as he recalled, then it vanished. ‘We were all listening to harp and piano music,’ he continued. ‘Drinking a little sugar water and indulging in conversation. Then all of a sudden there was a fearful clatter on the stairs outside, and the next moment Marat burst into the room with a bunch of his hooligans.’ He drew in his breath sharply. ‘He was filthy! The memory of the stench turns my stomach even now.’ His lips curled. ‘He was wearing one of those carmagnole jackets like the Marseillais, black trousers, no socks, and boots covered with nameless ordure which he left all over the carpet.’

Georges opened his mouth to speak. He knew the story.

But Carichon went on regardless. ‘He was twitching like some wretched animal. The women were terrified. He stared at us and shook his fists, calling us whores and counter-revolutionaries. He even spat on the floor.’ His nostrils flared. ‘After he’d gone, we had to open all the windows and go around with a perfume bottle.’

The smell was a consequence of Marat’s disease and therefore irrelevant, but Georges did not bother to argue that. He could see the revulsion in Carichon’s face and the emotions behind it, the knowledge of violence, the unknown and the uncontrollable. Despair had overtaken him at the sheer ineffectuality of the Girondins, their lack of urgency and, when it came to the point, of courage.

‘I know,’ Georges said quietly. ‘I already heard all about it.’

‘What is there ahead?’ Carichon’s face filled with bitterness. ‘Invasion, civil war and bloody chaos!’ He was so angry his body shook. ‘It’s so idiotically futile, so blind to the flesh and passion and dirt of reality. They’re as unrelated to living, breathing human beings as Rousseau. It’s all words, scribbles on miles of paper that means nothing at all—’

Georges made his decision, not with certainty but as a desperate chance, the lesser of evils.

‘We’ll still try it,’ he interrupted. ‘Just change the arrangements, in case whoever killed Bernave knew something of it. Change everything we can—men, places. We can’t change the time.’ He watched Carichon’s face intently, looking for the slightest flicker of deceit. He saw the spark of hope again, and the knowledge of fear.

Carichon hesitated barely a moment. ‘Good,’ he said softly. ‘Good. It’s our only chance.’

‘There is only one thing we lack ... because of Bernave’s murder.’

‘Oh? What’s that?’ There was no shadow of denial in Carichon, no foreknowledge of what Georges was about to say.

This was the moment. He would test Carichon’s commitment to its ultimate limit. ‘Bernave was the only one who knew the man to take the King’s place in the carriage,’ he said. He did not add the rest; it was obvious after an instant’s thought.

Carichon’s jaw dropped. ‘But without him it won’t work! It can’t! You’ll have to find someone else!’

‘I know that.’

‘Then why are you here telling me?’ Then the blood drained from his face as he realised what Georges was saying. He backed away, stumbling against the table and putting out his hand to save himself. ‘Oh no! You can’t ask me that! I’d be ...’ he swallowed and almost choked, ‘I’d be ... torn apart! They’d ...’ It was beyond him even to give words to it. He stood there shaking his head, gasping.

Georges did not argue. Looking at the man’s terror was enough to know that even if he promised to come, his nerves might render him incapable at the last moment.

He nodded very slightly, touched Carichon on the arm, and turned and went out of the door again into the street. Perhaps he should not have expected the ultimate sacrifice from Carichon, but he still felt a suffocating disappointment. Carichon had seemed the best chance. There were not many Georges could ask, because to do so he had to trust them with so much of the truth.

It was dark now, but as he passed a woman buying coffee from one of the sellers, she turned and stared at him in the light from a café window. She was probably about thirty-five, but fear and hunger made her seem older. He must be more careful than he had that morning. He smiled at her, using all his charm.

‘Good evening, Citizeness!’

She relaxed and smiled back. ‘Evening, Citizen.’

He hurried on towards the river. He was glad to move quickly; at least it set the blood coursing in his veins. He must find someone tonight. He dare not be out tomorrow, and by dusk tomorrow evening it would be too late.

And what after that—after the King was saved, or dead? He could not expect Célie to feed him for ever. She might be fortunate even to feed herself. If he did not find some form of work he would starve, or die of the cold. People did. And if this sort of misery and chaos continued there would be more and more of them. He was young and strong—what about the ill, the weak, the old, the very people the revolution was supposed to protect? Was this what all the dreams and hopes had come to: suspicion, fear, and even more grinding poverty?

He was in the Rue St-Antoine now. The Place de la Bastille was just ahead. That had been a bitter joke—storming the one prison in Paris which held only a few indigents for whom it was more of an asylum than an incarceration! They had stumbled out into the daylight totally confused, suddenly frail—and now homeless.

He crossed the place, head down. Fortunately the wind made that a natural thing to do. No one took any notice of him.

He found what he was looking for, a cooper’s yard. He turned the corner into the shelter of the wall. The man he had come to see was working with the barrels, a trifle awkwardly as if he had not been born to labour. Now at a glance he looked ordinary enough but under his dull, brown working clothes he had a certain dignity, and when he looked up he stood with his shoulders square. His hands were soft, although they were dirty. He had a long nose and heavy cheeks, and he was barely average height, but his eyes were clear and he looked at Georges squarely.

‘Can I help you, Citizen?’ he asked.

‘Possibly,’ Georges replied, keeping his voice low.

The man peered more closely. ‘Coigny? You look like him!’

‘I’ve seen better times,’ Georges agreed with a smile.

‘Haven’t we all?’ The man laughed abruptly. ‘And it’ll get worse.’

Georges raised his eyebrows. ‘You think so?’

‘You can’t be that naïve,’ the man said with anger in his voice. ‘Of course it will! There’ll be no stopping war on all sides. We’ll have got rid of the King, poor sod, in the name of freedom; and imposed a tyranny greater than anything we had before. Certainly we were in a bad way then, with corruption everywhere, but this cure is worse than the disease.’

‘The operation was a success but the patient died,’ Georges said succinctly.

‘You’ve got it!’ the man agreed. ‘What can I do for you? It must be something important to bring you out here.’

‘You have some royalist sympathy ...’

‘Sympathy, yes,’ he agreed. ‘But I don’t want the King back on the throne. I just don’t want the poor devil executed because it’ll bring war down on us all, and leave these lunatics in charge. I nearly said “in control,” but nobody’s in control of anything. The Girondins couldn’t organise an evening salon, and the Commune doesn’t want to. Chaos is their natural state.’

‘Are you prepared to do anything about it?’ Georges asked.

‘Anything?’ the man said slowly, watching Georges. ‘You still have hope that something can be done?’ There was incredulity and derision in his voice. ‘I don’t know whether to envy you, or pity your innocence. It’s too late. I would do something if I thought it would work. I don’t. I’m not giving my life pointlessly. Bad as it is, I’d still rather be alive than dead.’ He shrugged with a bitter smile. ‘That’s the trouble with atheism: it breeds few martyrs. We can’t imagine some glowing heaven where we are rewarded for sacrifices here.’ He gestured with his hand. ‘If this is all there is, we’d better hang on to it as long as it’s bearable. Few of us can cope with the thought of extinction.’ He shrugged. ‘Funny that: no matter how little a man thinks of himself, he cannot imagine the world functioning just as well when he is no longer part of it.’

Again Georges did not argue. There would be no purpose, only risk. He bade him goodbye and went out into the street again. The wind was edged with sleet.

He could not blame either of them that they were not willing to be torn and bludgeoned to death in the King’s place. The thought was enough to make anyone quail, sicken them and turn their insides to water. He could not look at it himself.

His clothes were wet through and his muscles were locked with cold.

Did he believe in the King’s rescue enough? How much of his commitment was really only words? How frightened was he of a few moments of agonising, unimaginable pain, his own body destroyed while he was still aware of it? Everybody died eventually, sometimes after long illness. Wasn’t that worse?

Yes. But that was in some unforeseen future, not the day after tomorrow! And not of his own choosing.

But it would still come ... one day. And who would he be then? A man who had not lived up to his beliefs. A man who was willing to ask others to sacrifice what he would not give up himself. A hypocrite, who in the moment of final decision was a failure.

But he was the wrong age, the wrong build, the wrong colouring to make anyone believe he was the King!

And there was so much he still wanted to do, to say, people he could not part from yet. Amandine, Célie ... especially Célie. There was so much to learn about her, and even more that she needed to know about him—weaknesses and strengths, little things, a time for laughter as well as courage. Above all they must have at least one time together when they were honest, without pretence, without the past and the future in the way. He could say what he meant, and touch her just once.