Jane Feather - Charade

by Unknown

  While the king and his family sought shelter in the parliament house the mob slaughtered his garrison of Swiss Guard who were instructed too late to lay down their arms. Danielle, sick to her stomach, moved amongst the assassins, stepped over the bodies being stripped by eager hands, watched as the emblems

  of royalty were torn down, and generally behaved as if she was one of them until the tumult died down. Then she was able to slip away through the dark streets where the cries of the mob's triumph faded in the distance and she reached the walls of St. Vire's house. The postern gate stood unguarded—an ominous sign, but after what she had seen this night it was not surprising. Their carts, piled high with straw, stood in the deserted courtyard and she nodded in satisfaction.

  "We must leave here immediately," she said to the group waiting, grave-faced and talking in subdued whispers in the salon. "There is no time to waste. We must mingle with the crowds who will roam the streets 'till dawn and then attempt a daytime passage through the barriere. You will decide amongst yourselves who is to come with us."

  "The decision is made already," St. Vire said. "You will take the women and children of these three families, the rest of us will remain and attempt to effect our own escape to Brittany."

  "D'accord." She glanced at Julian who merely said, "All is arranged, Danny. While we have been waiting for you to make an appearance, we have been quite busy."

  St. Estephe gnashed his teeth in silent fury. All his carefully laid plans must again be postponed. He had intended to follow Danielle and her friends with a party of his own men and make his move in that remote fishing village far from civilization. He would take them all red-handed in the moment of flight, returning the aristos and the English spies in triumph to Paris as further evidence of his loyalty to the revolutionary committee. He would remain in Brittany amusing himself with the little de St. Varennes while he waited for her husband who would find her—and her captor—easily enough. And when he eventually returned to Paris, leaving his enemy dead, he would deliver Danielle to Madame Guillotine and mop up the rest of these traitors and all the others whose identities he held. It was a perfect plan and one that accomplished many things in a single throw. But now, after the mob's activities of this night, again he could not afford to leave the center of the power struggle that would inevitably take place in the next weeks.

  He would have to wait until her next visit, and nothing would prevent her from returning; not now when the need had become so totally imperative and would become even more so by the minute. In the meantime, he would throw a few of these aristo fools to the lions, bait for the mob's appetite, and the panic that that would cause would run like wildfire, inevitably leading to carelessness as they made their plans for exodus, and he would pick them off one by one, with no one any the wiser of the traitor in their midst. Yes, it was a pleasing plan, St. Estephe decided, looking around the anxious faces in the room. He must just be patient and remember that everything comes to him who waits.

  Danielle was conferring in a low voice with her colleagues as St. Estephe mentally revised his plans.

  "Our only hope is to approach the barriere boldly," she was saying. 'This night's work can be used to

  our advantage. We will wear the bonnets rouges and sing the "Qa Ira" and will tell with much bloodthirsty detail of what we have seen. In fact," she paused with a shudder, "I think it would be more convincing if we carried with us some souvenirs from the Tuileries, and . . . and perhaps we had better look a little bloody ourselves."

  There was short silence and then Tony said grimly, "Let us go then."

  The five of them slipped from the house and then ran boldly through the alleys in the direction of the Tuileries. The streets were packed with shouting, singing hordes brandishing flaming torches, passing around flagons of wine. Impromptu dances were being performed on corners and in squares, and the scene in the Tuileries gardens came straight from the pits of hell. The crowd, intoxicated with blood and liquor had hardly diminished since Danielle had left. Some had collapsed beside the bodies of the Swiss Guard, others trampled heedlessly over the living and the dead, their voices rising in raucous triumph. Danielle smeared blood on her blouse and ripped a gore-stained shirt from one of the bodies before vanishing behind a tree to retch violently as the rough red wine that she had drunk earlier revolted in her stomach and spewed forth in a convulsive tide. The others, as filthy and bloody as she now was, found her there within a few minutes. They had shared too much intimacy for Danielle to feel embarrassment

  as they waited in silence for the spasms to pass before helping her to her feet.

  "I am all right," she whispered, trying to stiffen her wobbling knees. "Please, let us leave now."

  Dawn was breaking in eerie beauty over the hellish scene of horror as they made their way back through streets rapidly emptying as the night's excesses began to have their effect. "Danny, you must rest a while," Jules insisted. "We will leave in two hours."

  "No, we must leave now. I cannot rest until we are through the gates. We will find somewhere to wash off this ..." A tremor shook her slight frame and the four men looked at her anxiously. "Please, you must not worry," she reassured, intercepting the look. "I am really quite strong, you understand."

  "Yes," Jules said with a dry twist of his lips, "we understand quite well, but I am very much afraid that Justin will not. I hope to God he will be at Mervanwey to put a stop to this."

  "Oh, do not be absurd." The remark had the desired effect and brought a flash to the brown eyes. "He will do no such thing since he and I are now quite in agreement over priorities. I am sure that the next time he will accompany us."

  "Well, he'll most assuredly not permit you to leave without him," Jules stated and Danny grinned, much

  in her usual manner.

  "Mais, d'accord, mon cousin. Qa c'est la pointe."

  There was little traffic as they made their way to the gate, their passengers hidden beneath the layers of straw. About half a mile before they reached the barriere, Jules and Tony put their horses to the gallop and they all stood, singing the "Qa Ira" at the tops of their voices, flourishing the bloody shirts they had stripped from the bodies and waving a leathern flask of wine.

  The guards who had spent the night at their posts, hearing the sounds from the city but unaware of what had transpired, rushed forward to stop them and the horses came to a plunging standstill. Danny leaped from the cart, offering her flagon and demanding that they drink to La Republique. The five of them were a fearsome sight with their gory talismans, the blood and filth streaking their exhausted faces—fearsome but utterly convincing. Danny poured out the story in an excited stream of gruesome, explicit detail while her companions nodded, grunted, and drank as the flagon was passed around and her audience shouted their enthusiasm. The three women and six children, packed like sardines beneath the straw, held their

  breath and huddled, paralyzed with fright as the party seemed likely to continue forever. And then came the sound of a whip crack and the carts began to move, slowly at first but gathering speed as the white dusty road to safety stretched emptily ahead.

  "You have missed your calling, my friend," Jules remarked to Danny, who under the rush of adrenaline, appeared quite restored.

  "And what is that?"

  "You were clearly made for the stage," he told her, a tired grin cracking the caked filth on his face.

  "Yes," she agreed, giving the thought all consideration. "I think I might have liked that, but then I could have been only Justin's mistress, so it would not have been at all convenable."

  Julian's laugh crackled in the still morning air and the other cart drew alongside. "Just what's so amusing?" Westmore demanded in French, using the regional accent that Danny had taught them. Jules shared the joke and their hilarity bordered on the hysterical as the aftermath of that horrific night took its toll.

  * * *

  Safe again at Mervanwey, Danielle appeared to move in an abstracted dream.

  "She is her
self only with the child," Lady Lavinia bemoaned to her husband as August became September and Danielle continued to postpone a return visit to France, waiting each day for the sight and sound of her husband.

  "She sent the messenger to Pitt two weeks past," Charles said, idly turning the pages of his book, the words they contained conveying nothing to him. "There should be a reply soon."

  Danielle was in the rose garden at the head of the cliff playing hide-and-seek with Nicholas as she kept watch over the winding path that climbed steeply to the house. She spent the most part of the day here,

  as it commanded the best view of the approach road, and Nicky was more than content to be in his mother's company during thet late summer days. Danielle talked to him constantly about his papa, showed him the picture she kept under her pillow every night before he slept, desperate to keep the

  image and memory alive for the child who now ran on tottering chubby legs and had mastered an impressive vocabulary of demand and description. The words came singly as yet, but they came in both French and English. Danielle ached for Justin's presence, sharing with her the excitement as their son developed in leaps and bounds.

  This sunny late September afternoon she sat on the wall where an eon ago Justin had proposed to a hoydenish minx who had just held him up at pistol point for a joke that he had not shared. Nicky was blowing vigorously on a dandelion clock, chuckling delightedly as the white cotton wool puffs danced in the air. "Un, deux, trois," he shrieked, running to catch the fluffy strands.

  Danielle smiled absently, looking down the path. At the sight of the lone horseman her heart lurched and then sank. Even at this distance she could tell through the pores of her skin that the figure was not the

  one she sought. However, maybe it was the messenger returning from London and if so he would have news. Good or bad, it no longer mattered. Just something to make sense of the waiting. She scooped up Nicky and ran with him toward the house.

  The messenger brought little comfort. Pitt had made no attempt to dissemble in his note to Danielle. There had been no news from Justin—it was too early to despair as he had been gone but five months, but there was cause for concern. More than that he could not say. He thanked her for the invaluable firsthand reports from Paris and begged that she take both care and heart.

  "Eh bien, mes amis, are you ready to make another voyage? We have delayed overlong and there may well be people waiting for us in the village. If so, they will be losing heart rapidly." Danielle smiled with

  an effort across the dinner table that evening. "The news from Paris worsens, if that is possible, according to Pitt's message. The royal family are now imprisoned in the Temple, quite at the mercy of the people, and Madame Guillotine takes her victims with increasing fervor."

  "Danny, let us make this next journey without you?" Julian asked quietly, knowing the request to be fruitless but shivered by the bleak look on her face.

  "Non!" she declared. "I will go quite mad if I stay here! I beg pardon." She apologized for the rude exclamation. "I cannot walk the cliffs waiting for Justin," she explained in a more moderate tone. "We

  will go again to Paris and I will use my energies in that way. There is much work to be done and I can

  do it with more heart than I would have preparing for my widow's weeds."

  The blunt statement contained only truth, clear-cut and invincible, and no one around the table could

  find the words of contradiction.

  They set sail three days later and in nine days were again in Paris—the capital of the new republic of France. The abolition of royalty had been decreed on September 21. While Louis XVI and his family suffered the discourtesies and cruel deprivations of the sans-culottes guards, the tumbrils began to roll from the prisons to Place de la Revolution. D'Evron had Been dead these last six weeks, spared the journey from Chatelet to Madame Guillotine where, with hands bound, hair cropped, and shirt collar opened, he would have placed his head upon the block for the blade that would have ended his life

  amidst the jeers of the tricolours who knitted the names of the aristos-come-to-judgment into the long scarves taking shape beneath their busy needles.

  The Comte de St. Vire died in that manner, unaware that in the jeering crowd a small figure witnessed

  his death and prayed for his soul. Danielle ran beside the tumbrils as they moved to the place of execution, searching for familiar faces, pallid in preparation for their deaths. She could do nothing for them now, but had a desperate need that they should see a familiar face and die in the knowledge that there was still hope of escape for those they left behind.

  This time they were to take three carts out of Paris. St. Estephe had provided the third and Dream Girl would handle the extra passengers because she must. Once the winter storms set in, raging against that unwelcoming coast, not even Jake would risk the voyage, not to mention standing to at anchor for two weeks while he waited for the light to show from the cove.

  They passed the barrieres in their usual fashion, except that this time Danielle wore the peasant dress

  and kerchief of a farmer's daughter and flirted outrageously with the guards, dancing around the guardhouse as the carts passed through unquestioned by the distracted sentries. She made her escape

  by the hem of a grimy petticoat, leaping back onto the seat beside Julian with a stream of invective that contained the promise of her return. The guards laughed heartily and promised her reception on the next occasion with much ribaldry.

  "God damn it!" Jules exclaimed as they hit the familiar road. "Why must you take such risks? You become more outrageous every time."

  "It is necessary," she replied calmly.

  They reached the Breton coast in ample time, quite unaware that St. Estephe and his men were following them, half a day's journey behind and by a different route.

  St. Estephe had hoped to make up the time, knowing that his chosen route was shorter and that on horseback they could travel faster than the laden carts. But he made a grave error of judgment in picking a path that, unlike Danielle's, took him through major towns where they were frequently stopped and

  held at the gates while their credentials were examined. In one place they were hauled before an excitable mayor prepared to suspect any party from Paris of being fleeing royalists. St. Estephe fumed at the delays, raged at the officious bureaucracies that insisted on confirming his passports with meticulous care, and could not begin to understand why he was in such a hurry as they conferred at length before returning the papers and wishing him a pleasant journey. Thus his hopes of being on the beach, ready in ambush when the fugitives signaled for the dinghy, were unfulfilled and the careful orderliness of his plans thrown into disarray.

  "The dinghy will have to make two journeys," Danielle whispered to Westmore as they stood on the small beach, shrouded in dark cloaks. "We should first send our passengers." She glanced at the pale shivering group huddled in the lee of the cliff, sheltering from the blasts of the late October wind. There were nine of them, seven women and children and two men, and the journey from Paris had been arduous in the extreme, made even more miserable by constant complaints at the privations they all endured and the incessant challenges of the men who refused to accept the authority of the grimy urchin that was Danny, now back in her shirt and britches.

  Westmore agreed. "I'll be monstrous glad to see the last of them," he muttered. 'The voyage will be

  made wretched with their moans."

  Danny laughed without much humor and shrugged, peering across the black expanse of foam-flecked water for the first sight of the dinghy. "It is coming," she said as her sharp ears picked up the soft splash of oars an instant before her eyes made out the dark shape.

  They all ran to the shore to help beach the dinghy and the two monosyllabic sailors merely grunted when told that they must return. The boat could carry seven passengers if enough of them were small and the nine passengers argued amongst themselves, wasting precious moments, as to who should go f
irst.

  "Take the women and children; the men stay here with us," Philip ordered crisply. One aristocratic lady, clasping her child to her bosom, announced dramatically that she would not be parted from her husband. "As you wish, madame," Philip responded in frosty tones. "Let us just hurry for the Lord's sake!"

  The husband in question began to bluster at this brusque manner of addressing his wife and Danielle, quite out of patience, whirled on him with a few well-chosen words that left him stammering with fury. But at last they pushed the laden dinghy off the beach, Danny and her companions soaked to their thighs while the French family stood high and dry on the beach, muttering indignantly at their rude treatment.

  "Merde!" Danielle hissed. "Perhaps you would prefer the tender strokes of the guillotine?"

  "Hush," Jules said, putting his arm around her. "They are frightened."

  "And are we not all?" she muttered, thinking of Justin with a deep stab of lonely despair.

  It was two hours later when the dinghy reappeared and this time, in the interests of speed, waited in the shallows instead of running onto the beach.

  "Vous permettez, madame?" Jules said politely as he swung the woman off her feet and carried her to

  the boat. Westmore carried the squawling child but no one offered to assist the stiff figure of the father who waded with a visible shudder into the cold black water. The rest followed and the oarsmen picked