Ribbons of Scarlet

by Kate Quinn

  I headed for the stairs and my daughter, but Danton’s big hand shot out and gripped my elbow. “You tell that gelding you married to fall in line. His day is done. It’s my time now.”

  “Let go,” I snapped like a nursemaid putting an ill-behaved child in their place.

  People were watching now. Even Danton couldn’t manhandle me in public before my husband’s own theater box, and he knew it. But he took his time letting go, crowding me with his massive height, his smell of male sweat and newspaper ink. “You walk around like you’re made of ice, but I know you, Manon. Under those skirts you’re wet for it.” He spoke softly, giving me another long up-and-down look. “Anytime you want a man in your bed instead of a cadaver, you know where to find me.”

  He saluted me with a grin and disappeared back into the box just as my escort fought his way back up the stairs to my side. “There was such a delay getting a cab—” I barely heard him over my own inner trembling. Pull yourself together, I told myself fiercely, calling my daughter to me and gripping her hand, but I could not stop shaking. I was ten years old again, smelling male sweat and feeling a male hand on my wrist, feeling naked and ashamed and seen. Danton of all people had looked at me and seen the whore I was. My husband with his great discernment did not see it; the man who sent me love letters did not see it.

  Perhaps he should, I thought. Perhaps then he would leave me be. Right now, that was all I wanted—to be left alone to serve my husband and tend my child and play my small part in the service of the struggling new republic, and not be called a slut. Why was that too much to ask?

  “Maman?” my daughter whispered.

  I pulled her against my side. “We’re going home, mignonne.” But I could not stop trembling, and the next day I steeled myself in dread and shame and went at noon to the chocolate shop near the Palais.

  HE WAS THERE as I came down from the hired cab, leaning against the door in a blue coat, the winter wind ruffling his hair. He dropped his hat at the sight of me, picked it up again with a grin at his own foolishness, a grin that froze my insides hard with terrified longing.

  I did not know how to begin, but he began for me. “It’s one of the things I love.”

  I blinked, already off guard. “What?”

  He gestured at the cab, now rumbling away down the street. “You never step from a carriage, you always jump. Like you can’t wait to run to where you’re going.” Another grin. “For weeks I’ve been watching every cab, hoping I’d see you jump and run toward me.”

  “A foolish waste of time,” I couldn’t help saying, “when there is so much to do.”

  “I can dream of you and the republic at the same time, Manon. I planned most of my first Convention speech with my eyes closed, imagining your face.”

  “It was a good speech,” I managed to say, breath puffing white in the cold. He had argued so passionately for reconciliation between the Paris faction and the rest of the country; for a law condemning the instigators of murder and not just the murderers; for a domestic force to rival the bands of armed sans-culottes roaming the streets. The kind of sensible, moderate action this country needed if we were to move forward with the business of governing ourselves. “A very good speech.”

  His eyes rested on me tender as a kiss. Curiously, that look steadied me. He would not look at me like that again when he heard what I had to say.

  The little chocolate shop was nearly bare inside, no fragrant rolls or sweet buns on sale. Bread was dearer than gold in Paris at the moment.

  He bought a single cup of chocolate. “All I can afford, I’m afraid. We’d better drink it outside if we don’t want to be glared at.” He looked back with a smile at Pauline Léon who had sold him the chocolate. The shop’s owner was tall, raw-boned, her face young and her eyes old, light hair straggling under a proud red cap with a tattered tricolor cockade. She met my eyes with a glare, and so did the friend at her side, a woman with belligerent eyes and a pretty face ravaged by hunger. I recognized her, too—Louise Audu, the so-called Queen of the Market Women who had gained notoriety at Versailles years ago during the women’s march.

  Sans-culottes females like that were easily led, yapping at Marat’s heels and sighing over Robespierre from the galleries. Yet some argued for giving women like these the vote!

  “You give our sex and our revolution a bad name,” I muttered, retreating from Louise’s and Pauline’s hostile glowers back to the cold street. We went around the side of the shop to a little alley between buildings, a space where we might stand squeezed close in some privacy.

  He offered me the chocolate. “Do you love me, Manon?” he asked simply.

  My stomach clenched. “I am a virtuous woman.”

  “You are.” His mouth quirked. “You’re also ducking the question.”

  I took a gulp of chocolate. It tasted bitter rather than sweet. “You respect and support my husband.” Poor Roland, who suspected nothing of me or the man he called friend. “How can you make advances upon his wife?”

  “I respect the man, but not the husband he makes you. He takes your writing and calls it his own. I see him grow sulky if you take so much as a step from his side, even for your daughter. He demands every instant of your time, every bit of your care—”

  “It is his right to demand that.”

  He took the cup, turning it so he could drink from the same place my lips had touched. “Passion is also a right—your right.”

  “You say so because of how I look,” I replied bluntly. “Because physiognomists would say I am a woman made for passion.” That was what men thought, when they saw a small voluptuous woman with a curving mouth and skin that blushed with every emotion—but no one so obviously made for voluptuous pleasure had ever enjoyed so little of it. “Liberty, equality, fraternity, those are my rights. Not passion.”

  “The Americans say the pursuit of happiness is a right.” His hand upturned toward mine. “I believe I could make you happy.”

  “Happiness is rarer than one thinks.” I pulled away before our hands could meet. “The consolations of virtue never fail.”

  “Cold consolations, Manon. Do you expect so little from life?”

  “It is very wise to be able to lower one’s expectations. We are not Americans; the pursuit of happiness is not a right I expect.” I took a breath, dizzied by temptation, pulling from it angrily. “I cannot be your whore!”

  His eyes were dark and steady. “You are the woman I love. Not a whore, not ever.”

  “Oh, but I am.” I made myself look up at him, so much taller with so much yearning in his gaze. Time to wipe it away. “I was—at a very young age, I was—” I could not say it directly. I could not. I took refuge in vagueness. “You would do better not to yearn for fruit that has already been tainted while still green.”

  My hands were freezing. I thrust them into my muff, avoiding his gaze.

  His breath caught for a long moment. I didn’t raise my eyes. “What happened?” he said at last, quietly.

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter.” And I’d promised my mother I would never tell. Her panicked eyes, her hands digging into my shoulders, her voice shooting a thousand questions. She took me to confession so I might be cleansed, but afterward made me swear on a crucifix that I would tell no one, not ever.

  “Oh, Manon . . .” His voice was low. “Who harmed you?”

  “I wasn’t—it was not—” How could I tell, and not tell? A fifteen-year-old apprentice in my father’s engraving shop, luring me close one afternoon, drawing my uncomprehending hand beneath the table to touch something I could not see. What are you afraid of? Don’t be stupid, I won’t do you any harm. I’d been so puzzled, so alarmed. I won’t say anything, I kept saying. Just let me go.

  “Did he try to force a husband’s rights?” Quietly.

  I managed a minute shake of my head. No, the boy had not—not fully, anyway. The second time it happened, the boy had pressed me between the window bench and his lap, his chest squashing against my back
. Are you still afraid? I’m not doing you any harm.

  But I want to go. My dress—

  Never mind your dress, I’ll see to that. Pulling it up, reaching underneath while at the same time reaching for himself. Doing something to himself I could not see. The way his eyes rolled up in his head afterward, his groan—

  I should have run to my mother. I didn’t. That was what made me a whore. I knew it was wrong, so why didn’t I run to my mother? Some part of me must have been curious, must have wanted it. The apprentice boy had seen that.

  My mother had seen it, too, once she saw the look on my face and pried the story out of me. Oh, God, her eyes as she babbled of religion, virtue, honor, reputation—she invoked them all, hugging me to her bosom and making me promise I would never transgress again, never take a man’s advances so lightly. I’d soon been shaking with sobs, feeling myself the greatest slut on earth.

  “Oh, ma petite,” my mother said, comforting me through her own tears. “You are fortunate, never forget. He did not spoil you fully. No one will ever know.”

  But I was spoiled. I could live my life a virtuous woman, never prostitute myself as an author of words or a soiler of other men’s beds, but I was what I was. Coarse-fibered Danton knew it when he saw me. Now the man who had loved me would too.

  Good, I thought, see what I am and leave me alone before I give in. Because I did not have the strength to be a scarlet woman on the outside as well as in my soul.

  I looked up with blurred eyes, hoping to see him recoil.

  Instead, he drew my hand from my muff with a touch so light I could have broken it with a breath. He didn’t bring my hand up to his lips—the same hand I’d scrubbed with harsh soap because it was the one the apprentice had taken and pulled under the table. Instead, he lowered his head and kissed each of my fingers in turn.

  “You are supposed to revile me,” I said, bewildered.

  “Who in the name of God would revile you, Manon?” For the first time he sounded angry. “Has Roland?”

  “He does not know.” I looked away. It had been a great struggle with my conscience, whether to tell him before we married. It would have been the honorable choice, but what if he had broken our betrothal? He had been reluctant to marry me; my birth was not equal to his, nor did my modest dowry make up for it. It had taken more than three years of courtship before he decided my youth and my serious mind would be recompense enough to merit an offer. I think I still might have told him—I did not fear spinsterhood so much as that—but my mother had made me promise silence. It had been a vow. The last vow I made to God, and I might not believe in God but I believed in my mother. She was gone and I couldn’t betray the only promise she had ever forced from me.

  “You did not break your promise in telling me.” The big hand around mine squeezed, so gently. “You did not really tell—I asked questions, and your eyes gave answers rather than your voice. That broke no vow.”

  How had he read my mind? “You are supposed to go away,” I said, near tears. “Why do you think I told you? So you would leave me.”

  “I will go if you want it. Do you want it?”

  I knew what whores wanted. I could already feel myself melting into him, shaking as though I had a fever. Had he kissed me I would have flown away, but he only held me quietly against him, one arm holding me up so I wouldn’t fall, the other stroking the length of my back as though he were stroking a terrified horse. Only I could feel the panic mounting even as my bones loosened. Since I was ten I had looked on every man who seemed friendly with a kind of terror. And since my marriage, no man but Roland had touched me past the press of a hand or a quick fraternal embrace. Now I was letting myself be touched, and I could feel the danger mounting.

  I could take abuse. I could take slander. I had spoken truth to Roland when I said such things would not make me budge.

  I could not take gentleness.

  My breath came in uneven puffs on the cold air as I pulled away from my lover. It would be fair to call him my lover, I thought, even if he had not set his lips to more than my fingertips. In the ways that mattered, I’d surrendered. “Please let me go.”

  “As you wish, Manon.” His face was drawn. “Anything that passes between us will always be as you wish.”

  I rushed out of the alley with blurring eyes, crashing straight into a red-capped figure blocking my way with arms akimbo. Pauline Léon made no effort to steady me as I staggered, and at her side, Louise Audu smirked. “Setting up a rendezvous with your fancy boy instead of working for the republic?”

  “You Girondins can’t keep your eyes on the prize,” Pauline said, disapproving. “It won’t be you who makes a new world.”

  “And it will be you?” I heard myself snarl, too brittle and close to tears to stop myself from snapping back rather than withdrawing with proper dignity. “You think pikes and slogans make a nation?”

  “I didn’t see you laboring on the streets alongside us, citizeness,” Louise retorted pertly. “Or marching on the king to demand change.”

  “You didn’t see me sawing a guardsman’s head off with a filleting knife, either, like some of your friends,” I lashed back. “A field of carnage does not make a nation.”

  “Nor do scruples.” Pauline stepped out of my way with a sniff. “Women like you don’t have the guts to do what needs to be done.”

  Yes, I do, I thought. And before my nerve could fail me, I went home, laid my repentant head in my husband’s lap, and told him everything.

  “IS IT DANTON?” Roland’s voice was low and tight. The study was dim, the dying fire throwing shadows over his taut face as he looked down at me. “I see him looking after you—”

  “Never.” I flinched, unable to look my husband in the eyes from where I sat beside his chair on the floor. He had pushed my head from his lap after I finished my confession. “I would never look at Danton—”

  “Robespierre? Did the Incorruptible corrupt you—”

  “No—”

  “Condorcet, then, with his half-baked philosophy and egg always showing on his cuffs from shoveling down omelets? Or Saint-Just, he’s a handsome sprig—” Roland began throwing names at me, voice rising. All I could do was sit on the floor beside his chair, cringing. You have earned this, I repeated to myself. You have earned all of this.

  “It is not any of them,” I managed to say before Roland could reach the right name. I was robbing my husband of faith in his wife today; I would not rob him of trust in an ally. Because I knew my lover would remain faithful to Roland’s support even if I would not come to him—he was not so petty as to throw over the only honest man in service of the republic simply because of a disappointed heart. And the bald truth was that Roland needed every friend in the Convention he could get, so I kept my lover’s name to myself. “It does not matter who it is, because nothing has come of it or ever will. I tell you of his existence only to maintain honor between us.” And to stop myself from falling further—that I freely admitted.

  “I wish to know—” Roland began.

  “I have not surrendered my virtue, and I never will.” I looked up at my husband through swimming eyes. “Do you believe me?”

  A long, dreadful moment. The fire crackled in the marble hearth. Such a cozy, connubial scene—I would have felt less out of place in the bloody September Massacres where the Princess de Lamballe had been torn to pieces. I felt I was being torn to pieces.

  “I believe you didn’t surrender your body,” Roland said at last, stiffly. “If only because you take little pleasure in such pastimes.”

  I flinched. “You know I have done my best to please you.”

  Your best is not much. It hung in the air between us. Our first night of marriage had given me some disagreeable surprises—I had come to see my betrothed very comfortingly as a person without sex, a thinker in a folded neck-cloth devoted entirely to reason. To meet the flesh in the dark under the bedclothes, all gripping hands and moist gasps, had been a great shock. Entirely my fault—since the
incident with the apprentice I had shut myself away from anything I might have learned about congress of the flesh and come to my marriage bed knowing worse than nothing. I had not been able to stop myself from crying out in pain, and my new husband had been very upset. He had married a woman twenty years younger; he must have felt himself entitled to something softer and more welcoming than the terrified board I could not stop myself from becoming. He had not had the patience to loosen me, and the promise to my mother had locked my mouth helplessly when it came to telling him why I was such a disappointment.

  “We have been happy enough,” I managed to say, “despite my deficiency in that way.” I had never denied him my bed, no matter how stiff and panicked I felt, and after our daughter’s birth he’d seemed to feel his advancing years and sought it less. Things eased then; I threw myself into working intimately with him in every other way to make up for my failings. “You know I honor and cherish you. I would follow you to the ends of the earth—”

  “Yet you make it clear you are making a sacrifice to do so,” he snapped.

  I have sacrificed everything I am in your service, I thought before I could stop myself. Can I not sacrifice one small portion of feeling to something else? But I shoved that thought aside. I had no right to it. My husband was entitled to everything I had, everything I was. “What do you wish from me?” I asked instead. “I will do it.”

  He looked at the fire, his profile gaunt and tired. For a long moment neither of us said anything. “Go to bed.”

  I rose, smoothing my crumpled skirts with shaking hands. “Will you sit up tonight?”

  “Yes, I have a report to study.” I could see him grappling for the return of routine, taking refuge in business, and I could have wept. “From the inspector-general of national buildings.”

  “What about?” I asked, because I always asked, always encouraged.

  “It seems a locksmith has come with a confession that he installed an iron safe for the king at the Tuileries. It bears investigation. Who knows what might be found.”