Raoul raised an inquiring eyebrow, his interest sincere. La Force was in the Marais district, close to the Chat Rouge. There had been no mention of these escapes in the official reports; no tidbits dropped to the broadsheet hacks.
"We are not even certain how they are getting out. Since you live in Le Marais, de Villaret, this is just up your street, so to speak. How about you take a week to look into it?"
"But of course." It gave him an official opportunity to investigate La Veuve Bosanquet.
"De Villaret." Danton delayed him after the morning session ended. "Warn your friends in the Plain—I was thinking of Boissy in particular—that they can no longer look after goats as well as cabbages. It's one or the other. We shall expect their votes in future."
"I understand."
"Just make sure they do."
* * *
There were two reasons, no three, for the abrupt disappearance of the brazen, mysterious La Coquette. Firstly, the Chat Rouges carte du jour had successfully seduced clientele from rival establishments. Secondly, the acting troupe, happily high on an appreciative audience, were now producing an excellent balance of entertainment themselves, without Fleur's involvement. Thirdly, the fire had been a warning from someone. Oh and there was a fourth reason. Not that Fleur was a coward precisely, but with republican foxes like de Villaret and Hérault sniffing around her chicken coop, she felt safer in her widow's bombazine than behind the lascivious silks of La Coquette.
Safe up to a point. Immersing herself in the daily activities of the Chat Rouge was a better antidote to worry than snuff or opium in marshmallow, and Fleur was deeply worried not only that she had heard nothing from Tante Estelle but also that Raoul de Villaret might still be investigating Matthieu's death.
But at least she was no longer hungry and, despite living in a city at war and occupied by her family's enemies, Fleur was revelling in her busy, bourgeois existence. She and Blanchette accompanied Thomas's cheerful bulk as he pushed a barrow around Les Halles in the early morning, and she enjoyed listening to him haggle over everything from beef flanks to glace chestnuts.
Whenever she could afford the time, the Widow Bosanquet was careful to keep up attendance at the Jacobin Club or the Convention to give the appearance of a loyal patriot—suitably cockaded. (Perhaps there was a streak of Protestant blood in her, misbegotten generations back by some ancestor who had had the sense to save himself from being massacred on St Bartholomew's Day.) Attending the club had its blessings. Not only did she discover Emilie's giggly, golden-hearted company to be exhilarating (even if her coarse wit was sometimes shocking), but the young used-clothing seller was also Fleur's exuberant source of all the tittle-tattle that chirruped in the undergrowth of alleys and laneways—everything from the price of bread to the more sobering accounts of how some aristocrat had died that morning. Fleur dared not hush her on the latter but sometimes she recognised a name or remembered a face and it was necessary to stopper her outrage and let the actress in her take over. While the Widow Bosanquet sat nodding over the verre du chocolate, the ci-devant Françoise-Antoinette de Montbulliou inwardly wiped away tears.
She also learned more about her unwanted nephew-in-law, Felix Quettehou. The swallow-tailed, well-dressed deputy at the funeral was not his weekday persona. Lord no, Emilie declared, Quettehou normally wore the bandanna and trousers of the sansculottes. Well, he had to, didn't he, seeing as he was a printer who took commissions from the enragés, cranking out incendiary prose that accused the imprisoned Queen Marie-Antoinette of everything from bestiality to incest with her children.
"Look, this is another one of his," Emilie giggled, spluttering biscuit as she perched on a stool at the Chat Rouge. "See, I told you, it's far worse than Marat's paper."
Fleur picked up the broadsheet and read it with growing horror. It provided an education in crudity—not only a foul cartoon but gutter lies beyond her modest imagination—with Quettehou's name ribboning the printer's line at its base.
She swallowed, feeling even more out of her depth. "I wonder if he was behind the fire," she said suddenly. "Except that we haven't had any trouble since we've started doing well."
"Well, you wouldn't, would you, Fleur love," gurgled Emilie. "If it was him, he wouldn't want to destroy a goldmine. Reckon it must have been. If it had been some other café owner, they'd have had another go at you by now. No, I reckon he'll try and do it legal-like." She slid to the floor and shook her striped skirts into order. "Well, are we going to the club today or not?"
It was queuing to enter the gallery of the Jacobin Club that Fleur nearly encountered the artist David, slicing his way self-importantly through the waiting women. Her start of recognition made him glance back at her. It was hardly likely he would recognise her but she wasn't taking chances. The moment he bustled on, she surreptitiously moved to the other side of Emilie. Another deputy to avoid; another painful memory stirred up.
She must have been about nine years old when her father had summoned David to Clerville to paint her half-sisters. God knows what commission the great man had extracted, for he was famous even then. It was an episode she had pushed into the attic of her memory to grow cobwebs. She wanted to forget forever David's expression of distaste when her father had insisted that all his daughters be in the painting. The artist's gaze had crawled over her chubby torso with blatant distaste. In the end he had depicted her as a hideous Cupid with her plump thighs swathed in some sort of Grecian loin cloth and a gauzy scarf, which looked as though it had blown conveniently out of the ether, across her podgy chest.
Hours of posing for sketches by the foul-tempered David or worse, the pimply, boastful apprentices he had brought to mix his paints and do the boring tasks. Well, one of them got his comeuppance. Her sisters had amused themselves by pretending they admired the upstart, encouraging his swaggering, tormenting him with moistened lips and easing up their draperies. Oh, they had been cruel, but it had all ended when they shut him in the hidden passageway behind her father's bedroom and—
Cheers crashed in upon her memories. Fleur landed back in the present with a thud. Around her, the sans-culotte women were craning like a disturbed bird colony.
"Merde! That's Marat!" Emilie's mouth was grape-shaped with astonishment. "He's sticking his neck out coming here. The government have ordered his arrest." She tugged Fleur vigorously towards the doorway as huzzahs broke out around them and suddenly there was a great commotion as the Jacobins rushed out of the hall to welcome their hero.
Although Fleur had mimicked this most famous of revolutionaries, she had only seen him from a distance. Now she looked at him with different eyes, realising just how important he was. The darling of the sans-culottes. Close up, he definitely wasn't a demigod. In fact, the man who posed between the double doors, kissing his fingers to his worshippers... well, he still looked ordinary to her.
And he was coming past them. Like beggars from the Gospels, women reached out to touch this new, rather short messiah. The men, paying more than lip service to equality, thumped his back. Close up, the famous bandanna was not just an eccentricity, an attention-drawing device that proclaimed Jean-Paul Marat the people's beloved bandit, it also strove to conceal an inflammation spreading from his scalp. No one should have stared but everyone did. Leprosy, was it? No, some other sort of skin disease.
Around his shoulders he wore the same grubby, narrow pelt of ermine. A two-fingered gesture to the monarchy of Europe, Fleur supposed. The rest of his apparel was unremarkable: cotton shirt, leather waistcoat and mouse-coloured trousers that ended at bare calves held up by a belt softened by years of service. Inconspicuous. No wonder the soldiers sent by the Girondin ministry had failed to find him.
He strode up to the rostrum, gleeful as a monkey, and verbally jingled his freedom at his enemies. He had decided to face the indictment, he announced. There was a moment's silence while his audience digested this and then they cheered, no, roared! If their hero felt confident enough to confront the government, well, f
ormidable! Encouraged, approved of, Marat's oratory grew more vehement, condemning the Girondins and their ministers in language not fit for delicate ears. Beneath the shocking colour of his words, Fleur discerned the phrases of an educated man. Charlotte had been correct to say that this man was dangerous, and for other reasons too, it struck Fleur; not just conviction caused his stridency, but the constant, smarting whip of his disease. Was it killing him? Did he sense his tide was ebbing, or did the river of hate gushing out of his mouth somehow give him a brief oblivion?
He did not stay at the rostrum long but made his way back down the hall, shaking the hands thrust out to him, as though he were a victorious general. No one had ushered the women up to the gallery so they were still clustered around the neck of the hall. As Marat reached them they surged forward to pay homage as though he was another Christ, Emilie among them, and Fleur was left, noticeable in her reticence. To her absolute horror, Marat freed himself from the pats and fawning and pushed through to confront her.
"So you are the cheeky bitch who owns the Chat Rouge." Legs astride, he stopped before her, blatantly exploring the curve of her breasts. "You are fucking lucky I saw the funny side of things. Merde, I could have the people rip the place apart any time I bloody well choose."
His vulgar language did not shock Fleur; she had heard coarse language in the marketplace in Caen.
"Yes, I realise that, Citizen Marat. I am grateful for your tolerance and I do apologise for La Coquette teasing you as part of her performance, but we needed to draw in customers." She beamed up at him and received a grin in absolution. "At least you would have found yourself in good company on stage," she teased.
"Yes, old Max and Georges, I hear," he chortled, rising onto his toes to see where Max Robespierre was; then the workman eyes flickered back to her. "Though why your actress was lampooning that young dog, de Villaret, had me really vexed until I discovered that he's screwing the little bitch. No wonder we haven't seen hide nor hair of him for the last week."
Well, that was a punch between the eyes. This time she felt her face go red. She must be blushing like a smoky Paris sunset. What made it all the more insufferable was that before she could splutter an answer that was neither furious nor foolish, Marat leaned close and whispered: "And tell La Coquette if she wants to mimic me in future, I'll give her lessons—for a price!" and he slid an impertinent hand to Fleur's derriere and goosed her.
"There is nothing about goosing in the New Testament," Fleur muttered later to a jubilant Emilie, trying to impress upon her new friend that for her part, she considered all revolutionaries, and Marat in particular, far from holy, before the two women parted at the Place des Innocents.
Screwing La Coquette! They were rabid dogs, the lot of them. Ideals! Pah, give these deputies the chance of extra money for looking the other way, or offer them a tumble on a mattress, and their morals went out the window quicker than a sneeze.
"Where are Columbine and Juanita?" she demanded, marching into her café and stopping short at the uproar. Chairs were sprawled at ugly angles, benches lay on their sides, half-a-dozen voices were exclaiming from the cellars and Juanita was sitting on the stage cradling a squashed bergère hat, her feet adangle, and wailing loudly.
"We've had a visitation, patronne," Thomas, wiping his hands on his apron, emerged from the kitchen as if he had been listening for her. "The section gendarmes and the national guard. They've been searching the entire neighbourhood. Orders of your friend, de Villaret."
"Friend!"At least the café had not been singled out, she thought, suppressing the reflex of panic."Did they damage anything?"
"Best see for yourself, petite." He jerked his head towards the dressing-room. "There's the worst of it."
Fleur halted in the doorway, wrinkling her nose at the fulsome reek of stale orange-water. Tights, tabards, bodices and skirts lay in a melee on the floor, the cosmetics pots had been swiped from the dressing table and that too had been tugged away from the wall, but it was the grotesque tangle of wigs that turned her stomach. It reminded her too much of the foul executions in the Place de la Revolution.
"Apart from the cosmetics, is there any actual damage?"
"Look at this!" Columbine held out the costume Fleur had worn for the first half of her performance. Ugly rents disfigured the exquisite poult de soie skirt.
"And you should see the cellar, patronne. Bloody imbeciles should be killing foreigners, not bayonetting onions," muttered Thomas. "But the bastards didn't start drinking and they didn't steal so I suppose we must be grateful for small mercies."
"Get Juanita to help you, Columbine, and sort out how much is damaged," Fleur ordered, and swept off towards the cellar stairs with Thomas behind her. "You say de Villaret was with them."
"Yes, petite, with the gendarmes, it was about two hours ago. Poor Gaspard was here on his own. He had no choice but to let them search. And then the soldiers came."
Below stairs, the staff, with much grunting and effort, were heaving the wine racks and the barrels back against the walls. One of the former lace-makers was stitching up the rip in a sack of flour; another was shooing onions back into a box.
"The main thing is to not let this disrupt today's menu," Fleur declared to Thomas. "We can deal with most of this tomorrow morning." She commiserated with Gaspard and then clapped her hands, "Back to your normal jobs, please, and thank you for clearing up the mess."
Once everyone had dispersed, she took a candle and made her own swift exploration, more out of curiosity than to check for damage. Where was the door that M. Beugneux had taken her through to avoid de Villaret? It had to be here somewhere, or had she been so soused in champagne that she had imagined it? The cellar walls seemed solid and disappointingly dull. No sign of concealed doors anywhere. Puzzled, she returned to her upstairs realm.
Within half an hour the chaos of the dressing-room had been shelved, hung or wiped. The soldiers, with sans-culotte relish, had only bayonetted the two gowns that might have passed muster at old Versailles.
"This is so unnecessary," fumed Fleur. "Indeed, we should be recompensed."
"You are not going to confront de Villaret, surely?" squeaked Juanita.
"I do not mind seeing him on your behalf, patronne," Columbine offered somewhat too eagerly.
"No, I have no wish to foist such an unpleasant task onto you," replied Fleur firmly. She flung the two costumes over her shoulder and headed off to the Palais de Justice with an expression St Joan might have worn to fight the English; but she had not counted on April turning so clement. The brocade gowns were heavy to carry and by the time she reached the bridge to the Îsle de la Cité, she was hot, weary and regretting her hasty temper, especially as the medieval walls of the Conciergerie prison, which now specialised in prisoners who had been condemned to death, stretched up before her, high and menacing. She crossed the Pont au Change, halted in front of the clock on the corner tower of the Palais de Justice and drew a deep breath. It was not too late to reconsider. The doors of the huge guardroom that lay beneath the palace were propped open. The interior was like a huge whitewashed crypt and noisy with soldiers. Was she a fool to come here? She was no longer an aristocrat, she reminded herself, but a bourgeois businesswoman. Having an affair with La Coquette, was he?
Refuelled with anger, she marched up to the iron railings enclosing the busy forecourt of the Palais de Justice. It might be easiest to edge in behind the cartload of potatoes that was trundling in, but one of the whiskered guards manning the gilded gates thrust his pike across her way.
"Hey, you there! Just where do you think you are going? Let's see those!"
Stupid of her. Clutching expensive, old-fashioned gowns made her look thoroughly suspicious. The guard strode up so close she could smell the tobacco on his breath. Studying her face for guilt, he began to search through the folds of the gowns. "I am here to see Deputy de Villaret," she muttered unwillingly.
"Oooh, likes ballgowns, does he?" smirked the other guard. "I would have said
he was a breeches and waistcoat fellow myself, but it's surprising what weapons are hidden in a woman's skirts these days. Hold the deputy's finery, friend, while I check the rest of the citizeness."
Fleur was convinced that the only reason the sentries let her in—after they had finished fumbling her for knives or pistols—was to annoy de Villaret. Scarlet-faced, furious and excessively manhandled, she hastened into the middle of the courtyard then faltered. A huge, decaying maypole wearing a weathered tricolore ribbon stood incongruously to her right. To her left rose the steep roof of Sainte-Chapelle, the chapel of the Valois kings, its precious windows blessedly intact. At least they had not used the jewel-like glass for artillery practice but, judging by the large cabinets that were being harrowed in up the steps, it no longer echoed with plainsong or organ music. Ahead of her a trio of old gossips sat knitting at the base of broad stone steps leading up to the law courts. Three men, lawyers to judge by their robes, were clustered halfway up, deep in discussion.
"Oi! Dressmaker, that way!" The first guard was pointing at a wicket gate beneath a low archway to the right of the stairs where more guards were checking a visitor's papers. Zut!
This time she was more poised. Time for a dazzling smile and a dash of La Coquette.
"I am here to see Citizen de Villaret," she requested, and strove to disguise her horror as she realised the tall gentleman in front of her was no visitor but a new prisoner having his name taken.
The gentleman glanced back at her as if seeking a fellow sufferer and then, judging her to be merely a seamstress and a sans-culotte, coldly jerked his chin up.
"Take no notice of his haughtiness, chicken," joked the sergeant. "He won't have that head much longer." Showing off to her, he violently drove the butt of his musket into the prisoner's side.
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