Fleur-de-Lis

by Isolde Martyn

  Fleur's eyes clouded with tears but she dashed them away.

  Your father was dragged ahead of me before this mockery that called itself a tribunal. They declared him guilty and he was hauled out into the street where fiends armed with sabres dispatched him. Two or three of those ahead of me suffered the same fate and then I was forced to take my turn before the gutter lawyers. Mercifully one of the national guard who knew me spoke up on my behalf and I was given my liberty. On stepping out into the street, I was embraced as a patriot by the same foul butchers who had just slain my fellows. I recognised M. de Villaret, a ci-devant deputy of the National Assembly from Berri. His hands and coat were stained with innocents' blood and there was a crazed look on his face.

  An abbot who was fortunate to survive the massacres at La Force prison tells me this same deputy was at the prison just before your unfortunate sister, the Vicomtesse de Nogent, paid the price for being our poor Queen's friend.

  The immediacy of the writing, the character of the author and the purity of his intentions in writing to her brother argued that there was little reason for her to doubt the veracity of his testimony.

  The second letter was even more damning. Bertrand, the turnkey at the Abbaye Prison, testified to seeing de Villaret killing one of the prisoners in the street on the second of September. He recognised him because the young man had visited the prison before in company with the Minister of Justice.

  The cruel phrases etched themselves on her mind. Fleur forced herself to read the priest's letter a second time and then she sat staring at the wall. She had thought it possible to fall in love but now it seemed far easier to hate.

  * * *

  Running along the Rue Saint-Honore an hour later, garbed like a youth, dodging the soldiers lest she be forced to show her papers, Fleur knew the risk was high. She had left her house in her widow's clothes and changed in the stable, not an easy task with Blanchette nudging her for carrots and hopeful for an outing.

  Beyond her immediate neighbourhood Fleur slowed and sauntered along in her old Calvados manner, whistling, one hand stuffed in the pocket of her jacket and a sealed letter under her arm as though she was an errand boy. By the time she reached the Rue Saint-Antoine she had a heel blister from one of her new boots, but the hidden blade gave her confidence, as did the small knife she carried in a leather sheath beneath her workman's carmagnole.

  The ancient gabled cornerhouse where Raoul de Villaret lodged was three storeys high and had been divided up into apartments. A list of residents' names was daubed on the wall just within the main door, which opened directly onto the street, and fortunately there was no inquisitive concierge or suisse to witness her visit.

  De Villaret was living on the second and third floors. Fleur sprang up the polished wooden stairs with swift, light feet and came to a gasping halt on the uppermost landing outside a solid-looking door. She knocked. When no one answered, she crouched and unknotted her handkerchief, which contained a wire and the ring of passe-partouts. Oh, God! If the soldiers had caught her with those, the consequences wouldn't bear thinking about. Crossing herself, she said a swift prayer and knelt to put an eye to the keyhole. A half-finished face stared back at her. Hérault's!

  It was only a painting on an easel. In fact the room was full of faces, she discovered to her astonishment as she softly closed the door behind her. The quayside waft of linseed was recognisable and she discerned oil of spike lavender and drier fragrances that took her back to childhood, to the time that David had come to Clerville and set up his temporary studio in the old nursery. Forgotten words bubbled up from memory as she gazed about her: pouncing and impasto, glazes and scrambles; and the colours: sienna and ochre, green earth and rose madder, massicot and azurite. For an instant she closed her eyes and imagined Maman again, beautiful in her lace and hooped gown standing at David's shoulder smiling. "Keep still, Cupid," she had teased, "or your arrow will hit the wrong heart."

  And it had. She had made a mistake and now she had just made another; this was deVillaret's studio, not his domicile. It was a spacious room, perfect for an artist, amply lit with windows on both sides, and the low ceiling with its exposed beams lent a Renaissance atmosphere. A place to concentrate on work, for there was no comfort here: no furniture to speak of, save for a simple wooden chair and a chaise longue.

  Fleur turned to go then hesitated. This all belonged to de Villaret; the lover she now hated. For an instant she had the urge to overturn the cabinet with its drawers of poisonous pigments and hurl crimson lake at Hérault's half-finished grin. Instead she resolved to explore her enemy's domain. To destroy you need to understand, she told herself.

  It was orderly. Families of brushes, camel hair and hog, hung on a string between the medieval beams like victims à la lanterne. The palette knives were precisely set, like an executioner's tools upon a scaffold of a table. She found casts of hands and faces and a human leg bone in a wooden crate. In a drawer she found chicken skin, ivory and vellum: animal sacrifices to the art of miniature painting.

  Tiptoeing her fingers through the frames stacked against the old Louis Quinze wallpaper, she discovered a leather portfolio secured at the sides with red tape. It yielded sketches of marquises and courtesans, dukes and deputies, their political allegiances no longer keeping them from brushing cheeks. De Villaret's clients must have liked how he depicted them and paid, for there were few final portraits propped against the wall. Most of these people were dead now, she supposed; severed, like dead flowerheads. All dead while you prosper, she whispered, running a finger across one aristocratic portrait that bore the confident signature. Did this proud marquise refuse to pay your price?

  A shabbier portfolio contained evidence of experiment and more variety of subjects. Some sketches must have been done years ago for the paper was poorer quality and foxed with age. One study moved her—a man and a woman's interwoven hands. Both wore wedding rings and Fleur's first assumption was that they were a husband and wife, except there was such a poignancy revealed in the interweave of fingers that she was left wondering whether they were lovers, each snared in a loveless marriage. Such love, it almost made her weep. Oh, how could a regicide so cunning and murderous show such sensitivity?

  Biting back self-loathing at the memory of last night's surrender, she swallowed the tears and resolutely worked her way through the pile. A modello made her pause again—a small-scale painting of a larger project: Marcus Antonius dying for love of Cleopatra, self-disgust fighting a war with adoration across his contorted face.

  Fleur could see David's influence but here was a sensitivity lacking in the great master's heroic figures; a dying man whose hand reached out to the beholder as if to say: I may have failed at the last but I have lived!

  Nor was de Villaret's Cleopatra like one of David's weepy women, but defiant and tragic. The woman's soul was in her eyes.

  It was magnificent.

  On the shelf a clock chimed the half-hour, reminding her she was staying too long with no result to show for it. She straightened with a sigh only to notice a sketchbook open upon the chair. His current work, perhaps? Curiosity won her over. In an instant she was on her knees with the book open before her on the floor.

  And there she found pastels of the woman who had modelled for Cleopatra, close sketches of her from the waist up in a drawstring cotton bodice with a rose satin sash, and one of her asleep on the chaise longue with a sheet half drawn over her sprawled nakedness. Fleur glared at the chaise longue. Oh, he had found comfort here, all right. The bloody, treacherous son of a whore! "Artist's fingers," Emilie had said. Damn him! Yes, he had artist's fingers. Every inch of her skin had experienced them, even... Well, he must be laughing. Having killed her father, he had now taken her honour. She turned the page in fury, and stared, wide-eyed in astonishment, at her own image.

  La Coquette, cheeky and flirtatious, in stays and greasepaint, and, facing the actress on a different sheet with a grave and challenging expression, herself as a widow. De Villaret mus
t have drawn her from memory, but what disturbed Fleur was that the two drawings were on the same scale, at the same angle and the matching jawlines were unmistakable. Each of the sketches was clearly dated: the actress sketch had been done the very day he had seen her satire. But the first sketch—mon Dieu, this had been done in Caen.

  For the moment she could not bear to turn another page. It was as if he had been spying on her the entire time. The clever rogue must have known she was La Coquette when he had sent the coach to arrest her, before the balloon fiasco, before she had even thought of confessing.

  Hate simmering, she flicked on through the sketchbook and found several more drawings. Herself at the Café Liberté, laughing, and one of her as a country girl, sitting demurely in a pony cart gazing down at her hands folded in her lap as though she were being driven home from a funeral. Avid for more, she was disappointed to find the rest of the workbook unused but there was a loose sheet tucked in at the back of the folder.

  Fleur took it out and gasped. Oh, now she understood the term erotic. A man in a Greek tunic, his legs bare, was pushing open a wooden door. The man's pose was not exactly furtive but he wore soft buskins on his naked feet as though he wished to tread softly. The room he was entering, like a voyeur, contained a scrolled couch and, sitting mermaid-like with her legs curled beneath her, was a semiclad girl. A Grecian filet glinted gold against the creature's auburn curls. One of her breasts was uncovered, and the white folds of her chiton were only fastened over one shoulder, as if she had been distracted while dressing by the tiny dog that was standing with its front legs against the couch. The filmy fabric gaped enticingly to reveal the young woman's other breast as she leaned down, snapping her fingers teasingly. She was not looking at the dog but staring at the man who stood observing her. Her red lips were parted in shock at being caught inflagrante but her eyes were subtly assessing her visitor's intent. It was a look that Fleur had glimpsed before; the covert glance of a maid at her employer; the swift appraisal her sisters had given male callers; a look as old as Eve's.

  Persephone was scrawled beneath the sketch. Persephone in the Underworld after her abduction. Fleur gazed once more on the girl's features. The face, not so easily recognisable as the other sketches, was hers. She was Persephone, torn between virtue and inevitability. And the god coming to possess her—Fleur sat back on her knees, her face scorched with shame. This too was dated. Caen, 18 March.

  The whistling and heavy feet on the stair shook her to reality. She grabbed a small urn from among the model props and shrank against the wall behind the door, holding the pot up ready to strike him hard.

  "Raoul, are you back?" The door was hammered again. Oh God, she'd not locked it. The oath that followed was one of Robinet's ripest.

  Should she pretend she was here to model? That de Villaret had gone to buy more oils? No! Wine! Fleur held her breath; the urn waited. "Stupid cul's left it unlocked," muttered the sans-culotte, peering in. The door closed again. He must have possessed a set of keys, for a key turned in the outside lock and was removed.

  Fleur let out her breath. A different door rattled on a lower landing, then a few moments later she heard Robinet greeting someone down in the street. De Villaret? She darted to the window, but it was just an old woman, perhaps one of the other tenants. Quickly Fleur tried to remember the right rod to free herself from the studio. Her hands ran with sweat but finally she made the lock surrender.

  Two apartments shared the lower landing. She broke into the one that lay beneath the studio and found herself in de Villaret's other sanctum; his tricolore sash, greatcoat and deputy's plumed hat hung from a nail on the door, and a rolled-up banner was angled in a corner. It was a pleasant room with a tall window that opened onto a tiny iron balcony overlooking the street. Behind a screen in one corner was a marble wash stand with a large bowl and ewer, a small canister of tooth powder, two bottles of essence, razor, strop and shaving tray. Above it, mockingly coroneting an ornately framed mirror, was a sans-culotte workman's bonnet. The escritoire, predictably, was locked and might demand ingenuity to open it.

  Pockets, Philippe had said. She groped the lining of the greatcoat; its inner pocket yielded up an ancient errand list, a card of speech notes and a small folded packet, which made her blush when she glimpsed the pink ribboned sheath inside. She cursed its owner and shoved it back in its wrapper. The caring man who had led her through the steps of lovemaking was nothing more than a selfish blackguard, safeguarding himself against fatherhood and soldier's pox. Well, Fleur hoped he got soldier's pox and every other malady of the bedchamber; she hoped bits of him dropped off and... Fleur stormed towards the salaud's and then stopped, scraping her tears away. She must be businesslike. Yes, detached and scrupulous in her exploration.

  The armoire, like most gentlemen's, contained some forty shirts, quality ones with underarm gussets, all neatly stacked; a pile of detachable cuffs, both sober and frivolous; and an ample supply of ironed linen stocks, with and without crimped ruffles. It was the blue coat deVillaret had worn at the Palais Royal that almost unhorsed her. She slid a hand into one of the flapped pockets and caught her breath, hearing voices below and the ominous creak of wooden stairs.

  Not again! If it were de Villaret returning... Without a second thought, Fleur wriggled her feet between the spare shoes inside the wardrobe and hastily pressed herself against the back, drawing the twin doors to. The tails of his coats—the man had plenty—tickled her arms, and the aroma of other men's tobacco hung in the folds, but the rich, spicier scent the deputy wore drove into her with every breath. What if he discovered her?

  Fleur froze, her hands splayed against the splintery wood behind her. One of the boards curiously gave beneath her fingerpads.

  The outside knocking was deferential, the voice out of breath: "Your clean sheets, citizen! No, not there? Bloody stairs!" The panting laundress departed, cursing.

  Pushing aside the thicket of clothing, Fleur stepped out onto the carpet; then, opening the wardrobe doors wide, she jerked aside the commissioner's tunic deVillaret had worn in Caen and eased forward on all fours across his satchel and shoes to explore the back of the wardrobe. It seemed quite solid but then as she ventured higher, one of the panels pivoted inwards. As she pushed the upper end of the board, the lower end seesawed out at thigh height, revealing a cavity. A false back! Formidable! This was like something out of a storybook.

  One knee on the bottom of the wardrobe, she dipped her arm inside the hollow. Her fingers scrabbled against leather but her knuckles were touching something rough and fibrous. Familiar from her recent exploration in his studio, Fleur recognised canvas. A rolled up painting, no less. Why would he—?

  It was not easy to extract but she managed and, pink from her exertion, sat back on her heels and examined her treasure. Happy in its rolled state, it fought at being unfurled and her arms were aching and stretched as the picture was revealed. Good God! She let go in shock. It bounced against her lap and speedily rescrolled itself some distance from her knees. For a moment she studied it as though it were some snake that might attack again, and then, with painful breath, she pinioned the middle lower edge and readjusted her weight so she was straddled over it, hands and knees holding each corner.

  Fair, lost faces simpered from another life. Her half-sisters. The Judgement of Paris. On the right-hand side, thrust in at the cajolement of Maman, was Fleur herself, smirking with a nine-year-old's self-confidence, the cupid bow alert for mischief.

  Fleur ran a finger over the jagged corner. Four years of wondering who the man was who stole it and why? Why of all the treasures in her father's chateau, had the thief chosen this? And how had the painting found its way into de Villaret's hands? Why would he want it? Because it was David's? She rolled it up, her emotions a tempest of anger, disbelief and sorrow as she stowed it back in its hiding place and tidied the shoes back in front.

  Raw, she sat down before the writing desk in the chair de Villaret must sit in to write his letters and picked t
he lock. Lifting down the board, she scanned the pigeonholes and drew out a slim, leather-bound notebook. Only the first few pages were used—notes for several speeches—but on a whim she turned the notebook back to front and read, in burgeoning horror, the cold-blooded note of her father and sister's slaughter in the September massacres. Her immediate family were listed, one by one, in de Villaret's pleasant—oh, so legible—script with a control and dispassion that was absolutely terrifying. Fleur felt like a fly that had blundered into some foul and monstrous web.

  Philippe de Montbuillou, émigré. Last heard of in Coblenz, wanted for anti-revolutionary activities

  Marguerite, Vicomtesse de Nogent, ci-devant lady-in-waiting to Marie-Antoinette, perished with the Princess de Lamballe in disturbances, September 1792

  Henriette-Josephine, Marquise d'Aurillac, died in hunting accident, 1788

  Cécile, suicide, December 1792, Frith Street, Soho, London—"enceinté en acte de décès"

  Good God! According to the death certificate, her sister had been carrying a child. Fleur crossed herself, cursing the foul beast who had made Cécile pregnant and then abandoned her to starve. How in God's name had de Villaret discovered so much and why? There was one last entry:

  Françoise-Antoinette, daughter from de Montbulliou's second marriage, educated at Trinité School, Caen.

  Underscored beneath her name were the words:

  I have found her!

  * * *

  Raoul reached the Rue Saint-Antoine in a devil of a hurry. His morning was in chaos. The reception for Marat had gone well but afterwards Danton had called a brief meeting of the Committee for General Security. Raoul received a congratulatory clap on the shoulder for assurances that the escapes at La Force would cease, and then in the same breath was told that his colleagues wanted him to leave immediately for Caen and report back on any adverse federalist activity. It was urgent. Seeing that Marat had been acquitted, the committee was concerned that the angry Girondin government might carry out its threat to move its headquarters away from Paris, and Caen would be ideal. Who else on the committee was so well qualified to be their eyes and ears? A coach would be waiting for him at the Cour de Messagèries and an official of the Central Paris Commune who was travelling on to Cherbourg would be joining him.