Knowing her past, Roger felt no compassion for her, and replied tersely: ‘Your future means nought to me. I am now an official of the French Government, and have been sent to enquire into your doings. You have been endeavouring to blackmail Madame de Beauharnais, have you not?’
Seeing her hesitate, he added: ‘Come! I have no time to waste; and I have men outside awaiting my orders. If you refuse to answer my questions I will have them take you off to prison.’
‘You put a hard interpretation on it,’ she muttered sullenly. ‘Marie-Rose Josephine is my foster sister. She owes me much; for it was through being of service to her that I was thrown out of her father’s house, and became what I am.’
Roger gave a cynical little laugh. ‘You seem to have forgotten that you told me the whole story yourself, and that there is another side to it. Had it not been for your example in taking a lover she might not have been incited to go to such lengths with William de Kay. But, that apart, it was you who planned and induced her to go through this form of marriage which has since proved the curse of her life; so she can owe you nothing but the bitterest reproaches.’
‘I intended it only for her happiness. She should remember that, and that in girlhood we were devoted friends. She is rich, and could well afford to give me the small pension which is all I meant to ask.’
‘She might have, had that been all, and you had gone to ask it of her yourself. But it was not. You meant to bleed her white. For that, to conceal your identity in case she went to the police, you had to have an intermediary, and for the purpose have been using Citizen Fouché.’
Fear showed in Lucette’s eyes, as she said in a low voice: ‘So you know about that?’
‘There are now only a few minor details that I do not know about this matter: such as why you choose him for your agent.’
‘It was owing to a man I met soon after landing at Nantes. He told me that Citizen Fouché was a skilful homme d’affaires, and not above sharing any profit to be obtained from a valuable piece of information. My friend gave me a letter of introduction to him.’
‘I see. Let, us proceed to business, then. Be good enough to hand over Madame de Beauharnais’s diary.’
‘I … I have not got it.’
‘That is a lie. You are much too clever to have passed it on to Fouché. Had you done so, you know well enough, he would have had no further truck with you.’
‘I tell you I have not got it’
‘Then that is most unfortunate for you.’ Roger drew from his pocket the Order of Transportation, opened it, held it to the light, and told her to read it. Then he said:
‘When I came here I had no idea that you were Madame Rémy. But I was prepared to make a bargain with her, and I will do so with you. Give me the diary, and agree to leave Paris for good tomorrow morning, and I will have this order suspended. It will be marked “to be executed only in the event of the person named being found to have returned to the Capital”. Should you refuse, I will call in my men to arrest you, and I shall see to it myself that you start on your journey to Cayenne tomorrow.’
‘No!’ she exclaimed with a violent shake of the head. ‘I’ll not give it up. Send me to Cayenne if you will. I am no flabby European to take a fever and die of it. For once I’d have something for which to thank my black blood. I’ll be little worse off there than I am here, and I’m not yet so ill favoured that I could not seduce one of the guards into aiding my escape.’
At her outburst Roger’s confidence in his prospects of success suddenly slumped to near zero. It had not occurred to him that for a mulatto prostitute transportation threatened few of the terrors it would have held for an ordinary French woman. All he could do now was to play his subsidiary card; so he said:
‘I think you underrate the horrors that you will have to face. I am told that conditions in the convict ships are appalling, and that many people die upon the voyage. Be advised by me and take the easier way. Your refusal, too, may have been influenced by lack of money. If so, I will give you a hundred louis; and that will see you back to the West Indies in comfort.’
Again she stubbornly shook her head. ‘No. I know enough of Voodoo to survive the voyage, and within a month of reaching Cayenne I will have escaped. Then I will join another fraternity of sear-overs. The diary is safe enough where it is. Later I will return and collect it. Having kept it so long, I’ll not give it up. It is my life-line to a secure old age.’
Roger had already thought of threatening her with prison, but whatever charge was trumped up against her she could not be kept there indefinitely. Then, as he sought desperately in his mind for a way to get the better of her, the expression ‘life-line’ that she had used gave him a sudden inspiration. Since she was who she was, he still had a forgotten ace up his sleeve.
Refolding the transportation order, he said quietly: ‘You seem to have overlooked one thing. Piracy is just as much a crime punishable by death in France as it is in England. Unless you produce that diary, I will charge you with it; then the thing you count your life-line will become the rope that works the blade of the guillotine.’
At that her jaw fell; then she screamed: ‘You fiend! You devil!’ and came at him with hands rigid like claws in an attempt to tear his eyes out. Thrusting her off, he gave her a swift jab in the stomach, which sent her reeling and gasping for breath back again on to the couch.
Standing over her Roger said firmly: ‘Now! Do I send you to your death or will you give me the diary?’
Still whimpering, the fight at last gone out of her, she pulled herself to her feet, and slouched across to a door at the far end of the studio under the steep stairway. Roger followed her and, as she opened it, could just make out by the faint light that beyond it there lay a kitchen. Going inside she fished about for a moment in its near darkness, and emerged holding a heavy meat chopper.
Alert to the possibility that she meant to attack him with it, Roger watched her warily. But without a glance at him she went up the twenty or more narrow stairs to the small landing; then, using the blunt back of the heavy chopper, she began to hammer with it at the end of one of the many short cross beams that supported the roof of the studio. After half a dozen blows the nails that held the end of the beam to a large rafter were loosened enough for her to pull it down. It was hollow, and thrusting her hand into the cavity she drew out a small leather-bound book. Then she came down the stairs and handed it to him.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Allow me to congratulate you on having thought of such a good hiding place. We might have hunted the house for a month without coming upon it. Indeed, I doubt if we would have found it short of pulling the whole building to pieces.’
With a shrug, she walked past him, threw the chopper on to the table, and sat down again on the couch. Meanwhile, he flicked over the leaves of the little book to make quite certain that it was the thing that he had gone to so much trouble to obtain. It was a thick book and all but the last dozen of its pages were covered with a round childish scrawl. Soon he came upon the name William repeated three times on the same page, then on a passage that made his raise his eyebrows. It was, he thought, remarkable how indiscreet young girls could be during the first upsurge of physical passion, in confinding their feelings and experiences to paper. Little wonder Madame de Beauharnais could not face the thought of her diary falling into the hands of an unscrupulous publisher. There was no law to prevent the printing of such material, however personal; and there were still innumerable books on sale describing, without the least truth, obscenities of the most revolting kind said to have been practised by Marie Antoinette, which had been published while she was a Queen living in splendour at Versailles.
Slipping the book into his pocket, he walked over to Lucette, and said: ‘Now, about yourself. If you will tell me where you wish to go when you leave Paris tomorrow morning, I will do my best to aid you, and will provide the money for your journey.’
‘I think I had best return to the Indies,’ she murmured despondently. ‘Wit
h food to be had for the asking and the warmth of the sunshine, life is at least easier there.’
‘Very well. I will endeavour to secure you a passage in a blockade runner.’
As he spoke, there came an urgent knocking on the front door.
Muttering a filthy oath, she pulled herself to her feet. ‘I expect that is a customer. I must open to him, but will say that I am engaged.’
Roger watched her cross the room, pull aside the coarse curtain and unlatch the door. It was immediately thrust wide. With a cry of surprise, she took a pace back. Slamming the door to behind him, Fouché stepped after her into the room.
Snatching up his sword-cane Roger called out to him: ‘So you followed me! What do you want here?’
Thrusting his way past Lucette, Fouché advanced to the table, and halted. Glaring across at Roger, he panted: ‘I had hoped that you might still have to collect the order of transportation you spoke of from Barras, before threatening to execute it. Even had I had the luck to pick up a coach I might have managed to get here a few minutes before you.’:
‘Then you have had your half-hour’s walk for nothing,’ said Roger quietly. ‘I already had the order; but it will not now be needed.’
Fouché’s pale eyes switched from Roger’s waist-line to Lucette’s neck and he said sharply to her: ‘Then you have told him where the diary is?’
She gave a sullen nod. ‘He has it. We argued over it for some time but I surrendered it to him five minutes since.’
‘You fool! You black, besotted witch!’ he snarled. ‘Did you not have the sense to realise that had you kept it hidden it might yet have meant big money for us both?’
‘For you perhaps, but not for me!’ she cried with sudden defiance. ‘He has the power to send me to the guillotine, and would have done so had I held out against him. I know this man! He is my enemy; my jinx! Had I not bought my fife with the book he would have delighted in bringing about my death.’
‘You know him?’
Roger felt a sudden awful sinking in the pit of his stomach, but there was nothing he could do to stop Lucette shouting back:
‘Know him; do I not! He says now that he is a Frenchman, but I find that hard to credit seeing how first we met. Everyone then believed him to be an English milor. He had an English wife, English friends and was upon an English ship. In Martinique, too, everyone spoke of him as Son Excellence Mister Brook. But I care not what he is. I know only that he would gladly see me dead.’
‘So!’ Fouché hardly breathed the word. Then, swinging round on Roger, his cry of triumph rang to the rafters. ‘A witness! The one witness I needed to support my oath! Mort Dieu; you are now no better than carrion in the executioner’s cart!’
Left with no time to think or plan for such an emergency, and made desperate by the terrifying turn events had taken, Roger whipped out his sword-cane. Across the table he made a furious lunge at Fouché; but his enemy sprang back, pivoted on his heels and dashed for the door. Swerving sideways Roger jumped over the couch, but Lucette threw herself in his way. Before he could get past her Fouché had wrenched the door open and was bellowing into the darkness:
‘Corporal Peltier! Bring your men! Citizens! Help! Quick! Come to my aid!’
Still hoping to transfix Fouché with one well directed thrust which would silence him instantly and for ever, Roger leapt after him. Fouché was standing in the doorway. He was still yelling for help, but from fear of another attack had his head half-turned towards the room. Roger’s lunge was aimed high to take him through the throat. Fouché jerked his head back so sharply that it hit the open door a resounding crack. The movement saved him. The flashing point missed his Adam’s apple by the faction of an inch, then buried itself in the wooden, door jamb. The thrust had been delivered with tremendous force. Under the impact the thin blade snapped. Roger was left holding only the handle and ten inches of the steel. Next moment Peltier and his three men blocked the doorway and came pushing past Fouché into the studio.
Giving way before them, Roger darted back behind the table. He was at his wit’s end for a sound course to pursue, and could think of nothing but an attempt to exert his authority. If he could succeed in that it might save him for the moment. He would then at least have a chance of destroying the all-important diary, and perhaps be able to escape from Paris before on a joint information laid by Fouché and Lucette a warrant was issued for his arrest. Pulling the order for Lucette’s transportation from his pocket, he waved it in the faces of the advancing soldiers and cried:
‘Touch me if you dare! I am the agent of Citizen Director Barras. Here is my warrant. Your own officer charged you to obey my orders. They are that you arrest Citizen Fouché and this woman.’
Fouché’s shouts had attracted several people. As they came running up behind the soldiers he slammed and bolted the door to keep them out. Turning, he hurried back into the centre of the room. His friend the Corporal gave him an anxious look, and asked eagerly:
‘What’s bin ‘appenin’, Citizen? I saw ‘im attack yer! ‘E’d no right ter do that, even if ‘e is a police agent. What d’yer want us ter do?’
‘Ignore his orders and accept mine,’ replied Fouché promptly, ‘What I have long believed the Citoyenne Rémy here has now confirmed. He is an English spy.’
‘Sacré bleu!’ exclaimed the Corporal. ‘An English spy! An’ ‘e’s an aristó ter boot, or my name’s not Jacques Peltier. ‘E ‘as both the looks an’ the smell o’ one.’
‘You have been told a lie,’ Roger cut in sharply. ‘I am neither. This absurd charge is based upon my having been abroad on a secret mission which occupied me for many months after 9th Thermidor Before that I was a member of the Paris Commune. As a Citizen Commissioner from its founding there are thousands of people in Paris who can vouch for my identity and my patriotism.’
That’s true, that is,’ nodded a tall guardsman with ginger hair. ‘I knew ‘im by sight before that too, when I were a pot-man in the Jacobin Club. I ‘eard ‘im speak there against our going to war over the Spanish Treaty.’
‘Yes,’ supplemented one of the others, a thick-set man with a swarthy face. ‘I thought I recognised him, and I do now.’
‘Don’t be taken in by that,’ snapped Fouché. ‘He has acted as one of Pitt’s agents from the beginning. For years past he has consistently betrayed us. He is the son of an English Admiral and his name is Brook.’
‘You lie!’ retorted Roger. ‘This is a plot by which you are attempting to evade arrest.’
‘It is the truth, as the Citoyenne Rémy can confirm.’
‘I do!’ shrilled Lucette, turning to the soldiers. ‘He is an English milor. I was for a week with him last year in an English ship.’
‘You are mistaken,’ said Roger firmly. ‘I have a cousin named Robert MacElfic who much resembles me. It was him you must have met.’
She gave a harsh laugh. ‘That lie will not serve you. Citizen Fouché is right. You are an Englishman and a spy. I will swear to that with my dying breath.”
‘You see!’ added Fouché triumphantly. ‘He admits to having English relatives. He admits, too, to having been abroad at the time the Citoyenne Rémy says she met him. What more do you require?’
‘That’s enough for me,’ growled Peltier, glancing round at the three guardsmen. ‘Well men; what der yer say?’
The ginger-haired one looked doubtful, but the swarthy man said: ‘I’d sooner take Citizen Fouché’s word than his; and the third soldier nodded his agreement.
As Roger took in the expressions of suspicion, anger and hatred on the faces of the five people who formed a semicircle round him, he knew that his situation was desperate. If he once let them haul him off to a police office nothing could then prevent a full enquiry into his past. He had spared no pains to get accepted a history of himself as watertight as he could make it; but there were some small holes in it, such as his statement that he had been born in Strass-burg, which could never be covered up.
He had had, to
o, as the only means of throwing discredit on Lucette’s identification of him, to say that it was his cousin, Robert MacElfic, whom she had met. She knew that for a lie, and it would not be difficult for French authorities to check a statement by her that from January to August a Mr. Roger Brook had been Governor of Martinique. Should he once be caught out on even a few minor matters, under skilful interrogation the whole false edifice he had built up would gradually be torn to pieces. Yet, although he knew that his life depended on it, he could think of no way out of the impasse with which he was faced, except to shout at the soldiers again:
‘This is a plot, I tell you! This man and woman are in league together. Both are under sentence, one to banishment and the other to transportation. Don’t be fooled by their lies, or you will rue it; I order you to arrest them!’
‘Nay!’ cied Fouché. ‘It is him you must arrest; or never again will you be able to call yourselves true patriots.’
‘Come lads!’ Peltier took a step forward. ‘Let’s take ’im ter the police office. They’ll ‘ave the truth ahrt of ‘im, an’ by me old mother’s grave I vow Citizen Fouché ‘as the rights of it.’
‘Stop!’ shouted Roger. ‘I represent the law. ‘Twill be jail for any one of you who lays a hand upon me.’
Seeing that the men still hesitated, Lucette began to scream abuse at them. ‘Go on, you cowards! You’re four to one! What are you afraid of? Take him to the police and see what I will say of him. I’ll prove him a liar! Aye, and a thief! He came her to steal and has a book of mine in his pocket.’
Like the proverbial ‘last straw’ the simple charge of theft seemed to weigh down the balance against Roger in the minds of all three guardsmen. It needed only a final cry from Fouché to spur them forward.
‘I take responsibility for this! Seize him! Seize him!’
The Dark Secret of Josephine Page 53