The Flood-Tide

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  All was quiet in the Bay, and Thomas took the chance to revictual and rewater from Yorktown, while his gig rowed up the Bay to the plantation with an invitation to Charles and his lady to dine on board. He was not quite so sure of his position as to dare to dine off the ship. The invitation was accepted, but on behalf of Charles alone, and Thomas was a little disappointed, for he had never yet seen the famous Miss de Courcey. But he was delighted to see his cousin, whom he embraced heartily, and took him straight to his cabin for a glass of Madeira before dinner was served.

  ‘You are looking famously well, Thomas,' Charles said. ‘This damned war seems to suit you. I wish I could say the same for myself.’

  Thomas thought that Charles was looking less happy than he would have expected, for a man who had newly married his heart's desire. 'I trust you are in good health yourself?' he probed delicately. 'And your lady? Her absence is not through any indisposition, I trust?'

  ‘Oh no,' Charles said with a curious roughness. 'She is well, but would not come. Eugenie likes her comfort. I bring her excuses and apologies.’

  Thomas hardly knew what to say, and there was a brief silence until Charles said, 'You have read the Declaration of Independence, I suppose?'

  ‘We had copies within two days,' Thomas said. 'It must be a widely distributed document. Well, it was no shock, after Commonsense, and I cannot see that it changes anything.'

  ‘A formal declaration always changes things,' Charles said. 'What men say is more irrevocable than what they do. All that talk of republicanism and equality - "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" - that is contrary to everything we have always believed, everything that has made it possible for men to live together in harmony.'

  ‘But my dear Charles, you don't suppose anyone really means it?' Thomas said. 'I see no signs that the Patriots intend to establish equality in their new States. The property qualification, and the religious qualification - yes, even the literacy rule - will prevent a good deal more than half the people having the vote. When they talk of all men being equal, they only mean that they, the upper orders, must not be deemed inferior to the King and the aristocracy, not that the lower orders are not inferior to them. And what about the slaves? There is no mention of equality for them.'

  ‘The first draft of the document contained a condemnation of the slave trade, but it was deleted from the second draft,' Charles told him. 'You are right, of course. They do not mean to include the slaves, or the poor, in their new order - but the fact remains that it has been said, and it cannot be unsaid. When you kick a pebble down a mountainside, it falls slowly at first, bouncing and rolling, and a child could stop it with one hand. But it gathers speed, and at the bottom of the mountain it may smash a man's skull. So it is with ideas. So it will be with this one.'

  ‘Oh, I think you exaggerate the importance,' Thomas said soothingly. 'These ideas spring up and die down again, and things go on much as before.’

  Charles shook his head. 'I don't know. There is a tide in the thoughts of men, and the tide is making. I am afraid of the flood.’

  Dinner was brought in, and changed the subject, and Thomas told Charles of the progress of events in New York and Canada as they consumed such delicacies as the ship could provide - pea soup, and fried chicken, and oysters, and corn bread, which Thomas was just beginning to get used to. It was at least better than ship's biscuit, now his own flour was finished. By way of dessert they had a dish Thomas had learned about in Boston, which the Indians had invented, made of cornmeal and sugar and molasses, very rich and sweet.

  When they had eaten, and the table was cleared, and the port brought out, Thomas said genially, ‘So, dear cousin, you have joined the ranks of the married men. I have not yet congratulated you, or wished you joy, which I do with all my heart. How did you manage to persuade her father to give you her hand? I remember you were sure he would not be willing.'

  ‘I did not need to persuade him - he was as eager for the match as I could ever have been,' Charles said, and he sounded dark and bitter, and Thomas looked at him with surprise and concern.

  ‘Surely it was a compliment to you, that he wanted you for his daughter,' he said.

  ‘I thought so at first, but now I see that what he wanted was to get his daughter married at all costs. I happened to be convenient, that's all.'

  ‘What can you mean? A beautiful heiress cannot be hard to match.'

  ‘A Creole, and a Papist. If she had not been hard to match, she would have been married long before, for her father was desperate for an heir. Well, I can't blame him - he wanted to ensure the survival of his line, and he must do what he considered best for his daughter. No, I blame myself for being such a fool.'

  ‘But, my dear, what can be the matter? You were so in love with the lady—'

  ‘Oh God!' Charles cried, suddenly burying his face in his hands. 'This is all so horribly disloyal. I am ashamed to speak so, but I can't help it. There is no one else in the world to whom I can own it.'

  ‘Own what, Charles?' Thomas asked gently. 'Come, you can tell me. It will go no further, whatever it is, you know that.'

  ‘I know, but you will blame me.'

  ‘I won't, I promise. I only care that you should be happy. You are my best friend, and my wife's brother.'

  ‘Oh, Flora - you must not tell Flora, promise me!' Charles cried. 'She was against it from the beginning. She told me so - she asked how I could know I was in love when I hardly knew the woman - and she was right.’

  Thomas was now thoroughly alarmed, but he said nothing, waiting for Charles to tell him in his own way.

  ‘She was so beautiful - she is so beautiful,' Charles corrected himself, 'and her beauty still moves me. But, oh Thomas, there is nothing underneath. How was it that I did not see the truth before? How could I be blinded to the emptiness inside her. We have nothing to say to each other, nothing. She is not, cannot be, a companion to me.'

  ‘But you used to talk to her - I remember you saying so.'

  ‘It was a trick she was taught in that wretched convent, of how to behave in conversation with a man. Look directly at him, they told her, and nod and agree, and now and then repeat something he has said. That way he will think you very wise. And I was duped and flattered like any other lovesick fool. But now she is married she does not need to go on doing it. All she ever talks of is her clothes and her silly little dog. If I talk to her of my work, or the war, or - or anything, she simply does not attend.’

  To Charles's great indignation, Thomas burst out laugh ing. 'I'm sorry, cousin, but this is not so very strange a thing after all! You will not be the first man to discover that he has married a very foolish woman. Indeed, the majority of women have nothing in their heads at all, and in my experience, the majority of men prefer it so.'

  ‘Is that how you think of Flora?' Charles asked angrily. Thomas sobered himself and shook his head.

  ‘I was spoiled, I grew used to Morland women, and wanted more than a pretty picture to look at. That's why we Morlands so often marry our cousins. You should have waited for a cousin, Charles, indeed you should. But you must make up your mind to love your lady for beauty, which is what you married her for after all. She has not deceived you - you deceived yourself.'

  ‘I know,' Charles groaned, 'and I feel guilty about speaking of it at all. But you cannot imagine how isolated I am. I have no one to talk to, no one at all. In the evenings, even my father-in-law goes to his own room, and I am left alone with Eugenie - talking of Paris fashions.'

  ‘Well, there is the root of your trouble,' Thomas said. ‘Other men with silly wives have the society of each other. Why do you not go and live somewhere else?'

  ‘Don't be a fool, how could I leave?'

  ‘Sell York, and buy an estate somewhere else,' Thomas said simply.

  ‘You talk like a sailor,' Charles retorted. 'Land is not so easy to come by; and besides, even if York was mine to sell, I could not do it. It is their home, and I was permitted
to marry Eugenie solely to preserve it and provide an heir. That was the bargain, and I cannot go back on it.'

  ‘Then the only other advice I can give you is to start a family. Once you have your children growing up around you, you will find enough to occupy you to keep you happy.’

  Charles said nothing, but his gloom did not lift. Though he longed to tell Thomas the rest of the story, it was a thing too private to be mentioned, even to his cousin and best friend. The fact was that he had been virgin when hemarried, and like most young men he had thought physical rapture, as well as spiritual, would follow naturally from his union with his heart's desire.

  But the one had proved as disappointing as the other. The beautiful Eugenie lay passively in his bed, neither encouraging nor discouraging, and indeed, how could he expect her to behave otherwise? But it was as though she was not there at all, and the idea of perpetrating such outrages in her absence, as it were, daunted him. On the occasions when he did pluck up courage to disturb her exquisitely-frilled lace night attire, and touch her remote and flawless body, he gained no pleasure from it: it made him feel obscurely as though he had insulted her.

  That was not how it was meant to be, he was sure. He had heard so much about the great joy and pleasure of it, which apparently other men had, and he longed to ask Thomas, with his greater experience of life, to explain it to him, and perhaps tell him where he was going wrong. He was sure that Flora and Thomas had passed together through those hidden gates - but it was simply not something he could ask.

  *

  During that summer of 1776, when General Howe assaulted and finally took New York, Monsieur Henri Ecosse was laying long and careful seige to Mademoiselle Homard. It was a project to absorb and intrigue him, but unlike many a man before him, he discovered that he liked and admired the object of his desires more, the more he knew of her.

  Madeleine, he discovered, was a cheerful, sensible and, to his surprise, well-educated girl. She had spent her four years at school in a convent learning to read, write and sew; her father had taught her arithmetic, so that she could keep the books; and she had been further fortunate in a godfather, the Cure Fontenoy, who not only had an extensive library at his house near St Sulpice, but encouraged his goddaughter to use it to continue her education.

  But added to that were the attributes of her own character. She had the shrewd common sense and levelheadedness that he would have expected from a prosperous Parisian bourgeoise, and was an excellent judge of character - except, Henri thought, that she seemed to like him. But there was nothing coarse about her. She had a natural good taste, and distinguished with one glance of her clear grey eyes between the genuinely excellent and the meretricious. She, he was persuaded, would not have been taken in by Rousseau. He enjoyed arguing with her more than with any man he had ever met, for she would cut through the bone of the matter, and never allowed him to obfuscate by claiming greater experience of the world, or greater age.

  ‘If you cannot match sense with sense,' she would say, ‘you have nothing to claim from your years.’

  He had established his alter ego as the decorator of the homes of the rich, and had enjoyed the business of setting up his double life almost as much as Madeleine's company. Duncan had helped him, having revealed to his master that he knew about the Cheval Bleu from having followed him there. Henri rented rooms in a shabby old house in the Rue des Ursulines, just off the Rue St Jacques, in what had become over the years the Scottish Quarter of Paris. It fitted his false background of being the descendant of a Jacobite exile, and explained the name he had taken at such random. There he kept the clothes Monsieur Ecosse wore, and the books he read, and devised his character and history. It was a wonderful release to him when he grew tired of his own life, when Versailles and the Tuilleries and the Palais Royale palled, to trot away over the bridge to his other life, and he could not disguise from himself that the seduction of Madeleine had ceased to be his only motive for doing so.

  He was surprised that the seduction was taking so long, for when she first consented to meet him secretly he had thought the battle half over. A girl who would deceive her father by meeting a man secretly, was, in his experience, unlikely to resist very long the greater sin. But Madeleine was unlike any woman he had met before, and even more to his surprise, he took as much pleasure from walking and talking with her as he anticipated from making love to her.

  She was accustomed to walk to her godfather's house and spend some hours there reading, and her father, who admired her cleverness, let her off as often as he could to do so, so it was not difficult for her to meet Henri in the Jardins de Luxembourg. At first Henri had been at pains to establish his false identity, and to tell her of imagined commissions and conversations, but she seemed remarkably incurious about it all, and soon he ceased to trouble and discussed other matters with her. She was as interested as Ismène in the new philosophies, and it amused him to compare her opinions with his mistress's.

  Madeleine, for instance, like Ismène, rejected the notion of original sin, but did not from that conclude that man was essentially good, and that there was no need for religion or the Church. 'There is good and base material in all of us, and it depends upon how we are brought up which flourishes. We need all the help we can find for the good to triumph - we cannot reject our greatest helper.’

  Ismène's friends were very interested in the ideas of Darwin, and concluded that as there was an essential order in the universe, so man too must be subject to natural laws, and that if it could be discovered what those laws were, a perfect form of government could be established.

  ‘But nothing that man devises can be perfect,' Madeleine argued one day as they walked in the gardens, 'because man is not perfect.'

  ‘So you do not think there is any point in changing the form of government?' Henri asked her. 'For instance, do you not think a republic would be better than a monarchy?'

  ‘In theory it might be,' she said, 'but in practice I think the chance of improvement would be small. For surely anyone seizing power must be more hungry for it than someone who has it already?’

  Henri laughed, delighted. 'Oh, it is so refreshing to hear common sense spoken. If only - some other friends of mine could hear you.' He stopped himself in time from mentioning Ismène.

  ‘There is a story, you know, told in the classics, of a wounded soldier waiting on a battlefield for the surgeons to come,' Madeleine said. 'There was a second soldier nearby, worse wounded than himself, his wounds black with flies. The first soldier was about to drive them away, when the second soldier cried, "Oh, do not do so! For these flies are almost sated with my blood, and they are not hurting me nearly so much as at first. If you drive them away, their place will be taken at once by new and hungry flies." '

  ‘What a cynic you are!' Henri said. 'Better one lion than a whole pack of jackals, that's your philosophy!' And he stopped under a tree and turned her to face him, taking both her hands. She smiled up at him, and his heart turned over. How can this be? he asked himself. Have I come to love her? He gazed at her strong, clear face, her beautiful mouth, the tawny-gold hair dappled with leaf shadows, the proud easy carriage of her head upon her graceful neck. She was as innocent and strong and wild as a roe deer, and he wanted her desperately, more than he had ever wanted anything. He pressed her hands, and she returned his gaze levelly, looking into his eyes with a directness that made his bowels melt.

  ‘Oh Madeleine—' he began helplessly.

  ‘Yes, Henri? What is it you want of me?'

  ‘I want you,' he said, drawing her closer. She came without reluctance or coquetry, and he felt the warmth of her body, smelt the sweet, female scent of her, and trembled. 'I want to possess you entirely, to have you near all the time, day and night, to know you are mine only.' She nodded, not a nod of consent, but of attention, like a good student listening to the professor. 'Will you come to my rooms?' he asked her, feeling, even as the words took the air, how paltry they were, how unfitting.

  ‘You kn
ow I cannot,' she said evenly.

  ‘It is only a few minutes walk from here. We can be alone, private—'

  ‘Henri, you know you cannot ask that of me. I am a child of the Church. I cannot give you what you want without marriage. Even though,' she added in a different voice, low and unwilling, 'even though I want it myself.'

  ‘Oh, my darling!' he said, and pressed her against him. But she pushed him gently away.

  ‘I am wrong to deceive my parents in meeting you like this. I cannot do more.'

  ‘But - I cannot marry you,' Henri faltered, wondering what reason he could give for his unwillingness that did not betray his secret; but to his relief she assented to the propositon.

  ‘No,' she said. 'My father would not agree.’

  Henri raised his eyebrows in surprise. He had not thought of Homard as anything but approving. Madeleine smiled kindly.

  ‘Papa likes me to encourage you as a customer by serving your table when you eat at our café. But he would not wish me to marry a man about whom he knows nothing, whose living is uncertain and depends upon the whim of the rich and famous. On your own admission, your customers are very capricious about settling their bills.’

  He had told Homard this to explain why he was so apparently poor, when the kind of service he offered ought to have commanded high fees. Inwardly he gave a rueful smile. This deception business had more pitfalls than he had anticipated. In desperation he made one attempt to persuade her to become his mistress, promising his love and fidelity always, as every man had promised every mistress throughout history. Any other honest woman would have been mortally offended by the request, but Madeleine only smiled, a smile of perfect understanding and perfect strength that made him feel weak and confused but somehow safe, as though she had taken charge of his soul and would lead it safely.

  ‘No, Henri, I cannot do that. I love you, and I believe you love me, and that our love would be happy and successful. Why else did God direct you to the Cheval Bleu, of all the cafés in Paris? But we could not be happy and good without God's blessing. I would marry you with the greatest joy, but I could never consent to be your mistress.’