by Diana Norman
‘His wife sent me this letter.’ She took Sophie’s letter from her pocket, less in confirmation than to show him how stained and battered it was. ‘She’s got a friend whose brother drives the diligence that goes between Paris and Caen and he took it to Gruchy and they gave it to one of Ma’s smugglers to bring over. I can send the certificat by the same route. If Nicolas can reach Gruchy, Jan Gurney will carry him back across the Channel on one of his trips.’
‘That missus and her smugglers . . .’ He shook his head in amused wonderment at Makepeace, then sobered. ‘When did Mme Condorcet send the letter?’
‘Two and a half weeks ago.’
‘Things could have changed, old dear. Can’t hide long in Paris nowadays; too many informers. You have to reckon he’s been discovered by now.’
She had indeed reckoned it; since the letter had arrived this morning she’d reckoned that every day, every minute of Nicolas’s concealment in some Paris cellar, Sophie had worried her husband would be found.
‘I have to try.’ she said. ‘They were so good to me when I stayed with them and Sophie’s in great distress for him. She’s scraping a living for herself and their little girl in Paris by painting portraits.’
‘Her Ladyship is getting restive, my lord.’
‘I’m coming, dammit.’ Lord Ffoulkes hoisted himself off the wooden horse and crossed to the desk to stub out his cigar in the hands of a bronze Echo. ‘Stay here and I’ll send Blanchard in—he organizes the forgers. A certificat shouldn’t take more than a day or two.’
‘Thank you, Andrew.’
When he’d gone, she walked across to the desk where the statuette held a still-smouldering cigar in bronze hands stretched beseechingly toward an invisible Narcissus. Philippa picked up the stub, crossed to the fireplace and threw it into the grate before returning to wipe the Echo’s blackened palms tenderly with her handkerchief. ‘Show some pride, woman,’ she told it. ‘He’s never going to love you.’
Next to Echo was a turnip; he was experimenting with turnip-growing at his estate in the Fens. Papers concerned with his many projects leaned untidily against the model of a new village he was building for his workers in Kent, putting them on higher, healthier ground—a note to himself stuck out of one of the chimneys: ‘Mem: Mrs B don’t like thatch.’
She made herself sit down in a chair by the fireplace so that she would not be tempted to tidy it all up for him. ‘Bedlam’s full of tidiers, ’ he’d told her once.
The library smelled of him: cigars, his books—of which she’d read more than he had—a tin of liniment left open on a Benares table, two glasses containing dregs of malt whisky on top of his drinks cupboard . . .
She breathed it in. So far, Félicie’s scent had not penetrated but it wouldn’t be long before her embroideries and sachets would dominate the room.
At the moment, pride of place was still given to his mother, a touching portrait done while she was pregnant; whether he’d meant to or not, Reynolds had caught her frailty, as if he’d known the energetic baby she was expecting would literally take the life out of her.
All the women Andrew had fallen in love with had resembled this portrait of the mother he’d never known; he’d made Philippa his confidante and gone to her with his woes or happiness over this or that wispy blond maiden whose fragility had attracted him. She’d listened without flinching, like the Spartan boy enduring the fox gnawing at his vitals.
His first wife had possessed the same quality as his mother and had come to the same end. Félicie, with her pale skin and hair, her small bones, was yet another in the line, though, Philippa thought, there was an element of steel to the Frenchwoman that the others had lacked.
‘God send there is,’ she prayed in sudden, desperate contrition. ‘Lord save me from the sin of waiting for another of his wives to die. Let there be a baby and let them all live happily ever after. I mean it, Lord.’ She did mean it, but because her conscience was as honest as her mother’s, she added: ‘He wouldn’t marry me anyway, I’m too hard and brown.’
It would have surprised even the intimates of the small, collected figure sitting in the large library chair to know that Philippa regarded herself as analogous to a coconut. During her childhood in America, her Aunt Susan had once shown her one that had made its way to Boston and had explained that, when young and green, the things were awash with a liquid like fermenting milk.
Even then Philippa was aware that very few of the people she loved returned her affection with the passion with which she wanted to extend it; Aunt Susan perhaps; Betty, her nurse, certainly, but not her mother.
When Makepeace had given her, then aged seven, the choice of staying in England or sailing to Boston with Aunt Susan, Philippa had seen the offer as betrayal. The child had considered that if her mother loved her with the intensity with which she loved her mother, the idea of their parting—which had extended into years—was a suggestion that could not have been made.
It had always been part of her nature to hide any hurt, either physical or mental, a legacy from the father who had died days before she was born; a father who, in turn, had inherited it from a long line of Dapifers who had cultivated English sangfroid to an almost ludicrous degree.
So it had seemed good to little Philippa to hide pain by inflicting it and telling her mother, with apparent composure, that she chose Aunt Susan and America.
Just as it had seemed good to twenty-six-year-old Philippa to accept Stephen Heilbron as a husband within hours of hearing that Andrew Ffoulkes had taken a wife.
She realized she hadn’t told Ffoulkes that she and Heilbron were engaged and wondered if it was because there hadn’t been time or if she hadn’t wanted to, and if so, why.
Oh, most definitely, she was a coconut. Philippa saw her exterior as brownish, unattractive and impermeable and thanked her God that it gave no indication of the love, the tenderness for creatures as hurt as she was, the horror with which she regarded the world’s wrong-headedness, the tears which, if she wasn’t Philippa Dapifer, she could even now shed in fellow feeling for a forlorn statuette, the raging jealousy, the bad language, the whole boiling of pitching, shuddering, emotions that seethed through every organ of her interior being.
And she knew that, had she been capable of showing Andrew Ffoulkes all or any of these passions, he might not now be married to that aristocratic bit of French flummery but be wed instead to Philippa Dapifer, who would suit him much better.
A ridiculous fruit, the coconut.
‘Lord Ffoulkes said you wished to see me, Miss Dapifer.’
She stood up. Before she’d met Blanchard, and knowing the esteem in which Andrew held him, she’d asked what he was like. ‘Imagine a Machiavelli that plays cricket,’ Andrew had said, ‘and you’ve got Boy Blanchard.’
The description was just; the Italianate beauty of an Elizabethan courtier, a Raleigh or an Essex, combined oddly with the breeziness of an Old Etonian. In fact, he was Ascendancy Irish on his father’s side, though his early childhood had been spent in France with his mother. His spoken French was that of Paris; the others, Francophiles though they were, spoke fluently but with an accent that, fortunately, the critical Parisians put down as belonging to the Languedoc.
For Andrew’s sake, Makepeace had often included the young Blanchard as her guest during the boys’ holidays but hadn’t liked him much; she was always at a loss with subtle minds. ‘A schemer,’ she’d called him.
Philippa, who’d seen less of him and for whom he was The League member she knew least, had wondered if this was pique on her mother’s part, or competitiveness for the ruling place in Andrew’s heart, though this was uncharacteristic; Makepeace had always reckoned that love couldn’t be rationed and there was enough for everybody.
Anyway, Makepeace had denied it. ‘I ain’t jealous of him, he’s jealous of me. He’s jealous of everything Andrew has.’ Which had seemed equally unlikely; for there was no denying Blanchard’s ease and popularity with his friends. Better-read than th
ey were, with only his baronetcy to set against the others’ peerages, with less money and fewer estates, they nevertheless deferred to his cleverness and included him in every venture. Andrew teased him unceasingly and called him ‘Reynard.’
‘Sir Boy . . .’ As always she found the address awkward; to christen one’s son ‘boy’ argued indifferent parents.
He interrupted to beg her to sit down and took a chair opposite hers. She found that she had gained his interest as never before. While she explained that she wanted papers for a friend, she felt him trying to assess her with a care she was unused to from men and very few women.
She was dismayed to see it resulted in a sympathy he might have extended to a stricken warrior—one who’d fought on the other side, though what battle they had previously been engaged in she wasn’t sure. He was being kind.
She reminded herself that this man had trouble with his teeth—it was the most reassuring thing she knew about him. His lips stayed over them, even when he smiled.
‘Delighted to be of service in plucking another brand from the burning,’ he said. ‘What’s a little forgery among friends?’ He got up to seat himself at Andrew’s desk, rummaging in its drawer for paper. He dipped a quill into the inkwell, keeping it poised. ‘What name shall he travel under?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said, ‘Something middle-aged and respectable. ’
‘Let us say . . . hmm . . . Auguste Bourrelier. It breathes respectability, not to say bulk. I hope your friend is rotund. But if he has been in hiding these weeks, I suppose that’s unlikely. Is one to be vouchsafed his real name?’
She was reluctant to give it. Andrew obviously hadn’t mentioned it to him.
Blanchard was watching her. ‘It would help to know his identity,’ he said, gently. ‘Perhaps The League can be of assistance to him.’
‘Condorcet,’ she mumbled.
Blanchard lowered the pen. ‘The Marquis de Condorcet?’
She met his eyes. ‘He and his wife are good friends of mine.’
He leaned back in the chair. ‘And were good friends of the Revolution, I believe.’
Philippa said nothing.
‘Which has now turned on them,’ he added.
‘Nicolas refused to vote for King Louis’s execution,’ she said in explanation.
‘How good of him. Nevertheless, I understand the Marquis previously played a large part in His Majesty’s overthrow.’
She was becoming angry, as she always did when she heard the Revolution’s founders villified. Where were you when famine was decimating France? You saw it, you lived there with a nobility that not only didn’t care but didn’t notice. How many men and women did you rescue from death then?
She gently reminded him of his place. ‘Lord Ffoulkes sees no reason to deny him a certificat on that account.’
He was drawing the quill’s feather down his long cheek. ‘Lord Ffoulkes is an amiable man.’ Then he surprised her. ‘I shan’t, either.’
He scribbled something on the tablet. ‘Memo to forger—one certificat de civisme in the name of, what did we say, Auguste Bourrelier?’
‘I am grateful.’ Suddenly she was tired, as if the two of them had been physically fighting.
‘Je vous en prie.’ He folded the paper as he stood up and tucked it in his cuff. ‘It may take a little time, of course, but you should have it in a week or two.’
Shocked, she got up. ‘There are no weeks to spare. Andrew said it would only take a day or so.’
‘Yes, I have yet to inform Lord Ffoulkes of a recent reversal. Our counterfeiter has hurt his forging hand. Naughty man, an injury from beating his wife somewhat too vigorously I understand. He assures me the sprain will be mended within the month.’
Sophie. Sophie. She kept her face expressionless. ‘Is there nobody else you might use?’
He smiled. ‘Contrary to opinion, Miss Dapifer, my acquaintance with the criminal classes is limited.’
Ma was right, she thought; she never liked you. She allowed herself a lunge. ‘Is that not unfortunate for your French dentist? How will your poor teeth fare now?’
She’d scored a hit; he was less amused than he had been. ‘Ah, yes, the Froggy tooth-puller. Luckily, his papers were completed before the forger fell out with his wife. Never mind, I am sure the good Marquis will be attended to before the month is out.’ He bowed. ‘Miss Dapifer.’
‘Sir Boy.’
But it was her blood left on the floor.
Stephen Heilbron found her standing in the middle of it. ‘My dear, your mother is asking for you. What is the matter?’
She was in Paris, in a cellar; she could hear the approaching footsteps of National Guardsmen. ‘I’m sorry, Stephen?’
He sat her down in the chair by the fireplace and took the one Blanchard had occupied. ‘Tell me what’s wrong.’
She stared at him; confidences were foreign to her. In the fire-light his face was not unlike that opposite hers minutes before, dark and aquiline, both of an age, but whereas Blanchard’s had been careless , her fiancé’s was careworn, the Devil obviously having more concern for his followers’ complexion than God had.
I have to learn to talk to him, she thought. We must share things.
What he wanted from her was friendship, comfort, devotion to his cause, absolute loyalty, not least her fortune, all of which she was happy to give him. Her own character would be a casualty, of course; his personality was such that it robbed other people of theirs but, again, that was a gift she could easily render in recompense for not loving him as her mother had loved her father.
Her return would lie in being useful to a man who would one day abolish the greatest evil under the sun. And the knowledge that Andrew Ffoulkes would never know he had wounded her almost to death.
She must not shortchange this wonderful man; theirs could at least be a meeting of minds, in which case she had to open hers to him.
So she told him—she was so unused to explaining her thinking and motives that it took effort.
He was astonished by her, as if he hadn’t accounted for her having a life before she met him. Nor had he known there was such a thing as The League; he was both surprised and pleased. ‘Christian work,’ he said.
‘Apparently, Sir Boy imposes limits to its Christianity,’ she said. ‘He is not prepared to save those who do not agree with him.’
‘Condorcet,’ he said. ‘Condorcet. Where do I know the name from? And you are friends with this man?’
‘Yes. I spent four summers in France with him and his wife. Busy as he was, he was good enough to give time to my mathematical studies. In ’91, his wife and daughter came to England to stay with Mama and me.’
‘Mathematical studies?’
‘I am interested in mathematics,’ she told him.
‘How very unusual.’ She watched him turning the pieces of the jigsaw to make them fit. ‘Condorcet. Philippa my dear, are we talking of Condorcet the Encyclopédiste?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
He sat back, his elbows on the arms of the chair, clasping his hands so that his mouth rested on them while he thought.
Philippa waited.
‘A revolutionary,’ he said, without looking up.
‘And a republican. Yes.’
‘A member of the National Assembly.’
‘Yes.’ She went on waiting.
‘An atheist.’
There it was. ‘But a great humanist, Stephen.’
‘A contradiction in terms, my dear. And this is the man you wish to see escape from a predicament that was much of his making. You would see him brought to England.’
‘Yes.’
He got up and walked around the room, while she watched him, his hands behind his back
He had never approved of the Revolution in France, even when it was young and fresh and Englishmen and woman less large-hearted than himself had been flocking excitedly across the Channel to witness the most radical experiment in history. He hadn’t sought her opinion of i
t, presumably believing it to be the same as his own.
Blame Makepeace Dapifer Hedley, she thought.
Not that her mother advocated revolution; she had suffered too much from both sides during America’s fight for independence, as had Philippa herself. ‘Causes kill people,’ she’d always said. But during a life that had seesawed between poverty and riches she had discovered both conditions to possess an equal share of saints and sinners, and that class divisions were a nonsense. In Makepeace’s book, so was patriotism. People—individuals—mattered, not countries.
Perhaps now was not the moment to mention that, during the war between the United States and England, Makepeace had helped American prisoners of war to escape from England via her smugglers. She had not felt she was betraying her adopted country by doing it; the men were suffering, ergo they ought to go home.
It was her mother’s love of freedom for the individual that Philippa had inherited. With gratitude.
Stephen, though, only loved God. She thought God frightened him somewhat; he was haunted by the judgment to be passed upon him when he died. It was as if he were one of England’s prefects squirming with shame under God’s schoolmasterly eye at the antics of a class for which he had responsibility.
The common people’s disregard for Sunday worship, any worship, the drunkenness, crime and prostitution of the streets filled him with as much shame as if they were his family’s. He didn’t see them as the outcome of demeaning poverty, like Makepeace and Philippa did, but thought they could be cured by suppressing licentiousness, ‘which is the parent of every species of vice.’
God had told him to free the slaves and that would be done though it killed him. But God had said nothing about dividing property equally between rich and poor—an idea he regarded as born out of madness. Liberty, equality, fraternity would be found in Heaven and not before.
‘The Almighty has set before me two great objects,’ he’d told her once, ‘the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of morals.’ Sometimes she didn’t know which he wanted most.
Condorcet, who called God a superstition . . . Condorcet, the advocate of women’s rights, of divorce, who’d helped to pull down a king in order to set up a people . . . Condorcet was Stephen Heilbron’s nightmare.