by Diana Norman
She leaned forward to kiss him. ‘Keep him safe,’ she whispered.
‘Same to you,’ he said.
Bracey took his place, putting one foot on the steps to raise her face to Makepeace’s and kiss it, her great skirts billowing.
Makepeace felt something slither against her ankles. The coach rocked slightly.
Bracey shut the door. The window was down and Makepeace reached out to her with both hands. ‘Thank you,’ she said; she had difficulty with it. ‘And Bracey ...’
‘Yes, missus?’
‘Tell the company from me, they were . . . extra wonderful tonight.’
Widow Lackitt was grinning. ‘We bloody were, weren’t we?’
Sanders cracked his whip and the coach jolted forward at a rate that threw Makepeace back against the seat so that there was no chance to wave good-bye to The Duke’s and its actors—something for which she was always sorry.
The body on the floor started to get up but she put her foot on its head. ‘We ain’t out of the woods yet.’
It grumbled. ‘I do not like to hide under women’s skirts.’
‘You be grateful,’ Makepeace said. She opened the flap to the box. ‘Anyone following us, Sanders?’
‘They are, missus. But we got the speed.’
She sighed. This was déjà vu. ‘Sanders, why do we always end up on the wrong side of the law?’
‘Don’t know, missus. But we always do.’
This time, though, she couldn’t go back to Reach House. They would know where she lived, and where Jacques lived; Blanchard would have told them. This time—and it struck her hard—she could never go back.
‘Where to, missus?’
‘Babbs Cove,’ she said.
Chapter Sixteen
THE most shocking thing about their trial was how run-of-the-mill it was and how tired the court was. When Ffoulkes’s and Philippa’s turn came they were merely customers in a long, long queue to be served by men with a tedious job to do before shutting-up time. There was no special interest in the fact that they were English. The Tribunal had tried Englishmen and women before, as it had tried Germans, Dutch, Spaniards, Danes and sentenced them all to death; it killed internationally.
The setting was nice; late-evening sun lit the wonderful ceiling of the Salle de Liberté but its walls echoed back voices sharp with fatigue, and the click of boots as National Guardsman patrolled the line of prisoners at the bar. On the other side of the wooden barrier that separated the body of the court from the public stands there were eight spectators, two of them asleep. The chamber had been absorbing heat all day and had lost none of it. The jury was trying to keep awake but, like the judges, it looked more tired than the prisoners.
Since nearly all crime was now considered a conspiracy against the Republic, the Convention had decreed that all those on conspiracy charges should come to Paris for trial and suspects were being brought to the capital in the thousands from all over France. If prisons and the guillotine were to cope, the process had to be expedited. Elsewhere in the building four other Revolutionary Tribunals were hearing cases—and would do far into the night. To save time, defendants were allowed neither witnesses nor counsel, juries had the choice of two verdicts: guilty or acquittal.
Ideally, the accused were tried in the morning, received their sentence at two o’clock and, if guilty, executed at four. In reality, most had to wait their turn to die, sometimes for weeks.
They were heard in batches. Alongside Ffoulkes and Philippa was a baker, a farmer and his son from the Vendeé, two priests, a shop girl who was pregnant, the ci-devant Countess Hervé Faudoas, her daughter, Mme de Galles, and an elderly couple from Saint Omer who were still trying to find out what they were accused of.
Philippa was in a state of detachment through shock; she noticed some things in detail, mostly unimportant, while others passed her by. She might have been watching an inferior play that she had to sit through but on which the final curtain refused to come down. She was aware it was her fault they were there at all and that any moment the guilt of causing Ffoulkes’s death as well as her own would obliterate her, but not yet; she couldn’t feel anything yet.
She had apologized nevertheless. When he’d achieved some awareness after his battering at the hands of their captors, she’d squinted out of her one good eye in order to dab his bloodied face with her apron and said she was sorry.
Now, here at the bar of the court, she supposed she should apologize again; he didn’t seem to have noticed the first time. She touched his hand. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘So you bloody well should be.’ He was odd. Not angry but absent, as if his mind was on other things, as if she didn’t deserve his attention. Which, she supposed, she didn’t.
She kept expecting God to give her back the minutes at Number Fifteen and again at the bridge so that she could amend them. The Lord must find this massive punishment too great for a moment or two of impetuosity. He would save Ffoulkes, surely.
But the play went on and on and he was showing no sign of intervening in it.
She did thank him for the fact that, by rushing out of Number Fifteen without her papers, there was nothing to connect her with that address. Nor had Ffoulkes been registered as living there. As long as M Sarrett hadn’t been arrested as well, that household could remain as undisturbed as it was before Condorcet entered it.
And where was he? She tried to stretch her mind to that wandering innocent but couldn’t.
She supposed she really ought to concentrate on the matter in hand.
The president, irritable and tired, was addressing the thirteen members of the jury. ‘Interrogation of the prisoners has already taken place, citizens.’ His tone suggested they could take the rest of the evening off. With his three assisting judges he sat on the high bench, facing the prisoners from under a broad-brimmed hat with plumes and a tricolor cockade. Before him on the bench lay a bell and two loaded pistols, ready at each hand for any prisoner who became unruly, although it had become apparent that the person he’d most like to shoot was the state prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, also beplumed, who sat on a cross bench between jury and accused.
There’d already been prosecution errors. Several of the defendants on the list had been attributed with the wrong sex. Now Fouquier-Tinville got up to announce that he was offering no evidence in the case of the shop girl; she’d been arrested in mistake for her mother who’d been heard to say, ‘Fuck Robespierre and the price of bread.’
‘It was a confusion by the National Guard, Citizen President. Both the girl and her mother are called Marie.’
‘And I daresay both are guilty of disrespect to the Republic,’ said the president. ‘Let the charge stand. Too much damn paperwork otherwise.’ He rang his bell to drown out the prosecutor’s protests and the girl’s scream.
Fouquier-Tinville sat down, scrabbling among his papers. M Sarrett had said of him that he’d once been a conscientious lawyer. His work now meant he was lucky to get three hours’ sleep in twenty-four. The previous week he’d been found standing on the Pont Neuf, staring at the river and muttering: ‘Red, red, red.’
One by one the prisoners were led forward to hear the charge against them. The general lassitude smothered indignation, even fear, like a blanket. Waiting for her turn, Philippa knew that, like each of her fellow accused, she would declare herself innocent but not as if there was any point to it, because there wasn’t. When he asked each if he or she had anything to say in his or her defense, citizen president tapped his fingers on the table, occasionally yawning.
The ci-devant Countess and Madame de Galles didn’t even bother; their titles were their condemnation. Both said, quietly, ‘Vive le roi.’ The priests, too, were guilty by profession, knew it and merely invoked God.
The baker afforded a momentary change of tempo by saying truculently that he expected nothing from ‘a load of crooks and idiots like you lot.’
The shop girl was the only one who showed energy; she became hysterical and ha
d to be taken away to the Tribunal hospital.
The Vendeéan farmer began to explain that he and his son had been forced to lodge rebel soldiers in their house or have their crops burned, but he went on too long and citizen president became impatient. ‘Yes, yes, it’s noted. Next.’
This was Ffoulkes. The charge was conspiracy against the Republic. Any doubt that Blanchard had supplied the information against him was dispelled by its detail. They even gave his name and title in full. ‘Andrew Christopher Elphinstone Ffoulkes, so-called Baron of Wulford.’
Around the court one or two heads were raised from interest.
Perhaps they won’t kill him, she thought. From their point of view he’s a spy and an aristocrat, but he’s an English spy and aristocrat. They can use him as a bargaining counter. Isn’t that what sides do in war? Exchange a valuable one of yours for a valuable one of ours?
He didn’t look much against the splendor of the chamber and the judges; too shabby, too many cuts on his face. So valuable, she thought, so valuable to me.
Citizen president was unimpressed; he’d tried aristocrats, spies and Englishmen before; here were merely the three offenses combined. He repeated the formula without emphasis: ‘What have you to say in your defense?’
‘Nothing, really,’ Ffoulkes said. The easy voice seemed to be issuing from somebody else. ‘One would just like to point out that the woman there’—a dismissive wave of the hand in Philippa’s direction—‘the one supposed to have conspired with me is a stranger as far as I’m concerned. Just another female who’s mislaid her papers. Saw her being arrested and waded in on impulse. Nothing to do with me. Sorry.’
He was pushed back into line.
Citizen president’s eyes had closed, he opened them. ‘Next.’
Philippa stepped forward.
‘No papers,’ Fouquier-Tinville said, on sure ground. ‘Gives her name as Bettine Gagnon but believed to be Philippa Dapifer, English, associate of the previous accused.’
Blanchard had been thorough.
‘What have you to say in your defense?’
‘Nothing.’
The elderly couple from Saint Omer were put forward after her but, like the rest of the court, she’d expended her attention on other things and never did find out what they were accused of.
The jury was directed to an anteroom to consider verdicts and to be quick about it.
‘God Almighty, I gave you a chance, blast you,’ Ffoulkes hissed. ‘Why in hell didn’t you take it? It might have worked.’
‘Oh, shut up,’ she said. ‘If I can’t die for you, I might as well die with you.’
He became remote again.
I’ve done it now, she thought. I’ve told him I love him. It seemed a much more momentous utterance than any made in court so far. Well, he might as well know.
When the jury didn’t appear within fifteen minutes, a National Guardsman was sent to fetch them back.
Every defendant was found guilty—except the two farmers.
‘But they’re from the Vendée,’ citizen president said with ominous patience, ‘The Vendeé’s in revolt against the Republic.’
The jury foreman was flustered. ‘We know, Citizen President, but we decided they were coerced and . . . well, farmers. Paris needs supplies.’
‘Look,’ said the president, ‘they’re from the Vendée.’
‘Ah,’ said the foreman. He turned round to peer at his fellow jurymen. ‘Guilty, then.’ He sat down. He got up again. ‘But we did think . . . the defendant who’s going to have a baby . . . we did think execution ought to be delayed . . . until she does.’
Citizen president had come to the end of his tether. ‘Of course it will, you dolt. Do you think we’re in the Dark Ages?’
The prisoners were lined up and led out by guards carrying lanterns. It was a long walk, mostly through a labyrinth of passages. Philippa was two behind Ffoulkes. She heard the ci-devant Countess ask him: ‘Do you know where one is going, M’sieu?’
‘The Conciergerie, Countess. The two palaces are connected.’
‘The Conciergerie. Where they held the Queen before they murdered her?’
‘Yes, Madame. We’ll pass her cell.’
‘That is something, then, God give her mercy. To suffer where she suffered.’
How does he know all this? Philippa wondered. She listened to the two chatting as they went along; they had acquaintances in common. She heard Ffoulkes say, like someone discussing the points of an inn, ‘If one can pay for it, one can procure a cell to oneself. Otherwise it’s the common hall.’
‘I have . . . ’ The Countess’s voice sank to a precautionary whisper.
‘I’ll see what I can do for you tomorrow,’ Ffoulkes promised her. ‘Bit late for haggling tonight.’
The Countess, an elderly woman, gave a deep curtsey as they passed the little iron door behind which Marie Antoinette had spent her last hours. Ffoulkes raised her and gently hurried her on; the priests had fallen to their knees and guards were kicking them to their feet.
Past open courts. An exercise yard. Downwards along passages with gilded vaulting. ‘But they are taking us into the bowels of the earth,’ the old man from Saint Omer complained.
‘Bowels certainly got something to do with it,’ the baker told him. The smell was becoming thicker as they went, like fog settling on lowest ground.
All at once they were in a great space, the Hall of Arms with its thirty-six blond, branching pillars amongst which Philip the Fair’s men-at-arms had waited on their king’s orders in the fourteenth century and where hundreds of men and women now passed the time until their execution. It was hot and dark, with a ferocious communal silence, like a lair occupied by sleeping animals.
There was light at its far end where a jailer sat at a table in the entrance to an ogival-roofed corridor. He took their names. ‘I ain’t separating you women tonight,’ he said. ‘It’s too late, you’ll have to bed down here with the men. Get yourselves some straw. Any of you’s got chink, I’ll see to you tomorrow.’
Bedding straw had been swept into a ceiling-high pile at one end of the corridor and new arrivals from the other tribunals were picking it up in armfuls.
Ffoulkes gathered a great heap for the Countess. Philippa had to gather her own but when she’d have made her bed next to the woman, he picked up enough for himself and nudged her along the corridor into the hall away from the light of the jailer’s lantern. ‘Here. More private.’ She could just see him patting straw into place at the foot of a pillar.
He settled her on the bed he’d made, a cushion of straw between her head and the pillar, then sat down beside her. They talked in whispers.
‘We’ll get out,’ he said. ‘I’ve been in and out of more French clinks than you’ve had hot dinners. There’s always a jailer with a palm to be crossed with silver.’
‘Have you got any silver?’
‘In my boot. Bloody uncomfortable. I’ll see about it tomorrow.’
‘Will there be a tomorrow for us?’ she asked.
‘Good God, yes. They’ll have announced tomorrow’s quota for the tumbrels already, they call out the names the evening before. Plenty of time to work the oracle. Go to sleep.’
He’s lying, she thought. Even if it was true that he’d escaped from prisons before, it had been with the connivance of The League and its money, safe house, identity papers. But the lies, his very voice, were the rope she clung onto to stop herself slipping into black fear and drowning in it. Now that she was part of it, the silence wasn’t silence at all; it was whimpers, snores and rat-infested rustling. Somewhere, in another part of the building, a baby was crying. A jailer’s child? A prisoner’s?
The pity of it enveloped her. Women loving men as she loved this one, men loving women, children loving parents, father and mother desperate with love for their child, son, daughter torn from loved parents, brothers, sisters . . . the irreplaceable web people spun to keep each other safe ripped apart. For what?
‘Ma�
��s going to be so mad,’ she said, just to keep talking and not drowning. ‘Do you think she’ll know what’s happened to us?’
‘We’ll tell her,’ he said. ‘Go to sleep.’
‘You shouldn’t have come after me,’ she said. ‘I could bear anything if I hadn’t got you into this.’
‘For God’s sake, go to sleep.’
‘I can’t.’
There was a jerking cry in the darkness; someone waking from a bad dream into actual nightmare, then someone else’s voice gentling whoever-it-was until they were quiet again.
‘Look,’ Ffoulkes said, ‘since you insist on flagellating yourself . . . I wasn’t going to tell you this, hardly decent considering everything, being your godfather and married and all, but I didn’t try and save you out of bloody chivalry ...’
Somewhere a golden sun rose and melted everything in its path as it crept towards her.
‘Fact is, something happened on that bloody bridge when they were marching you across.’ He paused. ‘You didn’t look your best, you know, hair all over the place, black eye ...’
‘That was later,’ she said, happily.
‘Was it? Well, you weren’t Venus rising from the waves and I thought: “Leave it, Ffoulkes, it’s her own damn fault. You’ve got better things to do than get your head chopped off for a scarecrow like that ...” ’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘No, I didn’t. That was the moment I realized that if they took you down to hell, I’d follow you. Now in the name of God, let me get some sleep.’
She leaned her head back against the pillar and allowed sunlight to penetrate the marrow of her bones.
‘Ffoulkes,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Do you think they’d provide a cell for two?’
IT was against the rules for male and female prisoners to lodge together but the Conciergerie’s rules were crumbling and he arranged it the next morning, he could arrange everything except their freedom. They were to live à la pistole by paying twenty-seven livres in advance for accommodation for two. He even carried her over the threshold. The cell had two iron beds with mattresses. They only needed one.