Tuppenny Times

by Beryl Kingston

  Nan stood on the hotel steps to watch their passing and thought they looked admirable. ‘That’s the new freedom,’ she said with approval. ‘I never did think much to those ol’ stiff petticoats, nor breeches neither. This is a deal better, don’t ’ee think?’ And she made up her mind to discard her stays the very next morning. What a joy ’twould be never to be pinched by that hard ol’ leather ever again!

  The hotel was in a road called the Rue St Honoré, which since it ran from the eastern wharfs north-west across the city, was crowded with goods-carts and heavy wagons. But there were no carriages and no sign of any vehicle for hire, and the concierge, who sat in the entrance hall of the hotel knitting stockings at a dizzying speed, told them brusquely that if they wanted to get anywhere they would have to walk. Nan didn’t think that was a hardship, even though the cobbles were so huge and rough it hurt her feet merely to stand upon them, but William Henry was put out, given the fragile state of his early morning constitution.

  ‘Perhaps we would be better advised to wait until the traffic has cleared a little,’ he tried.

  But she was determined. ‘I en’t come all this way to sit indoors and wait,’ she said, brown eyes fierce. ‘I mean for to see the city and the trial. Ask her where ’tis.’

  It appeared that it was being held in the Hall of the National Convention in the Tuileries, and that the public galleries were always crowded and that the concierge held out very little hope of her two foreign guests being able to obtain a seat. ‘Tout le monde a envie d’être là,’ she said, needles flashing. ‘Mais citoyens, si vous achetez une cocarde, peut être …’

  There was a box full of red, white and blue cockades lying on the bench beside her. William Henry translated as well as he could, fumbling in his fob pocket for coins. ‘She says it is very unlikely that we will manage a place at this trial, my dear. Howsomever, it seems we stand more chance of success if we wear a cockade. Deux, s’il vous plaît, madame.’

  ‘I’ll get us a seat. Just you watch!’ Nan promised, pinning her cockade onto the side of her bonnet. ‘Come you on, Mr Easter, you follow me.’

  Which he did with exhausted meekness, as she pushed a way for them through the hubbub, past narrow alleys crowded with people and dogs and unkempt donkeys, and pungent with night soil that hadn’t been collected for weeks, past tenements so ancient and badly built that they were flaking away and sagging sideways onto their neighbours, past the elaborate stone frontage of the splendidly upright Hôtel de Ville, with its fine clock and its two grand archways and its high sloping roofs shining grey-blue in the damp air, on and still on, until they reached the Place du Carrousel and the battered frontage of the Tuileries, where William Henry said he simply had to sit down and rest for a moment because his heart was palpitating and at his age palpitations were often the first signs of an impending seizure.

  The square was full of people, all moving purposefully towards a dark entrance on the further side of the building.

  ‘You shall sit down the minute we’re inside,’ Nan said cheerfully. ‘I shan’t let you take a seizure, never you fear.’ But then she noticed that there were three other sources of attraction in the square and that people were flocking towards them too. ‘We’ll stop on our way across, and see what that is,’ she said. ‘Shall we?’ And before he could reply, she trotted him off through the crowds towards the nearest gathering.

  To find a young man, in the now familiar long striped trousers, straight-cut coat and red woolly cap of liberty, busily selling news-sheets, pulling them one after the other and very rapidly from a thick pile held under his left arm, and calling his wares in a harsh, hoarse voice. He had a leather purse slung on his right hip and there was a small tattered child standing close beside it feeding it coins as fast as their customers passed them into its hands. They were doing a roaring trade. In every sense of the words.

  ‘I wager he makes more money in a day than we do in a week with those ol’ Consuls of yours,’ she said to William Henry as she dragged him off again towards the Tuileries.

  ‘Perhaps we ought to try selling newspapers when we get back home. What you think?’

  ‘I do believe the crowd has thinned out a trifle,’ he said, looking across at the entrance and hoping to deflect her from planning his life.

  ‘Come you on, then,’ she said.

  Whether it was on account of the cockades, or because of the ruthless way Nan pummelled through the crowds at the door, or simply because the Fates willed it so, they were sold two roughly printed tickets and allowed into the building. It was accomplished so quickly and so easily they could hardly believe it. William Henry was still mopping his forehead and blinking with amazement when they were ushered into the public gallery of the renowned National Assembly and saw the king himself sitting below them.

  The little theatre was as packed as the concierge had predicted, and marvellously warm after the chill of the streets outside, but Nan noticed with something of a shock that the men ranged on tiered seats all around the room were dressed entirely in the old style, from the powdered wigs on their old-fashioned heads to the neat breeches and woollen stockings encasing their legs. There were plenty of sans culottes around her in the gallery, but below, in the hall where justice was being administered, and in the two tiers of boxes where the gentry sat and watched, the old style prevailed. William Henry was considerably comforted.

  ‘All is not lost, you see, my dear,’ he said, squeezing himself onto the bench beside her. ‘Reason will prevail here, I fancy, for these are sober men. You have only to look at them to see it. The world is not entirely wild.’

  And certainly the king looked calm enough, slumped in an ordinary chair behind a low table covered in blue baize and apparently listening to a speech being made by a short man standing no more than a foot away from him. And the judges sitting above him at their round table on their round dais were listening too, their faces mild, like men passing the time of day after a good meal. But there was an air of extraordinary wildness among the two audiences, as if this event was some long exciting party. In the boxes the ladies and gentlemen were paying no attention to the speech at all but sipping liqueurs, and greeting their newly arrived friends with shrieks of delight and prolonged conversation, and in the gallery they were sucking ices and taking bets on the outcome of the trial. The air was sharp with the zest of hundreds of oranges which were being peeled and munched all over the hall. It was as if the trial and its spectators existed in two quite separate worlds.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked William Henry.

  ‘’Tis hard to tell,’ he said, straining his ears to catch the words of the speech. ‘He seems to be speaking about taxation, my dear. La gabelle, yes, yes, that is the salt tax. I cannot imagine why the salt tax should concern the men who deliberate upon the life or death of a king. Poor man! He is very pale.’

  But the next man who strode to the blue baize table and stood rigidly before it waiting for silence, showed them both exactly what was going on. He spoke one word, and one word only, but it was given with such dramatic finality there was no doubt what it meant. ‘Mort!’ he said, and the woman sitting next to Nan pricked a little hole in the red card she was carrying in her left hand and the sans culottes applauded.

  ‘They’re voting,’ Nan said. ‘And three ways if I’m any judge.’ For the woman had three cards on her lap, one red, one white and one blue and there were pin holes in all three. ‘Ask her, Mr Easter.’

  ‘That would hardly be proper, my dear.’

  ‘Well then, tell me the words and I’ll ask.’

  ‘Hush, my dear. There is another speaker at the table.’

  This one made a short speech and nodded his head a great deal, before he cast his one-word vote. It was a different word this time, and recognizable. ‘Emprisonnement!’ Their neighbour pricked it on her white card, pursing her lips with displeasure.

  ‘That’s imprisonment, en’t it?’ Nan said to the woman. ‘Oui citoyenne, emprisonnement. Oui,’ the wo
man nodded.

  ‘So what’s “more”?’

  ‘Death, I fear, my dear,’ William Henry said.

  ‘And that’s the red card, “more”, en’t it?’, touching it. Cheerful agreement. ‘So what’s the blue?’

  ‘Exil,’ the woman said, and as if in answer to her, a man’s voice voting below them came echoing up through the tangy air. ‘Exil!’

  ‘What excitement!’ Nan said. ‘To be here when they’re counting the vote. Think of that!’

  But after an hour of it, as the speeches dragged interminably on and the three cards still seemed to contain an equal number of pin pricks she grew tired of sitting still and waiting.

  ‘They’re taking a mortal long time,’ she complained.

  ‘’Twill be dinner time presently,’ William Henry agreed. ‘I do not feel we should curtail our sustenance, even on a king’s account.’

  ‘Ask her how long they’re like to be,’ she suggested, and this time, since the woman appeared friendly, he did as she suggested, and was surprised to learn that the vote had been going on since eight o’clock the previous evening and that no final verdict was expected until equally late that night.

  ‘Democracy would appear to be an uncommon slow process,’ he said.

  ‘Well, if that’s the case,’ his practical wife decided, ‘I vote we go to dinner and see the sights, and buy some presents, and then come back here for the verdict.’

  So they went to their dinner which was delicious, and they bought a wax doll for Annie and a box of toy soldiers for little Billy and a rattle on a stick for the baby, and afterwards they fell into conversation with two other English visitors, which passed the time most agreeably, and at seven o’clock they walked to the Tuileries for the second time that day. And were disappointed. For the entrance was blocked with arguing Parisians and there was no movement either in or out of the building. It appeared that the Convention hall was jammed to suffocation, and nobody, but nobody, was being admitted.

  Nan was cross. ‘We come all this way,’ she said stamping her foot, ‘and now we en’t to see it. Damn fool Frenchies! Why didn’t they try him in a bigger hall? They might ha’ know’d there’d be a crush.’

  The night air was bitterly cold, and William Henry had a red nose and numb hands, and was aware that she was attracting attention. ‘We will return to our hotel, my love,’ he said. ‘There is no sense in courting an ague.’

  ‘But then we shan’t hear the verdict!’ she wailed.

  ‘We shall hear soon enough,’ he said. ‘We and all the world. For the news-sheets will print it tomorrow.’

  And sure enough the paper-sellers were hawking the news when they woke the next morning. Nan had her clothes on in minutes and ran out to buy her copy, returning with the rough paper in her hand, demanding a translation.

  William Henry was sitting up in bed sipping his coffee which had just been brought up to their room. He did his best to provide one. ‘He is to be executed tomorrow morning, poor man,’ he said. ‘In the Place de la Révolution. By guillotine. Oh dear, oh dear!’

  ‘I knew they’d execute him,’ she said. ‘A king executed! Imagine that! We must go and see it.’

  He was imagining it and it was making him shudder. ‘Surely, my dear, you do not wish to witness such a barbarous thing,’ he said. ‘It would be quite terrible. Oh no, I cannot believe such a desire in my own dear Nan.’

  She poured coffee into her cup and set down the jug with a clatter. ‘I en’t come all this way to see history made and then go a-flinching away at the last moment,’ she said. ‘I knew they’d kill him. I always said so. You was the one what thought otherwise. So now I mean to see it done, make no mistake about it. I mean to see it done.’

  And although he spent the day sighing and urging her to reconsider her decision, she was adamant. They went to the great cathedral of Notre Dame on a little green island in the middle of the river and ate a delectable meal in a gold-and-white restaurant near to an open air market called les Halles, and walked to the Bastille which was nothing more than a heap of rubble, and took a promenade along the grand parade that ran through the middle of the Elysian Fields, and she agreed with him that Paris was a civilized city and well worth exploring. But no matter what arguments he used, she still maintained that if the citizens of Paris intended to decapitate their king, she intended to see it.

  She was awake at six the next morning, wide awake and trembling with energy, flinging the shutters back against the wall to see what was going on in the courtyard below them. It was still dark and the air was dank with mist which coiled into their bedchamber in long chilling swathes.

  William Henry began to cough at once. ‘Nan, my love,’ he begged between spasms. ‘… I pray you … close the window … we shall both take a chill.’ Even their morning jug of piping hot coffee did little to console him. Surely she didn’t really want to see this dreadful thing! ‘Would we not be better advised to stay within doors on such a day? Or at least until the mist has cleared. A fog is invariably pernicious, I fear, and we are uncommon close to the river.’

  ‘That’s almost cleared away now,’ she said briskly, stepping into her petticoat. ‘Time we was dressed. Street’s full of people already. If we don’t make haste, we shall miss it.’

  So he had to make haste and although he made it as slowly as he could, shaving with meticulous care and hiding his spare cash and their two precious return tickets in a purse tucked under the mattress, eventually they were breakfasted and dressed and out on the cold cobbles, walking towards the appointed place along with half the population of Paris.

  Such a crowd there was in the Place de la Révolution in the half-light of that early morning. The entire area was black with people, swirling for position in the swirling mist, their red caps everywhere, as thick as poppies in a field of corn. There were dark figures standing on the terraces of the Tuilerie gardens, and others perched high on the mounds of building materials that littered the courtyard, men remarkable in their striped trousers, women swathed in cloaks, young girls arm in arm, whole families, nurses, babies and all, eagerly waiting for the last act of the tragedy.

  The guillotine stood in the midst of the people, on a high scaffold that had been erected between the central promenade of the Elysian Fields and the empty plinth that had once supported a statue of the king’s grandfather. The executioner was ready and waiting and so were the national guard, who stood at ease in two close packed lines all round the scaffold, bulky in their heavy blue jackets and their black tricorne hats with their muskets bristling above their shoulders.

  ‘There’s space up that pile of stones,’ Nan said taking his hand to lead him there. ‘We shall get a better view aloft, you see if we don’t.’

  ‘We are well enough here, little Nan,’ he protested mildly, for he really had no desire to see anything at all. But she was already pulling him towards the mound. She seemed even more energetic in this brutal city than she was at home. And of course it was a better view up on the stones. But bitingly cold, because they were exposed to the mist and away from the protection of the crowd. He fumbled his watch from his fob pocket and glanced at it to see how much longer they would have to wait. But he couldn’t wish the time away, chill though it was, for that would mean hastening the king’s end, and bringing closer the awful moment of execution.

  The murky sky above the square gradually dissolved into a patchy greyness, the crowd grew denser by the minute, and the growl of their anticipation louder, and presently they heard the throb of distant drums and turned as one person towards the sound, faces alert with a terrible eagerness. ‘Le roi! Il arrive!’ Oh, poor man, William Henry thought, shivering in the damp air. What he must be suffering!

  The people below him were parting to left and right to make way for a man on a fine white horse. He was followed by a troup of guardsmen marching four abreast and flanked by an equal army of sans culottes armed with pikes, and they, in their turn, were followed by a lumbering green coach. The king had arrived.
The growl became a snarling roar so loud it even drowned the relentless beating of the drums.

  William Henry realized that his heart was throbbing with fear, and glanced at Nan protectively. Being so young and slender and vulnerable, what must she be feeling, poor child? But she had caught the excitement of the crowds around them and was watching the coach as avidly as any.

  It was several minutes before the clumsy vehicle could be inched through the throng and arrive at the scaffold, and then there was another delay before the awkward figure of the king blundered down to stand among the escorting guards. He was wearing a brown greatcoat and a three-cornered hat, which Nan thought rather dull for such an exalted person, but when three of the guards stepped forward and tried to remove them, he resisted quite strongly. There was a short argument, which annoyed the crowd, but eventually the king was led to the scaffold, stripped to his shirt and breeches and shorn for execution so that his fat bare neck could be seen quite clearly above his white waistcoat.

  Then he walked to the edge of the scaffold and seemed to be signalling to the drummers to desist, which rather to William Henry’s surprise, they did. Were they going to allow him to make a speech? The crowd fell silent too, and in the chill hush that followed, a voice spoke into the mist, ‘Peuple, je meurs innocent.’ Then the drums were rattling again and the people watched without sound as the figure above them was spreadeagled underneath the blade, his fat arms behind his back.

  ‘This cannot be,’ William Henry whispered. But Nan said, ‘Go on! Go on!’

  And the blade came rattling down, gathering terrible speed as it went and hitting the king’s neck with a crunch that could be heard all over the square. Blood spurted into the air, horrifyingly red, and the executioner stooped to pick up the severed head and display it to the crowd. But there was a further horror to gratify them. The king’s neck had been so fat it had defeated the axe. His head was still attached to his body. So the guillotine was raised and dropped for a second time, and at that the crowd found tongue again and began to cheer, ‘Vive la nation! Vive la république!’ tossing their hats in the air and dancing with joy.