by Anne Perry
Georges was still too stunned to be aware of anything but the horror in his own mind. For the first time since she had met him at Amandine’s house, nearly a year ago, there was no guard in his eyes, no mask, of laughter or bravado. Suddenly the real man was there, and she was sharply conscious of it.
‘Could Bernave have been working for the Commune?’ He searched her face. ‘Is it possible? Why haven’t we all been arrested?’
‘Not very dramatic.’ She defended herself behind a black humour. ‘I’d wait until the last moment, if it were me. Watch us until we try to rescue the King, and then take us all, when it’s too late for anyone else to step in. If you’re going to make a great gesture, do it when everyone’s looking. No glory, otherwise, and Marat would never sacrifice a chance of that!’
He said nothing, but she could see he understood.
‘We can’t warn the others, Bernave’s men,’ she went on. She had to talk, tell him everything. ‘We don’t even know who they are. Only he knew that.’
The humour flashed in his eyes as well. ‘I suppose we don’t really know that they haven’t been arrested already!’
She drew breath to tell him not to say such a thing, then let it out in a sigh. Was she glad the laughter was back in him again? Was it hope—or a mask, like hers?
‘I don’t know how we can succeed now,’ she answered instead. ‘I don’t even know how far he got ...’
Georges smiled, but faintly, a ghost of the way it used to be. ‘What is this man Menou like?’
‘Revolutionary,’ she replied. ‘He won’t give up until he arrests someone.’ Menou’s calm, keen face came back to her mind, and the strength in it. ‘He can’t,’ she added. ‘He’s already committed himself to saying it matters. His men heard him. And if Bernave really was working for the Commune, then they will certainly want revenge. I expect Marat himself will demand it.’ The thought was sickening. She pushed it away. ‘But I can’t believe that!’ she said firmly. ‘Not Bernave! He wasn’t ...’ she tailed off.
What did she really know of him? She had never even heard of him until four months ago. She had only ever seen him in the house in the Boulevard St-Germain. Apart from Georges, she knew no one he knew, except St Felix, and the Lacostes, and of course Amandine. She knew nothing of Bernave beyond what he had wished her to know, perhaps what he had deliberately shown her. And how much of that was true!
Without thinking about it consciously, or remembering why, she had formed the belief that there was some unspoken pain in his past, an old grief which had called on all his reserves of courage and hope to sustain him through it. Perhaps that was why he still kept the Thomas à Kempis, and other books like it, remembrances of an older faith.
Or maybe she had only imagined it, reading something into his face which was not there, into the scars on his hands and body, because of her own hunger for the certainties that would have comforted her. Maybe there was no corresponding reality, and never had been.
‘Bernave wasn’t what?’ Georges’ voice interrupted her thoughts, demanding she return to the present.
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘I was going to say “anything like Marat or the Communards.” But I don’t think I know very much at all.’
‘Except that Menou won’t let go until he finds out who killed him,’ he answered for her.
‘Then that means I’ve got to get him a solution.’ The realisation was appalling, but inescapable. ‘He’s going to watch the house. He posted a guard in the street this evening.’
Georges stiffened. It was the first sign of physical fear she had seen in him. He must feel trapped here. Every sound, every footstep on the stair had to set his nerves jangling.
‘He didn’t see me!’ she said quickly.
‘How do you know?’ He was only half looking at her, his head turned to catch any movement in the darkness beyond the door.
‘Because I didn’t go out on to the Boulevard St-Germain,’ she explained. ‘I didn’t go anywhere near it until past the church.’
He was confused. ‘You have to! There’s no other way out.’
‘Yes there is.’
‘What?’
‘Out of the attic window and in through one that was open, down their stairs and out into the Rue de Seine, then along the Rue Jacob.’
His eyes widened with incredulity. ‘You went over the roofs! You’re crazy!’ Now there was fear in him—for her. ‘Célie, you could have slipped and been killed! If you’d been hurt, no one would have found you! You’d have frozen to death up there. Never again, do you hear me?’
‘Yes, of course I hear you,’ she said with a sharp shiver of satisfaction. ‘And I shall do as I please.’ She leaned forward, cutting off argument. ‘Georges, one of us in that house killed Bernave. I don’t know for what reason, but it could be anything. I thought I knew more or less what we all believed, but perhaps I don’t! Maybe one of them is secretly a royalist?’ She ignored the disbelief in his face. ‘Or they can see what we can of the dangers if they execute the King, and if they knew Bernave was really working for the Commune ...’ She left the rest unsaid. The conclusion was obvious.
A gust over the rooftops rattled the window, sending an icy draft through the cracks.
‘St Felix?’ he said with surprise. ‘Wasn’t he the only one who knew anything about what Bernave was doing?’
‘I think so,’ she agreed. ‘Anyway, neither Fernand nor Citizen Lacoste have any sympathy with aristos, let alone the King.’
‘Neither have I,’ Georges said quietly. There was a regret in him, a sadness he would not name or explore. ‘I just think executing him is only going to make things worse.’
Célie remembered the lands he had spoken of with such haunting loss. It was part of all the old way which was gone for ever.
‘Citizen Lacoste is for Robespierre,’ she reasoned aloud, watching Georges’ face and wishing she understood more, and yet also afraid to. ‘But he wouldn’t be against anyone spying on royalists. And Fernand is for the Commune and Marat. He thinks they are going to be the saviours of us all.’
‘God help us!’ he said bitterly. ‘And don’t tell me not to speak of God! I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.’ But his brief half-smile vanished as if it had never been. ‘What about Madame Lacoste?’
Célie tried to think back to ever hearing Madame speak of any political belief, even to seeing a reaction in her face to news of victories or reverses in any cause, but no sharp image came to her mind, no emotion over any of it, except pity or exasperation. With Madame it was individuals who mattered, not causes. There had been moments of regret for something she must have lost in the past, but there was no anger or surprise left. Whatever it was, she had accepted it long ago. She cared intensely for her family, but the rest was private. Célie did not even know what she had felt for Bernave. Something powerful, deeply hidden. She had assumed it was resentment for her family’s dependence upon him, and fear in case he failed them, intentionally or not.
Then Célie remembered the tenderness with which Madame had washed his dead body, and laid it in peace. But that could have been religious faith, or the pity of a good woman for any death.
‘I don’t believe it ...’ she began slowly.
‘What do you know about her?’ he pressed.
‘I suppose nothing. I just remember the way she looked when she saw Bernave dead. She and Marie-Jeanne were the only ones who were grieved. And ... and me.’ Honesty compelled that. ‘I liked him, in spite of the way he treated St Felix.’
His face shadowed. ‘St Felix?’
‘Yes ... he gave him all the worst errands, the most unpleasant and dangerous. I don’t think I would have gone, not at the times and to the places he sent him.’
‘Such as?’ Georges pressed.
‘Going to give messages ...’ only now did she realise the import of what she was saying, ‘... to men in the Sections ... and the Commune. To do with getting the King out of the city. Marat’s men ...’ She look
ed at his face, trying to read it. She saw the quick leap of fear and it made her feel sick. ‘Two or three times he’s come back beaten.’ She dropped her voice to little more than a whisper. ‘Last time one of the mobs drifting around got hold of him. He really was hurt.’
‘When?’
‘Yesterday, the same day Bernave was killed. Do you think he found out that Bernave was spying for both sides ... or the wrong side?’
‘What else do you know about St Felix?’ Georges persisted. ‘Apart from the fact that Bernave seemed to trust him? Who is he? Where does he come from? How did Bernave know him?’
This time she thought for several moments before she answered, again trying to remember, disentangle facts from impressions. She was barely aware of how cold she was. She was clenched inside and her fingers were numb.
‘He came a little after Amandine and I did, towards the end of October,’ she answered slowly. ‘He just turned up one day. Bernave obviously knew him already, but it seemed as if they had not met for many years. Bernave was surprised, I’d swear to that. It was clear in his face. There was something about St Felix he did not expect, but he never said what, and I have no idea. St Felix’s wife had died. Laura, I think her name was. He seemed very grieved about it, although I don’t think it had just happened. Maybe a year ago. He still looked very distressed. I don’t know if he had lost his home or the revolution had taken it, or why it was he didn’t stay there.’
She struggled to visualise clearly the fleeting moments she had seen his face in repose, unguarded. She had felt an intense loneliness about him, as if the past returned to him and he could no longer keep at bay the loss and the regret which engulfed him. It had hurt her to see it, for him, and for Amandine, because it seemed no one could touch it.
‘Where was it?’ he asked. ‘His home?’
‘I don’t know. He hardly ever speaks of it. Maybe the memory was too painful. I gathered the impression he simply wanted to leave the place where he and his wife had been so happy. I think I can understand that.’ She tried to imagine loving someone so completely, knowing a time without blemish when everything that truly mattered could be shared, good and ill, laughter and beauty and pain. And then the unbearable loneliness when that person was gone ... probably for ever, if there really were no God. Perhaps you could not endure to stay in that place. It should be left, a perfect memory, never without the one you had loved, never spoiled by anything that happened afterwards.
And it was easy to think of St Felix feeling like that. In her mind Célie could see his face with its sadness, and the elusive emotion in it that no one in the Boulevard St-Germain seemed able to touch. Perhaps Amandine came the closest, but the core of it escaped even her. There was a secret heart of St Felix, a memory or a dream, that he never shared. Its presence was in his eyes even when he laughed.
Georges was waiting for her to continue. He was watching her, sitting in an echo of the same hunched position she was, the blanket huddled around him as her cloak was around her.
‘I don’t know,’ she said at last. ‘It’s a part of him he keeps locked away, perhaps so nothing will spoil it.’
‘That doesn’t tell us much,’ he pointed out bleakly. ‘When it comes to facts, it could be anything.’
She was afraid St Felix had killed Bernave, not for any political reason, but because he hated him for the danger and humiliation he put him through.
‘What?’ Georges demanded, reading her face. ‘You thought of something.’
There was no point in not telling him. ‘What if it was simply anger at the way Bernave used him?’ she asked.
‘Then why did he allow it?’ he countered.
‘I don’t know! Anyone else would have refused ages ago, but he never did. It didn’t matter what Bernave asked him to do, even if it was raining, or it was the middle of the night, he never refused. He never even complained. I don’t know why.’
‘Because he believed in the cause just as passionately as Bernave himself,’ Georges answered for her.
She did not voice the other reason that occurred to her with swift and ugly clarity.
He did, precisely as if he had heard it in her mind. ‘Or else Bernave had some power over him, a way of forcing him to do whatever he wanted, and that St Felix could not deny. Until last night.’ He peered at her, searching her eyes to see what she thought of it.
The wind gusted against the glass again and spattered it with sleet.
‘I suppose so,’ she conceded. ‘I ... I can’t think of St Felix like that. He seems ...’ She lowered her eyes. ‘Amandine is in love with him. If he killed anyone, it would be for a ... a better cause than to escape coercion.’ She looked up, confident again. ‘If Bernave were forcing him to do something he felt was wrong, he’d have stood up to him and refused in the first place, not now after months.’
He put his head in his hands and rubbed his eyes slowly. In the silence she heard the faint rasp of his palms against his unshaven chin.
‘God! What a mess!’ he sighed. ‘I believed Bernave completely. I never doubted him. It seems absurd, but there was so much else to care about.’
‘There still is,’ she assured him. ‘And now Bernave is dead we’ve lost the only person who knew the whole plan, and all the people.’
He looked up at her. ‘Are you prepared to go on alone ... if we can?’
‘Without Bernave?’ Célie thought of all the things they would have to learn: who was prepared to take the King’s place, how they could contact him. Who else knew the details and could betray them. What would have to be changed, for safety, how they would do it in time.
Georges was watching her, his dark eyes wide. ‘If we don’t the King dies, and we plunge into even worse chaos than this ... and war,’ he said. ‘The risks will be higher. We’ll have to change everything Bernave knew the details of, in case Menou was right and he told the Commune.’
The full enormity of it struck her, almost choking her breath. ‘They’ll be expecting some attempt! They’ll double the guard, and wait for us!’
‘Of course,’ he agreed. ‘We’ll have to move earlier on the route than we planned before. I never told him where the safe houses were that I’d found. He didn’t ask. But he knows the one in the Faubourg St-Antoine, because he sent St Felix there. We’ll have to find a new one.’
‘He knew the drivers!’ she went on. ‘He sent me with messages for them—Bombec, Chimay and Virieu.’
He was silent for a moment.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘We can’t change them,’ he replied. ‘They are the ones who knew the man who will take the King’s place, who’ll recognise the clothes when the King wears them, and assume it is him again.’
‘Then that means they are not part of the plan! Not knowingly!’ she pointed out. ‘So Bernave will not have trusted them with anything—whichever side he was on! We can still use them! We just need to change the safe houses.’
There was the shadow of a smile, not on his lips but in his eyes. ‘You’ll go on, won’t you?’
His certainty warmed her—and frightened her. ‘We have to,’ she replied, swallowing. ‘Bernave is dead, but nothing else has changed. If we don’t go on, all the other things will still happen: war, everything else.’
He nodded, with just a tiny movement of his head in the guttering candlelight. ‘We need St Felix,’ he agreed. ‘He knows about the routes beyond the city, and he has the passes. You’ll have to talk to him, see if he is still with us.’
‘What ... what if he was the one who killed Bernave?’ She hated saying it; her voice betrayed her emotions.
Again the moment of humour came and vanished. ‘If he did, then it was because Menou was right, and Bernave betrayed us to the Commune,’ he said softly. ‘St Felix will be with us. We just have to change everything Bernave knew about.’
She tried to keep her own voice level. ‘And if it was Fernand, or Monsieur Lacoste, because they knew he was trying to save the King?’ she asked. ‘They wouldn
’t have turned him in to the Commune, even loyal as they are, because they’d know that if they did Bernave would go to the guillotine and the house would be confiscated, and the business. They’d all be out on the street, without a sou.’
‘The same.’ There was no hesitation in him. ‘We change everything Bernave knew about, and keep going ... if St Felix is with us.’
‘I’ll speak to him,’ she promised, dreading doing it. She had no idea how he would respond, what arguments she would have to use. And yet he had endured all kinds of hardships, even misuse at Bernave’s hands. He must be passionate in his loyalty to the cause. Perhaps he understood it even better than she did? ‘Yes, of course I will,’ she repeated more firmly. She made as if to stand up and begin already.
He reached across and caught her wrist. She felt the strength of his fingers.
‘Something else you must do—tonight!’ he said urgently.
She relaxed into the seat again, waiting.
‘You must search through all Bernave’s papers, before this Menou does,’ he said. ‘Destroy anything that could betray us—or that could look like it. He’ll be sure to go through everything in the morning. He’ll be looking for reasons for someone to kill Bernave. He’s got to consider money and the business. I imagine Marie-Jeanne will inherit it. Even if no one else does, she’ll go through all the papers herself. If she found anything she thought suspicious, or she didn’t understand, she might show it to Menou. You must do it tonight.’
She nodded, her throat momentarily too tight to speak. The thought made her stomach flutter with fear.
‘Remember everything you can about the routes he uses to Spain, England or Italy,’ he went on. ‘Post houses where they change horses, properties he owns, anything that could be part of the plan, or of use to us. Don’t destroy anything they’ll expect to find, unless it betrays us completely. Don’t take anything away with you. They might search you and you can’t afford to be found with anything. Apart from the fact that it would draw greater attention to whatever it is, they’ll have you for stealing.’ He was still holding her wrist. His hand closed more tightly. ‘Be careful, Célie!’