But that was not what happened.
She had delayed him at La Roche a day longer than he meant to remain and then there had been confusion over the change of horses at Rouen, so that he had less than two hours to spare when he finally reached Le Havre. He had not much luggage since he planned to return so soon. Even so he was fretting to get it all aboard before the Siren weighed anchor. So he was curt to the man who pulled at his sleeve and stammered, ‘Monsieur Short, beg pardon, sir.’
‘Yes, yes, what is it, can’t you see I am trying to get aboard before the confounded ship sails?’
‘Sir, sir, I am s-sorry.’ The man was filthy dusty from the road and so out of breath he could hardly utter. ‘But I have a message from Madame la Duchesse. She is dead, sir, that is what I am to tell you.’
Wm stared in amazement and horror. What was this nonsense? How could she – but perhaps the message was meant to say that she was going to take her own life. Was there no end to her play-acting?
‘The old lady, sir,’ the breathless messenger wheezed, ‘she went on Sunday, very sudden, it was a proper shock though she were so old.’
‘Madame d’Enville is dead?’
‘Yes, sir, and madame says you’re to please come back home, because she can’t carry on by herself. She would have written a note but there weren’t time.’
‘Madame d’Enville is dead and I am to go back,’ Wm repeated in a trance-like way, as if repeating instructions from Dr Mesmer.
‘Yes, please, sir, I know madame will be ever so happy if you oblige.’
He recognised the man now. It was Pierre, one of the wagon men who had brought Rosalie’s canoe on the cart that very first day. Not the sort of fellow you would normally send off on a breakneck ride across country to deliver a crucial message with his slow speech and his sleepy grin. But there he was at the bottom of the gangway, clutching his dusty cap in his big red hands, looking as though his own fate as well as his mistress’s depended on William’s answer.
He did not hesitate.
Madame d’Enville had been eighty-one years old. She had survived the deaths of her son and her grandson but her heart and lungs had been failing before those two blows within a month of each other broke her spirit. Every winter they had wondered whether she would get through the pneumonia that always gripped her. In the summer heat her palpitations kept her to her room, except for a short walk along the terrace in the early evening. There was nothing less surprising than her death and it came peacefully enough in the early hours of a Sunday morning, just before the bell began to ring for Mass (another sign of the new relaxations). She felt no need to cling to life any longer and had said so at regular intervals.
To Rosalie the death of Maman was the end of her close family. The rest were all dead or scattered far away. None of them had lived with her through the worst times. As grandmother and mother-in-law combined, Madame d’Enville had been more of a mother, and for much longer, than her actual mother.
He knew he must wait. Even as he urged his weary horse over the hills of Bray, he knew that the urgency was all on his side. She was tired, not simply from shock and grief and from the long months of caring for her grandmother, smoothing over the times when she repeated herself or lost her bearings in the conversation and, most difficult of all, trying to keep amused an old lady who had always been impatient and had counted on the best minds in France to divert her.
‘I am here and I love you, that is all I have to say. Tell me what to do, think of me as your factotum, your Figaro. I won’t ask anything more.’
‘As long as you promise not to sing. That would be, what do you call it, “the last straw”,’ she finished in English.
He treated her as an invalid, as though she had simply replaced Maman as the centre of all their concerns. When she felt a little better he drove her in the cabriole down the sandy track by the river. He never allowed the horse to get out of a walk, so they had time to watch the ducks diving and the moorhens lead their broods through the overhanging willow branches. She had taken over the old green straw hat that Maman used to wear in the summer. He could scarcely see her face under its droopy brim. And he remembered how he had adopted his father’s battered old farmer’s felt hat after his father died. There was some primitive comfort to be had from putting on something that belonged to the person you were mourning.
‘We must go away,’ she said suddenly. ‘I must break the chain of memories.’
‘We could go to your house in the Auvergne, I should love to see it. I remember Lafayette telling me that it was the most beautiful part of France but perhaps he was biased because that was where he came from.’
‘No, no, he was right. There is nowhere like the country round Verteuil, but that has many sad memories too. No, I think we should go to Vichy.’
‘But I thought you hated spas and after all it was at Forges-les-Eaux—’
‘Forges was a wretched place but Vichy is different. I remember as a child my parents taking me there after I had nearly died from the whooping cough.’
He did not care for the idea, but it was his firm conviction that she should be contradicted in nothing until she was well again, well enough, that is, to say ‘yes’.
They had not reserved lodgings in advance. The best they could find was a miserable second-floor set in a gloomy house at the edge of the old town where the carriages turned to go on to the thermal springs. There was a gaming house in the woods beyond the springs and the local blades were in the habit of going on there after the assembly rooms closed and not coming back until two or three o’clock in the morning. Wm was always a bad sleeper and it was just at the moment when he was finally dozing off that the carriages would return to the town, creaking and rumbling at the sharp corner and the tipsy gallants and their women whooping with pretended panic at the lurching.
Then he would lie awake staring at the blotches of damp on the cheap wallpaper, a pattern of pink shepherds and shepherdesses capering endlessly across a scrubby arcadia. Beside him he could hear Rosalie’s gentle breathing. He imagined her flushed and frightened with the whooping cough and her parents hanging over her in a rented bedroom like this. She had grown thinner since being imprisoned and somehow this made her look younger still, like one of those pale serious little girls he had seen in their white dresses outside the church waiting for their first Communion.
In the morning they trudged along beside the shallow scummy river, following the other patients towards the springs.
‘Do we look as bad-tempered as that?’ said Wm, pointing to a crapulous man of about seventy who was bursting out of his clothes and looked scarcely on speaking terms with his vinegary wife whose nose was screwed up in disdain as though she could already inhale the badeggs smell of the springs.
‘Worse, I should think. Oh, look, there’s Madame de Maupertuis.’
‘Will you allow me a moment to jump in the river and drown myself?’
‘You must say good morning to her first and then she can tell everyone that she was the last person you spoke to before the tragic event. You know how she loves to be part of a drama.’
‘Oh God, and there’s the man with the terrible warts, the Comte de something.’
‘Durance,’ Rosalie prompted him. ‘He told me with pride that his doctor said he was the most bilious patient he had ever examined. He’s been coming here for years.’
‘Does any of them ever get better?’ William sighed as he surveyed the sickly yellow and purple complexions of the visitors moving slowly towards the little pavilions that housed the springs.
‘Ah, and there is Madame de Durance. I had heard she was bedridden, with a palsy I think, though she said it was some disease I had never heard of and certainly could not spell.’
‘In Virginia we would call this swampland and only the slaves would live there, which is why they all catch the fever.’
A light rain began to fall, more like mist. The green hills surrounding the spa seemed to close in on them.
Madame de Maupertuis d
id not say good morning to them but bowed in a distant fashion.
‘Do you think she disapproves of us?’
‘I hope so,’ Wm said.
‘Couldn’t we tell her that we are living together as man and wife?’
‘Is that what we are doing?’ he enquired.
‘Well, man and would-be wife.’
‘But I haven’t even asked you, at least not since I came back from Le Havre.’
‘I thought the last time you asked still counted, like a passport that is valid for several journeys. Was I wrong?’
He did not answer but hugged her and whirled her round like a Russian dancer. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Madame de Maupertuis staring at them.
The rain was heavier now and their faces were wet with tears as well as rain.
‘Why should we cry when we are so happy?’
‘Rousseau says somewhere that all profound feelings express themselves in tears.’
‘I don’t care what Rousseau says.’
‘You will come to America with me then?’
‘Of course I will but not yet, there is so much to settle, we must not run before we have learnt to walk.’
He did not press the question. It was enough to have asked it and for her to have said ‘yes’. More than enough, he thought, as he whirled her round again, his hands slipping on the wet silk of her dress. A gaggle of visitors with their umbrellas up had to step aside from the path to get past them.
‘Look,’ Rosalie said, ‘we have made them smile.’
‘We must plant a tree to mark the event.’
Standing there, out of breath with his arm round her waist, he thought he had never been so happy. The steamy green hills that had seemed so oppressive only a few minutes earlier were now an enveloping blur of bliss. The visitors carrying their personal silver-gilt cups to the springs were like a procession of the blessed in a medieval painting.
All the same, he could not wait for ever, not now that he had her answer.
‘This letter from Peyton says that I am sure to be made bankrupt if I do not return. I know he is inclined to take fright easily, my poor brother, but even so—’
He did not need to remind her how he had rescued her from the same fate by guarding her fortune through the Terror, nor how many of her friends had not been so lucky and were now skimping miserable existences in places like this or in seaside lodgings in England or Belgium.
‘It will only be for a short time now,’ he said. ‘I shall be back by the spring.’
She nodded without speaking.
‘Elbridge Gerry is travelling home on the same boat,’ he said. ‘He is a fine fellow and he will repair the gaps in my knowledge of American affairs.’
‘I can see you are looking forward to the voyage already and you used to be so frightened of the sea.’
‘Well, it has to be done,’ he said lamely.
He secretly thought that in the end she might decide to come with him. Perhaps they could marry on board. A ship’s master was licensed to perform the ceremony.
But as the day of his leaving grew closer he could see that she had no such intention, so he didn’t mention it.
They said goodbye in her little house in the rue Faubourg-Saint-Honoré (she had sold the great hotel in the rue de Seine three years earlier, just after the Terror had ended).
‘The sooner you go, the sooner you’ll be back. That is what I keep saying to myself, but I don’t really believe it.’
‘Well, it’s true,’ he said.
‘I won’t be able to endure it, you know.’
‘You have endured separations much longer than this.’
‘But I was younger then,’ she said. ‘I had friends and family. Now I have no one but you.’
‘You have hundreds of friends who would be only too glad to keep you company at La Roche.’
‘Oh, I shan’t go to La Roche, I should die in a week rattling around there. I’ll go to Acosta, to Adelaide’s. It’s close enough to home and they are always so kind.’
‘You will be in good hands there, the best in fact.’
He thought with affectionate recollection of that long low chateau a few miles down the Seine from La Roche-Guyon, where Rosalie’s cousin Adelaide de Castellane had so often entertained them. In his mind he could feel the boards of the long gallery under his bare feet as he crept from his room in one of the pavilions to hers in the main block, and he remembered the mist from the river curling in through the open window and cooling their naked limbs. And in the morning he would listen with that sweet drained feeling throughout his body while his host discoursed on freedom of religion, a subject on which he had made quite a name for himself in the Assembly, and little Boni de Castellane crawled in and out of the table legs, unreproved by his father who was a fervent follower of Rousseau’s educational methods. During the Terror Monsieur de Castellane had lived quietly among his tenantry but Robespierre had not forgotten him and the day before the Ninth of Thermidor had him thrown into the Conciergerie. But it was Robespierre who finished up on the scaffold while the amiable and popular Castellane was released a few weeks later, like Rosalie and Maman, after an appeal from the local commune. Yes, Rosalie would be looked after well at Acosta.
He slipped off early the next morning while she was still asleep to his apartment in the rue Matignon where he had his bags packed. He left a short note behind. Her reply was waiting for him when he broke his journey at Rouen.
Paris, 9 a.m., 9 Thermidor
After a restless night, my dear sweet friend, I have just woken up to find your tender note. As I was waking I thought I held you in my arms for a minute but alas it is only your thoughts that surround me. I foresaw last night that our sad farewells would not be renewed this morning. I did not insist on it, because I feared I might make it worse for you, but it would have been douce to see you once more.
Let us think of the future and annihilate the present and shorten the distance that is going to separate us by thinking only of each other and of our plans and our most cherished desires. It is to my dear husband that I am writing, my husband whom important business is carrying far away from me but only for a moment. Imagine that this is the last disappointment we shall experience between us, in a few months we shall meet again, never to be separated. This letter will arrive at Le Havre almost at the same time you do. Keep loving your wife, whether absent or present. I will be travelling with you to Le Havre and you will follow me to Acosta. Goodbye until tomorrow, gather up my tenderest kisses, my darling friend, my heart is all yours and for life.
He could not stop the tears pouring down his cheeks as he read the final sentences of the letter, remembering how they had read together in La Nouvelle Héloïse that same fancy of the lovers being always present to one another, wherever they might be physically.
The next day she wrote from Acosta,
We went for a walk this evening, the night was calm and mild, but a year ago I walked the same way with my lover and now I am without him. I secretly hoped that I would not be given the room I had last year and given yours instead. I don’t know if they guessed, or if it was by chance but here I am. What pleasure it gives me. I sit in the same chair as you did, I sleep in your bed and I am surrounded by everything of yours that I could collect: your little portrait is on the desk and the note you left behind and I kiss them all …
Goodbye and think of your wife, your dear wife, let us love each other for ever. Let us number our letters, so that we know if they have gone astray. This is number 2 and I hope you will have received the one I wrote yesterday an hour after you left
Every day she wrote, numbers 3, 4, 5, 6 from Acosta where Adelaide and Monsieur de Castellane were being infinitely kind and understanding. In number 5 (13 Thermidor) she regretted bitterly that he was going at all:
Oh God, how I wish we could cancel this cruel separation, how I would use every influence I have over you to keep you with me, yes, even to demand in the name of our love that you sacrifice this
terrible voyage for my sake and begin from this very moment to secure our happiness. Ah, how miserable I am to be the cause of your grief! How I repent of not having settled our destiny last year!
She returned to Paris where she wrote him numbers 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11, again and again rehearsing her love for him, her agony that they should be separated and her passionate desire that he should cancel his passage on the Sophia and come back to her.
I think I never knew quite how much I loved you [this was number 11]. Is there really no way for us to come together again and to abandon this sad voyage and begin this very moment to enjoy our happiness and our union? You are the only person in the world for me, the rest are nothing beside you. Every day I go through torment not knowing whether you have embarked since the letter I have just received from you and whether you are at this moment enduring the hurricane we have just endured here.
William was in fact on the point of leaving Le Havre, but not by sea.
‘Not sailing? My dear Short, this is a very sudden change of plan.’
‘Unfortunately some letters I have received make it impossible for me to travel.’
‘Well, I confess I am deucedly sorry to hear it. I had much looked forward to our being shipmates.’
‘So had I, Mr Gerry. I hope that we may correspond and keep up our acquaintance that way.’
‘Nothing could be more agreeable to me, sir. But not sailing, well! You have no complaint of the Sophia, I trust?’
‘She looks very well found. It is just that I have unavoidable business in Paris. Thank you, my bags are already ashore.’
Mr Gerry waved him goodbye from the gunwale, staring at him as at some rare species previously thought extinct. There was a letter waiting for him at his lodgings on the harbour front.
I am only writing to you, my dear friend, in case you have not left already. I hope that tomorrow you will be starting back towards me. I am waiting for you with a pleasure and an impatience equal to the profound misery I have been enduring till now. I spent the whole day in a profound agitation, which I cannot describe. At last I shall see you again and I shall be happy. Goodbye, but it is only a short goodbye before we see each other again and never separate, no, never.
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