The end of time? Selena reflected.
That was too damn late.
So she suffered, knowing that she would always suffer.
By night, she cried herself to sleep. By day, drawing upon those reserves of strength, which were still, incredibly, present within her and which had never failed her before, she began working with Martha Marguerite in an attempt at improving her French. The effort distracted her from sorrow, at least temporarily, and her mental acuity was a source of satisfaction.
If the baby died for a reason, she found herself thinking, then there is a reason for my wits, my life, as well Out of such knowledge grew a conviction that a future still beckoned her onward and, when Selena realized this, she began to recover. By the time the Lancia entered the English Channel, homing on Le Havre, Selena’s spirits had improved to the extent that she slept more, and cried less, in her cabin at night.
Indeed, the green haze of England, lying in the mist to port, roused both her emotions and her blood. What had the poet written of that isle? “A green jewel set upon the sea”?
“Aye!” murmured Selena, standing on the tossing deck. “Aye, and well enou’ t’ say such a thing.” It was as if the mere proximity of Britain, which had so long and so cruelly held Scotland in thrall, evoked her fiery Scots emotions and loosed her Scots tongue. “Well enou’,” she said, “but England, ye’ve na seen t’ end o’ Selena MacPherson yet. Because ye’ve got Coldstream Castle, an’ I mean t’ ’ave ’er back!”
Brave words. Cruel world. Wide ocean. Small ship.
“I will!” she declared, smacking the ship’s railing with the butt of her fist. After all, if life was a web, if there was indeed a plan that underlay all events, she had not traversed the great globe of earth for nothing! There was a purpose in her nearness to England now.
“There has to be,” she said.
“I hope you have not begun to talk to yourself,” said Martha Marguerite, approaching Selena with a smile that did not conceal a measure of concern.
“Don’t worry. I enjoy the conversation,” Selena shot back, and Martha smiled because she knew the younger woman would, in spite of her burdens, be healthy in her mind and in her heart.
“Have you ever been to England?” Selena asked, as the mists cleared for a moment, showing the coastline inviolate since William the Conqueror’s invasion in 1066.
“No. Nor do I wish to. I am French,” pronounced Martha with a sniff of her nose and a lift of her chin. With each day at sea, as her homeland had drawn nearer, the older woman had grown prouder of her ancestry and more prideful in bearing. “La belle France,” she repeated, over and over, as if it were a land of milk and honey—or at least wine and cheese—superior to all others.
“When I return to England,” Selena said, still gazing at the coastline, “it will be in glory.”
“Well, indeed you are of the nobility.” The older woman shrugged. “And thank the Lord for that. Because in France, we of high birth know how to keep the lower orders in their places.”
Selena sighed. For all of Martha’s numerous good qualities, she had never known what it was like to be penniless and hunted and alone. Perhaps the truly unbridgeable gulf between peoples was the one separating those who had never visited the abyss of impotence and poverty from those who had.
“When we are in Paris, my dear,” Martha Marguerite went on, “I shall see that you live like a queen until Jean’s return. I have friends at the highest level, you see, including Marc and Zoé Moline, who design all the clothing for Marie Antoinette and the women of her court. And Jeanne, the Comtesse de la Motte, was a childhood friend of mine. She is now a favorite of the queen’s.”
“You haven’t been home in years,” wondered Selena. “How do you know these things? And your château has been burned to the ground—”
“Trifles, my dear,” Martha sniffed. “The canaille will soon learn who is in command. First, I shall stiffen the spine of Monsieur Longchamps, my family’s lawyer. Then in consort with the clergy and the nobles of Côte d’Or, I shall tax the peasants until they have coughed up enough money to rebuild our country home. As my dear father used to say, God rest his soul, ‘If you flog a dog long enough, he will whimper at the sight of you.’”
Selena, who had very narrowly escaped a brutal whipping in Oakley’s Room of Doom, looked away and said nothing, having attributed Martha’s arrogant pronouncements to high emotions attendant upon homecoming. She knew, based upon her reading of history and her more recent experience in America, that one land, one country, could not indefinitely sustain its internal peace, let alone its position in the affairs of the world, when it was disastrously divided within.
Alas, however. When Captain Telémas sailed into Le Havre and tied up at the swarming pier, Martha appeared on deck dressed as if she were to be carried straightaway to an audience with King Louis XVI himself. A diamond-studded tiara rested atop her careful coiffure. She wore a silken gown complete with train, which in spite of the fact that it was years out of date, conveyed wealth and breeding. The heat of July had not dissuaded her from draping an ermine stole about her shoulders, a piece of fur that did nothing to conceal the strands of pearls at her neck, nor the bejeweled golden bracelets at her wrists. Selena, who was worried enough about her own mysterious cache of treasure—still in the greatcoat’s lining, the coat in a battered portmanteau—gasped in alarm.
“We must still journey all the way up the Seine to Paris,” she told Martha. “Surely you don’t mean to wear those valuables on the river boat?”
“This is France!” declared Martha Marguerite. “I am safe here.”
“If I might be so bold,” interjected Captain Telémas, stepping toward the two women, “the young lady is correct. France has changed, I am afraid, since you last were here. Look.” He gestured down at the docks upon which stevedores labored and all manner of men and women scurried hither and thither.
Martha complied, scoffingly at first, and so did Selena. Her misgivings and the captain’s outright warning were neither idle nor misplaced. Even as the three of them stood on the Lancia’s polished deck, hundreds of eyes, hungry or hard or hate-filled, glared up at the handsome woman wearing the jewels and fur.
Martha Marguerite shrank back. Selena, dressed simply in dark-colored cotton, almost did so as well.
She had suffered enough acquaintance with danger to know it when she saw it.
“I told you,” the captain repeated, a bit sadly. “France has changed.”
He was right. Selena scanned the crowd and saw in a moment at least five different people who looked prepared to kill, if only for a piece of bread. There was the gaunt, knife-thin young man leaning against the wooden wheels of a tumbrel. He looked close to starvation, although not for lack of food alone. Hatred, too, consumed his bones; his fury weighed more than his body did. Or the slattern lounging in a warehouse gateway with a prospective customer. She and the man both eyed Martha’s white throat, not only for the pearls thereon but for the blood therein. An old woman, bent and stooped, wielded a tin cup, begging for alms and calling, “Save yourselves while you can. Save yourselves before the deluge comes.” Even a little boy, scarcely six years old, unwittingly revealed an implacable and remorseless fury at the sight of Martha’s ostentation. He was just sitting on the dock and kicking his feet. But there was power in each kick, and murderous meaning.
Selena saw this and more. Suddenly she imagined a France in which all the poor, the outcast, the lowly and dispossessed were huddled on the howling threshold of flashpoint. Martha and her kind lived in one world, they in another. And they had borne enough. The time to turn tables was imminent. The smell of revolution rode the very air, obliterating the rich, multifarious odors of the harbor and the docks, of oil and grain and leather, even fish. Indeed, Selena did not sense here even a jot of the forces that had driven the American uprising, in which a strong draught of rationalism had seasoned martial fervor. No, this was different; this was malice promised in return for malice
performed.
This was biblical. This was an eye for an eye.
Martha Marguerite finally saw it as well. “I shall go below and change,” she said huffily.
The riverboat journey up the Seine was uneventful, save for Selena’s enjoyment of the ordered beauty of the French countryside. Yet here too she saw the stark contrasts. Great châteaux and noble cathedrals rose above grimy, stinking peasant villages and towns. The nobility rode fine horses, better fed and cared for than the men and women, and children too, who tilled the nobles’ lands from dawn to dusk. Fat clerics, drawn in gleaming carriages, waved desultory blessings from closed cabs, as if a languid sign of the cross would put bread in a man’s mouth. The miracle of the loaves and fishes was not to happen here. A smoldering fury, ready to leap into flames, was evident behind the hedgerows and across the jade-green fields.
“La belle France,” murmured Martha Marguerite, somewhat sadly.
But if Martha sensed the changes at work during her absence, the changes building to a crescendo now, that insight deserted her as soon as the riverboat reached Paris.
“Look at it!” she exulted.
And Selena did. She was thrilled from the start, but a little disconcerted. Compared to this gleaming, light-filled city spread out before her eyes, Edinburgh was a small town, Bombay a plain of hovels, New York a backwoods village. She had been taken by her father to London once, but she’d been too young to appreciate it. For her, for now, Paris could not but be the most wonderful place she had ever been.
She had been a toddler in London, a Scottish princess in Edinburgh, a slave in Bombay, and a spy in New York.
All she could do was wait and see what Paris might make of her now.
“It will be very simple,” explained Martha, as the two women walked up the gangplank and left the riverboat. “I’ll hire a cab to take us to my family’s home, we’ll settle in, and tomorrow I’ll begin sending invitations. Oh, we’ll have a grand time, we will.
“You there, boy!” she called, hailing a loutish young fellow in threadbare shirt and battered cap. He was busy currying a sway-backed horse hitched to a sagging buggy. In the buggy, asleep on the seat, was another young man of the same age, equally unimpressive in his attire. “You there! See to our bags here on the street. I wish to hire you.”
Selena saw at a glance that Martha had erred again, not by her apparel this time—she was dressed sedately, if well—but by the lofty presumption of her tone.
“Oh, and is that right?” the lout responded, continuing to brush the beast. He seemed lackadaisical on the surface, good-natured enough, but with a hint of something like meanness in his eyes. He glanced contemptuously at the pile of luggage on the street. “Well, you may want to hire me, as you say, so I’ll try to make up my mind while you and that pretty little piece with you trundle your junk over here and put it in the buggy.”
Martha Marguerite was aghast. She’d never been spoken to that way in all her life. “How dare you address me in that manner!” she sputtered.
“You’re lucky I’m talkin’ to you at all,” the fellow drawled, grinning at Selena.
She understood. However, this young man’s father or grandfather might have rushed to please a rich woman, he would not do so unless he chose.
“I’ll have you…I’ll have you beaten soundly for your impertinence!” vowed Martha.
The man laughed. “Sebastian! Sebastian!” he called.
His partner in the buggy awoke and sat up. “What is it, Hugo?”
“We’ve got us a rich woman here who’s going to have us beaten if we don’t jump right smart.”
Hugo and Sebastian laughed in unison. Martha was on the verge of apoplexy. “I’ll have you arrested!” she shrieked. “Gendarme! Gendarme!”
Hugo and Sebastian thought that this too was wildly funny.
“Madame,” said Hugo, when he had stopped laughing, “all the police are in the center of the city, trying to contain a demonstration. Now why don’t you calm down and find yourself another hack? As you can see, we’re busy.”
He returned to currying his horse. Sebastian pulled his cap over his eyes and leaned back against the buggy seat. He was still chortling to himself.
While this exchange had been taking place, riverboat passengers had hired the rest of the waiting buggies. This was the only one left. Stepping forward, Selena decided to see what she could do.
“Monsieur Hugo,” she implored, hearing the Scots accent clearly in her new French, “I’m afraid my companion doesn’t quite understand what is happening in France these days. She’s of the old school, if you know what I mean.”
“She’d better learn the coming ways right quick,” Hugo growled. But he looked her up and down with interest. “You look like a comtesse all right,” he said in appraisal, “but you seem fairly human. How’d you get stuck with that old cow?”
He pointed rudely toward Martha, who was close to dancing with outrage.
“Please. She’s all right really. Could you take us in your buggy? You’ll be well-paid.”
Shouldn’t have said that! she realized. Now we might be robbed.
“Oh? How well?” asked Hugo, his eyes narrowing.
“We don’t…that is, we don’t have any money with us. But when we reach our destination—”
“Which is?” he snapped.
Martha Marguerite, with great dignity, gave the Right Bank address.
“Hey! Maybe we ought to hold ’em for ransom then?” commented Sebastian, from his seat in the buggy.
Hugo laughed, not entirely pleasantly, but Selena decided, before things got further out of hand, to give him the full benefit of her violet eyes.
“Please?” she asked, so kittenishly she might have meowed as well. “S’il vous plait? My companion does not mean what she says.”
“Ah!” commented Sebastian sarcastically, heat of anger in his voice now. “And the Archbishop of Rouen did not mean it when he had my grandfather’s hands lopped off for failing to tithe. Nor did the chief magistrate of St.-Cloud mean it when he hanged my sister for stealing a loaf of bread to feed her starving children.”
“When the Third Estate takes its rightful place in affairs,” added Hugo grimly, “the tyrants will receive their just due.”
Third Estate? wondered Selena. She did not know exactly what the men were talking about, but their meaning was clear enough. They were outraged at the order of things.
All she wanted to do now was to reach Martha Marguerite’s home in safety. Selena and the older woman lugged their bags over to the carriage where Hugo changed his mind and deigned to help them lift the luggage into the vehicle. It was large enough to seat six, with a canopied top but open sides. She helped Martha inside, the men swung up into the driver’s seat behind the horse, and the buggy moved off.
“What is the Third Estate?” Selena asked Martha in a whisper.
“Oh, nobodies. The workers and the peasants. They have no power and mean nothing. They have always been poor and will always be poor. It is the order of things. Philip the Fair said it best: the duty of the Third Estate is ‘to hear, receive, approve and perform what should be commanded of them by the king.’”
“I don’t think Hugo and Sebastian quite share that view.”
“They will when I get through with them. As soon as we reach home, I shall have our family servants seize these obstreperous brigands and take them to the magistrate. Then we shall see how things are!”
Martha was so agitated, so furious, that Selena decided not to discuss the matter further. Perhaps when Martha reached the safety of her house, she would look more charitably upon the young men who had brought her there.
The carriage passed first through a haphazard neighborhood of narrow, winding streets. Tall houses of gray stone were jammed together here, houses with steep, slate-shingled roofs and grimy brick chimneys. Many people walked about, apparently idle, most of them ill-clothed. They glanced sullenly at the buggy, inspecting its occupants with something barely s
hort of malice. Then Hugo guided the horse out onto a wide street that ran along the Seine. Selena had heard of Notre Dame and now she saw it for the first time in all its hoary, historic magnificence. She held two thoughts simultaneously: how grand it was, and how many poor people had gone hungry in order that it might be built and maintained.
On the roadway and all around the great church a vast crowd of people blocked the buggy’s progress. Hugo reined the horse to a halt.
“Go on!” commanded Martha. “What is the matter?”
Sebastian glanced over his shoulder. “We’ll move along, madame,” he said sharply, “when we’re able. Or would you have us run down these people in our path?”
“What’s happening?” asked Selena. She could hear someone shouting in the distance. Welling roars of approval followed each spate of shouting.
“It is someone giving a speech,” said Hugo. “And I intend to listen.”
Selena stood up in the carriage. She saw, perhaps fifty yards away, a man speaking from some sort of wooden platform. He was half-hidden from her by the crowd. Hugo and Sebastian were standing up in the driver’s seat for a better view, so she crawled up on top of the canopy for a look as well. She could hear the speech more clearly now.
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