Liberty's Fire

by Lydia Syson

  ‘I thought everything was going to be all right again after the armistice. It was bad enough during the siege, just dragging on and on, and hardly knowing what was happening outside Paris, or when it would ever end.’

  Anatole nodded guiltily, and tried to concentrate. Thanks to Jules he couldn’t really claim to have starved while Paris was besieged – if you had the money to pay for it, there was always something to be had, and Jules always had enough. Although Anatole kept expecting to be summoned any moment by his battalion for a great sortie against the Prussians (‘Foolhardy!’ according to Jules), the call had never come. He hadn’t even had to worry much about his own family, all safe in the middle of France, no brothers threatening to volunteer. The freedom of not having to account for his every movement in letters home had been positively liberating.

  ‘Very difficult,’ he said. ‘Awful.’

  ‘Impossible!’ Marie contradicted. ‘And now I just can’t bear it … so much uncertainty, going on and on and on … It’s hateful. All I wanted was for Emile to hear me sing again.’ Her eyes were shining more than ever. Tears were clearly threatening. ‘Was that so much to ask?’

  ‘Emile is your brother?’ Anatole thought he had better clarify.

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s right. My only brother. My only relative in fact. And I had hoped so much he would be back for the first night.’

  ‘And maybe he will. There’s still plenty of time. But right now, the most important thing is that you don’t ruin your voice for this evening.’ A hiccup made Anatole realise he still had her handkerchief. He wasn’t sure whether to return it or not. ‘In fact, don’t you think it would be a good idea to let your voice rest completely until six o’clock?’

  She glanced at him sharply, and reached for her shawl. ‘Yes, you’re probably right. I’ve taken up too much of your time already.’

  ‘No, not at all … I’ve enjoyed our rehearsal.’

  A slightly tight smile. ‘Yes, so have I.’

  Marie seemed to be waiting for something else.

  ‘I tell you what …’ said Anatole, suddenly inspired. ‘Why don’t you come and hear the election results at the City Hall with me next week? I’m going with my friend Jules – Mr Crowfield. It’s bound to be interesting, and then you won’t have to wait a moment to find out the news. Whatever it turns out to be.’

  ‘Crowfield?’

  ‘American.’

  ‘Oh, how interesting.’

  Marie agreed to meet them, and Anatole walked her back to her dressing room. For just a few minutes he even managed to forget about the girl he’d left in the second-best box. When he finally pulled open the door again, she’d vanished, and he realised he’d been an idiot. His coat was still there, but his money certainly wasn’t.

  6.

  Night had fallen good and proper by the time Zéphyrine got back to Montmartre. From the half-open door of the church a roar of voices came, stopping her in her tracks. It didn’t sound much like Vespers. A cluster of black-clad widows were on their way in, deep in conversation. Passing the basin of holy water at the entrance, they crossed themselves as usual. Zéphyrine followed them inside, and did likewise from force of habit.

  Everything smelled more or less the same. Cold stone and old incense, the waxy smell of a hundred lighted candles. At first the congregation didn’t seem very different either, although Zéphyrine had never before seen so many crowded into the pews on a Monday evening, nor fancy bonnets among the white caps. Instead of incense, wreaths of tobacco smoke drifted towards the ceiling, twisting up from the pipes of men who sat with their hats firmly on their heads. Some of the women were smoking too. Zéphyrine was glad Gran’mère couldn’t see this, or hear the way the people whooped and whistled in response to the speaker.

  It wasn’t Père Ambroise in the pulpit. Instead of his soporific nasal drone, a woman’s voice came ringing out over the heads of this noisy congregation. It was followed by another wave of cheering. As soon as the applause died away, the woman spoke again.

  ‘No more weakness!’ she commanded, and Zéphyrine instantly felt her backbone stiffen. ‘No more uncertainty!’

  Another roar hit the rafters.

  ‘Here in Paris beats the very heart of France! Don’t listen to the monarchists who’d drag us back to the days of Empire! Don’t trust the so-called Republicans of Versailles! We must demand our rights! The Republic must be guaranteed, and with it the liberty of our beloved city, and our freedom from the chains of slavery! Your children’s future depends on you. The future of Paris depends on you!’

  The speaker wore a red-striped jacket over a plain black dress. Her immense brow furrowed over a strong Roman nose – the kind of nose Gran’mère used to call clever, on a man. One arm was raised above her head, and her hand was outstretched as if reaching for freedom. The distant look in her eyes made Zéphyrine wonder if this woman could see something she couldn’t. How did she dare to step up to the pulpit like that? How could she? What was she thinking of, standing there behind the eagle-carved book rest? Not that she was reading her speech.

  ‘Citizens! Citoyens and citoyennes! It is up to us, the workers, to declare ourselves free of the old ways at last! It is up to me, and it is up to you! We must be ready to take this opportunity for self-determination. We must seize the future in both hands!’

  Zéphyrine was unbalanced by another huge roar of agreement. Like a great wave, it caught her at her chest, and she came out of her trance. Coins hot and clinking in her palm, she cast about for someone she knew. Arguments kept breaking out in the pews, all jabbing fingers and wide-stretched eyes. Still no sign of the priest.

  At last! A familiar face. Creeping up to the end of one of the back benches, she nudged the girl sitting at the end. Rose Lenoir lived a few streets away, where her mother ran the local laundry. Before the war, Zéphyrine always looked forward to seeing Rose. They’d chew the fat as they pounded the linen, and her grandmother always chided her for taking so long over it. ‘I was just helping Rose with her deliveries,’ Zéphyrine would explain, and then she would be forgiven, for a fever in childhood had left Rose’s foot paralysed, and she’d been lame ever since. Everyone knew how heavy her baskets could be.

  At the sight of Zéphyrine, Rose instantly shuffled up and got all her neighbours to do the same. She patted the empty space left on the bench, reaching up to pull Zéphyrine down into it. Rose smelled of soap, as usual, her skin as well scrubbed as her clothes, and her eyes shone.

  ‘Where have you been?’ asked Rose. ‘Why didn’t you come up to the Butte on Saturday morning with everyone else when the soldiers came to take our cannon? I was sure I’d see you. Everyone was there … and she —’ nodding at the speaker in the pulpit — ‘she was so wonderful! She always is.’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ Zéphyrine hissed, resisting. ‘You see —’

  Her words were drowned out by another cry for action. A mother across the aisle raised her head and fist to agree; the baby who had just been feeding at her breast, kicking his legs in concentrated bliss, stared round in surprise at the sudden disturbance. There was a ripple of laughter, and his mother clapped her hand over her bare breast. But the child just gurgled happily at all the smiling faces, and went back to his supper.

  ‘I can’t stay, Rose. I’ve got to go.’

  Rose didn’t take her eyes off the pulpit. Zéphyrine sighed, and returned to her hunt for the missing priest.

  A neatly bearded man in a side pew looked up from his notes and met her searching eyes with his. His eyebrows lifted enquiringly, and he beckoned her over. She hesitated before taking a step towards him, pointing at her chest as if to say, ‘You want to talk to me?’ He nodded. A silk top hat rested on the man’s knees. His jaw was set, and his nostrils seemed to be struggling with some disgusting smell. Just in time, one of the black-shawled widows bustled over with her collection box, shaking her head, and drew Zéphyrine away to the light of the open door.

  ‘Who is he? What does he want with me?’ Zé
phyrine asked.

  ‘He keeps trying to interview people. Just ignore him. He says he’s a journalist. Maybe he is. Maybe he isn’t. We think he must be a spy from Versailles. Best leave him alone.’

  Zéphyrine turned to glare at him. He frowned – as if he had a sour taste in his mouth – and bent back to his writing.

  ‘Do you know, he asked if the speakers here – what did he call them again? That’s right – the orators – he asked if the orators were paid to speak here … No, to “perform” he said!’ The widow spat out the word ‘perform’.

  ‘Can you tell me something else?’

  ‘If I know the answer, dearie, I’ll tell you anything you like.’

  Her kindness brought Zéphyrine close to the edge again. No more weakness, she told herself again. Just say it out loud.

  The widow jingled her collection box absent-mindedly while she waited for Zéphyrine to speak, happy to catch anyone coming and going.

  ‘Help for the wounded of the siege!’ she called. ‘Help the poor orphans!’ She had to shake quite hard to be heard in all the racket. It sounded more like a marketplace than a church.

  Zéphyrine choked back the tightness rising in her throat. She wasn’t an orphan. She could stand on her own two feet. Somehow. She had to start somewhere.

  ‘I’m looking for the priest. For a funeral. Do you know what I have to do? How much it will cost? Gran’mère, you see, my grandmother I mean … Gran’mère is dead.’

  And then, despite the bread she’d eaten, or maybe because of the wine or perhaps because it was the first time Zéphyrine had said those words out loud, the windows of the church began to ripple and spin, and she collapsed in a heap on the flagstones.

  7.

  Rose picked Zéphyrine up from the church steps. She took her back to the house behind the laundry, and Madame Lenoir immediately sent her own mother to watch over Gran’mère’s body. Then she set several pans of water to heat on the stove and dispatched her sister to summon the undertaker. The younger children were shooed like chickens from the kitchen, the tin bath lifted down from its hook on the yard wall, and a screen was arranged round it. Meanwhile Rose went and found clean clothes for Zéphyrine – a cotton dress and shawl, and a nightgown and petticoat and underthings too, all perfectly pressed. ‘We’re lucky, running the laundry,’ Rose whispered. ‘People leave things behind sometimes, and don’t come back. Stuff gets lost.’

  When the bath was ready, Zéphyrine needed to hold on to Rose’s arm to climb into it. Just lifting a foot seemed an effort by then, and she couldn’t stop shivering. She tried to make herself as small as she could, hugging her knees. She felt like an empty milk churn, sour and curdled inside: if she knocked against anything, she would surely clang and then everyone would hear how hollow she was.

  Rose pretended not to notice, and distracted her with the neighbourhood news between jugfuls of hot water.

  ‘Best day since before the war, and you missed everything. What timing. The soldiers of the line came right past here on their way up. We knew straight away something was wrong. Didn’t you hear it?’

  ‘Yes, I heard it.’ Of course she had. You could hear everything from that attic. But it didn’t mean you could do anything about it.

  ‘I woke up first!’ chipped in the youngest girl, Hortense, from behind the screen.

  ‘No, you didn’t, I did!’ said Laure, and the screen wobbled as she gave her sister a shove.

  The children had all crept in to hear the tale told again. Nobody in Montmartre could hear it often enough.

  ‘Well, I was out on the street first,’ said their brother proudly.

  ‘Shut up and let me tell the story,’ called Rose, flicking water at them over the screen. ‘Or I’ll send you all outside.’

  Zéphyrine wiggled a soapy finger in her ear so she could hear properly. It did sound exciting, the way Rose told it. Boots quietly tramping in the earliest hours of the morning. Waking to the scrape of steel on stone and under-the-breath swearing, as the government soldiers came sneaking up the hill to steal Montmartre’s cannon and disarm the people of Paris. But the army’s call for horses – too late – went unanswered, and suddenly, from the houses all around, came the cry of treason. Before long, the infantrymen were confronted with a troop of furious women and children.

  ‘Weren’t you scared?’ Zéphyrine asked.

  ‘We weren’t!’ yelled the children, lying, while Rose nodded.

  ‘Tell her what happened then,’ came a solemn voice.

  ‘We weren’t there. We didn’t see that,’ said Rose sharply ‘Anyway. That’s enough. Out you go. Zéphyrine has to dress, and we need to put her to bed. Up you get.’ She wrapped Zéphyrine in a stove-warmed towel, and whispered in her ear. ‘Things got nasty later. Out of hand, you know. There were deaths. It wasn’t meant to happen. It wasn’t good. But sometimes these things can’t be helped.’

  Then Madame Lenoir’s sister came back and said, ‘It’s all arranged. They can do it tomorrow.’

  The funeral was very quiet. Not many mourners this time. Not like her grandfather’s, with its hearse and plumes, and half the neighbourhood following behind. That was the first time Zéphyrine had ever come to Paris, two years earlier, getting the bus, and the train, and the bus again with her mother, and never dreaming that she wouldn’t be going home with her afterwards. Nobody had told her she’d be left behind with Gran’mère, so she’d never had a chance to say goodbye to her half-brothers. It was a trick, she realised later. She was never quite sure who had planned it, but she could guess. Her stepfather had made his hatred of her clear from the day he’d moved in.

  At Papi’s funeral everything had impressed her, from the moment the procession had left the church, chanting of Paradise. This time the priest’s words went through her like air, and left no trace. She wouldn’t care if she never saw Père Ambroise again in her life, never again heard him murmur ‘my dear child’ or ‘I’ll pray for you’. They returned from the cemetery, with all its new graves, and Zéphyrine slept at the Lenoirs’ for a whole night and most of the rest of the day too, only getting up for a supper of broth and bread, before sleeping again. It was good to feel nothing. She was too tired even to dream.

  The next morning, Rose took her to see the Montmartre Women’s Vigilance Committee. The women there could organise water into wine, she said. They’d help her.

  By this time, Zéphyrine could begin to argue. ‘But I can’t take charity … I don’t … I’m not …’ She tried again. She didn’t know she already had – that Hortense had taken a collection in the neighbourhood to make up the money needed for the funeral. ‘Gran’mère would …’ At a glance from Rose, trudging doggedly, unevenly, beside her, her voice trailed off. They both knew her grandmother’s thoughts about charity were no longer relevant, any more than her favourite proverb: ‘A goat must graze where it’s tethered.’

  ‘In any case,’ said Rose, breathing harder from the steep climb. ‘It’s not charity. It’s redistribution. It’s making things fair for once. What on earth is wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’ And a goat may wander where it will, Zéphyrine added in her head.

  She was awed by the silence that greeted them when they walked into the committee room. She’d been expecting discussion, discord – the kind of raucous debate she’d heard at the political meeting in the church. Everyone here was so hard at work that they didn’t even look up at first. A big trestle table in the middle, hard wooden chairs round it, and women’s heads down, pens in hand, papers piled high, working away.

  ‘What are they doing?’ she whispered.

  Rose looked vague, and waved an unhelpful hand. ‘Paperwork.’

  ‘Oh.’

  The quiet scrape of nib on paper continued, and Rose gently cleared her throat. The first worker looked up, and Zéphyrine caught her breath. That woman from the church. But now she seemed less godlike and more human. Definitely still clever. Zéphyrine found herself blushing under her careful
scrutiny.

  ‘Yes?’

  Faint lines at the corners of her eyes – she wasn’t young – suggested that she wasn’t always so serious.

  Zéphyrine swallowed, and let Rose do the talking.

  ‘Someone else who needs our help, citoyenne.’

  The woman smiled slightly. ‘You are so good at finding them. I sometimes wish you were equally good at finding the men who are shirking from their duties to defend Paris. But I daresay they’ll show themselves in time. Once they realise what’s at stake.’

  Her mouth straightened, forming a great line across her wide, open face.

  Rose nodded. ‘Zéphyrine has just lost her grandmother.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. Did I know her? Was she one of ours?’

  Zéphyrine shook her head quickly, and felt herself going even redder. She couldn’t possibly reveal Gran’mère’s views on committee women. ‘You wouldn’t have met her.’

  She was sure this woman spent no time on her knees. She might be at home in a pulpit, but she didn’t look the praying sort.

  ‘No matter. How can I help you now? You are looking for work, I take it?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I am.’

  ‘Can you nurse?’

  ‘Of course, she can!’ Rose interrupted enthusiastically. ‘She’s just been nursing her own grandmother, haven’t you, Zéph?

  ‘I – I … no, I really can’t.’ Zéphyrine hung her head. How could she explain how much she hated a sickroom? That blood and vomit and excrement made her heave and turn away? How could she admit to her impatience and incompetence? ‘I’m no good at all at that kind of thing. I did it because I had to. And anyway, I didn’t make her better. She died.’