by James Tipton
I started to speak and almost retched. The man immediately drew an embroidered handkerchief from his sleeve and handed it to me.
“Hold it over your mouth, my dear. It was, at one time, scented with vanilla. There might still be a residue. It has helped ladies before.”
With the scarf to my mouth, I managed to tell him whom I was looking for. “You mean you are not one of us, a prisoner? The world has not deserted you.” And he bellowed out, in a voice that belied his age, Paul’s name and politely maneuvered us through the throng of men and women, languishing on a thin layer of straw on the floor or standing in small groups. The only other sounds than his voice were low conversations or the constant hacking of someone coughing, and soon Paul strode up to us. “Annette, you’re not—” he began.
“No, I’m visiting, as Marguerite did.”
“Thank God. How is Monsieur William?”
Other prisoners moved away to give us our privacy. The old gentleman bowed, and I thanked him. I never saw him again. Such are the unremembered acts of kindness and of love, which are the better part of a good man’s life, as William was to write later. But I remember that man and thank him again now. In the world of anger into which I had succumbed, I remember his simple act of compassion.
“Monsieur William is on his way to join his powerful friends in Paris and rectify his situation. Oh, Paul, look at your poor face, that’s what Marguerite called it.” I lifted my hand to it and realized I still had the gentleman’s handkerchief. I looked after him, but he was lost in the many dim figures in half-light.
“It’s an awful face but glad to see yours. Come, sit on my little handful of straw.” And he helped me down. I put the handkerchief back to my face.
“You shouldn’t have come, though, Annette. This is no place for—”
“A woman in my condition? No, neither is riding a wagon to Vendôme and walking throughout that city. I think we all need the Holy Tear, Paul.”
“Ah, yes, that would be a boon.”
“Here,” and I opened a cloth sack. “The guard at the gate was very interested in this bread and this jug of water. Even this cheese, which you can’t smell in this place. Marguerite insisted that you have the bread, especially.”
“You are good to me. How’s—”
“Marie’s making beautiful drawings of autumn leaves. Gérard’s waiting for your return from Bordeaux. He’s concerned about his birthday.”
“I’m afraid he’s going to have to wait a long time.” He winced when he said that, as if the words had caused the bruises on his face new pain.
“Marguerite is strong. She says she doesn’t know why she hasn’t fallen down and died, and I said she hasn’t because she can’t. She’s being strong for the children. That bread makes you feel civilized, doesn’t it? Just the taste of it.”
“It does,” Paul said, with his mouth full. “Excuse me.” Then he added, “How is Pierre?”
“Monsieur Duclos’s arguments prevailed there. Pierre’s being released tomorrow because he is old and, they said, not right in the head anyway. They said you, on the other hand, were quite sane.”
“I don’t know about that. Well, I’m glad for Pierre. All this would be too hard on him. He wouldn’t have made the march to Orléans.”
“Paul, are you ever allowed out into the courtyard, for some fresh air?”
“Once each morning, a few others and I have been given the honor of carrying two buckets each out of this stinking place. It’s hardly enough. But it’s an attempt at being civilized, as you would say.”
“Where do you empty it?” I asked.
“It is of no concern. It does not affect my health.”
“Your health is my concern. If you are sent on to Orléans, it could truly suffer.”
He paused with a bite of bread between his teeth and looked sharply at me. Then he spoke softly.
“In the latrine. There is always an armed guard right behind me.”
“Where is the latrine?”
“At the end of the courtyard, near the wall.”
“Where near the wall?”
“What do you mean?”
“The north end of the wall? The south?”
“About halfway.”
“Does the guard ever leave you?”
“Only when I enter the latrine. He says that is not his job, to follow me in there.”
“Is there a window in the latrine?”
“At one end.”
“Where is the guard in relation to the window?”
“He is at the door, and the window is at the other end.”
“Not facing the courtyard?”
“Not facing the main courtyard, but the remaining area between the latrine and the wall.” He looked down at his straw. “The wall is very high, Annette.”
“Can you arrange to be by the wall tomorrow?”
“Annette—”
“At what time are you sent to empty the bucket?”
“Seven in the morning.”
“The same each day?”
“I hear the bell tower strike.” He touched his face. “Marguerite washed my face and did not say anything about it being all one bruise.”
“It will look better in daylight, tomorrow morning,” I said.
“Does Marguerite know of this?”
“Not yet. I wanted to talk with you.”
He paused.
“It’s not worth it, Annette, to endanger—”
I put my hand on his hand and shook my head. He looked at me, then down to the straw, and was silent. When I rose to leave, he helped me up and met my eyes and said, “Thank you.” Then he escorted me to the door, pounded twice on it, and yelled, “Visitor leaving.” The mustachioed guard opened it a crack, saw my face, and let me out. I had no time to look back at Paul before the guard slammed the door.
He didn’t start down the arcade but stood still and stared at me again. I realized I still had the handkerchief over my nose. I left it there.
“You like your friend?” the guard said.
“My brother-in-law,” I said.
“You stay with me,” the guard said. “One night, and I will see that he walks out a free man.” I wanted to slap his mustache and the hand on it. “I don’t mind that you are going to be a mother. I like them better like that,” he said.
I spoke through the handkerchief. “That is very kind,” I said, “but my brother-in-law is innocent and will be released.”
“This is your last chance,” he said. “You should take it. I do not ask again.”
“It is not necessary,” I said, and he motioned for me to walk in front of him again, and I felt him staring at me from behind.
I lay in my bed that night wondering if I were a fool, a brash fool endangering her dear brother-in-law, who might, after all, be released in Orléans. I could be ruining the happiness of my sister and of her children, and needlessly endangering myself and William’s unborn child as well. What right had I to do that? What right had I to think I could help? What hubris, for which I would be punished? And now they were trusting in me. What had I gone and done? And if I were caught? I had heard they didn’t guillotine pregnant women. They waited until they delivered their babies in prison, then guillotined them. And if William’s child was then raised by the state? Would I go to hell for making that baby an orphan, for bringing Paul to the scaffold?
I prayed to Sainte Lucette that I would successfully help Paul and his family. She had helped me twice before. And it was really such a simple plan. I had not told Paul or Marguerite what it was, for it was so simple they could doubt it, and it probably left out a thousand variables. I went over it again, pictured it all in my mind, step by step, even imagined things that could go wrong and dealt with them. Yet I still felt afraid.
Marguerite had the children ready now. They thought they were going on a trip, although I think Marie knew. When I played the scenes over and over, I always stopped when we all got in the family carriage, waiting in the road that wound through
the vineyard, the carriage that would then go east on country roads, avoiding the bridge at Blois and crossing the river at Beaugency, then north on other side roads to the Channel. Paul would hire a boat from there. We just had first to get to that carriage in the dusty autumn vineyard.
I said good-bye to La Rouge in my mind. She would not understand. In a letter to Angelique, I had given my younger sister care of Rouge. Tomorrow Jean would bring Rouge and Le Bleu back to chez Vergez. Then other thoughts deluged me: William, I thought, would not want me to put myself in danger. Yet William was not a predictable man, and he was fond of Paul. No, no one could say what Monsieur William would think. I wanted Claudette to come, but the carriage was full. In a letter that Claudette would bring to my mother, Marguerite asked that Claudette, Jean, and old Pierre work at chez Vergez. Claudette and Angelique liked each other, and it would be a felicitous arrangement until I could send for Claudette, as soon as—
Sleep was useless. I pushed back the bed curtains, wrapped my old dressing gown around me, and lighted a single candle from the night-light on the wall. As I opened my door, I saw the sack behind it that held the length of rope I had bought that day, the receipt carefully left with it. I knocked on my sister’s door, heard her wide-awake response, and soon we were sitting, side by side, covered in a wool blanket, on her balcony on a soft October night, the same moon that had lit the horse, escaping to it knew not where, shining on the rows and rows of vines descending steeply to the river.
“They don’t grow grapes in England,” Marguerite said.
“I believe they’re beer drinkers,” I said.
“That’s unfortunate,” she said. “I’m all knotted up inside. Other people do this kind of thing. Dramas happen to other people. You don’t think they will happen to you. Why? What did we do? Monsieur Duclos is hopeless, now. Polite and very helpful—he stayed up all last night, and he had his agent get the money, but he’s hopeless.
I don’t want anything to happen to the children. But Annette, if we stayed here and did nothing, it’s likely that, if Paul, well, if he were convicted in Orléans, the state would confiscate chez Vincent anyway, and the children would lose both a father and a home.”
“That’s likely,” I said.
“My God, what did Paul do? Help an old servant, who had been with his family since before Paul was born. Wouldn’t any self-respecting man do the same? And to be put in jail, to be called a traitor, for that. For keeping bullies off an old man. I never knew there was so much hate in the world.”
“There’s enough love for us to be sitting here, trying to get away together.”
Then my sister’s tone turned suddenly light, even playful. “What if, Annette—what if we made it to England, and Monsieur William lived down the road, and we all ate horrible English food under the same roof?”
“That would be a delight,” I said. “But I wish we could fit Cook in the carriage. Monsieur William said her sauces were always a miracle and a mystery to him. She could set up a restaurant, and all the English would think she was mysterious and miraculous, and she ’d become famous and we would be her servants. Now that’s a revolutionary turn that I could like.”
“What about Maman, though?” Marguerite said. “She ’ll never forgive us for leaving. And poor Angelique. She always said we didn’t include her in our games.”
“I don’t think she would want to be included in this one.”
“And sweet Etienne. He ’d want to come.”
“He ’ll probably follow us.”
“I just—,” started Marguerite, “I just can’t let anything happen to the children. If they stop the carriage, they wouldn’t arrest the children—”
“They would only want Paul and me. Don’t—”
“Why are you doing this, Annette? I love you so, for your courage, but you don’t have to. You don’t have to do it.”
“We only have a short period of time. As you said, Duclos is no help. And I’m the one who thought up the stupid plan.”
She laughed a little. “How do soldiers ever sleep the night before a battle?”
“I don’t think they do. I think they lie awake and talk around their campfires or stare into the flames.”
“What do they talk about?”
“Home. Loved ones. Not the next day.”
“Do you remember, Annette, when we used to lie under a blanket, like this, and talk away summer nights, talk till dawn about boys, or some prince—”
“You were always going to some castle.”
“Chez Vincent is my château on the hill,” she said. “I got all I wanted.” I held her hand under the blanket. “Gérard’s fifth birthday is coming up,” she added. “He was asking me about it today, and I almost burst out crying, right in front of him, talking about his birthday.”
“He’s always wanted to see the Channel. He’s heard about it.
Huge waves and ships. It will be exciting.”
“It will be that.”
I felt all right now. As I sat and talked with my sister about it, somehow my fear and self-doubt had dropped away, and a peculiar calmness had taken their place. Everything looked clearer than I had ever seen it, as if I had suddenly awoken from a long slumber and was seeing my sister’s face in the moonlight, the river in the distance, for the first time. “Look at the moon, Annette,” Marguerite said. “Look at the moon on the vineyard of chez Vincent.” And it lay now, as it sunk westward, in a sheen over the vines and on the river.
“Doesn’t the sheen look solid on the river?” I said. “Like ice, as if one could just walk right across. Why not?”
We held hands silently and looked over that land that was still hers.
“Thank you, Annette,” she said. “Thank you for what you are doing for us.”
“Roses,” I said. “The English are fond of roses, and so is Marie.
I think she will become a great painter of English roses. Gérard will become a sailor, an admiral of the British fleet.”
“Oh, no. Let’s not get involved in any more wars,” she said, and leaned her head against my shoulder. “Jean’s a good driver, yes?”
“He’s very reliable.”
“It’s just so irrevocable. That’s all,” she said. “So irrevocable—like a death, a marriage, a birth. The church should have ceremonies for leaving a home and leaving one’s country, as they do for the other irrevocable steps of life.”
“I’m afraid such ceremonies would be called counter-revolutionary,” I said.
“Well, I’d do them anyway,” Marguerite said, sleepily. I didn’t say anything, and soon heard her regular breathing beside me. I looked a bit longer at the moon dipping into clouds above the river, and when the moon had gone fully into them, I led my sister, sleepwalking and not really awake, to her bed, and I went back to my room, dressed, lay on my own bed and noticed all my doubts and fears still playing about my mind, yet underneath feeling calm and ready.
Mercy
I thought, I should turn back right now, before I do anything truly foolish. Marguerite would understand. So would Paul. Nothing would be lost if I turned back right now. Yet I knew I would do nothing of the sort. I wouldn’t knock on the ceiling of the carriage to tell Jean to stop. It was all in motion, after all. And it was, of course, foolish. But sometimes wild, foolish plans work.
We were across the bridge now and going along the quai Abbé, lively with early-morning business: wagons filled with grain and barrels of wine, carts loaded with sacks of sugar and coffee, just upriver from Nantes; bargemen calling and carrying and hauling. We must have seemed incongruous in this traffic. Farmers unloaded hay bales and herded livestock onto sapines, broad fir-planked barges with no sails, headed downriver. Two large gabares with their beautiful tall sails were docked on their way to Orléans. I thought briefly of the quai at Orléans, where I had walked with William. Where was William now? Then I saw the road we would turn on to drive by the abbey.
It was suddenly silent and deserted. We passed by guards in a sma
ll court at the south entrance of the abbey. I could feel them staring at us, even in our small, plain carriage. Any carriage now, betokening aristocracy, raised suspicions. I thought one of the guards caught my eye. He looked young, about Etienne’s age. But they were at their posts and could not see the carriage once it was past the courtyard.
The abbey had a thirteenth-century wall, built to keep intruders out rather than the devout in. Its thick, chipped limestone, about ten feet high, followed the monastic buildings. The ancient wall was on our left. We were the only vehicle on the road, and the crunching of the wheels on the gravel was louder than I had anticipated. I thought one could hear it all the way back to the château de Blois.
About halfway between the south and north entrances, we stopped as planned, and I leaned out of the window and asked Jean what was the matter. I wondered if the guards had heard the stopping of the carriage, this far down the road. Jean said that Gascony, the lead horse, appeared to have picked up a stone in its hoof, and I said I wanted to see. Jean helped me out of the carriage, the basket over my arm. I checked my clock, and it was five minutes until seven. I looked up and down the road. Two empty wagons, heading toward the quai, trundled well ahead of us. Jean cradled the back hoof of Gascony in his large callused hand for me to examine; Gascony looked around at us, swiveling his ears in curiosity, wondering what we were about.
The problem with plans, simple or complex, is that something always happens to interrupt them. We were out of sight of the guards, but apparently not out of hearing.
Out from the court, walking quickly, came one of the guards. He shouted, “Is something wrong?” I saw that it was the young one, who had caught my eye. “I heard your carriage stop,” he said. “May I aid you in some way?”
“That is good of you, but it is nothing. My coachman can take care of it.”
He looked disappointed. He knelt by the horse and looked at the shoe, then the ankle, and he looked up at me. “But I can see nothing wrong,” he said, in a tone more surprised than suspicious. Perhaps he was suspicious, but he didn’t want to admit it, even to himself. He wanted to help.