by James Tipton
In a matter of minutes all the bags were on top of the carriage and roped down, and I put one small bag and a basket of food inside.
Cook had prepared a last meal before she and Françoise left for the house of Isabelle, an old friend of Marguerite’s and mine.
“Come, let me wash your face before we start,” Marguerite said to Paul.
“We don’t have the time,” he said. “Quick now, everyone in the carriage.” Paul stood beside the door and helped each of us in. He kept looking back toward the road.
We commenced along the side of the house and into the vineyard.
Across from me were the children, each with their favorite pillow, and I could smell the sausage and cheese in the basket. For the first time that day, I thought I could eat. I leaned out the window, took a last look at chez Vincent, and saw the dust rising from about six horses rapidly approaching the front of the house. I could make out the blue jackets and black hats. And at this short distance I knew we could not outrun them. I shouted up to Paul to stop. “National Guard,” I said to him.
He stopped the horses. “What’s wrong?” Gérard said.
“Hush,” Marie said. “Bad people are here.”
“You can drive, Annette,” Paul said. “It’s me they want. Come, now,” and he jumped down and opened the door to help me out.
“Papa, I know a place to hide,” Gérard said.
“Gérard, we can’t hide,” his father said gently. “This is not a game.
You ride on, and I’ll meet you later.”
“No,” started Marguerite, and a look from Paul stopped her.
“It is a good place,” Gérard insisted. “No one ever finds me. It’s my secret place.”
“Is it the one on the other side of the terrace?” I asked.
“Yes, that one. Come.”
“It’s a good place, but a dangerous one. It’s a narrow ledge, hidden from view from above. They would still follow us, Paul, if I drove.
It is worth a try. What can it harm? If they find us there, things are no different.”
“Let’s go,” Paul said.
We left the carriage at the edge of the vineyard and almost ran back up to the terrace. I held Gérard’s hand as he proudly ushered us behind the chestnut tree. “Down there,” he said, and pointed over the low wall to a little path just on the other side that descended to the left, then stopped suddenly on a narrow rock ledge, directly below the terrace, where, a lifetime ago, Gérard had shouted, “Find me!” then froze with fear. Now we were all afraid.
“I don’t like his place,” Marie said.
“Show us, Gérard,” his father commanded.
First, we climbed over the low terrace wall, then I could feel Gérard’s little hand enclosed in mine as he led us carefully down to his secret place. His fifth birthday was in two days. Then I let go of his hand before the path got too narrow to pass, and leaned back against the cliff wall so the family could go in front of me. I wanted them to be together. Paul held Marie’s hand. On one side was the cliff wall that turned into the terrace wall above us; on the other was a sheer drop into a ravine, then the vineyards sloping down toward the river. It was a good place. You could not see us unless you were hanging over the terrace balustrade, and then only if you looked straight down.
They all quietly passed me, and for a moment I looked down at Marie’s lambskin slippers, then beyond them to the drop. When I was rescuing Gérard, I had been too intent to notice it. Now I knew why he had frozen. All I could think of was falling, my body breaking on the rocks.
I felt bad in my stomach, then my head began to spin. The vineyard swayed beneath me, and the cliff swung down toward the valley.
I lurched, and Marie gave a shriek of fear. I knew I had to get away from the cliff. I would endanger them all. Right now I didn’t care about the National Guardsmen as long as they didn’t find the others; and it wasn’t me they wanted. Someone shouted from above me that he had heard a cry. I stepped back off the cliff and gave a look to Paul and Marguerite. I didn’t know when I would see them again. Paul’s eyes were questioning, but my sister’s broke my heart. She knew. I waved to them and pointed from them down to the carriage in the vineyard, so they would have no doubt as to my meaning: I wanted them to escape, and this wasn’t my time.
Then I half ran back up behind the chestnut tree and leaned against it, gasping.
A guardsman grabbed me roughly by my upper arm; he stank of fresh sweat and old sweat in an unwashed uniform. “Here’s one,” he shouted. They assembled about me.
“Where is Monsieur Vincent?” one said.
“I am pregnant. I am sick. Let me sit down.”
I started to sit on the stone bench below the tree, then thought better of it. “I must go sit inside. You frightened me, and I’m afraid I will get sick,” I added, which was half true. There was a blur of blue coats and black pointed hats around me, and I didn’t care. I opened the French doors myself and sat on the couch in front of the fireplace.
I leaned my head down.
“Get her something to drink,” a commanding tone said. “Where are they?” A hand emerging from a scarlet cuff lay heavy on my shoulder, and I shook it off.
“Keep looking upstairs. In the stable,” the voice connected to the hand said.
The Vincents’ brandy decanter was held in front of me. “Drink.”
But I didn’t want to drink. I shook my head, and they took the decanter away. My nausea was real. The room I knew so well blurred into a dream, and the guardsman stood above me, with his scarlet collar and cuffs, shiny sword hilt, snow-white trousers, and deep blue coat, his carefully curled mustache, his face showing a growth of whiskers, his hazel eyes that were not evil, but impatient. I was a task, unpleasant and frustrating, that he wanted to get over with. The escape of Paul Vincent had got in the way of his well-planned day, and he resented it.
“They have already left,” I said.
Another guardsman entered the drawing room and stood where Marie liked to lie on the floor and work on her drawings. He saluted.
“We have found their carriage, Captain. It is ready for travel, but no one is inside.”
“If they have already left,” the captain said, in a smooth, almost cordial tone to me, “then why is their carriage still here?”
I had to think through the fog. I said what seemed logical to me. “I was going to follow them and bring them their luggage. They wanted to leave, immediately. They left on horseback over an hour ago. They can all ride.”
“Why were you hiding?”
“Wouldn’t you hide if you were a woman alone and soldiers rode up?”
He ignored that. “Where were you going to meet the Vincents? At one of the counter-revolutionary strongholds in Normandy?”
“They are not counter-revolutionaries. This has all been a hideous mistake. Monsieur Vincent was merely protecting an old servant when he was arrested.”
“They’re aristocrats and counter-revolutionaries.”
The captain had foul breath, and when he spoke, I involuntarily turned away. He also smelled of sweat under the gold braid on his uniform, the uniforms in which men feel so important.
“Look at me,” he said, and his hazel eyes and stinking breath and pressed uniform and smelling body and shiny boots and violence coiled up in an arm that would strike me if I were a man; and all of this made me see my dream of so long ago, my nightmare of the men with their weapons. Suddenly I was in it. The captain grabbed my arm, and I screamed.
“You, a woman ill and expecting, were going to drive that carriage alone?”
“I am a good horsewoman,” I said. “My father taught me to hunt—and to drive a carriage and a wagon. We were an egalitarian family. We didn’t leave everything for the servants.”
“Where are the servants? I want to question them.”
“They were sent away. There is no one here but me.”
A guard entered the drawing room and reported that no one was upstairs. Another came in fro
m the stable and announced that it was empty except for a large carriage.
“If they had left in a carriage,” I said, “they would have taken that one. See for yourself. They have left. Search outside. Search all the Loire Valley. Which town will you choose? Aren’t there more important concerns? Farmers hiding priests in the Vendée? Armed brigands attacking ripe crops? Austrians and Prussians at the frontier? Your nation is in need of you, Captain. One harmless winegrower, who could have furnished France with excellent vintages, and his small family are surely as important a threat as all these other things. So go search for them. But they are not here.”
He slapped me with the back of his hand. The slap stung, but it helped with the dizziness. My eyes swung into focus. And it seemed to be the officer’s last effort at communicating with me. Then someone else entered the room. He looked as though he had just arrived.
A guardsman entered and saluted his superior, but seemed to be addressing me, in tones of dripping sarcasm. “Sir, as you ordered, we have inquired in the shops in town, and one merchant does remember selling such a rope as was used in the escape. His bill of sale is written out to a woman who resides here, the home of the escaped prisoner. Is that not a coincidence? This woman, named Madame Williams, is furthermore married to an Englishman, a suspected counter-revolutionary, who fled Blois. The merchant described her, and his description matches you. Are you not Madame Williams, born M. A. Vallon?”
I looked up at him. “Yes, I am Madame Williams.” I enjoyed saying it. “That merchant did sell me a rope. But it is unused, Captain,” I said. “Just send a man upstairs. It’s behind my door, third room down the hall on the left.”
“No need, Madame,” he said. “You just admitted the merchant sold you the rope.”
I thought, this man needs an arrest. It is a point of honor, especially if his main prey has escaped. But I tried once more.
“It’s there,” I said. “I’m telling you, it’s there.” It was hard to keep the tone of desperation from my voice. I had been too naïve to think my “evidence” would make any difference.
The captain poured himself a glass from the Vincents’ brandy decanter, gulped it down, looked at me for a moment, and said calmly, “Oh, we ’ll find Paul Vincent. Rest assured that we will find Paul Vincent. But now, if we can’t arrest the traitor, we can take his accomplice. You think this is just fun, don’t you? Another sport, like hunting? You enjoy the danger when you corner the boar, but it is at a safe distance. You like to race, to see how fast you can ride before you fall off, but you will only bruise your thigh. But now you have misjudged the danger. You aristocrats are all the same. You’re just bored.
It’s not a sense of loyalty to a fallen king that you respond to, just a sense of boredom. Arrest her. Let her be bored in prison.”
“You have no evidence.”
“We have the word of a clerk, and the rope you left dangling on the prison wall. You will lose your head, Madame, pregnant or no. It will save the world from more like you. Married to an English spy.”
He paused. “That is good.”
Then he put his face close to mine and held my chin between his thumb and forefinger. I turned away, but he jerked my face toward his. The smell of his breath and his body mixed into an odor that surrounded and trapped me. I stared at his bright scarlet collar. “It’s a nice head, though,” he said, “a very nice head.”
Then he straightened up and motioned for the others to take me. I was glad it was over, that I could breathe freely. The family must be exhausted with fear, clinging silently to that ledge. How long can one stand on a ledge? About one second, for me.
I was the prize of the National Guards now. The officer could resume the duties that Paul and I had interrupted, for he had something to show for his work. One counter-revolutionary brought to justice. I was not afraid, it sounds strange to say. I was tired and dazed and relieved that some decision had been made. I had a soldier at my arm, as if I were being led to dance. Angelique would like this, I thought; she likes soldiers.
Two guardsmen remained behind, stationed at the front of the house. I did not think they would be able to hear from there a small carriage slowly rolling out through the vineyards below.
They tied my hands behind me and put me on the crop of one of the saddles, and I rode like a girl with her lover, sitting in front of a soldier on his horse, down the hill, across the bridge, and through the streets of my childhood.
A Slant of Light
I was expecting them to take me back to the abbey prison, but they took me to the old Beauvoir Tower instead. This was the oldest prison in Blois, used since the counts of Blois bought it from the lords of Beauvoir five hundred years ago. Many centuries of woe had gone into the stones of that massive square tower. At first I was with prisoners who had been there since before the Revolution and knew nothing of the changes outside. Their hair and beards were matted, their faces covered with sores, and it was with some relief that a few hours later I was led up a flight of narrow stone stairs and locked in a room, covered in a thin layer of straw and only half filled with other recent arrests, most of them women and some children.
One named Madame Pellegrin took one look at me and said Divine Providence had blessed her with five children and that this was no place for me—how cruel could the National Guard be? She led me to her corner of straw and gave me most of her bowl of broth, and I fell asleep with my head in her lap as she stroked my forehead. No one had done that since my good nurse, Madame Bonnet, who died before my fourteenth birthday. She was the true confidante and guardian of my childhood.
When I woke, I saw a dirty stone floor and smelled the hay and was lost, for a moment. Then I saw the back of Madame Pellegrin, curled asleep next to me, saw the prostrate bodies of others, a couple stirring in the dim light, one sitting on a bucket in a corner, and remembered.
I looked up at the dark wall and the thin slit that was its only window.
Light was slanting through the slit in a tiny line and touching the edge of the hay near my face.
I held my palm up in the tiny slant and watched my hand fill with golden light, as if the light were a liquid thing. Darkness fell sharply away from the edge of my illuminated hand. I gazed at my palm now as if it were an isolated detail of a Renaissance painting, a hand with fingers longer than mine, not surrounded by shadow, but resting on the folds of an azure skirt rippling with light. Thus I spent my day, dreaming of paintings or of tapestries I had seen in the châteaux of my childhood. I noticed how in the morning the shaft fell also over the top of Madame Pellegrin’s head, across her soft features and onto her arms as she cradled her four-year-old son. She should be the model for a modern Madonna and child, I thought, but there are no painters in prison, and the only art done now is in praise of the Revolution.
She had told me that we were the lucky ones; there weren’t many of us. We were all going to be tried before the city magistrate and not sent all the way to Orléans. They probably thought we were not fit, she said, and it would look bad for the revolutionary government to be sending women and children on a long march.
“Grace,” she said, “takes many forms.” Her husband and older son were walking with the others the forty miles to Orléans. She cried for them at night, after her younger son was asleep. They had fed and hid a refractory priest in the Vendée for months before being informed on. Her three daughters had escaped.
I thought my mother would be notified and would, perhaps, visit me, but no one came. When, after about a week, Madame Pellegrin and her son left, I felt impossibly alone. I withdrew more and didn’t talk to the other prisoners, who left me alone. I thought of the Vincent family, hoped that they had made it safe to the Channel, somehow, and worried that Marguerite and Paul worried about me. Then I couldn’t imagine or think of them, except that my sister’s face reappeared regularly in my mind, as if she were checking on me. I asked Lucette to protect my sister and my baby and thought of how the name Lucette means light or bringer of light. Yet I
didn’t notice the strip of light anymore after Madame Pellegrin left.
I saw again in my mind moments that I had lived with William, some that I have told you about, and some not. These moments became more real than my reality. Then one day it was suddenly impossible to imagine anything outside of the darkness and odors and coldness of my walls, and I curled up in a ball on the straw and dozed or slept most of the day. I would feel the baby kick and think that I was a bad mother, having taken these risks and now provided such poor nourishment for her growing body—just the meager, bricklike, wormy biscuits and stale water—then I thought, also, if I had not this precious gift within me, then I would truly be alone.
The beige muslin dress, short brown wool jacket, wool stockings, and cotton underskirts that I had worn that morning for travel grew increasingly filthy, and my hair became as matted as that of the old prisoners I had seen on my first day. I tried to comb my hair with my fingers. No wonder, I thought, it is easy to think the accused guilty, for by the time they come before the judge they look desperate enough to have done anything. When my name was finally called, I had no time to wash my face with dirty water. Nine others and I had our hands tied behind our backs, were led out to an open cart, and made to stand as we drove in the rain through Blois. It was as if it were someone else’s city. Or as if this was all happening to someone else. Things like this, Marguerite said, happen to other people, not to us. We drove past Saint-Louis Cathedral and stopped at the Town Hall.
In spite of the cold and the rain, I found I was now extremely thirsty. We stood in a small courtyard, perhaps once used to receive goods for the Bishop’s Palace. We were to stand and not move. It had stopped raining, and we stood in puddles in the old court of the Bishop’s Palace.
Two National Guardsmen walked by us to receive a carriage. The horses looked overworked and uncared for, but one black one could have been fine, and could be once again. The guardsmen looked tired, as if they had been on duty all night.