Meanwhile Melanie was doing her best to plead for her father, both with Saint-Just and his more powerful companion. She reminded them how Dr. Remain had always treated the poor in his district, whether or not they were able to pay.
The leaders looked momentarily sympathetic, but could not have been much impressed, because they promised nothing and offered no hope. Their response was restricted to a few more platitudes of Revolutionary morality.
"One moment." The Angel was holding up a pale hand. "I have seen that name…" Turning aside, he scattered papers on a table, then held up the one he had been looking for. "I am sorry to tell you, citizeness, that Citizen Remain, your father, deserved the full penalty for his crimes—and he paid that penalty this morning."
Five minutes later, when he and his disconsolate companion were back outside, Philip was muttering between clenched teeth: "I wanted to hit that man. I very nearly did."
Melanie, the tough young woman, had come near fainting at the news so brutally delivered, and Philip had to support her to the door. Her father's body—in two pieces—would now be in one of those anonymous mass graves inside the cemetery of the Church of the Madeleine…
Radcliffe embraced her like a brother, did what he could to comfort her. "The scoundrels! I am so sorry…" People walking in the street turned their heads toward him when his words fell clearly in the air. Well, he didn't care.
In an effort to divert her even slightly from the raw fact of death, he commented: "And so that is the famous Robespierre. He seems to make no effort to avoid dressing like an aristocrat… or behaving like one, either. I had no idea you knew the man."
"I have been present at a dinner or two where he was entertained, that's all." Melanie wiped her eyes. "But I don't suppose it would make any difference if I, or my father, had saved his life. Oh, Philip, it is horrible to think… of the grave."
"Of course it is."
"You will tell me my father died by accident? That someone was in a hurry and made a mistake?"
"No, I won't try to tell you that. Mistake or not, it's a damned outrage!"
"But one must go on." She wiped her eyes. "It is necessary to live for…" Her words trailed away.
"Yes, there will be a future for you someday. And for France. What will you do now? And what about your cousin here in Paris? Are there any other relatives?"
"My cousin, yes," she murmured in a dazed voice. "Marie Grosholtz."
"I wonder if she has heard the news?"
Melanie made an effort to pull herself together. "Yes, I had better go and see my cousin."
"I'll come with you."
"No! That is, I think it will be better if you don't come just now. Besides, you still have important business that you must be about."
"You will be all right?"
"Yes!" And it seemed that, with a great effort, she had pulled herself together. She sounded almost normal. "I am sure."
The comment about his business was true enough. His meeting with Paine could be of some importance, and ought not to be postponed, even though Radcliffe had arrived too late to exert any influence on behalf of the Remain family.
Radcliffe reluctantly agreed to the temporary separation. But he insisted on arranging a rendezvous with Melanie, at the address she had already given him.
"Yes. Very well. We will meet there, and we will have… things to talk about, you and I. That is where my cousin is employed. Even if I should not be there, the people at that house will know where to reach me."
After being passed from one government official to another, most of whose names and functions he failed to remember, Philip told the last committee that he saw (whose title he never quite managed to find out) that, since housing seemed so difficult to obtain, he would appeal to his old acquaintance Thomas Paine, where he could be sure to obtain lodging for a few days at least. That seemed to solve the problem. Meanwhile, Old Jules had kept tagging along with Philip. The old man was carrying his own identification paper, provided by the Committee of his own district, but he might as well have left it at home. With an American to question, a new set of foreign opinions to be sounded, none of the authorities seemed much interested in one more aged provincial.
Having given up on housing for the moment, Radcliffe set out to locate Tom Paine.
Again and again, as he sought to find his way to Paine's lodgings, Radcliffe's papers were checked by heavily armed and mustached men in workingmen's coats, with tricolor cockades on their red caps, who looked at the documents, and at him, suspiciously. He thought several of them were probably unable to read.
In fluent French he declaimed, so often that it began to seem like part of a ritual: "As an American, I am fully in sympathy with your wish to be rid of kings and queens."
Absent this almost regular interference, Paine would not have been hard to find. He was at his house.
Paine during much of his stay in Paris occupied a rented mansion at No. 63, Rue de Faubourg St. Denis. While still technically within the city, the area had a rural character, and seemed far removed from Parisian street life.
The house was separated from the street by walls and gates, and, isolated in a grove of maple trees, reminded Radcliffe of a farmhouse. Indeed the courtyard was like a farmyard, with geese and chickens scratching and waddling about.
Paine was a red-nosed man in his late fifties, a couple of inches under six feet tall, very nearly Philip's own height. When Philip caught up with him, standing in his courtyard, feeding his domestic fowl with handfuls of grain, Paine was dressed like many of the other Revolutionary officials Radcliffe had seen thus far in France: a blue coat over a red waistcoat, long hair pulled back and tied without wig or powder. And of course the ubiquitous tricolor cockade.
"I thought perhaps that I would find you at the Convention, sir," Radcliffe said in English. "Are you still a member?"
"Only nominally, I am afraid. I go but little to the Convention, and then only to make my appearance; because I find it impossible to join in their tremendous decrees, and useless and dangerous to oppose them."
The older American, having observed over a period of months and years how the situation was deteriorating, said he was half-expecting to be taken into custody himself at any time.
"Really, sir!"
Paine's smile was wan. "Really."
Not knowing how to respond to that, Philip got out his oilskin packet and handed over the confidential letter he was carrying.
Philip hadn't seen the letter open until now, and had only a general idea of its contents. Paine now enlightened him by reading the last part of the message aloud:
… your presence on this side of the ocean may remind Congress of your past services to this country; and if it is in my power to impress them, command my best exertions with freedom, as they will be rendered cheerfully by one, who entertains a lively sense of the importance of your works, and who, with much pleasure, subscribes himself,
Your sincere friend, G. Washington
"That is very welcome," Paine mused aloud, refolding the paper. "It seems that I—"
And then he suddenly fell silent.
An armed party of soldiers had appeared.
Their sergeant approached, grim-faced. "Philip Radcliffe?"
"Yes." But this is some mistake…
In the name of the people, you are under arrest."
Philip was stunned. When a pair of men moved to seize his arms he fought back instinctively. Before the brief struggle was over, one of the soldiers had a bleeding lip, and the American had suffered a slight wound on the crown of his head. Meanwhile the voice of Thomas Paine was raised in crude and clumsy French, arguing with the soldiers to no purpose.
Blood trickling down his face, Radcliffe said: "If my father was living here, now, no doubt the Committee would find him dangerous too."
He was a block away from the gate of Paine's house, being marched along the street with arms bound behind him, before it crossed his mind to wonder what had happened to Old Jules. Certainly th
e old man was nowhere in sight now.
By the time I reached Paris again, I had more or less fully recovered my strength. Once more I was actively in pursuit of my brother, and I had in mind several refinements on the last cycle of punishment to which I had subjected him.
Meanwhile, Philip Radcliffe was not far from my thoughts. Given the young man's impulsive disposition, and the strange environment of Revolutionary Paris that he was about to enter, I thought it doubtful that he would be able to stay out of trouble very long.
It was Old Jules, of course, who brought me word that my recent benefactor had been arrested a few hours earlier, charged with aristocracy and other nonsense, and was now imprisoned, already under sentence of death—such speedy action by the Tribunal was by no means unusual in those days. Before leaving the chateau, I had privately arranged with Jules a means by which I could be summoned when the need arose. (His master, I was sure, was much too enlightened to take seriously the idea of burning a lock of hair in a candle-flame, whilst reciting certain words.)
When the occult summons came, surprising me only by its swiftness, I was annoyed by the distraction, but considered that my honor allowed me no choice. I must defend the man who had so recently saved my life. I would have to abandon for the time being my pursuit of Radu, and concentrate my energies upon the task of getting Philip out of prison.
Citizen Legrand received the news calmly enough from the old peasant. "Well, it did not take the young man long to put his head into the noose—or in this case under the blade. I am not much surprised. He seemed energetic and impulsive."
Old Jules nodded sadly. It was easy to see that he was more than half afraid of me, now that the bit of magic I had given him had worked, and would welcome the opportunity to spend as little time with me as possible.
Constantia, who happened to be on hand, remarked: "Is this American of such importance to you, then?" I turned on her a look of cold surprise. "It is a matter of honor."
"Oh," she murmured. "Ah, yes. That again."
Chapter Seventeen
After his return to Revolutionary Paris in the last decade of the eighteenth century, Radu Dracula maintained at least two and sometimes three residences in the city, keeping no single one for more than about a year. He occupied each domicile under a different name, and of course lived in each in the guise of a breather. The metropolitan population was now swollen to more than half a million, and despite the determined efforts of the new government to keep track of everyone, one who knew how to go about such matters found it easy to dispose of one official identity and assume another.
He found it delightful to contemplate a world grown so crowded with breathing folk. The more of them there were, the more the beautiful youth of both sexes excited his sensuous cravings. And all his life, from his own youthful breathing years, he had preferred cities over the countryside.
While the hunting party composed of his associates had been out scouring farms and villages and forests, hot on the trail of his brother, Radu himself had remained in the city—which was, after all, a lot safer than trying to hunt down Vlad. He understood that fact much better than did any of the people he had sent out.
* * *
Endlessly fascinated by the Terror as it developed, the younger brother spent a great deal of time roaming about the city, usually after dark, dressed in sans-culotte costume.
Wearing his carmagnole and his red woolen nightcap with a jaunty tricolor cockade pinned on one side, in perfect accord with the latest in popular fashion, he joined hundreds of others in haunting the Place de la Revolution, waiting for the next batch of executions.
In such guise, he had taken a modest part, chiefly that of an encouraging observer, in the slaughter at the Palace of the Tuileries, in 1792; he never realized how narrowly he had escaped Vlad's efforts to find him there.
The sole survivor of Radu's failed war party returned to the city, bringing his master the story of the disastrous attack upon his older brother. The survivor for some reason believed that his making a thorough report entitled him to a reward of gold, or at least forgiveness, for his part in the fiasco.
When Radu was certain that he had extracted every bit of relevant information his informant could provide, he paid him instead in a different kind of coin. Then he made his own preparations to hurry to the scene of the reported combat.
Packing up one of his portable caches of home earth in a convenient traveling bag, and saddling a horse, the younger Dracula started out. He had a hidden earth or two of his own in the area that he was bound for, but Vlad had been there and might have destroyed them. Radu intended to take no chances.
Following with some difficulty the trail of his vanished posse, according to the best directions the unnerved survivor had been able to provide, he came in the course of two days to the rural site of the fight, a scene which had begun to regain its pastoral and peaceful character. Here the visitor from the city spent some time in observing closely the remaining marks on the ground and torn-up grass and shrubbery, reconstructing the event in his own mind. It appeared that the failed assassins had almost succeeded in killing Vlad before he could dig himself up out of his ravaged earth. There, certainly, was the ruined grave, with a lot of French dirt still scattered about, and the remnants of at least one breather's body still lying where the crows and wild dogs had let them fall.
Radu drove off the remaining scavengers, who dared to clamor their annoyance at him. He even considered refreshing himself with the blood of one of them. For some months now all the blood, all the nourishment he had ingested had been human. This rich diet sometimes began to pall a trifle through the very sameness of its luxury; but now, after thinking the matter over, he decided to hold out for some finer sustenance than wild dog.
He was impressed anew, though not at all surprised, by the evidence of his brother's ferocity and skill in combat. These were matters that the younger brother knew and appreciated better than anyone else who was still alive.
With the experience of three hundred years to guide him, Radu had little difficulty interpreting a number of the surviving details of sign left by the fight. Scraping at the ground with a booted foot, he unearthed more rat-gnawed breather's bones, the last remains of another of his servants.
Served the fools right for bungling their job!
Until this moment he had at least allowed himself to hope that his brother was truly dead. But he no longer thought that there was any chance of that. Logically, of course, there was still a chance that Vlad, injured and caught out in the open, had died of his wounds, or succumbed to the searing power of unshielded daylight.
Radu had chosen a strong, phlegmatic mount, and he went riding languidly. Today it amused him to be brazenly aristocratic. Traveling by daylight under the shelter of a cloudy sky and broad-brimmed hat, he found and followed the trail left by his wounded brother in leaving the scene of the struggle.
He rode past one vulture, and then another, who from their perches on high dead branches regarded the journeying vampire with the air of amused spectators. He tried to find his own amusement in the fact, but failed.
One thing the cautious searcher knew he would not find was his brother's corpse; the old, old nosferatu did not linger on in any earthly form once they had expired; their bodies tended to vanish, quickly and rather spectacularly.
In good time the trail he was following brought him to a chateau, or manor, which now stood silent and deserted under the moon.
For a time Radu sat motionless in his saddle, probing the scene before him with all his senses. Only a few days ago, this house had been someone's dwelling, but now the subtle changes accompanying desertion had come over the place. Dismounting and walking forward, he found that he could enter almost without difficulty. Only a shadow of the habitation factor remained to slow him at the door, testifying to recent occupation.
If his brother had found shelter anywhere, the odds were overwhelming that it was here.
That feeling was soon confirmed when
Radu sensed the presence of a vampire's earth. Alluring, like the faint aroma of baked bread to a breather. Radu had not known about this hideaway of Vlad's until now. There were no clues that a breather would have noticed, but undoubtedly there existed a flattened oval of Transylvanian soil under the paving of the floor in the oldest part of the house, beneath an odd irregular chamber now used only as a storeroom or shed.
The hideaway was now unoccupied, but evidence was not lacking that Vlad had been here, not many days ago. Wounded, but doubtless once he had reached this spot, he had been able to recover; ominously, there was no lingering psychic smell of vampire-death. A few small stains had been allowed to dry on the stone floor, and had since almost disappeared. But Radu could sense them.
Vampire blood.
The investigator was tempted to take advantage of the earth of his homeland to catch a daytime nap. But in the end he did not dare do so, thinking it quite possible that Vlad might be returning at any moment.
There might, he thought, be some advantage to finding out who else had been living here. Perhaps he would be able to talk to one of Vlad's active breathing helpers; there always seemed to be a few such folk around.
Prowling the deserted upper rooms of the house, he sought with no success for some evidence of the identity of the latest occupant. Well, there were other ways to obtain information.
At dusk Radu emerged from a doze on his portable earth, which he had tucked away inside the trunk of a fallen tree, to look for someone from whom he might be able to obtain more information.
The young girl appeared very conveniently, climbing a gentle path that led up to the rear of the house, obviously coming back from the stream, where she had caught a fish or two, now gill-looped on a string, to eke out her meager diet. She was as wide-eyed and innocent as her fish. Oh, charming, charming!
He stood beside the path, impeccably handsome, radiating kindness. "What is your name, my child?"
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