Superstition

by David Ambrose

  The next months saw the transformation complete. Lafayette was as much the hero of the hour in France as he had been in America. At every, level of society the French people reveled in the defeat of their old adversary, Britain, and were proud beyond words of the role played in it by Lafayette and the troops he had persuaded the government to send. Lafayette was lionized not only in France but in all the liberal courts and salons of Europe; and, wherever he went, Adam Wyatt went with him. At Versailles he was presented to Louis XVI and his beautiful young queen, Marie Antoinette. In Paris he was introduced to Thomas Jefferson, there to negotiate trade agreements with America. He spoke at length with the elderly and still brilliant Benjamin Franklin, present as a roving ambassador. They were heady times for a young man of his origins. Sometimes it seemed to him that those years of puritan simplicity were all a dream from which he had now woken. At other times he feared that his new life was the dream, and that he would awake to a scolding from his mother for some minor infraction, then have to go out on a cold morning to bring in the herd for milking.

  But he didn't wake up, and after a couple of years of his new life he stopped fearing that he was going to. He wrote home dutifully, though infrequently, and received short, awkwardly written letters from his mother, usually with a brief postscript added by his father. The news they contained struck him as increasingly banal and uninteresting, evoking a world that seemed remote and unattractive, a far cry from the life of one of the principal secretaries to the Marquis de Lafayette, to which exalted rank young Adam Wyatt had now been appointed. Although his patron had made a return visit to America in 1784, Adam had not accompanied him; he was, he wrote to his parents, too busy with his master's affairs to think of leaving France. Later, of course, it would be possible, though he could not be sure exactly when.

  What he did not mention was that he was in love not only with Paris but with Angelique. She was the daughter of a noble family who were friends of the marquis. They shared his reforming zeal and his conviction that the future must belong to all men and not just the privileged few. At the same time, like the marquis, it never occurred to them that the monarchy was any obstacle to such reform. The king was king of all men, a symbol of the country's unity. That there was unity in the country, sufficient at any rate to carry through such democratic reforms as might be necessary, was something taken for granted by everyone in the rarefied atmosphere in which Adam moved. The young queen, Marie Antoinette, might be criticized for her extravagance and occasional folly, but these were minor matters. The king, though indecisive and a poor leader, was nonetheless accorded the respect due to his position and enjoyed the loyal support of even the most liberal of the nobility and the great majority of the country.

  Angelique had become a favorite at court and was a regular companion of the queen. Adam himself began increasingly to be received there. The fact of his being an American hero with a quick wit and a now near perfect command of the language made him a fashionable and fascinating figure. When he and Angelique married in the summer of 1787, their wedding was one of the season's more glittering affairs. His wife's dowry was sufficient for the purchase of a fine house in the Faubourg Saint-Honore in Paris and an estate in the Loire Valley. Adam Wyatt was now a man of substance, treated as an equal by those he had originally come to serve. If America had pointed out the direction in which the future lay, Europe, and especially France, he believed, was the place were it would be most swiftly and successfully achieved.

  He continued to believe this throughout the summer of 1788 even as evidence mounted that the country was on the verge of bankruptcy. The single greatest contribution to this state of affairs was the cost to France of its involvement in the American War of Independence. Adam noted with interest that nobody pointed the finger of accusation at either him or his country; the only subject of debate was how to make up the deficit. In the autumn it was agreed that the Estates General should be called in the spring of 1789. This was a kind of national parliament made up of clergy, nobles, and elected representatives of the people. It had not met since 1614 and was the only body with the constitutional authority to decide how new taxes could be levied to deal with the crisis.

  No one, least of all the liberal and enlightened minority to which Lafayette and now Adam Wyatt belonged, anticipated how this event would serve as a focus for discontents that went back far in time and ran deep throughout the country. An arctic winter had triggered food riots and fueled the deep resentment that the vast majority of the poor felt toward the privileged few. When those privileged few, in the form of the clergy and the nobility, tried to assert their will over the newly elected representatives of the people in the Estates General, the dam broke.

  The court, Angelique among them, continued to amuse themselves as usual, unconscious that anything was seriously amiss. The enlightened nobility, such as Lafayette, welcomed and participated in the changes that were now becoming inevitable. None of them, however, imagined that these changes would amount to anything more than a controlled redistribution of power: a constitutional instead of an absolute monarchy; a fairer distribution of wealth; a lifting of the grinding poverty to which 90 percent of the population, laborers and peasants, had for too long been subjected. Nobody anticipated outright, bloody revolution.

  Perhaps because he was a foreigner and for all his newfound wealth and privilege still an outsider looking in, Adam sensed that what was happening here was very different from the so-called revolution in America. The enemy there had been the old colonial power in Europe; here in France the enemy was visible through the windows of the royal palaces and fine houses such as Adam's own. He walked the teeming streets, sometimes accompanied by two armed servants for protection, sometimes alone but dressed in rags to avoid becoming the target of attack or robbery. He saw the king and queen and ministers of government burned in effigy; saw shops and warehouses broken into by the starving poor, their owners beaten and murdered for protecting what they thought of as their own; watched as mobs tore down the hated ring of customs barriers around the city and overran the frightened soldiers sent to quell their rioting. He was present when the Bastille, the hated feudal prison and symbol of oppression, was stormed and the heads of its governor and guards mounted on pikes and paraded through the streets to cheering crowds. Adam sensed that there was worse, much worse, to come, and felt a kind of fear that he had not known before.

  After the fall of the Bastille Lafayette was made, by popular acclaim, commander of the National Guard, a new volunteer army that would henceforth be the ultimate authority behind each step of the revolution-for such all now acknowledged it to be. Yet there was still no suggestion from the men who emerged as its leaders-Robespierre, Danton, Mirabeau, Desmoulins-that the monarchy should be forfeited. On the contrary, hated though it was by the people, it was seen by thinkers and reformers as essential to society's stability, its safety guaranteed by Lafayette and the same National Guard that was born out of revolution.

  Adam was with Angelique at the court at Versailles on the fifth of October, 1789. There had been a grand banquet celebrating the arrival of the Flanders Regiment for a routine change of garrison. Fine food and wines had led to expressions of sentimental support for the king and queen in the face of continuing criticism from the revolutionary National Assembly. Adam looked on with misgivings as the revolutionary red and blue cockades which the soldiers had been ordered to wear were torn off and trampled underfoot. He knew too well that these excesses would be reported and could only aggravate the situation. Sure enough, an angry mob descended on the palace, slaughtering guards and breaking into the royal apartments. The king and queen and all their court had feared for their lives. Adam had hidden with Angelique in a wardrobe in one of the royal bedchambers. Only the intervention of Lafayette and his National Guard had saved them. But Lafayette's authority was slipping; the mob threatened to turn on him and hang him unless he and his troops forced the royal family to return with them to Paris and live henceforth in the more modest
Tuileries Palace, where they would in effect be prisoners.

  It was the turning point in Adam's life in France. He loved his wife and was caught between the now doomed world they had so happily inhabited for too short a time and the rising tide of blood that the revolution had become. Events proceeded with an almost hypnotic inexorability. Adam knew that he and Angelique would be forced sooner or later to flee, but they were held for the moment by bonds of loyalty, he to Lafayette, she to the queen. Faction after faction seized revolutionary power, each one sweeping forward on fresh tides of blood. The guillotine worked day and night; the stench of death was everywhere. By the end of 1792 Lafayette had been arrested in Austria and thrown into prison as a “dangerous revolutionary.” Shortly afterward the king was executed in Paris. Suddenly it was too late to run. Adam and Angelique went into hiding, living in daily fear for their lives. He held her in his arms and tried to stifle her heartbroken sobs as they watched the queen dragged to the scaffold, only thirty-seven but looking like an old and broken woman, her hair prematurely white. The crowd around them danced and cheered with a vicious joy…and someone, seeing a young couple not sharing the revolutionary fervor of the moment, pointed them out to the local militia.

  They ran, but it was hopeless. The crowd had them in its power, and Adam feared they would be torn limb from limb. It was in that moment of raw panic that he did the thing that would haunt him to his grave and beyond: when he saw his wife seized and, in her despair, screaming her love for the dead queen and her contempt for the wretches who had killed her, he protested that he did not know this woman.

  The lie did not work. Worse, Angelique had witnessed his betrayal. She became strangely quiet, gazing at him as though across a void of time and space, no longer caring what would happen to her.

  He saw her carried off, to what fate he never knew, and called out after her to beg forgiveness and swear his undying love. But it was too late. Too late for everything.

  That night he gazed out through the bars of a prison cell, oblivious of the stinking mass of humanity around him. Tomorrow they would all be dead. Until then was time enough to mourn for his life, regret the country he had left, the new life he had too easily been seduced by, the errors he had made by loving first too well, and finally not well enough.

  Come morning, he embraced his fate with a bitter equanimity that passed, in others’ eyes, for bravery. He gave a grim laugh, remembering it was something that passed for bravery that had brought him to this present circumstance. With that thought he mounted the steps to the scaffold on which the queen had died the day before, and on which, for all he knew, his wife had died already; then knelt as though in prayer, hands tied behind his back, and closed his eyes to meet his death.

  16

  The members of the group read their copies of the document with nods and murmurs of approval. All had contributed something to “Adam's story,” though it was impossible to say now who had come up with which specific element or detail. They'd all spent every free moment they had reading up on the period. Not only was the French Revolution exceptionally well documented, it was also widely popularized. Lavishly illustrated general histories were complemented by academic tomes on specific elements and personalities. They spent two sessions discussing what they'd read and passing around any pictures that had caught their attention-portraits, drawings, sketches, and cartoons of the time.

  Drew, who had a flair for charcoal sketching, drew a head and shoulders portrait of Adam as she imagined him. She gave him a strong face with high cheekbones, a fine, slightly Roman nose, dark eyes that had a steady, questioning gaze. He was beardless but had thick, dark hair that he wore relatively short and which fell boyishly across his forehead. His mouth was full and had a hint of humor to it. The picture appealed to everyone else in the group, and from then on hung on the wall as a permanent reminder of the man they were trying to create. Eventually Joanna, as the only writer among them, had been given the job of “typing up” the story and putting all the elements and details they had discussed into some coherent form.

  “Barry's checked it out,” Sam said, “and I've had a colleague of mine in the history department do the same. Nobody can find a trace of any Adam Wyatt, or anybody remotely like him, having returned to France with Lafayette.”

  “So what do we do now?” Roger asked after a brief silence. “Sit here until he comes knocking at the door?”

  “I don't think ghosts knock at doors, Roger,” Sam replied. “It kind of defeats the point of being a ghost, I would think.”

  Barry rapped the table with his knuckles and made a funny voice. “Let me out, let me out!”

  Maggie smiled. “You know, I'm still not sure we should have called him Wyatt. Every time I hear the name I think of Wyatt Earp. It makes it a bit hard to take him seriously.”

  “According to Sam, if we take him too seriously he's not going to work,” Ward Riley said, leaning back, arms folded. “If I've understood the principle of this thing correctly, we could have sent Mickey Mouse to France and gotten the same results.”

  “Or lack of results,” Roger added with a twitch of his mustache, then quickly held up his hand to forestall what he felt was a general protest. “All right, I know…give it time. Meanwhile, what precisely do we do?”

  “We sit and talk about Adam,” Sam said, “and any other subject that might take our fancy. The important thing is we get used to being in each other's company. When that happens, maybe Adam will choose to join us.”

  Joanna's arrangement with her editor, Taylor Freestone, was that she would be regarded for the moment as on full-time assignment to the “ghost story.” She knew, however, that this exclusivity would last three weeks at most. If results had not begun to appear by then, she would be regarded as available for other jobs in between her twice-weekly sessions with the group.

  She copied Taylor on Adam Wyatt's fictitious life story and gave him digests of her notes on the theory and process of what they were attempting. After two weeks, these memos began to look more like delaying tactics than dispatches from the front. She could feel skepticism beginning to replace enthusiasm in Taylor Freestone's attitude. “It'll take as long as it takes,” was all she could tell him.

  “I suspect we haven't filled out Adam's story enough for us all to believe in him,” Sam said at the beginning of their next session. “Until we imagine his day-to-day life better than we do he's still no more real than a character in a book.”

  Barry said that he thought they all sensed his day-to-day life pretty well. It was true, they'd added a lot of detail. They knew where he lived in Paris, they'd described the house, and they'd imagined at length his small cheteau and estate in the country. They'd even wondered why, in an age before routine contraception, he and Angelique didn't have children. Their answer was that it simply hadn't happened. Although there were any number of medical conditions that might have been responsible, they hadn't settled upon one, making the excuse that neither Adam nor Angelique had been particularly troubled by the matter and had assumed that, given time, she would inevitably get pregnant. By common consent it was agreed that they were physically attracted to each other and had a good sex life.

  “We've talked about what they eat, the sort of places they go, the people they see,” Roger said. “What else is there? Inner monologue? Dreams? Personal growth?”

  “I don't think they'd invented personal growth then,” Ward Riley said with a half-smile. “That only happened when psychoanalysis connected with California.”

  Joanna noted with interest that Ward Riley was showing the least sign of impatience of anyone in the group. There was a calmness in him that became more apparent the longer one was in his company. She supposed it was a consequence of his preoccupation with Eastern philosophy. She wondered if he meditated or practiced yoga or followed any other special discipline, and made a mental note to ask him.

  “‘By his friends shall ye know him.’”

  Everybody looked at Pete, who had spoken.

/>   “I think it's a quote, but I'm not sure where from.”

  Joanna said she thought the quote was “deeds” not “friends,” but she wasn't sure either, and certainly couldn't say where it came from. But they all got the point.

  “The question is,” Drew said, “do we invent his friends, or use real people? If we invent too many characters we risk losing focus on Adam.”

  “Drew's right,” Barry said, “about losing focus, I mean. What we need to do is place him among real people who aren't so famous that they feel like storybook figures.”

  The trouble was they'd all been reading up on the revolution, so that all the main players in it were fixed in their minds and difficult to maneuver into some new scenario of their own without striking a fatally false note. Joanna smiled to herself, remembering the Hollywood screenwriter she'd had a brief fling with a few years ago. He'd told her about “the curse of the Hollywood biopic,” where characters in top hats and tailcoats greet each other in the street with lines like “Morning, Ibsen,”“Morning, Grieg.”

  “There are perhaps one or two characters from history who aren't quite so well known as to be almost cliches.” Riley leaned forward slightly as he spoke, crossing his legs, hands cupping his elbows. “Also they're colorful enough to-what shall I say? — spice up the story a little, stimulate the imagination.”

  Everyone looked at him expectantly. “Go on,” Sam said, as though having a shrewd idea what was about to come up.

  “I was thinking about Cagliostro and Saint-Germain,” Riley said.

  Pete laughed. “Sounds like a conjuring act in Vegas.”