He thought he heard a voice now coming from the sitting room. Where in the hell was the bastard Aldwell? Gone, he hoped — and forever.
John had seen the revulsion in Alex's face as he'd lifted him back onto the couch in the library, then later up here. Good friend, hell!
For now it suited him to be ill. He held perfectly still, thinking the woman outside would hear him and come running again. But she didn't, and he tried to stretch his legs beneath the covers, and experienced that peculiar sensation which had plagued him off and on during the last few weeks, the sensation that he possessed only one leg, his right.
But he had no intention of discussing such a complicated physical ailment with a circuit nurse.
Suddenly a sharp, uncomfortable twinge spread across his skull, a curious though blessedly short-lived numbness spreading down over his neck and shoulders. Perhaps his judgment of her was too harsh. There was something pleasant in her attendance. At least she was constant, her touch gentle.
Harriet dead... Over. That brief though perfect love. She had been so frail...
Carefully he opened his eyes and looked slowly around. A mean room, small, limited. On the ceiling directly above the small lamp table on the left was a blackened circle where the flame had burned too high. No wall decorations, no softening tapestries. My God, he had paid a fortune for Brussels tapestries. Where were they now?
Suddenly the chaos and the ruin that now were his life broke all around him. No tears. Too late for tears. Was it too late for everything? Would he be given another chance?
Papa, do you love me?
He closed his eyes and in the self-imposed blindness he felt, after all these years, his father's arms about him.
His father...
Regarding the Eden wealth, my lord, I now surrender all claim to it...
Madness, John muttered, and recalled how he had run from the magistrate’s chambers that hot July morning. But something more. It had not been merely the act of a madman that had done such devastating damage to their relationship after that.
Suddenly a terrifying thought occurred. He would die here, in Caleb Cranford’s old bed, in this small mean-spirited apartment, attended by a stranger, abandoned by all. And by the time his family was notified and came drifting slowly back — not to see him decently buried, but to claim, like scavengers, whatever part of Eden wealth they could make off with — by the time all that happened, he would be lying liquidly in his grave, the worms already at work.
No!
Someone had to come, someone who once had loved him and would be willing to at least try to forgive him.
Elizabeth.
She was the closest, in Paris. She would respond to Aldwell’s letter, he was certain of it. Dear good Elizabeth, more his mother than...
Elizabeth.
The name kept reappearing in his mind like a beacon on a dark night. How much he loved her and would welcome her back into his good graces. Then, with Elizabeth established at Eden, it wouldn’t be long before the others followed, for they had always looked to Elizabeth to set the pace and the tone.
In his new state of ease, brought on by the projection of a new and dazzling future for Eden, he smiled.
Elizabeth.
The mere thought of her, the sound of her name, brought him peace. He loved her so, always had, always would. She would come to his aid.
He was certain of it.
La Rochelle House of Detention, Paris, France July 3, 1874
Despite the limited comfort of their privileged cell on the ground floor, Elizabeth sensed hazards in the night and looked up from her small lamp which illuminated her sewing box and her sharp shears, and allowed her embroidery to fall limp in her lap.
She stared at the darkness beyond the bars toward the end of the corridor, hearing footsteps where no footsteps should be.
“Did you hear anything?” she asked Eugenie, who had been dozing off and on all evening. Normally Elizabeth would have been content to let her sleep, but with a start she realized she was suffering an emotion she hadn't truly felt for years. She was afraid.
There! She heard it again, someone in the darkness meeting someone else, then both standing stock-still. Though she had no clock to state the time, she needed none. After four years in prison she was expert at judging the tortoiselike passage of the leaden nighttime hours.
After midnight now, she was certain. No one ever moved around after midnight, certainly not in this part of La Rochelle. In the common wards, those unspeakable pits of filth and degradation, there was movement all night long. Thank God the general had discovered her talent with the needle and, needing a female companion for the young Countess Eugenie Retiffe, whose father did not think she'd been punished enough after four long years in this unique circle of hell, moved both women to this small barred cell, which had ap-peared like heaven after the horrors of the common wards.
And here they would remain, Elizabeth until her four-year sentence had passed on December 10, 1874, and poor Eugenie until her father felt that she had been cured of her “dangerous revolutionary inclinations.”
Dangerous? Eugenie? Elizabeth smiled. The girl had been a pitiful creature back in 1871 on the barricades, endured by the others only because of Lousie Michel's initial kindness to her.
We need assistance from all quarters, even aristocratic ones. Let her serve with us. We will be sending back to her father an enemy.
Well, Louise hadn't had many lapses in judgment, but there certainly sat one. Still, it wasn't a fair assessment. The girl had performed to the Best of her ability, and during the last four years everyone had suffered and had stood shoulder to shoulder against the inhuman nightmare that was La Rochelle.
Slowly Elizabeth became aware that her own eyes were as fixed and as staring as poor Eugenie's were.
Nightmare...
That was a proper assessment, all right, and she dared to relax from her needlework for a few moments, though she knew she'd have to finish Eugenie's work as well as her own by dawn, or the general would be angry. His only daughter was marrying within the week, and for the last four weeks Elizabeth and Eugenie had stitched monograms on lace handkerchiefs, lace bodices, lace petticoats, and other intimate pieces of apparel where Elizabeth had never dreamed monograms could or should be stitched.
But what right had she to complain, when nobler women like Louise Michel were now serving unspeakable sentences at hard labor in remote places — “where their screams could not be heard” — like New Caledonia. And many other whom she'd grown to love and respect during the revolution now lay in unmarked graves scattered throughout the various cemeteries of Paris, some of the bodies of those executed reclaimed by their families, but most abandoned to a pauper's grave.
The grim remembrances of the past came unexpectedly. Silently she said a brief prayer for her dear friend Louise Michel — pray God she was still alive — and said another prayer for all those who had been executed.
Punishment...
The word resounded incongruously through Elizabeth's mind as she retrieved her needlework and commenced to stitch a pale pink rose in the comer of a petit-point handkerchief.
Why punishment?
What had any of them done that had not sorely needed to be done? In fact, the miracle was that it had not occurred sooner, women for the first time in history manning the barricades, loading guns, fighting oppression and injustice with the same zeal and dedication as men, and equally as ready to pay the price.
Suddenly she leaned sharply over, unmindful of the needlework, which was becoming crushed in the process.
She was afraid. But why? For Elizabeth, freedom was less than a year away. During her confinement she hadn't quite learned to live with the guilt brought on by her easy sentence. Four years at La Rochelle House of Detention, while Louise Michel...
Louise dead?
That was a possibility she couldn't deal with, not yet. Once she was freed from this place, it was her intention to return to London and sell the rest of
her belongings, enough to purchase passage to New Caledonia, where she would try to barter for the release of as many women as she could.
That thought, filled with purpose and movement and hope, gave her courage to lift her head and glance at the sleeping Eugenie and even to face the darkness beyond the bars again, listening.
There was something...
“Eugenie, please wake up,” she whispered, poking the young girl's knee, hoping to rouse her to wakefulness.
Listen!
“Who is it?” she called out softly through the bars, confident now that someone was out there in that black passageway. “Is there...?”
Quiet now. Surely it had been only her imagination. Elizabeth took up her sewing again.
Captain Jouenne...
Why had she thought on him now? Captain Jouenne, the prosecutor in most of the trials of the women incendiaries, a short, squat, dark, arrogant Frenchman, nothing distinguished about him. You could see his double a thousand times on any given day on any Paris street. Pencil-thin mustache, dark uneasy Gallic eyes, a paragon of mediocrity on whom Fate had played the crudest trick of all, had somehow given him the airs and illusions of superiority.
She could see him still so clearly, strutting between the bench and the prisoners' dock, could still hear that offensive voice... “these women are moral monstrosities, more dangerous than the most dangerous man,” Captain Jouenne had raved, playing broadly to the allmale tribunal and the all-male bench, as well as the all-male gallery. “The emancipation of women has been preached by scholars, and look where we are led by all these dangerous Utopias. Have they not held out to all these wretched creatures bright prospects, incredible chimeras: women judges, women as members of the bar! Yes, women lawyers, deputies perhaps, and for all we know, generals of the army! Certainly, faced with these miserable aberrations, we must believe we are dreaming...
Then she could remember no more and stood abruptly and knew now what she had known then, what was clear to all with half an inclination to see, that what Captain Jouenne was putting on trial was the idea of education for women. Again, unaware that her needlework had now joined Eugenie's on the dirty floor and, under the duress of her recent recall, she strode as far as the limited cell would permit — about eight feet — until her feverish forehead was pressed against the cool bricks.
It seemed so long ago, yet the fury was still so fresh.
Beware the danger of a revolution which is not permitted to happen.
She still remembered the words of Louise Michel. Resting her forehead against the wall, she caught a sudden glimpse of the patch-work quilt that had been her life. She'd started in the common cell of Newgate Prison in London. Would it end as it had begun, in a cell in a French prison?
Abruptly she scolded herself for her morose thoughts. What nonsense to consider her life ending! She was in her prime and, most important, alive with purpose. Hadn't Louise Michel told her to wait in London? Word would come to her there about the movement. She would be one of the few on the “outside,” free, as it were, to continue the cause while awaiting Louise's release.
She turned away from the wall as though she'd found the courage in that one thought to face the next hour. How good it would be to see certain people! Lovable old Alex Aldwell, and even Aslam, though he bore the characteristic and dangerous drive of John, and in a curious way she now was tired of driven people.
This last thought caused her to pause. She looked intently down on the table and small circle of light, seeing neither table nor light nor sewing box nor shears, seeing instead one face that once she had loved more dearly than any other in the world. John.
Would she find the time and energy, she wondered, to journey to Eden Point? She was certain he was still there, flourishing no doubt John had a singular talent for flourishing.
She began effortlessly to wrap a single pink thread around and around her finger, seeing neither thread nor finger, seeing nothing that belonged to this foreign and brutal French world, seeing instead a clear and moving progression of the extraordinary events that had bound her life inextricably with that of John Murrey Eden.
Suddenly on the opposite side of the cell Eugenie gave a loud snore that sounded like the neighing of a horse.
Early morning now. It had the feel of early morning, a dead heaviness in the air, like a universal fatigue.
John... The young man she’d helped to raise.
She thought the name so slyly, as though she were trying to fool herself. Years ago she'd made a melodramatic exit from Eden Castle, vowing, along with Richard and the others, never to return.
John Murrey Eden... Like a son.
Abruptly she stood, enjoying a curious flow of energy at the mere thought of the name. He was remarkable, not in the same ways his father had been, but in different ways.
Noise again. Where was it coming from? Nothing mysterious about it now, boots moving heavily without fear of discovery or need for concealment.
“Eugenie, wake up,” Elizabeth whispered, nudging the silly sleeping girl harder than ever. “Eugenie, please...”
They were coming close, the sound of those boots, more than a single pair she was certain, at least two, maybe...
“Eugenie...”
She spoke the name aloud, and the sound of her own voice jarred her back to a degree of good sense. Why was she afraid? The cell door was locked, the key tucked safely inside the mug on the small table. She reached for the mug and knocked it rolling on the floor.
“Eugenie!”
She heard the hysteria in her voice. There was nothing she could do in such a state. Be calm. It could just be guards moving from one area of the prison to...
Where was the key?
Hurriedly she lifted her skirts and pressed her feet into the search, swinging them in wide arcs across the floor, hoping to hear the telltale rattle of a piece of metal. It was here; she knew it. It had always been here, concealed safely either by herself or by Eugenie. All that she had to do was...
“Eugenie, please wake up.”
Fear and confusion mounting, she went down on one knee and reached under the table into the darkest corner, her fingers tearing at the emptiness, moving out in all directions.
“Eugenie, please help...”
As she looked up in entreaty, she saw the dull-eyed girl looking directly down on her, eyes wide open, her expression noncommittal, though Elizabeth could not see one trace of sleep.
“Eugenie, the key,” Elizabeth begged, still bewildered by the girl's placidity. Couldn't she hear the approaching threat?
“The key, Eugenie. Do you have...?”
The question incomplete, she saw the girl staring at the empty darkness beyond the bars, which were no longer empty.
Evolving out of that darkness were two duplications of every communer's nightmare, the dark blue, red-splotched uniform of the soldiers. Feddres, these two like all the others, curiously faceless beneath the square-brimmed and perching little blue hats — monkey-grinder hats, Louise Michel had called them.
Still on one knee searching for the key, Elizabeth looked up again at Eugenie's curious behavior. Generally given to groundless hysteria, the girl now seemed to be a model of quiet courage.
“Eugenie...”
Too late. Elizabeth saw something matching between the unnatural calm on Eugenie's face and the same calm on the two soldiers, who simply stood on the other side of the bars, two fixed images staring blandly in, while Elizabeth, the only pocket of movement in the cell, continued to search for the key, even though she knew now that she would never find it.
“Madame?”
The male voice cut through the silent confusion and was followed by a question which Elizabeth didn't understand and which was all the more terrifying because she understood all too well the meaning and the message, and looked slowly up and saw one soldier holding up the key for her inspection, holding it gingerly, as though it were hot or wet or soiled.
Betrayal? Why? What had she ever done to Eugenie Re
tiffe except befriend her when no one else would? She might have found the courage to ask this question if there had been time. But now she heard the key grating in the lock and saw Eugenie gathering up her cloak beneath which was her valise, packed and bulging. Obviously in exchange for the key, a bargain had been struck.
As the cell door swung open, Elizabeth tried once more to find the breath and courage to address the silly young girl. Didn't she know these men were not to be trusted?
“Eugenie, be careful,” she called out as the girl slipped easily past the two soldiers, who allowed her to pass without offering the least resistance.
For just a second the girl looked back at her, and Elizabeth thought she saw a faint look of apology on her face.
Well, then, what business did she have with these two, who now stood inside the cell, the door closed and locked behind them, grinning down on her with an expression she'd seen before on male faces.
“What... do you want?” she asked, growing strangely calm when confronted with this ancient threat. “Surely there are younger, fresher Frenchwomen in La Rochelle.” She smiled, trying reason, knowing it would fail. She stood beside the low table, using it for support against the tidal waves of revulsion which were beginning to seep over her.
No!
Beware the danger of a revolution which is not permitted to happen.
She'd been through this too often before. The two soldiers resembled the strutting peacock Captain Jouenne, as one was loosening the tight gold collar around his neck. Jouenne used to do that near the end of a day of lengthy testimony.
“Please,” she whispered, seeing the expressions on their faces alter to something more threatening. The one on her left began to move quietly into position behind her, thus shattering her focus. She couldn't keep her eyes on both of them.
“What did you promise Eugenie in exchange for the key?” she asked quickly, moving back from both men, the three of them now forming a triangle. If she could get them talking, she might stand a chance.
But either they didn't understand her any more than she understood them or their time here was limited. She sensed the one behind moving down on her, and then she felt something coarse and knotted pulled back between her teeth, distorting her mouth, causing her to gag briefly, and for a few moments longer she struggled, al-
Eden Rising (The Eden Saga Book 5) Page 13