The prison was barely half a mile away, yet his mental agitation seemed to make it double that distance. He thought it improbable that the jailers would refuse to surrender Athénaïs to him, but there was always the chance that they might insist on first consulting some local authority. If that proved to be the case, things would become very awkward. He would probably be asked why he could not interrogate Athénaïs in her cell; a committee might be formed to assist him in questioning her; in the last event he might be compelled to exert his overriding authority and cow with dire threats any Municipals who opposed him in order to get Athénaïs out and carry her off. Should he be forced to employ such strong measures and fail to return her to the prison in the morning, it would take a lot of explaining away to the Committee of Public Safety when he returned to Paris. Finally, there remained the grim possibility that Athénaïs might give away the fact that he was her old lover; his intent to betray the Republic for her sake would then be clear, and he would be lucky if he escaped accompanying her to the scaffold in a few hours’ time.
On reaching the gateway of the grim stone building he pulled the hanging handle of the bell; it was still jangling hollowly within when a small door in the great arched wooden gate was pulled open and a slovenly sentry peered out. The light of a lantern suspended from a bracket in the wall shone on Roger’s gaudy sash and feathered hat; at the sight of them the man drew back, bade him enter, and asked what he wanted.
Stepping inside to a broad stone-flagged passage, Roger closed the door, and told the man to fetch the head turnkey. Three more unshaven, surly-looking ruffians appeared from a nearby guardroom, and with a muttered oath one of them shambled off along the dimly-lit passageway. A few minutes later he returned, bringing with him a huge barrel of a man who limped, and who seemed to roll rather than to walk; from the belt that encircled his gargantuan paunch there dangled a bunch of heavy keys.
“Citizen jailer,” Roger addressed him, in an even, almost casual, voice, “I require the woman de la Tour d’Auvergne for private questioning. I will, of course, give you a receipt for her. Bring her here without delay.”
The monstrous turnkey stared at him for a moment, then suddenly began to wheeze with laughter; one of the soldiers tittered, and the others guffawed.
“Silence!” snarled Roger, “or by God I’ll wipe the laughter from your faces with my crop! Now, what do you find in my demand to give you such cause for mirth?”
His outburst quelled them in a moment, but a sly grin still twitched the corners of the fat turnkey’s mouth as he replied:
“You come too late, Citizen Representative.’
For a second an awful fear caused Roger’s heart to contract. At times, when his circus was due to move on the next morning, afternoon sessions with the guillotine had been held. That had never occurred except on his personal order; but it was possible that his executioner, anxious to get early on the road to Paris and home, had taken the law into his own hands. The ghastly thought that Athénaïs’s lovely head might already have tumbled into that blood-soaked basket made his own blood drain from his face. He could only gasp:
“Too late! What—what the hell d’you mean?”
The fat jailer was grinning openly again, and he wheezed, “Another was before you, Citizen Representative. You’re not the only one who thinks it worth losing a night’s sleep to question a pretty aristo in bed. Were I younger I’d envy the man who took her off, and I’ll wager he won’t bring her back much afore it’s time to push her into the death-cart.”
Roger’s relief was almost instantly overcome by a wave of rage and horror. He knew quite well that revolutionary officials often used their powers to make good-looking women prisoners the victims of their lust. Private questioning was always the excuse. The woman was promised her life if she submitted willingly; in most cases she did, if not she was raped. In either case she rarely secured a permanent reprieve. Sometimes she was kept on ice for a few weeks to provide further enjoyment, while praying that each new degradation to which she submitted would prove the final payment; but as soon as the man tired of her it was a hundred to one that he would send her to the guillotine.
Now Roger cursed himself for not having foreseen such a possibility, and for his excessive caution in not having come to the prison earlier. The thought of Athénaïs, forcibly stripped, beaten half-senseless, and in the grip of some swinish Municipal, filled him with demoniacal fury. Only by clenching his teeth like a vice for a full minute could he keep control of himself; then he snapped out:
“To whom did you hand her over?”
The turnkey was no longer grinning; he could see the blinding rage in Roger’s blue eyes. In an effort to excuse himself, he stammered, “To a man who had the right to question her, Citizen Representative—one I could not refuse. ’Twas the Citizen Public Prosecutor Hutot.”
Of all the Revolutionary officials in France, the man could not have named one better calculated to add fuel to Roger’s blazing anger. Hutot was not, as were so many of them, a pervert or a sadist; he was quite normal, but with the normality of a rutting hog. Years before, Roger had shared a room with him and four other apprentices for several months. In an instant of time a series of mental pictures of those days flashed through his brain—Hutot at nineteen, a great rawboned lout guzzling the lion’s share of the food in the kitchen where the apprentices fed—Hutot dead drunk and vomiting on the bedroom floor, which meant that Roger had to clear up the disgusting mess—Hutot climbing back through the dormer window in the early hours by a rope that Roger had let down for him, after a night spent with some slut down at the river docks—Hutot sneaking back into the bedroom, still red-faced and perspiring from having tumbled the fat cook in the little room under the stairs where she slept. Almost choking with fury, Roger blurted out:
“How long is it since he took her away?”
The fat man shrugged. “Twenty minutes—no, it must be half an hour or more, Citizen Representative.”
“Half an hour!” Roger knew his hands were trembling. He could not stop them. Hutot was not the type of man to savour his dishes with the sauce of refinement. He would have plenty of liquor handy, but it would not even occur to him to provide a tempting supper and during it endeavour to woo Athénaïs into some degree of complacency. No—having got her to his room he would set about her without delay. By a supreme effort Roger shut out from his mind the picture of what might be happening at that very moment, and snapped:
“Where does the Citizen Prosecutor live?”
To his horror, the jailer shook his head. “I have no idea, Citizen Representative; I have had only official dealings with him.”
It was the last straw; Roger could have screamed aloud in his dismay at being faced with this awful impasse. He could run to the Town Hall. They would know there, but at this hour it would be closed for the night. The custodian was probably already in bed and would have to be roused. It was quite possible that he would not know Hutot’s address either, and more precious time would be lost—half an hour, or an hour perhaps—before someone could be found who did.
Unexpectedly, one of the National Guards came to Roger’s rescue. After spitting on the floor, he said, “The Citizen Prosecutor installed himself some weeks ago in the house of a lawyer who was arrested—the one who escaped from prison the night before last. I know the house, but forget his name.”
“Léger!” exclaimed Roger. “Was it Maître Léger?”
The man nodded. “That’s the one.”
Almost before the words were out of his mouth Roger had turned, wrenched open the door, and sprung through it. Next moment he was pelting as fast as his long legs would carry him down the deserted street. The moon had not yet risen and the starlight hardly percolated to the narrow cobbled ways, but Roger had known them in boyhood so well that he could have found the right turnings without hesitation even in pitch darkness. Within six minutes he had entered the Rue d’Antrain; panting, he halted before a well-remembered door, and began to pound upon it w
ith the head of his riding-crop.
After a moment there was a stir inside. A bolt was shot back and the door swung open to reveal a slovenly-looking young woman. She was holding aloft a lighted candle. Roger could see that she was blonde, about twenty-five and coarsely good-looking; but one side of her face was now red and swollen. It looked as though she had recently received a blow there. She was just the type of gutter-bred dance-hall queen that Hutot had pursued so avidly in the past, and Roger guessed at once that she was for the time being his permanent mistress.
Still struggling to retrieve his breath, he gasped, “Where is the Citizen Prosecutor?”
Fear, at first sight of the trappings that showed Roger to be one of the all-powerful Commissars of the Revolution, swiftly gave place in the woman’s pale blue eyes to malicious pleasure. Standing aside for him to enter, she jerked her blonde head back towards the stairs.
“He’s up there with an aristo girl he brought home.” Putting a hand up to the bruise on her face, she added angrily, “The lecherous swine! I’ve told him before I wouldn’t stand for his having women in the house, and when I gave him the rough side of my tongue he knocked me down. I’ll leave him! I swear I will!”
Unheeding her complaint, Roger sprang past her and took the stairs three at a time. To his left, as he reached the first landing, lay a room that Maître Léger had used as a private office; to his right lay the family sitting-room; beyond them were the main bedrooms of the house. Just as he was about to dash on down the corridor he heard a groan. It seemed to have come from the sitting-room. Halting in his tracks, he swung round in that direction. Another groan came and the sound of heavy breathing.
A shudder of horror shook him. White to the lips, he seized the door handle. It turned loosely in his grasp. The door was locked.
Raising his clenched fist, he beat frantically upon it, and shouted, “Open! In the name of the Law, I command you to open!”
There was no reply. There came a fainter groan, then again that awful sobbing for breath.
Stepping back, Roger ran at the door, lifted his right foot and brought the sole of his boot crashing flat against the lock. With a tearing of wood the lock gave and the door flew open. Drawing a pistol from his sash, he cocked the weapon and strode into the room. The scene within was utterly different from that which he had feared and expected.
The groans and laboured breathing were not coming from Athénaïs, but from Hutot. The great brute lay sprawled in a corner. She stood a few feet away from him, the neck of a broken bottle clutched in her hand. A trickle of blood was running down from his wiry hair on to his fleshy nose, and tears were oozing from the corners of his eyes. Why a knock on the top of the head should cause him to be gasping like a fish out of water, and how, considering their respective heights, Athénaïs had succeeded in administering such a blow without standing on a chair, provided a puzzle which Roger did not attempt to solve for the moment.
The main facts were clear. Two nearly empty glasses were standing on the table and Athénaïs’s dress had been ripped open; the curve of her right shoulder showed pink and naked above her left hand, with which she was holding up the torn dress to conceal her breast. Evidently Hutot had made her drink two or three glasses of wine with him, then assaulted her; but she had been too quick for him, and using the empty bottle as a weapon had got the best of the encounter. Her eyes round with excitement, she was now staring at Roger. She broke the brief silence by exclaiming:
“Rojé! So it is you! When I saw you in court I would have taken an oath that it could be no other.”
In his relief at finding her unharmed, his impulse was to run forward and take her in his arms. But Hutot, although in bad shape, was not unconscious. He was lying with his back propped up against a press and he looked dazed, but might still be capable of making sense of all he heard or saw. Swiftly Roger assumed his most severe expression, and was on the point of silencing Athénaïs, when she hurried on:
“When I was told in my cell that I was to be taken from the prison for questioning I felt certain it must be you who——”
“Citoyenne!” he cut her short; “you mistake me for someone else.” Then, waving a hand towards Hutot, he added, “This man has exceeded his authority. That you appear to have given him cause to rue it does not concern me. As a Public Prosecutor he had no right to remove for questioning a prisoner who had already been condemned; but, as the representative of the Committee of Public Safety, I have that right.”
Athénaïs was greatly overwrought by the ordeal she had just been through. Still convinced that she was face to face with her old lover, she gave an hysterical laugh, and cried, “Do you then mean to risk my serving you as I have served him? I warn you, Monsieur, that it can be prodigiously painful.”
“Silence!” roared Roger, “or I’ll use my crop on those bare shoulders of yours! Now! Take that Indian shawl from the settee to cover them, hold your tongue, and accompany me hence.”
Jolted out of her hysteria, Athénaïs threw down the bottleneck that she was still holding, picked up the shawl and draped it about her. At that moment a low wail caused Roger to swing round towards the door. The blonde girl had followed him upstairs. She was standing in the doorway regarding Hutot with a half-angry, half-pitying, look.
Hutot’s breathing was becoming easier, but had he given a last gasp and died Roger would have considered it no more than his deserts. Now, he thought only of what would suit his own plans best, as he said to the girl:
“Put him to bed and give him something to make him sleep. When he wakes you may tell him that, in view of his having caught such a tartar in this little aristo, I’ll institute no disciplinary action against him for removing her from prison, and that I make myself responsible for returning her there.”
With a mutter of thanks, she knelt down beside her stricken man and began to mop the blood from his face. Roger grasped Athénaïs firmly by the arm and hurried her downstairs; as soon as they were out in the street she said in a swift whisper:
“Oh, Rojé! No words can express my amazement and gratitude that God should have sent you, of all people, to rescue me! But how comes it that you are dressed in this livery of the Devil?”
He smiled a little grimly, but gave her arm a reassuring squeeze. “This is no time to talk of that, m’dear. Let it suffice that unless we are monstrous unlucky within the next hour I’ll have you safe out of Rennes. I’ve not yet forgiven myself, though, for arriving so late upon the scene. That you should have succeeded in turning defence into attack so effectively fills me with astonishment and admiration. How in the world did you manage to overcome that swine?”
Athénaïs, still intensely excited at having been rescued by him, gave a nervous laugh. “When he grabbed my dress I drew back and kicked him with all my strength in—in a certain place. As he doubled up with pain I seized the chance to snatch up the empty bottle and break it over his head.”
It was just on six years since Roger had seen Athénaïs. They had parted at the time of her elopement with the good-looking young Vicomte de la Tour d’Auvergne, which he had made possible. She had then been a girl of eighteen, and too innocent to even imagine such a method of rendering a man hors de combat; her disclosure of it, with only the barest hesitation, brought home to Roger more swiftly than anything else could have done that marriage and the years had matured her as much as they had himself. After a moment absorbing the fact, he felt that he must risk a question of the type that no one in France any longer put casually to an aristocrat, and asked:
“M. le Vicomte? I trust that he is . . . safe, and that I may have the happiness of restoring you to him?”
“Alas! he has been dead nearly a year,” she replied. “Our marriage brought us more happiness than most couples enjoy, and I still miss him greatly. As you may remember, he held most liberal views, so he became an officer in the National Guard; but during a riot in Brest he was treacherously shot by one of his own men.”
The news saddened Roger, as M. de
la Tour d’Auvergne had been one of the earliest friends he had made among the French nobility. His mind swiftly jumped to the two children he had heard that Athénaïs had borne; but before he could bring himself to ask about them, she went on bitterly:
“My children also are dead. While I was absent in Brest with M. le Vicomte, our château in the country was burnt down at the instigation of some agitators from Paris. The . . . the children perished in it. Now that I have told you this, please do not refer to it again. It is a subject which I endeavour to banish from my mind, except when an opportunity occurs for me to revenge myself on the canaille.”
The positively venomous hatred that Athénaïs put into her last few words again revealed to Roger how greatly she had changed. He had known her as a lovely romantic girl, spoilt by her riches and high station to a degree that at times had made her petulant, but at heart sweet-natured and idealistic. At twenty-four she was even more beautiful than she had been at eighteen, but grim experiences had clearly tempered her into a violent and dangerous woman.
Another twenty paces brought them to the Hôtel de France. Without a word, Roger led her into the courtyard and through the side entrance to his private sitting-room. Dan was there with the riding things all laid out, and Roger asked her to change into them at once, so that they could be off with a minimum of delay; then he took Dan out into the corridor and told him what had happened.
After a short whispered conference they decided that there was no necessity to alter their plan because it had been Hutot who had removed Athénaïs from prison. The story that, after questioning her himself, Roger had decided to take her to Nantes to check her information was still perfectly plausible. Even if Hutot had taken in Athénaïs’s claim of recognising him as an old friend who had come to rescue her, he might equally have swallowed Roger’s repudiation of it. If his suspicions had been aroused the worst he could do would be to send a Municipal after them to Nantes to verify that they had really gone there. But by the time it was discovered that they had not they would have disappeared without trace; and if the story ever reached Paris, Roger felt confident that he would have no difficulty in quashing it.
The Man who Killed the King Page 34