Time of Terror

by Hunter, Seth

  “The peace party?”

  “Danton’s party.”

  Danton. Nathan remembered the name arising during the conversation around Sara’s table. But all he knew of Danton was that he had stirred the mob into an attack on the royal palace, was generally regarded as being responsible for the September massacres and had rallied the people of Paris against the foreign invaders. Not the actions of a man of peace.

  “I had not thought, sir, that there was a great movement for peace,” he ventured cautiously, “either in France or England.”

  “Yes, well, I will be frank with you, sir, the war is not going as well as we might have hoped. You will have read in the newspapers of several recent setbacks . . .” Indeed Nathan had. The news from every front was bleak. “The emergence of a peace party in Paris would be of some interest to us.”

  Nathan inclined his head without comment. Indeed, he was more than a little bewildered at the direction the conversation was taking. Had they confused him with a diplomat of the same name? Pitt’s next sally was even more confusing.

  “I believe you are acquainted with Mr. Thomas Paine.”

  The Great Revolutionist. A need for caution here.

  “I have met him, sir, at . . .” But better not mention his mother in this company. “In London. Before he left for France. But . . .”

  “We want you to talk to him.”

  Nathan was startled. “To Thomas Paine?”

  He looked to the First Lord in some confusion but Chatham was studying the weave of the carpet with great interest.

  “Yes. We want you to sound him out on certain matters. To see if he would be willing to act the broker, as it were.”

  “But . . .” Nathan’s mind was racing again and going nowhere. “Where should I find him, sir?”

  Pitt arched his brow. “Why in Paris, sir, where else?”

  II—VENTÔSE

  the Time of the Wind

  Chapter 14

  Mad Tom

  A foul December crossing with a chill north wind whipping the Channel into white rage and scouring their faces with sleet. But at least it drove the British cruisers off station in the Baie de Seine for fear of running upon a lee-shore, and the French welcomed the Speedwell into Le Havre like a bird of good omen, bringing news of the outside world and another load of Best Virginia. No one, it seemed, had linked the barque with the capture of the Vestale four months since and the Jacobin representative had been recalled to Paris, leaving more amenable men in charge. Imlay was not there—gone to Paris according to his steward, who assured Nathan he would take good care of the cargo and arranged a chaise for his own journey to the capital.

  So Nathan entered Paris on what would have been Christmas Eve, if Christmas had not been abolished. The fourth of Nivôse by the revolutionary calendar: the month of snows, though in fact it was raining and the guillotine under a tarpaulin shroud like some grim icon of Death with his scythe shielded against the rust.

  Nathan leaned back in his seat, withdrawing a little into the collars of his cape as the coach proceeded along the Rue Saint Honoré. Or rather the Rue Honoré as it was now, saints having gone the way of Christmas. There was little life on the streets but the Philadelphia Hotel was ablaze with light and when he climbed stiffly down from the coach he heard sounds of revelry from within. Clearly the residents were in the mood to be festive, or possibly it was like this every night, Nathan reflected as he tugged upon the bell pull for the third time and hoped someone would hear it above the raucous bellowing of “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen”—in English—that echoed around the Passage des Petit Pères.

  Eventually came the porter with a lantern and stared lugubriously at him through the bars.

  “It is the Americans,” he said wearily. “We have asked them to keep the noise down but they are in spirits, so to speak.”

  Nathan explained that he had not come to complain but to see one of the guests, a Citizen Paine. “I believe he is staying with you at present,” he persisted when the porter showed a blank countenance.

  “And if he is,” said the fellow, “and I were to inquire for him, who would I say is asking?”

  “Captain Turner,” said Nathan. “Of New York.”

  The man sighed heavily and searched among his keys.

  “You had better come and wait inside,” he said, “while I find out if he is here.”

  Nathan followed him across the small courtyard into the lobby where he could better appreciate the subtleties of the verse—and the fiddle and drum that accompanied it. He began to tap out the rhythm with the fingers of one hand on the desk and was thus engaged when a voice behind him inquired: “Captain Turner?” and he turned to find the familiar features observing him from the doorway.

  He had last seen Thomas Paine two years ago—at his mother’s of course, where he met all the King’s enemies—and he had changed very little: the same funny-sad shambles of a man with his quizzical smile and his beak of a nose and the eyes of a rheumy old eagle. It was apparent that he recognized Nathan almost at once, though he had the wit not to denounce him.

  “Captain Turner,” he murmured, taking Nathan by the arm and escorting him to a sofa on the far side of the lobby beyond the hearing of the porter. “You have a twin in London, sir, though the name is different.”

  “I beg you will not take offence,” Nathan replied in the same low tones. “It is a necessary subterfuge in the circumstances.”

  Paine shrugged. “Subterfuge in Paris. One might as well take offence at whores in the Haymarket. But you take a considerable risk, my boy. Are you still in the British Navy or has your mother finally persuaded you to desert and join the Revolution?”

  “I am still in the service,” Nathan admitted. “In fact . . .” He paused a moment before committing himself but if he could not trust the man he might as well have stayed at home. “I am sent by Mr. Pitt to offer you passage to England, if you wish it, and all charges against you dropped.”

  Paine stepped back a pace with an expression of exaggerated surprise: the Mad Tom of popular perception with his fanatical stare and his big red nose reeking of rum and revolution. Indeed there was more than a hint of spirits about him now—but it was Christmas.

  “All charges against me dropped,” he murmured drily. “And in return?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Well, I do not expect it is for nothing. Billy Pitt gives nothing for nothing.”

  “To be frank,” Nathan dropped his voice even lower, “Mr. Pitt hopes that you may use your influence with certain parties to bring about negotiations that may lead to peace.”

  Paine stared at him a moment longer. Then he sank down on the sofa. “By God, boy, and he has sent you to tell me this?”

  Nathan sat down beside him. It did, on reflection, seem something of a long shot.

  “What makes him think I have any influence with the current bunch of fanatics in the Tuileries?” demanded Paine. “My attempts to influence them in the matter of the late King lost what little credit I ever had with them. I doubt I could plead my own case, let alone Billy Pitt’s.”

  “Well, the current French administration may have to change for the better.” Not a good choice of words . . . “That is, to reflect a more reasonable point of view.”

  “Ah, now we have it. Does Mr. Pitt have anyone in mind?”

  “Monsieur Danton was mentioned.”

  Paine loosed a bray of violent laughter. “So Georges Danton is now become ‘reasonable.’ Well, I might yet be received at the court of St. James.”

  “Mr. Pitt did not go as far as to suggest that possibility, but there are funds at my disposal . . .”

  “You offer me a bribe, sir?” Paine clamped his hand on Nathan’s knee, his brow fierce. Then he smiled. “Pitt were wise to save his gold for Danton. What am I to offer him?”


  “Whatever resources he requires,” replied Nathan, “within reason.”

  “Quite so. He being a reasonable man. Well. How very interesting. But Danton is a French patriot. What can we offer France? The return of Canada is, I suppose, out of the question.”

  “It did not arise in the course of our conversation,” Nathan admitted.

  “No. I did not suppose it.”

  “Mr. Pitt believes a suspension of hostilities is as much in the interests of France as it is of Britain.”

  “He does, does he? And would he want us to restore the monarchy?”

  “It is not specified as a precondition for talks, though the release of the young King from the Temple would be appreciated.”

  Paine made a courteous if mocking bow.

  “And a constitutional monarchy has always been favoured in Britain,” Nathan continued smoothly—he was become quite the diplomat, “as it is by Monsieur Danton if I am not mistook.”

  A door opened within the hotel and they heard voices raised in song.

  I saw three ships come sailing in,

  On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day,

  I saw three ships come sailing in,

  On Christmas Day in the morning.

  Paine regarded Nathan thoughtfully. “Billy Pitt knows how to pick his couriers, I’ll say that for him. There are few men in England I would have trusted, even so far as we have gone. How is your mother, pray? Still as beautiful as ever?”

  “She was in good health the last time I saw her,” Nathan assured him a little coolly. He was always cool when a man spoke of his mother in a certain way, though as far as he was aware Paine had not been one of her paramours.

  “She knows of your mission?”

  “No. I regret I was not at liberty to tell her.”

  “It would probably amuse her greatly, if she were not so worried about you coming back to her in one piece. It will certainly amuse Danton.”

  “Then you will speak to him?”

  “I wonder. Paine the Peacemaker. It is an interesting possibility. And certainly Danton would stop the Terror. Let me think on it.” He glanced down at Nathan’s bag. “You are staying the night?”

  “If there is a room.”

  “Oh I am sure there is a room. We are a dwindling band of brothers, I fear. You are lucky to find me here. I am no longer a permanent resident. I live a quiet life these days in Saint Denis but I came into town for the revelry. You must join us for dinner.”

  “That might not be wise,” Nathan suggested. “I do not want to be questioned too closely on my character as an American.”

  “My dear boy, you could wear a ring through your nose and speak Hottentot and they would take you for an American tonight, they are so much in drink. However, as you wish. We will meet at breakfast.” A frown crossed his brow. “Perhaps not breakfast. Dinner might be more ‘reasonable’ as it is Christmas, do you not think?”

  He drew back a little the better to form a view of Nathan’s features.

  “Well, well, who would have thought it when first we met, eh? And you thought me a fairground entertainer, I recall.”

  He clapped Nathan on the knee once more. “Tomorrow,” he said, “and we will talk more soberly.”

  The bell tolled its way into Nathan’s consciousness. At first he thought it was a church bell for in his dreams there had been a church. A church and a gallows and a cart full of women stripped to their shifts as for a hanging.

  And then he woke up and realised it was the bell at the gate. And he was in a room at White’s Philadelphia Hotel. He was up at once and running to the window. A gleam of bayonets in the lanterne above the gate and tall black shakos . . .

  Nathan pulled on his clothes, grabbed his sword and hanger and rushed out of the room. Other guests, in various stages of undress, were already in the corridor, gazing at each other uncertainly and there was a little huddle at the top of the stairs, gazing down. Nathan joined them in time to see the soldiers clattering up, the porter at their head. Soldiers or gendarmes, he could not tell: they wore blue uniforms with white slashes down the front. And two officers in dark capes with large bicorn hats decorated with plumes of red, white and blue.

  “Which is Tom Paine’s room?” Nathan demanded of the men at the top of the stairs.

  “Room twelve, I think,” one of them offered, “on the floor below.”

  He ran down the stairs but the invaders were already banging on doors.

  “What is going on?” Nathan demanded, in the hope of diverting them for he knew instinctively who they had come for. He had drawn his sword from its hanger and the guards turned on him, levelling their muskets but getting in each other’s way in the narrow space and then one of the officers pushed his way through with his hand on the hilt of his own sword. His gaze swept across Nathan and to the Americans gathered on the stairs.

  “I am Commissioner Gillet of the Bureau of General Security,” he announced, in a voice that carried. “And I have a warrant for the arrest of Thomas Paine. Any man who interferes with that commission will also be arrested.”

  “What is the charge?” Tom Paine stood in the doorway in his nightcap, with the same quizzical smile he had worn when he had seen Nathan earlier that night in the lobby but considerably paler about the gills.

  The officer turned his head and stared at him for a moment.

  “You are Citizen Paine?”

  “I am.”

  “Then you will get dressed, if you will, and come with us. We can discuss the charge on the way to the Luxembourg.”

  He turned again to confront Nathan who had not moved or put up his sword. He stepped up close to him so they were almost eye to eye. A long, lupine face that might have been thought handsome had it not been for the arrogance and the cruelty in it; the face of a man who has been given more power than is good for him—or for anyone he encountered.

  “Now stand aside, boy, before I take your little sword off you and give you a thrashing with it.”

  There was a moment when Nathan might have taken him by the throat but it passed. He stood aside as they marched Paine away down the stairs.

  Chapter 15

  Christmas in Paris

  Sara Seton had grown up in the conventional wisdom that Death was essentially a silent presence: the thief who comes in the night. You awoke to find him standing at the foot of your bed, crooking a bony finger. He crept like a miasma into the room where your mother lay ill and stole her breath away. He lingered discreetly in the graveyard where you buried her like one of the pale statues on the tombstones. But Death seemed to have grown noisier of late. He came rampaging through the streets at the head of a mob banging upon a drum and yelling, Mort aux aristocrates. He rattled and creaked over the cobbles in the Rue Honoré with a cartload of victims for the Machine on the Place de la Révolution. Or he came banging on your door in the early hours of the morning escorted by a squad of gendarmes with a warrant for your arrest, signed by the proper authorities.

  The one thing Death did not do in Paris in Year II of the Revolution was surprise you.

  So when Sara was awoken by a determined knocking upon the door early on Christmas morning her first thought was that it was Death come for her at last, and the second the rather uncharitable hope that he had got the address wrong and come for one of the neighbours.

  She sprang from her bed and ran to the window but it was just one man and he did not look like a policeman. Then he stepped back a pace and looked up and she saw that it was Nathan.

  She grabbed her robe and ran out on to the landing. Alex was standing at the open door of his bedroom looking anxious. He said nothing but there was a world of questions in his eyes.

  “It is good,” she told him. “It is the American. The friend of Mary’s that I told you of. Go back to bed before you catch cold.”

/>   “Hélène!” she shouted. “The door.”

  But then she remembered. She had sent the maid off to her family for Noël. And the cook had gone to stay with her sister. She and Alex were alone in the house. She inspected herself in the mirror on the landing and lifted her hands to her hair to tie it back in a ribbon but then she thought better of it and let it fall back to her shoulders. She made a lion’s roar to stretch the skin round her mouth and gnawed at her lips to put more colour into them. Then she ran down the stairs to the door. She had to struggle with the bolts and she was quite breathless when she finally opened it but it was only partly to do with her exertions.

  “Madame, I am sorry, I . . .”

  He tugged off his hat and stared at her like a delivery boy who has come to the wrong address.

  “I am desolate to disturb you at such an hour.”

  His hair was longer than she remembered it and his face thinner; but he was still a mere child.

  “I was hoping to find Imlay,” he said.

  “Imlay is not here,” she told him.

  “Oh.”

  They stared at each other in silence for a moment.

  “Oh come in, come in,” she said, standing back from the door. “Out of the cold.”

  “I should try and find him,” he said but he stepped into the hall.

  “I have sent all the servants away for Noël,” she told him, as if she had a whole household of them and not just two women and a part-time gardener. “Whatever the authorities have to say about it, it is still the festive season, at least for some families.”

  But not hers. She had not wanted to draw attention to herself. She had not even been to Mass.

  “Come down into the kitchen,” she said. “It is warmer there and you can talk to me while I make some coffee.”

  She had banked the fire up for the night and happily there was still a small glow among the embers. She began to rake fiercely at them.