Time of Terror

by Hunter, Seth

  He stopped for a moment on the river and watched the barges being unloaded on the quays and thought of his own cargo which should now be well on its way to Paris. Imlay had returned by coach two days ago: a much more cheerful man than when he had set out from Neuilly. The Speedwell’s cargo had been loaded into a smaller 80-ton vessel and brought up to Rouen whence it would be transferred into barges for the journey into Paris. Tully was now waiting for Nathan to rejoin them in Le Havre.

  And yet he lingered in Paris.

  He told himself that he had a mission to complete: a mission far more important than the delivery of contraband tobacco to an American shipping agent. Whatever services Imlay was prepared to render to the British government, they could not possibly be more important than the prospect of peace, and while there was still hope of Paine’s release, Nathan could not bring himself to admit his mission a failure.

  But was this the real reason he stayed in Paris?

  The bells of Notre-Dame tolled the hour. At noon he was meeting Sara after her art lesson in the Rue Honoré. He could not get the woman out of his mind. But what did he want from her? Well, one thing was obvious; he could not delude himself about that. Romance? Yes, certainly there was that, but the sexual element was paramount. She seemed to exude some drug that had intoxicated him. Being close to her was like . . . he sought an analogy, and found one in his study of the planets. Magnetism. He was like a planet orbiting the sun, unable to escape its pull, destined to make that eternal trajectory, never coming any closer, never getting away.

  Fool. Poor, bloody fool that he was. And the Speedwell waiting for him in Le Havre.

  He crossed the river and began to walk westward along the front of the Louvre and the Tuileries, walking for no particular reason except that he had an hour to kill and his head was full of questions and doubts. The waterfront was busier here. Gangs of stevedores were working on the barges moored two or three deep along the quays. More people, more activity than he had seen in the course of his dismal journey inland from Le Havre through the drab, dispirited villages with the black-shawled women silent in the doorways and the men gone to the wars. But this was the front-line of the Revolution and these its crack troops mustered at the ring of the tocsin to do bloody execution in the cause of liberty. Certainly they looked as if they might be useful in a fight with those savage hooks they carried to thrust into the bales of cargo and heave them on to their backs. And would as soon thrust into living flesh . . .

  He had been walking for some minutes along the waterfront and now he came to a bridge, swathed in scaffolding, with barges on the river below, laden with stones from the Bastille, the great prison that had been taken by the mob in ’89, at the start of it all. Stones that were now being used to build new and more useful edifices for the Republic. Nathan remembered the excitement of his friends in New York when they first told him of events in Paris that summer, which now seemed so long ago. As if they were seeing the dawning of a new world order. As if the spirit of their own revolution, their own sense of liberty, had spread back across the Atlantic and the Old World had been born again in a new image. Even in England there had been such hope—and not just among his mother’s friends.

  And now . . .

  He looked up as he heard the sound of a drum. He had been walking without noticing much where he was going and now he saw that he was in a large open space, part meadow and part town square, with some great buildings on the far side and a large crowd of people in the middle, gathered around an object that he recognized with a shock as the guillotine.

  Or the Humane and Scientific Execution Machine, as the Revolutionists called it.

  No longer shrouded.

  A macabre curiosity compelled him to seek a closer view of the device. It had been designed by the King himself, he had heard, who had amused himself by making locks and other mechanical contraptions while his country slid into chaos. But its popular name was derived from Dr. Guillotine, the man who had tested it at the School of Medicine in Paris, using corpses, it was said, of criminals who had suffered the traditional forms of execution by hanging or being beaten to death with iron bars. It was supposed to be much more humane than either. The blade fell so fast and cut so cleanly, the severed arteries gushed like a fountain but there was no pain, the good doctor reported; it was like someone blowing on the back of your neck.

  Nathan shivered and turned away, ashamed to be so ghoulish. He was not in favour of public executions, nor inclined to watch them. But then from the street opposite, parallel with the river, there emerged a grim procession.

  First there was the drummer, beating the step, then a file of foot soldiers in blue uniforms with fixed bayonets. Then a troop of horse. And then the carts. Farm carts with high sides that the English called tumbrels and the French charrettes.

  Nathan stood as though mesmerised. The convoy turned and came across the square and passed within a few yards of where he was standing. Two carts with about five or six prisoners in each. And all of them women.

  Women of all ages, though mostly young. Their hands were tied behind them and their clothes torn at the front, as low as the breast. And their hair cut short to expose the neck. Some were crying, the tears coursing down their grimy faces, some were moving their lips as if in prayer, others simply looked dazed.

  The sight stirred memories that were buried deep in Nathan’s memory—or perhaps not memory, for he had not been alive at the time; more of an instinctive response that combined elements of loathing and horror and fear. Like a family curse. The witches of Salem.

  And some of this must have shown in his face for after they had passed he saw a man looking at him with suspicion. A man better dressed than most he had seen in France, with red, white and blue plumes in his hat and thigh-length boots and a sword at his hip.

  “Why are they all women?” inquired Nathan. It came out almost without thinking, as if in explanation of his shock, for he thought the man might be an official.

  The man continued to stare at him silently.

  “What have they done?” Nathan persisted, unwisely perhaps.

  “They are whores,” said the man. “Or nuns.” With a shrug as if there was no distinction.

  The carts had reached the scaffold now and the women were being led out of them and stood in two rows with their backs to the machine.

  “Are you a foreigner?” said the man, stepping closer, and his hand was on the hilt of his sword.

  Nathan shook his head and turned away, pushing through the crowd.

  He stopped after a while, when it was clear he was not pursued, and found he was shaking. From fear or anger or something of both. And disgust. He felt as if he was walking through a city of death.

  He could not walk away from this. But what could he do?

  Danton would stop the Terror.

  Nathan recalled the words but not who had said them. Then he remembered: Tom Paine on the night before his arrest. He felt an excitement and an agitation, very like his feelings for Sara. A sense of frustration. He could do something about this if only he knew how.

  Could he approach Danton himself?

  But what was he to tell him? He was no diplomat. He had no powers vested in him. Danton might denounce him to the authorities as an English spy.

  He would certainly suspect him of being a provocateur.

  But should he not take the risk? Or was it all vanity? Vanity and delusion. Just as he had thought the cannonball fired at him in the mouth of the Somme would give him enduring fame as the instigator of war, now he thought to be the instigator of peace.

  “Good day, Citizen.”

  He stopped dead and found himself staring at Sara Seton.

  She was regarding him with a quizzical smile and her head tilted at an inquiring angle.

  Of course, he was in the Rue Honoré. It was the route they took with the death car
ts from the Conciergerie to the Place de la Révolution. And it was where the painter Regnault had his studio, where Sara went for her art lessons.

  “What were you thinking?” she said. “You looked as if you were in another world.”

  The world of the dead. Did she not see them, did she not hear them, when they passed below the windows of the studio? Did she carry on painting her flowers, or whatever it was she painted, while the death carts rolled through the street below with their hapless cargo? Did she close her eyes and her mind to them, like the rest of Paris?

  “I have news for you,” she said excitedly but glancing over her shoulder and lowering her voice for fear of being overheard. “From Mary. The Americans in Paris have made a protest against the arrest of Thomas Paine. They have been invited to petition the National Convention and they have asked Imlay to be their spokesman. Mary is delighted. She is confident that Paine will be promptly released.”

  Chapter 18

  the Room of the Machines

  Nathan sat between Mary Imlay and Sara Seton in the front row of the public gallery of the National Convention and looked down into the auditorium as it filled up with the representatives of the French Republic. Stoves had been lit to take the edge off the chill and the sense of drama was intensified by the shafts of winter sunlight that lanced through the smoky air from the windows set high in the walls.

  It had links with the theatre. It had once been the props room for the royal theatre of the Tuileries: the Salle des Machines where they kept the scenery and the ingenious devices used in masques and other entertainments. Lately it had been redesigned by the artist David as a suitable forum for the voice of the people but Nathan’s first and lasting impression was of the Roman circus. This was partly because of the noise: the roar of several hundred voices that echoed around the great chamber; partly the seating which rose steeply from the body of the hall and curved in a wide semi-circle leaving a space in the middle for the tribune where the main drama took place: where reputations were made and lost and where the heroes of the French people fought what had increasingly become a fight to the death; and partly the three great tricolours that hung from ceiling to floor behind the President of the Convention sitting on his throne high above the rabble like the Roman Emperor himself, ready to turn his thumb up or down, to decide who should live and who should die.

  The President’s was not a permanent office. In keeping with the spirit of the Republic, he was chosen from among the representatives for a period of two weeks and then succeeded by another. Today it was a man called Vadier who was also the chairman of the Committee of General Security—the Police Committee.

  “People call him the Grand Inquisitor,” whispered Sara as the noise died down to a murmur and the Americans came in.

  We who are about to die, salute you.

  Unlikely gladiators, they looked for the most part like the respectable men of business they were—brokers, bankers and merchants—the exception being Gilbert Imlay who as usual gave the impression that he would be more comfortable dressed in buckskin riding upon a horse. But he stood with the others, soberly suited with their hats in their hands, at the bar of the Convention—seventeen good men and true—while the representatives of the French people gazed upon them with curiosity or indifference or growled like lions that smelt a Christian.

  Vadier leaned forward over his desk, ringing his bell for silence.

  “Who speaks for the petition?” he asked, fixing the Americans with a glare over his pince-nez. He was in his late fifties, one of the oldest members of the Convention, a former soldier in the King’s Army and a magistrate.

  “I do,” said Imlay, stepping forward to the long rail that they called the bar of the Convention. He leaned on it as if it was the bar of a tavern and he was waiting for the President to have the courtesy to serve him a drink. Nathan glanced sideways at Mary and saw her staring at him with lips parted and eyes shining, utterly adoring.

  Vadier invited him to address the Convention.

  Imlay had a good voice. It carried well but without apparent effort. The expatriates had chosen him for his voice and because they said he spoke the best French but Nathan was surprised he had accepted the privilege. It was not without danger. He suspected Mary’s hand in it.

  “Citizens,” Imlay began. “The honour of representing the French people has been extended to the most famous men of other nations. Among them, the member for Pas-de-Calais, Thomas Paine: the apostle of liberty in America, a respected philosopher and a citizen renowned for his virtue . . .”

  But already it was going badly. There was hissing from the galleries and a stamping of feet. Imlay looked a little taken aback but he persisted, raising his voice a notch.

  “In the name of the friends of liberty, your American allies and your brothers, I beg you to consider our plea for the unconditional release of Thomas Paine. We urge you: do not allow the alliance of despots the pleasure of seeing him in prison. His papers have been examined and reveal only that love of liberty and those principles of public morality that have earned him the hatred of kings and the love of his fellow citizens.”

  But there was no love here. Many of the delegates were now on their feet howling insults and shaking their fists and the public galleries were a seething mass of hatred and rage. Imlay stepped back among his fellow Americans, smiling a little and shaking his head. Nathan glanced at Mary again. Her face was white.

  “It has been orchestrated by the Jacobins,” she said.

  Nathan looked around him at the howling faces. The sunlight had faded and the tallow candles had been lit and in their smoky yellow light they looked like a pack of snarling dogs. Yes, he thought, it has been orchestrated. This was how it worked.

  The President was ringing his bell furiously and at last the noise died down. A man stood up, among the high benches to the left of the tribunal where the leading Jacobins sat, an area known as the Mountain. He began to make his way forward between the rows of delegates and another murmur arose and a single name: Danton.

  Nathan watched him as he made his way to the tribune. He moved easily, almost sauntered, with every eye upon him. A colossus in height and girth, with a massive head and neck, like a bull’s. There was a story that he once had a fight with a bull when he was a child on his mother’s farm in Arcis on the Aube. It was one of the few fights he had ever lost and the experience was engraved on his features. His nose was broken and flattened. A great scar ran down one side of his face, another twisted his lip, lifting one corner in a permanent sneer. An extraordinary face. It surpassed ugliness. There was so much force in it, so much power and vitality. He looked like a stevedore or a blacksmith. In fact, unlikely as it seemed, he was a lawyer by profession and still in his early thirties.

  He ascended the tribune, threw back his head and gazed imperiously around the assembly as if someone might challenge his right to be here. It was unthinkable.

  “The will of the people is that Terror should be the order of the day,” he began. Like Imlay he appeared to be making no effort to raise his voice, there was no strain in his throat, but it carried easily to every corner of the hall. “But Terror, if it is necessary, should be directed against the real enemies of the Republic and against them alone.”

  There was a murmur of approval from the benches in the middle of the hall where the majority of delegates sat. The Plain. Or less politely, the Marsh where they sank in obscurity under the shadow of the Mountain.

  “It is not the will of the people that a man whose only fault is a lack of enthusiasm should be treated as if he were a criminal—and a—traitor. That way leads only to despotism, and the end of liberty.”

  He turned abruptly from the tribune and was halfway to the benches before the applause began. Some even began to cheer. Nathan looked down at the Americans. Imlay was smiling as if they had won. But could the mood turn as swiftly and decisively as this? Ju
st because Danton had spoken.

  It was possible. The Marsh invariably did what the Mountain told them . . .

  But the Mountain no longer spoke with one voice.

  The President was exercising his arm again and Nathan saw that another man had stood up on the benches to the left, not far from where Danton had been sitting. A slight man in a green jacket with white hair.

  “Citizen Robespierre,” announced the President.

  A roar from the galleries. Clapping and cheering and waving of hats as Maximilien Robespierre made his way to the tribune; the idol of the Jacobins and the spiritual leader of the Revolution though he had no office or title. His friends called him the Incorruptible, or the People’s Tribune; his enemies the Eunuch or le chat-tigre, the tiger-cat.

  Robespierre, too, moved slowly but it could never be described as a saunter. His tread was too careful for that, indeed very like a cat’s. A cat in high heels. He wore breeches and striped stockings in a style that had been in vogue before the Revolution among aristocrats. Yet he did not look like an aristocrat. He looked more like a tailor who catered for aristocrats. Or a valet, perhaps. There could have been no greater contrast with Danton, though they were both lawyers by profession and much the same age.

  He mounted the tribune. It seemed to dwarf him. In fact he looked almost childlike as he blinked at the assembly, his expression pensive, almost perplexed. He pulled down a pair of spectacles that had been hidden in his powdered hair—it was his own hair, Nathan saw now, and not a wig—and adjusted them on his nose, consulting a single page of notes. Then he looked up—and was a different man. The spectacles transformed his features. Green-tinted with thick frames, they gave him a palpable air of menace. It might have been Nathan’s imagination but he felt a sudden chill in the air. The chamber was completely hushed.

  “People have appealed for indulgence,” he began. His voice was unimpressive, thin and reedy. It made you strain to listen—but perhaps that was to his advantage. “The threat, they say, has been exaggerated.”