by Hunter, Seth
Nathan forced himself to look down at the terrible thing at his feet.
It was the head of a woman. A woman who had once, not very long ago, been young and perhaps pretty.
But it was not Sara.
He sobbed with relief. Then came the rage. An animal rage beyond reason. He released a stream of obscenity, straining at his chains, his mouth flecked with spit and vomit, until Gillet, smiling, left the room.
Nathan was shivering, his whole body in spasm, fighting for control. He looked once more at the pulley on the ceiling. The pulley was the weakest link. All those weeks in the Châtelet he had strengthened his arms with exercise, hauling himself up to the little square of window, but did he have the strength to haul himself up to the pulley? It was about five or six feet above his head and his arms already felt as if they were being wrenched out of his shoulder sockets. The longer he waited, the harder it would be. But he was stretched to the limit; he could not reach up any further, not even to grip the chain above the manacles.
He looked down at the head, inches from his feet. He stretched out his right leg as far as he could and trapped a clump of hair between his toe and the floor. He tried to edge it towards him but he did not have enough leverage. The more he stretched the more the gyves dug into his wrists. Blood was trickling down his arms. He managed to hook a strand of hair between two toes. It moved an inch or so towards him. The eyes stared directly at him now in what might have been a mute appeal, or silent reproach. He tried again. Slowly, inch by inch, he dragged it towards him until it was at his feet, the glazed eyes staring directly up at him.
“I’m sorry,” he told the thing that had once been a woman. “God, forgive me.”
Then he stood on her face.
He balanced precariously as if he was standing on a football, except that he could feel her teeth through the ball of his foot. He felt like a clown in some macabre circus act but now he could reach the chain above the manacles. Slowly, hand over hand, he began to haul himself up. The pain in his arms was beyond belief but he had the strength. All those weeks in the Châtelet had not, after all, been entirely wasted. His face was up against the pulley. One final effort and he had grabbed the long metal bolt that fixed it to the ceiling. If he could hang on for long enough with one hand he could use the other to lift the chain off the wheel and drop it down over the axle. That would give him three or four inches of slack. Enough to put his feet on the ground. And he might even be able to use the chain as a wrench to split the casing round the pulley. He gripped the bolt with one hand and let go of the chain.
But it was impossible. He did not have the strength to hold on that long with one arm. With a cry he let go and fell awkwardly to the floor, wrenching his shoulder so badly he blacked out for a moment. When he came to, the first thing he saw was the head, lying beyond his reach now with one eye closed in what appeared to be a macabre wink.
The door opened and Gillet came back. This time he carried a cane. A long thin cane tapering slightly towards the end. He stood in front of Nathan, flexing it in both hands.
“Despite our several meetings,” he began, “and the level of intimacy we have attained, I do not believe I know your name.”
“Turner,” said Nathan through his split and swollen lips. “Nathan Turner.”
Gillet stepped behind him. The swish of the cane and a fiery pain across his buttocks. Again and again. Then Gillet began to walk around him, slashing and cutting, taking his time, picking his targets. Nathan had seen men flogged at the grating with a hundred strokes of the cat but nothing like this, the man contemptuously circling him and slashing the cane at his exposed body. Chest, shoulders, back, buttocks, thighs. The swish and sting, swish and sting, with scarcely a second between. Nathan hung with teeth bared, staring at the wall through a haze of tears, sustained by a rage that burned as hot as the cane on his naked flesh.
A pause.
“Why did you come to Paris?”
“Business. With . . . an American . . . merchant.”
“Called?”
“Imlay.”
Knowing he must know already.
“And Thomas Paine?”
“I have told you . . . I had no . . . dealings . . . with Thomas Paine.”
Gillet drew back the cane.
“No!” It was not quite a scream, not yet. “I was sent . . . to find him . . . in Paris.”
“By whom?”
“The President. Washington.”
“You are an intimate of the American President?” Gillet bent the cane as if he was testing it for flexibility.
“He is a friend of Thomas Paine. He wished me . . . to bring him back to America.”
“And when he was imprisoned, you were to rescue him.”
“No. There was no . . . no plan to rescue him.”
“So why were you in the quarry at Porte d’Enfer?”
“I have told you . . . I had business with the owner, Le Mulet.”
“Yes, yes. But it is the nature of that business that interests me. When I asked you before, I had not the means of eliciting a true answer. Now, as you perceive, I have.”
The punishment resumed. The swish and the cut. On and on. Nathan tried to count the strokes thinking they might stop at twenty, then thirty . . . His whole body was on fire but incredibly he could still feel each individual stroke, like a hot coal suddenly bursting into flame.
Even more incredibly, his mind was working on a plan. A story. One that Gillet might find convincing. Not yet, though, not yet. Or he would not be believed. It had to seem as if it was forced from him by the extremities of pain. And so much depended on who had informed upon him. Imlay? Morris or his servants? Philippe the égoutier? Le Mulet, or one of Le Mulet’s men?
Another pause.
Nathan hung limply from the chain, his head drooping to his chest. His skin was striped like a tiger’s except that it was red on white. He could see the blood running in rivulets down his body, down his legs, down the drain at his feet. The woman’s head lolled on its side, a single eye gazing in blank indifference.
He mumbled something incoherent.
Gillet raised his chin with the point of the cane.
“I cannot hear you. Repeat.”
“He wanted me . . . to take . . . a cargo. To England.”
“What cargo?”
“Silver . . .”
Slowly, with shuddering sobs, he told his story. Le Mulet had a cache of silver plate from confiscated aristocratic households that he wished to get out of the country. Worth around a million livres. He wanted Nathan to take it to England to sell through contacts he had there.
“You were aware that this was illegal?”
“Yes.”
“Punishable by death.”
“Yes.”
“But you agreed?”
“No. I refused.”
A single cut of the cane across his cheek.
“I agreed. I agreed. But then . . . we were . . . the police, the Guard came.” The cane was raised. “Please. No more. I . . . You know . . . I was taken . . . to the Châtelet. I came back to Paris to find it . . . for myself.”
“And where is it now, this silver?”
“He did not say.”
Gillet slashed the other cheek.
“Please. I beg you. He would not say. You must . . . believe me. But I guessed. It was close to . . . the bottom . . . of the shaft. In the Empire of the Dead.”
Silence.
Save for the drip, drip of sweat or blood. He closed his eyes and hung limply from the chains. He could no longer feel the pain in his arms or wrists for the pains elsewhere.
“It should be easy enough to check. And if it is not there, well, we will resume the interrogation.”
The guards came back and took him down from the ch
ain and dragged him from the room. A corridor, another door and they were in a small yard. Walls rose up all around but high above he could see the sky. In the middle of the yard stood an iron pump and a trough. They dumped him on the ground and pumped water over him. It was cold and wonderful. When they had finished they dragged him back into the building and into another room and gave him some clothes, not his own, which were in shreds. But they did give him his boots.
And with them a grain of hope.
Once he had put them on they marched him back into the courtyard where there was a black vehicle waiting with a pair of horses, not the same vehicle that had brought him here, but a prison wagon with a door at the back and bars on the window. They threw him in and chained him to a rail.
He wondered where they were going to take him. To the Châtelet? Or for more coffee and cake with the Duplays and a second interview with their lodger? But it was neither of these places.
They took him to the Luxembourg.
Chapter 41
the Palace of the Medici
Nathan was in a cell with nine others, one of them a doctor: an Englishman called Brand who examined his wounds and treated them with a salve.
“You will not believe me,” he said, “but you are lucky it was not a whip.”
Nathan did not believe him.
“A whip would have cut you to the bone. These are mostly welts and will heal without a mark. There are a few cuts here and there but they are not deep.”
But Nathan carried scars that could not be seen and they went very deep indeed. He had not thought of himself as a vengeful person but revenge now seemed to be all he could think of. Feverish on his thin mattress, his whole body a burning torment of flayed skin, he kept himself sane with a vow: he would get out of here and he would find Gillet and he would kill him. It was his only reason for staying alive.
But then, as the pain ebbed and the wounds healed, at least on the surface, he began to think of other reasons.
Sara was here. In the Luxembourg. And he had the means of getting them both out.
It had of course occurred to him that he had been brought here, rather than to any other prison, because Gillet must suspect the existence of an escape route and hoped that Nathan would lead them to it. He knew there had been searches just after the death of Danton because Brand and several other prisoners had told him about them. One even said they had been looking for a tunnel and began to speculate as to its location but this merely confirmed Nathan in his suspicion that the man was an agent provocateur sent to draw him out.
All of this convinced Nathan that they had been unable to find the secret door behind the stage in the old prison theatre, now the prison store. So it must still be there.
The problem was, how to find it?
But first he had to find Sara.
Male and female prisoners were kept apart. The men in the west wing, the women in the east, with a courtyard between. Both sexes were allowed into the courtyard for an hour each day but at separate times: the men in the mornings, the women in the afternoons. There was a metal pump and a trough where they could wash themselves or their clothes and naturally when the women were at the pump many of the men crowded at the windows to gaze at them and sometimes to communicate with women they knew or wished to know.
As soon as he could leave his bed, Nathan joined this admiring throng.
He saw her at once. She had some soap—a much sought after commodity in the prison—and she was standing by the pump and washing her hair. For a while Nathan just stood, clutching the bars of his window, and watched her. She seemed little changed, still stood out from the crowd: statuesque, her figure emphasised by the thin muslin dress she wore, a cotton smock around her shoulders, wooden clogs on her feet. She looked like a peasant woman—or rather Rousseau’s ideal of the peasant—doing her washing at the village trough. She was absorbed in her toilette, working her hair up into a lather and then lowering her head for one of her companions to pour water over it from a jug. But after a while she walked away a little, rubbing at her hair with a towel. And then she looked up and saw him.
She made no sign of recognition and nor did he. He had some notion that it might be dangerous. But one of the other men noted her stare and nudged him and said, “Hey, it is your lucky day, monsieur. She is the belle of the Luxembourg.”
“Much good it does me,” grumbled Nathan, “as there is no way of contriving an introduction.”
“Oh, but there is,” said the fellow, “and more than that.”
And that was how Nathan discovered that the prison store had another, unofficial function besides the sale of supplies.
Although the two sexes were not allowed there at the same time, for a small consideration the staff permitted notes to be left and, for a much larger sum, assignations to be arranged. The male party would be invited to step through a drape into a room at the back and his lover would join him there when it was the women’s turn to use the store. It was a lengthy process to arrange such a liaison but it could be done.
Nathan went back to his cell to think about it.
He was still afraid that the authorities had set a trap for him. He had to take his time, to make sure he was not watched.
But how much time did he have? How long before Gillet gave up trying to find the non-existent silver in the Empire of the Dead and came back for him? To resume where they had left off. And for Sara, too, time was not something that could be relied upon. Sooner or later her name would appear on the List—and they would take her on her final journey.
The List came round between eight and ten every evening, with the names of the prisoners who had been selected for trial the following morning. The cell doors were left open during the day but at night they were shut and locked and the turnkey would chalk a number on the outside, according to how many prisoners from that particular cell were on the List. There were up to a dozen people in each cell and of course none of them knew the number or what the names were so they would lie awake, wondering. Then later that night, usually around midnight, the Death Squad came round. And then they knew. That was when the screaming started, though sometimes it began earlier.
Like everyone else in the prison Nathan expected the next twenty-four hours to be his last and every night he listened for the sound of the turnkeys doing their rounds and for the scratch of the chalk on the door and the clump of boots on the stairs. After midnight when they had been and gone he was usually able to get some sleep. But sometimes there was an inexplicable delay and the Death Squad didn’t come round until the early hours or even after the first streaks of dawn had appeared in the sky and those nights were the worst. The prisoners had their own rule to stop people singing after ten but no one could stop the screaming.
By day it was not so bad. There were things to do; they had their routine.
The prison was divided into blocks known as chambers and every chamber formed a society with an elected president to enforce the rules. Each prisoner was given a task such as lighting the fires, sweeping the room, doing the laundry, making the beds—everyone in Nathan’s room had a trestle bed and a straw mattress, some with a cupboard or a little table next to it and sometimes a candle bought from the prison store. The rooms varied in size but most were high-ceilinged and quite large and each was named after a republican hero from the classics, such as Brutus or Cassius, Cato or Cincinattus, Socrates or Plato. Nathan was in Cato. His cellmates were typical of the diverse society of the prison: a cross-section of the bohemian Faubourg of Saint-Germain where wealth and want were close neighbours. There was a viscount and a marquis, a lawyer, a priest, a couple of medical students, a theatrical scene-maker, a valet who was much put upon by the two aristocrats, and of course, the English doctor, Brand. Nathan maintained the fiction that he was American, fearing an informer: there were plenty of those, according to Brand.
They even had news,
of sorts, from the government newspaper the Moniteur. It was from this that Nathan learned of the safe arrival of the grain fleet from America. The French fleet, he read, had won a great victory over the British. But bread was still in short supply according to Brand who had his own informers. The bread on sale in the prison store at the legal maximum of ten sous was mostly sawdust and oatmeal, though you could buy good white bread at ten times the price under the counter.
There was plenty of freedom to move about within the prison, at least during the day, when the cell doors were not locked. In the afternoons they tended to congregate in the large antechambers or common rooms where they walked, talked, played games such as cards or chess, or simply stared out of the windows into the gardens below, hoping to see a relative or a friend looking out for them.
It was here that Nathan met Thomas Paine. He was talking animatedly to a circle of acquaintances but he stopped in mid-sentence when he saw Nathan and stared at him in some astonishment and not a little alarm.
“Mr. Paine,” said Nathan quickly, doffing his hat. “It is good to see a fellow American—though I had rather it were in New York.”
Paine still said nothing but Nathan could almost read the thoughts that must be running through his head.
“Perhaps you do not remember me,” he continued, aware of the curious glances he was getting. “Captain Turner. Nathan Turner. Of the barque Speedwell. Of Salem. We met at the Philadelphia Hotel on the night of your arrest.”
“Aye,” said Paine, his expression a little more relaxed. “Captain Turner. What . . . how . . . ?” He spread his arms to indicate their present surroundings.
“I am suspected of smuggling,” Nathan told him, “or at least of associating with smugglers.”
Paine nodded as if he understood. He looked older and thinner than when Nathan had seen him last, which was not surprising after several months in prison. He had been held in solitary confinement since his famous meeting with Danton but now he was back in his communal cell. He’d had no word from the American Minister or any of his friends in the city and was anxious for whatever news Nathan could impart, which was not much. Later they talked more privately and Nathan told him that as far as he was aware the prison authorities still considered him to be an American seaman.