Time of Terror

by Hunter, Seth

  “I believe my masters thought it would give me some protection,” he said, “if I was caught.”

  “Or throw the blame upon the Americans for your misdemeanours,” replied Paine thoughtfully.

  Nathan was not sure what he meant.

  “Well think on it, man. If your mission succeeds all well and good. Danton is the new Messiah. He makes peace. We all go home. If it fails . . .” He shrugged . . . “Well, you are an American citizen acting on instruction from the United States government. It would not please the French I can tell you. They do not like people interfering in their affairs. It certainly would not please Robespierre.”

  Especially if he discovered the true nature of his business in France, Nathan reflected, and that he was wrecking the French economy with forged currency.

  But he kept this thought to himself. Paine was still a Revolutionist. He might be supposed to raise some objection if the Revolution collapsed in an avalanche of useless paper, manufactured in Britain.

  They met frequently after this first encounter, usually in Paine’s cell when he was not writing. He was completing an essay on the character of Robespierre, a subject that obsessed him more than most; just as Robespierre, he claimed, was obsessed with him. He thought that Robespierre was jealous of his reputation as a philosopher and a writer and that this was the real reason he had ordered his arrest.

  “He has long had pretensions to the literary life,” he argued. “But unhappily for the rest of humankind he failed to impress his talent upon his contemporaries and like many a mediocrity before him took to politics—by way of the law. Mark my words, the most dangerous men in the world are those who fancy themselves as artists or writers—or even actors—and who, in frustration at their lack of success, become politicians: a profession for which their poor artistic endeavours appears to make them remarkably well suited. Possibly because of the element of duplicity involved.”

  What made Robespierre particularly dangerous, in Paine’s eyes, was his utter conviction that he was right. About everything.

  “And therefore any who disagree with his judgement must be wilfully blind or motivated by evil intent and destroyed without compunction. Though interestingly, he is not by nature inclined to violence. He cannot bear the thought of bloodshed, though he forces himself to order it for the sake of society. But he would faint at the sight of a cut finger.”

  “If he was aware of a plot to destroy the Revolution,” Nathan ventured, “would he not be justified in employing extreme measures to counter it?”

  The discovery of the forged notes in the catacombs had been preying on his mind. Could it be that the British government’s attempt to undermine the Revolution had only succeeded in undermining the moderates and driving the French people into the hands of the extremists? That in some ways the British government had itself brought about the Terror?

  “Robespierre sees plots where they do not exist,” Paine insisted. “He uses them to justify every attack on liberty, justice and human rights. It is he who has destroyed the Revolution, and any who have a different opinion to his own.”

  Nathan conceded that he was probably right. In truth, he was more concerned in escaping the Terror than explaining it.

  Slowly, forever looking over his shoulder, he had worked out a plan.

  Sewn into the hem of his boots—the boots he had recovered at the last minute in the House of Arrest—were twenty gold pieces. This gave him a means of shopping in the prison store—and of bribing the guards. But he had to be careful. The possession of gold was a criminal offence in the Republic, punishable by death. You could not simply go to the store, slap your gold coin on the counter and wait for the change.

  What you did was slip it under the counter.

  The guards at the prison store were in the money-changing business. Those prisoners in possession of gold coin—and Nathan was not the only one—could exchange it secretly for assignats. At the rate of 100 livres to one louis d’or.

  It took Nathan a few days to discover this but once he had he became a regular visitor to the store. Prisoners were permitted to enter in batches of ten at a time to what had once been the theatre lobby and to stand in line at the old box office where a list of stores and prices were displayed. The stores themselves were kept where the theatre stalls used to be. And for private conversations—and transactions—there was the old manager’s office.

  This was where Nathan changed his money and where—a few days later—he explored the possibility of meeting one of the women prisoners.

  “Name?” inquired the guard, taking out a tattered notebook and licking the lead of his pencil.

  Nathan hesitated.

  “You have to give me her name,” the fellow sighed, “if I am to give her the message.”

  “You will give her a message?”

  “Well how else are you going to meet her?” The fellow shook his head.

  “Sara,” said Nathan. “Sara Seton.”

  But she might no longer be known as that. What was he to do? He did not wish to get her into trouble. But she was in trouble enough already. He had to take the risk.

  “Or she might be known as Sara de la Tour d’Auvergne,” he added.

  The fellow wrote it down.

  “When?”

  “When?”

  “When do you want to meet?” Rolling his eyes.

  “Tomorrow? Tomorrow night?”

  Nathan anticipated some objection but the fellow merely said, “Two hundred livres. Payable in advance.”

  Nathan returned to his cell to find Brand rooting through his bag of medicines and looking worried.

  “Thomas Paine is ill,” he said. “He has a fever.”

  “What kind of fever?”

  Brand looked at him in exasperation. “I don’t know the precise nature and even if I did I would not have the medicines to treat it. And he certainly does not have the strength to fight it.”

  Nathan went with him to see the patient. He looked terrible. He lay on his bed covered in a thin blanket, shivering and covered in sweat. He could not eat and could barely speak.

  The weather had turned warm after a period of rain and the cell was stifling. Brand asked the turnkey if they could leave the cell door open at night to allow the air to circulate a little.

  “I cannot do that,” he protested. He was a great, slow ox of a man called Bastien, not one of nature’s brightest but amiable enough and willing to oblige if there was profit in it, at no trouble or inconvenience to himself.

  “Why not?” inquired Nathan.

  Bastien frowned as he gave this some thought. One possible reason occurred to him.

  “They might escape?” he proposed.

  “How can they escape?” Nathan demanded. “The outer door is always locked. Even were they to leave the cell they could not leave the block, much less the prison itself.”

  “This is true,” said Bastien, nodding thoughtfully. “What’s it worth?”

  They settled on fifty livres.

  But it did little to alleviate Paine’s distress and Dr. Brand was not hopeful.

  “It is as much a mental affliction as anything physical,” he told Nathan. “He has suffered months of anxiety under the shadow of the guillotine. The discomfort and the indignities have contributed to his condition but I believe the primary cause is disappointment. He grieves at the course the Revolution has taken. And now he must face the possibility that he has been wrong and men like Edmund Burke were right. In short, he has lost the will to live.”

  “It were a pity to die from losing an argument with Edmund Burke,” Nathan remarked, but he acknowledged that philosophers were more sensitive than mortal men.

  But then Paine’s will to live ceased to be of any relevance.

  After dinner Nathan went back to Paine’s cell to see if there
was anything he could do for him. He sat beside him for a while reading to him and mopping his brow from a bowl of lukewarm water. Then Bastien came round jangling his keys. Nathan took this as the signal for him to be locked up in his own cell for the night but as he left he saw to his surprise that Bastien was closing the door behind him and preparing to turn the key in the lock.

  “I thought we had agreed to leave it open,” he said.

  Bastien looked troubled.

  “I regret,” he said, “that it cannot stay open tonight. I will have to give you back your money.”

  “Why not?”

  But even as he asked the answer came to him.

  “They are on the List,” he exclaimed.

  Bastien said nothing but continued searching among the keys on his ring.

  “How many?” Nathan demanded.

  Bastien still would not answer.

  “Is Paine one of them?”

  Bastien looked at him directly, his big round eye almost tearful, and nodded. “The only one,” he confirmed.

  “But that’s inhuman,” Nathan rebuked him. He recognised the absurdity of this observation. “They’ll have to carry him out of here. He’ll be dead long before they fetch him to the tribunal, let alone the guillotine.”

  “It won’t be the first time,” said Bastien. This was true. They had executed corpses before, in the interests of revolutionary justice.

  Nathan thought quickly.

  “Leave the door,” he said. “Leave him in ignorance until they come.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “I will give you another fifty livres to leave the door open.”

  The turnkey looked at him. Greed battled with the fear of exposure.

  “I must still put the number upon the door,” he insisted.

  “Then do so,” said Nathan, “while the door is open.”

  He could see the ox brain struggling to weigh up the implications of this.

  “After all, they cannot escape if the outer door is locked,” Nathan assured him before Bastien could think of another way the prisoners might turn it to their advantage.

  He went to fetch the money from where he had concealed it in his cell. When he returned Bastien was locking up one of the other cells and Nathan took the opportunity to take one of Paine’s cellmates aside and tell him what was happening.

  “What are we to do?” the man agonised, pulling at his whiskers. He was a Belgian, one of three in Paine’s cell: army officers who had been on leave in Paris when the French had marched into their country.

  “Why, when he has gone you must rub the number off the door,” Nathan told him, marvelling that he appeared as dull-witted as the jailer. But then he had a better idea. When the door was open it lay flat against the wall and the jailer had chalked the number on the side that was facing him. “No. Simply close the door. Then the mark will still be there, but on the inside, do you see?”

  Bastien never accompanied the Death Squad on their rounds. If the Belgian opened the door again after they had been and gone the turnkey might not realise how the error had occurred and with any luck it would serve for another night.

  Nathan returned to his cell and lay awake listening for the familiar sounds of the Death Squad. They came a little after midnight. The boots on the stairs. The jangle of keys. The names called out loud. And then the screams. But he had no way of knowing if they had stopped at Paine’s cell. Not until morning when he saw Bastien again.

  “They did not take him,” he said. “I cannot understand it. The number is clearly marked on the door.”

  “Well, I won’t tell anyone,” said Nathan, “if you don’t.”

  Bastien gave him a reproachful look.

  “They are bound to find out,” he said. “They’ll be back for him tonight.”

  This was true. And this time, Bastien said, he was going to make sure the door was locked and then there could be no mistake.

  Nathan agonised all through the long hot day. That evening he was due to meet Sara in the prison store. But could he go through with it, knowing that he was leaving Thomas Paine to certain death?

  He decided he could not. He would have to take Paine with him.

  He worked out another plan. It was desperate but so were the circumstances. He would have to involve others. Brand, certainly. And the three Belgian officers. Between them they would get Paine down to the prison store. And then . . . Well, there were never more than two or three prison staff there. They would overcome them and reach the secret passage before they managed to alert the guards.

  But first he had to ensure that the passage was still there.

  When the prison store opened at four Nathan was the first in line. They knew what he had come for.

  “Round the back,” said the guard, jerking his head towards the curtain at the back of the lobby.

  The guard he had paid was waiting for him on the other side with a lamp. “You’ll need this,” he said. And then with a smirk, “And there is a mattress on the stage area. For the use of our clients.”

  “How long?”

  “It will be an hour before I can let the women in.”

  “But—she knows?”

  “She has had the message. If she doesn’t come, that’s up to her.”

  So he had an hour. Not long for all he had to do.

  He walked through what had once been the theatre stalls, now with the seats removed and the area stacked with provisions. A regular black market. A short flight of wooden steps took him up on to the stage and what had presumably once been the backstage area; nothing now dividing them. There was no sign of a door or any other means of exit or entrance. Le Mulet must have got it wrong—or made the whole thing up.

  Then his eye fell on the mattress. He kicked it aside with his boot. And there it was. A trapdoor set into the floor of the stage.

  Nathan worked back the bolt, not without effort, and heaved it open. A flight of steps descended into darkness. He picked up the lantern and climbed down into what was clearly a props room. His light exposed various weird and wonderful objects that had obviously been used in past productions: a dragon and the face of an ogre, suits of armour, wood and plaster trees and parts of a castle. And there were the costumes Le Mulet had mentioned. Hundreds of them. On wheeled racks stacked against the back wall. In a fever of impatience now Nathan pulled and pushed them aside, setting up clouds of dust and moths . . .

  And right in the middle he found the door.

  He seized the brass doorknob and twisted it both ways. But the door was locked and there was no key. He searched the walls, the floor, even rooted among the racks of costumes. He could not possibly have come so far only to be cheated by a locked door.

  He lifted the lamp to examine the lock. A mortise lock screwed into the wood. He looked around for something he might use as a wrench but there was nothing. He considered piling some of the props against it and starting a fire but the staff would smell the smoke.

  In despair and anger he kicked the door with his boot . . . and the lock moved. He kicked again and the entire lock fell out leaving a hole big enough for him to put his hand through.

  He almost laughed aloud. Le Mulet’s men must have chipped the back off the lock and stuck something there to hold it in place. He turned the handle again and the door swung obligingly open . . . And there were the steps where the stones had been piled.

  Nathan grabbed the lamp and descended into the Black Chapel. Just as it had been when he had first seen it: the Beast on its altar, the upside down Christ . . . And the tunnel leading back into the Empire of the Dead.

  He was so exhilarated he could have shouted out loud. But he still had much to do. He had to wait for Sara and leave her here. Then make some excuse to the guards and return to Paine’s cell and persuade the Belgians to co-operate .
. .

  He turned to go back to the theatre but then something made him pause. A smell.

  Of candle wax.

  His candle? But then he lifted the lamp and saw the others on the altar with the wisps of smoke curling from the wicks.

  He had started to turn when the blow came, catching him high on the head and pitching him senseless at the foot of the altar.

  Chapter 42

  the Death List

  A throbbing pain in his head centred at a point just above his right ear and a red glow in his eyes like a fireball; then sunlight, flickering through a moving window, hurting his eyes. A jolting sensation as if he was in a coach.

  Sudden shadow, the light taking shape and form. He was in a coach. And there was a figure seated opposite him, a child . . . No . . . He tried to focus on it raising his hand against the glare. Bulbeau. Tugging at his whiskers and smiling to himself as if at some private joke.

  And he was not alone. There was another man sitting next to him, of normal stature. Someone Nathan had not seen before.

  Nathan put a hand up to his head where it hurt and felt a lump there and dried blood crusted in his hair.

  “Sorry about the head,” said Bulbeau, still grinning. “It was Pierrepoint. He gets excited.”

  Nathan looked at the man sitting next to him. Was he Pierrepoint? Judging from his expression he probably was.

  “Sorry,” he said. “He told me to do it.”

  The coach emerged from the shadow of the buildings and the sunlight lanced through the window once more. And yet it was the dying of the light, the last before sunset, and Nathan saw that they were crossing a vast square with a fountain in the centre and a tall statue of a goddess, black against the sun. And he knew where they were—for this was where the Bastille had once stood; before they tore it down and built the fountain in its place. And the goddess was Isis, the Egyptian goddess of rebirth whose ample breasts gushed the “milk of liberty” on ceremonial occasions.