Blake's Reach

by Catherine Gaskin

‘If I don’t get back to England, Jane, then I know you will welcome Louise to Blake’s Reach in my place, and care for her.’

  He stood up then and began to make amiable, careless farewells to Paul, calling the tavern-keeper to refill Bordillet’s empty glass. Jane watched his stumbling exit, and watched Bouchet also rise and follow him to the door. She was startled to discover that it was not brandy, but tears, that blurred her last sight of him.

  Five

  The streets were emptying, as Charles had said, and their footsteps were too noisy on the cobbles. Jane had never before known the kind of fear that gripped her now ‒ not even those moments when the Dragoons had entered Barham had been like these. This was a fear of something unknown, a betrayal, a false word, a moment of time lost, and the hope of safety with it. She held her cloak tightly to her body, and paced her steps to Paul’s quick ones. The dark streets were no longer friendly.

  Albert Cornand’s shop in the Rue de Paris was locked and shuttered; it had a sad, deserted look ‒ grey plaster peeling off the walls, and no lights visible anywhere. Paul’s knock seemed thunderously loud, echoing in the canyon of those overhanging houses. To Jane it seemed as if everyone in the street must hear that knock, and come to stare at them, and to question.

  ‘Qui est là?’ The urgent whisper on the other side of the door startled her.

  ‘Fletcher! ‒ Captain of the Dolphin!’

  The bolts were pulled back softly, and the door swung open just enough to admit them.

  ‘Quickly!’ Then the door closed behind them, and they were in total darkness.

  ‘For Heaven’s sake bring a light!’ Paul said. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Pardon, Monsieur, but I did not want anyone who might be watching to see who it was came in.’

  ‘Is someone watching?’

  ‘I don’t know, Monsieur, but one can’t be too careful.’ As he spoke a door at the other side of the room opened and a woman stood there holding a candle. Jane glanced about her quickly, and recognized the room she had seen from the street earlier in the evening, the room that had been packed with Cornand’s patrons. There was the smell of wine characteristic of each place they had visited while searching for Bordillet, but here there was also the smell of bread and sweet pastries.

  The woman was tall, and had a frail appearance; it was hard to imagine her living with the sweet pastries and the wine.

  ‘Monsieur Fletcher! Thank God you have come!’ Her voice was a soft whisper as she moved towards them.

  ‘What is wrong, Madame?’

  ‘The Comtesse, she is going to die! We thought that you would not come back …’

  ‘How do you know she is going to die?’

  ‘Ah, Monsieur …!’ The light of the candle fell on Albert Cornand’s worn face; he had the pallor of someone who spends his life indoors, but his body was stocky and well-built. ‘She is worse!’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I fear it is but a few hours now.’

  Madame Cornand spoke quietly. ‘What are we to do, Monsieur? She must leave here, or she will die on our hands ‒ and how are we to explain the body of a dead woman? Before God we have been loyal, Monsieur, but this is asking too much!’

  ‘Dying …’ Paul looked at Jane. ‘All of this ‒ and she will die, after all.’

  ‘Yes, Monsieur, she will die ‒ and very likely we will die also for harbouring an enemy of the People. It is cruel …’ Jane had the feeling that Madame Cornand had been brave for a long time, and now, at last, the control was beginning to slip.

  ‘Courage, Cecile!’ her husband whispered. ‘We are not taken yet, and perhaps Monsieur will devise some …’ He broke off. They had all heard the quick footsteps in the street outside, and had paid no attention except to lower their voices still further. Now the footsteps had stopped outside. Someone rapped lightly on the door.

  ‘Qui est là?’

  ‘Un ami ‒ un ami de Paul Fletcher!’

  ‘It’s Charles!’ Paul said. ‘Quickly, open the door! Get him inside before he’s seen!’

  Charles slipped inside like a shadow. He was panting, and drops of sweat stood out on his forehead. He leaned back against the door.

  ‘I got away from him! He followed me to the quai, so I went into a wine shop and had some brandy. Then I went into the brothel next door. He didn’t follow me there ‒ he waited outside. As long as you have enough gold they don’t ask questions in those places, and they helped me through a sky-light, and showed me a passage into the next street. I told them it was my brother-in-law. They were most sympathetic.’

  He stood upright then, taking a deep breath. ‘Forgive me ‒ I stand here talking, while there’s so much to be done.’ He looked at Cecile Cornand. ‘Madame, is she up there?’ he said, nodding towards the stairs.

  ‘A moment, Charles!’ Paul said. ‘It’s more serious than we thought. The Comtesse is dying ‒ Cornand says only a few hours now.’

  Jane watched his face as he listened; instead of shock or grief there seemed to be anger there. He was angry with Paul for speaking the words.

  ‘I don’t believe it!’ he said. ‘I don’t believe it! She can’t die now that she is so close to freedom! Louise has more courage than that!’

  ‘It isn’t a question of courage, Monsieur,’ Cecile Cornand said gently. ‘I think the Comtesse thought of herself as dead when she knew Pierre Latour would not return. She is worn out ‒ there is nothing she can do for herself.’

  Charles scowled. ‘I don’t believe this talk,’ he said. ‘Let me see her.’ He motioned Madame Cornand towards the stairs. She moved to go ahead of him with the candle, but on the bottom step she paused, and turned back.

  ‘Monsieur, you understand the position? If the Comtesse dies here Albert and I, we are lost! There is no way we can take her body from here …’

  He cut her short. ‘She will leave here alive, and you will not be troubled, Madame! Now ‒ please take me to her!’

  Jane climbed the stairs behind him, her eyes fixed on his erect shoulders and back. He was a strong man, and a courageous one, and she wondered if he had, perhaps, the strength to will Louise to live ‒ if he could breathe into her his own spirit of defiance. He was so stubborn in his belief, and single-minded in his determination to get her to freedom that, for the moment, no other life but hers was of any importance. Paul and herself, Albert and Cecile Cornand, the Duvals waiting on the Dolphin, they were all helpless before him, doing what he bid them like puppets, bending before his formidable purpose. Perhaps Charles knew that with Louise it would be the same, and from him she would gather the strength to go with them. Whatever happened, they were all in Charles’s hands, compelled to do as he instructed them.

  ***

  Jane looked at the face of the woman in the bed, and she wondered how she could ever have feared her. Louise de Montignot could have been any age; her face was not wrinkled, but it was drawn and haggard, so that she appeared, at first, to be an old woman. Her hair, which might have been blonde once, was almost white. But there were traces of beauty in the features ‒ delicately fashioned chin and brows; her eyes were light blue. She wore a plain, coarse bedgown; the clumsy material stood away from her thin bones. Her hands were blue veined and transparent.

  She had spoken to Charles briefly when he entered. Now she closed her eyes, and seemed to rest for a time, with long intervals between drawing each breath, as if she were trying to save her strength to speak again. Her eyelids flickered open heavily; she moved her hand in a slight gesture that motioned Jane closer to her bedside.

  ‘Monsieur Fletcher told me you had come over from England to be with me,’ she said slowly. ‘It is most generous ‒ I am grateful. But you must go now, while there is yet time.’ Her hand touched Jane’s briefly, then it fell back on to the bed cover. She closed her eyes again, and the difficult, slow rhythm of her breathing was resumed.

  ‘Charles!’ Paul called softly from the shadows over by the window. ‘Come here!’

  Charles rose stiffly f
rom his seat by Louise. Jane caught a glimpse of his face, rigid and sober, his lips folded in a tight line. Albert and Cecile Cornand stood by the open door, and as Paul spoke there was a slight movement from them, a stirring of alarm. Albert took a step further into the room, as if he meant to join them. But then he paused, shaking his head.

  Cecile Cornand had hung blankets before the two windows to make sure none of the damp night air would reach Louise. While Charles had sat by the bedside, Paul had moved between the two windows, each on a different side of the triangular-shaped room, and parted the blankets cautiously, just enough to give him a view of the streets below. Now he stepped back and gave place to Charles.

  ‘Down there!’ he said.

  Charles stood by the window, looking down into the Rue de Paris. The seconds slipped away, and an unspeakable suspense gripped the people in the room. It even communicated itself to Louise, through the isolation of her weakness. Her eyelids moved.

  ‘What is it?’ she whispered to Jane.

  Jane touched her hand reassuringly. ‘Nothing ‒ nothing at all.’ Louise didn’t seem to hear her.

  Charles stirred, and dropped the blanket back into place.

  ‘It’s he …’ he said wearily. ‘It’s Bouchet ‒ he has more cunning and more tenacity than I gave him credit for.’

  From Louise there was suddenly a sharp cry, a much louder and stronger tone than she had used before.

  ‘Who is it? Have you been followed?’

  Charles spun round. ‘Keep her quiet!’ The words rang out harshly, cruelly.

  Then, as he realized that it was Louise who had spoken, his face underwent a swift change. It had the stricken, contrite look of one who has sinned unforgivably. For the first time Jane saw self-accusation and dismay in Charles’s face. He strode across the room to Louise’s side, bending low over the bed. His hand groped wildly for hers; but his voice was very firm and strong when he spoke.

  ‘Louise, I love you! I have always loved you!’

  ‘I know.’

  The listeners barely heard her. The words were a whisper, a sigh. Charles straightened, and laid her hand gently back on the bed cover. Then he motioned them all to follow him from the room; they went without question, feeling that they ought never to have been there; and yet they knew that Charles didn’t care that his words had belonged to them all. Nothing mattered to him but that Louise should hear them.

  They grouped together on the landing at the head of the stairs. Charles closed the door softly, and then turned to meet their questioning gaze. He looked firmly at each face in turn, not shrinking from what he saw there.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I regret I’ve brought this trouble on all of you. The man out there in the street is Bouchet, an agent of the Paris Commune.’

  Madame Cornand covered her face quickly, in a gesture of distress.

  He went on. ‘I believed I had shaken him off. I came here only because I thought my presence would give the Comtesse better heart and strength for the journey.’

  He shrugged, but not casually, as was his custom; it was a gesture eloquent of the inevitability of fate, and his acceptance of it. They had the feeling that he spoke the words because he had to, because it was owing to them that he should speak. But his thoughts and needs were back behind the closed door.

  Slowly Madame Cornand’s hand came down from her face. ‘Monsieur, we cannot blame you for mistakes made from compassion. But ‒’ she tried to hold her voice steady ‒ ‘but what are we to do?’

  ‘Bouchet has only one concern,’ Charles said. ‘He has been sent to find Louise, and because he recognized me, he has found her. He has never heard the name Cornand, and the Commune expects no arrests of such people. Neither will he risk his quarry to follow you, Jane ‒ or Paul. So long as this house is watched only by Bouchet, you are able to go. If you go immediately, Bouchet can do nothing. He is helpless. He has followed me here, and here he will stay until the National Guard can be called out to take the house, and whomever they should find inside it. When they come they must find only Louise and myself. She will not live to be moved from that room, and for myself … I may not leave her.’

  Six

  It was all finished; by now Louise was dead, and Charles taken.

  All day, while the Dolphin beat her way against perverse winds towards the English coast, they had lived with the knowledge that this must happen. But while the day had been young, with the sun hot and strong on the white sails and reflected blindingly off the surface of the water, they had not quite believed it. They had heard Charles’s words, and knew that he was committing himself to his own death, but they had clung to some slight hope of his escape. They didn’t speak of this to each other ‒ none but the most necessary words passed between them ‒ but they had kept the thought stubbornly. Then, as the shadows of the masts and the bulwarks grew long on the deck, and the white chalk cliffs came into view, they began to admit secretly the foolishness of this hope. There was no possible escape for Charles and he, better than anyone, had known it.

  As if drawn by a common thought, they had come together in one place at the bulwark, watching the coastline as the Dolphin slowly inched her way to Folkestone. Paul had taken on no cargo in Le Havre, and for once the Dolphin had no need to fear a Revenue Cruiser coming into sight. The sun lay gently and pleasantly on the low hills of Kent; to the watchers on board the Dolphin the land looked safe and peaceful.

  Suddenly Albert Cornand spoke: ‘It will be all over by now ‒ yes, by now it is all finished, and he is perhaps even on his way to Paris.’

  ‘He was a brave man,’ his wife said gently.

  ‘He was a rash fool,’ Marie Duval commented.

  Auguste Duval sighed, ‘He was a man in love.’ His tone was low, but for the first time since he had come aboard the Dolphin it seemed that he was prepared to hold to something on his own conviction.

  ‘Never will I forget it,’ Cecile Cornand said. ‘I hope I never again have to live through minutes as long as those when we were getting to the quai. That man, Bouchet, staring at us … and not knowing if he’d let us go, or if there’d be a guard on the quai when we got there.’ Her voice trembled. All day she had been waiting to say these things, and she couldn’t hold them any longer.

  Marie Duval looked at her hostilely. ‘How do you think we felt? Trapped like rats on this ship, and waiting every second to hear the Guard come on board searching! And not knowing what had happened to those three … going off like that and leaving us … I tell you, Madame, they were long hours.’

  ‘Not so long as the time he spent waiting for them to come,’ Cornand said. ‘Though, for him and the Comtesse I suppose it was short. Strange to think of them alone there in our shop, Cecile. I wonder if she died before the Guard came. I hope so … It must have been a very bad time for him …’

  Jane turned suddenly and faced them.

  ‘Can’t you stop talking about it?’ she demanded fiercely. ‘He made his own choice … and if he wanted to be with the woman he loved, then he had what he wanted. There was no “bad time” for Charles. There would only have been a bad time for him if she had died alone, before she knew that he had come for her. Don’t you see ‒ as long as she knew that, he didn’t care!’

  ‘It’s well for the rich, who can afford to be romantic,’ Madame Duval said. ‘For us it is different … we are still alive, and have to go on living. And what with? And how? Everything we had is gone, Mademoiselle! We are ruined … ruined!’

  ‘I’ve heard you say that before,’ Jane answered, ‘and I don’t believe it. You have your lives, and you have a future. England is a strange country to you, but to make a living and to have a future is not any more difficult there than in Paris. People are much the same wherever you go ‒ as greedy or as kind. There’s love and there’s hate. There are people who’ll help you, and those who won’t.’

  She nodded to Auguste Duval. ‘You take your talent with you, Monsieur, and your wife has shrewdness enough for six people.’r />
  Marie Duval shrugged. ‘You talk easily, Mademoiselle!’

  Jane was not listening to her. Her gaze had shifted to the Cornands, still leaning against the bulwark gazing at the land where they would be alone and without resources. What was there to say to them, she wondered. They had no talents, and no gold. They were ordinary people with only the virtue of the courage that had kept them loyal to the dead Royalist cause; now their courage would have to see them through loneliness and perhaps poverty. They might later decide it had been too high a price to pay. There was nothing to say to them, she decided ‒ nothing they didn’t already know, and they would not thank her for platitudes. They had each other, and they knew that also. Each counted on the courage and loyalty of the other. There was no need either to point out that to them. So there was nothing to say; they knew well enough what was ahead of them.

  She slipped away from the group and moved aft, where Paul was taking his turn at the wheel.

  She had spent no time alone with him since they had left Le Havre. She knew that he had been on deck most of the night, and this morning had flung himself into the hammock Albert Cornand had vacated to snatch a few hours of sleep. All through the day he had been preoccupied, as if he hardly knew she was there. But now he smiled at her, and his eyes came to life.

  ‘A few hours and we’ll berth in Folkestone, Jane. It seems wrong to be heading back this way in broad daylight, without a cargo and without a worry about a Revenue Cruiser.’

  She leaned back against the bulwark, slightly behind him. He had to look back over his shoulder to see her.

  ‘That’s not what you’re really thinking, Paul.’

  ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘I’m thinking of him ‒ and so are you.’

  ‘Yes …’ she said. ‘I’m thinking of him.’

  Charles would stay with them all of their lives. They would never be able to forget Charles, not they, nor the Cornands, nor the Duvals. For her and Paul he was someone they would remember, not at intervals, with faint surprise that he had gone so long unthought of, but he would be with them constantly. Jane knew that he had had many things to teach her, and that she would not be finished realizing and learning them for a long time. She wondered if he had ever known or cared how much she would learn from him.