‘Everything I have done,’ he said, ‘has been to end this war.’
Hannah almost laughed. ‘How you can say that misleading us all, that – that lying will bring about—’ She stopped. This was pointless. ‘What now, then? Do you intend to shoot me? Return me to one of your prisons?’
‘No.’ He flicked back the curtain to broaden his view of the place de l’Opéra and the boulevards that bordered it. ‘We are going to wait for your mother.’
III
Elizabeth rose from the empty ammunition crate she’d been perched on for much of the afternoon. ‘We’ve seen enough,’ she announced over the shell-fire, lifting the hem of her dress to nudge Clem with her boot. ‘Brandy at the Grand, I think.’
Clem knotted his curtain-scarf and climbed to his feet. There had been a thaw that morning, melting the frozen ground to sludge, but as the sun sank it was turning arctic again. The prospect of hard liquor – of the good stuff from Elizabeth’s private supply, imbibed in the comfort of her sitting room – was welcome indeed.
‘Hear, hear,’ he said. ‘Right behind you.’
They left the western terrace of Mont-Valérien, picking their way around its outer wall to the track that led to Paris. The fort, largest and best-loved of the fourteen that encircled the city, loomed beside them in the misty twilight. General Trochu’s idea had been that it would serve as an anchor to the sortie, providing the soldiers with a symbol of French steadfastness and strength. In this it had most certainly failed.
The day’s action had been focused on the Buzenval Ridge, the natural barrier between Paris and Versailles and the site of numerous unassailable Prussian positions. It had been a thoroughly depressing spectacle, bloody and futile. From the western terrace Clem and Elizabeth had watched the French battalions slog up the muddy slopes, through the remains of farmsteads and orchards; grind to a halt under a punishing barrage, dropping in their dozens, unable or unwilling to advance any further; and then eventually start to break apart, drifting back down, defeated once more.
As a sign of Parisian desperation – or perhaps in line with Besson’s theory about the government’s plan to prune the city’s reds – the National Guard had been allowed a much greater role than in previous attacks, accounting for nearly half the total force. In addition to their usual heavy drinking, cowardice and insubordination, the citizen-soldiers had also displayed a panicky impulsiveness with their rifles that had led to the accidental killing and wounding of scores of their own countrymen. Clem had even witnessed a band of stragglers blast away at General Trochu’s staff after mistaking the mounted officers for a party of Uhlans; at least one had died in his saddle, slumping onto his horse’s neck as it galloped off towards Saint-Cloud.
Neither could the militiamen be convinced to remain on the ridge overnight, abandoning footholds for which so many of their comrades had fallen without a thought. To the rear of Mont-Valérien Clem and Elizabeth encountered a swollen river of deserters, inching through the ruined village of Puteaux to the Pont de Neuilly. Elizabeth was soon recognised and the Leopard remarks began. Once again, her Monsieur Allix had been a vocal advocate of a large-scale sortie, with the National Guard as its spearhead; and once again he’d been conspicuous by his absence when the fighting had actually started. Elizabeth put on her usual show of faith. She’d made excuses for him on previous occasions, supplying suitable tales of derring-do to explain why he’d removed himself at the critical moment, and she did the same here. On she chattered, her hands working through their repertoire of Gallic gesticulations, trying to stay genial in the face of queries that ranged from amused and faintly indignant to downright hostile.
‘Good Lord,’ she murmured to Clem at one point, ‘I am not responsible for the man.’
Civilians thronged around the gate at the head of the avenue de la Grande Armée, lining the road down to the place de l’Étoile and beyond. They were genuinely shocked to see the heroes they’d cheered out that morning returning to the city with nothing to show but a long list of the dead and maimed. These people, drunk on their own patriotic bombast, had plainly expected the day to close with the National Guard singing the ‘Marseillaise’ in the courtyard at Versailles. Many women were anxiously inspecting the soldiers as they passed, asking after missing husbands and sons. Clem felt a keen longing for his bed; he’d burrow down among the sheets like a mole, pull the eiderdown over his head and not come out until there was a train waiting to convey him directly to Calais.
‘Mrs Pardy! I say, Mrs Pardy!’
A corps of newspapermen was standing in the greenish light of a petroleum lamp, casting questions into the returning militia in an attempt to gather details of the battle. Montague Inglis was on the margins of this group, bent over slightly with one long arm raised into the air. The Pardys stopped and he came to meet them, giving Elizabeth a bow and Clem a quick nod. Little remained of the smooth, adversarial, slightly suspect fellow who’d met them in the lobby of the Grand the previous September. His beard was reaching mad hermit proportions, and his clothes bore evidence of heavy repair. There was a nervousness about him, also – Elizabeth had obviously cut him loose rather against his will.
‘Mr Inglis, did you not venture outside the wall today?’ she asked. ‘Whatever will the readers of the Sentinel do, deprived of your first-hand observations on the sortie?’
The journalist laughed, a sad croak from somewhere in his beard. ‘That is more your style, Lizzie, than mine. Besides, the outcome of this piece of idiocy was never in doubt. The rabbit, for some unknown reason, decided to leave his hole and scamper about before the stoat.’
Even with everything they’d seen that day, Elizabeth could not let this stand. ‘How very like you to pour disdain on the sacrifice of those—’
Inglis lifted a palm. ‘My dear woman,’ he interrupted, ‘I really don’t want to run through this debate again. I came to speak with you with a particular purpose in mind – a warning, if you like, to impart to one I still consider a friend.’
Elizabeth’s stare said: Well?
‘There is talk,’ Inglis glanced back at the newspapermen, ‘of something building up in the northern arrondissements. They say the rappel is being beaten from Montmartre to Ménilmontant.’
‘Hardly unusual.’
‘Perhaps not, but several of the ringleaders are apparently naming your man – your Leopard. They are claiming that he is a traitor.’
Clem tensed. He’d all but given up on Jean-Jacques Allix. Besson had seemed indifferent to the discovery he’d made in the Jardin des Plantes. Clem got the feeling that he’d already guessed Allix was the author of the letter – that he’d been sure of it from the beginning. Clem himself had not seen Allix since that meeting before the leopard cage, nearly a month ago now. He was beyond reach, beyond investigation, popping up unannounced at the odd ultra rally, but existing principally in the sensational paragraphs of Elizabeth’s reports. Clem had imagined many different motives for Allix’s mysterious behaviour. Outright treachery, though, alleged by his own people – this was new.
‘Inevitable, I suppose,’ Elizabeth sighed. ‘There is no medium in this blessed city between the Capitol and the Tarpeian Rock: if you do not exist in a state of continual triumph you must be enacting a betrayal. They will rage and rant until he returns from his mission – and then none of them will even have the backbone to repeat their baseless slander to his face.’ Her features softened very slightly. ‘But I thank you for your concern, Mont. It is always helpful to hear of these little stupidities.’
Inglis bowed again. Clem attempted to learn more about the accusations against Allix, but the journalist had nothing to tell. It became increasingly clear, in fact, that he was in a state of some distress; the Marquis de Périchaux, an old friend of his from the Jockey Club and a colonel in the loyalist militia, had been killed that day near the Château de Buzenval. Inglis had seen the marquis’s body being borne into the city, off to his mansion on the boulevard Haussmann. The sight had plainly stagg
ered him. Although capable of great hardness, Elizabeth Pardy was not a hard soul; laying her fingers on Inglis’s forearm, she asked him to the Grand for a glass of brandy. He accepted at once, and the three of them carried on towards the centre of the city.
They were walking along the Champs Elysées, almost at the place de la Concorde, when the opening shots of that night’s bombardment rumbled through Paris. The Buzenval sortie clearly hadn’t affected it at all; it was a different, entirely independent part of the Prussian siege machine. The atmosphere was already turbulent, thousands of civilians and militia thronging in the near-darkness, jostling, arguing and sobbing. As the barrage settled into its bludgeoning rhythm the people let out an enormous, weary groan. Some began to wail uncontrollably; others scaled lampposts and Morris columns, screaming slogans or launching into tirades.
‘It really does beggar belief,’ said Inglis over the noise. ‘These Prussians must have lumps of deuced granite where their hearts should be. They are deliberately aiming for our hospitals and churches, you know. Towers, domes, steeples – the blackguards are using them as targets.’
‘It’s a crime, Mr Inglis,’ Clem agreed. ‘A bloody crime.’
The Pardys, of course, had undertaken a full journalistic tour of the bombarded arrondissements. Elizabeth had insisted on it, both to assess the destruction being wrought and to experience what it was like to be under fire; and Clem, reinstated as the default assistant, had been obliged to accompany her. Despite the smashed paving stones in the place du Panthéon and the single hole punched in the golden dome of Les Invalides, the general level of damage had struck Clem as surprisingly light – but the mad fear he’d felt when a salvo of shells had shrilled overhead, cracking and rattling in an adjacent street, had definitely been great enough. It had been another hour, however, an endless, nerve-racking hour, before he managed to persuade his mother to stop conversing with the dazed-looking locals and return to the safer side of the Seine.
‘Little wonder that they’ve murdered so many innocents,’ Inglis continued with uncharacteristic feeling, ‘so many damned children. I went to the funeral, Lizzie, of those poor little fellows from the Lycée Saint-Nicholas. I knew one of their fathers – a big name at the Bourse. The anger at the graveside, the sheer incomprehension … it was beyond words. That Kaiser is a Herod, a blood-soaked modern Herod, and History will judge him accordingly.’
This incident had occurred some days earlier at a boarding school on the rue de Vaugirard, just by the Luxembourg Palace. A shell had flown in through a dormitory window, killing four young boys as they slept. Righteous fury had swept the city; a great boost had been given to those calling for another sortie.
They were crossing the Concorde now, past the statue of Strasbourg with its lapful of withered garlands. Inglis accepted one of Clem’s stale cigarettes, exhaling a long feather of smoke. He appeared close to tears.
‘Have you been keeping up with your animals, Mont?’ Elizabeth asked, thinking to soothe him with a favoured topic. ‘We went to see the elephants slaughtered – but for some reason my foolish son then refused to queue up at Voisin to purchase us a portion of their meat.’
The journalist stayed quiet for a few seconds, squeezing the bridge of his nose and taking another drag on his cigarette.
‘Oh yes,’ he replied, his voice lighter and a touch forced, ‘I certainly had me some elephant. Had to try it, didn’t I? Trunk of Pollux, I believe it was, for no less than forty shillings a pound. I went at it like Pickwick’s fat boy, Lizzie, but I must confess that I found the stuff far from toothsome – damnably coarse and oily. The stranger the beast, it seems, the worse the dinner. Still, allowances must be made.’ He indicated the string of petroleum lamps running from the Concorde along the rue Royale. ‘Our cooks are out of fuel, and the solution advised by this blockheaded government is that they use those ghastly contraptions as an alternative source of heat. The chefs of Paris can work wonders with very poor materials, but when they are called upon to cook an elephant with a spirit lamp the thing is almost beyond their ingenuity.’
The entrance of the Grand was the only bright spot on the boulevard des Capucines, dozens of lanterns hanging from its porch to aid the medical personnel passing continually beneath. A terrible scene no doubt awaited them within. Clem had grown accustomed to much about life in besieged Paris, from the hunger and cold to the oppressive boredom; the constant cannon-fire was to him like the ticking of so many clocks. The horrors of the hotel lobby, however, especially in the aftermath of a battle, could never be diminished. He peered apprehensively at the canvas curtains, already hearing the shrieks and the pitiful, childlike whimpers – smelling the torn flesh and exposed organs. Don’t look, he instructed himself; just don’t look.
There were three militiamen, perhaps four; they barrelled into Clem, catching him completely unawares, shoving him to the ground and kicking at him with all their strength. Elizabeth was on them immediately, pushing them back and demanding an explanation. From the pavement, he watched his attackers yell and jab their fingers; they were reds, Montmartre men with little brass 197s on their kepis, and they were talking about Allix. Elizabeth protested, delivering her standard defence. Before she could complete it one of them struck her so hard around the face that she stumbled to her knees.
Clem tried to get up. Inglis appeared beside him, shielding Elizabeth and bellowing for assistance. An officer of the line strode from the Grand with a handful of orderlies. There was more shouting and some threatening gestures; and then suddenly the red guardsmen took to their heels, running off across the place de l’Opéra.
Elizabeth was already standing again, a gloved hand laid against her cheek. Without speaking, she made an adjustment to her hat and went into the hotel.
‘What – what the deuce was that?’ gasped Clem.
‘We should get inside,’ Inglis said as he helped him to his feet. ‘I really think it’s wise.’
‘What did they want?’
‘Blood, Mr Pardy,’ the journalist told him. ‘They wanted blood. And they will most assuredly be back.’
There was a thin crack of light beneath Elizabeth’s door. This was odd; surely nothing left burning that morning would still be alight. Clem was about to remark on this when his mother, who was half a dozen steps ahead, opened it and went through. On crossing the threshold she cried out and dropped to the floor as if she’d been shot. Clem rushed over to her: a stone-cold faint. He glanced up to see what had prompted it and almost joined Elizabeth on the carpet.
It couldn’t be true.
Hannah Pardy was dead. She’d been buried somewhere on the Villiers Plateau for almost two months now. Was this some kind of dream-vision, brought on by hunger and an overdose of death and doom? Clem had heard of such things, among the hardy community who still ate their ration in the Grand’s dining room. Only the day before a lady had confided to him that she’d heard her pet poodle yapping at the foot of her bed in the night, despite the poor creature having been given up for dinner several weeks before. These, though, were particular to one person. Elizabeth had plainly seen Han as well; Inglis, too, was gaping at the figure across the room.
‘Dear Lord,’ Clem said.
Hannah Pardy was alive. She was sitting in an armchair in the Grand Hotel, a candle on the table at her side. She wasn’t starved, but in every other respect appeared pretty wretched. Her militia uniform was filthy and growing threadbare; her pale skin was marked by anxiety and exhaustion. As she moved forward in her chair, looking with concern at their unconscious mother, he saw that her face was bruised, as if someone had socked her in the eye.
‘Is she all right?’
Clem checked Elizabeth’s pulse. ‘Merely a swoon.’
Hannah’s attention shifted to Clem. ‘What the devil are you still doing in Paris?’ There was conflict in her voice; she was both glad to see him and dismayed that he was there. ‘I was told you’d flown off in a balloon with Monsieur Besson.’
Clem got up from the c
arpet. Allix had lied. He’d let them suffer a devastating grief for nothing. Why had they taken him at his word – and why had he deceived them? What on earth was going on? Clem felt a strong need to tell his sister everything he knew.
‘We were brought down,’ he said, ‘by your man Allix, according to Besson – reckons he loosened the stitching of the envelope.’ He took a breath. ‘There is something very wrong with that fellow, Han, something—’
Hannah slanted her head ever so slightly towards one of the windows; and Clem saw him standing in the shadows, watching the streets below. The situation between them was plain. Han’s lover, the famous Leopard of Montmartre, was keeping her in the Grand Hotel against her will.
A gasp from the floor signalled Elizabeth’s revival. Before Clem could even look down she was across the room, arms clasped around her daughter.
‘My girl, my dearest girl! I thought you were gone for ever – I thought you were lost to me! My sweetest, most precious one!’
Hannah returned this embrace a little awkwardly, unable to match her mother’s effusiveness. Things were not as joyous as they seemed. She’d returned from the dead, Clem saw, straight into a nasty bit of trouble.
‘Mr Inglis,’ said Allix, ‘be so good as to shut the door.’
‘What the deuce happened, then?’ Clem demanded, determined to have it out. ‘What’s the story here, Allix? Did you rescue her, pray, from some Prussian dungeon? Or just dig her up and breathe life back into the body? Explain yourself!’
Allix turned to the room. Sight of that scarred visage, the eyes so still and evaluating, nearly caused Clem’s courage to fail.
‘He’s a Prussian,’ Hannah said. ‘He’s a spy.’
For several seconds nobody spoke or moved.
Perspiration broke out across Clem’s upper lip, tickling in the bristles of his beard. He was acutely aware, all of a sudden, of the closed door behind him.
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