I could not see into his thoughts. I was almost afraid to look into them, in case I found Lucie there. Perhaps he was trying to remake with me the life he had loved so much with her. I wondered if she had knelt to take off his boots, and if she had looked up at him and smiled as he cupped her cheek or ruffled her hair. They had loved each other and Diner had had no need or thought of me then.
Late one evening Thomas woke with a cry so sharp it speared its way through the house all the way down to the kitchen. Diner gave no sign that he had heard it. I made an excuse and ran up to Philo’s room, but there was no sound and when I peeped through the door I saw her and the baby sleeping. In the morning Philo was red with excitement.
‘His tooth’s cut!’
Surely it was too early for that? I felt inside his mouth and she was right. The ridge of a tooth had erupted from his upper gum.
Philo laughed and said, ‘He’ll be up and walking by Christmas.’
One day the sun shone and I wrapped Thomas in his shawl and went to see Hannah. She had been ill with rheumatism and I thought, when I saw her, that she had aged ten years since my mother died. Even so, she hauled herself to her feet, cracked the crust of the fire and set the kettle to boil. I noticed a printed sheet by her chair, and picked it up.
‘Read it, Elizabeth. It is written by Tom Paine.’
‘Did he send it to Augustus?’
‘He sent it to London and it was printed there for friends to distribute. A copy was sent to Augustus. It is Tom’s address to the National Convention in Paris, calling for the trial of Louis Capet.’
‘You mean, the King?’
‘Louis Capet, a citizen who used to go by the title of king,’ Hannah corrected me. ‘Read it. I suppose that they translated it into French for the Convention, but this is Tom’s own good plain English.’
Augustus must have swelled with pride. His old friend, now a member of the National Convention in Paris, advising it on the fate of the King of France: it was all beyond his wildest dreams. My mother would have calmed him. She never let Augustus float beyond himself, as he was apt to do.
I tucked Thomas into the crook of my arm, and began to read:
The despots of Europe have formed alliances to preserve their respective authority, and to perpetuate the oppression of peoples. This is the end they proposed to themselves in their invasion of French territory. They dread the effect of the French Revolution in the bosom of their own countries; and in hopes of preventing it, they are come to attempt the destruction of this revolution before it should attain its perfect maturity. Their attempt has not been attended with success. France has already vanquished their armies; but it remains for her to sound the particulars of the conspiracy, to discover, to expose to the eyes of the world, those despots who had the infamy to take part in it; and the world expects from her that act of justice.
These are my motives for demanding that Louis XVI be judged; and it is in this sole point of view that his trial appears to me of sufficient importance to receive the attention of the Republic.
‘He does not call him Capet. He calls him Louis XVI,’ I said.
‘Tom has a wonderful way with words,’ said Hannah.
‘Do you think that his words will be translated into deeds, as well as into French?’
Hannah looked at me severely. ‘They must be,’ she said. ‘It is as he says: an act of justice.’
I looked down at Thomas, fast asleep. He would remember none of this. As for me, I did not care tuppence for the King of France or for Tom Paine either, although it was heresy to say so. I had grown to detest this shadow-boxing with great events. We were far away from Paris. We could influence nothing. Where was the sense in all these words and the eager reading of them, the passing on of intelligence and the taking up of attitudes? How could Hannah pretend to feel so strongly? It was like trying to touch naked flesh with heavy gloves.
‘Julia said to Tom once—’ said Hannah.
‘I must go. He will be hungry.’
‘You are always going, Elizabeth. You no sooner come than you go again.’
These weeks had seamed her face with grief. She wanted to talk to me of Mammie, to make her come alive again between us. But I would not mourn Mammie with Hannah or with anyone. In this I was not soft, as Diner said: I was hard. It was all gone, all of it, the life we had lived. It could never be brought back and so it was better not to remember it. Mammie would come to me, or not, as she chose.
I had folded up her Indian shawl, pretending that I wanted it for my bedroom. I had wrapped it in paper, tied it with string, and put it in a box at the foot of my bed.
‘I am sorry, Elizabeth,’ said Hannah. ‘I should not have troubled you with Tom Paine.’
Her nose was red: poor Hannah. She was on her dignity, gathering it about her because she had asked something of me and I had refused her.
‘I am sorry too, Hannah. I’m only tired, and worried about Thomas. Philo thinks he is getting another tooth. He has one already, did I tell you?’
‘You had your first tooth at three months,’ she said, easier now that we were back on familiar ground. ‘We neither of us realised you were cutting it, but one day you cried and I looked into your mouth and said to Julia, “Why, this child has a tooth already, and another coming!”’
Only Hannah remembered. Only Hannah knew what we had been, the three of us.
‘I dare say it will be the same with Thomas,’ I said.
‘Julia said it was a wonder you had not bitten her.’ She smiled, and then her face quivered. ‘I never told you, Elizabeth, how your mother grew while she was carrying you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I had her height measured on the door-frame, a mark for every year. Of course, when she left, we never saw those marks again.’ My mother had taken Hannah with her, who had been with her as governess since she was twelve. Her parents would not have kept Hannah in the house anyway. They said that she had corrupted their daughter and pandered for my father. ‘But later, when they married and we all found lodgings, I made another mark to show her present height. We didn’t think any more of it; she was past growing, I thought. But one day she went through the door holding you, and I saw that the top of her head was well past the mark.’
‘Perhaps she was wearing thicker shoes.’
‘I am not a fool, Elizabeth. I measured her against the mark in her stockinged feet, and she had grown two inches.’
‘And so all the time that I was growing, she was growing too.’
‘Yes.’ After a while she added, ‘And she was writing, too. She wrote a page shortly before your birth, and gave it to me to keep.’
‘Was it ever printed?’
‘No. It was only a few sentences. She scored out the rest and then recopied what she wanted to keep, and gave it to me.’
‘Have you still got it?’
‘Of course. I would never destroy a word of hers, unless she wished it.’
I took a breath. I could not harden myself against this. ‘Would you show me, Hannah?’
Hannah’s hands fidgeted together. She had got into this habit, like an old woman. She seemed reluctant and I wished I had not asked her.
‘I will show you,’ she said at last. ‘But remember that she was younger then than you are now.’
She went to her own chest, a small wooden chest very like a sailor’s, which held all her personal possessions apart from her clothes. I had never seen inside it, not even in my young and curious days. I had not dared to touch it.
‘Help me down, Elizabeth.’
She could not kneel without assistance, and once she had searched deep in the layers of her possessions and come up with a black-bound book, she needed me to help her stand again. The book was a prayer book. Hannah tapped it apologetically.
‘I had it in my childhood and even though I have quite thrown off superstition, I have never brought myself to travel without it.’
She opened the book, and took out a folded sheet of paper, an
d unfolded it. I saw my mother’s writing. It was more spiky than it had become later, and the ink was brown with keeping.
‘Cheap ink,’ said Hannah, ‘but written in her own hand. Read it, Elizabeth.’
I took the paper. There was very little written on it.
But I know One Thing, that I have my own Spirit and it is the Equal of any Man’s and in this I might say: I have my little Horse and I will ride it even if in truth it is a Donkey and a poor slow Thing.
I knew instantly that she had written it in case she died of my birth. She had wanted to leave proof that the path she had taken was the one she had chosen, and she had not thrown away her life at sixteen. She had been poor then and rejected by my father’s family and her own. Many of her friends refused to meet her, even after her marriage. She had plunged into a new world and she did not yet know the depth of it.
I wondered if she had read that paper to me long ago, when I was a child too young to understand it, and I had remembered her words in some part of me when I hugged her and said: ‘I could not love you any more, Mammie, if you were my own pet donkey.’
Hannah took back the paper and folded it so that it fell back into the same creases. She put it back into the prayer book, closed it and snapped the clasp, but made no move to put the book away. Her hands were fidgeting again as they caressed the worn black leather. Her eyes were filmed and inward and for now there was no place for me in her grief. All she wanted was to sit there with the book in her lap.
‘I must go,’ I said. ‘But come and see us, Hannah. He is never in until past eight in the evening. And then you can see Thomas too.’
She sighed, and I noticed the faint trembling of her head on her neck.
‘It’s better if you come here, Elizabeth.’
I had realised a while ago that it was not only Hannah’s visits that Diner disliked. He did not want any friend of mine to come to the house. Susannah Quinton had paid a visit some weeks earlier. She wanted to see Mammie’s grave, although we had not yet set up a stone. It was necessary to wait, and besides, I dreaded the discussion there would be over the words that should be cut into it. I had always liked Susannah. She had round, brown, startled eyes, more startled than ever since she had been in Paris, and she had good sense. She did not care a fig for Caroline Farquhar. Susannah would wink at me behind Caroline’s back when she prated of ‘the people’ while bullying her maid over the washing of her lace. Susannah gave Hannah a guinea towards her mourning, although she could ill afford it.
Diner did not like Susannah. He said nothing amiss when she came to the house, but the hour passed awkwardly and he did not leave me alone with her. After that I made sure to see her elsewhere. I questioned her closely about what she had seen in France, and it was nothing like the newspaper reports which Augustus read out. She had left a great deal out of her letters, she said, for fear that they might be read before they left the country. Often she was in confusion as events raged around her. Only afterwards would she understand that she had been present at some significant moment which would be described and redescribed endlessly by those who had not been there. She had brought with her several copies of Le Père Duchesne, which she had sewed into the lining of her petticoats. I could not read French well but Susannah translated for me. The language was very different from that of Susannah’s letters. ‘Je suis le véritable Père Duchesne, foutre!’ I listened to the text and thought I would not like to be denounced by Père Duchesne, but Susannah was passionate in her support of the pamphlets.
‘Père Duchesne represents the common people! You can have no idea of how they have been abused and oppressed by their rulers. Listen: is this not magnificent?
‘Je me fous des menaces, et elles ne m’empêcheront pas de dire la vérité; tant qu’il me restera un souffle, je défendrai les droits du peuple et ma république, foutre. Ma vie n’est point à moi, elle est à ma patrie, et je serai trop heureux si ma mort pouvait être utile à la sans-culotterie qui, malgré les assassins et les empoisonneurs, sera toujours la plus forte.’
‘You go too fast, Susannah. I can barely follow.’
The truth was that I could not follow at all, but Susannah persisted in thinking my French far better than it was.
‘Well, let me see … “I don’t give a …” Hmm … he is very blunt, Lizzie. “… for threats, and they won’t stop me telling the truth; as long as I have breath in my body I shall defend the rights of the people and my republic …” Hmmm, hmmm. “… My life does not belong to me at all, but to my country, and I’ll be only too happy if my death can be useful to the sans-culottes” – you know, Lizzie, the revolutionary party – “which in spite of murderers and poisoners, will always prove the strongest.”’
‘Yes, that is very fine,’ I said. ‘But it sounded better when you spoke in French.’
‘Absolutely! French has become the language of liberty and struggle!’
Susannah hugged me warmly when she left. ‘Dear Lizzie! It does me so much good to see you. Your eyes, you know, are so exactly your mother’s.’
‘But you love me for myself.’
‘Lizzie! How can you say that? Of course I do.’ Susannah opened her own round brown eyes very wide; then she caught me to her again. ‘We are living through such times that those yet to be born will look back in wonder.’
‘That is what Augustus says.’
‘Yes. But all the same – and I hope you will not misunderstand me …’ She dropped her voice almost to a whisper. ‘I am glad to be home for a while.’
‘Will you stay? I wish you would.’
‘No, I must go back. You cannot understand until you go there. I am a witness to history, Lizzie.’
‘As long as you are only a witness. But you are English. What if Père Duchesne took it into his head to denounce you?’
‘He would never do that,’ said Susannah confidently. ‘I am on the side of the people. I have no wealth, no position, no privileges to protect. I too defend the rights of the people and of the Republic.’
‘Promise me that you will not be only too happy to make yourself useful to the sans-culottes by dying. Leave that to Père Duchesne.’
‘Lizzie, if only I could take you to Paris! You would not be so cynical then.’
I saw Susannah several times during her stay, but I never mentioned it to Diner. There was no need for him to hear of her, any more than he needed to hear Thomas’s cries. His eyes watched and followed me, but I told myself that he could not see everything.
12
The trial of the King of France began. Everyone in England called it that, although he was king no longer. In France, at the trial, they called him by his first name: Louis. He was Louis Capet now, a man like any other. It was what we had always believed to be the truth: that all men were equal and none should set himself up above another on the grounds of birth. The divine right of kings was no more than a justification for unfettered tyranny.
Even so, I could not quite believe that it had all come about.
‘Louis, la nation française vous accuse. L’assemblée nationale a décrété, le 3 décembre, que vous seriez jugé par elle; le 6 décembre, elle a décrété que vous seriez traduit à sa barre. On va vous lire l’acte énonciatif des délits qui vous sont imputés … Vous pouvez vous asseoir.’
We had eaten, but Diner did not want me to clear the table yet. He read the passage aloud to me in French, and then translated it. He had spent a good deal of time in France and he could translate as rapidly as he read. I wondered if he and Lucie had spoken French together. But of course they had. It was an intimacy beyond bearing, that they had shared not only their lives but a language too, and one that I barely spoke. I forgot about what Diner was saying as I pictured them together, talking in low impassioned tones and then laughing at some private joke.
‘Lizzie, you are not listening.’
‘I am sorry. Please read it again.’
‘Louis, the French nation accuses you, the National Convention has decreed, on the
3rd December, that you will be judged by it; on the 6th December the Convention has decreed that you will be brought to its bar. The list of the crimes of which you have been accused will be read to you … You may be seated.’
‘It is very curious,’ I said, ‘to think of the common people giving the King permission to sit or stand.’
‘They will kill him,’ said Diner. The words fell between us like stones. I had not yet thought such a death possible.
‘Surely not. Augustus believes that they will send him into exile.’
‘Then he’s even more of a fool than I thought. They cannot leave the King alive. If he is imprisoned his existence will be a rallying-point. If he is exiled he will not go quietly. He will call on every crowned head in Europe to raise an army and restore his kingdom. Those who have brought him to trial know that, and they also know what will happen to them if the King’s armies take back France. No man will vote for his own torture and execution, Lizzie. They will kill him, and then you will see what comes of it. These French will ruin us all.’
He spoke with anger and with impatience, as if he saw too clearly what lay ahead and was weary of waiting for it.
‘They cannot ruin you,’ I said. ‘They are hundreds of miles away and even the most eager of the sans-culottes will scarcely make their way to London, let alone Bristol.’
I must have smiled at the thought of them arriving in our city with banners and tricolour cockades. I did not mean to mock him, but Diner looked at me as if I were his enemy and said: ‘You find all this amusing, Lizzie? You think nothing of the kind can happen here, even though it is what everyone you know has been working towards for years? The mob in Bristol would gather in an instant. You have not seen a riot, I think. I have. Perhaps you should learn to build something, and then watch while others destroy it.’
His hands clenched, and for an instant I was afraid. My skin prickled, even though I knew there was no reason for it. You are a fool, I told myself. You have no cause for fear. He will not hurt you.
Birdcage Walk Page 13