Fallen Angels (15 page)

If his sister had seen him she would not have known whether to laugh or to cry. He had not shaved for a week. He wore, on his unruly, uncut red curls, a redder cap, the cap of Liberty. He wore ragged trousers, as much a sign of revolutionary fervour as the red cap itself. A man in breeches was suspected of elitist sympathies.

On his feet he wore wooden sabots, too big for him and stuffed with straw. He had a torn coat, tight belted with string, covered with a crude cloak of dirty sacking. In the Palais Royale he had caught sight of his reflection in a cutler's window and he had laughed at the astonishment his appearance would have caused in Lazen.

He sometimes thought of his sister's pleading words. Campion had said, with truth that he was ready to admit but not to follow, that his duty now, as Lazen's heir, was to ensure the succession. He should, he knew, be in England. He should be choosing one of the innumerable girls who would want nothing more than to be the next Countess of Lazen.

He had never wanted to be the heir. The death of his elder brother had thrust the responsibility unwillingly on Toby's shoulders at a time when he was already enmeshed in Lord Paunceley's secret world. He was reluctant to leave that world and the death of Lucille had determined him not to leave it.

If Lucille had lived, he thought, he would have taken her to Lazen and been satisfied. No one knew how she had touched his life, how her very presence had given him happiness, how her death had left him with a bleak and awful anger.

Lord Paunceley, that most clever and least principled of men, had seen the anger and been glad to use it for his own ends.

Lord Paunceley had sent Toby to the Vendee, an area of French countryside to the south of Brittany, and there Toby's job was to determine what hope its people had of successfully rebelling against the new FrenchRepublic. The Vendeans wanted their King on the throne, they wanted their church restored, and they wanted nothing to do with Republicanism and its shibboleths of equality and liberty. Yet on this January Sunday in 1793, this historic, wet Sunday, Toby had left the Vendee to be in Paris.

He had stayed the night with twenty others in a room of a small lodging house in the Rue des Mauvais Garcons. He gave his name there as Pierre Cheval, astonishing the landlord by writing it himself in clumsy, block letters in the book. Peasants from the country were not supposed to be able to read or write. He had eaten a meal that cost him six sous, then gone out into the cold, sleety streets of Paris. He had gone to a drinking club called Laval's. At first, being a stranger with a country accent, he had not been welcomed, but when he said that his Mend Gitan had sent him he was taken into the drunken company of the main table.

Now, as he approached the Place de la Revolution, he saw the girl he had met the night before. Terese. She was a black haired, bright eyed girl who, at Gitan's name, had pushed next to Toby and questioned him about the Gypsy's whereabouts.

Her voice, as she saw Toby in the street, was eager. 'Did you find him?'

'Not yet.' He had lied to her. He had told her he was in Paris to meet the Gypsy.

She fell into step beside him. 'He is coming?'

'He promised.' Toby grinned at her. 'Won't I do?'

She pouted, but took his arm nevertheless. 'He is coming?' she insisted.

He nodded. 'He said he'd meet me here. If not today, tomorrow. Either me or Jean Brissot.'

Toby had gone to Laval's to find the fat Brissot who had boasted that Lucille de Fauquemberghe's skin was like milk. The man had not been in the tavern. Terese, sure that he would be in the Place de la Revolution, had promised to meet Toby and point Brissot out to him.

Now, as they walked westward in the great crowd, she looked up at the tall, red-headed man. 'Why do you want to meet Jean?'

'I told you. Business.'

'What business?'

Toby shrugged. 'Gitan's business.'

The answer satisfied her. The Gypsy, it seemed, could do no wrong. The mere mention of his name made her smile. She stopped to let a legless beggar swing past on muscular arms. 'I hate Brissot. He's a pig with hands.'

'Hands?'

'Hands everywhere. It's Terese this and Terese that and his hands are up you and down you and round you, squeezing and mauling. He's a pig!'

A pig, Toby thought, who had raped his Lucille. He smiled at the girl beside him. 'You just find him for me.'

'And you keep his bloody hands off me.'

She seemed happy enough to be with Toby. She enjoyed playing the city girl who showed the country boy the sights of Paris, none of which was more impressive than the great machine erected in the centre of the Place de la Revolution.

If there was one symbol of equality in the new France, then surely this machine was that symbol.

In the old days only the nobly born could expect the quick execution of a swift axe. The peasants were not so fortunate. They might be burned, hanged, disembowelled, or killed in some other slow, imaginative way that would amuse the crowd. Yet today was the age of equality and now all condemned men and women died in the same privileged way. They lost their heads and they lost them swiftly.

The machine was not a French invention. It had been used in Britain, Germany and Italy, yet French genius had refined it. Dr Joseph Guillotin, a member of the National Convention, had recommended the adoption of the machine and, under the supervision of the Academy of Surgeons, he had refined its operation by testing it on live sheep and dead lunatics. Now it stood, massive and high, a product of equality and science.

Terese and Toby, arm in arm, shuffled towards the great machine. The angled blade, beaded with water, was held at the top of the two uprights by a taut rope. The crosspiece above the blade had been whitened by the pigeons that huddled against the rain.

Terese licked her lips and stared at the machine. 'You've seen it before?'

He shook his head.

She laughed. 'Sneezing into the basket.'

That was what the people of Paris called the death that this machine gave. The sound of the falling blade was like a sneeze, and the motion of the head, twitching up as the blade struck then going violently down as it bit, was like the jerk of a man sneezing. Toby laughed. 'Sneezing?'

'Atishoo.'

The crowd pushed them away from the machine. The rain fell steadily. From Toby's left came the sound of boots on the cobbles and he could see the bright slashes of bayonets over the crowd's heads.

Terese stared about her. 'I don't see Gitan.'

'Patience.' Toby was astonished at the loyalty the Gypsy engendered in girls. This one had not seen Gitan since the previous autumn, yet the mere mention of his name had made her face flushed. To take her mind off the Gypsy, he bought them both some
petits pains
from one of the many hawkers. The bread tasted of sawdust. 'Do you see Brissot?'

The soldiers cleared a path through the crowd and held it open with their steel-tipped muskets. Cavalry, ragged men with curved swords, clattered down the cleared path and arrayed themselves beside the machine. The platform was tall enough for the crowd to see over the horses. They waited.

Terese was worrying. 'He'll never find us!'

'He said to meet him at the bridge if he couldn't get through the crowd,' Toby frowned. 'But he might not come till tomorrow!'

Not that anyone could now hope to get through the huge throng that filled every inch of the great square. Even the hawkers had given up trying. The crowd, packed and expectant, waited. Voices made a great buzzing hum, broken by laughter or a child's crying. The rain fell. The pigeons on the tall machine strutted up and down as if bemused by the noise and the great crowd that stretched in every direction.

Then, oddly, there was silence.

As if by agreement the crowd stopped talking. Heads turned to the north side of the square.

'Brissot,' Terese whispered and nudged him. 'There!'

'Where?'

'There! The man with the bottle!'

Toby saw a lank haired, pudgy man tipping a black bottle to his lips, and then the movement of a tattered umbrella half hid the man.

Over the heads of the crowd he could see the roofs of carriages, the leading one a dark green that glistened from the rain. The crush of the crowd created warmth. Terese had an arm about his waist.

Toby stood on tiptoe and moved his head till he saw the plump, grinning Brissot again. The sight of him, the thought that that pig had raped his Lucille, stirred a sudden, terrifying anger within him. He put a hand inside his ragged, string tied coat, and felt the handle of the knife that was strapped to his body.

Drums sounded from the procession that approached the machine, drums whose skins were made soggy by the weather, but which were thumped energetically by the drummers who had been told to keep the sound going until all was over.

The coaches stopped. Now, from his place in the crowd, Toby could see nothing of what happened. He could not see a pale, fleshy man descend from the green carriage and be stripped of his brown coat and hat. He did not see the shears slice off the collar of the white shirt and then cut the long hair from the nape of the man's plump, white neck.

He did not see the priest, dressed, as the law demanded, in lay clothes, mutter his prayers against the crowd's silent enmity.

He did see the man climb the wood stairway to the platform where three men waited for him. The priest, the rain soaking his book, followed.

The fleshy, pale man's arms were tied behind his back, lashed from wrist to elbow so that his shoulders were unnaturally forced back.

As the plump man came in sight of the crowd so there was a kind of sigh that went through it. Terese, her tongue between her lips, stood on tiptoe, one hand on Toby's shoulder. Her eyes were bright. For a moment at least she had forgotten the Gypsy.

The man walked to the platform's edge. Toby saw his fat, white neck, his double chin, and his fleshy, drooping lips. The man began to speak and, miraculously, the drummers stopped. Toby frowned as he tried to catch the words.

'I pray God that the blood you are about to shed will never be asked of France…' and then the wind seemed to snatch the next words of the fleshy man away. Someone shouted by the machine, shouted angrily, and the drummers guiltily began to beat their soggy skins again, the noise rising to drown the man's words.

'Fat bastard,' Terese said.

The three men who had waited on the wooden platform, the executioner and his two assistants, moved towards the man. One assistant took his left upper arm, the other the right, and they guided him forward to the plank.

Clumsily the man lay down. The two assistants lugged him forward as if he was a sack of barley, pulled him until his head was under the uprights. Then the executioner dropped the wooden brace that trapped the man's neck beneath the blade.

The assistants stood back.

The priest knelt. He made the sign of the cross.

The drummers, their wrists weary, kept their sticks moving. The crowd seemed to hold its breath.

The executioner stepped to the taut rope. He unlooped it, jerking drops of water from the twisted hemp, then let it go.

The blade scraped in the grooves. It fell. The rope, snatched by the weighted steel, snaked and danced and looped upwards.

The man screamed.

The scream went on. The blade had fallen, yet all of Dr Guillotin's experiments with sheep and lunatics had not allowed for a neck this thickly fleshy.

The scream came pathetic and shrill over the drums' failing sound. Not one of the great crowd spoke or cheered as the scream rose and fell, sobbed and faded. The executioner, startled into action by the awful scream, hauled on the rope so that the great blade rose jerkily to the top of the shafts again.

The scream faded. The blood on the wide blade, diluted by rain, ran pale down the slanting edge. The executioner gave one more tug, stepped back, and the rope snaked up again.

The blade caught speed, hissing, rattling down, and the plump man sneezed into the basket with a snatch of the head and a thump as the blade bit through his neck and sprayed a fan of bright blood on the kneeling, praying priest.

Silence.

Toby thought the crowd drew its breath.

And then the cheer came, a cheer that startled the pigeons up into the grey, wet air, a cheer that sounded like the thundering of a great sea within the elegant facades of the huge square, a cheer that told France that its King was dead, that tyranny had met the blade, that the Republic had cut its last ties with the past.

Louis XVI was dead. Pigeons circled the square. A soldier jumped onto the scaffold and held the dead man's head by the hair. He rubbed it against his trousers to provoke the mocking laughter of the crowd.

The priest, his clothes spattered by the King's blood, hurried into the anonymity of the crowd which was reluctant to go back to the cold, hungry hardships of winter.

Slowly, still excited, the great crowd dispersed.

Toby struggled to stay near Jean Brissot, fighting against the tide of bodies. Terese, gripping his cloak of sacking, wanted to find the Gypsy and Toby suggested she waited at the bridge to the south of the square. 'He said that's where he'd meet me.'

'What if he's not there?'

'Meet me at Laval's tonight!'

He watched her go, then pushed through the crowd towards the plump man who had gone beneath the wooden scaffold to dip his finger in the blood of a King.

Toby stayed with Jean Brissot. He followed him through the day, through the alleys, followed him until the fat, loud man went into a dark courtyard to relieve himself of the wine that had celebrated a monarch's death.

Compared to Louis XVI, Jean Brissot was fortunate. He had little time to contemplate his death. He had listened with horror as the red-headed man talked of a long dead girl, a horror that turned to panic as he tried to run and shout for help. But Toby tripped him, turned him, stood astride him, and gutted him from groin to chest. He did it for Lucille de Fauquemberghes, for whom death had been far, far worse, and when it was done the small courtyard seemed awash with the fat man's blood.