Fires of Delight (26 page)

“I am of the family LaRouche,” she informed him coldly, proudly. “I have just returned to Paris after a long absence and I have had to endure this…this distressing
monstrousness!
This sort of thing would never have happened in the old days, nor frankly today, if you and your men were performing your duties correctly. Now stand aside and let me pass. I want to go home.”

Chastened and chagrined, the guardsman moved aside and let them proceed.

“Thank you, Madame LaRouche,” said the speaker from his hiding place beneath the skirts. “Perhaps what I have said about the nobility is not true in every instance.”

“That was damn clever of you, old lady,” added Hugo, more prosaically.

Martha sputtered helplessly. Old lady indeed!

Selena looked around carefully. They had left the plaza and the crowd behind and had entered an area of elegant, imposing homes with courtyards and gardens and great walls.

“It’s safe to come up now,” she said, and the young man complied, cocky and grinning.

“I want to say in my own behalf, ladies, that I do not make it a habit to hide behind women’s skirts.”

“Who are you?” demanded Martha Marguerite, shrinking away from the man who had said all those alarming things and who had, moreover, urged the mob to storm the Bastille fortress.

He ignored her question. “So you are a LaRouche, are you?” he said. “If memory serves, your grandfather made his fortune in tenement rentals. Eduard was his name. ‘Eviction Eduard,’ he was called. And wasn’t your château burned to the ground by peasants awhile ago? I think you had an uncle, Pierre LaRouche, dead now. Instead of taking half the harvest from his subjects, which, though standard, is outrageous enough, he raised the levy to eighty percent. I’m afraid there was retribution.”

Martha Marguerite went white and said nothing.

Selena, who had been watching the young man’s face as he denounced Martha, decided that she’d been all too correct in her initial estimate of his unyielding nature. She then saw his eyes swing appreciatively, gratefully, toward her.

Suddenly his expression changed. His mouth twisted in surprise and his eyes widened in…disbelief. He was looking not at her face but at the cross she wore around her neck.

“Where did you get that?” he demanded. “Who are you?”

“I think I see a guardsman up ahead!” warned Hugo.

“All right,” said the firebrand. He gave Selena a last look of appraisal, then jumped from the moving buggy, vaulted over a stone wall, and was gone.

There was a momentary silence in the buggy. Selena fingered the cross at her throat.

“Hugo,” she asked, “do you know who that man is?”

“Of course I do,” the lout replied, grinning with the pleasure of familiarity. “He’s a radical leader, a comrade of Monsieur Mirabeau. You’ve just made acquaintance with Pierre Sorbante.”

“We are getting close now,” said Martha Marguerite excitedly, leaning forward in the carriage and looking at the fine old houses along this grand street. “Almost home.”

Selena was much impressed. The LaRouche residence must be in one of the most exclusive
arrondisements
of Paris. Huge old elms lined the streets, and in the gardens beyond the walls, she glimpsed fountains and statuary, beds of exquisite flowers laid out in geometric designs, circles and octagons and crosses.

Which of course reminded her of Erasmus Ward’s cross on the chain around her neck.

Sorbontay
.

Pierre Sorbante?

Why would exceedingly different men, LaValle and Ward, speak his name at the very moments of their deaths? She recalled how Ward, lying on the planks in the Battery fortress, had flailed at his neck while dying. Had he known that the cross was gone? That Penrod had taken it? Certainly he could not have known that Gilbertus Penrod had given it to Selena. And she recalled too the significant glance that had passed between Penrod and Royce regarding the fact that Selena was wearing the cross.
“It’s all right, Gil,”
Royce had said.
“The cross is in good hands
…”

In good hands?

Safe?

Then there must be some important purpose attached to it, but Selena hadn’t the slightest idea what that purpose was. Ward had been a spy, however, and LaValle something of a smuggler, so Selena could not help but reason that the little talisman represented or conveyed or presaged a meaning of dangerous import.

“Everything has meaning,”
Davi the Dravidian had taught her,
“and often it is the opposite of what it seems to be.”

That wisdom, however, did not help Selena at all just then. She was very much at sea in the matter of the cross.

“Turn in at the next gate,” Martha ordered Hugo, who obediently did so.

Great tears appeared immediately in the woman’s eyes when she beheld her family home, but they were not tears of joy at returning after so long. Selena stifled a gasp of surprise. Hugo and Sebastian hooted derisively. Vergil Longchamps, the lawyer, had understated his letters woefully with regard to conditions prevailing in affairs LaRouche.

“You better pay us, and that’s a fact,” warned Sebastian. “We didn’t take you here to be made fools of.”

“There must be some explanation…” faltered Martha.

The old horse clopped through the iron gate, which was thickly rusted and stood wide open to the street.

“We
always
had a servant in livery at the gate,” Martha Marguerite said apologetically.

Cobblestones were loose or missing on the drive. The lawns and gardens were untended and unkempt. The branches of trees, unpruned, hung down to the earth, and a fishpool, stagnant and filled with leaves, sent a fetid odor into the air. The big gray house was imposing only in its size. There was a look of decay about it, like a proud old dowager gone to seed.

“Oh, my!” mourned Martha.

The carriage stopped in front of the house. Selena got out.

“No funny business now,” warned Hugo, getting down from the driver’s seat. “We mean to be paid, I tell you.”

“And you will be,” Selena snapped. She had the money Jean had given her, not to mention the sovereigns and jewels. “Get the luggage down, will you, please?”

The two men reluctantly went about that task, as Martha and Selena climbed the wide stone steps and knocked on the massive bronze door of the house. They waited for what seemed a long time, then finally heard footsteps inside. The door swung open slowly, with a great elongated
creak
, and two little old ladies, nearly identical and bearing some resemblance to Martha, stood there blinking rheumily in the July sunlight.

“Martha? Is that you?” bleated one of the women.

Then with great sobs and heartrending exclamations, they embraced
Martha, she embraced them, and all three of them cried at once.

“Oh, Martha, you’re finally back! We were so worried…”

Pulling herself together, Martha Marguerite introduced her sisters, Charlotte and Colette, to Selena. They were twins, somewhat older than she, and upon them had fallen the burden of the family after the death of. Uncle Pierre at the hands of the Côte d’Or peasants. Obviously, the burden had been too heavy.

“What in God’s name has happened here?” wailed Martha, drawing Selena and her sisters into the house so that Hugo and Sebastian, busy with the luggage, could not overhear family business. “Where are the servants? Why haven’t the grounds been tended?”

Charlotte patted her thinning gray bun of hair in woeful nervousness. “Somehow there is no more money.”

“What? Father was a millionaire many times over!”

“But there is no more money. You must see Monsieur Longchamps at first opportunity. We could not pay the servants. They ran off, taking with them what they could carry of our furnishings and jewelry. The gendarmes can do nothing. The lower orders are in the grip of a political fever. Oh, Martha, we don’t understand what is happening. We can’t understand what Monsieur Longchamps tries to tell us.”

“It is true,” Colette corroborated. She wore her hair exactly like her sister. Selena thought they resembled two frail ghosts out of some
ancien régime
, baffled by a new world, vulnerable and wandering around beyond their time. “It is true, we don’t understand. Only old Stella, the cook, has remained with us. And she is nearly blind now.”

At the sound of her name, a heavyset old woman in a faded yellow frock appeared at a distant doorway and peered owlishly toward the rueful conversants.

“Oh, Stella!” wailed Martha Marguerite, rushing over to the cook and embracing her warmly. “Loyal Stella, one out of all of them.”

Stella, Selena noted, did not look especially happy to see Martha. Another mouth to feed. Perhaps she had stayed on here only because of her physical disability.

“How can we run a house without staff?” cried Martha. “We
must, at the very least, maintain a front until such time as I speak with Longchamps and our fortunes are restored!”

Selena was doubtful, in the present condition of the house, that any servants could be attracted.

“Hey, there!” called Hugo, clearing his throat loudly and scraping his boots in the foyer. “We got to run along now. You going to settle up with us, or what?”

He looked more than a little worried that he would not get paid, and threatening as well.

“Oh, Lord…” said Martha, unconcerned with the problems of mere commoners, looking at the walls of the house, where the outlines of stolen paintings were visible.

“I’ll take care of you,” said Selena. She walked to the door and down the steps onto the ruined drive. Hugo followed her. Sebastian joined them.

“Look,” said Selena, “this place is obviously in a bad way…”

“That don’t mean nothing to me,” Sebastian growled. “We want our money.”

“And you shall have it,” replied Selena, drawing a couple of hundred-franc notes from her bodice.

The two young men gaped at the sight of such wealth. Selena gave them one of the notes.

“Now,” she continued, waving the other before their acquisitive eyes, “I want to make a proposal. We need help around here. I want to hire the two of you, and your horse and buggy, for…oh, let’s say a month. You may, I think, stay in the carriage house”—she saw this structure off to one side of the mansion—“and do all manner of jobs. At the end of the period, I shall give
each
of you five hundred francs, and you may remain in my employ after that, if you so choose. Fair enough?”

“We won’t take to being bossed about, though,” warned Hugo. “We’re citizens of France now, you see, and bound servants of no one.”

“Understood,” agreed Selena. “Just deal with me. The ladies inside may find it difficult to change their ways, but leave them alone. Do we have an agreement?”

They did. And when Selena informed Martha Marguerite, the woman was too dispirited at the scope of her problems to demur.

That night at dinner, however, she regained a small measure of her
élan
, especially when Selena insisted upon contributing whatever was required for the maintenance of the household. She was, after all, in fact if not in law, the wife of Jean Beaumain, a wealthy man. And had Jean been here—which he should have been, damn the Chamorro obsession—he would have offered no less.

Hugo and Sebastian, using Selena’s money, had managed to procure two piglets, which old Stella roasted to a crisp, crackling turn, and several dusty old bottles of excellent Burgundy were brought up from the long-neglected wine cellar. Thieving servants had stripped the dining room of silver, china, paintings, sideboards, and assorted valuables, but the heavy Louis XIV table and chairs remained. So with a few candles, common tableware, and cracked glasses for the wine, the women made the best of things.

“First thing tomorrow,” Martha declared, slicing her portion of roast piglet, “Selena and I will call on Monsieur Longchamps and get to the bottom of this lack of money. I swear, I do hope for his own sake that Longchamps has not been deceiving us. I don’t like the look of things one bit.”

“An evil man,” said Charlotte. “He told us a terrible lie about Uncle Pierre cheating his serfs.”

Martha and Selena let that pass. It was one “lie” that seemed to be true.

“And after I’ve confronted the counsellor,” Martha went on, “I shall see Marc and Zoé Moline, the couturiers. It is my duty as a titled woman to call upon their majesties at court, and I wish to wear the latest fashions. I am a LaRouche, after all. Appearances must be maintained, even during this difficult time.

“I shall engage gardeners and artisans forthwith, and then begin sending out invitations. This house shall ring again with the sound of music and laughter…”

Martha Marguerite’s eyes were already far away, entranced by a glorious future that would be exactly like the glorious past.

“Remember how it was when father and mother gave those grand masques? Such fun! The dauphin came once dressed in the costume of a frog, and all of us kissed him. In the end, he pulled off his headpiece and became the prince that he was. Oh, it was priceless!” exuded Colette.

“You
never
kissed the prince,” Charlotte disagreed. “You were much too shy, and hid all night in the pantry.”

“That is not so,” whined Colette.

“Is!”

“Is not!”

“It doesn’t matter,” interrupted Martha, shushing them. “The important thing is to restore things to their former beauty. And we are fortunate in having Selena to help us.”

The old twins regarded Selena with polite curiosity. She was just a passing stranger, no more a part of their world than serfs were, or starving laborers or radical political firebrands were. They would not realize, not even at that last shred of a second as the guillotine blade hissed downward toward their necks, that the world had changed forever.

For dessert, old Stella had outdone herself, using fruit from the overgrown trees in the garden. But her eyes failed as she carried her masterpiece to the table, and the whole dish fell in a mess upon the floor. The LaRouche women wailed in disappointment, but Selena didn’t really mind.

It had been a plum pudding.