Season of Light (46 page)

Her last note, written cross-wise after a further hour of deliberation, was a postscript regarding the Shacklefords.

Give Susan my love. Wish her well. I’m sorry I couldn’t have known her better. And Mr Shackleford, likewise. I regard him as very dear, please tell him
.

When it was done she held the letter in her lap, as if her own words might somehow save her. It was one thing to convey a portrait of resignation for the comfort of her family, quite another, once alone in the dark, not to feel searing, gut-wrenching outrage. Why hadn’t Didier spoken up for her? Why had he not thrown up his hands and cried: Thomasina is innocent. Instead, when the door had closed behind him, it was as if Madame had snapped shut her capacious portmanteau for the last time.

Perhaps there was still hope. Perhaps even now Didier was rallying his arguments or visiting influential friends on her behalf. But hope, she decided, was a tricky bedfellow. She understood that she had been a sore inconvenience to him and suspected that already, back in his apartment, he would be engaged in a thorough washing of hands.

The next day Asa was transferred to the Conciergerie. During the short ride in a closed carriage she glimpsed only dull spurts of colour – dark grey cobbles, an occluded sky, the dirty jackets of the coachmen. Occasionally some passer-by would thump the side of the carriage. The journey was shared with Lucie, the dressmaker, who occasionally touched her hand for consolation, although her eyes were closed, perhaps in prayer. Asa would much rather have been alone. To endure her own fate was bad enough; to witness the suffering of another innocent woman intolerable.

But this was all that was left of the world, and these last sensations would have to be savoured – a wheel bouncing on a stone and the smell of horses; the familiar, leathery reek that made Asa ache with longing for the stable-yard at Ardleigh. At one point Lucie opened her eyes and they managed to exchange a smile. Easier to appear calm in the carriage, much less so when they were bundled up narrow steps and into the Conciergerie, where they were pushed through one crowded space to the next until they came to a cell occupied by half a dozen other women.

Asa could barely remember her name. ‘Asa. Julie. Thomasina. I was interrogated about my name until I can’t remember who I am.’

Nobody was much interested, although one or two wanted to know whether it was true that she was the English woman who’d been part of the plot to kill Marat. Don’t dare give in here, she told herself. You show them how an English woman, an abolitionist with revolutionary sympathies, can behave. So she sat very still with her back to the wall and her hands folded, as Madame might have done. The other women wandered about in the passageways or elbowed their way outside to a courtyard, where they stood in tired groups or queued to wash undergarments at a little fountain. When they gathered once more in their cell it was like a travesty of a tea party; an assembly of women in dirty gowns with weary faces and dull hair. Some told crude jokes, reminisced or recounted the story over and over of how they had been unjustly denounced; others were numb. A woman hunched in a corner was yelping from the pain in her abdomen. When Asa sat beside her and offered to rub her back she began to talk about the old days before she and her husband, a successful timber merchant, had been discredited by a long-term debtor turned government agent. She was a delicate soul with round eyes and a swollen belly, bewildered by the violent change of fortune that had brought her within a few days from a dainty turquoise drawing room to a stinking cell in the Conciergerie.

Once the door was locked for the night Asa and Lucie undressed to their shifts and made a nest of their skirts. The other women were restless as they settled to sleep, clearing their throats, cursing, exuding the appalling stench of cooped-up lives. Asa knew that beyond these four walls were countless other such chambers. The scent of Lucie’s hair was the only counterweight to the sound of a woman vomiting into a pail, to the ooze of reeking sludge, to the knowledge that this was probably the last night of all.

‘So, it doesn’t look as if I shall see my little boy again,’ Lucie whispered. ‘The gaoler’s wife back at the other place told me she thought I didn’t have much chance. But it seems so unfair – just because Madame Roland is a Girondin. I made two dresses for her. That’s all.’

‘Your husband will be back soon. They’ll listen to him, if he’s in the militia. Is he a good man?’

‘Not so bad. A bit jealous; a bit full of himself. Not really cut out to be a soldier but he’s keen to do the right thing. He’ll be horrified that I’ve been arrested, not because he’ll think it’s unjust but because someone in our family should have disgraced themselves by stepping out of line.’

Lucie fell silent for a moment and there was just the eerie mutter of women half asleep in the incalculable dark. Asa’s thoughts clawed for a way out; again and again she dragged them back into line. There was no hope. She was condemned on two incontrovertible counts: she had alluded to a forbidden topic, the massacre of priests, and above all she had expressed sympathy for Corday.

‘What would you do if they said you had one more day left and they would allow you to spend it exactly where and how you wanted?’ whispered Lucie. ‘It’s easy for me. I’d just want to be with Christophe. I would have an ordinary day, nothing special. I’d lift him out of his bed in the morning, and kiss his little neck and smooth the tangles from his hair. I’d feed him his bread and milk and perhaps walk with him in the sunshine, tuck him up in the afternoon and watch him sleep. And then I’d want them to take me quickly, while I was still smiling, so that’s how he’d remember me, not in tears, like I was when they came for me.’

‘I think I’d also choose a sunny day, in spring,’ Asa replied. ‘I’d walk by the sea with my friend Caroline and we’d pause to watch the waves. And I’d really pay attention to each one. I’d follow the line of a breaker, lose myself in a bit of froth until every last bubble was gone or it had disappeared under the next wave. And then we’d go back to Caroline’s cottage. The fire would be lit, and we would sprawl in our chairs with our skirts pulled up to our knees, and we’d hear the fall of a log and the rustle of a page and we wouldn’t say a word. And in the evening I’d go home and eat dinner with my father and we’d argue because I would be wanting him to attend to something on the estate and he’d make an excuse about having neither the money nor the time, and then I’d stomp up to my bedroom, and press my forehead to the windowpane, and wish for a different life.’

‘There is no man, then, apart from your father?’

When no reply was forthcoming, Lucie sighed, tucked her head into Asa’s lap, and seemed to fall asleep

A lantern flickered on the far side of the cell, but darkness encroached, like the wing of a great bat. A woman was screaming and others yelled out for her to be quiet.

Asa drew a long breath of foul air and thought again of that parlour in Littlehampton, and of Mr Lambert resting his head in his old hand and talking about eternity. All I know for sure, thought Asa, is that darkness will come swiftly. Or perhaps, on the other side, there will be light. And all the dead people – Corday, Mr Lambert, even my mother – will be waiting. She tried to concentrate on small things: the tapestry cushion on her parlour chair with its design of coral-coloured roses and the mis-stitch in one of the petals, a violet in the hedgerow above Ardleigh wagging on its hair-like stem; the creak of a board as her father climbed the stairs to bed, a worn leather chair, empty, and a Mozart minuet.

She prayed that the last journey would be quick and dignified, and that her tongue would not unlatch and beg for mercy.

With the daylight came a deceptive degree of normality. It couldn’t be true that any of these women washing their faces at the crowded fountain would be dead by nightfall. Lucie managed to dress impeccably in a copper-coloured gown and a snowy-white scarf. Her hair was loose and glossy and as she moved there was still a whiff of fragrance. When her name was called, in the first batch of the day, she and Asa embraced as if they had been lifelong friends, and then Lucie was led away.

So, a couple of hours left, at most. Asa sought out a wardress she had noticed the previous night; elderly, with crumpled skin and an air of competence that might have suited a cook or gardener. ‘I want you to do something for me,
citoyenne
,’ she said. Her voice was soft and reasonable, scarcely a sign of dread. ‘Take this fan and preserve it for me. It was given to me by a friend and is very precious. I should hate to see it destroyed or broken.’

‘I don’t take bribes.’

‘It’s not a bribe. It’s a gift. It may not be worth much money any more, but it is beautiful, don’t you think? It’s called a cabriolet fan, and is very rare. The leaf is pure gold.’

‘Take care, prisoner, I report all exchanges such as the one you’re attempting to the tribunal and this conversation, were it known, would be enough to sign your death warrant.’

‘There is nothing anyone can do for me. I am bound to die. They have associated me with Charlotte Corday.’

‘Then what do you want? Nobody would give me such a thing for no reason.’ Yet she was clearly entranced by the colours, and no wonder. In this place, where colour meant every shade of grey, Madame’s soft turquoises, blues and golds bloomed.

‘What I want is time, for the dressmaker Lucie, who’s just been called to trial today.’

‘Who do you think I am? Isn’t time what everyone wants? You’ll be asking for the key next.’ Her hard gaze roamed across the fan and her finger stretched out and caressed the glinting enamel.

‘All she wants is time to see her son.’

‘Out of the question.’

‘I’m sorry you can’t help. But I still want you to have the fan.’ Asa flicked it shut, pressed it into the woman’s hand and moved away.

‘I suppose I could have a word. I might be able to put off her execution for a day or so.’

‘It must be a week, at least.’

The wardress stared at Asa. ‘You say you are the friend of Charlotte Corday.’

‘I knew her.’

‘And what is your connection with this dressmaker woman?’

‘Just that. A connection.’

‘Well, I must say, I admire your nerve. Get along with you. I’m making no promises.’

At midday Asa’s name was called and she was marched away through files of prisoners. Besieged by panic, her consciousness split in two and she had an exalted vision of herself stepping from the hired carriage, slipping her hand on to John Morton’s arm, treading a marble floor to enter a room filled with sparkling light. And in a parallel world, here was another Thomasina Ardleigh, thrust into a courtroom which echoed like a cavern, with a momentous Gothic ceiling. She caught sight of a copper skirt whisking through a far door. What had been the verdict on the dressmaker?

The grandeur of the hall was diminished by makeshift tiers of seating backed by wooden panels upon which spectators were ranked as if at a theatre. Nobody took much interest in this new prisoner and the room was noisy with muttered conversation. The gallery was a blur of assorted reds and blues, grubby white caps, dark hats, gossiping mouths.

Of the five judges, the most senior was round faced and ponderous with huge hands. A jury of twelve men lounged on benches. Asa was told to sit facing the dais but said she preferred to stand; if she gripped the chair-back they would not see that her knees were shaking. By now she felt calm, exactly as she had when she used to bathe in cold water with Georgina; there was always a moment between anticipation and the final plunge when the body was absolutely committed and the mind was clear.

‘Prisoner Ardleigh, you are an English woman charged with travelling under a false passport and in disguise, and of conspiring with Charlotte Corday to murder Marat. How do you plead?’

‘I am innocent of …’ Her voice was frail in the massive room. She was altogether too insignificant for this moment.

‘Do you admit that you were smuggled into France under a false passport?’

‘I had no …’

‘You said that you spent the day prior to Marat’s assassination walking up and down his street, in order to get the lie of the land.’

‘That’s
not
what I said. It’s true I walked past the end of his street. By chance.’

‘Under interrogation you admitted that you had remained in Paris following Marat’s assassination, for the sake of Charlotte Corday. Do you now deny that?’

‘That’s not what I …’

‘Citizens of the jury, here, briefly, are the facts: Prisoner Ardleigh admits to having arrived in France illicitly, to having met Corday while in Caen and to travelling to Paris in advance of Corday by two days. She admits to visiting her former lover, Deputy Didier Paulin, in his apartment in order to discuss politics with him and thereby discover more about Marat’s likely movements. Can you therefore doubt that she is a spy, sent from England in order to conspire …?’

‘What you are hearing is a distortion of the facts,’ Asa cried. ‘It’s true I met both Corday and my former lover Didier. But it’s a matter of pure coincidence that it happened to be shortly before Corday decided to kill Marat.’

‘Ah, but prisoner, at the very least you admit to meeting Corday. It’s quite clear that you made no attempt to dissuade her from her wicked intent.’

‘How could I when she didn’t confide in me?’

‘Perhaps you were her inspiration, you an English woman …’

‘We walked about Caen, that’s all. We discussed her childhood.’

‘Look at it from our point of view,’ said the judge, perhaps a little irritated with himself for engaging in argument with her, ‘and ask yourself how we can possibly be expected to believe so many coincidences. To continue; next thing we know, having met Corday, you come to Paris two days ahead of her. What I say to the jury is: can you doubt that this woman used her relationship with Deputy Paulin in order to track the movements of our beloved Marat? We have wasted enough time on this English woman. Gentlemen of the jury, do you find her …?’

The jury was already conferring. An elderly, thin-lipped man, having muttered a word or two to his companions, threw back his head and yawned luxuriantly. Asa stared at the bobbing feather in the judge’s hat.