The Silver Blade (8 page)

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Authors: Sally Gardner

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BOOK: The Silver Blade
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These were the days of conscription when young Frenchmen like Yann were expected to fight for their country. The trouble was that although Basco looked the part, he had been completely honest when he said he could not act his way out of a paper hat. Now, with less than an hour before the curtain was due to rise, the poor man was feeling sick to his stomach. Clutching his rosary, he prayed with all his might that the Virgin Mary and any other saint of wayward and lost travellers would hear his prayer and bring Yann back in time, before they were all sent to the Tribunal and the death carts.
Upstairs in his office, Citizen Aulard was pacing back and forth, his nails chewed to the quick, while Tetu sat on the edge of a chair with Iago the parrot perched on the back.
‘I suppose Basco could come in on crutches and limp through his part. After all the theatre has been closed for five days on account of his supposed sprained ankle.
Mort bleu
, I wish now I’d said he’d broken a leg.’
‘It would have made little difference,’ said Tetu, looking sadly at his friend. ‘We would still have been ordered to put on a show.’
‘Five days I’ve been rehearsing Basco,’ said Citizen Aulard, who looked tired, ‘and there has been no improvement, none. He’s a wooden doll, a puppet. What are we going to do?’
‘I’ll work the magic,’ said Tetu, ‘and make it look as if he’s performing Yann’s tricks.’ He got out of his chair. ‘I’m teaching Yann a new one.’
‘What’s that?’
Tetu handed Citizen Aulard a piece of paper.
‘Where did you get this from?’ asked the theatre manager.
‘Get what, my friend?’
‘Why, this bill! Who spent this money?’
‘Look again.’
Citizen Aulard stared in amazement. Nothing. Just a plain piece of paper.
‘Why, that’s marvellous, quite extraordinary!’
‘Then I will do the magic tonight.’
‘It’s not the magic that worries me,’ said Citizen Aulard. ‘He’ll give the game away the minute he appears on stage.’ He threw up his arms and exclaimed, ‘We are lost. What will become of Iago?’
M
uch had changed since the days when Citizen Aulard had managed the Theatre of Liberty in the rue du Temple, and one of the main transformations started with the theatre manager himself. He had become passionate about the real-life drama that was happening outside his proscenium arch; the appalling tragedies played out daily, seasoned as always with the pepper of pathos, in the court rooms of the Tribunal.
The injustice of it all had struck Citizen Aulard like a bolt of lightning, for what is liberty, what does liberty stand for if it is not the right to free will, the right to free speech? The right to come and go as one pleases? More important still, what did it say about the leaders of the Revolution if they cared so little for their fellow men that they argued there was virtue in terror? Surely that way lies the end of the world?
Tetu agreed wholeheartedly with his sentiments.
‘Fine words are what all actors want,’ he replied, ‘but only the few and the brave are called upon to act.’
To Tetu’s astonishment Citizen Aulard had acted, and Tetu had been genuinely moved by this newly courageous man, a sheep in borrowed lion’s clothes, who was determined to play his part helping citizens escape, even if it cost him his life.
Yann, Tetu and Citizen Aulard had set about gathering a small company of trusted actors, an eccentric menagerie of misfits. Every one of them had his or her reasons for joining such a dangerous venture; all of them knew their lives were at stake if it failed.
The decision to move to new premises had arisen due to Citizen Aulard’s realisation that the theatre on the rue du Temple was too open to prying eyes. After all, this was the age of spies, of busybodies and nosy neighbours, of flapping ears and loose tongues. There was no choice but to find another venue with easier access to the road to the coast.
The Circus of Follies, as it was known, was on the south bank of the Seine situated in a muddle of streets off the rue Jacob, hidden in an undistinguished square. There, squashed in between the crowded tenement blocks with a few wretched shops and one grubby cafe to keep it company, it looked ill at ease with its surroundings, desperately waiting to be found.
And Yann had found it, not from above but from below in the catacombs, while he was trying to find a way out of Paris that bypassed the barricades and gates. Down in those ancient Roman limestone quarries, long since abandoned, was a honeycomb of tunnels and caves and passages. This is where Yann began his search.
In between shows, he would disappear for days, carrying with him enough supplies to last up to a week. On these journeys he started mapping the routes, helped by work carried out before the Revolution, when the catacombs had been reinforced to stop Paris from subsiding into the abyss. The workers, afraid, Yann supposed - as he was himself - of getting lost, had written on the walls the names of the corresponding streets above.
To begin with Yann was disorientated by the darkness, a sensation he wasn’t used to, for the dark had never bothered him. Yet here, where no sunlight had ever been, the darkness had an altogether unfamiliar texture. No dawn would break through these shadowy corridors. This darkness would never remember the light of a lantern; it would be nothing more than a pinprick in the liquid heart of eternal night. So powerful was this absence of light that for the first time Yann experienced the sensation of being blind.
After a while, he began to find in this strange subterranean world a place of peace where he could think, without the lights and noise of Paris to distract him.
Over the weeks he refined what he needed to take with him. A hammock was essential, so when exhaustion played havoc with his sense of direction he could restore it by sleeping.
The beauty - the underground streams, the cavernous chambers, the mysterious writing on the walls - began to work a magic on him. The discovery of an abandoned shoe touched him deeply. A memento weighted with all the desire for life, made more poignant still by the bones brought from Paris graveyards and arranged along the walls.
It was one day, one night - he didn’t know - after many hours of exploring when Yann finally stopped, knocked some nails into the walls and climbed into his hammock. He was drifting off to sleep in a twilight between dreams and reality when he thought he heard whispering.
‘Damask and death,
Velvet and violence.’
The Sisters Macabre were singing to him.
He was out of his hammock in a flash. Lighting his lantern, he lifted it high and looked behind and in front. Nothing, just a long passage that disappeared into blackness. Was it a dream? They had appeared to him before in nightmares, the Seven Sisters Macabre, the tragic automata Kalliovski had created from the corpses of his most beautiful victims.
‘Calico and corpses,
Taffeta and torture.’
By the light of his lantern Yann saw a passage hewn out halfway up the wall. He knew now that he was awake. He crawled into the dank space, pushing his knapsack ahead of him. He emerged in a high-ceilinged room. It was empty. Shining the lantern he looked up and realised he was staring into a shaft: an escape route. Yann took out his map. He had found many such escape routes, but for various reasons none were usable. They were too exposed or just plain unsafe. He needed one that came up into the city out of sight. Carefully he clambered to the top of the shaft where an old, rickety spiral staircase protruded into the void, and cautiously started to climb, uncertain if it would collapse under his weight. It was sturdier than he had thought and he found himself in a cellar. At one end was a narrow wooden door which needed all his strength to open. It led into a derelict building that was home to hundreds of startled pigeons. As far as he could make out it was a small playhouse that looked as if it were about to come tumbling down.
Next day Citizen Aulard made enquiries into who owned the building and with the financial backing of Charles Cordell and Henry Laxton he bought the rundown theatre.
Citizen Aulard oversaw its restoration, organising carpenters and scene painters to repair the stage and generally make the place more appealing. On the opening night the show, a pantomime, went well. Magic was what nearly all the citizens of Paris hungered for, anything to escape what was happening day by day. Those faithful few in the audience who could remember Topolain and his talking Pierrot were in agreement that Basco’s Harlequin outshone even the great magician.
With a stage full of actors, and many changes of scenery, there was so much to distract the eye that one hardly noticed there were extra players on some nights: a portly clown, or Colombine’s charming maid, or two butcher boys, who were in reality a merchant and his family in disguise, waiting to be taken to the catacombs and then out of Paris and to the coast.
Now there were fewer than twenty minutes to the moment when the drums would begin to roll and the curtain would rise on a terrified Basco.
C
itizeness Manou, who guarded the stage door, entered the theatre manager’s office. She was an unprepossessing sight, with the pipe she had taken to smoking attached to her bottom lip, wrapping her in a fog of wispy smoke in which she wheezed and puffed continuously.
‘Are they back?’ said Tetu, spinning around.
‘No,’ she puffed. ‘Here, this came for Yann.’ She handed Tetu a letter. ‘Thought it might be important.’
‘No sign of him? Nothing, nothing at all?’ asked Citizen Aulard.
‘No, unless he has become invisible. Nothing would get past me. Just the letter.’ She left, her shoes echoing loudly on the wooden stairs.
‘That’s another thing,’ said Citizen Aulard. ‘These letters. If they fell into the wrong hands, you know what that would mean.’
‘Death,’ said Tetu helpfully.
‘
Mort bleu
, as if we didn’t have enough to worry about. I thought you’d spoken to Yann. No good will come of this infatuation. The world may have gone insane, but it still clings tightly to its prejudices.’
They were interrupted again, this time by Harlequin’s leading lady, Colombine, dressed in full costume and holding her mask.
‘Are we going on stage or not? The cast are downstairs and they don’t know what’s happening. Is there any news of Yann?’
Colombine was a pretty girl with a sharp, foxy face. She could have been a fine actress if she had not been so in love with herself, and with making sure that everyone in the company felt the same way about her. Only one person had not succumbed to her charms, and that was Yann. And nothing attracted her more than a man who refused to see what she had to offer.
‘I mean I can’t do this show single-handed, and I can’t act with a lump of wood.’
Basco entered dressed as Harlequin, looking as if he were about to go to the guillotine.
Colombine sighed, ‘Give me strength.’ Putting her hands on her hips, she said, ‘Well, it looks like we’ll all be laying down our lives if Yann don’t show up.’
The tears had started to fall down Harlequin’s cheeks. Citizen Aulard handed him his handkerchief as once more the door opened.
‘What?’ shouted Citizen Aulard. ‘Does no one knock in this building? Is my room just a thoroughfare?’

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