The English Heiress Read online

  Madame Aunay froze. “They are upon us,” she cried.

  “So? We are ready,” Aunay answered.

  He was no coward, and with a plan of action laid out for him, he had taken heart. Roger glanced at Leonie, but there was nothing to worry about there either. She had removed her cap and darkened her hair with oil. The work in the cellar had darkened it still further with dust and cobwebs, and her face and hands were smeared. She looked a proper slattern physically, and in her eyes was the hard light and angry calm they had held when she announced I killed him over Marot’s corpse.

  The cellar door was closed. There was nothing they could do to hide it, but the table loaded with mugs and bottles had been drawn across it to give the impression that the door led nowhere and was not in use. The noise of shouting and singing grew louder. Aunay went to stand in the doorway as if curiosity had drawn him there. Sometimes, he had heard, the mob could be turned by a jest or the offer of a gift. Madame Aunay cried out for him to come away, but he told her curtly to be still.

  “If we can hand out those watered bottles and keep them from coming in, we will have lost little and gained credit as supporters of the people,” he said grimly.

  It was an excellent idea and it might well work. Nonetheless, there was a dangerous side to it. Those who were “friendly” to the mob might be expected to join it, Roger thought. If they were asked to do so, Aunay and his wife might reasonably protest that they had to remain in the café, but it would be more dangerous for Roger and Leonie to refuse than to go along. They could always slip away after a time. The shouts and roared snatches of song were coming closer. Roger gave Leonie one last kiss and warned her what might happen.

  “What if we should be separated?” she asked, fear flickering in her eyes again.

  Roger had not thought of that. He almost sent her up to their room to hide, but if the mob should come in and find her there and should be in a nasty humor, worse might befall her than she had suffered at Marot’s hands. Suddenly Roger remembered a long coil of thin rope behind the counter. He pulled it out and tied it around Leonie’s waist, wrapping it round and round her like a thick, awkward belt.

  “If we should be dragged out,” he said, “I will tie the other end to my arm. Act like an idiot. I will use that as an excuse or think of another.”

  He might have said more, but a voice from the outside called angrily, “What are you doing here? Do you not know the enemies of France must be slaughtered before they slaughter us?”

  “I am here to serve the friends of France,” Aunay shouted. “Wife, bring me a drink for my friends here.”

  Shaking, but with a smile pasted on her face, Madame Aunay carried forward the cheapest of the tin mugs half-filled with wine. It was accepted with a cheer. No more was said about joining the crowd, but other hands were thrust forward. Aunay stood at the door, seemingly the better to hand out the drinks more quickly, but his position was also effective in blocking the entryway. Roger began to hope that they would yet escape anything worse than the depletion of the landlord’s stock of ordinary wine and cheap mugs. Leonie filled cups at the bar, and Roger and Madame Aunay ran back and forth carrying them.

  Soon, however, the drinking vessels were gone. Aunay began to hand out the bottles of watered wine. The crowd was good-humored now, laughing and singing, passing the bottles from one to another. However, the bottles were disappearing very quickly, and at the first refusal the temper of the mob might easily change.

  “No more than a dozen bottles left,” Madame Aunay hissed into her husband’s ear as she handed him two more.

  From his position, Aunay could see that a few more people had crowed the street. He hoped it meant that this was just a splinter group broken off from the main body. In any case, he had to get them moving again. “Where are the enemies of France?” he cried. “You are refreshed. Let us go and destroy the enemies!”

  “The enemies! The enemies!”

  The cry went through from mouth to mouth. There had not been enough drink to inebriate them, but it took little to inflame their minds.

  “We have drunk wine,” a voice bellowed. “Now let us drink blood!”

  There was a surge of movement toward the corner of the avenue, which would take the mob back to the Salle de Ménage where the assembly sat. Aunay turned slightly in the doorway to look at his wife, who was proffering two more bottles.

  “You have served us,” another voice cried. “Now come serve your country.”

  The landlord’s arm was seized and he was dragged out into the mob. Madame Aunay shrieked and dropped the bottles to reach for her husband. A man grabbed her outstretched hand and pulled her out also. Roger had started forward to help the landlord and his wife, but two men and a woman burst through the doorway. The woman took hold of Roger’s arm. Leonie rushed from behind the counter, eluded the grasp of the two men, and seized Roger’s other arm. Behind them, the two men surged forward.

  After the first minutes of acute anxiety, Roger and Leonie realized there had been nothing threatening about their seizure. The men and women around them, although filthy and ragged and wild as beasts, wished them no harm. Indeed, Roger and Leonie looked little better than their present companions and were taken to be members of the same ill-treated and oppressed group. Those who had dragged them out only wished them to share the pleasure of easing the years of helpless hatred that cruelty had bred in them. They thought they were giving Roger and Leonie a rare treat. A gift of release and revenge that they had been too afraid to take on their own.

  As they were pulled and pushed along, they were separated from the woman and the two men who had drawn them into the crowd. Roger managed to unwind the coil of rope from Leonie’s waist and tie it firmly around his left wrist. One man behind them noticed and pushed his way forward.

  “What do you do?” he snarled. “Is she of the émigrés?”

  “No,” Roger shouted back, forcing a laugh. “She is my woman, but she is a little simple.” He touched his temple in the time-honored gesture indicating an affliction of the brain. “If she is drawn away or lost, she will never find her way home.”

  The moment passed, the questioner being pushed elsewhere by the tide of people, Roger drew Leonie to him and held her, concealing the rope as well as he could. In spite of the danger that the question asked of him exposed, he was unwilling to take the chance that Leonie would be dragged away. Several times he tried to edge toward a street opening and escape, but it was impossible. Either they were hurried along too fast, or just as Roger prepared to dart into the darkness, a new group came rushing out of the alley to join them. The crowd was growing larger and tighter-packed in the street.

  From time to time Roger glanced at Leonie. If was dark now and he could not read her eyes, but her body moved freely against his, giving no indication of the stiffness of terror, and, when she realized he was looking at her, she smiled at him. He took it for gallantry, for a sign of her remarkable courage. In a way, he was right. Leonie did have courage, but at this moment she was not aware that she needed it. She had realized as soon as Roger did that unless they met some other mob that intended to stop the one of which they were a part, they were in no danger.

  In an odd way, Leonie was even enjoying herself. Although Aunay had said the mob desired blood, she was not thinking of that. From behind the counter of the café, she had not heard the shouts about slaughtering the enemy or drinking blood. Thus, she strode along, merely uplifted by the excitement of the crowd around her. Now that fear was gone, and she had not yet considered what would happen next.

  “Where are we going?” she yelled into Roger’s ear under the cover of the noise.

  “I wish I knew,” he bellowed back. “We’re on the rue de Rivoli now, heading east. There is the Tuileries, but they have been sacked already.”

  The wandering route of the crowd had confused Roger. They had set out toward the Salle de Ménage but then had veered away, come almost to the bridge that took one to
the Versailles road, and then veered away again to travel eastward. Hopes that the marching was aimless and the crowd would simply disperse after a while alternated with fear that some small incident would suddenly enrage them and they would go on a rampage of senseless looting and burning. This fear made him begin to work his way toward the edge of the group again, hoping he could turn off into a side street.

  Achievement of his first objective ruined nearly all hope of achieving the second. Free of the roar and jostle on all sides, Roger became aware that the march was not nearly so haphazard as he had thought. Before he could make the mistake of trying to slip off and thus identify himself as someone not in sympathy with the mob, he recognized “flankers” who prodded and encouraged along those who seemed to be tiring or losing interest. Moreover, he could now make out the individual cries from those in the lead, which the body of the mob had only answered with hoarse roars of approval. “To the Abbaye!” was the cry.

  The Abbaye… Roger had heard the name before, and recently, but he could not place it at the moment, wondering—as they came to the once beautiful, now tattered gardens of the Tuileries—whether it could be a meeting place. In the gardens he tried to escape again when the mob spread and the pressure of moving men and women diminished.

  “This way!”

  “To the Abbaye!”

  “Over the bridge!”

  “The traitors will not escape us!”

  Each cry was another voice, each shift of direction seemed to be blocked by a different body or pair of reaching arms. The last voice, however, struck horror into Roger’s soul. Had they not already been on the bridge—the Pont Royal, it used to be called—Roger would have taken his chances at breaking free because he now knew what the Abbaye was and what the mob’s purpose there would be. The Abbaye was a prison and the mob was set on turning the wild speeches of the radicals into facts. They were going to try to murder the prisoners taken in the domiciliary visitations.

  When they came off the bridge, Roger made a determined effort to escape. He swung Leonie around and pushed sideways. This, however, permitted a tattered scarecrow of a man, whose only whole piece of clothing was the red cap of the revolution, to seized Leonie by the arm so violently that he tore her free of Roger’s hold. She screamed with shock and revulsion and pushed at the tatterdemalion and he staggered away, but the damage was done. Others were shoved between Leonie and Roger. The rope around her waist prevented them from being really separated, but Roger could no longer control the direction in which Leonie moved. She tried to stop so that he could come up to her, but that nearly precipitated a real disaster.

  The mob was gaining momentum, the whole mass moving forward more nearly at a run than at a march now, and Leonie’s hesitation only resulted in two collisions with people close behind. The first she twisted away from, jerking the rope that Roger had been gathering up out of his hand so that only the fact that it was tied to his wrist prevented his losing her entirely. The second collision all but knocked her from her feet. Leonie shrieked again, this time with fear, realizing what would happen to her if she fell. She made no further effort to go against the tide. Sooner or later, she told herself, they had to stop and then Roger could reach her. Roger had come to the same conclusion almost simultaneously and gave up any notion of pulling back on the rope. Resistless, both were swept along.

  Then the pace slackened, and quite suddenly Leonie was pushed into a nearly solid mass of people. This time she was in no danger of falling or being trampled. It was impossible to fall. She put a hand on the rope behind her and tried to wriggle backwards, but that too was impossible. Inexorably, she was pushed ahead into the filthy back of the person in front of her. The pressure grew, forcing her face into the stained, odorous rags until Leonie thought she would smother. Desperately, to keep breath in her body, she slid sideways into the indentation of space where the shoulder of one person pressed against the shoulder of another. And still the pressure behind her grew as more and more people came from the streets to join the mob.

  The shoulders Leonie had been pressed against parted slightly, parted more. Leonie pushed back, seeing what was about to happen, but was unable to prevent it. Like an olive pit pressed between thumb and forefinger she was squeezed between the two shoulders and propelled forward into another tattered, smelly back. This time she resisted as long as she could, turning only her head so that her nose would not actually be enveloped by the rags that clothed the body in front of her. She knew Roger would be trying to work his way along the rope to reach her.

  It was the feel of the rope, painful as it was, dragging at her body this way and that as people pressed against it, that kept Leonie from panic. In spite of the real dangers she recognized, she did not feel alone or helpless. Still, she could not avoid being pushed sideways again, and again forward, and she began to fear that the rope would snap or be torn from her waist or from Roger’s wrist. The immediate concerns of breathing and hoping that Roger would be able to reach her kept Leonie from realizing that the noise of the crowd was increasing as she was pressed forward and that mingled with the roars and yells of excitement, were screams of terror and pain. It was thus not until nearly an hour later—an hour of being slowly and involuntarily squeezed through one opening and then another, a process that was producing a ponderous type of circulation within the mob—that Leonie found out what was happening.

  She had been pushed forward once again, but this time there was no one in front of her to stop her progress. She plunged ahead, to be brought up hard against the baton of a man who, she realized later, must be concerned with controlling the mob. At the moment, Leonie realized nothing but the pain of the bump and the force with which the man thrust her back. She gasped and staggered and would have fallen, except that the packing was not so tight at this point in the crowd because the line could bend, and Roger burst out after her and caught her in his arms.

  Not realizing who held her, Leonie shrieked. Then, as she turned her head to see who had grabbed her, her eyes swept past the man who had pushed her back and over the entrance to the building a few yards away. Another scream was torn from her, and then another, before she was turned forcibly around and her cries were muffled in Roger’s breast.

  The steps of the building were wide and deep, and they were gleaming wet and red with blood—the sections of staircase that could be seen in front of the great doors. The rest, to either side, were obscured by bodies, some of which still twitched as the lifeblood, streaming from gashes made by pikes and sabers, drained away. As Roger watched for some minutes, too horrified to turn his eyes away, a woman came voluntarily, even eagerly, out through the doors. The crowd roared. She paused in surprise. Simultaneously, a saber slashed her, cutting through neck and shoulder, and a pike was thrust into her chest just below her breasts. She did not have time to scream but fell forward as the pike was pulled out. A third man darted forward from the side and dragged the body onto a heap already lying there.

  Roger fought back his desire to retch, suddenly aware that he was being poked at with a hard object. It was one of the agents of the commune who was shouting angrily, desiring to know why Leonie was screaming and hiding her face. It was fortunate that Roger did not dare release her. Had his hands been free, he might have acted before he thought and flung himself at the butchers of the bloody shambles. As it was, he was too aware of the need to get Leonie away to permit his outrage to rule him.

  “Does she pity these traitors who would murder her and her children if we did not deal with them first?” the agent of the commune demanded.

  “She knows nothing about such things,” Roger roared, realizing that to say what he really thought would result in Leonie’s body was well as his own joining the heap. He lifted his left arm, showing the rope and then pointed to its terminus on Leonie’s waist. “She is simple,” he bellowed. “She is only afraid. She does not understand.”

  “Are you simple too, to bring such a one here?”

  “I could not
help it,” Roger replied. “I could not leave her in the café alone when I was drawn out by the crowd. But it would be best if I could take her away from here.”

  Leonie had fallen silent. She had recognized Roger’s voice when she drew breath to scream again and she had choked back the cry. The agent of the commune looked around, but the street was clogged with people in all directions.

  “It may be best, but it may also be impossible,” he growled. Then he gestured with his head toward the left. “Go that way. When the cart comes to take away the bodies, you can get through behind it.”

  The idea was not pleasant, but Roger was now so desperate that he would have accepted a far more unpleasant method—any method, in fact—that would get him and Leonie away. Dragging her with him, he began to work his way along the front of the mob, dodging blows and ignoring curses as he blocked first one and then another person’s view. Soon the mad bellow of the crowd increased again. Roger turned his face away and shielded Leonie’s also. There was nothing he could do. The protest could cost his life and Leonie’s and would still not save a single victim.

  The third time the eager peal of the bloodlust rose, Roger was almost up against the wall of the building only ten meters or so from the cross street where the carts would enter. He began to avert his head again from the horror he could not prevent when the ululation of the mob changed. A young man in the remnants of a uniform had dodged the pike thrust aimed at him, spun away from the saber cut and leaped onto the pile of bodies on the steps. From there, another leap carried him halfway down, right in Roger’s direction. Just behind him two pike-wielders struggled over the corpses and in front of him the agents of the Commune of Paris converged, raising their batons.

  There was a limit to what Roger could endure, and he thrust Leonie away to the side. A single glimpse at the young face showed fury not fear, and the ex-officer’s arms were raised to defend himself rather than hopelessly to ward off the coming death blows.