Читать книгу Illumination - Matthew Plampin - Страница 11

Hannah took hold of Clement’s lapel and pulled him away from the booth, into a doorway beside the bar. The material was well worn; it was the same coat he’d been using when she went, and it hadn’t been new then. The fortunes of the Pardy household had plainly not improved. He’d started talking in his old manner, rambling on about how very well she looked and how much this place seemed to suit her; hearing and speaking English again after so long felt strange, a little wrong, like walking in someone else’s boots.

‘Shut up, Clem,’ she said, ‘for pity’s sake.’

She considered him for a second: a guileless boy still, largely unchanged by the two years that had passed. His face, freckled by another idle summer, lacked the pinched quality Hannah had grown used to in Montmartre. Poor he might be, but he had food; he had a good bed and an easy mind. A flicker of contempt gave way immediately to guilt. Clement had been her sole regret when she’d fled from London. She’d abandoned her brother to Elizabeth. This could not be ducked or denied. He had every right to resent her – to demand that she explain herself and listen to the suffering he’d endured in her absence – but he was grinning, saying how pleased he was that they’d been reunited, whatever the circumstances. She released his coat.

‘Is she here with you? Answer me.’

Clem’s grin fell. He scratched at his blond whiskers and glanced along the bar. ‘Over there somewhere, I’m afraid. Her blood’s up something awful, Han. You’d better get ready.’

Hannah was glad of the anger that gripped her; it at least dictated a clear course of action. ‘Why have you come? Why now?’

A letter was produced from his coat pocket, written in an official-looking hand. She read it with gathering dismay.

‘But this is quite untrue. It’s nonsense.’

‘Who could’ve sent it, do you reckon?’

Hannah thought hard. This letter was obviously intended to humiliate. The arrival of her family from London at this pivotal time would make her seem like a hopeless ingénue – no different from the hundreds of hare-brained English girls who ran away to Paris every year, only to be retrieved by their relatives. It labelled her a tourist, an outsider, someone not to be taken seriously. The list of suspects was long. She’d learned that camaraderie between artists was a fragile thing, in constant danger of tipping into rivalry. They might share a philosophy of painting, but each one of these professed comrades, in some private chamber of his heart, desired the ruination of the rest. There were others as well; impatient creditors, a handful of rebuffed suitors, and the likes of Laure Fleurot, who’d pointed Clement in her direction with such malevolent delight. Any of them could be responsible.

Ingenuity had been required, of course, both to discover the St John’s Wood address and compose a letter in English. Nobody of Hannah’s acquaintance had ever admitted familiarity with her mother tongue. Translators and draughtsmen could be found throughout the city, though; and besides, who could say what knowledge people chose to keep hidden?

‘I’ve no idea,’ she said.

‘Things are getting bad here though, aren’t they? It’s like the city has been given over entirely to soldiers. I’ve heard that there’s to be a siege, Han – a bloody siege.’

Clem’s experience of Paris had plainly unnerved him. Her brother led a sheltered life, seldom straying from long-established paths; he was singularly ill-equipped to cope with the upheaval that had come to define the city. The past few months had seen wild jubilation at the outbreak of war, the misery of subsequent defeat and then a bloodless revolution, swift and uproarious, unseating an empire in a single day. And now, almost impossibly, events were escalating yet further. The end of Napoleon III had not brought the end of the war he’d started. The Prussians were coming for Paris – set on razing her to the ground, it was rumoured, and then remaking her in their own forbidding image.

Hannah shook her head, remembering Jean-Jacques’s words. ‘These invaders do not see what Paris is,’ she said. ‘They think we’ve been cowed by the fall of the Empire and the destruction of the Imperial armies, but the opposite is true. Our city has been liberated.’

‘Our city? Quite the loyal Parisian these days, Han, ain’t you?’ Clem’s laugh was tense. ‘I mean to say, that’s all well and good, but these Prussian blighters are approaching in their hundreds of thousands. They have guns like you wouldn’t believe. I read in The Times that at the battle of Sedan they—’

Hannah wasn’t listening. She looked at the letter – at her address on the rue Garreau. ‘How did you find me? Here in the Danton, I mean?’

Clem stopped; he grinned again, pride in his detective powers displacing his apprehension. ‘Why, from your paintings. This fine establishment features in a good few of them. I asked your landlady about it and she was kind enough to provide directions. Then I recognised that girl, the one in blue, from your portrait of her. Simple stuff, really.’

‘You went into my home? What were you thinking, Clem?’

He became defensive. ‘We were worried, Han. We thought you might be poorly, or starving, or—’

A murmur of excitement spread through the Danton, rippling out from the doors to its furthest corners. Many turned to stare; Hannah overheard a nearby labourer say ‘l’Alsatian’ to his companions. Jean-Jacques had arrived. Two inches taller than the next tallest man, black hat still on his head, he was moving slowly towards the bar, shaking hands and giving nods of acknowledgement. A squad of National Guard pulled him among them, hailing him as a brother as they poured him a glass from their wine jug.

‘I say,’ Clem remarked, craning his neck, ‘isn’t that the black-suited fellow from your paintings – the orator? Is he going to speak?’

Hannah didn’t answer. Exactly how much had her brother deduced? She tried to remember what had been left in the shed – and suddenly realised that if Clem could recognise Jean-Jacques, Elizabeth might be able to as well. A situation too awful ever to be anticipated was unfolding around her. She stepped from the doorway, hurriedly plotting the best path through the crowd whilst trying to think of an excuse that would get Jean-Jacques back outside.

‘What news, Alsatian?’ someone shouted. ‘Where are the pigs now?’

Jean-Jacques addressed the room. His voice, accented slightly by his home province, was not loud, but it blew away the bar’s chatter like a March wind. ‘The latest sightings are of Crown Prince Frederick, crossing the Seine to the south. The Orléans line has certainly been severed.’ The Danton let out a groan. ‘Do not lose heart, friends, it is but a minor loss. The Prussians will be driven back across the Rhine before a single week has passed. We will beat them.’

Those around him managed an embattled cheer, the National Guard raising their glasses to the coming victory; and between the uniformed arms was Elizabeth Pardy, poised to introduce herself to this noteworthy gentleman and ask him about her daughter. Like Clement, she seemed eerily the same – a figure from Hannah’s past transposed awkwardly onto the present. Her hair was tucked up beneath a fawn travelling hat; her expression amiable yet glassy, concealing a deeper purpose. And now Jean-Jacques was turning towards her, listening as she leaned in to speak.

The next Hannah knew she was before them, quite breathless, grasping his left hand in both of hers. There were exclamations of surprise. Elizabeth planted a kiss on Hannah’s cheek; her face was cold and heavily powdered, and the most extravagant praise, in French, was pouring from her lips. It took Hannah a moment to understand that the subject of this laudation was her paintings. She’d expected some overwhelming line, delivered with chilly calmness – a statement of disappointment and distress, perhaps, intended to floor her with shame. She hesitated, completely wrong-footed.

‘Wonderful,’ Elizabeth was saying. ‘Extraordinary, beyond anything I had hoped for. I see what you are doing, Hannah, I see it so clearly. It is close to genius. You are on the verge of something great, my girl. I predict a—’

Hannah recovered her wits. She cut her mother short. ‘You’ve made a mistake,’ she said, in English. ‘That letter is false. I don’t need your help, Elizabeth. Go back to London. Go before it’s too late.’

The alleyway smelled of pears and neat alcohol. It led downhill, away from the rue Saint-André; a stream of inky liquid was crawling through a central gutter. This was Hannah’s short-cut to the rue Garreau, skirting the place Saint-Pierre to the south. She’d covered a dozen yards before she realised that home was useless. Elizabeth knew where she lived. She’d been to the shed and seen what was inside. She could return there at any time.

Hannah stopped beneath a lamp set in a rusted wall bracket. She’d released Jean-Jacques as soon as they’d left the Danton, running off to the right and into her alley. He’d followed, keeping up easily; he was only a couple of yards behind her now. She crossed her arms and glowered at him. His instinct for people was strong; he should have seen through Elizabeth at once, yet they’d been talking quite happily when Hannah had snatched him back. It felt almost as if he’d been an accessory to her mother’s ambush – to that contemptible attempt to disarm her with flattery. He was watching her, waiting for her to speak. Their abrupt exit from the Danton hadn’t perturbed him. Jean-Jacques Allix was a man beyond alarm. Throughout the summer, as France had been shaken to the brink of collapse, Hannah had found this absolute steadiness reassuring. Right then it made her want to knock off his hat.

‘What did she say, Jean-Jacques? What was under discussion?’

He was quiet for a few more seconds. ‘Only you, Hannah,’ he said. ‘Only you.’

His voice was tender; Hannah remembered the day she’d just passed, sitting at her easel on the place de l’Europe with her brushes in her lap, longing for the moment when they would be together again. But she steeled herself. She would not be lulled.

‘I can’t believe she’s here in Montmartre. I can’t believe it.’

‘She told me that she’d come to ensure that you were safe. A mission of mercy.’

‘Elizabeth came to fetch me,’ Hannah snapped, ‘to reclaim her wayward child and return her to London.’ She covered her brow. ‘I fled my family, Jean-Jacques. I climbed from my bedroom window in the dead of night and travelled alone to Paris. There it is. That’s what I am. A runaway.’

Jean-Jacques nodded; up until now, Hannah had let him infer that she was an orphan, without any surviving relatives in England, but he didn’t seem surprised or affronted by the truth. ‘We all must adapt ourselves,’ he said. ‘It is part of life. The timing of this visit is strange, though. Surely any person of sense can see that there’s a good chance of becoming trapped – that our foe is nearly upon us?’

Hannah sighed; she calmed a little. ‘An anonymous letter was sent to London. It informed her that I was in urgent trouble and needed to be collected before the Prussians arrived.’

Jean-Jacques considered this. ‘A low trick,’ he said. ‘The act of a coward. Do you know who was responsible?’

‘I have my suspicions.’

‘Your mother has been cruelly deceived – fooled into coming to Paris at a most hazardous time. You must be worried for her.’

Hannah glanced at him; his humour could be difficult to detect. ‘That woman is why I am in France. It was her manipulations, her interferences and lies, that drove me from my home. And she is more than capable of looking after herself. Why on earth should I worry for her?’

Jean-Jacques looked away; a line appeared at the side of his mouth. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘She’ll be well. Bourgeois like her always are. A haven will be found. She’ll wait out the assault in perfect safety.’

A barrier ran through the population of Paris, according to Jean-Jacques and his comrades, separating the bourgeoisie from the workers. It rather pleased Hannah to hear Elizabeth placed on the wrong side of their great boundary; it gave her a sense that she had allies, not least Jean-Jacques himself. Directly next to this, however, sat the uncomfortable knowledge that but for a change of clothes and lodgings she was certainly as bourgeois as her mother.

‘Such a simple path would never do for Elizabeth. She isn’t one to hide away.’ Hannah paused. ‘It doesn’t matter, at any rate. She’ll have to leave Paris. She hasn’t any money. A stay in a hotel, even for a single night, is completely beyond her means. To be quite honest, I’m surprised that she managed to find enough for her and Clem’s passage.’

Jean-Jacques had been gazing at the surrounding rooftops, his hands in his pockets; now his dark eyes flicked back to her. ‘Clem?’

Hannah cursed under her breath; she was being careless. ‘Clement,’ she admitted, ‘my twin brother. He lives with Elizabeth still, back in London. And has come to Paris today.’

‘You have a twin brother.’ Jean-Jacques said this with gentle wonderment. The line at the side of his mouth deepened again. ‘Another of Hannah’s secrets is revealed.’

‘It is not what you might think. He and I, we are too different to—’

Hannah gave up. It was no use. Everything was overturned. In the space of ten minutes the life she’d crafted in Paris had been irreversibly altered. Jean-Jacques had found out that she’d misled him and had glimpsed the troubles of her past. The Danton regulars, her supposed friends, would be extracting all they could from poor Clem; they’d probably discover even more than Jean-Jacques had. She’d been exposed. Whatever chance she’d had of being taken on her own merits was gone. She might as well walk back to the Danton and surrender herself to Elizabeth. Her mother had won. She leaned against a wall, pressing her damp palms against her forehead. She was finished in Paris.

‘Hannah,’ said Jean-Jacques. ‘Look there.’

Lucien and Benoît, two of the painters she’d been talking with when Clem had appeared, were strolling past the alley mouth: thin men smoking short cigars, sharing a drunken laugh as they headed towards the place Saint-Pierre. Octave, a sculptor, was a few feet behind. Hannah straightened up. Clem might be with them. She strode past Jean-Jacques, back out onto the rue Saint-André. There was no sign of her brother; the painters, however, gave a ragged roar of salutation.

‘Why, Mademoiselle Pardy,’ Lucien proclaimed, twisting his moustaches, ‘what the devil is going on? You leap from the middle of a really quite stirring account of Courbet’s decline to converse with a young gentleman who, from the brilliant yellow of his hair …’

‘The delicacy of his nose and brow,’ inserted Benoît, who fancied himself a portraitist, ‘the fullness of his lips …’

‘… can only be your brother. And then, even though this fellow has come all the way from the soot and smoke of London, you run from him after a few seconds, grabbing the fine Monsieur Allix for a – a turn beneath the stars, I suppose I should call it, for the sake of decency …’

‘… leaving your brother entirely alone: a whiskery Anglais in an old suit, adrift in the Danton, too scared even to bleat for help.’

Lucien’s cackle would have curdled milk. ‘So we wave him over. What else could we do for the brother of such a dear friend? I have a little English,’ he confessed with a modest shrug, ‘sufficient, at any rate, to learn that he is not the only member of the Pardy family in Montmartre tonight. There is a mother also, standing at the bar. A woman who, although undoubtedly mature, is still worthy of the attentions of any man who—’

‘Enough.’

Jean-Jacques didn’t speak with any force or volume. His tone was that of an equable schoolmaster who’d let his pupils run loose for a while, but had reached the limit of what he would allow. The half-cut painters were halted – stopped dead. Lucien looked off down the street; Benoît, frowning slightly, fiddled with his cigar.

A smile crossed Hannah’s face. It had been six weeks now since Jean-Jacques had first walked into the Danton, but these Montmartre artists had yet to accept that their blonde Anglaise was theirs no longer. Although Jean-Jacques was always cordial, he made them both jealous and nervous; when quite sure that he wasn’t around, Lucien would sometimes refer to him as ‘the killer’.

‘What has drawn you gentlemen from the Danton?’ Jean-Jacques asked them now. ‘Surely you still have wine to attend to?’

Octave, the least waspish and inebriated of the three, spoke up. ‘Everyone is coming outside, Monsieur Allix. They say that the forest of Saint-Germain is burning – put to the torch by the Prussians.’

Jean-Jacques was starting for the place Saint-Pierre before Octave had finished his sentence. Hannah and the artists fell in behind. Her immediate impression as they reached the square was that Paris had somehow circled the Buttes Montmartre – that the central boulevards, normally seen glowing in the south, had been rearranged to the north-west. This light was different, though, a shimmering, acidic orange rather than the flat hue of gas; it was alive, expanding, slowly draining the darkness from the night sky.

The once-distant war had reached them. Hannah’s pace slackened; her hands hung at her sides. She was not afraid. Jean-Jacques had prepared her for this. A magnificent resistance lay ahead. There would have to be sacrifices, of course, but the result would be a better Paris – the beginnings of a better world. It brought her relief, in fact, to see these fires. Over the past few days, as the city’s anticipation and dread had mounted, a part of her had grown impatient for it all to begin.

A restless crowd filled the place Saint-Pierre. People squabbled and brawled, and shook their fists at the tinted horizon; scattered individuals raved and railed, predicting doom; mothers gathered up their children and hurried off in search of shelter. It felt like the moments before a riot. Jean-Jacques was a good distance away from Hannah now, pressing onto the merry-go-round in the square’s centre – which was little more than a gaudy shell, its horses stowed away somewhere and its brass poles bound in sackcloth. Around him the appeals had already started.

‘How bad is it, Monsieur Allix? Tell us what you’ve heard!’

‘My saints, will the city really be next?’

A lantern was hoisted up onto the merry-go-round. Jean-Jacques climbed into its light and faced the place Saint-Pierre. Word went around; dozens turned, then hundreds more. The Alsatian was assured, unflappable, with a speech at the ready that needed only to be unfurled on the sharp evening air. He lifted his hands and the multitude fell quiet.

Jean-Jacques Allix had been speaking in bars and cafés since his return from the fighting in the east. That he was a veteran of some renown had all but guaranteed him an appreciative audience. Across the northern arrondissements, his persuasive, uncomplicated eloquence had soon resulted in him being adopted as a spokesman and leader – roles he seemed to relish. Paris was glutted with paper tigers; its halls resounded with bold claims and pledges that were wholly without substance. Jean-Jacques Allix, however, had acted. He had struck at the invader and bore the scars of conflict. He knew of what he spoke. He would not disappoint them.

‘It is true,’ he began. ‘We have the evidence of our eyes, do we not? The Prussians are burning our ancient forests. Trees that have withstood the passage of many centuries – that are as much a part of our brave city as the buildings around us now – will tomorrow be but smouldering stumps. It is another shameful crime to add to the Kaiser’s tally.’

‘They mean to do the same to Paris!’ someone shouted. ‘Reduce her to ashes!’

‘A fiery death!’ wailed another. ‘Oh Lord, a fiery death!’

‘Do not be afraid, citizens,’ Jean-Jacques instructed. ‘Be angry. The reason for this burning, for this obscene devastation, is to deny us an escape route through the woods. They want to keep us here, every man, woman and child, to weather their assault. That is the nature of our enemy.’

There was a surge of profanity, every conceivable curse crashing and foaming between the bar-fronts.

Jean-Jacques raised his voice. ‘But what they do not understand – what they do not understand and what we will demonstrate to them very clearly in the days to come – is that we have no wish to escape them. That we welcome their arrival and the great chance it gives us for revenge. Our bloodthirsty foe is blundering into a trap. Kaiser Wilhelm and his soldiers have travelled hundreds of miles to be destroyed at the gates of Paris. They will face the wrath of the workers – a million French souls – a mighty citizen army hardened by labour and united by a single righteous purpose!’

The crowd’s fearfulness had departed. ‘Vive la France!’ they cried, lifting their flags once again; and the Marseillaise, banned under the Empire, swelled up powerfully from the back of the square.

Hannah, stuck on the fringes, was quite light-headed with pride and love; she struggled to keep Jean-Jacques in sight as he dropped from the merry-go-round into the throng. He was making for a nearby hut, built to stow Nadar’s spotting balloon – the contraption itself, a common spectacle during the last week, had been deflated and packed away at sunset. Before this crude, windowless cabin Hannah could see a group of Jean-Jacques’s political associates. Dressed largely in black, these ultras ranged in appearance from thuggish to almost professorial. Another orator, meanwhile, had taken to the merry-go-round, a National Guard captain who set about urging every able-bodied man who had not already done so to enlist for service in the militia. In seconds, an entire division’s worth of would-be recruits was pushing forward across the place Saint-Pierre, rendering it impassable.

At the balloon hut, Jean-Jacques was shaking hands and sharing embraces. His comrades were proposing that they all leave the square, no doubt to attend some red club or debating hall. He looked around, running his gaze over the crowds. Hannah waved and he saw her at once. His eyes could have held yearning, an apology, a promise; she was too far from him to tell. The next moment he was gone.

Hannah was not upset. Their partings were often like this. True ultras frowned upon romantic attachment; they were supposed to give themselves completely to the revolution. That Jean-Jacques chose to stay with her regardless, despite his deepest convictions, brought her a shiver of delight whenever she thought of it.

The balmy late-summer afternoon had cooled to an autumnal night. Hannah hugged herself, wishing for the coat and cap she’d left behind in the Danton. She couldn’t think of returning for them now, though – not while her mother might still be inside. The despairing fatalism of earlier had passed. She was not going to surrender to Elizabeth. She would find a way to continue. Uprooting again, finding a room over in Les Batignolles perhaps, might be the answer.

Lucien and Benoît were talking across Hannah with exaggerated nonchalance, as if unimpressed, knowing that they had been rendered yet more minuscule by Jean-Jacques’s address. She wouldn’t be any the worse, frankly, for leaving these fools behind. Both were members of the same radical naturalist school as Hannah – committed to an art founded entirely in their experience of the modern world. Benoît, however, was more notable for his May-queen prettiness and estranged millionaire father than any picture he’d produced; while the stooped, liquor-soaked Lucien, although possessing a touch more intelligence than his friend, was scarcely more capable with the brush. Octave had talent, at least, but the cost of stone had prevented him from ever properly expressing it. Of late, in fact, the taciturn sculptor had been reduced to making plaster angels to sell to tourists.

Recalling Lucien’s claim to be able to speak English, which he’d definitely never mentioned before, Hannah wondered if he could be responsible for the letter Clem had shown her. Straightforward envy would be the motivation, complimented by a desire to punish her for neglecting them and becoming involved with Jean-Jacques. She quickly dismissed this theory. Lucien was not genuinely spiteful, for all his caustic posturing; and in any case, he had struggles enough of his own – high-minded ones against the artistic establishment, more basic ones with bodily need – to embark upon such a painstaking prank.

Consideration of the letter led Hannah back guiltily to Clem. She asked the artists if they knew what had become of him. They looked at each other.

‘As we were stepping out of our booth,’ said Benoît, ‘Mademoiselle Laure was stepping in. Pretty smartly, I have to say.’

‘Heart the size of a houseboat, that girl,’ Lucien declared. ‘Handsome lad like your brother – he couldn’t be in better hands. I watched them, actually, for a short while. Neither has much knowledge of the other’s language, but some kind of communication was being achieved. If you catch my meaning.’

Hannah swore. Laure Fleurot was a cocotte, a dancer and gentleman’s companion, exiled to Montmartre from the central boulevards – not a whore, not exactly, although she was said to have accepted money for her favours in certain situations. Hannah knew to her cost that she wasn’t to be trusted for an instant. What could such a woman possibly want with Clement?

Interest in the Pardy family dwindled, thankfully, the well-oiled artists moving onto discussion of their own siblings. Benoît had four sisters, it emerged, who insisted that he dine with them every week; whereas Lucien had a brother in Lille who he had not seen for more than a decade. Octave declined to contribute.

It proved a rather sobering topic. Lucien, seeking to reverse the tide, suggested another drink. Hannah glanced over at the mouth of the rue Saint-André, aware that she should extricate her brother from the Danton – and that she wasn’t going to. The risk of encountering Elizabeth was too great. It wasn’t as if Clement was actually in danger, after all; he was a grown man now, surely capable of fending off a hard-bitten Parisian tart. Like many ashamed by their selfishness, Hannah sought solace in swearing later action: I will write to him in London, she vowed, the letter I never wrote him when I first fled – a long letter that will explain everything. I will write to him as soon as this war is done with and our new lives have begun.

‘Somewhere downhill,’ she said, starting to walk. ‘On the boulevards.’

The knocks shook the shed, rattling the paintbrushes in their jars and sending the Japanese screen toppling to the floorboards. Hannah woke; she was curled up on an old wicker chair, fully clothed, off in a shadowy corner. The morning was full-blown, lines of sunlight slicing between the slats of the warped window-shutter. Gingerly, she eased her stiff legs around and set about untangling her boots from the hem of her dress. Down in the city a bugle sounded, distant and mechanical, playing out its call and running through an immaculate repetition.

The second round of knocks, even louder than the first, dragged Hannah from the chair into the middle of the room. Staring at the door, she imagined the person who was surely on the other side: head cocked, hair and hat just so, listening intently for any movement within. The moment had arrived. Elizabeth Pardy had come back to the rue Garreau.

Returning home in the blue gloom of two o’clock, filled with cheap wine and belligerence, Hannah had actually been disappointed to find the shed empty. She’d decided to stay awake and wait. Elizabeth had journeyed all the way from St John’s Wood; she would never admit defeat so easily. Hannah had lit her lamp and scoured the shed for any sign of her mother’s earlier inspection. None could be found, not even a whiff of face powder, yet everything had seemed altered somehow – diminished by her scrutiny. The shed had looked smaller, dirtier, more wretched; the paintings inadequate, dull, lacking a critical element. Hannah had barely managed to prevent herself from taking up her canvas knife and scraping them clean.

Instead, she’d attempted to amend a scene of the midday crowds promenading on the Quai de la Conférence, to put in what was missing. Luckily, next to nothing had actually been done; but she’d been drunk enough to forget her smock, and as a result there was paint smeared on her sleeves and front. In the pocket of her dress, also, was a flat-headed brush, one of her best, its bristles encased in a hard clot of yellow pigment. She’d plainly sat down to assess what she was going to do and stumbled immediately into sleep. There wasn’t any money to replace this brush. Cursing her stupidity, she started to pick at the dried paint with her thumbnail.

The third salvo was impatient, with emphatic pauses left between each knock. Hannah consigned the ruined brush to a jug of soft-soap. Her will to fight was utterly gone; her eyes were raw, and her head ached a little more with each movement she made. She wondered if she could hide, pretend to be elsewhere – or perhaps slip out of the window.

‘It’s me,’ said Jean-Jacques. ‘Open the door.’

Hannah snapped back the bolt and he rushed in on a gust of fresh, cold air; his kiss was hungry and tasted of strong coffee and aniseed. A hot, unthinking joy flooded through her, washing away her tiredness and her pain, fizzing in her toes and fingertips. She kissed him again, more passionately, trying to unbutton his jacket; but he moved around her and carried on into the room.

It was obvious that Jean-Jacques hadn’t been to bed and didn’t intend to now. Some of his usual self-possession was absent, lost in exhilaration. A lock of black hair had escaped his hat, curving across his brow – connecting, almost, with the line of the scar on the cheek below. He went towards the mattress and reached for the black coat he’d left hanging on the wall.

Hannah watched him search through its pockets – and realised that her mother and brother were sure to have seen this coat when Madame Lantier showed them the shed the night before. She recalled the speed and certainty with which Clem had identified Jean-Jacques in the Danton. They’d worked it out. They knew everything. She shut the door; so let them know, she thought. Let them form whatever conclusions they please. How can it possibly matter now?

Jean-Jacques had taken a small notebook from the coat and was attempting to make an entry inside. Writing posed a steep physical challenge for him. The hand within his right glove was a mottled, broken thing, missing both the index and middle fingers, torn to pieces several years ago and clumsily reassembled. He’d told Hannah that this terrible injury had been inflicted at the same time as the slash to his cheek, while he’d been fighting in America against the Southern Confederacy. Assisted by the wooden digits sewn into his glove, he’d managed to develop a scrawl that was just about legible. That morning, however, his distraction proved too much; he’d dropped his pencil before a single word was complete. Kneading the crippled hand, he asked for her assistance.

Hannah gave it gladly. Jean-Jacques dictated a list of names, dates and directives, rapidly covering three pages. It felt unexpectedly intimate. He was trusting her with the ultras’ secrets, their plans, the lifeblood of their campaign; whereas she hadn’t even been able to reveal the most basic facts of her life before Paris, leaving him to discover them by accident the previous evening. Hannah longed to explain how badly she’d needed to flee from London – to shake off her tired role as the oppressed daughter and begin again – but she knew that this would have to wait. She closed the notebook and handed it back.

‘What’s happening?’

Jean-Jacques put it in his jacket. ‘The army is marching from their camps in the centre of the city. They’re going beyond the wall – to engage Prussian advance forces to the south.’ His attempt at a businesslike bearing failed; he hugged her, another tight, three-second clasp, and then held her out at arm’s length. A thin ribbon of light wound over his face, striping his irises with crimson. ‘It is starting, Hannah, at long last. The fight is finally starting.’

Hannah swallowed; when she spoke, her voice sounded hoarse and heavy, as if it belonged to someone far older. ‘What – what are we to do?’

Jean-Jacques let her go. ‘We must gather everyone,’ he said. ‘Everyone. We must march on the boulevards and show our numbers – our willingness to meet our enemies in battle. We must show that we are ready.’

He walked to the shed door and pulled it open. Dazed by what he proposed, by what he was already putting into action, Hannah didn’t move; several seconds passed and she heard him ask, ‘Are you ready, Hannah?’

She grabbed a cloth from an easel and tried to wipe the paint from her fingers. ‘I am,’ she lied. ‘I was about to leave myself, actually, for the place Saint-Pierre. I only took so long to open the door because I thought you might be my wretched mother, come to deliver the lecture I denied her last night.’ She smiled at her own foolishness. ‘But she’ll be on a train by now, halfway to Calais – a hundred miles from here.’

Jean-Jacques turned in the doorway; behind him, a bank of sunlit cauliflower leaves dipped in the breeze. ‘What do you mean?’

Hannah’s headache twitched back to life. ‘If we are engaging the Prussians,’ she said carefully, ‘then Elizabeth will have taken flight. The final trains will have gone.’

‘Forgive me, Hannah,’ Jean-Jacques replied, ‘I thought you’d already know. The last railway lines were cut long before dawn. No one made it out this morning.’ He paused. ‘Your mother is caught.’