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Chapter 3
The nursing fell to Adele or almost all of it, Ester helped her wash him and so such things as needed two women or she sat with him while Adele dined downstairs with her father and Loretta, listening to stories of King Robert and of Loretta's great grandmother and of the grandeur of the de Martinique lineage and their connection with noble families.
Once or twice Loretta came to sit beside the bed holding the man's hand and contriving to look as though it was she who had saved his life but for most of the hours of the day and night it was Adele who sat with him or slept on the pallet laid in front of the fireplace ready when he threw off the blankets and then lay shivering in fever.
The men from the Section didn't come back and the streets were quieter, or at least there was no fighting. They heard of arrests from Margareet and Adele herself when they walked around the streets. There were soldiers everywhere, columns of men marching towards the eastern barriers. The people in the streets had become more insolent to anyone who seemed rich or well dressed. Once they saw a priest being arrested ad taken to the Section. A mob gathered around the small squad of tatterdemalion soldiers taking from his house. "A bas les caltotins! Vaoila un jean fourtre! A la lanterne!" they didn't stop at verbal abuse and a scene like that wasn't easy to watch even for foreigner or any decent person.
Mr Baltimore still spoke of leaving for Fresemme at once or at least tomorrow or the next but that is a problem with the wounded man. Adele would have would agreed to leave if they could obtain passports, horses on short notice but that the man was still hurt and they didn't know a safe place to take him. It began to seem to Adele that she had been nursing him forever. To her it was the most natural thing in the world to lift his naked body wash and dry it, change the linen, hold the head in the crook of her arm to feed him with broth. As she sat watching him sleep she began to feel that she knew him than anyone in her life, even more than her father yet she knew of him was his name. Tala Valkov. He told them that he was connected with Count de Martinique, Loretta's great uncle. Here and there he talked in his fever and she gathered snippets of details and guessed more details. He spoke of how he had been a soldier and fought in Kirovia. He also mentioned a Colonel Aracand, of a gang called 'Blitzkrieg' and a few names that he murmured a couple of times. The second night he twisted and tried to crawl out of the bed, Adele realised that in his state he thought that it was men he was hunting, the red coats.
She held him down while be cursed in every language that he knew and she couldn't recognise a syllable. His eyes burning in the candlelight, mad with fever and then like grey glass as though blind with weakness, this scared Adele into thinking that he was dying for sure. Se still didn't like him and there wasn't anything about him that was likeable beside his helplessness. A man doesn't change his character just from being ill and yet there was a sense of more than pleasure in nursing him. A kind of triumph in having such control, over a man who had so clearly disliked her at first sight. He had seemed to be a man who showed little respect for women except to use them. She wondered how he'd feel when he was well enough to realise what had happened
The moment came in the early hours of the 4th day about two o'clock, she heard him moving, woke out of her light sleep and lifted the candlestick to see what he was doing. He looked around him, at her with his bewildered yet clear of fever blue eyes.
"Where the devil and I?" he said, trying to get up after clenching his teeth against the pain of his leg as he moved, "Madame! What are you-where is this?" staring around, at her again as she had lain down in her shift as her blue hair was loose on her shoulders. She felt for her nightgown and pulled it around her, "Lie down." she said, "You must try not to move."
"How long have I been here?"
"Three days, almost four now."
He lay back onto the pillow, "And the King?"
"You must not talk."
He sat up again then grunted at the pain and propped himself on one arm. "Tell me!"
"They've taken him to another palace called the Temple, he's no longer King at leat that's what I've heard. Lie down or your wound will break open, you almost died and please do as I say or you will." His face was sheathed in seat already, silvery in the candlelight. He had to submit for he was weak then started to curse under his breath as the fever seemed to be returning.
"Don't tire yourself."
"And you've been nursing me?"
"All of us."
"How did I come here? This is your lodging, Madame de Martinique's home?"
"Yes, you just came here after being in a fight and shot in the leg."
"I know."
She began to sponge his face, as he was sodden with sweat. Adele lifted the covers away to sponge and dry his body. He tried to prevent her, "Stop it girl! What are you doing? I-"
"You have to be kept clean," she said, "Do you think that I haven't done this already?"
He turned his head away from her.
"I must lift you up," she put her arm under his shoulders, it was an extraordinary thing. She had done this a dozen, twenty times while he was unconscious yet not she found herself flushing and her face burning. His naked body against her arm, his head fallen back as something between horror and despair in his eyes then something else. As if he'd never seen her before, astonishment as she knelt by the bed holding him. The hair falling forward onto his chest, a sky blue gentleness against the white, the candlelight throwing shadows, brightness that glistened his eyes, her hair and the gold bracelet on her arm. The paleness of his body and then the slightly tanned where he was sun burned. Her own arm as though it had been dusted with gold like pollen. His hair like crimson blood, the liquid under the skin. They looked at each other as if he was child-her lover. Like a shock or touching fire or the numbness of ice. The words that she had never would enter her mind, her lover! The numbing sense of burning, her face, her mind, flowing through her as if her entire body was turning scarlet.
She must move, do something, go on drying him, lay him down and cover him her mind said but she couldn't move. Her heart wanted-yearned for her to put her head down until her hair covered both them like a curtain. She did lower her head a little as the strands of blue slippery like water laid spread out over his chest, a heavy mass of it. It spilt down his side.
'Am I mad' she thought but couldn't do anything, couldn't draw back or control her mind. Her mouth so close to his that she could feel his breath.
She heard him moving, his hand moving. His arm behind her neck. Pulling her down until their mouths were touching, his dry with fever, parched dry and burning for something to quench them. What are you doing? What is happening? The questions made no sound, made no sense. She held him against her as if by her own strength she could heal him, the numb sense of burning and warmth.
She was no longer kissing him, he whimpered in her mouth, "Lie down with me. I'll die of it but lie down with me now please." His hands at her shift as she didn't know what he was doing. Then his body shivered, grew rigid, he made a furious sound of agony between his clenched teeth and lay slack barely conscious in her arms. The red haired head had fallen sideways from her; sweat was running like water on his throat and his back so that he was soaked with it. She looked at him for a moment of disbelief and very slowly put her mouth against the crook of his neck. The taste of salt lingered there cold and damp.
A sudden thought appeared in her mind, "He's dying! What have I done what happened?" she began to cry out for Ester while getting up. "Ester!" she let go of him to run for help as the girl appeared in the doorway yawning as he had rolled out of her bed or Loretta's. "Help me he's dying I've killed him."
The girl came and knelt beside her and peeled back the last of the covering from his legs, blood. The golden hands on the skin touching feeling lying still.
"What have you done Madame?" the eyes huge in knowing.
"Nothing! I lifted him up and-and-nothing! What do you mean?"
Ester clicked her tongue. "If you do that again he'll die for sure," she laughed a low whispering full of laughter and malice.
"Do what? What do you mean?"
"Make love to him Madame."
"Make-love?" staring at the girl with her dark eyes full of knowledge. "Are you mad? they knelt looking at one another; Adele was too astonished and frightened at what happened to be angry. Ester's expression changed from cruel amusement to a slow incredulity.
"You don't know?" Ester said at last, "You don't know anything." Astonishment, something close to pity, contempt and again pity in her eyes. Kneeling close to naked and the unconscious man naked in the bed. She felt that of the three of them it was she was indecent even her breast burned crimson.
"I-I know everything," she whispered, "Everything," she didn't know why she said it then thought of the hens and the cock in the stable yard at home. Of the bull covering a cow in the field beyond the orchard. Two farm boys with dairymaids in the dairy breathless with laughter and then running away when they realised that she was there. "I know everything." she said again, "But-" What had that to do with this, with-with holding his head to-she felt the taste of salt sweat on her mouth and tried to remember what had happened. Nothing! Love? Making love?
"You're mad! Wicked! How can you be so evil?"
Ester reached out and took her wrist, the long fingers cold. Drawing her hand forward laying it palm upwards in Ester's lap. "Hold the candle nearer," she said and without knowing that she was doing it Adele obeyed.
"Loh! Loh! She has so much love to burn a man to ashes. Oh Madame! Killing! You'll kill more men than this one. You won't kill him; he's too strong but others! Oh oh here is the path of darkness. So much death Madame."
Lifting her eyes to Adele's for the first time something near to respect in them. "Now I'll bring him back to you." She held Adele's knuckles against her breast for a moment against the ribs of her heart. Adele could feel the beating of it which stayed with her when Ester let her hand go. It stayed and seemed to become part of her heartbeat.
She wanted to ask what the girl meant but she couldn't make herself say anything. Ester went back to sleep as Adele knelt up looking at the man. I don't even like him. Making love? As if the girl had emptied filth on her, why? She no longer wanted to touch him as if she had to lift him again she wouldn't be able to look at him while she did it. What did he say to her? She couldn't remember had he only been whispering in fever? She put her hand against his forehead it was burning, his hands were burning, his chest every part of him everytime she touched him. She must cover him up; she touched his leg below the wound, above it.
'So much love to burn a man to ashes' the girl should be whipped. Suddenly she out her hands over her eyes. To ashes. What is in me? I must be mad myself. The two farm boy in the dairy. They had had the girl bent over the milk tub and-no no! Boys playing a brutal game. Animals. And I? The cock jumping on the clucking hen treading her down, beating his coloured wing in triumph. No! I lifted him up nothing else! Love is-what is love?
"I love you," Cousin Kenny had said once. When they were ten years old, before she had begun to grow so tall to tower over him and over most boys around her age. Love was-to be married to be a mother to nurse children; to-she had put all thought of it away long ago, years ago. She was too tall, too strong and too intelligent. To submit herself to someone like Cousin Kenny! Or any of his friends or the young men in Menos, or the neighbour's sons. It had never been thinkable, they all wanted wives like Loretta and she wanted-.
She wanted to be a man. She touched the place where they had cut his chin. The bristles rasped her fingertips; did he just look at her? She turned his head towards her opened his eyelid with her finger, "Lie down beside me," he had said and then? She had a savage temptation to do it to see ho it might feel. To lie beside a man naked. I'm going totally mad so mad that it no longer mattered like a dream like something for which one has no responsibility at all. She laid her hand against his heart; the girl's heart now his, how hard it beat. Like knocking at a door, his breathing was so feebly that she could scarcely hear him. You won't kill him, he's too strong.
'But I nearly did' she thought and instead of terror there was something like astonished pride in thinking it. She had a momentary remembrance of that woman lifting her axe. The woman had been young, her arms bare to the shoulders already stained with blood. Adele imagined herself as that woman and she knew how the feeling took over her body in a shriek of triumph. So much death.
Her green eyes shut looking into the dark.
Ester came back with a tumble of smoky milky acrid smelling liquid, "Hold his head Madame."
They gave him the drink and it was as though he belonged to her, completely hers. To heal, to-he lay against her shoulder, swallowing the liquid and muttering something while his blue eyes were hidden under some of the fallen red hair. She held him like a possession as if someone was threatening to take him away from her. Still in that curious suspended state of mind in which she wasn't responsible for her thoughts, she could let them take their own path drifting like clouds in the wind. The fact that she knew nothing about him that he'd not seemed to like her when they met made no difference or rather added to the sense of possession. Like catching a wild animal in a trap, and it twists its way that the only binds the wire tighter until eventually it strangles itself.
Ester looked at her and nodded as her eyes were saying, "Yes, yes Madame he's yours, only yours now." She drew up the covers over him while Adele still knelt supporting his head.
"You must let him rest," Ester said as she smiled with her white teeth. Adele laid him down reluctantly and went to her own mattress by the fire. Ester knelt and covered up as though she'd decided be a friend to Adele. She returned to Loretta's room as Adele lay awake listening to his shallow breathing and occasional whimpering.
'I shall be-I shall be myself again,' she shivered a long shivering from shoulders to feet.
'So much love'
What does that mean? I was impossible, it had no meaning. Cousin Kenny listening to Miss Silvestri sing and swearing that she sung like an angel, that was love or he was tone deaf. She laid her hand flat against her heart under her breast. Love? The way the bull roared, the cock flapped its wings? Its I who should be whipped, whipped at a cart's tail. She put her hand over her eyes and the palms were burning.
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He began to be able to sit up to talk although it tired him to talk much for the first day or so but he wanted her to talk to him while he listened, watching her attentively a complex of interests behind his eyes. Neither of them spoke about what had happened as she herself believed at time that nothing at all happened. He had a crisis in the illness and she brought him through it and now he was mending at last. He asked what the soldier said to her the day of the Assembly, the day of the fighting.
"Are all the women in your country tall as you?" she repeated from memory.
"Are they?" he asked while watching the dancing green eyes.
"Of course not."
"Are you a horsewoman?"
"Yes," she began to tell him about Haru who was descended from the Godophin on his dam's side. She mentioned the stables, the dogs, Bayard Downs and fencing with Kenny. "He isn't much of a good fencer, he's going to be a clergyman, but at least he's someone. Miguel whose now in the Life Guards can only fence with a sabre," she held out her fist and turned it for a cut.
"You can use a sabre?"
"Oh yes, I'm better with it really than a foil because poor Kenny is almost useless, He doesn't like to fence with me now, he say's its immoral for a woman to fence but that's because he always loses."
She got up and found a poker holding it en garde. Slowly extended her arm until the point of the iron was aimed at his chest. Sliding her right foot forward and very slowly right knee bent until she was at full lunge and the tip of the poker touched his shirt. Adele altered her fist to a sabre grip and cut to his right cheek and then to his left touching each time. He didn't move as his eyes watched her in amusement, admiration nor was there something else in them.
He took hold of the poker and drew it and her towards him. "Do you want to kill your patient?"
She didn't answer as she let go of the brass handle and knelt beside the bed. "I must make you comfortable," she said but didn't alter the pillows. He laid down the brass and iron poker on the bed like a sword between them.
"I must thank your father for letting you nurse me, I owe him a debt and you a greater one."
"It was Ester who saved you."
"I must go as soon as it's possible; I've brought you all into danger."
"The danger is gone, if there was any. You must let yourself get well first."
He looked at his hands lying on the covers. The had turned extremely pale as though he was an albino, his well shaped hands; the bones long and straight. She wondered what and who he was, apart from having been a soldier and whether Valkov was his real name but the most she wanted to touch him. In a moment she would lift him up from the pillows to rearrange them. Hold his head against her shoulder; it was the most natural thing to her to do. The wickedness of that girl to try and make out that it was-she found herself begin to burn.
He was looking at her and the flush grew darker scarlet which made her furious with him. "What are you smiling at? Do you think it's amusing to have me kneel down to make a man's bed for him?"
He stopped smiling, "Do you look like that at Cousin Kenny?"
"What do you mean?"
"No wonder he loses poor devil," he took her hand and closed it into a fist, gently touching the sinews on the insides of her wrist with his fingertips. "Maybe one day you and I'll fence together. Although I'm better with a gun than a sabre."
"I must make your bed."
She was making it when her father came in to bring her for a walk with him.
"That damned fellow," Mr Baltimore said when they were out of the house, "How can you stomach puffing his pillow and-and whatever you do for him Why the deuce don't you leave it to Loretta's girl? And sleeping in the same room! What would anyone say if they knew of it at home?"
"But they won't know Papa, and suppose he should be taken ill in the night again? I told you he almost died the other night; he was so weak that-"
"Your mother would have a fit if she knew."
"Then she would leave everything exactly as it is, as she always does."
"You ignore all she says as you do with me. We shall have you married when we're home again and then you may torment the poor wretch and leave me to grow old in peace. You're twenty, Adele, its high time you were settled in like. I've meant to say this to you before. Good heavens! Look at that villain over there did you ever see such a face? No, we must have you settled Adele, with a nursery full of babies which will give you better things to think of instead of taking a wounded assassin into our home. Farmer Tate was saying to me only the day we left that he was sure you'd break your neck. Get away from me curse you."
They had begun to be surrounded by a small crowd, "We'd best get back Papa. Citizens, we're visitors, we wish you every good fortune, let us by please."
"Unwashed scoundrels."
Something else distracted the crowd's attention, and it began running down the street after a loaded coach shouting, "Stop the horses, stop them search inside!"
They turned back, Adele was trying to make her father hurry as she wasn't afraid for herself but a sudden fear that the men from the Section might come again and were already there. "We must hide him in the loft," she said. "We can't leave him where he is."
"Damnation, you race along as if you were on horseback. I wont hurry for these devils, as for that fellow surely he has some friends in Ishe who can look after him? I should like to leave here as soon as we get word again from old de Martinique. Even in these times he must have got my new letter by now to tell us to go back to Talmond. If he doesn't answer we shall simply go to him and make him so what's necessary. We should have gone already but this Valkov fellow of yours."
"He's not mine Papa. Oh please hurry! I shouldn't have left him."
Luckily nothing had happened and the only news that Margareet gave them at dinner was worse than ever. Of more arrests, of stories of plots to burn the city, to murder the government, to murder everyone. Rumours full of an old woman's terror and nonsense but behind them was an atmosphere that Adele had felt like there was a new storm gathering. Old Madame de Martinique trembled at every word her servant repeated as she clung to her rosary beads even while eating. It made the meal uncomfortable for Adele as she was on edge throughout it, waiting for the moment she could carry out her plan for bringing Monsieur Valkov up to the loft.
It took a good hour to manage it and when it was done he lay on the pallet bed so spent with the effort that she was afraid again that she killed him. While her father was not there she brought a mattress up for herself and laid it wit pillows and covers in a corner of the loft. Until at last she was alone with him, supper finished and her father gone to bed, the house was totally quiet as the candlelight threw unfamiliar shadows. The stool they had brought up with a china wash basin and ewer were set on the floor just in case they were needed.
The man lay asleep as the blue haired lady made herself comfortable on her mattress watching him. The shadows moving slightly on his face, around his mouth as he inhaled and exhaled. The candle flame bent forwards in a stirring of the dusty stifling air under the roof.
'High time you were settled in life in a nursery full of babies. Oh no no, I've not come this far as this.' she thought, 'To go home and marry cousin Kenny which was actually what her father meant for the past five years.'
"You're a handsome lady Adele," he had said long ago, "I'm your father but even I can see that you'd make a splendid mother for your children but I've to be frank with you my dear, your mother can't say it so I must. You frighten men out of their wits. I thought you might make a hint of it with Raul Farifeather, but he took off like a hare at the very hint of it. It was bad enough that you're barely six foot tall and you're scarce fifteen and not yet finished growing, but the way you behave!"
"But you're six feet tall Papa why shouldn't I?"
"Because you're a girl of course! A man doesn't want a wife like a grenadier! You must make them think that you're smaller than you are damn it, that you're tender and weak like every other woman. What do you do but go and lift Raul up in your arms to show him how strong you are then offer to wrestle him for dibs on the extra piece of apple pie. Good grief child I doubt that he's stopped running yet."
"I don't mean to marry anyone and certainly not Raul."
"You don't know what you're saying Adele, of course you'll marry. Now if you were to marry Kenny-"
"Cousin Kenny! Papa are you mad?"
"It would keep the estate together and he has a great admiration for you so has your uncle."
"Papa!" She had known that it was her mother's wish and not her father's so that she would be out of the house and out of the way. She tried to rid the thought before it took full shape but it was impossible. Her mother never like her and these last years Adele noticed it more and more. Papa she would have been glad enough herself to leave and be free of that cold and irritable dislike that always seemed to lie below the surface of all the conventional show of affection between her mother and herself. It was a thought that had come back to her again and again since that conversation. Oh how pleasant to become her own mistress except the price seemed extremely high. To marry Kenny! Or someone like him, to watch him as-as he lay in bed like-like this? Naked? To-hold him? She went and knelt close to the other bed and lifted the candle, in all their lives together, in their childhood, she had never seen Cousin Kenny naked. What did he look like without clothes? Not like this man definitely. He would be thin and flat chest with bony knees and spindly legs. Did that matter? Was love anything to do with-the way flesh is shaped? A body?
For men yes. A woman must be-her face-and but for a woman? Papa was handsome, had that matter to Mama? How could one know? Who would one ask? Adele thought of Ester, her face, her smile then knew the answer as if she had been thinking as Ester was there speaking. Adele wanted to pull back the covers and touch him. Oh how beautiful his body was, she hadn't thought of that before and not in those words as having anything to do with men. The depth and breadth of his chest, the long flat curving muscles of his legs, his long and narrow feet. She won't touch the covers. Won't touch him. Only like thinking of a statue, of a picture. His face? That wasn't beautiful at all except in the way that a savage, a weapon might be. The blade of a sabre, the way the hilt fits the hand. The blue haired woman closed her fist, cut to the left, cut to the right parry, cut low.
What is in me? What is it? Feeling a sensation of trembling, the shivering of her body, and her hand with its own life taking hold of the covers. Had Mama felt this? Ever? For Papa? She buried her forehead in the quilt, clenched the silk between her teeth until her jaws hurt. I won't touch him, I won't, and I won't look at him.
Downstairs there were sounds, a brutality of noise far down in the house by the street door. She heard it for a second without moving, without knowing what she had heard. They had come back! She was right they'd come back for him and were searching everywhere. She must go down, be there, be in bed, seemed to have been-Papa-the ladder, the ladder up her to the loft.
She knelt again and shook him whispering. "Wake up wake up you must help me to help you, there are men coming to search."
His eyes open clouded with the drug Ester had given him an hour ago.
"I must go down to them and you must take the ladder up and try to lift it in here. I shall push it up to you and you must reset the trapdoor. Understand?"
"Yes."
Adele climbed down and pushed the loose wooden ladder up into the dark loft. "Put out the candle."
Downstairs the crash of musket butts and the sounds of as troop of men, how many? They were already crowding, pushing and hammering their way into the apartment. Ten, twenty men, Ester opening the door to them, Mr Baltimore shouting protesting while holding his candlestick. The Commissary and three others in sashes. The sour smell of dirty wool, dirtier boots and sabots lingered in the room. Their eyes widened as they saw her.
"Where have you been citizeness?"
"How can you ask such a question to a woman in the middle of the night?" Heaven's mercy her bed there would be no sign of its being slept in. She forced her way past the Commissary and his three colleges and half a dozen of the soldier. "What is it you want messieurs? Citizens? I told you we knew nothing of that man."
In her room and the bed was tossed the covers thrown aside and the pillow dented. Adele saw Ester through the doorway, behind her the Commissary was shouting, "Search the apartment. All papers, all books. Citizeness don't attempt to hide anything. Monsieur you'll make a statement for me, you'll answer every question truthfully or it will be worse for you."
"What statement? What questions? My father doesn't speak any language other than Talmish, so he can't answer you." Two soldiers dragged her bed aside while another pulled out the draws of her dressing table scattering the contents finding two letters seizing them.
"Papers, citizen Commissary! Papers!"
"Give them to me!"
"They're from my cousin. What do you want here, are you mad?"
Loretta was screaming, "You're ruining my gowns, don't touch them, you filthy wretches, get out of my bedroom. Ester! Adele! Help!"
"In the name of the Section I order you to allow the search citizeness. We don't want to use violence."
A dozen voices shouting as Mr Baltimore tried to defend hi mahogany travelling chest. "The keys monsieur! Your only hope is to confess everything. Sergent break open that box." The splintering of wood, a scream of fury from Mr Baltimore, a man staggered as Mr Baltimore flung him back from his beloved treasures of silver brushes, pomade, writing case and men's jewellery and whatever else he kept in there. Hands gasping the papers from the writing case in triumph.
"Citizen you must come with us to the Section. Bring the papers Sergent and those books there'll be a code in them. I warned you to come so come with us of your own accord citizen or you'll be brought by force."
"You can't! Papa! They want to take you away. No!" standing in between the soldiers and her father.
"Citizeness, stand aside I warn you!"
A soldier stepped forward to put her out of the way and she hit him with all her strength. He fell as if he had been hit with a musket butt. Four men grabbed her arms forcing her against the wall.
"Come citizens we don't need to use violence against women. Tell the citizeness to control herself or we must bring her with us."
"He can't understand your language. I tell you what do you want wit him?"
"We suspect Monsieur Baltimore of being and enemy of the people an agent of the Talmish government and the émigré army. Your coat monsieur and your hat unless you wish to go bareheaded."
Nightmare, it couldn't happen, a flood of men pouring down the marble stairs into the hall with her father almost" carried by them.
A crowd gathered even at this hour of the night. What time was it? One in the morning? Two? Men women pushing shouting, "A plotter they've caught a plotter! One of the murderers!"
"It's a priest, a catolin, filthy jean foutre!"
"A plotter, one of the assassins."
She was still in her shift and nightgown, slippers running after the soldiers as if she were a madwoman crying, "Papa, Papa!"
The soldiers themselves were shouting, "Make way, he's dangerous, look at the animal, he's going to murder us all, he was going to murder Patriot Pierre, the Patriot Cruesole we've caught one of the nest rats."
A building, stairs, office, men shouting. She had to translate without knowing what she was saying. They wanted her father to sign a paper.
"I'll sign nothing damned their eyes! Monsters! Rights of man! They should be hanged, go home Adele. Go to the embassy tomorrow and we shall have these villains set to their rightabout. I shall have you all hanged for this abomination. They broke my box! Go back to bed Adele, you're in your nightgown for heaven's sake what will people think? At least cover your chest."
Looking down at himself, "What will they think of me?"
A man with a sneering face behind the long table shuffling his papers, while the other men were grey faced with exhaustion. "Take him to the commune, Commissary guard him well."
More nightmares of the streets and crossing the river was a task. A small room crammed with men ser shouting as her father's box of papers were handed though and tossed like an ark on the waves. There were men in tricoloured sashes or more like rags hoarse with shouting and stinking of stale sweat.
Downstairs again and another building and someone was saying, "The Mairie, the depot, the Citizen Cruesole will question him."
Sudden quiet as five men behind the table better dressed but the same stale sir of sleepiness exhausted hatred. The man in the centre of the five with greasy purple hair, bloodshot eyes and a thin nose and mouth.
"This is the accused?" he said in a heavily accented voice.
"We've heard a lot about you. You'd better confess at once or it will be the guillotine."
"The guillotine? Are you mad? Upon my soul you look it but I demand that you send word to my ambassador. I'm a Talmish gentlemen, a visitor her damn my stupidity for coming into your damned country. My daughter had been brutally handled by your ruffians and by box is broken-."
A soldier emptied an armful of the papers into the table which most of them were about Loretta's estated that were to come to her from her father's mother's family. Letters from her father when they were in Nalalia, from the count, lawyers tenants notaries. The five men behind the table reached and looked at the documents they wanted to broadcast as it they knew what documents they wanted. The man in the centre read in the list that had been fastened to the bundle. 'Papers concerning Limouisniere estate near Mevant and items, maps for the farmlands and the manors and their-'
"Maps!" One of the other men sprang to his feet." Who sent you here? What had been giving you your orders? Citizen Doctor, I demand that the woman he calls his daughter be arrested also. And the whole nest of ci-devants in that house. The woman de Martinique why was she not brought here?"
"Patience, citizen, we shall have them all in good time. Sign this." He pushed a document across the littered table with a pen and ink. "Do you claim you can't understand our language? This is the process-verbal saying that you have been arrested and why and your documents seized and that you understand."
"He doesn't understand!"
"Be quiet citizeness." His cold eyes not meeting hers and then when they did seeming quiet mad and yet he was quieter than the others almost polite.
Her fathers was brought away down the corridors through a stable yard and up stairs to a second storey as six men were bringing him up to what was a loft. It was six in the morning and there were jailers, ragged soldiers a woman and covered basket. Crying, "They wont let me even speak to him and my master has had nothing to eat since three days ago."
The door grinded to a halt as a sudden stench from beyond rushed out; there was darkness as voices of men waking from sleep growled in alarm.
In her distress Adele shouted after her father before he was out if sight, "Papa, papa come back! He's innocent you wretches!"
The woman was at her elbow tugging her sleeve. "Speak to them for me Madame tell them he has had nothing to eat. He'll starve they give him nothing."
She scarcely knew what the woman said as soldiers ordered them both down the stairs into the stable yard. When they were in the street the lady screamed, "Ys I'm an aristocrat imprison me too! I've been a servant all my life the servant of an aristocrat of good people. Kill me for it but I shall not deny it." She sat down with her basket weeping by the gate.
'I should comfort her' Adele thought but when the blue haired woman sat down to ask her what one must do, she refused to talk to anyone.
Sighing she began walking him the way they had come as people stared at her and called and jeered at her appearance. In all the time she hadn't thought to tell them where the man was, that he was hidden under the roof. It wouldn't have helped to betrayed him as they would probably kill her father anyway. Though as she reached the door she wondered whether she should have.
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ikl wings