SPOILER ALERT: THIS IS THE LAST CHAPTER.
It contains information you may not want to know until you read the rest of the story. To read from the beginning, go to the Blog Archive in the column to the right and click on the graphic next to June. The first chapter, "1. Fleeing Philadelphia" is at the bottom of the list. Click on "Fleeing Philadelphia," and you'll be at the beginning. If you have a problem, please email scatteredproud@gmail.com
Funny, how we all thought of Kit as small. He was, in fact, of the middle height. It was the slightness of his frame that had persuaded my father and others to call him a foal of a man, ignoring how that same foal changed beds, bathed children, and cleaned the dormitory before embarking on a full day––and, often, night––of service to the parish. His grip that day in the study was gentle, warm, comforting, with no hint of the edge-of-death frailty that had shocked us the year before.
I lay my head on his shoulder, drowsy with the sense of well being that precedes a deep, healing sleep. His coat had the crisp, clean scent of the soap we used for the children. The simple domestic fragrance reminded me that Kit had almost been a father to his own child. I let myself consider how he had created that child. I wanted him to be a father again. I wanted him to open his heart to joy, as he had once counseled me to open my own heart. I wanted him to never know another day of suffering. I wanted him to hope. I wanted him to laugh. I wanted him to love.
I wanted him.
I could feel him through our clothing. I would have given myself to him.
“It breaks my heart when you talk as if your life is ended," I said softly. "There’s so much more to you than any of us can ever know. Even you.”
“And it breaks my heart to hear you talk like that,” he replied, his own voice a shade above a whisper. “It makes me wish more and more that I had listened to your father and waited for you. If I had, none of this business would have happened.”
“But it did happen, and here we are.”
A light sigh riffled my hair. “It was worth it, Jan. For this instant alone, it was worth it.”
“An instant? An instant’s not enough for me. It never was. It never will be. Even if it is this instant.”
“What, then, would be enough for you? A mile of instants linked into hours? I can come to visit you at the vicarage, or at the rectory, or wherever you and George will live. We can take walks together. You can read me books. You can even put your children on my knee. I’ll be poor old Uncle Kit, making them yawn with thrice-told tales about his life in France in the final years of the century.”
I had a vision of wee ones not covering their gaping mouths and rolling their eyes because they knew “poor old Uncle Kit” would never see their rude behavior. I almost smiled, but I sensed Kit’s intent was far from blithe. “Those hours still wouldn’t be enough. Nor would days, months, years. Not even an eternity of visits with you would be enough.”
“Then tell me what you want, Jan, though I’m certain I know what it is, and I won’t deny I want the same thing. But to have it would be like saving a boxful of sunlight for the coldest, darkest day in winter. You gather the sunlight filled with certainty and anticipation, but when the time comes to open the box, all you expected to find isn’t there; it never was.”
“And which is better, reaching for the sunlight or one day despairing that you hung back and did nothing? Because the latter is what you’ll do, Kit. You’ll take those walks with me, and you’ll bore my children senseless. But as sure as you regret everything that’s happened, you’ll take those walks and bore those children regretting it wasn’t your own wife on your arm and your own children dutifully putting up with your tales.”
No doubt, he could tell by my motion and by the brighter tone of my voice that I was now looking up at him. He rested his forehead on mine. “The miracle of fidelity, Jan. I’m never quite certain how I won yours, or how you won mine. I only know what I could do to you … and with you … and for you …”
With a kiss meant to stifle his words, I invited him to do as he pleased. The kisses that followed prophesied he would sink into me as if sinking into a feather bed at night––softly, gratefully, eager to be encompassed by all which the bed has to offer. Only our sense of place thwarted us from reaching that highest sign of affection where we stood. The ado over Jerry’s pie was over, smothered by the noise of ordinary chatter and activity. Someone was bound to realize how long we had been gone and come looking for us. We parted, of a mind to compose ourselves before we returned downstairs, but I could not help thinking that Merit or Candace would easily spy a woman’s joy in me. And I feared to think what in the world we would tell George. We lived and worked with him. He would see the contentment that had settled upon Kit and the consternation that now bedeviled me for appearing to reject him. I was neither ungrateful nor out of love with George. His sole deficiency lay in being someone other than the man upon whom I had founded myself at a very young age. He deserved an explanation greater and more reasonable than any I could offer, even if what I told him was the truth. It was best if Kit and I spoke to him together. Kit agreed. We waited for an appropriate occasion.
Though Merit and Candace did indeed remark how well Kit and I were looking, George said nothing. I did not know if I should be relieved or alarmed. I would see him sitting with the paper but not reading. Staring out the window but not watching what was there. Sulking when he could have been joining a pleasant conversation.
“It sounds as though he suspects something and doesn’t know what to do,” Kit said when I told him about George’s manner. “Either that or he’s waiting for the right time to confront us, as we’ve been waiting for the right time to confront him.”
“Perhaps we’ve waited too long,” I said.
“Why is that, do you suppose? Are we too considerate, afraid of hurting his feelings? Or are we afraid he’ll be angry, as he has every right to be. I put you in his keeping. Now I’m taking you back. You can’t deny it seems pretty selfish, not to mention ungrateful, considering all he’s done for me.”
Something about Kit’s argument reminded me of the morning in the hills outside Reims, when George and I fed Josquin’s laborers with an insufficient amount of bread. We had feared the men would battle us, and each other, in a mad rush to seize what little there was. To our surprise, the men not only shared the bread, they looked after each other, seeing that nobody was left out. On our way back to the house, George attributed our fear to vanity: we had so worried about what the workers would think of us for bringing so little, we forgot that men are good and will help each other in time of need. “We should be ashamed of ourselves,” he said. “Where would either of us be, but for the kindness of others?”
I advised Kit of the episode in the vineyards. The account, and my belief that George would understand our circumstances gave Kit some heart. We resolved to speak to George as soon as we saw him.
As it happened, we were changing bed linens in the dormitory. George took Kit’s end of the sheet we were about to place on a bed and began to tell us about something he had seen the other day. It was, he said, the kind of thing we all hear about and long for but believe belongs only in children’s tales—the ones that end "they lived happily ever after."
I expected him to tell us about a merry couple walking arm in arm, surrounded by children who looked like them and shared their glee. He recalled, instead, the scene of a man and a woman in a parlor, doing nothing more than standing stock still in an embrace.
“They were at peace," he reflected, "a pure, simple peace, utterly content with each other…with their world…with every awful thing that the world has done to them…”
"I wasn’t spying on you, Jan," he said, perhaps fearing that my silence denoted anger at him for doing precisely that. "I was coming to tell you that I was going to the bakery to replace Jerry's pie. I was wondering if there was anything else I should get. I couldn’t ignore what Kit was saying. You both were too taken with each other to hear me in the hallway."
I felt I had been caught doing something that people ought not do in public. Should I defend myself, reminding him of the events that had led to the intimation of our marriage, and that he himself had never proposed to me? Or should I remain silent and let my dignity speak for me?
Kit must have felt the blow of George’s knowledge as severely as I. With a hand so cold I could feel it through my sleeve, he took me by the arm and suggested I sit.
“Yes, let’s all sit,” said George. He first set me on the side of the bed, set Kit a little farther away and sat between us.
I was certain he would upbraid us both. Instead, he covered my hands with his and spoke in a voice filled with sorrow for things that might have been but now could never be. “I have no right to come between two people who would come together naturally, if there was nothing in their way. Kit has your heart, Jan. What I don’t have is the audacity—or the stupidity––to take it for myself.”
With that, he placed my hand in Kit's, blessed us both and left us to ourselves.
By Christmas Day, the man who once lamented he could never give of himself had given away and married his own intended to the man who had once thrown him out of the house. It was no major celebration, only a little service at The Refuge, witnessed by Jerry and Candace, and by Pierre and Merit, who had quietly married during a trip to Pierre's family home near Grenoble, in the French Alps. Afterward, they raised cups of chocolate in a toast. We all rolled up our sleeves, did the dishes, and went back to work.
Five months later, Pierre retired from the army and became the director of The Refuge, which the expatriates continued to support though it was no longer a mission. Kit, George and I sailed home on an American ship of the line, accompanied by two envoys who had treated with the French to end the Quasi War. We were met on the ship outside Philadelphia by the bishop and Kit's father. Neither had received the envoys' letter in time to learn what had happened to Kit. Father DeWaere groaned, "Oh my God," wrapped his son in his arms, kissed him, and, weeping, rocked him as if he were a little boy. "It's all right, Papa," Kit said, his voice muffled amid the attention.
Ashen, wide-eyed, the bishop looked around us, repeating "Where is Francis Watters? Where is Mrs. DeWaere?" until George respectfully took him aside and gave him as much news as I allowed him to give. I had no desire for him to reveal that Kit had left America with one wife and returned with another. It was the truth, but it sounded absurd. The bishop--and Father DeWaere--would know everything in time. Now was not that time.
The bishop persuaded Kit not to leave the ministry and assigned him to teach theology and rhetoric at an academy in the Diocese. After living with Kit's parents for a while, we found a modest brick house with a garden big enough for a rose bower and a guinea pig paddock. Though Kit appreciated a quiet life, he liked a house filled with friends, students, and our own children even more. Everyone, young and old, would sit for hours, playing with the piggies or besieging us with questions about our life in France.
Kit at first had no desire to speak about his misadventures. He relented only when he realized it was better to satisfy curiosity and answer questions, rather than let people invent all manner of fiction. His candor had an unforeseen effect: Several students eager to fight in the Barbary War changed their minds after Kit showed them how a half-ounce of lead had redesigned his countenance. The boys' mothers made him new scarves, grateful that he had probably saved their sons' lives.
A mystery remained: The source of the quarrel between Kit and George. "What on earth made you detest him?" I asked over a breakfast spent laughing about the notorious fencing lessons.
Kit reflected. "It was my fault. (But what wasn't my fault in those days!) He wanted to make you his wife the moment he saw you. I acted like an older brother, determined to preserve a beloved sister from any man who would use her in his search for happiness and take her away forever."
Little Philip shrieked and lobbed a fistful of porridge at his smaller sister, who was on the other side of the table. The glob missed, exploding on his father's lapel.
I thoughtfully wiped away the mess. "Do you know, I think that, in those days, as you call them, we all were at fault because we thought we had all the answers. You because so much was expected of you. George because of what he turned out to be, with so much expected of him. I giggle when I remember him thinking he could keep death at bay by reading you newspapers and telling you stories. It was like lighting lamps to chase away nightfall."
"You wouldn't giggle if it had come to naught," Kit noted dryly. "But what about you? How were you at fault? You were little Janet, ferried from one place to the next by people who thought they knew what was best for you. I could never tell if you accepted your life as an adventure or a penance."
"Both," I proposed. "I had nothing to look forward to, except the certainty that I should live apart from the one person I had looked up to all my life. I might have been younger than you, Kit, but I was old enough to know I had no right to be with you. I resolved to live alone, doing good, hurting no one. "
"You never counted on finding somebody who would keep you company while you did those last two things, did you?"
"Never. I forgot there are more wonders to the world than we can ever imagine. And that's why I, too, was wrong to think I had all the answers."
While Kit and I made a home for ourselves, George became a circuit minister, riding to missions throughout Monmouth County, New Jersey. How he came into the position was itself circuitous. When the envoys found us in Paris, we thought they had mistaken us for another group of expatriates because they addressed him as Captain Cunliffe. Only then did we learn that the government had established a chaplaincy for the Army and placed him on the rolls as in the service of American interests in the Quasi War with France.
George always knew that he had been sent to France because of his experience as an army officer: he was to defend us with deadly force, if necessary. But he had had no idea that he was there on orders of the commander-in-chief, not the bishop. He said he thought the assignment a lark until he set foot in The Refuge. The place was precisely that, he said, a sanctuary--a safe place made holy by the work we did. He prayed the French authorities would understand we had nothing to do with hostilities between our countries, or with the politics that eventually led to the coup. He doubted he could do harm, if not murder, to preserve life. His calling demanded he turn the other cheek. At the same time, he refused to expect us to do the same, especially if it led to suffering or death. He was profoundly angry that Dona's presence made matters worse. As it turned out, he was right to suspect her. But he was wrong to blame her husband.
Unable to fight the workings of government, George endured a few months back in the service of his country until the chaplaincy was disbanded. He was promoted to major, discharged from the army with honor and finally returned to the authority of the Church.
To his vast embarrassment, he was awarded a Purple Heart for wounds received in action, a medal not given since the end of the War for Independence.
Malachi would have been pleased.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Saturday, July 11, 2009
31. That Spark of Ignorance
George was angry. Angry at the events that had brought us to that moment. Angry that Kit accepted he was being punished for helping a defenseless woman and her son. Angry that Kit was ready to die as part of that punishment. He released that anger not on Kit, but on the notion of Kit lingering weak and ravaged, awaiting the life of the world to come.
He propped Kit against the headboard and asked a steward to find us a newspaper—any newspaper, that day’s or earlier. I have no recollection which editions the man brought us.
What remains with me is the sight of George not simply reading aloud from the front page to the last, but adding quips that made Kit smile. No matter that Kit fell asleep or was unable to have long conversations. George was fighting the specter of death, and he was determined to win.
Every day, he brought books from Pierre’s library to read to Kit, as well as a pot of chocolate and bread, made by Merit, to break the monotony of Kit's hospital fare. When we tired of reading or translating French and German, we would chat about our lives in America, our lives in France, our childhood.
“You’re lucky my mother’s not around,” George told Kit. “She’s old Scots. She’d fatten you up with the stuff she’d force on me. And I do not say 'force' lightly. She'd threaten to get it in me by way of an enema if I didn't shovel it in.”
Lovingly, with enough detail to empty an unsuspecting gut, he disclosed the preparation and cooking of haggis, the traditional dish based on oatmeal and the respiratory system of a sheep. He then lapsed into imitations of aunts and uncles from the Scottish Highlands. The little show ended with him singing “The chevalier, being void of fear, did march through Birstle Bray, man” in a burr so thick, I thought he was singing in a language other than English.
I wish I could say every day passed so lightly. Alas, every day was never the same as the one before, even if the one before was better than the one before that. Sometimes Kit would ask us to forgo the diversions. He said it was enough to be with us; there was no need for us to exhaust ourselves on his account. He would grow silent, and we would sit for hours not knowing if he slept or brooded. He never, with the smallest, slyest reference, told us things we most wanted to hear from him: How Pierre had overwhelmed him in the middle of the night and brought him to the Bonapartes. How he had begged to be with us during the siege. How a marksman’s shot had aborted his messy gallop back to the vineyard. How another shot had brought him to the state he must endure for the rest of his life. He had no words for us on any of these matters. All he had was silence. Did he mean to spare us his agony, thinking it unseemly to slather a litany of horrors upon us, or did he suspect that we would neither understand nor appreciate the facts that littered the recitation?
Whatever the reason, Kit's torment frothed as George and I nodded off on yet another morning that had lapsed into muteness. He woke with a cry that almost made us drop from our chairs. He said he had entered a room where people he knew as a boy were chatting among themselves. “They were dead and I was dead and I thought I can't see God and then I realized I was in hell because you can't see God if you're in hell." The laugh that provided the sole punctuation for the outburst was part gasp, part cough.
George’s voice had the consistency of glass ground underfoot. “That’s not funny.”
“It’s hilarious really because I won’t see God even if I don’t go to hell, I can’t see a blessed thing! Read to me,” Kit begged, pawing the air for one of us. “Don’t let me fall asleep again I don’t want to see the wrong things in my dreams if I can’t see the right things when I’m awake will somebody please just read to me!”
George, who had grabbed Kit’s hand, nodded toward the Moniteur, but as I handed him the paper he winked at me and, lowering his head closer to Kit’s, said, “I’ll read to you what I read to Janet every night after dinner.” He began with the first page of the book he need not have in hand to read—the psalter. By the time he reached the fortieth psalm, Kit’s breath had the depth and evenness that signifies sound slumber.
“Bored as a babe,” George whispered. He seemed pleased, but I also sensed he was troubled. He later confessed he had omitted the thirty-first psalm. The lines “I am clean forgotten as a dead man out of mind; I am become like a broken vessel” so closely fitted Kit’s circumstances, he feared the three of us would, as he put it, “congeal in a sobbing glob of humanity.”
By spring, we were taking Kit for drives in the country, in a carriage borrowed from one of Pierre’s friends. He was supposed to be transferred to Les Invalides, but when Pierre saw the three of us together, he knew where Kit truly belonged. He gave up his own room in his own house and slept at the Val-de-Grâce so Kit could have a decent bed in a real home.
Amid comfortable surroundings, enshrined among friends whose purpose in life was to restore him, at least in spirit, to the likeness of his old self, Kit grew more adept with his state and less bashful about asking for help. Though he cut his own meat, I nearly fainted at the prospect of him feeling for the business edge of his razor. He assured me George was helping him, something I had no reason to suspect was anything other than the truth. Then came the morning he slept in. I brought fresh coffee to his room to find him not only dressed and buttoning his waistcoat, but so recently shaven his cheeks were pink and soap still glistened on the towel clinging to the washstand.
My greeting foundered as I wondered when George or Merit, who had been with me all morning downstairs, had had the time to shave him. Sensing my surprise, Kit blushed, grinned and admitted he had been shaving himself for weeks but said nothing lest I be needlessly concerned. Pleased to see him looking and sounding so well, I playfully threatened to swat him for the deception. He flinched, thinking I had raised my hand to accomplish the deed. “It was better to show the reality and hope you saw reason,” he said, “than to say something and help you create a fantasy on all the bad things that you alone imagine could happen.”
“How could I not think the worst? I can see what I’m doing, and I’m still wary of sharp things.”
“Ah.” Awash in understanding, Kit took his time getting into the jacket laid out on the foot of the bed, which had yet to be put together for the day. “It’s not what you think, Jan. I’m not in the dark. Darkness and light are nothing to me now. They’re not there. And you know what? I don’t need them. The world supports me with scents, sounds, textures. I don’t need to see this jacket to know it’s made of wool. I don’t need to look at the sky to know it’s about to rain. I didn’t need to observe your face to know you suspected I was finding fault with you.”
He lowered his voice on that last bit and looked down, as if watching himself as he buttoned the jacket. “I would never find fault with you,” he continued as that familiar, claret-colored flush overran what remained of his face. “What grieves me most about how I am now is knowing I shall never see you again, especially when George tells me how much the tailoring of a uniform agrees with you.”
For an instant, I thought to cheer him by saying what he heard was nonsense: All fiancés harbored assessments of their intendeds that others were likely to find excessive and based solely on biased perception. But I knew at once that such a statement was the foam of frivolity. His words were the echo of loss, and I was the place where that echo would end in an answer.
He went still as a chastised child when I gently advised him he was buttoning the jacket wrong.
“We’re destined for change the moment we enter this world,” I said as I buttoned him back up. “We change, or we die. And as we change––and grow up––we learn that it’s not what we see that matters, but what we know and what we do. What I look like doesn’t hold a candle to who you are and what you do.”
His hand caressed the side of my face. It was a moment before he said, “Thank you.”
I reminded him that breakfast was getting cold, and backed away before he could feel the bitter drops sneaking down my cheek.
As Kit's strength returned, George sought to improve him with the voracity of a landowner improving a parcel of property. He taught him to dance the Strathspey (a variation of the Highland fling), saying it would give him a more confident posture and a better sense of place and distance. For the same reasons, he taught him how to fence. Kit went down on a knee, felled by severe but silent laughter the instant George intoned, “This is a foil,” and closed his hand around the hilt. In time, though, the notion of a blind man swinging a sword grew less bizarre, and the two fenced a carefully paced match that reminded me of choreographed duels in Shakespeare's plays. Between the swordplay and the dancing, Kit really did begin to carry himself with confidence.
We returned to The Refuge in the fall of 1800, more than a year after the siege near Reims. The asylum had remained open during our absence, thriving in the care of Jerry and Candace Reynolds, who now had seven little girls to look after. Though Pierre had carried messages between us, and the couple knew how we fared, they still greeted us with hugs of joy and heartache, as though our reunion was a surprise. Kit, who had authority to make decisions without consulting the vestry, let George take over as vicar. He claimed to forget most of the services, and he could hardly study his way back into them. But the way he quietly retreated to a distant room whenever a parishioner stopped by suggested another reason behind his retirement: he had no desire to be seen.
Sometime during Advent I was in Pierre's kitchen, copying a pattern from a woman's magazine, when George came in from Evensong at a parishioner's home. He smelled of chimney smoke and frosty air. His face was ruddy with the cold. "I cannot tell you how deeply people are hoping you say Mass on Christmas Day," he said, warming his hands over the fire.
Hearing no reply, he looked over his shoulder and blinked at Kit, who sat over the Book of Common Prayer opened on the table in front of him.
Kit had just told me that he wanted to leave The Refuge altogether. He had asked me to consult the Book to see if the Induction of Ministers or the Form and Manner of Ordering Priests contained a reference about priests unfit to perform their duties.
He shook his head at George's news. "What I did led to calamity and death for a father and his son, for a mother and her child, and for an untold number of soldiers. I’ll never say another Mass or give another blessing for the rest of my days. You know that.”
“I do?” George glanced at me as though asking if I knew as much myself.
Kit made a noise of impatience. “What do you want me to do, gather the parish together in the biggest place we can find and show myself? Maybe I can do it on Christmas night. Get everybody sick to their stomachs after their day of feasting.”
George sat beside him, closing the Book. “Well, firstly, there’s nothing wrong with your appearance."
Kit tugged the tails of the black silk scarf wrapped around his head where his eyes had been. “I look like a child playing blind man’s bluff.”
“And when they see you, every woman in the parish will want to make you enough scarves to last Methuselah's lifetime.”
“Don’t patronize me, George.”
“Then let me reason with you. Suppose something happened to me (again), and I couldn’t work. Would you step in and do the best you could, or would you stand aside, knowing that whoever needed you would suffer all the more because you refused to help? Which is more important: your presumption of what God thinks of you for what you think you've done, or how we’re expected to act as Christian men?”
“You’d better flee, Jan,” Kit advised. “I feel a theological debate coming on.”
“That’s right, Jan,” George said promptly. “The Reverend Christian DeWaere believes his life has become a parable, and there’s only one way to interpret it: his way.”
“There is only one interpretation, George. One Corinthians, Nine: 'They who preach the Gospel should live of the Gospel.' It's the precept we're all charged with when we're ordained. I didn’t follow it. My belief in my own abilities got the better of me.”
“Throwing false modesty in with the pride, are we? How about gluttony, greed, sloth and the rest of the seven deadly sins? No doubt about it, my son: you're going to hell in a handbasket!”
"Yes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions."
George regretted the failed humor. He squeezed Kit's arm. “Listen: You want to know what God really thinks of you? This is what He thinks: 'For God so loved Kit, that He gave His only begotten son.'"
It's one thing to tell others the original, "For God so loved the world;" quite another to hear yourself referenced. For all Kit's intellect, he appeared to have neglected that one, simple tenet. Perhaps he was aghast at his error. Perhaps he felt shamed by yet another display of arrogance. Or perhaps, as George later said, it was the first time that he allowed himself to consider that God could be as kind to him as He was to others; he was a bit shaken. He paled, then turned red, sitting so still he seemed not to breathe. At last he excused himself, saying he was tired; he needed to lie down.
George followed discreetly, making sure he got upstairs without incident--and was out of earshot--before asking, “What was that all about?”
“He can’t say Mass, George.”
“Of course he can, with assistance.”
“No, he can’t. Not when he blames himself for what happened to everyone.”
“I'm thinking of our wedding, Jan. If Kit doesn’t officiate at our wedding, who will? I can’t do it for us. I can’t even serve alongside him. It’s not allowed.”
“Then talk to him. Or break the rules and serve alongside him. Which better reflects the tenets of the Church: rules or compassion?”
“Both, I should hope!”
Though Kit avoided visits from his flock, he always responded to letters. We usually worked on his correspondence in The Refuge's kitchen. When he asked me to take a letter several days later, the place was deliciously raucous: Jerry had baked an apple pie that had the heft of a doorstop. Everybody was howling with laughter, calling it "Jerry's Five-Pound Pie." I brought paper and pen to the little parlor on the second floor, where all was bright and quiet.
“Tell me something, Jan,” Kit said as he settled beside me at the writing table. “Why does a certain set of people come together to endure the unimagined dangers of life? Is it coincidence? Fate? The workings of a higher power? Or is it a little bit of everything, born of the desire to not suffer alone and the fear of dying forsaken?”
I chose my words with care. I could not be dishonest with Kit, but I had no heart to accuse him of inviting the things that had ruined him. “A year or two ago I might have observed that people are driven together by fear and self-interest. How could I not say such a thing? I believed my life was shaped by the actions of others engulfed and deluded by their own interests.”
“Myself among them?”
I placed my hand on his arm, willing him to understand he was blameless; he himself had been shaped by the acts of others. “We’re commanded to love one another. You taught me the difference between doing so out of thoughtless obedience and doing so because we understand each moment could be the last not only for ourselves, but for everyone we meet along the way.”
He sat, silent, considering. After a moment he cleared his throat. “The letter? Please?”
I wrote. His faltering words and hesitant phrases implied he was doing no more than giving me time to capture his thoughts. Then full sentences appeared, and I discerned the pace had nothing to do with his concern for precision. He was afraid: of what I would think. Of what I would say. Of what he revealed about himself.
“So you are to marry. Should I be surprised, recalling what I have witnessed this past year? Perhaps you know by now that nothing in this world surprises me any more. After a life of privileged responsibility, I have had no choice but to accept that life equals change, especially in matters of the heart. As children, we settle our affections on small, furry creatures that please the eye and rob our hearts through purrs and silly ways. By twenty, our attachment moves to human beauty, trusting that whatever pleases the eye must lead to perfect contentment.
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child. I am become a man but cannot put away all childish things. I refuse to relinquish that spark of ignorance called ‘hope’ that carries children through their daily trials and throws adults headlong into the immovable wall of life’s realities. Anything is possible for any possible reason.
When I understood that I was free from the delusion that had imprisoned me since my youth, I hoped, however briefly, that I would at last become the son your father never had but always wanted. I now must hope that the man who takes the place once presumed for me may exceed his expectations, and you both will be happy.
It’s good that I'm become a man with puny ability to sustain himself, let alone a wife and family. Strength and affluence would encourage me to steal another man’s treasure. That would be wrong. Now more than ever, I take comfort in knowing that our treasures truly are stored in heaven. The gems we find here on earth serve to remind us of the greater goodness from whence they come.
That said, I beg you to forgive my asking you to write this letter. I needed to know that, if I frightened you, you didn’t immediately throw my words into the fire. I’ll joyfully marry you to George with whatever authority my blessing holds. I confess, though, that it would be enough for me to kiss your hand, if I may. Forgive me if I hit it with my nose. I’ve always made an awkward bow.”
That was the end of the letter. I could not have written out more. The more I realized Kit directed his thoughts to me, the more my hand trembled; the more I made the letters very small and crowded them together. I made certain that I alone would be able to read words meant for myself alone.
I was as stricken by Kit’s admission as he seemed stricken by the notion of my marriage. Why? He himself had proposed the union on that early morning in the Val-de-Grace. I reminded him when and how he said he wanted me to have security and friendship. “You told me to go with George.”
“Yes...yes, of course..." The voice grew wispy with remembrance. "But that was before...when I thought..."
"You were going to leave us," I whispered.
"Forgive me. I had no right--" He took several strides in a panic, then stopped and turned around, lost. “Which way do I go? Janet? Which way—"
“Come to my voice, Kit.”
“Will you just tell me--"
“Come to my voice.”
I put myself in his path. He found me, and with the silent understanding that forms between couples, we stepped into each other’s arms. We clung to each other, heedless of the chill of the room, the sound of traffic in the street, the doings downstairs in The Refuge.
He propped Kit against the headboard and asked a steward to find us a newspaper—any newspaper, that day’s or earlier. I have no recollection which editions the man brought us.
What remains with me is the sight of George not simply reading aloud from the front page to the last, but adding quips that made Kit smile. No matter that Kit fell asleep or was unable to have long conversations. George was fighting the specter of death, and he was determined to win.
Every day, he brought books from Pierre’s library to read to Kit, as well as a pot of chocolate and bread, made by Merit, to break the monotony of Kit's hospital fare. When we tired of reading or translating French and German, we would chat about our lives in America, our lives in France, our childhood.
“You’re lucky my mother’s not around,” George told Kit. “She’s old Scots. She’d fatten you up with the stuff she’d force on me. And I do not say 'force' lightly. She'd threaten to get it in me by way of an enema if I didn't shovel it in.”
Lovingly, with enough detail to empty an unsuspecting gut, he disclosed the preparation and cooking of haggis, the traditional dish based on oatmeal and the respiratory system of a sheep. He then lapsed into imitations of aunts and uncles from the Scottish Highlands. The little show ended with him singing “The chevalier, being void of fear, did march through Birstle Bray, man” in a burr so thick, I thought he was singing in a language other than English.
I wish I could say every day passed so lightly. Alas, every day was never the same as the one before, even if the one before was better than the one before that. Sometimes Kit would ask us to forgo the diversions. He said it was enough to be with us; there was no need for us to exhaust ourselves on his account. He would grow silent, and we would sit for hours not knowing if he slept or brooded. He never, with the smallest, slyest reference, told us things we most wanted to hear from him: How Pierre had overwhelmed him in the middle of the night and brought him to the Bonapartes. How he had begged to be with us during the siege. How a marksman’s shot had aborted his messy gallop back to the vineyard. How another shot had brought him to the state he must endure for the rest of his life. He had no words for us on any of these matters. All he had was silence. Did he mean to spare us his agony, thinking it unseemly to slather a litany of horrors upon us, or did he suspect that we would neither understand nor appreciate the facts that littered the recitation?
Whatever the reason, Kit's torment frothed as George and I nodded off on yet another morning that had lapsed into muteness. He woke with a cry that almost made us drop from our chairs. He said he had entered a room where people he knew as a boy were chatting among themselves. “They were dead and I was dead and I thought I can't see God and then I realized I was in hell because you can't see God if you're in hell." The laugh that provided the sole punctuation for the outburst was part gasp, part cough.
George’s voice had the consistency of glass ground underfoot. “That’s not funny.”
“It’s hilarious really because I won’t see God even if I don’t go to hell, I can’t see a blessed thing! Read to me,” Kit begged, pawing the air for one of us. “Don’t let me fall asleep again I don’t want to see the wrong things in my dreams if I can’t see the right things when I’m awake will somebody please just read to me!”
George, who had grabbed Kit’s hand, nodded toward the Moniteur, but as I handed him the paper he winked at me and, lowering his head closer to Kit’s, said, “I’ll read to you what I read to Janet every night after dinner.” He began with the first page of the book he need not have in hand to read—the psalter. By the time he reached the fortieth psalm, Kit’s breath had the depth and evenness that signifies sound slumber.
“Bored as a babe,” George whispered. He seemed pleased, but I also sensed he was troubled. He later confessed he had omitted the thirty-first psalm. The lines “I am clean forgotten as a dead man out of mind; I am become like a broken vessel” so closely fitted Kit’s circumstances, he feared the three of us would, as he put it, “congeal in a sobbing glob of humanity.”
By spring, we were taking Kit for drives in the country, in a carriage borrowed from one of Pierre’s friends. He was supposed to be transferred to Les Invalides, but when Pierre saw the three of us together, he knew where Kit truly belonged. He gave up his own room in his own house and slept at the Val-de-Grâce so Kit could have a decent bed in a real home.
Amid comfortable surroundings, enshrined among friends whose purpose in life was to restore him, at least in spirit, to the likeness of his old self, Kit grew more adept with his state and less bashful about asking for help. Though he cut his own meat, I nearly fainted at the prospect of him feeling for the business edge of his razor. He assured me George was helping him, something I had no reason to suspect was anything other than the truth. Then came the morning he slept in. I brought fresh coffee to his room to find him not only dressed and buttoning his waistcoat, but so recently shaven his cheeks were pink and soap still glistened on the towel clinging to the washstand.
My greeting foundered as I wondered when George or Merit, who had been with me all morning downstairs, had had the time to shave him. Sensing my surprise, Kit blushed, grinned and admitted he had been shaving himself for weeks but said nothing lest I be needlessly concerned. Pleased to see him looking and sounding so well, I playfully threatened to swat him for the deception. He flinched, thinking I had raised my hand to accomplish the deed. “It was better to show the reality and hope you saw reason,” he said, “than to say something and help you create a fantasy on all the bad things that you alone imagine could happen.”
“How could I not think the worst? I can see what I’m doing, and I’m still wary of sharp things.”
“Ah.” Awash in understanding, Kit took his time getting into the jacket laid out on the foot of the bed, which had yet to be put together for the day. “It’s not what you think, Jan. I’m not in the dark. Darkness and light are nothing to me now. They’re not there. And you know what? I don’t need them. The world supports me with scents, sounds, textures. I don’t need to see this jacket to know it’s made of wool. I don’t need to look at the sky to know it’s about to rain. I didn’t need to observe your face to know you suspected I was finding fault with you.”
He lowered his voice on that last bit and looked down, as if watching himself as he buttoned the jacket. “I would never find fault with you,” he continued as that familiar, claret-colored flush overran what remained of his face. “What grieves me most about how I am now is knowing I shall never see you again, especially when George tells me how much the tailoring of a uniform agrees with you.”
For an instant, I thought to cheer him by saying what he heard was nonsense: All fiancés harbored assessments of their intendeds that others were likely to find excessive and based solely on biased perception. But I knew at once that such a statement was the foam of frivolity. His words were the echo of loss, and I was the place where that echo would end in an answer.
He went still as a chastised child when I gently advised him he was buttoning the jacket wrong.
“We’re destined for change the moment we enter this world,” I said as I buttoned him back up. “We change, or we die. And as we change––and grow up––we learn that it’s not what we see that matters, but what we know and what we do. What I look like doesn’t hold a candle to who you are and what you do.”
His hand caressed the side of my face. It was a moment before he said, “Thank you.”
I reminded him that breakfast was getting cold, and backed away before he could feel the bitter drops sneaking down my cheek.
As Kit's strength returned, George sought to improve him with the voracity of a landowner improving a parcel of property. He taught him to dance the Strathspey (a variation of the Highland fling), saying it would give him a more confident posture and a better sense of place and distance. For the same reasons, he taught him how to fence. Kit went down on a knee, felled by severe but silent laughter the instant George intoned, “This is a foil,” and closed his hand around the hilt. In time, though, the notion of a blind man swinging a sword grew less bizarre, and the two fenced a carefully paced match that reminded me of choreographed duels in Shakespeare's plays. Between the swordplay and the dancing, Kit really did begin to carry himself with confidence.
We returned to The Refuge in the fall of 1800, more than a year after the siege near Reims. The asylum had remained open during our absence, thriving in the care of Jerry and Candace Reynolds, who now had seven little girls to look after. Though Pierre had carried messages between us, and the couple knew how we fared, they still greeted us with hugs of joy and heartache, as though our reunion was a surprise. Kit, who had authority to make decisions without consulting the vestry, let George take over as vicar. He claimed to forget most of the services, and he could hardly study his way back into them. But the way he quietly retreated to a distant room whenever a parishioner stopped by suggested another reason behind his retirement: he had no desire to be seen.
Sometime during Advent I was in Pierre's kitchen, copying a pattern from a woman's magazine, when George came in from Evensong at a parishioner's home. He smelled of chimney smoke and frosty air. His face was ruddy with the cold. "I cannot tell you how deeply people are hoping you say Mass on Christmas Day," he said, warming his hands over the fire.
Hearing no reply, he looked over his shoulder and blinked at Kit, who sat over the Book of Common Prayer opened on the table in front of him.
Kit had just told me that he wanted to leave The Refuge altogether. He had asked me to consult the Book to see if the Induction of Ministers or the Form and Manner of Ordering Priests contained a reference about priests unfit to perform their duties.
He shook his head at George's news. "What I did led to calamity and death for a father and his son, for a mother and her child, and for an untold number of soldiers. I’ll never say another Mass or give another blessing for the rest of my days. You know that.”
“I do?” George glanced at me as though asking if I knew as much myself.
Kit made a noise of impatience. “What do you want me to do, gather the parish together in the biggest place we can find and show myself? Maybe I can do it on Christmas night. Get everybody sick to their stomachs after their day of feasting.”
George sat beside him, closing the Book. “Well, firstly, there’s nothing wrong with your appearance."
Kit tugged the tails of the black silk scarf wrapped around his head where his eyes had been. “I look like a child playing blind man’s bluff.”
“And when they see you, every woman in the parish will want to make you enough scarves to last Methuselah's lifetime.”
“Don’t patronize me, George.”
“Then let me reason with you. Suppose something happened to me (again), and I couldn’t work. Would you step in and do the best you could, or would you stand aside, knowing that whoever needed you would suffer all the more because you refused to help? Which is more important: your presumption of what God thinks of you for what you think you've done, or how we’re expected to act as Christian men?”
“You’d better flee, Jan,” Kit advised. “I feel a theological debate coming on.”
“That’s right, Jan,” George said promptly. “The Reverend Christian DeWaere believes his life has become a parable, and there’s only one way to interpret it: his way.”
“There is only one interpretation, George. One Corinthians, Nine: 'They who preach the Gospel should live of the Gospel.' It's the precept we're all charged with when we're ordained. I didn’t follow it. My belief in my own abilities got the better of me.”
“Throwing false modesty in with the pride, are we? How about gluttony, greed, sloth and the rest of the seven deadly sins? No doubt about it, my son: you're going to hell in a handbasket!”
"Yes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions."
George regretted the failed humor. He squeezed Kit's arm. “Listen: You want to know what God really thinks of you? This is what He thinks: 'For God so loved Kit, that He gave His only begotten son.'"
It's one thing to tell others the original, "For God so loved the world;" quite another to hear yourself referenced. For all Kit's intellect, he appeared to have neglected that one, simple tenet. Perhaps he was aghast at his error. Perhaps he felt shamed by yet another display of arrogance. Or perhaps, as George later said, it was the first time that he allowed himself to consider that God could be as kind to him as He was to others; he was a bit shaken. He paled, then turned red, sitting so still he seemed not to breathe. At last he excused himself, saying he was tired; he needed to lie down.
George followed discreetly, making sure he got upstairs without incident--and was out of earshot--before asking, “What was that all about?”
“He can’t say Mass, George.”
“Of course he can, with assistance.”
“No, he can’t. Not when he blames himself for what happened to everyone.”
“I'm thinking of our wedding, Jan. If Kit doesn’t officiate at our wedding, who will? I can’t do it for us. I can’t even serve alongside him. It’s not allowed.”
“Then talk to him. Or break the rules and serve alongside him. Which better reflects the tenets of the Church: rules or compassion?”
“Both, I should hope!”
Though Kit avoided visits from his flock, he always responded to letters. We usually worked on his correspondence in The Refuge's kitchen. When he asked me to take a letter several days later, the place was deliciously raucous: Jerry had baked an apple pie that had the heft of a doorstop. Everybody was howling with laughter, calling it "Jerry's Five-Pound Pie." I brought paper and pen to the little parlor on the second floor, where all was bright and quiet.
“Tell me something, Jan,” Kit said as he settled beside me at the writing table. “Why does a certain set of people come together to endure the unimagined dangers of life? Is it coincidence? Fate? The workings of a higher power? Or is it a little bit of everything, born of the desire to not suffer alone and the fear of dying forsaken?”
I chose my words with care. I could not be dishonest with Kit, but I had no heart to accuse him of inviting the things that had ruined him. “A year or two ago I might have observed that people are driven together by fear and self-interest. How could I not say such a thing? I believed my life was shaped by the actions of others engulfed and deluded by their own interests.”
“Myself among them?”
I placed my hand on his arm, willing him to understand he was blameless; he himself had been shaped by the acts of others. “We’re commanded to love one another. You taught me the difference between doing so out of thoughtless obedience and doing so because we understand each moment could be the last not only for ourselves, but for everyone we meet along the way.”
He sat, silent, considering. After a moment he cleared his throat. “The letter? Please?”
I wrote. His faltering words and hesitant phrases implied he was doing no more than giving me time to capture his thoughts. Then full sentences appeared, and I discerned the pace had nothing to do with his concern for precision. He was afraid: of what I would think. Of what I would say. Of what he revealed about himself.
“So you are to marry. Should I be surprised, recalling what I have witnessed this past year? Perhaps you know by now that nothing in this world surprises me any more. After a life of privileged responsibility, I have had no choice but to accept that life equals change, especially in matters of the heart. As children, we settle our affections on small, furry creatures that please the eye and rob our hearts through purrs and silly ways. By twenty, our attachment moves to human beauty, trusting that whatever pleases the eye must lead to perfect contentment.
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child. I am become a man but cannot put away all childish things. I refuse to relinquish that spark of ignorance called ‘hope’ that carries children through their daily trials and throws adults headlong into the immovable wall of life’s realities. Anything is possible for any possible reason.
When I understood that I was free from the delusion that had imprisoned me since my youth, I hoped, however briefly, that I would at last become the son your father never had but always wanted. I now must hope that the man who takes the place once presumed for me may exceed his expectations, and you both will be happy.
It’s good that I'm become a man with puny ability to sustain himself, let alone a wife and family. Strength and affluence would encourage me to steal another man’s treasure. That would be wrong. Now more than ever, I take comfort in knowing that our treasures truly are stored in heaven. The gems we find here on earth serve to remind us of the greater goodness from whence they come.
That said, I beg you to forgive my asking you to write this letter. I needed to know that, if I frightened you, you didn’t immediately throw my words into the fire. I’ll joyfully marry you to George with whatever authority my blessing holds. I confess, though, that it would be enough for me to kiss your hand, if I may. Forgive me if I hit it with my nose. I’ve always made an awkward bow.”
That was the end of the letter. I could not have written out more. The more I realized Kit directed his thoughts to me, the more my hand trembled; the more I made the letters very small and crowded them together. I made certain that I alone would be able to read words meant for myself alone.
I was as stricken by Kit’s admission as he seemed stricken by the notion of my marriage. Why? He himself had proposed the union on that early morning in the Val-de-Grace. I reminded him when and how he said he wanted me to have security and friendship. “You told me to go with George.”
“Yes...yes, of course..." The voice grew wispy with remembrance. "But that was before...when I thought..."
"You were going to leave us," I whispered.
"Forgive me. I had no right--" He took several strides in a panic, then stopped and turned around, lost. “Which way do I go? Janet? Which way—"
“Come to my voice, Kit.”
“Will you just tell me--"
“Come to my voice.”
I put myself in his path. He found me, and with the silent understanding that forms between couples, we stepped into each other’s arms. We clung to each other, heedless of the chill of the room, the sound of traffic in the street, the doings downstairs in The Refuge.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
30. Scattered Proud
So Kit was given back to us.
Though some of my readers have expressed displeasure at seeing the passive voice open a chapter, I know no other way to write this simple truth. To say Kit came back to us would be inaccurate. He did not come back to us. To say he came back would imply he had a choice. He had no choice. He was taken from us; someone other than himself would have to see to his return.
How long he would stay with us was another matter. The shot had ripped away his eyes and the bridge of his nose. The desecration and weeks of indifferent care at a military jail had turned him into a ghastly collection of bones topped by a death’s head swaddled in a blood-stained blindfold. There was no question that he would need care around the clock and for a long time. Pierre put him in the Val-de-Grace and then worried about getting the paperwork that formally declared him a captain in the French army. If he survived, he would be eligible for a pension and rooms in Les Invalides, the old soldiers’ home in the Champs de Mars.
His rank allowed a private room, which meant we could sit with him at all hours. In the beginning, he said nothing, but he knew we were there and who we were. He would thank us for a sip of water or any small comfort by brushing his hand against our coats, our arms, our hair.
The first time he spoke, he asked for Josquin and Malachi.
Merit gently shushed him and kissed his hair, as if comforting Mal when he was a small child. She bit her lip and squeezed her eyes shut to keep from crying outright.
George put his arm around her shoulders, telling her to sit, but Kit made a noise that sounded like “no” and clutched her jacket. After a moment Merit lowered her head to hear what he was saying. She sniffled; her shoulders shook as she wept. George looked away, helpless, but Kit clung to Merit, speaking for as long as he could, until she calmed down.
We hoped he would meet his wife’s fate with equal grace.
Several weeks after the coup, we learned that Dona DeWaere had reclaimed the house that the state had seized from her family during the Revolution. After helping Kit paint the trompe l’oeil murals at the vineyard, she went to the authorities and told them that Josquin Levy-Pfaltz, one of Gracchus Babeuf's co-conspirators, concealed an arsenal of technologically advanced muskets in his champagne cellars. Though Josquin owned only two of the muskets, Dona dressed up the truth, as she was so often wont to do. The Directors thanked her for the information by giving her the house.
Her beloved old home had been converted into the apartment building that Kit and I had visited months earlier. Dona was living on the upper floor, evicting tenants, when the Directors realized how she had tricked them. As troops broke down her door, she stabbed herself with a kitchen knife and died along with the baby she still carried.
George offered to tell Kit himself. Pierre agreed, thinking G.F. would speak to Kit as one clergyman to another. But George had another reason for assuming the responsibility.
He asked if I remembered teasing him about a young woman waiting for him in America.
“Of course,” I said, burning at the memory of how he had prevented the Guard from seeing us near Josquin’s estate.
We listened in dismay as he advised us that he had indeed left behind a young woman: his wife was buried in her family’s plot near Morristown, New Jersey, a victim of the same fever that had driven Kit and me from Philadelphia in 1793.
“I was a lieutenant of light cavalry in the capital,” he recalled with as much emotion as reciting a manual of arms. “At about the time you and Kit were lost in the woods, Jan, I was driving my bride to safety at her parents’ house. I thought she had escaped. We all did. But she didn’t. My commanding officer gave me leave to take her to her parents, but I was forbidden to go to her when she took sick. The day I buried her, I resigned my commission and pursued Holy Orders, I was that disgusted with serving a government that forced me to stay away from my wife when she was dying."
“Mon cher!” Merit reached for his arm but held back. “Did you never discuss this with Kit?”
There was a long silence as George stared at his hands with what I perceived as more than a touch of shame. “We’ve never been inclined to have friendly chats.”
"We presumed as much the night you jumped each other in the kitchen," I said, thinking it was something Malachi would say.
"At any rate," George interrupted, "I can speak to him as somebody who knows what it is to lose a spouse--if not as a respected colleague." Only Pierre went with him.
I nested in a fauteuil, determined to wait up for “the boys,” as Merit called them, but fell asleep over a German translation of Pliny’s account of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The sound of a chair scraping the floor woke me. G.F. settled in the fauteuil he had dragged next to mine. Low flames sighed in the hearth, sending crimson light pulsing through the darkness. I asked how Kit took the news.
George failed to eat a yawn. “Not a word! He just lay there. Scared the devil out of me. Thought he’d died, he was so still. But I guess he’d accepted for a long time that his wife was lost to him.”
I reminded George that Kit had lost more than his wife. He nodded. “I know. He didn’t mention it. Neither did I.”
We watched the feeble flames in silence.
“There’s something you should know,” George said softly.
“About you?” I doubted I would ever forget that he had never told me about the young woman he had left behind in Morristown.
“About Kit. It’s not a bad thing,” he assured me. “It’s a Kit thing. Weak as he is, he berated me for not letting you come with us tonight. He said you’ve known each other too long to be regarded as the flotsam of fate, strangers suddenly tossed together to muddle through a mindless moment in history.”
“'The flotsam of fate’?”
George chuckled. “He may not be able to say much, but what does come out of him is worth the wait. Maybe you’ll find out for yourself. He practically ordered me to bring you with me first thing tomorrow. I don’t know if he’s still the vicar or pulling rank--” He gestured to his humble enlisted man's uniform.
I thought Kit was still sleeping when we entered his room the following morning, but he held out his hand to me. It was cold; the flesh so thin and dry I feared it would tear at the slightest touch. His lips moved. I bent low, and he put his arm around my neck and pressed me ever so slightly but enough to bring me closer to his whisper. “Hear me out, Jan. Say nothing. Not a sound. Until I finish. Promise?”
I nodded.
“Janet. Do you promise.”
“Yes, of course.” How silly of me, to forget he could not see the common gesture of assent.
“This business of religion…We grow up believing we’ll die into life if we trust in The Lord, and follow His example, and ask His forgiveness, especially at the hour of our death. But when it’s one’s turn…No…when it was my turn…I never thought of God. I never asked Him to forgive me the things I had done or left undone. I thought only of the people I would leave behind. And the people I had wronged. And how my life was so unlike what I had foreseen when I was a boy. My time had come. There was no turning back. There was no way to improve my situation, or make amends, or change the direction of my ways. There was no consolation. There was no promise of life everlasting. There was only bitterness, disappointment…the certainty I would die into nothing.”
I appraised Kit’s recitation as the product of someone terrified by the suspicion that his life and everything he believed had been a fraud. I refused to let him believe he had lived and suffered for nothing. “But that’s the point of Our Lord on the Cross! For all he endured, his concern was for others, not himself. He felt what you felt. He knew what he felt must be the way it is and will be for each and every one of us until the end of all time. Why else would he say, ‘Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do’? He forgave all of us, not only the men who put him to death. He knew some of us would never be able to beg forgiveness for ourselves.”
“Don’t speak of that, Jan,” Kit said before I completed these thoughts. “I wish I could tell you I accepted death in half so manly a fashion. I begged my captors to show me the same kindness they would give a draft horse stricken in its traces, and deliver me from my agony. Hardly an example of Christian fortitude.”
The natural reaction would have been to weep and remind him of the irreparable sorrow the deed would have brought upon his friends. But I considered that my protest might instead strike him as condemnation. I had no desire to inflict more than the physical damage done him by his enemies and the emotional damage he visited upon himself. I turned to George, who had set his gaze upon the floor, his hands clasped behind his back in a show of patience and reflection. The attitude and the utter lack of surprise signified he already knew what I was only now just hearing for myself.
Despite the heavy wool uniform, I shivered. Not from the cool, raw air that still burrowed beneath my sleeves. From stopping myself from taking Kit in my arms and doing something that would tell the stewards I was anything but a soldier visiting a friend who had almost perished in action. I petted his hair and begged him to trouble himself no longer.
“Janet.” The tone of the breath that formed my name chided me for my distress and pleaded with me to be silent. “Thoughts of you alone kept me alive. I worried about you. I had to survive long enough to know you were settled in life. I have always wanted you to have fidelity, friendship, security.”
“You’ve always known I’d go back to Bethlehem—to my Moravians.” I meant to speak lightly about the place and people I had so often threatened to flee to, but tears leapt from my eyes onto Kit's hands, which I had folded between mine.
I never in our lives had given him so much as a friendly peck on the cheek to betray my fondness for him. I remembered sitting with George in the woods near Luxembourg, resolved to punish myself for never telling Kit that I had loved him ever since I was a little girl. Now God was giving me what could be my last chance to do so. I would be wrong to say or do nothing. I brought his hands to my lips.
“Go with George,” he said, as I kissed the places that glistened where my tears had fallen.
Do what?
I again looked to George, suspecting he knew what was on Kit's mind.
Kit sensed my confusion. “Go with George. I was wrong. He does deserve you.”
“Why ever did you think George did not deserve me?” I persisted gently, uncertain where all this was going.
Kit’s lips moved. Nothing emerged.
George patted his shoulder. "No matter: The mouth is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
The mouth worked again. George frowned. “Did he say ’Luke one-fifty-one’? There’s more than a hundred chapters in Luke?”
“I don’t remember Luke being as long as that. It must be Chapter One, Verse Fifty-one," I reasoned. “What does it say?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Neither do I.”
“But you’re a priest!”
“Not every priest knows chapter and verse.”
“Kit does.”
“How can he not know? His brain is bigger than his body!”
“George.” The tone Kit had used to silence me moments before now made both his friends pay attention. “The verse is, 'He hath showed strength with his arm…he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.’ It's so true. I thought I had all the answers. I was wrong. I got what I deserved. Whom have I to complain of...but myself?”
George pushed back Kit’s hair and turned his head so they would have been looking each other in the eye. “That's one eloquent horse pile, Kit. I don’t believe it. Neither should you.”
Though some of my readers have expressed displeasure at seeing the passive voice open a chapter, I know no other way to write this simple truth. To say Kit came back to us would be inaccurate. He did not come back to us. To say he came back would imply he had a choice. He had no choice. He was taken from us; someone other than himself would have to see to his return.
How long he would stay with us was another matter. The shot had ripped away his eyes and the bridge of his nose. The desecration and weeks of indifferent care at a military jail had turned him into a ghastly collection of bones topped by a death’s head swaddled in a blood-stained blindfold. There was no question that he would need care around the clock and for a long time. Pierre put him in the Val-de-Grace and then worried about getting the paperwork that formally declared him a captain in the French army. If he survived, he would be eligible for a pension and rooms in Les Invalides, the old soldiers’ home in the Champs de Mars.
His rank allowed a private room, which meant we could sit with him at all hours. In the beginning, he said nothing, but he knew we were there and who we were. He would thank us for a sip of water or any small comfort by brushing his hand against our coats, our arms, our hair.
The first time he spoke, he asked for Josquin and Malachi.
Merit gently shushed him and kissed his hair, as if comforting Mal when he was a small child. She bit her lip and squeezed her eyes shut to keep from crying outright.
George put his arm around her shoulders, telling her to sit, but Kit made a noise that sounded like “no” and clutched her jacket. After a moment Merit lowered her head to hear what he was saying. She sniffled; her shoulders shook as she wept. George looked away, helpless, but Kit clung to Merit, speaking for as long as he could, until she calmed down.
We hoped he would meet his wife’s fate with equal grace.
Several weeks after the coup, we learned that Dona DeWaere had reclaimed the house that the state had seized from her family during the Revolution. After helping Kit paint the trompe l’oeil murals at the vineyard, she went to the authorities and told them that Josquin Levy-Pfaltz, one of Gracchus Babeuf's co-conspirators, concealed an arsenal of technologically advanced muskets in his champagne cellars. Though Josquin owned only two of the muskets, Dona dressed up the truth, as she was so often wont to do. The Directors thanked her for the information by giving her the house.
Her beloved old home had been converted into the apartment building that Kit and I had visited months earlier. Dona was living on the upper floor, evicting tenants, when the Directors realized how she had tricked them. As troops broke down her door, she stabbed herself with a kitchen knife and died along with the baby she still carried.
George offered to tell Kit himself. Pierre agreed, thinking G.F. would speak to Kit as one clergyman to another. But George had another reason for assuming the responsibility.
He asked if I remembered teasing him about a young woman waiting for him in America.
“Of course,” I said, burning at the memory of how he had prevented the Guard from seeing us near Josquin’s estate.
We listened in dismay as he advised us that he had indeed left behind a young woman: his wife was buried in her family’s plot near Morristown, New Jersey, a victim of the same fever that had driven Kit and me from Philadelphia in 1793.
“I was a lieutenant of light cavalry in the capital,” he recalled with as much emotion as reciting a manual of arms. “At about the time you and Kit were lost in the woods, Jan, I was driving my bride to safety at her parents’ house. I thought she had escaped. We all did. But she didn’t. My commanding officer gave me leave to take her to her parents, but I was forbidden to go to her when she took sick. The day I buried her, I resigned my commission and pursued Holy Orders, I was that disgusted with serving a government that forced me to stay away from my wife when she was dying."
“Mon cher!” Merit reached for his arm but held back. “Did you never discuss this with Kit?”
There was a long silence as George stared at his hands with what I perceived as more than a touch of shame. “We’ve never been inclined to have friendly chats.”
"We presumed as much the night you jumped each other in the kitchen," I said, thinking it was something Malachi would say.
"At any rate," George interrupted, "I can speak to him as somebody who knows what it is to lose a spouse--if not as a respected colleague." Only Pierre went with him.
I nested in a fauteuil, determined to wait up for “the boys,” as Merit called them, but fell asleep over a German translation of Pliny’s account of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The sound of a chair scraping the floor woke me. G.F. settled in the fauteuil he had dragged next to mine. Low flames sighed in the hearth, sending crimson light pulsing through the darkness. I asked how Kit took the news.
George failed to eat a yawn. “Not a word! He just lay there. Scared the devil out of me. Thought he’d died, he was so still. But I guess he’d accepted for a long time that his wife was lost to him.”
I reminded George that Kit had lost more than his wife. He nodded. “I know. He didn’t mention it. Neither did I.”
We watched the feeble flames in silence.
“There’s something you should know,” George said softly.
“About you?” I doubted I would ever forget that he had never told me about the young woman he had left behind in Morristown.
“About Kit. It’s not a bad thing,” he assured me. “It’s a Kit thing. Weak as he is, he berated me for not letting you come with us tonight. He said you’ve known each other too long to be regarded as the flotsam of fate, strangers suddenly tossed together to muddle through a mindless moment in history.”
“'The flotsam of fate’?”
George chuckled. “He may not be able to say much, but what does come out of him is worth the wait. Maybe you’ll find out for yourself. He practically ordered me to bring you with me first thing tomorrow. I don’t know if he’s still the vicar or pulling rank--” He gestured to his humble enlisted man's uniform.
I thought Kit was still sleeping when we entered his room the following morning, but he held out his hand to me. It was cold; the flesh so thin and dry I feared it would tear at the slightest touch. His lips moved. I bent low, and he put his arm around my neck and pressed me ever so slightly but enough to bring me closer to his whisper. “Hear me out, Jan. Say nothing. Not a sound. Until I finish. Promise?”
I nodded.
“Janet. Do you promise.”
“Yes, of course.” How silly of me, to forget he could not see the common gesture of assent.
“This business of religion…We grow up believing we’ll die into life if we trust in The Lord, and follow His example, and ask His forgiveness, especially at the hour of our death. But when it’s one’s turn…No…when it was my turn…I never thought of God. I never asked Him to forgive me the things I had done or left undone. I thought only of the people I would leave behind. And the people I had wronged. And how my life was so unlike what I had foreseen when I was a boy. My time had come. There was no turning back. There was no way to improve my situation, or make amends, or change the direction of my ways. There was no consolation. There was no promise of life everlasting. There was only bitterness, disappointment…the certainty I would die into nothing.”
I appraised Kit’s recitation as the product of someone terrified by the suspicion that his life and everything he believed had been a fraud. I refused to let him believe he had lived and suffered for nothing. “But that’s the point of Our Lord on the Cross! For all he endured, his concern was for others, not himself. He felt what you felt. He knew what he felt must be the way it is and will be for each and every one of us until the end of all time. Why else would he say, ‘Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do’? He forgave all of us, not only the men who put him to death. He knew some of us would never be able to beg forgiveness for ourselves.”
“Don’t speak of that, Jan,” Kit said before I completed these thoughts. “I wish I could tell you I accepted death in half so manly a fashion. I begged my captors to show me the same kindness they would give a draft horse stricken in its traces, and deliver me from my agony. Hardly an example of Christian fortitude.”
The natural reaction would have been to weep and remind him of the irreparable sorrow the deed would have brought upon his friends. But I considered that my protest might instead strike him as condemnation. I had no desire to inflict more than the physical damage done him by his enemies and the emotional damage he visited upon himself. I turned to George, who had set his gaze upon the floor, his hands clasped behind his back in a show of patience and reflection. The attitude and the utter lack of surprise signified he already knew what I was only now just hearing for myself.
Despite the heavy wool uniform, I shivered. Not from the cool, raw air that still burrowed beneath my sleeves. From stopping myself from taking Kit in my arms and doing something that would tell the stewards I was anything but a soldier visiting a friend who had almost perished in action. I petted his hair and begged him to trouble himself no longer.
“Janet.” The tone of the breath that formed my name chided me for my distress and pleaded with me to be silent. “Thoughts of you alone kept me alive. I worried about you. I had to survive long enough to know you were settled in life. I have always wanted you to have fidelity, friendship, security.”
“You’ve always known I’d go back to Bethlehem—to my Moravians.” I meant to speak lightly about the place and people I had so often threatened to flee to, but tears leapt from my eyes onto Kit's hands, which I had folded between mine.
I never in our lives had given him so much as a friendly peck on the cheek to betray my fondness for him. I remembered sitting with George in the woods near Luxembourg, resolved to punish myself for never telling Kit that I had loved him ever since I was a little girl. Now God was giving me what could be my last chance to do so. I would be wrong to say or do nothing. I brought his hands to my lips.
“Go with George,” he said, as I kissed the places that glistened where my tears had fallen.
Do what?
I again looked to George, suspecting he knew what was on Kit's mind.
Kit sensed my confusion. “Go with George. I was wrong. He does deserve you.”
“Why ever did you think George did not deserve me?” I persisted gently, uncertain where all this was going.
Kit’s lips moved. Nothing emerged.
George patted his shoulder. "No matter: The mouth is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
The mouth worked again. George frowned. “Did he say ’Luke one-fifty-one’? There’s more than a hundred chapters in Luke?”
“I don’t remember Luke being as long as that. It must be Chapter One, Verse Fifty-one," I reasoned. “What does it say?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Neither do I.”
“But you’re a priest!”
“Not every priest knows chapter and verse.”
“Kit does.”
“How can he not know? His brain is bigger than his body!”
“George.” The tone Kit had used to silence me moments before now made both his friends pay attention. “The verse is, 'He hath showed strength with his arm…he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.’ It's so true. I thought I had all the answers. I was wrong. I got what I deserved. Whom have I to complain of...but myself?”
George pushed back Kit’s hair and turned his head so they would have been looking each other in the eye. “That's one eloquent horse pile, Kit. I don’t believe it. Neither should you.”
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
29. The Valley of Grace and Shadow
The little house with the half-timbered front and skinny, mullioned windows had sheltered all manner of residents since the fifteenth century. But it had never known the likes of the five soldiers who huddled under its peaked slate roof in the waning days of October 1799. The only real military man among them was the general who had the dull, prosaic job of managing the local army hospital. The others were a boy and his mother, and a young woman and a young man.
It would be the height of fantasy to suggest that Merit, Malachi, George and I dressed like soldiers in an attempt to hide from Josquin’s enemies, as Pierre had hidden Kit. The truth is, we had nothing to wear. Our clothes had been destroyed along with the estate near Reims. Everything else we possessed was in the house in Paris, which the authorities seized when they sent the Guard after Josquin. Pierre said it was easier to requisition fresh uniforms than to treat with tailors and dressmakers who would take too long to do things they would be paid too much to do poorly.
Pierre had spent so much time with Josquin’s family in Paris that I always imagined he lived in rented rooms, surrounded by officers whose chief talents were smoking, drinking, playing cards and various games of chance; he escaped to the Lévy-Pfaltz home for peace and quiet. I never imagined he would live in a house, or the kind of house he would call home.
It was said to be one of the oldest buildings in Paris. The cramped, tiny rooms were made smaller and more crammed by low, beamed ceilings, which George just cleared. Pierre, on the other hand, was compelled to stoop, lest he crown himself on the architecture. When George joked that a man of Pierre’s size had no business being there, Pierre said he had no choice. The house had been the billet of every director of the Val-de-Grâce since the place had become a military hospital after the Revolution.
“What was it before the Revolution?” George wanted to know.
Pierre took him to a window and pointed to the vast stone façade rising over the houses at the end of the street. “What do you think?”
George shrugged good naturedly. “A jail? It’s massive enough.”
Pierre laughed—one of the few times he had allowed himself a taste of levity since the siege of the estate. “Close! It was a Benedictine convent.”
I finally asked him something that had intrigued me for months: why the place was called Val-de-Grâce, which, in English, means Valley of Grace. It was in the city, not a valley.
He explained that the name came from the convent's church, the Église de Val-de-Grâce, which the mother of King Louis XIV built for the nuns after giving birth to her son. The name of the church was inspired by the location of the shrine of Saint Fiacre, a seventh century Irish monk who lived and preached in France and was said to work miracles.
While Merit was installed in the house’s only spare room, George, Mal and I slept on campaign beds scattered around the premises. George was in the drawing room; Mal, the music room. They gallantly let me have the library, whose ceiling-high cupboards were filled with books organized by subject and arranged by author, last-name first. I would lie awake at night, reading histories written in French or German. I avoided the books with Latin titles after I made the mistake of opening one to find color prints of things that can go awry in a person.
We lived in that house with no other purpose than to await word that Kit had died from his wounds or had been executed. Treating for his release was impossible. He was an enemy of the state. He would die by the law if Nature failed to take him first. I had accepted that he was a dead man well before we returned to Paris. Better to believe the inevitable than to hope for something that defied God or government.
Though we assumed the appearance of normalcy and cooked and cleaned house and raided Pierre’s library, it was more normal to stare at an open book, too obsessed with prayer to read, and to blame errant tears of sorrow on dust or the scent of roasting onions. One evening I retired to the library and did nothing more than sit on the campaign bed and surrender to unfortunate thoughts. I considered I had lived through pestilence, accident and battle, and I had accepted the death and destruction that had visited me as a result of all three. Now, however, I reflected upon the lives of the people who had been taken from me in the course of events. For the first time I contemplated how those people had done nothing to merit their gruesome ends. They had conducted themselves within the bounds of ordinary human expectations, eating, sleeping, working and enjoying their friends, families and separate degrees of success. So what, I wondered, was the point of ambition, friendship and the desire to do good when it led to nothing more than being erased from the world with no warning?
George discovered me sitting alone and sought to cheer me by closing his eyes and plucking a book from the shelf, surprising us both with the selection.
He meant well, but I was in no mood for kindness. “It’s a psalter I need. I don’t know the psalms by heart any more.”
“Oh, I’m a psalter on legs,” he said.
I thought he was being silly, but he sat on the floor beside the tiny bed and started reciting psalms at random. So I too sat on the floor and rested against him, lulled as much by his company as by the words he spoke.
We met in similar visits every evening after dinner. I soon reflected how I once had condemned George as the agent of my father’s death. Now I could not imagine my life without him. I was glad, and I was grateful. I told him so. I even told him about the day I believed God had cursed me and made me think my life had ended.
“What did Kit say?” he asked.
“I never told Kit.”
“Why?”
Why, indeed. I thought back to that time, willing myself the courage to reveal myself. “I couldn’t tell him. He was part of the curse. If I told him, he would have felt for me. He would have counseled me. He would have drawn me closer to him, without knowing what he was doing. I couldn’t allow that. It was wrong. God knows, it was wrong.”
“No, God knows what Kit would have said,” George mused. “You could have heard for yourself, if you had told him all this.”
“How could I tell him?”
“As easily as you have told me.”
Perhaps George understood I felt as if I had thrown a beloved item into the fire and now lamented I could not save it; it was lost to me forever. He spoke without judgment, and so low I could hardly hear him. “God never curses us, Jan. He’s made a world that invites us to learn who we are and all the good we can do.”
His unpreachy, Kit-like manner suggested this was no excerpt from a theology book. “You sound as though you’ve learned your own lesson.”
“It’s nothing you haven’t probably discovered for yourself,” he teased. “In truth, I was an ass, and just enough of an ass to think of all the other asses in the world, which got me to thinking about Noah and his ark. I remembered how a tender-hearted woman I once knew believed the great lesson of Noah’s ark wasn’t the saving of men and animals but the saving of Man’s conscience. Noah did more than ferry the animals to safety. He fed them, cleaned them, gave them a safe place to live. He was compelled to care for them and to care about them. His servicehood proved we’re not on this earth to live for ourselves. We’re here to serve others. Live for yourself alone, and you will indeed be cursed, Jan. Not by God. By yourself. Kit knew as much. He didn’t say it. He lived it.”
I said nothing. Though he did not seek forgiveness in so many words, I knew George was sorry for the way he had acted with us. I wanted to say something silly, to assure him that it no longer mattered. But I feared he would think I was taunting him, and I was certain Kit would not have wanted me to taunt him. His contrition was enough.
I think, too, I held my peace because I was wrung out of torment. We all were. We had neither the time nor the will for it. Exhausted beyond emotion, the five of us would drop our guard and gather around the kitchen table, chatting over coffee. Merit and our host would reminisce about his days serving as a medical officer in the American War for Independence. Pierre said he spoke no English at all in those days, but was lucky to meet an engineer from a wealthy family who had been schooled in England and spoke the language like a proper Englishman.
He resolved to learn English the day he requisitioned a farmhouse for use as a field hospital after the battle of Brandywine, where Josquin had found the guns. “The girl at the well was about your age, Jeanette. She offered water to us and to our horses. Josquin talked to her as if he had known her all his life. I wanted to talk to her, too. And I did talk to her. Many times, as she and her family helped us and the Americans. But it was never without my interpreter. In time I saw her attention was more on him, not me. I stepped aside, and as you all know, she became Josquin's wife, not mine."
I remember that story well, not as the wistful piece of history between two people reflecting upon their past, but for Mal crossly mumbling and leaving the room. I found him in the library, sitting near the window that he had cracked open.
He waved me away, saying the house made his head ache, the air was so close. “Never mind about me. Go back and enjoy Pierre’s fairy tales.”
His face was the color of scalded milk. I considered the story about his father had upset him more than he cared to admit and asked him if I could get him anything to drink or eat. He refused, doing a poor job of restraining his annoyance at me. From that moment, whenever he failed to appear for a meal or to join us for company, we would find him at a window, complaining about the house and his head.
On a chill, rainy night not long after, George and I were in the kitchen, gently debating the benefits of adding egg to the chocolate I was trying to make, when we heard a discreet knock on the door.
"Grotesque, how everything bad happens at night," Malachi mumbled.
We knew what he was thinking: Here, at last, was the news we were waiting for. Kit was no more.
Though Pierre was hurrying down the stairs, Malachi himself opened the door. In walked Lucien and Joseph Bonaparte, rain spilling from their hats. A third man followed. Rain plummeted from his hat, too. His scraggly, shoulder-length hair was soaked into tentacles the width of small snakes. He had the pallor of somebody who had once been deeply bronzed by the sun, but who begins to fade from spending too much time indoors.
The brothers nodded to George and me. The third man, who they did not introduce, eyed us with the vaguely curled-lip confidence of somebody who enjoys keeping secrets. To my eye, he resembled the Bonapartes. I thought all three quite rude for not offering an introduction. They watched me stirring the pot of chocolate. Gobs of rain rolled off their woolen greatcoats, splattering on the floor.
The third man spoke to Pierre. “So, there are no guns.” It was a statement of fact, not an accusation.
“The supply was not what we were led to expect.” Pierre kept his dignity, despite his slight but undignified stoop beneath the ceiling beams.
“Not what we were led to expect…” The man echoed softly. He lazily pointed to Pierre, to George, to me. “Toi … toi … toi …” You…you…you… “Know this: the next time we meet, we’ll all be in line for the guillotine. For this reason: the supply was not what we were led to expect.”
He scuttled back into the night, followed by the brothers.
The trio was out of sight when Malachi, still watching from the doorway, screamed, “Non! Napoléon!” He flung himself headlong after them, pleading with them to believe the painting was his idea … His father and Christian DeWaere were blameless…He alone was the traitor…the murderer…the criminal…
He shouted with such desperation that it seemed two voices were coming out of him. Suddenly he clutched his head, reeled, and folded over the arm George had stretched out in front of him in an attempt to stop his mindless flight. His collapse brought us running to where George knelt beside him, shielding him from the hard, hopping rain.
Napoléon looked on, indifferent, as Pierre tried to pry Merit away from her son’s lifeless body. I heard him mutter to nobody in particular. “Du sublime au ridicule, il n’y a q’un pas.”
“Pardon?” I hoped he understood my French.
He repeated what he had said, adding something else for which I again begged his pardon and asked him to speak slowly. He waved me off, looking most annoyed, and hurried away, repeating, all the same, in French: “From the sublime to the ridiculous is only a step. It looks to me like somebody stumbled.”
I hastened alongside him. He was the general of the French Army in Egypt. His brother was the president of the Legislature’s Council of Five Hundred. He was a friend of General DuCray. He was a friend of Josquin Lévy-Pfaltz. But at the moment, I was in no vein to contemplate friendship and rank. Josquin was dead. Malachi was dead. Kit would soon be dead. For no other reason than because Napoléon had wanted Josquin’s muskets, and they could not be had.
As my narrative has shown, I was a young woman who never could be accused of losing her head and submitting to displays of gross emotion in front of others. My perceptions might have been irrational, unique to myself and to my manner of discerning my world and those around me, yet never had I indulged in anger, tears, shouting, or other manifestations of the irrational in a place where all could see. Never, that is, until that moment.
Stepping quickly at Napoléon’s side, flayed by the rain, I saw beyond the rank and affiliations. I saw instead the prime mover behind our heartache. To my mind, the words he had just muttered dismissed all the deaths and suffering as crass spectacle.
I could not abide seeing Kit and Josquin and Malachi turned into the stuff of banal diversion. In an instant I became the instrument of rage and the purveyor of vengeance. Running in front of Napoléon, I turned and brought the back of my hand across his face with a force that made him trip to the side. I then set myself upon him, determined to thrash him until I could thrash no more, but he flung me away. When I came to my senses, I was at the side of the road, sitting in George’s embrace. He was kissing my head and scolding me for acting so thoughtlessly. His tears blended with the rain. I returned with him to the house and wept with the woman who had become a mother to me, and whose son, who had become so like a brother, would never again raise guinea pigs or grace our lives with a smart remark.
Later, Pierre slipped out in search of a rabbi who would see to Mal’s burial. An hour or so before noon, while he accompanied Merit to the service, George and I went from room to room, making certain the shutters were still closed tightly against the rain.
We saw cavalry in the street. Soon people were shouting news of a disturbance in the Legislature. The Bonapartes had seized control. They had no need of the Ferguson guns, after all—not with the French Army at Napoléon's disposal.
I hoped that the people who had ordered Kit’s arrest would be imprisoned as enemies of the state, but Pierre said this was unlikely. Though soldiers had escorted Napoléon into the Legislature and were positioned at strategic points around the city, the Bonapartes had no desire for revenge or civil war. They preferred to negotiate cooperation from their opposition. Their enemies would be invited to reconsider their political beliefs and work with Napoléon to turn France into a nation that upheld the promises of the Revolution.
News of the coup and its resolution kept us up all night discussing everything that had passed in the preceding weeks. Dawn crept over us with the feeble light that presages yet another day of rain. George glowered as he topped our cups with steaming coffee. “So this whole business has been little more than an exercise in compromise.”
“A vigorous exercise, perhaps, but, yes, you could say that,” Pierre conceded.
“Nonsense. Where Jan and I come from, people die to uphold ideals, not compromise. Compromise is defeat. I refuse to accept that Josquin, Mal and Kit died for the sake of compromise.”
Pierre folded his arms on the table and ruminated over the crumbs on his plate. “Ideals…compromise…It's all the same, mon brave. As Voltaire said: ‘What do humanity, goodness, wisdom and mercy mean to me when half an ounce of lead tears through my body, and I die in unspeakable agony in the midst of five or six thousand other dying men, all for the pretended interests of a man who knows us not?’” He slowly shook his head. "Man was born to die. Better to leave this earth as part of something larger than our simple, single selves, than by a fall from a horse or a carriage accident."
We were by that hour so fatigued and accustomed to despair that we scarcely shuddered at the sound of somebody at the door and the prospect of awful, long-awaited news.
Pierre took the note from the cavalryman and read with the want of emotion that comes from seeing whatever people believe means nothing to them: "Your friend is in the Bois de Vincennes." The message was signed, "N."
A suggestion of where our friend was would have been helpful. But as there was none, we resolved to search the wood southwest of the city until we dropped from exhaustion. Around midday, the rain shrank to a prickly drizzle. George and the lieutenant who led our group drew their horses close to consult the officer’s map. They debated meeting up with the group that included Pierre and Merit, who believed Mal would have wanted her to join the search.
A swallow flew around us, low, in taunting, tightening circles. Though riding pillion with George, I set my eye on the creature, appreciating how its frenetic path betrayed the measure of my own agony at our failure to find Kit. As the russets and browns of autumnal decay whirled by, I discerned in the edge of my eye a long, gray smudge that suggested a bolt of fabric trashed in the underbrush. Others saw it, too. We all dismounted and scrambled toward the site. The fabric was a sodden military greatcoat. Boots peeked from the tails. Wringing wet tangles of long, light brown hair spilled over the collar.
Without a word, George gathered up the refuse that was Kit and carried him to the carriage that waited nearby.
It would be the height of fantasy to suggest that Merit, Malachi, George and I dressed like soldiers in an attempt to hide from Josquin’s enemies, as Pierre had hidden Kit. The truth is, we had nothing to wear. Our clothes had been destroyed along with the estate near Reims. Everything else we possessed was in the house in Paris, which the authorities seized when they sent the Guard after Josquin. Pierre said it was easier to requisition fresh uniforms than to treat with tailors and dressmakers who would take too long to do things they would be paid too much to do poorly.
Pierre had spent so much time with Josquin’s family in Paris that I always imagined he lived in rented rooms, surrounded by officers whose chief talents were smoking, drinking, playing cards and various games of chance; he escaped to the Lévy-Pfaltz home for peace and quiet. I never imagined he would live in a house, or the kind of house he would call home.
It was said to be one of the oldest buildings in Paris. The cramped, tiny rooms were made smaller and more crammed by low, beamed ceilings, which George just cleared. Pierre, on the other hand, was compelled to stoop, lest he crown himself on the architecture. When George joked that a man of Pierre’s size had no business being there, Pierre said he had no choice. The house had been the billet of every director of the Val-de-Grâce since the place had become a military hospital after the Revolution.
“What was it before the Revolution?” George wanted to know.
Pierre took him to a window and pointed to the vast stone façade rising over the houses at the end of the street. “What do you think?”
George shrugged good naturedly. “A jail? It’s massive enough.”
Pierre laughed—one of the few times he had allowed himself a taste of levity since the siege of the estate. “Close! It was a Benedictine convent.”
I finally asked him something that had intrigued me for months: why the place was called Val-de-Grâce, which, in English, means Valley of Grace. It was in the city, not a valley.
He explained that the name came from the convent's church, the Église de Val-de-Grâce, which the mother of King Louis XIV built for the nuns after giving birth to her son. The name of the church was inspired by the location of the shrine of Saint Fiacre, a seventh century Irish monk who lived and preached in France and was said to work miracles.
While Merit was installed in the house’s only spare room, George, Mal and I slept on campaign beds scattered around the premises. George was in the drawing room; Mal, the music room. They gallantly let me have the library, whose ceiling-high cupboards were filled with books organized by subject and arranged by author, last-name first. I would lie awake at night, reading histories written in French or German. I avoided the books with Latin titles after I made the mistake of opening one to find color prints of things that can go awry in a person.
We lived in that house with no other purpose than to await word that Kit had died from his wounds or had been executed. Treating for his release was impossible. He was an enemy of the state. He would die by the law if Nature failed to take him first. I had accepted that he was a dead man well before we returned to Paris. Better to believe the inevitable than to hope for something that defied God or government.
Though we assumed the appearance of normalcy and cooked and cleaned house and raided Pierre’s library, it was more normal to stare at an open book, too obsessed with prayer to read, and to blame errant tears of sorrow on dust or the scent of roasting onions. One evening I retired to the library and did nothing more than sit on the campaign bed and surrender to unfortunate thoughts. I considered I had lived through pestilence, accident and battle, and I had accepted the death and destruction that had visited me as a result of all three. Now, however, I reflected upon the lives of the people who had been taken from me in the course of events. For the first time I contemplated how those people had done nothing to merit their gruesome ends. They had conducted themselves within the bounds of ordinary human expectations, eating, sleeping, working and enjoying their friends, families and separate degrees of success. So what, I wondered, was the point of ambition, friendship and the desire to do good when it led to nothing more than being erased from the world with no warning?
George discovered me sitting alone and sought to cheer me by closing his eyes and plucking a book from the shelf, surprising us both with the selection.
He meant well, but I was in no mood for kindness. “It’s a psalter I need. I don’t know the psalms by heart any more.”
“Oh, I’m a psalter on legs,” he said.
I thought he was being silly, but he sat on the floor beside the tiny bed and started reciting psalms at random. So I too sat on the floor and rested against him, lulled as much by his company as by the words he spoke.
We met in similar visits every evening after dinner. I soon reflected how I once had condemned George as the agent of my father’s death. Now I could not imagine my life without him. I was glad, and I was grateful. I told him so. I even told him about the day I believed God had cursed me and made me think my life had ended.
“What did Kit say?” he asked.
“I never told Kit.”
“Why?”
Why, indeed. I thought back to that time, willing myself the courage to reveal myself. “I couldn’t tell him. He was part of the curse. If I told him, he would have felt for me. He would have counseled me. He would have drawn me closer to him, without knowing what he was doing. I couldn’t allow that. It was wrong. God knows, it was wrong.”
“No, God knows what Kit would have said,” George mused. “You could have heard for yourself, if you had told him all this.”
“How could I tell him?”
“As easily as you have told me.”
Perhaps George understood I felt as if I had thrown a beloved item into the fire and now lamented I could not save it; it was lost to me forever. He spoke without judgment, and so low I could hardly hear him. “God never curses us, Jan. He’s made a world that invites us to learn who we are and all the good we can do.”
His unpreachy, Kit-like manner suggested this was no excerpt from a theology book. “You sound as though you’ve learned your own lesson.”
“It’s nothing you haven’t probably discovered for yourself,” he teased. “In truth, I was an ass, and just enough of an ass to think of all the other asses in the world, which got me to thinking about Noah and his ark. I remembered how a tender-hearted woman I once knew believed the great lesson of Noah’s ark wasn’t the saving of men and animals but the saving of Man’s conscience. Noah did more than ferry the animals to safety. He fed them, cleaned them, gave them a safe place to live. He was compelled to care for them and to care about them. His servicehood proved we’re not on this earth to live for ourselves. We’re here to serve others. Live for yourself alone, and you will indeed be cursed, Jan. Not by God. By yourself. Kit knew as much. He didn’t say it. He lived it.”
I said nothing. Though he did not seek forgiveness in so many words, I knew George was sorry for the way he had acted with us. I wanted to say something silly, to assure him that it no longer mattered. But I feared he would think I was taunting him, and I was certain Kit would not have wanted me to taunt him. His contrition was enough.
I think, too, I held my peace because I was wrung out of torment. We all were. We had neither the time nor the will for it. Exhausted beyond emotion, the five of us would drop our guard and gather around the kitchen table, chatting over coffee. Merit and our host would reminisce about his days serving as a medical officer in the American War for Independence. Pierre said he spoke no English at all in those days, but was lucky to meet an engineer from a wealthy family who had been schooled in England and spoke the language like a proper Englishman.
He resolved to learn English the day he requisitioned a farmhouse for use as a field hospital after the battle of Brandywine, where Josquin had found the guns. “The girl at the well was about your age, Jeanette. She offered water to us and to our horses. Josquin talked to her as if he had known her all his life. I wanted to talk to her, too. And I did talk to her. Many times, as she and her family helped us and the Americans. But it was never without my interpreter. In time I saw her attention was more on him, not me. I stepped aside, and as you all know, she became Josquin's wife, not mine."
I remember that story well, not as the wistful piece of history between two people reflecting upon their past, but for Mal crossly mumbling and leaving the room. I found him in the library, sitting near the window that he had cracked open.
He waved me away, saying the house made his head ache, the air was so close. “Never mind about me. Go back and enjoy Pierre’s fairy tales.”
His face was the color of scalded milk. I considered the story about his father had upset him more than he cared to admit and asked him if I could get him anything to drink or eat. He refused, doing a poor job of restraining his annoyance at me. From that moment, whenever he failed to appear for a meal or to join us for company, we would find him at a window, complaining about the house and his head.
On a chill, rainy night not long after, George and I were in the kitchen, gently debating the benefits of adding egg to the chocolate I was trying to make, when we heard a discreet knock on the door.
"Grotesque, how everything bad happens at night," Malachi mumbled.
We knew what he was thinking: Here, at last, was the news we were waiting for. Kit was no more.
Though Pierre was hurrying down the stairs, Malachi himself opened the door. In walked Lucien and Joseph Bonaparte, rain spilling from their hats. A third man followed. Rain plummeted from his hat, too. His scraggly, shoulder-length hair was soaked into tentacles the width of small snakes. He had the pallor of somebody who had once been deeply bronzed by the sun, but who begins to fade from spending too much time indoors.
The brothers nodded to George and me. The third man, who they did not introduce, eyed us with the vaguely curled-lip confidence of somebody who enjoys keeping secrets. To my eye, he resembled the Bonapartes. I thought all three quite rude for not offering an introduction. They watched me stirring the pot of chocolate. Gobs of rain rolled off their woolen greatcoats, splattering on the floor.
The third man spoke to Pierre. “So, there are no guns.” It was a statement of fact, not an accusation.
“The supply was not what we were led to expect.” Pierre kept his dignity, despite his slight but undignified stoop beneath the ceiling beams.
“Not what we were led to expect…” The man echoed softly. He lazily pointed to Pierre, to George, to me. “Toi … toi … toi …” You…you…you… “Know this: the next time we meet, we’ll all be in line for the guillotine. For this reason: the supply was not what we were led to expect.”
He scuttled back into the night, followed by the brothers.
The trio was out of sight when Malachi, still watching from the doorway, screamed, “Non! Napoléon!” He flung himself headlong after them, pleading with them to believe the painting was his idea … His father and Christian DeWaere were blameless…He alone was the traitor…the murderer…the criminal…
He shouted with such desperation that it seemed two voices were coming out of him. Suddenly he clutched his head, reeled, and folded over the arm George had stretched out in front of him in an attempt to stop his mindless flight. His collapse brought us running to where George knelt beside him, shielding him from the hard, hopping rain.
Napoléon looked on, indifferent, as Pierre tried to pry Merit away from her son’s lifeless body. I heard him mutter to nobody in particular. “Du sublime au ridicule, il n’y a q’un pas.”
“Pardon?” I hoped he understood my French.
He repeated what he had said, adding something else for which I again begged his pardon and asked him to speak slowly. He waved me off, looking most annoyed, and hurried away, repeating, all the same, in French: “From the sublime to the ridiculous is only a step. It looks to me like somebody stumbled.”
I hastened alongside him. He was the general of the French Army in Egypt. His brother was the president of the Legislature’s Council of Five Hundred. He was a friend of General DuCray. He was a friend of Josquin Lévy-Pfaltz. But at the moment, I was in no vein to contemplate friendship and rank. Josquin was dead. Malachi was dead. Kit would soon be dead. For no other reason than because Napoléon had wanted Josquin’s muskets, and they could not be had.
As my narrative has shown, I was a young woman who never could be accused of losing her head and submitting to displays of gross emotion in front of others. My perceptions might have been irrational, unique to myself and to my manner of discerning my world and those around me, yet never had I indulged in anger, tears, shouting, or other manifestations of the irrational in a place where all could see. Never, that is, until that moment.
Stepping quickly at Napoléon’s side, flayed by the rain, I saw beyond the rank and affiliations. I saw instead the prime mover behind our heartache. To my mind, the words he had just muttered dismissed all the deaths and suffering as crass spectacle.
I could not abide seeing Kit and Josquin and Malachi turned into the stuff of banal diversion. In an instant I became the instrument of rage and the purveyor of vengeance. Running in front of Napoléon, I turned and brought the back of my hand across his face with a force that made him trip to the side. I then set myself upon him, determined to thrash him until I could thrash no more, but he flung me away. When I came to my senses, I was at the side of the road, sitting in George’s embrace. He was kissing my head and scolding me for acting so thoughtlessly. His tears blended with the rain. I returned with him to the house and wept with the woman who had become a mother to me, and whose son, who had become so like a brother, would never again raise guinea pigs or grace our lives with a smart remark.
Later, Pierre slipped out in search of a rabbi who would see to Mal’s burial. An hour or so before noon, while he accompanied Merit to the service, George and I went from room to room, making certain the shutters were still closed tightly against the rain.
We saw cavalry in the street. Soon people were shouting news of a disturbance in the Legislature. The Bonapartes had seized control. They had no need of the Ferguson guns, after all—not with the French Army at Napoléon's disposal.
I hoped that the people who had ordered Kit’s arrest would be imprisoned as enemies of the state, but Pierre said this was unlikely. Though soldiers had escorted Napoléon into the Legislature and were positioned at strategic points around the city, the Bonapartes had no desire for revenge or civil war. They preferred to negotiate cooperation from their opposition. Their enemies would be invited to reconsider their political beliefs and work with Napoléon to turn France into a nation that upheld the promises of the Revolution.
News of the coup and its resolution kept us up all night discussing everything that had passed in the preceding weeks. Dawn crept over us with the feeble light that presages yet another day of rain. George glowered as he topped our cups with steaming coffee. “So this whole business has been little more than an exercise in compromise.”
“A vigorous exercise, perhaps, but, yes, you could say that,” Pierre conceded.
“Nonsense. Where Jan and I come from, people die to uphold ideals, not compromise. Compromise is defeat. I refuse to accept that Josquin, Mal and Kit died for the sake of compromise.”
Pierre folded his arms on the table and ruminated over the crumbs on his plate. “Ideals…compromise…It's all the same, mon brave. As Voltaire said: ‘What do humanity, goodness, wisdom and mercy mean to me when half an ounce of lead tears through my body, and I die in unspeakable agony in the midst of five or six thousand other dying men, all for the pretended interests of a man who knows us not?’” He slowly shook his head. "Man was born to die. Better to leave this earth as part of something larger than our simple, single selves, than by a fall from a horse or a carriage accident."
We were by that hour so fatigued and accustomed to despair that we scarcely shuddered at the sound of somebody at the door and the prospect of awful, long-awaited news.
Pierre took the note from the cavalryman and read with the want of emotion that comes from seeing whatever people believe means nothing to them: "Your friend is in the Bois de Vincennes." The message was signed, "N."
A suggestion of where our friend was would have been helpful. But as there was none, we resolved to search the wood southwest of the city until we dropped from exhaustion. Around midday, the rain shrank to a prickly drizzle. George and the lieutenant who led our group drew their horses close to consult the officer’s map. They debated meeting up with the group that included Pierre and Merit, who believed Mal would have wanted her to join the search.
A swallow flew around us, low, in taunting, tightening circles. Though riding pillion with George, I set my eye on the creature, appreciating how its frenetic path betrayed the measure of my own agony at our failure to find Kit. As the russets and browns of autumnal decay whirled by, I discerned in the edge of my eye a long, gray smudge that suggested a bolt of fabric trashed in the underbrush. Others saw it, too. We all dismounted and scrambled toward the site. The fabric was a sodden military greatcoat. Boots peeked from the tails. Wringing wet tangles of long, light brown hair spilled over the collar.
Without a word, George gathered up the refuse that was Kit and carried him to the carriage that waited nearby.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
28. Out of Our Hands
We pulled north to an encampment near the border with Luxembourg. There we waited: For Josquin. For Kit. For signs the other side had learned the truth about the arsenal.
I endured the roughness of life beneath the stars by trusting and knowing without doubt that Kit and Josquin would appear. I imagined they both would be on horseback, Josquin looking precisely as I had first seen him on the street in Paris and Kit seeming more secure in the saddle, thanks to Josquin’s patient tutoring along the way. All at once, for whatever reason, I wanted nothing more than to see Kit become an expert horseman. He deserved to look splendid in the saddle, glowing with the quiet joy of a man at one with the horse, not bobbing around in the throes of inexperience, as he did on the road to the vineyards. I felt real, physical pain whenever I remembered that sight and how George had mocked him. It contented me to think that once all was settled and we were back at the estate or returned home to Paris, Josquin would turn him into the rider he was meant to be. He would even be a better rider than George. I often imagined Kit and George competing against each other, jumping their horses over obstacles out in the country somewhere. Kit always beat George, much to George’s astonishment, which never failed to amuse me. It was a vision I returned to again and again as the days grew shorter and colder—and passed without the smallest word about either Kit or Josquin.
At last, in the middle of October, I once again learned that what I wished of life had no connection to what life preferred to force upon me through the will and actions of others. Lucien Bonaparte’s men brought news from Paris: Rather than concede they had been duped, the Directors announced that an insurrection had been put down, the instigators, punished. Josquin was dead. Workers had helped him release the horses from the stables, lest the Guard burn the buildings, but he alone ran back to the house to retrieve his son’s guinea pigs. He was on the topmost floor, in the room where Mal kept the little creatures, when the Guard set fire to the house. He was trapped.
I remember wandering the camp, smothered by the morose calm that follows hours of grieving. I found George feeding grass to his horse, which was in a small paddock with some of the other regimental mounts. He had the pinched, pale face of someone unable to take his mind off pain.
“Still hurting?” I said.
He shrugged, listless. “Only when I sit. Walk. Stand. They’ll have to throw me face-down over the saddle to get me to ride any farther.”
“You should tell Pierre.”
“So he can stuff me with opium and put me in a corner somewhere out of the way? No, thank you.”
I dangled needle and thread in front of George’s eyes. “Will you feel better if I repaired your britches?”
His mouth twitched into half a smile. “How long have I been running around like this? Maybe we should just let it go until the turn of the century. By then I should be walking around full as a harvest moon.” I knelt; he held his coattails aside.
The fist-size bloodstain in the side of his seat was enormous compared to the hole in the center of the stain, and there were still enough bandages under his breeches to cover Brooklyn. The padding left little room to ease the hole together. Nevertheless, I drew the needle through the edges of the crisp, browned fabric.
George watched my work, pensive. "Thank God it hit me instead of you."
“Praying all the way, were you?”
“No, I wasn’t.” The voice was small. “I’d never ridden through musket fire––with somebody hanging on to me, no less. I was a little possessed of trying to keep us both alive.”
“You seemed pretty level-headed to me.”
“I was terrified! I thought of all those soldiers who surrounded us and knew I’d never stop if any of them needed my services.”
The vaguely teary inflections made me glance into a face twisted with surprise and revulsion. “What’s wrong, George?”
For several moments his mouth moved, but no sound came out, as if he struggled with how to make himself understood. At last he creaked, “I’m a terrible priest. An utter wretch, blatantly void of love for humanity.”
“How can you say that?”
“How can anybody work with Kit DeWaere and not see his own failings? I could never give of myself the way Kit did.”
I put my hand over the one that clutched the coattails. “Of course you can,” I said ardently. “If we see someone who needs you, you’ll stop.”
George stared with the dimness of somebody hearing a language he has never learned. “He hasn't told you.”
“Who?"
"Pierre."
"About what?"
"Kit."
George turned and took my hands, unaware that the needle clung to his breeches, trailing thread. It sounded very much as if he was saying Kit was in Paris, badly wounded and charged with sedition.
I have no memory of running through the woods to Pierre’s tent, but I do remember him at his campaign desk, regarding me over the tops of his reading glasses, his pen to the paper, as I berated him for cowardly, thoughtlessly, callously hiding the news about Kit.
I recall urging him to understand that I had known Kit DeWaere longer than anybody in France. Neither he nor anybody else could imagine what Kit had done for me throughout my life. Kit was the closest person I had to family, and I was the closest person he had to family. I refused to let anybody dictate what I should or should not know about him.
The general heard me out with no sign of annoyance at my outburst. “I assure you, Jeannette, I am not callous. It would have been callous to burden you all at once with news about our friends, especially when we are in a position where there is nothing we can do.”
“Yet you told George.”
“Yes, because it would have been unfair to spring this news upon him and expect him to contend with everyone’s reaction while he dealt with his own. Believe me, there’s only so much a person can endure at one time and not go out of his mind.”
I suggested he speak for himself. “What are you yourself enduring, the fact that Merit was right, that you put Kit in a position where he couldn’t help himself if he was caught? Do you feel guilty?”
He held up his hand, demanding silence but asking me to let him relate what had happened that day. “Père Christian tried to ride back to the vineyard. He said he had no right to be protected when the people he served were in danger. I told him that Georges was there for you. As for Georges himself? Isn’t that what being the leader of a flock is all about—knowing there will be times when there will be nobody there for you, except God?
“You see, ma petite, for all we know or want to know, and for all we can or want to do, all is really out of our hands. Père Christian knew that. Console yourself with the knowledge that, when he dies—as he must die, by nature or the workings of the law––he will have died fulfilling the highest mandates of his faith. ”
Baffled, I asked him to explain the last point. He said Kit was awake by the time the Guard intercepted the carriage and tried to shield the steward when they fired through the window. “The God-fearing members of the contingent recognized what he did and brought him back to Paris, instead of delivering a coup de grace and burying him in an unmarked grave in the woods.”
Though not versed in military matters, I recognized the elegant play of words that denoted a blow meant to put a mortally wounded person out of agony. "A coup de grace? Why? What did they do to him?”
“Half an ounce of lead fired point-blank?” Pierre shook his head. “Don’t think of it, Jeannette. It’s best to remember Père Christian as he was.”
I begged him to stop speaking down to me—except the plea was more of a shout punctuated by the simultaneous stamp of a foot. “What am I supposed to tell his parents in America when they ask me what happened to their son? Am I supposed to stand there and stammer, ‘Ohhh, I don’t know,’ and let them believe that the one person who grew up with their son and worked by his side in a far-off land suddenly discarded him with the indifference of his attacker, as if he was a piece of trash?”
What Pierre told me was enough to silence me and convince me that it was indeed far better to remember Kit as he had been. After staring steadfastly at the man, containing the sensation that threatened to make me unwell at his feet, I removed myself from his presence and walked until I could walk no more and sat on a pile of bulging tree roots, cushioned by moss and a certainty: Kit was gone. His end had arrived more brutal and earlier than anything anyone could have expected for him. I would never again see his face or hear his voice, or have the comfort of his common sense and calm demeanor.
I should have been chilled or faint with horror.
I should have shrieked, or collapsed in sobs, or torn my hair, or scratched my face in the most heart-rending display of grief for the person who had been the longest and dearest of friends. I should have despaired into the want to end my life and join him in the grave.
But I was beyond horror, grief, despair.
I felt nothing.
It was not the emptiness of having spent the best of my sorrow on Josquin. It was the nothingness that came from knowing horror, grief and despair were not enough to express the severity of what I felt and what Kit must have endured.
I envisioned the last time I saw him, in that surprise visit to the estate, as if it were taking place all over again. I could see him on the horse, in the guise of a French Army captain, steeped in his own sweat, his pallor that of a fresh corpse. The look he gave me … Dear God, the look he gave me…. As he set his eyes upon me, I realized no, he did not want to speak to me. There was none of the guidance and gentleness he had shown me all my life. There was only what I had never before seen in him: Sorrow. Fear. The questions “What have I done to deserve this?” and “What will become of us all?”
I wondered what those final moments in the carriage, surrounded by Guardsmen, their guns at the ready, must have been like for him. His life was in danger. Why would he not fight back? Why would he not let the steward fight back? What was he thinking? Did he remember his friends? Did he remember his wife? Did he regret coming to France? Was there time for a prayer?
Somebody shuffled through the leaves. George. He sat beside me. “Does Kit know, Jan?”
“Does Kit know what?”
“His place in your heart.”
I studied the hands clasped around my knees. Which was the greater tragedy of my life, losing Kit or never telling him how vastly I esteemed him? I remembered all the times I could have told him. I had no doubt that I was now compelled to damn myself for my silence and to content myself with knowing I deserved damnation.
“Do you wish you had told him?”
“Don’t mock me. Please.” A feeble plea.
“Of course, you wish you told him. As I have wished all these weeks to tell you about my regard for you. I’m telling you now because after everything that has happened, and for everything that may happen, none of us has the right to conceal our hearts from those we hold dear. Forgive me, if you can, for my silence––as I’m sure Kit would forgive you for yours.”
A chill breeze wiped our faces. I shivered enough to let George put his arm around me. I leaned into him, consoled by his warmth and strength.
I had yet to answer his declaration of affection. How could I? I mourned Kit. I would probably mourn him for the rest of my life. I remembered being glad to leave him behind in Paris. I knew now it was the weeping of a heart wracked by the change his wife’s betrayal had wrought in him. I resolved to ask George and Pierre to help me find her once we returned to Paris. I wondered what she would think when she heard how her husband died. I could scarcely wait to see her face when I told her. I imagined she would be glad. I hoped their child would be a boy who looked enough like him to haunt her every minute she remained on this earth. Or perhaps it would be a girl, as vain and willful as the mother who would never be able to control her.
A thousand scenarios must have crossed my mind before I fell asleep, exhilarated by visions of revenge yet at rest in the security of George’s arms.
I endured the roughness of life beneath the stars by trusting and knowing without doubt that Kit and Josquin would appear. I imagined they both would be on horseback, Josquin looking precisely as I had first seen him on the street in Paris and Kit seeming more secure in the saddle, thanks to Josquin’s patient tutoring along the way. All at once, for whatever reason, I wanted nothing more than to see Kit become an expert horseman. He deserved to look splendid in the saddle, glowing with the quiet joy of a man at one with the horse, not bobbing around in the throes of inexperience, as he did on the road to the vineyards. I felt real, physical pain whenever I remembered that sight and how George had mocked him. It contented me to think that once all was settled and we were back at the estate or returned home to Paris, Josquin would turn him into the rider he was meant to be. He would even be a better rider than George. I often imagined Kit and George competing against each other, jumping their horses over obstacles out in the country somewhere. Kit always beat George, much to George’s astonishment, which never failed to amuse me. It was a vision I returned to again and again as the days grew shorter and colder—and passed without the smallest word about either Kit or Josquin.
At last, in the middle of October, I once again learned that what I wished of life had no connection to what life preferred to force upon me through the will and actions of others. Lucien Bonaparte’s men brought news from Paris: Rather than concede they had been duped, the Directors announced that an insurrection had been put down, the instigators, punished. Josquin was dead. Workers had helped him release the horses from the stables, lest the Guard burn the buildings, but he alone ran back to the house to retrieve his son’s guinea pigs. He was on the topmost floor, in the room where Mal kept the little creatures, when the Guard set fire to the house. He was trapped.
I remember wandering the camp, smothered by the morose calm that follows hours of grieving. I found George feeding grass to his horse, which was in a small paddock with some of the other regimental mounts. He had the pinched, pale face of someone unable to take his mind off pain.
“Still hurting?” I said.
He shrugged, listless. “Only when I sit. Walk. Stand. They’ll have to throw me face-down over the saddle to get me to ride any farther.”
“You should tell Pierre.”
“So he can stuff me with opium and put me in a corner somewhere out of the way? No, thank you.”
I dangled needle and thread in front of George’s eyes. “Will you feel better if I repaired your britches?”
His mouth twitched into half a smile. “How long have I been running around like this? Maybe we should just let it go until the turn of the century. By then I should be walking around full as a harvest moon.” I knelt; he held his coattails aside.
The fist-size bloodstain in the side of his seat was enormous compared to the hole in the center of the stain, and there were still enough bandages under his breeches to cover Brooklyn. The padding left little room to ease the hole together. Nevertheless, I drew the needle through the edges of the crisp, browned fabric.
George watched my work, pensive. "Thank God it hit me instead of you."
“Praying all the way, were you?”
“No, I wasn’t.” The voice was small. “I’d never ridden through musket fire––with somebody hanging on to me, no less. I was a little possessed of trying to keep us both alive.”
“You seemed pretty level-headed to me.”
“I was terrified! I thought of all those soldiers who surrounded us and knew I’d never stop if any of them needed my services.”
The vaguely teary inflections made me glance into a face twisted with surprise and revulsion. “What’s wrong, George?”
For several moments his mouth moved, but no sound came out, as if he struggled with how to make himself understood. At last he creaked, “I’m a terrible priest. An utter wretch, blatantly void of love for humanity.”
“How can you say that?”
“How can anybody work with Kit DeWaere and not see his own failings? I could never give of myself the way Kit did.”
I put my hand over the one that clutched the coattails. “Of course you can,” I said ardently. “If we see someone who needs you, you’ll stop.”
George stared with the dimness of somebody hearing a language he has never learned. “He hasn't told you.”
“Who?"
"Pierre."
"About what?"
"Kit."
George turned and took my hands, unaware that the needle clung to his breeches, trailing thread. It sounded very much as if he was saying Kit was in Paris, badly wounded and charged with sedition.
I have no memory of running through the woods to Pierre’s tent, but I do remember him at his campaign desk, regarding me over the tops of his reading glasses, his pen to the paper, as I berated him for cowardly, thoughtlessly, callously hiding the news about Kit.
I recall urging him to understand that I had known Kit DeWaere longer than anybody in France. Neither he nor anybody else could imagine what Kit had done for me throughout my life. Kit was the closest person I had to family, and I was the closest person he had to family. I refused to let anybody dictate what I should or should not know about him.
The general heard me out with no sign of annoyance at my outburst. “I assure you, Jeannette, I am not callous. It would have been callous to burden you all at once with news about our friends, especially when we are in a position where there is nothing we can do.”
“Yet you told George.”
“Yes, because it would have been unfair to spring this news upon him and expect him to contend with everyone’s reaction while he dealt with his own. Believe me, there’s only so much a person can endure at one time and not go out of his mind.”
I suggested he speak for himself. “What are you yourself enduring, the fact that Merit was right, that you put Kit in a position where he couldn’t help himself if he was caught? Do you feel guilty?”
He held up his hand, demanding silence but asking me to let him relate what had happened that day. “Père Christian tried to ride back to the vineyard. He said he had no right to be protected when the people he served were in danger. I told him that Georges was there for you. As for Georges himself? Isn’t that what being the leader of a flock is all about—knowing there will be times when there will be nobody there for you, except God?
“You see, ma petite, for all we know or want to know, and for all we can or want to do, all is really out of our hands. Père Christian knew that. Console yourself with the knowledge that, when he dies—as he must die, by nature or the workings of the law––he will have died fulfilling the highest mandates of his faith. ”
Baffled, I asked him to explain the last point. He said Kit was awake by the time the Guard intercepted the carriage and tried to shield the steward when they fired through the window. “The God-fearing members of the contingent recognized what he did and brought him back to Paris, instead of delivering a coup de grace and burying him in an unmarked grave in the woods.”
Though not versed in military matters, I recognized the elegant play of words that denoted a blow meant to put a mortally wounded person out of agony. "A coup de grace? Why? What did they do to him?”
“Half an ounce of lead fired point-blank?” Pierre shook his head. “Don’t think of it, Jeannette. It’s best to remember Père Christian as he was.”
I begged him to stop speaking down to me—except the plea was more of a shout punctuated by the simultaneous stamp of a foot. “What am I supposed to tell his parents in America when they ask me what happened to their son? Am I supposed to stand there and stammer, ‘Ohhh, I don’t know,’ and let them believe that the one person who grew up with their son and worked by his side in a far-off land suddenly discarded him with the indifference of his attacker, as if he was a piece of trash?”
What Pierre told me was enough to silence me and convince me that it was indeed far better to remember Kit as he had been. After staring steadfastly at the man, containing the sensation that threatened to make me unwell at his feet, I removed myself from his presence and walked until I could walk no more and sat on a pile of bulging tree roots, cushioned by moss and a certainty: Kit was gone. His end had arrived more brutal and earlier than anything anyone could have expected for him. I would never again see his face or hear his voice, or have the comfort of his common sense and calm demeanor.
I should have been chilled or faint with horror.
I should have shrieked, or collapsed in sobs, or torn my hair, or scratched my face in the most heart-rending display of grief for the person who had been the longest and dearest of friends. I should have despaired into the want to end my life and join him in the grave.
But I was beyond horror, grief, despair.
I felt nothing.
It was not the emptiness of having spent the best of my sorrow on Josquin. It was the nothingness that came from knowing horror, grief and despair were not enough to express the severity of what I felt and what Kit must have endured.
I envisioned the last time I saw him, in that surprise visit to the estate, as if it were taking place all over again. I could see him on the horse, in the guise of a French Army captain, steeped in his own sweat, his pallor that of a fresh corpse. The look he gave me … Dear God, the look he gave me…. As he set his eyes upon me, I realized no, he did not want to speak to me. There was none of the guidance and gentleness he had shown me all my life. There was only what I had never before seen in him: Sorrow. Fear. The questions “What have I done to deserve this?” and “What will become of us all?”
I wondered what those final moments in the carriage, surrounded by Guardsmen, their guns at the ready, must have been like for him. His life was in danger. Why would he not fight back? Why would he not let the steward fight back? What was he thinking? Did he remember his friends? Did he remember his wife? Did he regret coming to France? Was there time for a prayer?
Somebody shuffled through the leaves. George. He sat beside me. “Does Kit know, Jan?”
“Does Kit know what?”
“His place in your heart.”
I studied the hands clasped around my knees. Which was the greater tragedy of my life, losing Kit or never telling him how vastly I esteemed him? I remembered all the times I could have told him. I had no doubt that I was now compelled to damn myself for my silence and to content myself with knowing I deserved damnation.
“Do you wish you had told him?”
“Don’t mock me. Please.” A feeble plea.
“Of course, you wish you told him. As I have wished all these weeks to tell you about my regard for you. I’m telling you now because after everything that has happened, and for everything that may happen, none of us has the right to conceal our hearts from those we hold dear. Forgive me, if you can, for my silence––as I’m sure Kit would forgive you for yours.”
A chill breeze wiped our faces. I shivered enough to let George put his arm around me. I leaned into him, consoled by his warmth and strength.
I had yet to answer his declaration of affection. How could I? I mourned Kit. I would probably mourn him for the rest of my life. I remembered being glad to leave him behind in Paris. I knew now it was the weeping of a heart wracked by the change his wife’s betrayal had wrought in him. I resolved to ask George and Pierre to help me find her once we returned to Paris. I wondered what she would think when she heard how her husband died. I could scarcely wait to see her face when I told her. I imagined she would be glad. I hoped their child would be a boy who looked enough like him to haunt her every minute she remained on this earth. Or perhaps it would be a girl, as vain and willful as the mother who would never be able to control her.
A thousand scenarios must have crossed my mind before I fell asleep, exhilarated by visions of revenge yet at rest in the security of George’s arms.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
27. Delusions
I saw no sense in dressing like a boy, but Malachi said I needed to react to whatever the Guard threw at us without getting twisted up in skirts—or ruining them. The shirt, waistcoat and cravat he gave me were a passable fit, but the britches needed help.
Merit tacked quick tucks in the waistband. Though her hands shook, I remembered this was the woman who had spent a year of her life in her own cellars, running the family business while she waited for her husband to be vindicated and released from prison. All the while she and her son outfitted me, I asked again and again if Kit was safe. Again and again they assured me Pierre would keep all of us safe. But I could not dispel the memory of Kit in a uniform. It became him but was unnatural to him. I feared the masquerade would come to no good end precisely because it was a lie.
A jacket I had so often seen on Malachi—and adorned by a few stray guinea pig hairs--completed the suit. The transformation I perused in the cheval glass was nearly successful. “My shoes,” I lamented. “They’re girl shoes.”
Merit smiled. “They fit, ma chère. That’s more important than fashion. We’re escaping, not going to a ball.” All the same, she asked Mal to see if he had boots I could use, then excused herself to go change into a riding habit.
As we assembled in the foyer, ready for the road, Josquin said there was time enough for a small meal before the Army arrived. “Eat for the hunger to come,” he said when none of us claimed to be hungry.
Dusk was upon us. A distant flash of light and a deep, dry, hollow boom inspired me to ask if an approaching storm would prevent the forces from attacking. “Armies can’t fight in the rain—can they?”
“That’s not a storm,” said George as more booms and flashes drew us to the windows. Workers carrying muskets ran across the lawn, bawling for us to get out.
In a low, controlled voice, Josquin directed us to go not to the crayere, but through it. He expected Pierre would have seen the Guard’s advance and sent troops with horses to the other side of the hill.
George made certain that Merit, Mal and I were out the door before turning to Josquin. “What are you going to do?”
Josquin shoved him after us, spitting “Va-t’en!” with the fury of a trapped beast.
We ran up the hill to the gardener’s shed. Workers armed with conventional flintlock muskets opened the trompe l’oeil door and ushered us into the chilly depths of the crayere.
The place was an arsenal. I thought scores of workers would crowd the corridors, eager to grab a Ferguson musket and run to the defense of the estate. But aside from the armed men gathered around the entrance, all was quiet. I figured the guns already were distributed. Josquin’s men must be forming up to meet the Guard.
A worker shouted: troops had reached the house.
Merit led us through the crayere, past row after row of vats and kegs and racks of bottles. We arrived at the central room that had the doors at either end. Merit halted, unsure which door would bring us to the corridor that would, in turn, lead us to the corridor that would bring us to the opening on the opposite side of the hill. “It’s the east door,” she said, “but I can never remember which is east down here.”
All my life, I have counted on east being to my right. That evening in the crayere was no different. “Are you sure it’s not this?” I opened the door at the end of the room to my right and ran toward the angled corridor that held the arsenal.
“Jan, no!” Malachi screeched. I was marveling that I had never known a boy to screech when I was yanked by the coattails and twirled around, propelled by momentum. My shoulder slammed against something hard. I flopped to the floor as part of a heaving, human tangle.
When I sat up, Mal was on all fours, shaking his head and uttering an oath. There was no angled corridor behind us, only a wall that marked the end of a straight, short corridor. What I thought was the angled corridor into the arsenal was the trompe l’oeil painting of a corridor. Even the arsenal was a painting. The dim lighting in the crayere enhanced the illusion of depth and distance.
George swept his fingers over the images of the muskets, which seemed less real when viewed up close. “These are your guns? We’re under siege because of a painting?” He turned to Malachi. “Is this a joke?”
“A deterrent, mon cher.” Merit was on her knees, pushing back Mal’s hair to examine the scrape on his forehead. “We needed to appear stronger than we were.”
“Why? How could you possibly believe that a painting could scare away your husband’s enemies?”
“Forgive me for saying so, George, but you weren’t around to suggest something more appropriate.”
“I'm here now, and now I’m suggesting you can stop this assault. Send a message. Tell them the truth: There are no guns.”
She shook her head. "No. Let them come. They deserve to see this assault was for nothing. And they deserve to see what they have done to us for nothing."
Workers pleaded with us to leave: Troops were advancing toward the crayere. I remember following Merit and Mal up a series of crude stone ramps and steps. Every few feet the air grew warmer, a sign we were close to the surface. At last we entered a grotto that opened onto a wooded hillside.
Men dressed as workers, not soldiers, waited with horses whose saddles and cloths were the same as those I had seen on the Army horses ridden by Kit and Pierre. Merit and Mal rode by themselves. George made me ride pillion with him.
Red light coughed through the woods as the Guard and the Army approached each other firing muskets and cannon at will. Our guides brought us to the edge of the action. Clouds of black powder assaulted our clothes, our eyes, our hair with its sting and stench.
George swerved our horse between the trees. He rose into a half seat, something that nearly surprised me into letting go. With scores of pounds off its back, the horse moved quicker, with sure footing (though, as we discovered later, speed was not the reason why George assumed the position).
Eventually the air cleared. We passed a line of sentries and came upon a field where horses, soldiers and artillery waited, fog-pale in moonrise. More horses were tethered to lines stretched between trees to the rear, and hitched to empty carts and wagons.
Soldiers steadied the horses while we dismounted. George waited as I slid off the horse’s rump and into the arms of an infantryman. He then slowly lifted one leg over the saddle, paused, standing in the iron, and carefully lowered himself and leaned against the horse’s flank, exhibiting a knowledge of Anglo Saxon that exceeded the text of Beowulf and centered on the subject of procreation.
“What is it?” we cried. He flicked aside his coattail to reveal the possibility that he and his fencing partner had joked about under more benign circumstances: a large, dark red blotch on the side of his seat. Merit's hand flew to her mouth. Malachi guffawed.
“It’s not funny, you little weasel!” George wailed, ready to box the boy’s ear.
By then Pierre was half listening to the soldiers’ account of the engagement and half watching us. All at once the man I never heard utter one word of English was pulling George toward a big tent, telling him, in heavily accented English, to stop whining. “You’re not the first man to receive an extra orifice in battle. It would be nice if you were the last, but I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon…”
Having an idea what George was in for, I was a little surprised that nobody stopped Merit and Mal from hurrying into the tent after him. Then I remembered that Merit was a soldier’s wife, and Mal was a soldier’s son, and I considered that soldiers had a different way of doing things.
With nobody coming after me or deigning to escort me anywhere, I walked around the encampment, hoping to see Kit or Josquin—and trying not to listen for George’s yelps as he was parted from his inglorious memento.
One of the tents was not a true tent at all, but a canvas structure with three walls and a flat canvas roof. A lantern hung from one of the poles that supported the roof, providing enough light for a young man in civilian clothes to study a map. His face and figure were familiar to me. After a moment I realized it was the man who had confronted Pierre in Malachi's music room. He had an odd smile on his face. I wondered if he was imagining how he would present the arsenal to his brother Napoleon.
When I returned to my friends, George was hobbling around the tent that served as Pierre's headquarters in search of a place to sit. Mal was saying, “Too bad this isn’t America, George. They’d give you a Purple Heart to match your purple—"
“Malachi!” Merit cried.
“I didn’t say anything!”
“Don’t!”
“I just want him to feel better,” Mal muttered, close to tears.
"Where’s Kit?" I asked Pierre. "You said you were hiding Kit. Where is he?"
Everyone turned to the colonel, who said he sent Kit north to the Batavian Republic with a driver and a steward.
“But—mon cher!—you said he was here.” Merit’s patience was strained.
“He was. He tried to go back to the vineyard to be with you. When he failed to see reason, I shot the horse out from under him and had him taken to where he would be safe and do no harm.”
“The Batavian Republic?”
“America has envoys at The Hague, does it not?”
Merit had no idea, but George said it was likely.
Pierre pronounced it more than likely, for Lucien and Joseph had said as much. “He’ll be quite safe. He has papers identifying him as a Dutch citizen. With a name like DeWaere, nobody will question his true origin.”
“But his accent!” Merit pressed. “It’s far from Dutch.”
Pierre sat on a wooden campaign chair and wearily rubbed his eyes. “I thought of that. Let’s just say I made certain he gets a good night’s sleep between here and there.”
Merit sustained her gasp until it elided with the next word. “You drugged him? What if the Guard finds him? How will he defend himself? How will he escape?”
“The Guard won’t find him.”
“Are you certain? The Guard wasn’t supposed to be here until around midnight, remember.”
“He has an escort.”
"You call a driver and a steward an escort?"
Pierre gripped the arms of the chair and loudly, irritated, shifted in the seat. “Mes chers,” he announced. “However highly you regard our little curate, he is precisely that—a little curate. He can’t fire a musket, he can’t wield a sword, and, God knows, he can’t ride half a mile without falling off a horse. He has no business being among soldiers, especially during an engagement. He's a danger to others as well as to himself.”
The Bonaparte with the map approached the tent in the form of a silhouette against the orange glow that pulsed between the hills.
“They torched the place,” he said in French and nodded curtly toward the color.
Pierre stood. “Let’s get out of here.”
Merit tacked quick tucks in the waistband. Though her hands shook, I remembered this was the woman who had spent a year of her life in her own cellars, running the family business while she waited for her husband to be vindicated and released from prison. All the while she and her son outfitted me, I asked again and again if Kit was safe. Again and again they assured me Pierre would keep all of us safe. But I could not dispel the memory of Kit in a uniform. It became him but was unnatural to him. I feared the masquerade would come to no good end precisely because it was a lie.
A jacket I had so often seen on Malachi—and adorned by a few stray guinea pig hairs--completed the suit. The transformation I perused in the cheval glass was nearly successful. “My shoes,” I lamented. “They’re girl shoes.”
Merit smiled. “They fit, ma chère. That’s more important than fashion. We’re escaping, not going to a ball.” All the same, she asked Mal to see if he had boots I could use, then excused herself to go change into a riding habit.
As we assembled in the foyer, ready for the road, Josquin said there was time enough for a small meal before the Army arrived. “Eat for the hunger to come,” he said when none of us claimed to be hungry.
Dusk was upon us. A distant flash of light and a deep, dry, hollow boom inspired me to ask if an approaching storm would prevent the forces from attacking. “Armies can’t fight in the rain—can they?”
“That’s not a storm,” said George as more booms and flashes drew us to the windows. Workers carrying muskets ran across the lawn, bawling for us to get out.
In a low, controlled voice, Josquin directed us to go not to the crayere, but through it. He expected Pierre would have seen the Guard’s advance and sent troops with horses to the other side of the hill.
George made certain that Merit, Mal and I were out the door before turning to Josquin. “What are you going to do?”
Josquin shoved him after us, spitting “Va-t’en!” with the fury of a trapped beast.
We ran up the hill to the gardener’s shed. Workers armed with conventional flintlock muskets opened the trompe l’oeil door and ushered us into the chilly depths of the crayere.
The place was an arsenal. I thought scores of workers would crowd the corridors, eager to grab a Ferguson musket and run to the defense of the estate. But aside from the armed men gathered around the entrance, all was quiet. I figured the guns already were distributed. Josquin’s men must be forming up to meet the Guard.
A worker shouted: troops had reached the house.
Merit led us through the crayere, past row after row of vats and kegs and racks of bottles. We arrived at the central room that had the doors at either end. Merit halted, unsure which door would bring us to the corridor that would, in turn, lead us to the corridor that would bring us to the opening on the opposite side of the hill. “It’s the east door,” she said, “but I can never remember which is east down here.”
All my life, I have counted on east being to my right. That evening in the crayere was no different. “Are you sure it’s not this?” I opened the door at the end of the room to my right and ran toward the angled corridor that held the arsenal.
“Jan, no!” Malachi screeched. I was marveling that I had never known a boy to screech when I was yanked by the coattails and twirled around, propelled by momentum. My shoulder slammed against something hard. I flopped to the floor as part of a heaving, human tangle.
When I sat up, Mal was on all fours, shaking his head and uttering an oath. There was no angled corridor behind us, only a wall that marked the end of a straight, short corridor. What I thought was the angled corridor into the arsenal was the trompe l’oeil painting of a corridor. Even the arsenal was a painting. The dim lighting in the crayere enhanced the illusion of depth and distance.
George swept his fingers over the images of the muskets, which seemed less real when viewed up close. “These are your guns? We’re under siege because of a painting?” He turned to Malachi. “Is this a joke?”
“A deterrent, mon cher.” Merit was on her knees, pushing back Mal’s hair to examine the scrape on his forehead. “We needed to appear stronger than we were.”
“Why? How could you possibly believe that a painting could scare away your husband’s enemies?”
“Forgive me for saying so, George, but you weren’t around to suggest something more appropriate.”
“I'm here now, and now I’m suggesting you can stop this assault. Send a message. Tell them the truth: There are no guns.”
She shook her head. "No. Let them come. They deserve to see this assault was for nothing. And they deserve to see what they have done to us for nothing."
Workers pleaded with us to leave: Troops were advancing toward the crayere. I remember following Merit and Mal up a series of crude stone ramps and steps. Every few feet the air grew warmer, a sign we were close to the surface. At last we entered a grotto that opened onto a wooded hillside.
Men dressed as workers, not soldiers, waited with horses whose saddles and cloths were the same as those I had seen on the Army horses ridden by Kit and Pierre. Merit and Mal rode by themselves. George made me ride pillion with him.
Red light coughed through the woods as the Guard and the Army approached each other firing muskets and cannon at will. Our guides brought us to the edge of the action. Clouds of black powder assaulted our clothes, our eyes, our hair with its sting and stench.
George swerved our horse between the trees. He rose into a half seat, something that nearly surprised me into letting go. With scores of pounds off its back, the horse moved quicker, with sure footing (though, as we discovered later, speed was not the reason why George assumed the position).
Eventually the air cleared. We passed a line of sentries and came upon a field where horses, soldiers and artillery waited, fog-pale in moonrise. More horses were tethered to lines stretched between trees to the rear, and hitched to empty carts and wagons.
Soldiers steadied the horses while we dismounted. George waited as I slid off the horse’s rump and into the arms of an infantryman. He then slowly lifted one leg over the saddle, paused, standing in the iron, and carefully lowered himself and leaned against the horse’s flank, exhibiting a knowledge of Anglo Saxon that exceeded the text of Beowulf and centered on the subject of procreation.
“What is it?” we cried. He flicked aside his coattail to reveal the possibility that he and his fencing partner had joked about under more benign circumstances: a large, dark red blotch on the side of his seat. Merit's hand flew to her mouth. Malachi guffawed.
“It’s not funny, you little weasel!” George wailed, ready to box the boy’s ear.
By then Pierre was half listening to the soldiers’ account of the engagement and half watching us. All at once the man I never heard utter one word of English was pulling George toward a big tent, telling him, in heavily accented English, to stop whining. “You’re not the first man to receive an extra orifice in battle. It would be nice if you were the last, but I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon…”
Having an idea what George was in for, I was a little surprised that nobody stopped Merit and Mal from hurrying into the tent after him. Then I remembered that Merit was a soldier’s wife, and Mal was a soldier’s son, and I considered that soldiers had a different way of doing things.
With nobody coming after me or deigning to escort me anywhere, I walked around the encampment, hoping to see Kit or Josquin—and trying not to listen for George’s yelps as he was parted from his inglorious memento.
One of the tents was not a true tent at all, but a canvas structure with three walls and a flat canvas roof. A lantern hung from one of the poles that supported the roof, providing enough light for a young man in civilian clothes to study a map. His face and figure were familiar to me. After a moment I realized it was the man who had confronted Pierre in Malachi's music room. He had an odd smile on his face. I wondered if he was imagining how he would present the arsenal to his brother Napoleon.
When I returned to my friends, George was hobbling around the tent that served as Pierre's headquarters in search of a place to sit. Mal was saying, “Too bad this isn’t America, George. They’d give you a Purple Heart to match your purple—"
“Malachi!” Merit cried.
“I didn’t say anything!”
“Don’t!”
“I just want him to feel better,” Mal muttered, close to tears.
"Where’s Kit?" I asked Pierre. "You said you were hiding Kit. Where is he?"
Everyone turned to the colonel, who said he sent Kit north to the Batavian Republic with a driver and a steward.
“But—mon cher!—you said he was here.” Merit’s patience was strained.
“He was. He tried to go back to the vineyard to be with you. When he failed to see reason, I shot the horse out from under him and had him taken to where he would be safe and do no harm.”
“The Batavian Republic?”
“America has envoys at The Hague, does it not?”
Merit had no idea, but George said it was likely.
Pierre pronounced it more than likely, for Lucien and Joseph had said as much. “He’ll be quite safe. He has papers identifying him as a Dutch citizen. With a name like DeWaere, nobody will question his true origin.”
“But his accent!” Merit pressed. “It’s far from Dutch.”
Pierre sat on a wooden campaign chair and wearily rubbed his eyes. “I thought of that. Let’s just say I made certain he gets a good night’s sleep between here and there.”
Merit sustained her gasp until it elided with the next word. “You drugged him? What if the Guard finds him? How will he defend himself? How will he escape?”
“The Guard won’t find him.”
“Are you certain? The Guard wasn’t supposed to be here until around midnight, remember.”
“He has an escort.”
"You call a driver and a steward an escort?"
Pierre gripped the arms of the chair and loudly, irritated, shifted in the seat. “Mes chers,” he announced. “However highly you regard our little curate, he is precisely that—a little curate. He can’t fire a musket, he can’t wield a sword, and, God knows, he can’t ride half a mile without falling off a horse. He has no business being among soldiers, especially during an engagement. He's a danger to others as well as to himself.”
The Bonaparte with the map approached the tent in the form of a silhouette against the orange glow that pulsed between the hills.
“They torched the place,” he said in French and nodded curtly toward the color.
Pierre stood. “Let’s get out of here.”
Friday, September 19, 2008
26. Pursuit(s)
What set me sideways upon the withers of the amiable old horse was more than the prospect of having an amiable young man sit behind me with a protective arm around my waist. It was curiosity as to why that young man would furtively tell me, “We’ve got to chat,” as Malachi playfully rolled the blanket, which he had tied into a tight ball, down the hill ahead of us.
“What’s on your mind, George?” I asked as we swayed along the path that snaked from the estate to the road at the bottom of the hill.
I had not been on horseback in years. I loved the motion and being high up, but I was so afraid of the horse stumbling or bolting that I wrapped the mane around my hand in a death grip.
George sighed. “Oh, what isn’t on my mind! I followed you when you went after Mal but lost you at the shed. I figured you had chased him through the rose bower and around the hill. Then, chose etrange!—as Voltaire would say. A strange thing: As I contemplated that funny little shed, it made itself even funnier by belching like a ship’s bell.”
“The bell is part of the works. Malachi showed me.”
We rode farther. George directed the horse off the road and across an open field of tall grass, where we could talk without fearing to be overheard by wayfarers. The world glowed with the soft, pink light of late-summer evening.
I was wrestling with my conscience over betraying Malachi and telling George everything I had learned in the crayere when he mentioned I appeared troubled. “What happened? Did Mal try to get to know you in the Biblical fashion?”
The suggestion of boyish accoutrements fumbling through my petticoats burned my face. I realized that unless I told the truth, George would regard Malachi as a miscreant obsessed with something he should not be seeking. For Malachi’s sake, I risked Malachi’s anger and told all.
George let me speak with few interruptions. The only time he showed displeasure was when I revealed Kit’s interference. He shook his head, more exasperated than vexed. “What was he doing? What in the realm of all that’s good and glorious in this world did that...that child...think he was doing?”
He expressed no surprise at news of the arsenal. “I wondered why Josquin didn’t offer to show us the cellars when we first arrived. You’d think he'd be eager to show off his product.”
“I thought he had reason to be secretive,” I said. “Mal once told me that many vintners hire armed men to protect their champagne during shipping. They’re afraid a rival house will steal the shipment to discover what makes the brand unique.”
“No, no, it’s not the champagne he’s protecting. It’s the arsenal. Trust me. Men would kill for the muskets he owns.”
Only then did George tell me that Josquin’s muskets were rarities designed in 1776 by Patrick Ferguson, a colonel in the British army, and first used at the Battle of Brandywine, Pennsylvania, on 11 September, 1777.
"The Fergusons are special not simply because you can load them at the breech, as Josquin showed you, but because the rifling in the barrel offers murderous accuracy of aim. Loading at the breech also means you don't need to stand and ram the shot down the muzzle, the way you do with a conventional musket. You can perch in a tree or lie down on the ground, in a ditch or behind a shrub, where the enemy can't see you, and you can take him by surprise. About a hundred Fergusons were made, but most were thought to have disappeared during the War for Independence.
“Each musket was numbered on the bottom of the trigger guard,” George continued. “Josquin has numbers 55 and 89, which he claims to have found on the Brandywine battlefield. If there are as many as you imply, then it’s likely that he either located the rest of the original hundred or he had more made. If Babeuf knew about them, others know about them. And if others know about them, they, like Babeuf, will try to get their hands on them.”
“Do you think Josquin is involved with a rebellion?”
“If he’s involved with Lucien and Joseph Bonaparte, he’s involved with something.”
“Do you think they’re plotting something for when Napoleon returns from Egypt?”
“Yes, if, as you say, they were studying a map in Josquin’s kitchen the night Kit walked you home.”
“Then he could be safeguarding the muskets for Napoleon.”
George made a noise. "Good point. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Directory sends the National Guard to seize them before Napoleon returns."
“The government can use the Guard like that?"
"The Directors can do whatever they like with the Guard."
"Then wouldn’t the Bonapartes think of that? Shouldn’t they move the arsenal to another location before their enemies go after it?”
“Perhaps, but they may consider that the Guard would attack them on the way. It would be civil war, Jan. I doubt the nation can survive a war with itself. The armies are scattered across Europe and the Mediterranean, and the treasury hasn’t the funds. Aside from that, I can't imagine the populace suffering more levees of troops and taxes. From what I heard in the streets, they've had enough."
The sun was much lower now. Fearing we would be missed at the house, George urged the horse into a lumpy, reluctant trot. He slowed when we saw a double line of blue and white uniforms marching toward us on the slender road, several small cannon in tow. We discerned a limp, ragged chorus: "La republique nous appelle, sachons vaincre, ou sachons perir..." The Republic is calling us. We're resolved to vanquish or die.
The arm around my waist tightened. A breath hissed through my hair. “Kiss me--quick!”
“What?”
As I turned to look at George, flummoxed, he gently took my chin and pressed his mouth onto mine. His hands framed my head, holding me in place as his lips squashed, crushed, trampled and otherwise venerated every part of my countenance.
Sounds crept from his throat as I tried to pull away: “They musn’t… see our… faces…”
They were going to see much more than my face because I was starting to slide off the horse, and the motion was pulling up my skirts. George hauled me back, held me tight with one arm and spurred the horse toward the hill. I still dream about the whistles, cheers and laughter that pursued our ride back to the estate. I was so mortified by the time we reached the courtyard that I could scarcely detach myself from the saddle. I have a dim memory of George carrying me indoors, so rattled he clipped my head on the door frame.
“Something's afoot," he gasped, dumping me onto a settee. "The Guard’s left Reims--with artillery.”
The news stilled the fuss that Merit and Malachi were making over me.
Josquin alone was unconcerned. “They march around the hills every now and then. It lets the people see their taxes at work.” He kindly patted my shoulder. “It’s nothing to be afraid of, ma petite. They’ll be gone soon, if they’re not gone already. You’ll see.”
With the family returned to their dinner, I rested my elbow on the back of the chair, covered my eyes with my hand and peeked through the fingers as George slopped brandy from a heavy crystal decanter into a glass.
“I’m so sorry,” he creaked, holding the glass out to me. I confess, it was delicious to see him in a dither. I could not resist saying that he seemed exquisitely expert at the way he had treated me. I asked what I had refrained from asking earlier that summer: "A fortunate young woman is waiting for you to return to America, isn't she?"
Seeing that I refused the drink, he gulped it down himself and left me alone. He could barely talk to me without blushing for the next two days.
As Josquin predicted, the Guard did indeed appear to return to Reims, and those among us who did not share his insouciance were finally able to relax. Of an afternoon several days later, the sound of rhythmic metallic clicks and the occasional high-spirited shout drew me to the paddock alongside the house, where Mal and G.F. were fencing. It was a beautiful display. Mal was every bit as good as his father, and George had gained--or regained--a fluency that gave the session the elegance of a ballet. They scored by slapping the side of their rapiers against each other's rump.
“One false move, and we add to each other's orifices,” Mal explained during a particularly frantic round. “How...very...De Sade...”
“Mal!” Merit scolded.
“What!”
Merit's attempt to verbally discipline her son for referencing the banned writer came to naught as she beseeched both fencers to beware of the horse droppings.
As George glanced down at the ground, Mal whirled and thwhacked his rapier across George’s hindquarters. With a good-natured howl of defeat, George tossed Mal over his shoulder and carted him to the table where we sat with cake and cool drinks.
It was Mal who first noticed the Army officers riding on the road below the vineyards. I followed his point, squinting. “Is that Pierre?”
Mal frowned. “He never comes here in uniform. Or with anybody else.”
“An aide de camp?” George offered.
“He doesn’t have one.” Mal tugged his mother’s sleeve. “Something’s not right, Geveret! Pierre would never bring a stranger here. Maybe it isn’t Pierre, only someone who looks like him.”
George exuded assurance. “Well, whoever it is, it can’t be anybody we should be afraid of. Look at the way he’s riding. Does that strike terror in your heart?”
The horseman behind Pierre would canter a few paces, then pull the horse up and bounce around the saddle in a sitting trot—sometimes tipping dangerously forward--until finding his balance and trying a posting trot. After a few yards of an apparently smooth post, he would attempt another canter, and the cycle of sitting trot, posting trot, canter would begin all over again.
Now George puffed up further, apparently soundly enamored of his own abilities in the saddle. “That, my boy, is the living illustration of the term ‘half-assed.’ --He’s not sitting full in the seat!” George countered, cut down as Merit went “Shh! Be nice, mon cher! He may have been wounded in action.”
“Probably had a buttock sliced off in Egypt,” Mal muttered.
Merit did a verbal shearing off. “Ça suffit, mon petit. Get your father. Please.”
Mal ran.
Pierre halted some yards away from us and dismounted with an elegant leg over the horse’s neck.
The other officer, a slight creature whose uniform proved to be that of an infantry captain, performed the traditional leg-over-the saddle dismount as though the effort would rend him up the middle. Leaning against the horse, he removed his hat and wiped his glistening face on his sleeve.
Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. Nobody breathed.
Christian DeWaere in uniform was a sight as likely as snow in summer. We could not trust the reality of where we stood, let alone the truth of what we saw.
Kit continued to nuzzle his arm, unaware of the stricken souls who watched him, doubting their sanity.
Pierre followed our stare. “We had to hide him.”
George made a noise of disbelief. “You can’t hide someone who sits a horse like that! It’s a spectacle! You could sell tickets.”
Misery glazed the eyes peering up from the spot where the nose burrowed.
Josquin instantly assessed the significance of the visit. ”Who’s coming here?” he asked the colonel.
“The Guard.”
“What do they want? The guns? Me?”
“You. And the guns. You’re lucky--the Army wants only the guns.”
“The Army’s coming, too?”
Pierre gestured to his uniform. “The Army is here.”
“You would take what I have by force.”
“I would prevent the Guard from taking it by force.”
“Who’s the genius behind this? Lucien? Joseph?”
“You answered the question yourself when you said ‘genius, ’ mon vieux. You know Lucien and Joseph aren’t the brains of the family.”
“But Napoleon’s in Egypt--"
“He’s coming back—as soon as he has a proper arsenal behind him.”
“In other words, as soon as his brothers have the Ferguson guns.”
"You should have sold them the things and been rid of them."
"Rid of what? The Bonapartes, or the guns?"
Pierre offered no reply. Josquin thought. “When will the Guard arrive?”
“They should be in position by midnight.”
“I can’t just pick up and leave.”
“Don’t try. You can’t be seen in public. Get ready. I’ll send carriages by nightfall.”
Pierre easily stepped into the saddle and cantered back to the road.
Josquin Levy-Pfaltz was faced with losing his home, his fortune, and perhaps his life, within hours. He had a duty to secure the safety of his family and his guests. There was so much to do but so little time.
Yet with all this looming, he stopped to give Kit a leg up onto the horse. Calm, with authority, he then checked the girth and made certain the stirrup leathers were the right length. Words passed between them. First Kit, then Josquin, glanced in our direction.
No. Josquin glanced in our direction. Kit looked at me. I thought he wanted to say something. I stepped forward, meaning to go to him. He shook his head. George held me back.
Josquin stood aside as Kit turned the horse and followed Pierre at a frail posting trot. “Give Janet a suit,” he quietly ordered his son.
Mal hurried me inside.
I looked back, desperate to catch a glimpse of Kit. Instead I saw Merit and Josquin clinging to each other as I had seen no other couple embrace in public--as though it was the last time in this life that they would know each other’s touch.
“What’s on your mind, George?” I asked as we swayed along the path that snaked from the estate to the road at the bottom of the hill.
I had not been on horseback in years. I loved the motion and being high up, but I was so afraid of the horse stumbling or bolting that I wrapped the mane around my hand in a death grip.
George sighed. “Oh, what isn’t on my mind! I followed you when you went after Mal but lost you at the shed. I figured you had chased him through the rose bower and around the hill. Then, chose etrange!—as Voltaire would say. A strange thing: As I contemplated that funny little shed, it made itself even funnier by belching like a ship’s bell.”
“The bell is part of the works. Malachi showed me.”
We rode farther. George directed the horse off the road and across an open field of tall grass, where we could talk without fearing to be overheard by wayfarers. The world glowed with the soft, pink light of late-summer evening.
I was wrestling with my conscience over betraying Malachi and telling George everything I had learned in the crayere when he mentioned I appeared troubled. “What happened? Did Mal try to get to know you in the Biblical fashion?”
The suggestion of boyish accoutrements fumbling through my petticoats burned my face. I realized that unless I told the truth, George would regard Malachi as a miscreant obsessed with something he should not be seeking. For Malachi’s sake, I risked Malachi’s anger and told all.
George let me speak with few interruptions. The only time he showed displeasure was when I revealed Kit’s interference. He shook his head, more exasperated than vexed. “What was he doing? What in the realm of all that’s good and glorious in this world did that...that child...think he was doing?”
He expressed no surprise at news of the arsenal. “I wondered why Josquin didn’t offer to show us the cellars when we first arrived. You’d think he'd be eager to show off his product.”
“I thought he had reason to be secretive,” I said. “Mal once told me that many vintners hire armed men to protect their champagne during shipping. They’re afraid a rival house will steal the shipment to discover what makes the brand unique.”
“No, no, it’s not the champagne he’s protecting. It’s the arsenal. Trust me. Men would kill for the muskets he owns.”
Only then did George tell me that Josquin’s muskets were rarities designed in 1776 by Patrick Ferguson, a colonel in the British army, and first used at the Battle of Brandywine, Pennsylvania, on 11 September, 1777.
"The Fergusons are special not simply because you can load them at the breech, as Josquin showed you, but because the rifling in the barrel offers murderous accuracy of aim. Loading at the breech also means you don't need to stand and ram the shot down the muzzle, the way you do with a conventional musket. You can perch in a tree or lie down on the ground, in a ditch or behind a shrub, where the enemy can't see you, and you can take him by surprise. About a hundred Fergusons were made, but most were thought to have disappeared during the War for Independence.
“Each musket was numbered on the bottom of the trigger guard,” George continued. “Josquin has numbers 55 and 89, which he claims to have found on the Brandywine battlefield. If there are as many as you imply, then it’s likely that he either located the rest of the original hundred or he had more made. If Babeuf knew about them, others know about them. And if others know about them, they, like Babeuf, will try to get their hands on them.”
“Do you think Josquin is involved with a rebellion?”
“If he’s involved with Lucien and Joseph Bonaparte, he’s involved with something.”
“Do you think they’re plotting something for when Napoleon returns from Egypt?”
“Yes, if, as you say, they were studying a map in Josquin’s kitchen the night Kit walked you home.”
“Then he could be safeguarding the muskets for Napoleon.”
George made a noise. "Good point. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Directory sends the National Guard to seize them before Napoleon returns."
“The government can use the Guard like that?"
"The Directors can do whatever they like with the Guard."
"Then wouldn’t the Bonapartes think of that? Shouldn’t they move the arsenal to another location before their enemies go after it?”
“Perhaps, but they may consider that the Guard would attack them on the way. It would be civil war, Jan. I doubt the nation can survive a war with itself. The armies are scattered across Europe and the Mediterranean, and the treasury hasn’t the funds. Aside from that, I can't imagine the populace suffering more levees of troops and taxes. From what I heard in the streets, they've had enough."
The sun was much lower now. Fearing we would be missed at the house, George urged the horse into a lumpy, reluctant trot. He slowed when we saw a double line of blue and white uniforms marching toward us on the slender road, several small cannon in tow. We discerned a limp, ragged chorus: "La republique nous appelle, sachons vaincre, ou sachons perir..." The Republic is calling us. We're resolved to vanquish or die.
The arm around my waist tightened. A breath hissed through my hair. “Kiss me--quick!”
“What?”
As I turned to look at George, flummoxed, he gently took my chin and pressed his mouth onto mine. His hands framed my head, holding me in place as his lips squashed, crushed, trampled and otherwise venerated every part of my countenance.
Sounds crept from his throat as I tried to pull away: “They musn’t… see our… faces…”
They were going to see much more than my face because I was starting to slide off the horse, and the motion was pulling up my skirts. George hauled me back, held me tight with one arm and spurred the horse toward the hill. I still dream about the whistles, cheers and laughter that pursued our ride back to the estate. I was so mortified by the time we reached the courtyard that I could scarcely detach myself from the saddle. I have a dim memory of George carrying me indoors, so rattled he clipped my head on the door frame.
“Something's afoot," he gasped, dumping me onto a settee. "The Guard’s left Reims--with artillery.”
The news stilled the fuss that Merit and Malachi were making over me.
Josquin alone was unconcerned. “They march around the hills every now and then. It lets the people see their taxes at work.” He kindly patted my shoulder. “It’s nothing to be afraid of, ma petite. They’ll be gone soon, if they’re not gone already. You’ll see.”
With the family returned to their dinner, I rested my elbow on the back of the chair, covered my eyes with my hand and peeked through the fingers as George slopped brandy from a heavy crystal decanter into a glass.
“I’m so sorry,” he creaked, holding the glass out to me. I confess, it was delicious to see him in a dither. I could not resist saying that he seemed exquisitely expert at the way he had treated me. I asked what I had refrained from asking earlier that summer: "A fortunate young woman is waiting for you to return to America, isn't she?"
Seeing that I refused the drink, he gulped it down himself and left me alone. He could barely talk to me without blushing for the next two days.
As Josquin predicted, the Guard did indeed appear to return to Reims, and those among us who did not share his insouciance were finally able to relax. Of an afternoon several days later, the sound of rhythmic metallic clicks and the occasional high-spirited shout drew me to the paddock alongside the house, where Mal and G.F. were fencing. It was a beautiful display. Mal was every bit as good as his father, and George had gained--or regained--a fluency that gave the session the elegance of a ballet. They scored by slapping the side of their rapiers against each other's rump.
“One false move, and we add to each other's orifices,” Mal explained during a particularly frantic round. “How...very...De Sade...”
“Mal!” Merit scolded.
“What!”
Merit's attempt to verbally discipline her son for referencing the banned writer came to naught as she beseeched both fencers to beware of the horse droppings.
As George glanced down at the ground, Mal whirled and thwhacked his rapier across George’s hindquarters. With a good-natured howl of defeat, George tossed Mal over his shoulder and carted him to the table where we sat with cake and cool drinks.
It was Mal who first noticed the Army officers riding on the road below the vineyards. I followed his point, squinting. “Is that Pierre?”
Mal frowned. “He never comes here in uniform. Or with anybody else.”
“An aide de camp?” George offered.
“He doesn’t have one.” Mal tugged his mother’s sleeve. “Something’s not right, Geveret! Pierre would never bring a stranger here. Maybe it isn’t Pierre, only someone who looks like him.”
George exuded assurance. “Well, whoever it is, it can’t be anybody we should be afraid of. Look at the way he’s riding. Does that strike terror in your heart?”
The horseman behind Pierre would canter a few paces, then pull the horse up and bounce around the saddle in a sitting trot—sometimes tipping dangerously forward--until finding his balance and trying a posting trot. After a few yards of an apparently smooth post, he would attempt another canter, and the cycle of sitting trot, posting trot, canter would begin all over again.
Now George puffed up further, apparently soundly enamored of his own abilities in the saddle. “That, my boy, is the living illustration of the term ‘half-assed.’ --He’s not sitting full in the seat!” George countered, cut down as Merit went “Shh! Be nice, mon cher! He may have been wounded in action.”
“Probably had a buttock sliced off in Egypt,” Mal muttered.
Merit did a verbal shearing off. “Ça suffit, mon petit. Get your father. Please.”
Mal ran.
Pierre halted some yards away from us and dismounted with an elegant leg over the horse’s neck.
The other officer, a slight creature whose uniform proved to be that of an infantry captain, performed the traditional leg-over-the saddle dismount as though the effort would rend him up the middle. Leaning against the horse, he removed his hat and wiped his glistening face on his sleeve.
Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. Nobody breathed.
Christian DeWaere in uniform was a sight as likely as snow in summer. We could not trust the reality of where we stood, let alone the truth of what we saw.
Kit continued to nuzzle his arm, unaware of the stricken souls who watched him, doubting their sanity.
Pierre followed our stare. “We had to hide him.”
George made a noise of disbelief. “You can’t hide someone who sits a horse like that! It’s a spectacle! You could sell tickets.”
Misery glazed the eyes peering up from the spot where the nose burrowed.
Josquin instantly assessed the significance of the visit. ”Who’s coming here?” he asked the colonel.
“The Guard.”
“What do they want? The guns? Me?”
“You. And the guns. You’re lucky--the Army wants only the guns.”
“The Army’s coming, too?”
Pierre gestured to his uniform. “The Army is here.”
“You would take what I have by force.”
“I would prevent the Guard from taking it by force.”
“Who’s the genius behind this? Lucien? Joseph?”
“You answered the question yourself when you said ‘genius, ’ mon vieux. You know Lucien and Joseph aren’t the brains of the family.”
“But Napoleon’s in Egypt--"
“He’s coming back—as soon as he has a proper arsenal behind him.”
“In other words, as soon as his brothers have the Ferguson guns.”
"You should have sold them the things and been rid of them."
"Rid of what? The Bonapartes, or the guns?"
Pierre offered no reply. Josquin thought. “When will the Guard arrive?”
“They should be in position by midnight.”
“I can’t just pick up and leave.”
“Don’t try. You can’t be seen in public. Get ready. I’ll send carriages by nightfall.”
Pierre easily stepped into the saddle and cantered back to the road.
Josquin Levy-Pfaltz was faced with losing his home, his fortune, and perhaps his life, within hours. He had a duty to secure the safety of his family and his guests. There was so much to do but so little time.
Yet with all this looming, he stopped to give Kit a leg up onto the horse. Calm, with authority, he then checked the girth and made certain the stirrup leathers were the right length. Words passed between them. First Kit, then Josquin, glanced in our direction.
No. Josquin glanced in our direction. Kit looked at me. I thought he wanted to say something. I stepped forward, meaning to go to him. He shook his head. George held me back.
Josquin stood aside as Kit turned the horse and followed Pierre at a frail posting trot. “Give Janet a suit,” he quietly ordered his son.
Mal hurried me inside.
I looked back, desperate to catch a glimpse of Kit. Instead I saw Merit and Josquin clinging to each other as I had seen no other couple embrace in public--as though it was the last time in this life that they would know each other’s touch.
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