A Sharpness on the Neck

Chapter Fifteen

After doing his best to provide their mysterious wounded visitor with all the help that he was willing to accept, Philip Radcliffe had found himself a decent-looking bed, not too dusty, in one of the upstairs rooms, and had slipped off his boots and thrown himself down. His plan was to rest for perhaps half an hour before making final preparations for an early resumption of his journey to Paris.

He awakened in the late afternoon, feeling that he had slept for hours. Guilt at his tardiness was ameliorated by an accompanying practical conviction that the sleep had been essential.

Travel and nervous strain had left him more exhausted than he had realized. After a good sleep, the problems of the world, even those of Revolutionary France, looked considerably less formidable.

He awoke to find Melanie in his room standing over his bed, looking at him with what he thought was a strange expression.

"I thought I heard you stirring," she said. Vaguely Radcliffe noticed the servant girl, Marguerite, hovering in the doorway.

Melanie, her impatience showing, half-apologetically urged her new companion to start for Paris. They could cover a considerable distance before nightfall.

"Of course." He sprang up, feeling vaguely embarrassed and apologetic, and looked around for his boots. He rubbed his eyes. "Did you get any sleep?"

"Not a great deal. But I think enough. To be able to talk for a few hours with an old friend, a sympathetic listener, was perhaps better for me than sleep."

He went to the window and drew a deep breath. There had been rain, and the whole world now smelled clean and new.

In the glow of approaching sunset, Old Jules and his granddaughter were preparing some kind of meal, consisting largely of eggs and bread and a little cheese. There was also some honey; evidently the bees were on the job. Jules said the pond had been yielding fish, but he'd had no luck there today.

Radcliffe, accompanied by his fair companion, took a last walk upstairs and down through the old manor house, and looked around.

Again it struck him: How the house seemed to have shrunk since then!

Carrying a loaded flintlock pistol, and looking warily about him, Radcliffe walked out into the farmyard, and took note of the absence of any livestock worthy of mention.

The current de facto master of the house wondered about his strange, and strangely injured, guest. There were things about the man that Radcliffe did not understand. The bandages Melanie had applied yesterday had already been discarded today.

They found the discarded bandages, the ones Melanie had thrown away last night, when she saw that they were no longer needed. There was surprisingly little blood on the cloth—only a faint brownish stain that vanished mysteriously on being exposed to sunlight.

"Did you wash these, Marguerite?"

"No ma'am." The girl sounded surprised at the question. Who would wash such rags? Her eyes were sleepy, and her thoughts seemed to be elsewhere.

One of the responsibilities his mother had tried to charge Philip with, when she had heard that he might be visiting the old family estate, had been to do what he could for some of the old family retainers, or at least to see what might have happened to them.

Radcliffe had left Philadelphia with some idea of perhaps being able to evaluate this property. But once he had been confronted with the reality of Revolutionary France, any such plans were quickly forgotten. Obviously the lands and what was left of the buildings were worthless under these conditions. What they might be worth in the future, or who was going to possess them, seemed impossible to guess. And the old family retainers, with the exception of Jules and his granddaughter, were dead or gone away.

Not that he had forgotten for a moment his main purpose in coming to Europe and to France: He was charged with carrying out a particular and confidential mission for the fledgling government in America. More precisely, for one of its leaders—Washington himself.

Radcliffe now hinted at something of the kind to Melanie. Once in Paris, his duty would require him to see Tom Paine, and communicate some message to him.

Tom Paine, the English-American internationally honored in revolutionary circles, was now (along with Washington and others) an honorary citizen of France. Lately Paine had even been made a member of the Convention, the ruling legislature of the new French government that called itself republican. The man who had been king had been beheaded, more than a year ago, despite Paine's suggestion that Citizen Louis Capet had better be exiled to America, where he could learn the truth about democracy and the nature of republican government.

Radcliffe tapped his pocket, in which he was carrying, besides his own written invitation, a sealed letter addressed to Paine.

The sealed letter was in fact a private plea, from Washington himself, couched in diplomatic language, urging Paine to stop making an ass of himself, and sever his connection with the crazy men who were generally giving the idea of revolution a bad name, and were irritating the English unnecessarily.

Melanie simply nodded. No intelligent, politically conscious Frenchwoman needed the identity or importance of Tom Paine explained to her.

God knew, Philip didn't blame the peasants of France for revolting. Not after all the stories of starvation and maltreatment he had heard in the short time since he had arrived in the country. Many thousands had gone hungry, millions had been treated like animals under the old regime. But during the few years since the fall of the Bastille, the new stories of mass beheadings and worse were deeply disturbing. Surely human rights and justice were not to be established by turning into savage animals. Humanity ought to mean more than finding a new and painless method of capital punishment…

Philip continued trying to gather information about the political situation from old Jules, as well from Melanie. Radcliffe hadn't been in Paris for many years, having come directly to the estate from some seaport town, after a surreptitious landing in a small boat on the beach.

"In Paris, things will be different." His voice sounded confident, though he could no longer feel sure of that.

"That may be, Citizen." The old man, who had probably never in his life been more than two or three miles from where he was born, let alone to the big city, scratched his head, sounding dubious.

Philip clung to the idea that he would have much less reason to worry about his own personal safety once he had reached the city. Here in the countryside, barbarism reigned.

But in Paris he would be respected, given a hearing, as an American and an acquaintance—perhaps he could even claim to be a friend—of Paine.

In short, discounting rumors to the contrary, and thinking that the latest stories from the capital were probably exaggerated, Radcliffe clung to a belief that in Paris the Revolution would not be conducted by backward peasants. It would be, or at least could be made to be, more reasonable, more enlightened. There would be, there must be, some sane authority to whom it would be possible to appeal. It was out here in the hinterlands that people had turned utterly into savages.

When Philip asked Melanie when she had last visited Paris, her replies were somewhat vague.

"I seem to remember your father telling me, once, that the Remains had relatives there?"

That is true; I have a cousin." With Old Jules listening solemnly, an anxious expression on his face, she gave Philip the address."

She did not share Philip's hope that they would find the new government more moderate in the city. But she was willing to go there, or anywhere, on the chance of being able to help her father. In that effort she had nothing to lose.

Marguerite, a quiet and timid girl, expressed no wish to go with the party to Paris, and Philip thought that the girl's grandfather would have sternly discouraged the idea if she had.

In any case Philip packed essentials—blankets for sleeping out, powder and ball for his pistols, matches, razor, a change of linen, a little food and money, a clay pipe and some tobacco—in a couple of saddlebags, and tied the reins of his horse to the back of Melanie's light carriage.

Turning back for a last look, when he was already seated in the carriage with reins in hand, Radcliffe sighed. The house would have to be abandoned to its fate—there was no one to defend it, or the barns, which were now standing empty, prey to wind and weather, or any of the rest of the property. Besides, as an American in the revolutionary tradition, he was more than half-convinced that peasants who had been so long and viciously oppressed had some just claim to the land and other wealth of France. As for himself, he had no time or effort to spare in trying to assert a claim on property. He could expect nothing but more trouble if he stayed here, and therefore decided to evacuate the place while he still had a chance.

Once on the road, Philip and Melanie encountered little other traffic. They discussed the question of which revolutionary leader they should try to see first when they reached Paris. Tom Paine seemed a logical choice, though Melanie was doubtful about how much influence the American actually possessed.

Other possibilities were Robespierre himself, or the chief prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville. A few months ago, Melanie would have chosen to put her case before Danton, but Danton himself had lost his head in April.

Another subject kept intruding: their recent strange encounter with the wounded man, now almost miraculously healed, who called himself Legrand. Melanie had an idea that this morning's change in the behavior of the servant girl, Marguerite, was somehow connected with the man's presence.

Radcliffe frowned. "But the fellow was three-quarters dead when he arrived. You don't suppose he—?"

"I don't know."

But never mind, there were plenty of other things to worry about.

Of course the main subject of the travelers' thoughts, whether they spoke of it or not, was the fate of Dr. Remain. As far as Melanie knew, her father was still alive, but he could easily have been beheaded this morning, or yesterday, or the day before, and she, at this distance from Paris, would be none the wiser.

"Philip, for the first time I am glad that my mother is dead. At least she was spared this torture." And with that, Melanie fell into a long silence.

Philip could only admire his companion's courage in bearing up as well as she did.

The more time Philip spent with Melanie, the more she intrigued and sometimes irritated him. She was of course vastly, delightfully changed from the child he remembered—yet in some delicious sense she was still the same girl. A remembered trick of tossing her hair to one side, with a quick motion of her head. His small female playmate of those days, now transformed into womanhood.

Melanie and Philip considered stopping at the house of Melanie's family in the nearby village to get some of her things, but she decided that would be taking an unnecessary risk; the local Committee of Public Safety might decide at any time to resume operations. The house in town would be deserted anyway. Her mother had died years ago, and all her other relatives were either dead or absent.

Melanie was reluctant to give a firm estimate of the number of days it would take them to get to Paris. In these troubled days, travel times were hard to estimate.