‘By sole and special permit of His Majesty Victor Emanuel I, King of Sardinia, Jerusalem and Cyprus, Duke of Savoy, Piedmont and Genoa,’ David solemnly read out, translating the formal printed notice as he went, ‘Messrs Bonnafoux of the City of Lyons are pleased to run the ROYAL DILIGENCE twice weekly across the Alpine Mountains from Lyons to Turin, and at all seasons of the year. The vehicle will pass across the Col of Mount Cenis, resting overnight (unless otherwise stated) at Chambéry, St-Michel and Susa.
‘Next diligence departs Hôtel du Nord, 7 p.m. March 6th, arrives Piazza del Castello, Turin, 5 p.m. March 10th,’ he added a moment later, from a separate handwritten announcement in another corner of the coaching-office window. ‘Interior seats 75 francs, Coupé 50 francs.’
The young Lord Denton turned back toward his listener with a faint lift of his blackly feathered brows; an expression to be followed shortly by a grin.
‘Foul smells and suffocation in the belly of the beast? Or fresh air and frostbite in the coupé? So which is it to be then this time, Sary Ann, amore mio?’ He demanded of his mistress.
In the event they’d booked the more expensive, warmer and less healthy seats inside; and if the conducteur’s assurance that but three of the four remaining places were taken, had raised in them rash hopes of breathing-space and elbow-room, these soon were dashed by the uncomfortable reality. On boarding the vehicle – a four-wheeled diligence of an older, cruder type than they had yet encountered – the first thing to meet their gaze was an ungainly wicker cage suspended from the ceiling; a contrivance that was shortly to be crammed with all the beaver hats and muffs and bearskin coats and winter woollens that the other passengers had brought to wear above the snowline, and in the process to block out the very maximum of light and air. Of the other inside passengers, one smoked cigarros constantly, another fortified himself from a flask of powerful-smelling brandy, and a the third – a lady near as wide as she was tall – not only overflowed her seat, but carried in her lap a noxious little lapdog. There was no lamp or place to hang one from. So that by the time the diligence was ready to leave Lyons for its journey through the Alps, the atmosphere inside it – as a muffled voice remarked from the folds of David’s box-coat – was already close approaching something between the Black Hole of Calcutta and Irish Bridie’s bedroom on any working night in Brighton.
Despite Sary’s repeated willingness to leave Paris for Italy whenever David wished, he had allowed their friends there to persuade him to postpone the journey to the early spring. There was unrest in southern Italy, they pointed out, with the Bourbon King of Naples but recently deposed and talk of an invasion in the wind. It would be madness, they insisted, to attempt the Simplon or the Grand St Bernard in wintertime, while even for the lower Alpine route across the Col du Mont Cenis, there’d be a risk of drifts or avalanches. Only the previous January a coach had overset there in a snowstorm to force its passengers – the famous English painter, Turner, of their number – to undertake the whole descent on foot! Milor would be advised to wait at least ’til March, they thought, to make the crossing. And David – who like any man was only blind to reason when it interfered with what he thought himself – had seen the sense in the advice; confining his adventures for the present to maps and travel journals from Galignani’s Library spread out across the bed of their hôtel in St Germain. Or else to Sary in a similar position.
The giro d’ Italia that he’d planned for them that winter from his studies of Smollett’s, Piozzi’s and Joseph Forsyth’s Italian expeditions, first scaled the Alps, then crossed the Plain of Lombardy; progressing from Turin to the Duomo and the Scala Opera of Milan, to Verona and the tomb of Juliet, and on to Venice and the Piazza di San Marco, the architecture of Palladio, and Titians by the score! In Paris in the winter, before a blazing fire or lying in their curtained bed, he’d painted all the famous scenes for Sary in the brilliant colours of his own imagination. He’d borne her south with perfect ease and comfort on the wings of his descriptions, to view the masterworks of Michelangelo and Raphael in Florence in an atmosphere untainted by its heat and stench. Hand in hand and quite alone, untroubled by the strident voices of the cicerones, or by any other interference, they’d strolled between the fractured columns of the Roman Forum. They’d sailed to Capri, climbed Vesuvius and visited too many galleries of antique and Renaissance art ever to recall them all; each day returning from their expeditions with further priceless souvenirs. And Sary, watching David, hearing the excitement in his voice, was glad to travel with him in his fantasies of Italy – because as a successful whore she understood the importance of a really good imagination.
In fact it was the giro and not the destination of Italia that most appealed to David. The road which stretched beyond Dieppe was what he’d looked to, not the port itself; the same essentially in Paris and later on in Lyons. He longed to travel, not simply to enjoy the treasures of that legendary peninsula, but principally to put as many miles as possible between himself and Hadderton; to blur its memories, escape its obligations, and find a place – why not in Italy? – where he could build a better life for them than they had left behind.
Near the end of October, the Paris papers gleefully reported the final collapse in London of the new King George’s case against Queen Caroline. At the end of months of hearings, the evidence against the wretched woman was inconclusive. The English House of Lords had passed the bill by which the King had hoped to break his matrimonial bonds, but by too small a majority to risk a Commons vote; and London celebrated the Queen’s ‘acquittal’ by illuminating the capital for three nights in succession. But then with the announcement of Prinny’s plans for a lavish coronation the following July, poor Caroline’s brief spell of popularity had ended. To cheer the cause of a persecuted Princess was one thing; to acclaim and crown as Queen a patently immoral woman quite another – and in January of 1821, Galignani’s Messenger in Paris took pleasure in reprinting the scurrilous epigram that was then in circulation:
Most gracious Queen, we thee implore
To go away and sin no more;
But if that effort be too great,
To go away at any rate!
In February, Lord Southbourne had written to his son a second time to demand his return to England within a fivemonth to attend the coronation of his monarch; an injunction which had served instead to remind David of all he wanted to escape, and hasten his departure in the contrary direction.
The self-appointed valet de place, who’d attached himself to Lord Denton and his mistress on their arrival in the French capital six months before, had been loud in his insistence that no Englishman of quality could think of travelling south without a courier to see him safe – a fellow he could trust implicitly to load and guard his baggage, bespeak his rooms at the auberges, defend unto the death the bills of exchange or quantities of gold napoleons which they must carry with them – a man, in short, exactly like himself! But David had refused him out of hand, for David’s dreams of travelling had always been à deux. He would see personally to all the details, he declared, defend his currency if need be with the pistol that he carried in his belt – to show his father and the rest that he was old enough to guide his destiny and Sary’s, through France and Italy and anywhere on earth beyond it!
The journey from Paris to the Alpine terminus of Lyons had taken them but six days to complete; by diligence as far as Châlon, then down the river Saône by coche d’eau; a delightful kind of water-bus propelled by oars at scarcely more than drifting pace between hills rimed with frost and patterned with the shadows of their leafless vines – with dauntless Sary waving gaily at the passing river traffic, and David happy to have come so far with all their bags and baggage and their love for one another totally intact.
In near twelve hours of cramped and noisome blackness, from the last flaring of the porters’ torches in the Place St Claire to the first faint signs of dawn, the Royal Diligence had progressed by something less than twenty miles; so dark the night, so constant their ascent into the Alpine foothills.
By morning, David’s neck was stiff and sore. His boots felt as if they’d shrunken round his feet, and his right arm where Sary leant upon it had long since lost all feeling. In the dim grey light which seeped around the outer curtains of the coach, he could see the mop-thrum tangle of the fat Frenchwoman’s small dog asleep across her lap. From where he sat, the sagging luggage-rack obscured her face, but not the gusty snores that she emitted. In the next seat, a young man of not a quarter her circumference, and quite unknown to her, slept nestled like a child against her padded Lyons-velvet breast; his hat dislodged and fallen to the straw, his dark head rolling on the pillow of her huge left mammary each time it rose and fell. Despite his own discomfort, David smiled, and caught a corresponding gleam of teeth across the top of Sary's bonnet, to show that the fifth inside passenger was also wide awake.
‘George Grévin, merchant of fine fabrics at your service,’ was how the man had introduced himself to them the previous night, in between cigarros. ‘From me you can buy Lyons silks, plain, watered, figured or brocaded; also velvets, plain or ramaged; also Italian lustrings, tabbies, paduasoys and broglios, all of the first and finest quality.’ His type was only too familiar from David’s ventures into drapers’ shops with Sary, and one whose friendly smile was bound to presage sample-books and offers of reduction, as surely as a fresh new day would follow their uneasy night upon the road – a reflection which was promptly reinforced by the sound of the conducteur’s hobnails on the roof, and the sight of the outer leathers lifting to admit a flood of daylight.
Outside the landscape was green-washed, delightful and harmonious; less so inside, as the large lady woke to find her neighbour dribbling cognac-flavoured saliva all across her velvet bosom.
At Pont Bonvoison on the border of his Sardinian Majesty's Duchy of Savoy, and after several halts for necessary reliefs of one kind or another, les voyageurs were bidden to step down at last for breakfast at a village inn.
‘An’ thank the Lord for that, say I,’ Sary called out pleasantly to the other woman in the carriage, in the sure conviction that English must be understood if only spoken clearly. ‘I vow the way my belly’s been creatin’ these past four hours, it must ’ave thought me blessed throat was cut!’
At a long scrubbed table in the kitchen of the inn they breakfasted or dined, they scarce knew which, on chicken broth with fresh-baked bread and quantities of tea. The fat woman’s little dog, Chouchoutte, sat by her yapping piercingly for scraps – while the cloth merchant, with sample-books to hand, made it his business to congratulate the ladies for their fortitude, and stylish mode of dressing. On the outskirts of the frontier village down the street, their luggage was unloaded at the custom-house, and one by one the passengers were summoned from the inn to review its contents with the interested douaniers. David and Sary went together arm in arm, laughing at the sight of soldiers guarding rustic bridges over streams which any healthy child could leap – exclaiming at their first sight of the snow-caps over the village roofs, floating unsupported as it seemed way up above the clouds!
Others of their company were less impressed. For the next hour of their journey, the fat Lyonnaise complained constantly of the duties they had made her pay on clothes she’d purchased for her son’s wife down in Susa – gifts, generous enough, God only knew, which now became extravagance itself; whilst at her side the dark young Piedmontese who’d stained her bodice, sat cradling his brandy bottle, glowering savagely.
‘They have removed from him his Histories of Guicciardini and Davila. Also his volume on the Revolution by Mignet,’ explained the merchant through a pungent cloud of cigar smoke. ‘Young men like him, they think that their republican ideas may travel with them in their luggage through Royal Savoy and into Piedmont. They think they only have to wish it, for the King’s censeurs to vanish – how do you say it? – up in steam?’
‘In smoke. I think the word you seek is ‘smoke’,’ the young man snapped in perfect English, ignoring Sary’s snort of laughter. ‘Is that not so, signore?’ His large, intense brown eyes now turned on David. ‘When all the brutal edicts of these despots are burning in the piazzas of Torino and Novara, then you may believe that Signor Grévin here will see some smoke!’
The merchant smiled uneasily, and glanced behind him at the wall that separated their compartment from the coupé occupied by the conducteur and his outside passengers. ‘Un conseil, mon ami, gardez vos opinions pour vous,’ he murmured, pointing significantly with his lighted cigarro. ‘Les murs ont des oreilles, vous savez? The walls, my friend, have ears.’
But nothing now could stop the youth from speaking out, and he applied at once to David and to Sary for support. ‘You English with your Magna Carta and your Cromwell – you understand so well the Italian cause,’ he assured them. ‘You know what freedom is about; and when you hear as I have, that last week in this same village we have passed, the Prince de la Cisterna was arrested on his return from Paris and taken under guard to Finistrella, then you will burn with indignation too I think?’
‘Well I think that we might burn brighter, duck,’ Sary told him amiably, ‘if we knew who this Cistern feller is an’ what ’e’s done, an’ what the Finistrella is when it’s at ’ome.’ And in the event her carmine smile and roguish, black-lashed wink were all the encouragement the young man needed to recount the history of his people’s tribulations – a long story which had nicely filled, as Sary afterwards maintained, the hours it took them to trundle through the valleys to the pass of Les Echelles, where their next change of horses and postilions awaited.
The young man was returning from an uncle in Geneva, he informed them, to university in the city of Turin. Pietro Gemelli by name, he had the honour to be the firstborn son of il Conte Bartolomeo Gemelli of the Riviera di San Giulio in the Piedmontese province of Novara; a place where love of liberty had for centuries survived the rule of force. In the year that he was born, Pietro’s homeland at the very least could call itself Italian; a title restored to it by Buonaparte together with some small degree of independence. But, following the Emperor’s abdication and the restoration of Sardinian monarchs – the name, even the idea of a united Italy, was again forbidden to the Piedmontese.
‘Worse, far worse,’ the young Gemelli drunkenly exclaimed. ‘They have turned the clock back to the Middle Ages! You English would not believe the antiquated laws they force on us.’ He leant forward gusting brandy. ‘They bring back flogging, quartering for criminals, even breaking on the wheel. They have dismissed our magistrates, our professors of science and philosophy. The Jesuits now run our university, and everything advanced or liberal in Piedmont has now been set aside!’
‘And yet King Victor Emanuel is a righteous and a generous man, who stands for order and decency,’ the merchant made a point of adding and with sufficient force to carry his loyal sentiments through the coupé wall.
‘Le Roi des Sardines’?’ Gemelli flared his nostrils like a high-strung horse. ‘Righteous, generous, decent, and blind – blindly married to an Austrian Hapsburg when even now our enemies, the Austrians, are marching to invade the Democratic State of Naples! Where was his righteous Majesty when my student friends were cast in prison for wearing scarlet caps and cheering Neapolitans? Where was he when Cisterna was arrested and dragged in chains to the dungeons of the Finistrella fortress, and for no greater crime than voicing his belief in our Italian cause?’
It was a diatribe in keeping perfectly, so far as David and Sary were concerned, with the dramatic unreality of the scenery now visible beyond the windows of the diligence. At Echelles, where their road ascended through pine forests and shattered crags of chocolate-coloured granite, the young patriot was interrupted by a summons from the conducteur for them all to disembark. The suspension of the carriage and condition of the rope-tackle must be examined, he pompously informed them, in preparation for the Alpine traverse. And while the passengers stood sipping hot spiced wine from earthen bowls, the four post-horses that had drawn them up from Bonvoison were replaced by four more, even stouter, with the addition of an extra pair of ‘mountain leaders’ – high-haunched and frost-shod beasts with sharp calk-spurs set in their shoes to give them purchase on the ice. The new postilions seemed also to derive from some special mountain breed; thickset and swarthy, and made to look far more so by the massive sheepskin buntas and enormous iron-bound boots they wore to stop their legs from being crushed between the horses’ milling flanks.
‘Looks like we’re in for some fierce climbin’, eh signore?’ said Sary, giving David's arm a squeeze in her excitement, while the postilions cracked their whips flamboyantly for the ascent.
‘Vif, vif! Allons!’ they cried, as with one accord the horses lumbered into motion, straining in their collars to bear them in ascending loops through wild terrain which twenty years before had been impassable to all but mules and mountain porters.
‘You’re right, ’tis Buonaparte we have to thank for it,’ Gemelli said in response to David's question. ‘But reflect signore while you admire his work, that it is built upon the bodies of Italians! For all his promises of liberty and independence, he was no better when it came to it than any other tyrant with a crown upon his head. In Novara and San Giulio our people starved to build his bridges and his chaussées – we actually ate cats and rats, can you believe, to finance roads like this? And now we hear our King is ready to destroy the carriageway and return to mules and porters, only to spite the memory of the base-born Corsican!’ The young man laughed bitterly. ‘Can you still wonder that we seek a change of constitution?’
Yet nothing could diminish the achievement of Napoleon's engineers. At La Grotte the road plunged straight into the mountainside itself – into a tunnel of such mighty length that it required a series of rough-hewn ‘windows’ to admit some daylight – a rocky gallery that echoed to the cries of the postilions and the percussion of two dozen hooves and four great iron-shod wheels. The luggage on the carriage roof broke off enormous icicles, which clattered round it with the shrill sound of breaking glass; and when the diligence emerged at last into the twilight of the Alpine evening, it was to wind through defiles hardly less dramatic, festooned on either side with snow and ice and steeped in purple shadows. At Chambéry, the snow-shod leading horses were dismissed with their postilion to make their way back to Echelles. Then for a day of relatively easy travel, through corridors of frozen mountains – with hot meals, warm beds and neat Savoyard inns at either end of it – the Royal Diligence progressed another eighty miles; to breakfast on the Friday at Lanslebourg, the last town in Savoy. Above the settlement, at a military barrack against the lower slopes of Mont Cenis, the passports of ongoing passengers were duly stamped for Susa and Torino; and once again a new postilion and extra pair of horses were engaged for the ascent.
‘What say we take the coupé, darlin’, an’ ride forward to the top? Oh Davy, let’s!’ cried Sary on a sudden inspiration. ‘I won’t be cold I promise, an’ only think what famous sights we’ll see from there! We’ll ’ave it to ourselves an’ all, now that the other feller’s stopped off at Shomberie,’ she whispered, giving him a nudge through his thick box-coat. ‘With no one to overlook us or see what we’re up to eh, be’ind our little curtain!’
And so enchanting had she looked, smiling up at him from the cocoon of brightly coloured scarves she’d wrapped around her bonnet, that David could no more have denied her, than his body underneath its insulating layers of beaver, wool and flannel, could fail to stir to the suggestion.
Aside from regarding them as if they’d taken leave of all five senses at a stroke, the conducteur and his remaining outside passenger had offered no objection to giving up their seats to les voyageurs anglais; and by mid-morning all were set to scale the mountain that divided His Sardinian Majesty’s Duchies of Savoy and Piedmont, with the intrepid English couple riding up behind the horses.
In design, the coupé of a diligence was not at all unlike a little three-seat hackney cab, perched up before the body of the vehicle, sprung independently of it, and like a cab without a door in front. Nothing but a leather apron protected the knees of passengers from damp, with a curtain of the same material to draw across above, in case of driving rain or snow. Thus, not ideally suited to a journey through the Alps, the open view it gave across the horses’ backs was nonetheless superb, and certainly superior in every way to anything behind. Each time they rumbled round an outer curve of Buonaparte’s grande chaussée, the slated roofs of Lanslebourg were seen by the pair in the coupé to have shrunk a little more, until they were reduced into a tiny, perfect model of an Alpine settlement. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen bends above the town – they’d long since ceased to count – they reached and crossed the snowline, where the rumble of their passage was muffled to a duller sound. At intervals along the way, stone-built refuges had been constructed; cold harbours to protect unlucky travellers from blizzards or avalanches, with ten foot high red-painted posts set up between them to mark the road in case of drifting.
‘Look Sary, look!’ David leaned out to point to where a thin black track wound up the mountain by another route. ‘That’s how they had to come before the chaussée was constructed. Can you imagine – by mule, or carried up in chairs on poles!’ His voice elated, his dark eyes brightly shining. ‘Look, do you see those crags? I’ve heard that someone called them nature's fortress to guard her paradise of Italy. Aren’t they magnificent?’
And Sary looked, and looked again at David with the warm breath gusting out as frost each time he spoke; the bluish stubble of a two-day beard now shadowing his lower face. ‘Look over there, see there!’ he cried. ‘D’ye see the eagle soaring down the cliff? My God, it makes me feel… it makes me wish that I could fly!’
‘Well does it now?’ she said, one hand now busy with his coat and trowser buttons – the other ready warming on the bag of heated semolina which the woman in the Lanslebourg inn had given her to carry in her muff.
‘To fly? Or maybe just to feel ye’re flyin’, Davy Stanville?’
The leading postilion, shouting back instructions to the other for the negotiation of an outside bend, could see the English female sitting up on Monsieur's lap behind their leather apron – both smiling fondly with their arms around each other, pledging love without a doubt; the young woman rising gently on her lover’s thighs to the rocking movement of the coupé on its straps.
Or to something very like it.