2

The Avenue Ste Anne was deserted. As the St Clairs walked along it towards their home, their feet echoed eerily on the paving and the squeak of the handcart seemed magnified in the surrounding silence. Nobody spoke, but all stared round at the changes that had occurred. Two of the houses had been destroyed by fire and remained only as blackened shells, unsightly gaps like rotten teeth; and many others presented only blank exteriors, their windows shuttered and their doors barred.

As the family reached their own house they discovered it too was closed up, and for a long moment they stared at its shuttered windows and barred door with very varied emotions. Rosalie experienced a vast, if premature, relief; the house was, after all, still standing, it had been destroyed by neither the Prussian bombardment nor the French occupation, and she thanked God fervently that they had not survived the journey from St Etienne only to discover their home was a ruin. Emile also was relieved finally to have reached the house, for at last he was seriously beginning to doubt the wisdom of his decision to bring his family back to Paris, but he was amazed and angered by its air of desertion. Why was it shuttered and barred? Where were Gilbert and Margot? Why was nothing prepared for their homecoming?

Clarice and Louise, hardly taking in that the door was not wide in welcome, were far more interested in getting warm and having something to eat, and Hélène longed to remove her soiled dress and wash herself free from the smells of the back streets and the taste of her own sickness which lingered stale and unpleasant in her mouth.

Marie-Jeanne was old enough to remember revolution in Paris before. She was realistic enough to know that the declaration of the Third Republic in September last year, when the Emperor Napoleon III had been taken prisoner and subsequently returned to England, was going to have wrought an irrevocable change in Paris, and she knew very real fear as she stared up at the blank exterior of the house. Her eyes ran along the empty street where few houses showed any signs of life. The axed tree stumps were a stark reminder of the very recent and extreme needs the people of Paris had had to withstand and the gas lamps standing along the edge of the pavement did nothing to relieve the new austerity of the avenue. Marie-Jeanne shuddered as the cold fear came creeping.

‘Well,’ remarked Jeannot, cheerfully impudent, ‘they haven’t exactly rolled out the red carpet, have they?’

His sharp little voice broke in on their individual thoughts and Emile said shortly, ‘Wait here while I get the door open.’

The front of the house, guarded by large iron gates set in a railing-topped wall, looked across a paved yard with stone urns to be filled with flowers in the summer and shrubs to lend colour from November until spring. A wide flight of shallow steps led up to a huge front door, flanked on either side by shuttered windows and topped with a gracious fanlight splayed wide like a rising sun.

All was quiet and still and wrapped in a melancholy air of desertion and neglect. Emile went up the steps and pounded on the front door with the fine brass knocker, but even as he did so he realised the knocker was not as fine as it had been; both the knocker, wrought in the shape of a dragon, and the heavy brass door handle, were sadly dull and discoloured. It was clear that neither had seen polish or cloth for a very long time. There was no reply to his pounding and he knocked again, aware that his original unease at finding the house closed was increasing to alarm. What had happened here during the long months of the siege while they had been away? Where the devil were Gilbert and Margot? The echoes of the dragon knocker died away once more but there was still no sign of anyone answering its summons.

‘No one at home,’ remarked Jeannot helpfully and ducked to avoid a box on the ear from Pierre.

Rosalie approached her husband. ‘I still have my keys,’ she said and pulled a heavy key ring from her pocket. It was attached to her waist on a chain and she struggled for a moment to release the key he needed. Emile waited impatiently with his hand extended and when at last she proffered the huge key of the front door he almost snatched it from her. Inserting it in the keyhole he turned the lock and tried the handle. The door remained immovable, and Emile realised with a jolt that the massive night-time bolts were drawn across inside. He turned back to the family, who were waiting expectantly beside the disreputable handcart.

‘It’s bolted inside,’ he said. ‘Pierre, go through the stable yard and try there.’

Pierre disappeared to the carriage entrance in the lane that ran along behind the house but was soon back. ‘I can’t get into the stable yard, monsieur,’ he said. ‘The porte cochère is chained and the door in the garden wall is locked as usual. From what I can see above the wall, the house is shuttered at the back as well. It is all closed up.’

For a moment they all stood there at a loss and flakes of snow began to drift silently down; the fragile illusion of spring which had come with the morning had disappeared with the afternoon, the sky was once again leaden and the reality of winter returned. Hélène shivered. She stared up angrily at the barred front door and then, suddenly, an idea came to her. Taking her courage in her hands, for she seldom spoke to her father uninvited, she ventured to his side and said timidly, ‘Papa, the sunshine window.’ She pointed to the fanlight above the door.

Her father turned, irritable. ‘Well, what about it?’ He looked up at the semicircular window above the dark door.

‘It has no shutters, Papa. Perhaps if you could break the glass and lifted me up I could…’ Her voice, uncertain of her suggestion from the start, trailed away as she saw incredulity in her father’s face. She felt the colour flood her cheeks and said in a whisper, ‘Sorry, Papa.’

But her father was not angry, he was just amazed that Hélène had seen a solution to the problem that he had not. For the second time that day he patted his surprised daughter on the cheek and said, ‘Well done, Hélène, but not you.’ He glanced up at the little window again and said, ‘Jeannot, if I break that window can you wriggle through and draw back the bolts on the front door?’

Jeannot grinned and said loftily, ‘Well, breaking and entering isn’t really my line, of course, but I reckon I could manage that all right. As long as you’re the one what breaks the window!’

Using the butt of his pistol Emile reached up and with a sharp blow shattered the glass, then Pierre tossed the feather-light Jeannot up on to his shoulders and the child peered inside.

‘Break away more glass if you have to,’ ordered Emile and unwilling to hand over his pistol, he picked up a piece of stone and passed it up to the boy.

Balancing easily on Pierre’s shoulders, Jeannot broke the remaining shards of glass and with a cheerful, ‘Here I go then,’ hoisted himself up on to the window frame and started to slide through head first, drawing his legs in behind him to swing them round and drop down on the inside. He made the move with such practised ease that Emile, watching him, thought wryly that there was no doubt the boy had completed this manoeuvre on many occasions before. But just as Jeannot was preparing to drop nimbly down into the hall he suddenly froze and then with a tremendous scuffling re-emerged from the window and leapt down from Pierre’s shoulders. As he landed there was a loud report from inside the house and a bullet whistled through the broken window.

‘Good God,’ ejaculated Emile. ‘What the devil…?’ He looked at Jeannot, white-faced and poised for flight but firmly held in Pierre’s massive grasp.

‘There’s an old biddy in there with a pop gun,’ explained Jeannot, his voice quavering a little at his narrow escape. ‘Just standing in the hall shooting.’ As if on cue there was another bang from inside the house and they all instinctively ducked away.

Rosalie came to her senses first and raising her voice clearly and commandingly called, ‘Margot? Is that you? It is I, Madame St Clair. Open the door at once, Monsieur and the children will take cold standing in the street in such weather as this. You hear me, Margot? It is I, Madame St Clair, speaking to you.’

A tremulous voice called from behind the locked door, ‘Is it really you, madame?’

‘Indeed it is,’ cried Rosalie. ‘Now look sharp and open the door, for it is snowing again and we wish to be indoors immediately.’

There was another moment’s pause and then to their relief they heard the bolts being dragged back and the door at last eased open to reveal the pale and frightened face of Margot Daurier, the housekeeper. At the sight of Emile and Rosalie standing on the step her face crumpled and she began to wail. With a muttered oath at the terrible sound Emile led his family indoors, instructing Pierre and Jeannot to find Gilbert and get the cart unloaded. At the mention of Gilbert’s name Margot’s wailing intensified and Emile said angrily, ‘For heaven’s sake, Rosalie, find out what’s wrong with her and stop that appalling noise.’

Rosalie, once safely inside her own home, felt immeasurably restored and took immediate charge.

‘Marie-Jeanne, please take the girls upstairs and get them changed into warm, dry clothes. Margot, stop that crying if you please and tell me what has been happening here.’ She spoke firmly, her tone rallying the distraught woman a little, and her wails subsided to quieter sobs. Marie-Jeanne bustled up the stairs, chivvying the girls before her, while Rosalie continued to calm Margot.

‘Now,’ she began, but looking at Margot she suddenly saw how old and shrivelled she had become, her face like parchment stretched over her skull, and her clothes hanging off her as if they were not her own. She softened her voice. ‘Now, Margot, tell me, where’s Gilbert?’

‘Gilbert is dead, madame.’

‘Dead!’ Emile had just returned from below stairs where he had been unbolting the back door. ‘What happened?’ he barked.

Margot shrank away from him and said, ‘He went for food, m’sieur. He did not come back.’

‘How do you know he’s dead?’

‘Emile,’ remonstrated Rosalie, but he ignored her and repeated his question.

‘Because I found him, m’sieur. We’d nothing left to eat, not a crumb in the house. Then we heard that food waggons were coming into Les Halles so we went to buy food, but so did all of Paris. As they began to unload, the whole crowd surged forward, pushing and shoving, fighting to get the food. We were separated, Gilbert and I, and I lost him. People were grabbing at the food, screaming and cursing each other as they fought to snatch a chicken or some vegetables. Eggs were smashed on the ground – those precious eggs.’ Margot began to weep again and her story became less coherent. It seemed she had escaped the mob clutching a chicken and a cabbage. Concealing them beneath her cloak, she had made her way fearfully home to wait for Gilbert. When he did not return and darkness fell, she ventured out to look for him, but an angry mob was still seething round Les Halles and afraid for her own safety she had run back home. Next day, when there was still no Gilbert, she returned to the market and in a narrow alley she had found him a crumpled heap, still clutching half a loaf of bread. ‘They’d smashed his head in.’ Margot’s voice had become almost normal once again and then she cried, ‘but they didn’t get the bread. He was holding it still, clutched tight in his hand. A loaf of bread, that’s what they killed him for, but he didn’t give it up even then. He kept it. For me. I found it. He gave it to me, that’s what he died for.’ She began to laugh, a shrill hysterical laugh which rocked her frail body and echoed terrifyingly in the lofty hall.

A glance up the stairs showed Rosalie three pairs of horrified eyes peering through the banisters and she acted at once. She dealt Margot a sharp slap across the face and as the awful laughter ceased abruptly, hurried her away to the privacy of the kitchen, where to her relief she found the embers of a tiny fire in the grate. Gently she pushed Margot into a chair and looked for wood to rebuild the fire. There were two sticks in the basket and no sign of more, but recklessly Rosalie put them both on the fire and poked the embers to coax a flame.

‘There, that’s better,’ she said, turning back to Margot who sat quietly rocking herself in the chair, her thin arms clasped round her, hugging herself for warmth and comfort and crooning tunelessly.

‘Is there any more wood?’ Rosalie asked, but Margot did not reply. Her eyes stared, unseeing, into the middle distance as if she had not heard her mistress speak. With a tut of irritation Rosalie gave her attention to the kitchen, opening cupboards and then going into the stone-floored pantry. She stared in horror at its emptiness. It should be filled with hanging meat, there should be vegetables and bowls of eggs, cheeses stacked on the stone shelves, and chickens waiting to be plucked; crocks of bread and butter and fruit grown at St Etienne and brought into town. Today it was empty except for two turnips and an apple. The sight of the empty shelves panicked Rosalie for a moment. What would they eat? Here they were, a hungry household of eight – or nine if she was to feed Jeannot – and there was nothing in the house but two turnips. Of course Paris had been besieged, of course people had gone without food, died of starvation and, if Margot’s dreadful tale were true, been murdered for a loaf of bread, but the siege was over now, had been for two weeks. The gates of Paris were no longer closed, there must be food and fuel coming into the city, why had Margot not gone out and restocked the store cupboards? Why had she not re-engaged the necessary servants when she had received notice of their homecoming? Rosalie turned to Margot to demand these things but as she did so her anger faded. It was clear Margot had been incapable since Gilbert’s death, only fetching enough food to keep her from starving. Terrified and alone, she had barred herself into the house and as she lived in perpetual fear, her mind had cracked. She was of little practical use to them now, and leaving her huddled in her chair, Rosalie hurried from the kitchen to acquaint Emile with the situation.

She found him assisting Pierre and Jeannot to carry the trunks up to the bedrooms.

‘Emile, I must speak with you,’ she said. Her voice was sharp and brooked no argument, and caused her husband to lift his head in surprise. Rosalie had never addressed him in such a tone before.

‘Very well,’ he said and turned to dismiss Pierre and Jeannot.

‘Tell Pierre and the boy to wait here,’ said Rosalie. ‘We shall need them in a moment.’

Even more surprised, Emile said, ‘You heard Madame. Wait here for a moment.’

Rosalie led him into the drawing room and closed the door behind them. The shutters were still drawn across the window and the room felt cold and damp in the dim light that filtered through the slats. Rosalie shivered despite the fact that she had not yet removed her travelling cloak.

‘Well?’ demanded Emile. ‘What is the matter?’

‘Everything,’ said Rosalie shortly. ‘There is no food in the house and I doubt if there is any fuel either. I don’t think Margot can have got your letter; it’s obvious she wasn’t expecting us and anyway her mind has softened. There are no other servants and I should imagine little likelihood of obtaining any at the moment, so we shall be cold and hungry if we don’t fend for ourselves.’

Emile listened and then said, ‘Well, we’ll keep Jeannot on for a while, he seems an enterprising boy and he’ll probably be glad to stay for some warmth and regular food.’

‘When we’ve got some to offer.’

‘Precisely, when we’ve got some. Now, if you will be so good as to make a list of what you need I will send Pierre and Jeannot out to get it. I think it will be better if they keep together. Jeannot will know his way around all right and Pierre can deal with the money.’

Rosalie nodded and feeling a little less desperate, said, ‘I’ll go and talk to Marie-Jeanne, she’ll know what to get,’ and leaving Emile to speak to Pierre and Jeannot she went up to her daughters’ rooms to find her old nurse.

‘Madame,’ cried Marie-Jeanne as she entered. ‘I was coming to find you. We must have fires lit at once, the house is cold and damp. We shall all catch our deaths.’ At the comforting sight of the old lady Rosalie felt suddenly tired. She sank on to Hélène’s unmade bed and said, ‘We have to get food and wood for the fires. We have nothing in the house. Monsieur St Clair is sending Pierre out to get things. What shall I tell him to bring? What can we cook to feed us all?’ Her news was greeted with cries of consternation from the three girls, but she hushed them saying Marie-Jeanne and she would soon have everything planned, and in the meantime they could help by removing the holland covers from the furniture. With the children busily employed, Rosalie gave her attention to Marie-Jeanne.

Between them they concocted a list of basic necessities and when it was complete Rosalie took it downstairs. Jeannot was standing with Pierre, grinning from ear to ear, and at her approach he cried out, ‘Don’t worry about food, madame. I know where to buy food, as long as you’ve the money. Rich folks don’t starve!’

Pierre aimed a cuff at the boy’s ear which was dodged neatly and said gruffly, ‘If you’re going to work here, young ’un, you learn not to speak till you’re spoke to.’ Having asserted his authority over the boy, Pierre said to Rosalie, ‘Monsieur St Clair has given us money, madame, and the lad here knows where to go to get what we need.’ Rosalie nodded and turning to Jeannot asked, ‘Will you stay with us, Jeannot, after today?’

‘Yes, madame.’

‘Then when you come back we must find you some better clothes – perhaps I have an old suit belonging to one of my sons.’

The boy’s eyes gleamed and tugging his appalling cap from his head, he said, ‘Yes, madame. Thank you, madame.’

Undeceived by this action Rosalie smiled and handed Pierre her list. ‘Well, off you go or we shall all be hungry and cold.’

While they were away in search of provisions Rosalie organised Marie-Jeanne and the girls into making the house habitable again, and Emile searched the attic, finding several old packing cases which he brought down to the yard and chopped for firewood. They decided that only two fires could be lit: the kitchen range which would be needed to cook their food and would warm the lower region of the house, and the one in the drawing room where the family would congregate and for the present, take their meals.

‘The bedrooms will be very cold, I’m afraid,’ said Rosalie, ‘but there are plenty of bedclothes and everyone can have extra to keep warm.’

Hélène and Clarice were set to unpacking the trunks and shaking out the crumpled clothes which had been so hastily bundled back into them at the city gate, and Louise helped Marie-Jeanne shake out the feather beds and draw the curtains against the encroaching darkness. The lamps were lit and the mellow lamplight gave an added illusion of warmth.

Pierre and Jeannot arrived triumphant, Pierre carrying two baskets containing vegetables, bread and cheese, and Jeannot trundling his squeaking handcart laden with two sacks of coal and some green logs. They were greeted with cries of delight and Marie-Jeanne soon produced some hot, thick soup and hunks of bread and cheese after which everyone felt considerably better.

‘Not the dinner I had imagined on our homecoming,’ remarked Emile in a rare moment of family companionship, ‘but I’ve never known a meal more welcome or taste better.’ And taking the relaxation of his mood from him everyone agreed, and for a short while the whole family enjoyed the content brought on by full stomachs and a warm fire.

Below in the kitchen, Jeannot, resplendent in trousers two sizes too big for him and a warm woollen shirt, regaled the company with horrific tales of Paris under siege, describing his life in the streets where he slept rough and lived on his wits.

‘Haven’t you any family?’ asked Marie-Jeanne.

‘No,’ replied Jeannot breezily. ‘Never knew my pa, and Ma died a long time ago.’ He glanced round the kitchen and knew he had struck lucky. Warmth, food, clothes and wages. He was made for life, but even with these wonders all in prospect he already regretted his loss of freedom and wondered how long it would last, this living in a posh house. He eyed Margot, still huddled in her chair, and wondered if them upstairs would turn her out. It was clear she had gone barmy. He shrugged and turned away. Not his problem. He would stay for a while anyway, see how things went; he might get to like it.

Margot had not moved from her chair; she still sat rocking herself, apparently unaware of the activity about her. Her pitiful fire had died, but the kitchen glowed with heat from the range; even so she looked shrivelled with cold. Marie-Jeanne had coaxed her to swallow a few spoonsful of broth and spoken to her softly, but Margot had made no reply and at last Marie-Jeanne left her to retreat into her private world and went upstairs to put the girls to bed.

Alone in the drawing room, Rosalie spoke to Emile about their unexpected situation.

‘Should we get the staff to come up from St Etienne, do you think? Or engage new servants? Poor Margot, Gilbert’s death and the siege have quite turned her brain. I think we should send her to the country.’

Emile looked up from his contemplation of the fire and replied, ‘It is as you wish, my dear – I leave the running of the house to you, as always. I shall return to the office in the morning to see how they have fared there.’

‘We’ll need another governess for the girls,’ went on Rosalie. ‘When Mademoiselle Germaine left in July I had several applications for the post, but as we decided to leave it open until we returned from St Etienne, perhaps they are no longer available and I should advertise again.’ Rosalie fixed her mind determinedly on the normality of these problems to keep at bay the fears she had for their future. Suppose there were no servants any more? Suppose there was no food; had they to live indefinitely from hand to mouth as they had today?

‘What about the boy, Jeannot?’

‘I’ve told him he can stay and help Pierre,’ said Emile. ‘He’s glad of the food and a roof over his head, I should imagine. Scruffy little urchin. Still, he knows his way about and we’d have been in trouble without him today.’

Rosalie shuddered at the remembrance of their walk through the back streets. If they had been in the carriage they would have followed the main roads and avoided all that squalor. She looked round her comfortable drawing room and knew that whatever privations they might suffer in the immediate future, her life was immeasurably better than the sordid lives of people in those streets and she was not ungrateful.

Upstairs in the chilly bedroom, Hélène lay and listened to the regular breathing of her two sisters. She was too cold to sleep; she curled her legs up and wrapped her arms round her body in an effort to get warm and fall asleep, but she seemed as cold as ever and her brain whirled with the events of the day. She had seen places today that she did not know existed. She had seen the walking skeletons promised by Anne-Marie and had smelt the condition of their lives. Even in the chilly freshness of her own room, wearing a clean nightdress, her face and hands scrubbed and her mouth rinsed, she could smell the stench of the street and taste the foulness of its air. She had known fear in herself and seen it in the eyes of others and Hélène knew this day would be with her always, for the rest of her life.