“Those seven months,” he said, “when I was absent from Cleveland Street, came about for the sake of that same glass.”
He paused, watching my eyes.
“You had it copied,” I suggested, “or worked on copies yourself, and this meant taking up employment in some foundry the other side of London?”
He shook his head. “Nothing so simple,” he said. “The fact is, I was so pushed for money that I sold the glass to George Carter, my employer at the warehouse in Long Acre, and regretted doing so the instant I had sold it. It was no use buying it back, for the money he had given me in exchange went immediately on food, rent, and other necessities for the children. There was only one thing to do, and with the keys of the warehouse in my possession it was the simplest thing in the world to achieve. I knew where the glass was packed, ready to dispatch to some firm in the north of England, in Staffordshire, and I returned to Long Acre one evening when the building was locked for the night, and let myself in. It took me only a matter of minutes to secure the glass, nail down the packing case as though nothing had been disturbed, and let myself out again. Unfortunately I had mistimed the hours of the night watchman. I understood that he came on duty at eleven o’clock. Instead, it was half past ten. I walked straight into him as I left the building.
“ ‘Anything wrong?’ he asked.
“ ‘Nothing at all,’ I assured him. ‘I had some business to do for Mr. Carter.’
“The fellow knew me, and accepted my tale, but when I went to the warehouse next morning I was summoned into the office by George Carter himself, and he had the empty packing case on the floor beside him.
“ ‘This is your work, isn’t it?’ he said.
“It was no use denying it. The glass had gone. I had the keys of the building. The night watchman had seen me.
“ ‘I shall summon you for trespass and theft,’ he said, ‘and to ensure that there is no chance of your giving me the slip I have the Sheriff’s officer waiting to apprehend you. You will either return the glass or pay me the sum of £135 that I gave you for it.’
“I told him I would keep the glass and return the £135 as soon as I could raise it among my friends.
“ ‘Your friends?’ he said. ‘What friends? A bunch of émigrés like yourself, fed and clothed by the charity of the English government. I’m afraid I haven’t much respect for you or your friends, Mr. Busson Morier. If you can’t produce the glass today, or its value in cash, you will be taken into custody and committed for trial. As to your wife and children, your so-called friends must take care of them.’
“There was no question of raising the money, no question of returning the glass. I could not even raise the money for bail, for not one among us could muster more than twenty pounds. The worst part about it was returning to Cleveland Street and breaking the news to Marie-Françoise.
“ ‘Why not give him back the glass?’ she asked me, bewildered that I would rather be arrested for debt and theft than surrender it. ‘Robert, you must, for my sake and for the children’s.’
“I would not agree. Call it sentiment and pride, and cursed obstinacy, but I kept seeing my father’s face and the day he put the glass into my hands, and God knows I had let him down often enough in after years. I saw Michel, and you, Sophie, and Pierre, and my mother, and dear dead Cathie, and I knew that whatever happened to me I must not let the glass go.”
Robert looked across the salon at the glass, safe at long last in the cabinet at le Gué de Launay.
“My father was right, you know,” he said. “I misused my talents, so the glass brought me ill luck. Endeavoring to sell it was the final insult to his memory, and to a perfect work of art. I had time enough to think about that during seven months in jail.”
He smiled, and despite the lined face, the spectacles, and the dyed hair there was something of the old Robert in that smile.
“I should have been deported,” he said, “but the Abbé Carron intervened. It was he who had my sentence reduced to seven months, and finally raised the money for my release in February of ’99, about the time your General Bonaparte was winning victories against the Turks, with all of you applauding him here at home. Winter in Cleveland Street was bad enough, with the children ill with whooping cough, and Marie-Françoise pregnant again and doing the laundry for Miss Black in Fitzroy Square. Yet to live as an alien debtor was harder still, confined in a cell about six by four, knowing that it was my own pride and my own folly that had brought me there.”
My brother glanced about him, at the familiar furniture he had known at l’Antinière and le Chesne-Bidault.
“First La Force in Paris,” he said, “and then King’s Bench in London. I’ve become an authority on prisons on both sides of the Channel. Something, I might add, I have no desire to hand down to my children. Nor will they ever know of it. Marie-Françoise will see to that. When I returned to Cleveland Street we told them that I had been on business in the country, and they were still too young to question further. She will bring them up to believe that their father was just, upright, a devoted royalist, and indeed the very soul of honor. She believes it herself, and is hardly likely to tell them otherwise.”
He smiled again, as though this new image of himself was an excellent jest, as worthy in its way as that of the impoverished member of the former aristocracy.
“You talk,” I said, “as if Marie-Françoise were already a widow, and you in your grave.”
He stared at me a moment, then took off his spectacles and wiped them.
“She is a widow, Sophie,” he said. “Officially I’m dead. The sick man with whom I voyaged across the Channel died just before we reached Le Havre. He died with my papers upon him. The authorities will notify our committee in London, who will break the news to Marie-Françoise. Bereft, with six children to rear and educate, the Abbé Carron and his helpers will do far more for her than I ever could. Don’t you see, Sophie, it was the only way out? Shall we call it—my final gamble?”
19
I was the only one to know my brother’s secret, and I kept it even from my husband. François believed, and so did the others when they came to hear of his return, that Robert was a widower once more, his second wife having died in childbirth, as Cathie had done, during his first years as an émigré in London. It was bad enough that he had emigrated, thus forfeiting all respect and honor; but to have been imprisoned in London for debt, and to have left his wife and six young children to the mercy of others, was something that I knew very well my husband would not stomach, or my two brothers either.
Robert’s action in allowing another man to be buried as himself was, I felt certain, a criminal one which—if it should be discovered—would mean yet a further term in prison, perhaps for years. I could not condone his crime, neither could I condemn him. His lined face, the pouches beneath his eyes, even the tremor of his hands, a disability that had come upon him after leaving King’s Bench prison, proved to me how much he had suffered.
The dyed hair, an attempt to make himself look young but failing in its purpose, made me the more compassionate. I saw him as he was, a broken man, yet remembered the lovable boy, my mother’s firstborn. For the sake of her memory alone I could not betray him.
“What do you intend to do?” I asked him when he had been at home with us little more than a week, and François and I were still the only ones to know of his return. “Did you have anything in mind when you left London?”
“Nothing,” he confessed, “only a profound desire to get away from England and come home. You don’t know what it is, Sophie, to have mal du pays. I did not once. London, for the first few years, was almost as much of an adventure as Paris used to be when I lived there with Cathie. It was only when the war started and the people turned against us, followed by the horror of those seven months in prison, that I came to long for my own country—not Paris, but this.”
We were in the garden at the time. It was summer, and the trees about us were in full leaf. Rain, during the night, had
made the earth smell rich, and raindrops glistened on the petals of my roses and on the long grass below the gravel walk.
“Looking out through the bars of King’s Bench at that sooty London sky,” he said, “I would dream myself back at la Pierre and become a boy again. You remember when I was sworn in as master, and we processed from the glass-house to the château, and my mother wore her brocade gown and had powder on her hair? Looking up at her that day was the proudest moment of my life, and the time when she came to visit me at Rougemont. Where do they go, Sophie, those younger selves of ours? How do they vanish and dissolve?”
“They don’t,” I said. “They’re with us always, like little shadows, ghosting us through life. I’ve been aware of mine, often enough, wearing a pinafore over my starched frock, chasing Edmé up and down the great staircase in la Pierre.”
“Or in the forest,” he said. “It was the forest I missed most. And the smell of charcoal from the foundry fire.”
When Robert was released from prison no one would employ him, nor did he blame the Londoners for this. Why should they give work to an enemy alien, and a convicted thief? The Abbé Carron put him to sort library books in the schools, and this, with the allowance from the Treasury, kept Robert and his family from greater poverty still. Another baby, a girl, to whom he gave Cathie’s second name, Adelaide, was born when he was still in prison, and a son, Guillaume, eighteen months later.
“I tried to keep the children French,” my brother told me, “but, although they lived in what was virtually a French colony, they were hybrids from the start. Robert became Bobbie, Jacques James, Louis-Mathurin liked his name to be pronounced Lewis when he was little more than four years old. And Marie-Françoise, her looks gone and her hopes for my ultimate success blighted forever, turned to religion for comfort. She was always on her knees, either in our lodgings, or around the corner in the French chapel in Conway Street. She had to cling to something, and I had failed her.”
It was too late to reinstate himself in the eyes of his fellow émigrés. They pitied him, but they despised him too. Anyone who could sink to trespass and theft when existing on foreign charity could never again rise to a position of trust among them. My brother’s one salvation was that the Abbé Carron did not despise him too.
“As Marie-Françoise and the children became more reconciled, or it would be more truthful to say more resigned, to our drab, hopeless future,” Robert said, “so I yearned the more for France, for home. I began to feel a contempt for our émigré princes, for the comte d’Artois holding a petty court in Edinburgh, and for our King in Poland. Secretly I rejoiced in Bonaparte’s victories—he was the leader we had needed all the time. The country which I had believed finished when I came to London was by now the strongest in Europe, and the most feared. Had I been younger, and more courageous, I believe I should have escaped somehow and crossed the seas to follow him.”
As soon as the Treaty of Amiens was signed, and the amnesty granted to returning émigrés, my brother determined to come home. He had no thought then of deserting his wife and children. His idea was to seek me out, take counsel with Pierre and Michel, obtain some promise of employment, and then return to London to fetch his family home.
“Even as I said goodbye to them,” he told me, “there, in our cramped lodging in Cleveland Street, I reverted to the old fantasy of the burned-down château, of the splendors lost and gone. ‘We’ll rebuild,’ I assured them, ‘on the site of le Maurier, in the park, and found another glass-house where you, Bobbie and James, and Louis-Mathurin can work.’ I half believed it myself as I told them this, and, although inwardly I knew it could never be, it might still be possible, I thought, when the time came, to create some sort of a home for them and so make up for the deception.
“ ‘I’ll see you,’ I told them, ‘in six months or less. In just as long as it will take me to arrange matters on the other side.’ And, God forgive me, when I left Cleveland Street and mounted the coach for Southampton I felt all the burden and the trouble of the years slide away from me. Their faces dimmed almost as soon as I sniffed the salt air of the Channel, and once aboard the packet I had only one thought in my mind, and that was to feel French soil under my feet once more.”
Even then Robert still looked upon his journey as an experiment. He had no other purpose but to explore the possibilities of settling in France again. It was not until the evening before landing that temptation, swift and instant, came to him when, in the small cabin that he was sharing, his fellow passenger was seized with a sudden heart attack and died before a doctor’s help could be sought.
“He lay there in my arms,” he said to me, “this sick man, an émigré like all of us on the boat, known to nobody except by his papers. To change those papers, replacing them with my own, was a moment’s work. To call for help, to report the death, to acquaint the port officials when the boat docked and to leave the burial arrangements to them, all that was easy. I left Le Havre a free man, Sophie. Free to pick up my old life again without ties or responsibilities. Not perhaps as a master glass-maker, but as something else, it does not matter what. I’m ambitious no longer, I only want to make up for the years I’ve missed. Above all, I want to see my son.”
This was what he had been leading up to from the first. Once he had settled down under our roof at le Gué de Launay, his story told, his secret shared with me, it was Jacques who was foremost in his mind. His mother’s death he had expected. Grief for her soon passed. Jacques had become the symbol of everything precious in that old life laid aside.
“I’ve already told you,” I said, playing for time, “Jacques is a conscript in the republican army. He was called to the colors in April, on his twenty-first birthday, and he is attached to an infantry regiment, I don’t know where. Not even Pierre could give you his exact whereabouts at the present time.”
“But tell me about him,” protested my brother. “How has he developed, whom is he like? Does he often talk of me?”
The first two questions were easy enough to answer.
“He has your eyes,” I answered, “and your coloring. That much you know. He has Cathie’s build, he is small, below middle height. As to his nature, I’ve always found him affectionate and loyal. He is much attached to Pierre and to Pierre’s boys.”
“Is he intelligent and quick?”
“I would not call him quick. Conscientious would be the better word. He’s taken to life in the army, judging by his letters home, and the officers speak well of him.”
Robert nodded, pleased. I knew that for him Jacques was still a merry boy of eight, clamoring to help with the harvest in the fields of l’Antinière that summer of ’89.
“If he is like Cathie in nature we shall get on famously,” he said. “Surely now we are at peace they might let him home on leave, on compassionate grounds, to see his father?”
I was silent. Had my brother’s desire to see his son blunted perception?
“You forget,” I said after a moment, “that the republican army has been fighting England, the Allies, and you émigrés for nine years. A sudden peace may suit the Consul and his government, but it doesn’t make the soldiers who fought the battles the less bitter. You can hardly expect the commanding officer of Jacques’s regiment to send a conscript home because of you.”
Now it was his turn for silence. “You’re very right,” he said at length. “Now that I’m home I forget I was ever away. I must be patient, that is all.”
He sighed and turned to go indoors, and I noticed, not for the first time, how humped his shoulders had become in these last years; he had the stoop of an old man, and he was not yet fifty-three.
“Besides,” I called after him, “it would not do to call attention to your presence here, since you are officially dead.”
He gestured, as if this did not concern him.
“Dead to those in London, perhaps,” he said, “and to the port officials at Le Havre. Nobody else is likely to interest himself in another broken-down émigré come
to end his days among his family.”
The meeting with Jacques was thus postponed, for I was not lying when I told Robert that neither Pierre nor I knew where the battalion was stationed. Jacques might be anywhere—Italy, Egypt, Turkey—and the signing of peace treaties would not guarantee his return home.
“If I can’t see my son,” said Robert, “I can at least see my brothers. Are you not going to write to them and tell them that the prodigal has returned?”
Once again, I felt that he lacked perception. My welcome, because I loved him, was no surety for the feelings of the rest of us. François was noticeably cool, which Robert accepted because he had never known him well. As for my children, they were too young to form opinions, and seeing my fondness for this sudden long-lost uncle they took their lead from me.
But Edmé and Michel.… That was another matter. The pair of them, their inheritance and savings sunk in the Rougemont foundry and so lost, as I have said, were at present living on the borders of Sarthe and Orne, not far from Alençon. Michel had a position as manager of a small foundry there, and Edmé kept house for him. How long this would continue we did not know. Michel already showed signs of bronchial trouble, the dread disease of every glass-blower, which would, before very long, put an end to active work, if not to his life as well. I had seen too much of it in old days among our craftsmen at le Chesne-Bidault not to recognize the symptoms—the unhealthy pallor, the shortness of breath, the tight dry cough. Once the disease took hold, the end came quickly. It did not bear thinking about. I used to put it from my mind, and so did Edmé, but we were not deceived.