The Orion Ghost

CHAPTER 16

  1792:

  Their journey down to the Atlantic coast had been uneventful and the twins and Jeanne began to think of it as an adventure. Their father and Charles decided that it would be safer to hide during the daytime in the deep forests they would pass through, and continue their journey under cover of night. They had abandoned the old furniture as soon as they left Paris but they remained in their dirty, coarse clothes and kept the canvas covers ready to hide the children and their mother. They knew that the further from Paris they were the safer they were, but they also realised that other major cities were in sympathy with the ideas of the Revolution so they had to avoid them. Charles had packed enough food for three or four days. They could wash and drink from streams and even risk stopping briefly at inns in very rural areas where they could pretend to be taking goods to market and pick up a few provisions and take care of the horses.

  The children were grateful that they travelled by night because the weather was cooler then. They had skirted around Evry, Orleans and Blois not daring to enter these towns. As they approached Tours on the third night the weather seemed to be even hotter than in Paris, but it was very comfortable travelling by starlight. Their father was able to point out the major constellations. “Those three bright stars seem to be pointing us in the direction of the Chateau de la Grande Côte,” said Jacques and Céline together, and this they found comforting.

  On the fourth evening the family passed through Poitiers and knew that they were now very close to their chateau. The following day when they arrived on the wild Atlantic coast and drove through the huge iron gates of their own chateau they finally all felt safe. As soon as they arrived the children jumped out of the cart and ran all around the chateau. Everything was as they remembered it. There was the courtyard with the old well in the centre, the tiny chapel with a bell tower, the stables and tiny buildings for other animals then the house itself. At each corner of the building there was a pretty little turreted room on the third floor. The salons and kitchen were on the ground floor, the bedrooms and their father’s study were on the second floor, Jeanne, being the eldest, had been allowed to have a tiny bedroom in one of the towers. Everything was just as the children remembered.

  The children ran up the stairs to their own rooms to find their clothes arranged on their beds. They changed out of their horrible rough rags glad they would never have to see them again, and into their normal simple cotton clothes. Jeanne rushed up to her little room at the top of the chateau, flung open the balcony door and breathed in deeply the cool salty sea air. She could see the Atlantic Ocean from her tiny room and knew that at night she would take comfort in the gently flashing beacon of the lighthouse. She looked at herself in her mirror and was horrified to see how dirty her face looked and how wild her red hair had become after her journey from Paris.

  When they had washed and had something to eat the children decided to go down to the ocean while their parents and the servants who had come with them opened up the house. The beach was a symbol of freedom to them all. “At least the sea cannot be forced to accept Robespierre’s bloody Revolution,” said their father at dinner that night as their parents drank a champagne toast to freedom. Everybody stood up and said in loud and emotional voices, “To freedom!”