Authors: Matthew Plampin
The rue Montmartre brought him to the great market of Les Halles, the so-called belly of Paris, its wide iron-and-glass aisles busy with a drab siege crowd. Old people – why was everyone in Paris suddenly so old? – haggled like cawing crows. All pretence that the meat on offer had come from anything but beasts of burden had been abandoned. Stall after stall was decorated with the heads of horses, asses and donkeys, tongues lolling from their blackened lips. It was truly nauseating; Clem tapped a cigarette from a pack bought with one of his last French coins, thinking to block the stench with tobacco smoke. This is ridiculous, he told himself, directing his gaze towards the grimy skylights. You know what to do; you made your decision in the Mazas. Why delay it any longer?
Clem lit his cigarette and went on through the market to the boulevard de Sébastopol. He paused to get his bearings; then he turned up his jacket collar and headed north.
The Gare du Nord was filled with sounds that had no natural place in a railway terminus – the constant rainstorm of pedal-driven sewing machines; hammer-blows and saw-rasps; the lilting shanties of the sailors as they toiled over their ropes, nets and baskets. As Clem walked in there was a sudden swell of cooing and the cramped half-beat of confined wings: a dozen cages of carrier pigeons were stacked against the station’s far wall, before a hand-painted advertisement for a boot-maker in the Passage de l’Opéra. The gloomy hall ahead of him was dominated by a row of balloons, laid out where the locomotives had once idled. Some were being inflated, others let down, the bulging white envelopes rising and falling like the bellies of snoring giants.
In the centre of it all was Émile Besson, dressed in his grey suit, standing on a train-rail with his arms crossed. He was overseeing the installation of a gas-valve on a completed envelope – an especially large one with a blue stripe painted around its base. The tin funnel was being fitted onto the balloon’s mouth, being made airtight with a thick rubber band; Besson shouted a direction, repeated it, and then stepped from his rail to take over.
Clem stopped by one of the station’s iron lampposts, watching them work. After a few minutes someone noticed him and alerted Besson. Their last parting, Clem remembered, had not been the friendliest, the
aérostier
cutting him off mid-sentence to go to his meeting with Sergeant Peabody. There was no guarantee that he’d be greeted with any warmth at all – but Besson actually broke into a smile as he walked across the concourse. Clem smiled back, despite feeling very far indeed from any kind of contentment. He put the remainder of his strength into their handshake: Besson had to think him fit and able.
‘By Jove, old man,’ he said, ‘what an astounding operation! Why, it must be three times the size of the dancing school. Whole balloons, from start to finish, fashioned before one’s very eyes! Books will be written, my friend. Songs will be sung.’
‘Mr Pardy,’ said the Frenchman, ‘you do not have a coat or hat.’
‘Oh …’ Clem glanced at his suit, as if noticing this for the first time. ‘I left the Grand a little impulsively. A disagreement with my mother.’
Besson seemed to understand. ‘You look well, I must say. All things considered.’
So much for the display of robust good health. ‘You know, then? Where I’ve been?’
‘More than that. I tried to see you – to find out why you were being held. The Marais militia would not allow me past the gate. They saw that there had been a mistake, I think, but would not admit to it. I am sorry.’
‘That is—’ Clem’s chest tightened; he began to tremble again. He looked at the station’s cracked marble floor. ‘That is dashed decent of you. Dashed decent.’ He could feel Besson’s concerned expression on the top of his head. ‘I am tired, I must say … I thought I’d catch pneumonia in that place, at the very least. I suppose I’m fortunate.’
‘Many are finished by a stay in the Mazas. You are a resilient man, Mr Pardy.’
Enough wallowing, Clem thought. It was time to get to the point. ‘Listen, Besson, I need your help. I wish to enrol. I want to pilot one of your balloons – to become a … what d’you call it?’
‘
Aérostier
.’ Besson had been expecting this. ‘That is the term favoured by the
Société d’Aviation
.’
‘You need volunteers, do you not?’
‘Indeed we do. They are usually men with some ballooning experience, though, or sailors. You have only ever flown in a fixed balloon, is that correct?’
Clem nodded. They’d discussed this before his incarceration. He’d exaggerated wildly about both the number of ascents he’d made and the role he’d performed during them. Besson was under the impression that there had been over a dozen, and that he’d manned the valve for at least half of these, expertly controlling the return to earth. In reality he’d gone up just once, on a foggy summer morning over the Crystal Palace. He’d been a mere passenger, kept well away from the valve-cord and everything else. They hadn’t gone very high, scarcely a hundred yards by Clem’s estimation. Views had been restricted by the weather conditions: a silhouetted steeple, a few dull lanes, the glint of glass from the palace roof. Clem had found it rather disappointing.
‘Free flight is different. It is
dangerous
. The balloons can go in any direction, any direction at all. We talk much of winds, of pressure, but once you are up there …’ Besson shrugged. ‘You must be ready to improvise.’
‘I don’t mind the risk.’
The
aérostier
studied him. ‘You think you have something to prove.’
‘I just have to get out of this city. I’ve had enough, old man – far more than enough.’
‘Your mother?’
‘Well, yes, she is pretty central to it all.’ Clem’s bitterness returned. ‘She could have freed me from that damned cell any time she chose, but she left me to bloody well rot – to freeze and starve. I swear, Besson, she was on the verge of forgetting me altogether. She only cares about this accursed Leopard business. The
Figaro
, her damned career, the stupid books she’s going to write.’ Railing against Elizabeth felt good – a relief, like tearing off a stifling collar on a hot afternoon. ‘She’s taken Montague Inglis as a lover, too. I’m certain of it. I have to get away from
that
. Her affairs are always an absolute ordeal, believe me – epic bloody dramas in which everyone in the vicinity is impelled to play a part.’
‘I thought they were lovers already,’ Besson said, ‘or had been, perhaps, in the past. Such shows of contempt suggest great intimacy.’
‘I really have no idea.’ Clem reached for a cigarette but the pack was empty. ‘Something is up, though, and I don’t want to see any bloody more of it.’
Besson hesitated. ‘What of your sister?’
Clem pushed the pack to the bottom of his pocket. ‘Han has no need of me. I am nothing but a nuisance to her. We had words in the Hôtel de Ville during the uprising. She made it pretty clear that she judged my presence in Paris to be a comical mishap.’
‘She was worried for you when you were in the Mazas. She would have come to you had she been able.’
‘You’ve seen her, then? Since my arrest?’
The unthinkable occurred: Émile Besson became distracted. ‘Mademoiselle Pardy came to me that night,’ he admitted, ‘looking for somewhere to hide. We’d spoken, you understood, when I—’ He stopped. ‘I found you for her. She was afraid that they might shoot you. She stayed a good while, in the end, in case the police were searching for her. More than three weeks.’
‘Good Lord.’
Surely this episode would have been a great gift for Besson – his beloved at his mercy, requiring his help and left for ever in his debt – but something told Clem that it hadn’t gone well. Before he could work out how best to extract the details Besson moved their conversation into another area completely.
‘A massed sortie is coming in the next few days,’ he said. ‘We have received word from General Trochu. The attack was to be mounted in the north-west, near Neuilly, where the Prussian line is known to be weakest. There has been an upset, though – a change in strategy.’
‘Elizabeth mentioned this. A troop movement.’
‘Reports from the provinces claim that Minister Gambetta has been distinguishing himself as a field commander. His army is apparently winning victory after victory and will soon be in a position to relieve us.’ Besson looked back at his balloons. ‘I do not trust it myself, but our leaders are desperate for a French triumph. The main force for the sortie is in the process of being relocated to the south-east. They are going to push through the woods at Vincennes and then loop around to meet Gambetta as he advances from Orléans.’
Clem was doubtful. ‘I’m no soldier, Besson, God knows,’ he said, ‘but that sounds pretty damned ambitious to me.’
Besson agreed. Clem had heard him criticise Trochu before; the provisional government, in his view, had yet to make a single right step. ‘Nonetheless,’ he said, ‘several highly important flights have to be made, to convey details of our intended actions, and coordinate the two armies as closely as possible. They have us working night and day, dispatching our creations as fast as we can make them.’
Clem saw a chance – saw Besson dangling it purposefully in front of him. ‘So you’ll be needing all the pilots you can get.’
Besson was shaking his head. ‘It would never be allowed – not an amateur, and an Englishman as well.’ He became conspiratorial. ‘But I have a suggestion. They have ordered me to make one of these flights myself. I am the most experienced balloonist left in the city, you see, excepting Nadar and Monsieur Yon. A package of the most vital communiqués has been prepared, and another manager trained to replace me here in the Gare du Nord.’ The
aérostier
moved a step closer. ‘Nadar knows that I have a basic knowledge of the camera. He wants photographs of the Prussian positions, taken from the air as I leave Paris. He insists that this is possible. There are men in Orléans, he says, who will miniaturise the results so they can be sent back in by pigeon. Should the siege run on they could prove invaluable.’
This scheme had an immediate appeal. Clem gave his whiskers a ruminative stroke, his excitement building; he could tell what was coming. ‘Fascinating notion.’
‘If you truly wish to leave, Mr Pardy,’ Besson said, meeting his eye, ‘you could join me.’
Clem grinned. ‘I do,’ he replied. ‘Christ Besson, I do and I will. I accept!’
The
aérostier
’s lip curled the tiniest fraction. ‘We need not train you. There is no time, anyway. You know balloons, in theory at least, and you know cameras – so you can assist me with both. It is good luck, in fact, you emerging from the Mazas when you did. For the pair of us.’
Besson’s enthusiasm was slightly overdone; Clem perceived that he was concealing something, leaving an aspect of their proposed expedition unmentioned. He made no attempt to discover it. This was a friend, despite his secrets – someone who’d been trying to help him while his own mother sat eating cats and camels in the Grand. It would be nothing sinister. Clem wanted to cheer. He’d just secured a route out of Paris, and one that promised a thrilling exploit to boot. This could be a book, he thought suddenly: ‘An Airborne Escape from the Siege of Paris’, by Clement R. R. Pardy.
This could be a bloody book
. That would show her, and no mistake!
‘When are we scheduled to leave?’
‘Tomorrow – the day after at the latest.’ Besson pointed out the balloon he’d been working on earlier, the large envelope with the single blue stripe. ‘That is our craft there.
Aphrodite
, Nadar has called her. Come, I will show you the car.’
The two men started to walk back over the concourse. Besson looked at his new comrade, a curious, almost amiable expression on his face.
‘Are you really ready to abandon everything here in Paris, Mr Pardy?’ he asked. ‘What of your cocotte?’
Clem saw Laure Fleurot outside the Hôtel de Ville on that tumultuous afternoon, laughing and smoking under a black umbrella, indifferent to his fate. ‘We are done, old man. Played out. Dead and bloody well buried.’
‘It is often the way with such women,’ said the
aérostier
.
‘An affair that intense,’ Clem mused, ‘can’t hope to endure for very long.’
Besson put a commiserative hand on his shoulder. ‘Or perhaps she realised that you have no money.’
The commanders of the 197th had provided wine for the four hundred or so who’d volunteered for the battle-group – but from the liberality with which Laure Fleurot was distributing it you’d be forgiven for thinking that she’d laid it on herself. She whirled through the Moulin de la Galette with a bottle in each hand, overfilling cups, splashing wine on the dulled parquet, instructing everyone to drink and be happy. In return, the tipsy militiamen promised her dozens of kills; a land cleansed of Fritz; France liberated before the week was out. It would be five minutes at most, Hannah guessed, before Laure made it to where she was sitting. She wondered what she was going to say.
The Galette had been shut since late summer and was going the way of all Paris’s amusements, from the grandest to the most humble. Hannah had visited it from time to time, in her life before the war – before Jean-Jacques Allix. It had been the kind of place you might drop into on a Sunday afternoon for a glass of vermouth and a few gentle waltzes. Now, though, it was dark and slightly dank, the fading furnishings creating a disheartening atmosphere.
Hannah was up on the bar, sitting in a line with Benoît, Lucien and Octave. The three artists had joined the National Guard shortly after her, driven by a sense of duty she’d scarcely imagined that they possessed. A few days had passed since her return from the balloon factory. The 197th had welcomed her back without a word of rebuke; the Leopard’s girl, it appeared, could absent herself indefinitely and suffer no penalty. The circumstances of her life had been oddly unchanged. Rather more of the shed’s damp-warped exterior was visible due to the seasonal ebb of the vegetables planted around it, but everything inside was exactly as it had been left. Someone had paid her rent for the month, sliding the money under Madame Lantier’s door; as a result, the landlady hadn’t even realised that her tenant had been away. Nobody had come looking for her, no soldiers or bourgeois militia or secret policemen. All that caution had been for nothing. Her stay in the Gare du Nord with Monsieur Besson had just been so much wasted time.