The Rainbow Bridge (27 page)

It was through Jacquot that Louise heard the news that there
were to be visitors to the chateau: Captain Morteau from the winery, who had lost a leg in Italy, and his new wife, were expected. Also some poor lad who had served with the Captain in the wars.

Louise felt their presence as soon as their hired carriage passed Jacquot’s hut on its way into the yard. Soon their pull on her was so strong that she let go and found herself back in the dining hall where her picture had hung. She stood just inside the curtains so that she could see them before they saw her. How they had changed! A white scar stood out on Gaston’s forehead and his cork leg thumped on the polished floor as he walked. She wanted to rush and embrace him, but Colette was holding his arm, supporting him. For a long moment Gaston stared at the spot by the fireplace, and Louise could see images of herself flash through his mind.

‘You’d have thought the scoundrel would have left her picture behind,’ Gaston said to Colette. ‘I suppose he thought it paid for the land, but I doubt that he will ever know her as we have. You know, I can almost feel her here. Dear Louise, if only she’d appear again now.’

Louise was just about to step out when she saw Pierre. He had drifted into the room after the others and was looking vacantly about him. Louise caught her breath; here was someone in real need. What had happened to him? Where was the lad who had opened his heart to her in the barracks in Paris and whose eyes had met hers as he galloped off after his cat-calling friends?

For a little time after the battle of Rivoli, Pierre had been a hero. It was he who had delivered the order that released Charles Lasalle to hurtle down on the Austrians in the
greatest cavalry charge of the campaign. All hussars were heroes on that day. But this one seemed to have lost his mind. All he could talk about was a lady in green, some apparition that had come to him on the battlefield when his lieutenant was injured. Bonaparte himself visited Gaston in hospital, and realising that Gaston would never ride again, had promoted him to captain. Should he survive the infection that was inevitable after his amputation, he would at least have a captain’s pension. The deranged cadet was left to dress his wound and see him home if possible.

Gaston took Colette off to see the rest of the chateau and Louise emerged cautiously from behind the curtain. ‘Pierre?’ she asked, ‘Tell me what happened.’ He was looking at her, seeing her, she was sure, but his eyes – perhaps his mind – seemed to have lost their ability to focus. She moved closer to him and it was as though a mist had cleared from his vision.

‘You’re real!’ he breathed.

‘Yes, Pierre, I am real because you made me real.’

‘Am I still mad? If I’m no longer mad, they’ll send me back, you know. I don’t want that.’

‘They won’t send you back, Pierre, and you’re not mad … you never were.’

‘Your dress, it was splashed with blood. I couldn’t help it.’

‘I don’t remember any of it, Pierre. Was I there?’

‘Oh yes. It was you who calmed me. Forced me to bind Gaston’s leg so he’d lose no more blood. That’s when your dress …’

‘The dress is not important, Pierre, it isn’t marked. What happened then?’

‘You stayed with Gaston. You made me take the orders and deliver them to Lasalle. You see, the French line had been broken, in minutes we would all have been swept away. Only the cavalry could stem the tide. I wanted to charge with them, to die with them. I was sure the lieutenant would die and I couldn’t bear to be left on my own. Then I remembered that you were waiting beside him, so I returned. I got him across my horse and to a dressing station. When I came out you had gone, so I started looking for you. I asked everyone. They didn’t seem to understand.’

Louise and Pierre walked up and down the dining room together as he poured out his story. Neither of them noticed when Gaston and Colette came into the room. It was a wonder that Gaston’s roar of delight didn’t bring the whole chateau staff running. They stood around her, laughing, wanting to embrace but holding back …

‘Just give me a moment more, Louise,’ Gaston laughed. ‘I am like poor Brouchard: I see you one minute and then I don’t. There, I have you now!’ Louise told them how successful they had been in allowing her to see through their eyes, but there were many gaps she wanted filled and they eagerly supplied the details.

Eventually Marie’s mother called out that their coach was ready. It was time for them to go.

‘But you must come with us, Louise, and where is your picture?’ Gaston demanded. ‘I promised that I would come back and get you, remember?’

Louise had been preparing herself for this. ‘Gaston,’ she said. ‘It is time for me to move on. You and Colette have each other now. You don’t need me. And as for my portrait, don’t worry; it is not with the Count. It is in safe hands.’

They did their best to make her change her mind but deep down they all – except Pierre perhaps – knew that this
parting was inevitable. The last goodbyes were said, Gaston and Colette left the room and only Pierre lingered as if unable to move. Louise went up to him, took his hands, and then kissed him on both cheeks.

‘You must go too, Pierre. You are safe now, and everything will be all right. I give you my word.’

Jacquot and Marie were to be married in a month. Marie was all for moving straight into the dower house, but Jacquot, for some obscure reason, insisted that they spend the first night of their marriage in his hut. When Marie decided that this was romantic, she entered wholeheartedly into the scheme. It was then that she discovered Louise. It was a tense moment. Jacquot wasn’t there; she propped the picture up on the bed and cocked her head to one side.

‘The girl in the green dress. I wondered where you’d gone? Now why …?’ Her sharp eyes saw the nearly invisible tear in the canvas. She turned the picture over and looked, suspiciously at first and then appreciatively, at the intricate repair. ‘So that’s what he was up to. Put a stick through it perhaps and didn’t like to confess.’ She turned the picture over and curtsied very nicely to Louise; she’d been practising. ‘I’m sure you understand, Mademoiselle, but you will just have to find someone else. Jacquot is mine. You will have to go.’

Gaston, Colette, and particularly Pierre, were true to their promises to remember Louise, and, at least in their imaginations, felt her response. For as long as they lived she would share their triumphs and troubles. Colette spent quite a lot of her time in peace negotiations between Lucien and Margot, until to everyone’s surprise – and some people’s disappointment – Lucien discovered the joys of parenthood. Louise always knew when the grape harvest was in and the first of the juice had begun to flow from the presses. Even now in Les Clos du Bois there is a ceremony when the juice first begins to run. All work stops, glasses are filled and a toast is drunk: ‘À la jeune fille en vert!’ Nobody remembers any longer who this mysterious girl in green was, but the toast is drunk with reverence and enthusiasm.

When I was visiting Amsterdam in search of material for Wings Over Delft I had already planned that Louise’s portrait would
reappear
in the hands of a young French hussar at the time of the French Revolution. I had, however, no idea how I would get her portrait to France, let alone into the hands of a hussar. Towards the end of a long day looking at pictures in the Rijksmuseum, I came on a painting in the historical section in the basement of the gallery. I was
immediately
alert; surely that was a French uniform, and didn’t the blue white and red cockade signify the Revolution? The note beside the picture told me that this was a certain General Daendels, a Dutch man who had taken advantage of the frozen Rhine to lead a small French army into the Netherlands. Here he hoped to persuade the City Council in Amsterdam to resign in favour of his French
supported
Pro-Patriot movement. The date was 1795. I had no idea at the time, of course, what this meant, except that, surely such an army would include a troop of hussars. Already in my mind I could hear the clatter of hooves, and Gaston, dressed in his magnificent uniform, was emerging in my imagination. All I had to do now was to bring Louise’s picture and his troop of hussars together.

With a firm date on which to hang my tale, I began to read about that turbulent time and to discover other events that would help to root my story in history. The gruesome details of the Terror, with the march of the guillotine across France, are common knowledge, but the events at Nantes, which Gaston witnesses, are less well known. The uprising of the royalist Vendéeans, their massacre in
retreat
, and the mass drownings in the Noyades, which Gaston
witnesses
with the port doctor’s heartless daughter, still hide in the silence of shame.

It had not been my intention to drag Napoleon into my story just for the sake of the name. But when I discovered that Napoleon was in fact in Paris, looking for work with the Sultan of Turkey, at the time of Gaston’s arrival from the Netherlands, I had to think again. Reading on, I found that Napoleon had been a protégé of
Robespierre’s
brother so that, when Robespierre himself was guillotined in 1794, Napoleon came under suspicion, and was in fact in danger of losing his own head. He really had applied to the Sultan for a job, and what would be more likely than that he would recruit one or two likely young officers to serve under him in Turkey? Gaston and his small troop cut a dash when arriving in Paris and could easily have attracted his attention. In later life people who met Napoleon were amazed at how he appeared to know more about them than they knew themselves. His research into Gaston’s family would have been in character, as would his examination of the young hussar’s abilities. The incident that I recount at the end of the book, at the battle of Lodi, when Napoleon sights the guns himself, has become an icon for Napoleon’s relationship with his men. It was here that he was dubbed ‘our little corporal’ because he was prepared to do a corporal’s job to win the day.

In 2000 Jennifer and I went to France and travelled up the Loire, visiting the great chateaux. Then we crossed into the Burgundy area, where fields of wheat alternate with vast tracts of forest, and where deep valleys feed water northwards up into the Seine. The idea of a chateau within the forest came from one that we passed on one of our many walks. When, in search for wine we drove to the village of Irancy, I was immediately entranced by the perfect
symmetry
of the semicircular valley. The slopes were patterned with the geometric lines of the vines, and I knew that I had found a home for Gaston and an occupation for his family. I had to rely on books to acquire a knowledge of the winemaking process. I was therefore apprehensive, sometime later, when a friend invited us to meet a Frenchman who was an expert on wine. He, however, reminded me so much of my M. Morteau that I ventured to say that I had just been writing about an imaginary winemaker who talked to his grapes and his wines. ‘Naturellement’ he said, ‘Pourquoi pas?’ I felt that perhaps I had got something right.

A number of books have contributed hugely to my understanding of the time in which The Rainbow Bridge is set. Norman Davies’s, Europe A History not only provided me with a historical
framework
, but many historical asides as well, such as the story of the ‘Marseillaise’, and the gruesome details of the Noyades. The
Memoirs
of Madame de la Tour du Pin give a vivid firsthand account of the period. Madame was a member of Marie Antoinette’s
household
who not only survived the Terror but also met and conversed with Napoleon. It is she who records being amazed and
disconcerted
by Napoleon’s knowledge of her family and of her
connections
, when they met. A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel is a novel, but it gives a good idea of the complex thinking of the
leaders
of the French Revolution. One of my best sources on the
hussars
was in fact a children’s book, Hussars of the Napoleonic Wars, by Kenneth Ulyatt. For light relief I would recommend anyone to read Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Brigadier Gerard. After reading this, readers will understand why Napoleon was so anxious to establish that Gaston was not just swagger and bluster. For
information
on the Napoleonic era I would recommend
www.napoleon-series.org. The Story of Wine by Hugh Johnson is so fascinating that it is difficult to put down. It provided many of the details that went into my descriptions of the Morteau winery. I have the Encyclopaedia Britannica on my computer, and use it regularly, often to check the accuracy and reliability of information from
Internet
sites, which are only as reliable as are the people who have put them up.

Jacquot’s surprisingly good education could have put him in the way of the fairy tales of the great French storyteller, Charles
Perrault
(1628–1703). These stories include Blue Beard, Little Red
Riding
Hood, and Cinderella. I have attempted to catch the flavour of Perrault’s style in writing Jacquot’s tale.