Matthew Plampin - Illumination

‘What did she say, Jean-Jacques? What was under discussion?’

He was quiet for a few more seconds. ‘Only you, Hannah,’ he said. ‘Only you.’

His voice was tender; Hannah remembered the day she’d just passed, sitting at her easel on the place de l’Europe with her brushes in her lap, longing for the moment when they would be together again. But she steeled herself. She would not be lulled.

‘I can’t believe she’s here in Montmartre. I can’t believe it.’

‘She told me that she’d come to ensure that you were safe. A mission of mercy.’

‘Elizabeth came to fetch me ,’ Hannah snapped, ‘to reclaim her wayward child and return her to London.’ She covered her brow. ‘I fled my family, Jean-Jacques. I climbed from my bedroom window in the dead of night and travelled alone to Paris. There it is. That’s what I am. A runaway.’

Jean-Jacques nodded; up until now, Hannah had let him infer that she was an orphan, without any surviving relatives in England, but he didn’t seem surprised or affronted by the truth. ‘We all must adapt ourselves,’ he said. ‘It is part of life. The timing of this visit is strange, though. Surely any person of sense can see that there’s a good chance of becoming trapped – that our foe is nearly upon us?’

Hannah sighed; she calmed a little. ‘An anonymous letter was sent to London. It informed her that I was in urgent trouble and needed to be collected before the Prussians arrived.’

Jean-Jacques considered this. ‘A low trick,’ he said. ‘The act of a coward. Do you know who was responsible?’

‘I have my suspicions.’

‘Your mother has been cruelly deceived – fooled into coming to Paris at a most hazardous time. You must be worried for her.’

Hannah glanced at him; his humour could be difficult to detect. ‘That woman is why I am in France. It was her manipulations, her interferences and lies, that drove me from my home. And she is more than capable of looking after herself. Why on earth should I worry for her?’

Jean-Jacques looked away; a line appeared at the side of his mouth. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘She’ll be well. Bourgeois like her always are. A haven will be found. She’ll wait out the assault in perfect safety.’

A barrier ran through the population of Paris, according to Jean-Jacques and his comrades, separating the bourgeoisie from the workers. It rather pleased Hannah to hear Elizabeth placed on the wrong side of their great boundary; it gave her a sense that she had allies, not least Jean-Jacques himself. Directly next to this, however, sat the uncomfortable knowledge that but for a change of clothes and lodgings she was certainly as bourgeois as her mother.

‘Such a simple path would never do for Elizabeth. She isn’t one to hide away.’ Hannah paused. ‘It doesn’t matter, at any rate. She’ll have to leave Paris. She hasn’t any money. A stay in a hotel, even for a single night, is completely beyond her means. To be quite honest, I’m surprised that she managed to find enough for her and Clem’s passage.’

Jean-Jacques had been gazing at the surrounding rooftops, his hands in his pockets; now his dark eyes flicked back to her. ‘Clem?’

Hannah cursed under her breath; she was being careless. ‘Clement,’ she admitted, ‘my twin brother. He lives with Elizabeth still, back in London. And has come to Paris today.’

‘You have a twin brother .’ Jean-Jacques said this with gentle wonderment. The line at the side of his mouth deepened again. ‘Another of Hannah’s secrets is revealed.’

‘It is not what you might think. He and I, we are too different to—’

Hannah gave up. It was no use. Everything was overturned. In the space of ten minutes the life she’d crafted in Paris had been irreversibly altered. Jean-Jacques had found out that she’d misled him and had glimpsed the troubles of her past. The Danton regulars, her supposed friends, would be extracting all they could from poor Clem; they’d probably discover even more than Jean-Jacques had. She’d been exposed. Whatever chance she’d had of being taken on her own merits was gone. She might as well walk back to the Danton and surrender herself to Elizabeth. Her mother had won. She leaned against a wall, pressing her damp palms against her forehead. She was finished in Paris.

‘Hannah,’ said Jean-Jacques. ‘Look there.’

Lucien and Benoît, two of the painters she’d been talking with when Clem had appeared, were strolling past the alley mouth: thin men smoking short cigars, sharing a drunken laugh as they headed towards the place Saint-Pierre. Octave, a sculptor, was a few feet behind. Hannah straightened up. Clem might be with them. She strode past Jean-Jacques, back out onto the rue Saint-André. There was no sign of her brother; the painters, however, gave a ragged roar of salutation.

‘Why, Mademoiselle Pardy,’ Lucien proclaimed, twisting his moustaches, ‘what the devil is going on? You leap from the middle of a really quite stirring account of Courbet’s decline to converse with a young gentleman who, from the brilliant yellow of his hair …’

‘The delicacy of his nose and brow,’ inserted Benoît, who fancied himself a portraitist, ‘the fullness of his lips …’

‘… can only be your brother. And then, even though this fellow has come all the way from the soot and smoke of London, you run from him after a few seconds, grabbing the fine Monsieur Allix for a – a turn beneath the stars , I suppose I should call it, for the sake of decency …’

‘… leaving your brother entirely alone: a whiskery Anglais in an old suit, adrift in the Danton, too scared even to bleat for help.’

Lucien’s cackle would have curdled milk. ‘So we wave him over. What else could we do for the brother of such a dear friend? I have a little English,’ he confessed with a modest shrug, ‘sufficient, at any rate, to learn that he is not the only member of the Pardy family in Montmartre tonight. There is a mother also, standing at the bar. A woman who, although undoubtedly mature , is still worthy of the attentions of any man who—’

‘Enough.’

Jean-Jacques didn’t speak with any force or volume. His tone was that of an equable schoolmaster who’d let his pupils run loose for a while, but had reached the limit of what he would allow. The half-cut painters were halted – stopped dead. Lucien looked off down the street; Benoît, frowning slightly, fiddled with his cigar.

A smile crossed Hannah’s face. It had been six weeks now since Jean-Jacques had first walked into the Danton, but these Montmartre artists had yet to accept that their blonde Anglaise was theirs no longer. Although Jean-Jacques was always cordial, he made them both jealous and nervous; when quite sure that he wasn’t around, Lucien would sometimes refer to him as ‘the killer’.

‘What has drawn you gentlemen from the Danton?’ Jean-Jacques asked them now. ‘Surely you still have wine to attend to?’

Octave, the least waspish and inebriated of the three, spoke up. ‘Everyone is coming outside, Monsieur Allix. They say that the forest of Saint-Germain is burning – put to the torch by the Prussians.’

Jean-Jacques was starting for the place Saint-Pierre before Octave had finished his sentence. Hannah and the artists fell in behind. Her immediate impression as they reached the square was that Paris had somehow circled the Buttes Montmartre – that the central boulevards, normally seen glowing in the south, had been rearranged to the north-west. This light was different, though, a shimmering, acidic orange rather than the flat hue of gas; it was alive, expanding, slowly draining the darkness from the night sky.

The once-distant war had reached them. Hannah’s pace slackened; her hands hung at her sides. She was not afraid. Jean-Jacques had prepared her for this. A magnificent resistance lay ahead. There would have to be sacrifices, of course, but the result would be a better Paris – the beginnings of a better world. It brought her relief, in fact, to see these fires. Over the past few days, as the city’s anticipation and dread had mounted, a part of her had grown impatient for it all to begin.