That Dickens bloke lied.
Yes, it was the worst of times, the best of times, etc etc, and yes, the world was brimming with malcontents and malevolence, but I most certainly was not the evil Fury, the handmaid of death and vengeance that he painted me.
Let me tell you the truth.
I know authors amend reality to suit their petty tales but this has really gotten out of hand – you’ve probably seen the films and plays and retellings of that damned book. Where I’m always the ultimate baddie. Of course I was a sister of the Revolution – why wouldn’t I be? I’d suffered the heinous crimes of the aristocracy and, like thousands, millions, wanted them to pay. But I’d also saved those that required saving: Dickens never mentioned the washer-woman I’d dragged from the mob, the seamstress I hid in our basement, the street urchin I bundled with its mother in an escaping haywain. And what about the firebrand women I supported? The sans-jupons and activists seeking rights for all, not just white men? How I helped them escape across the border, or argued at their trials under fear of death?
The world knows nothing about that. Just the bits that appealed to a male English author.
So let me tell you about the day the true me emerged. The day Dickens falsified.
Not the July day we seized the Bastille. Yes, I confess that then there was blood on my hands. I’d hacked off the governor’s head with my knife and swung it so high its blood ran down my arm like syrup, and yes, I was joyous. It was a drug long-needed, and I was addicted. One of the sans-culottes tossed me a pike and I shoved the governor’s skull on hard and we paraded it through the streets with the other toffs’ heads. I licked my hand: the blood was as heady as red wine.
It was a fine day – blame me for that if you must.
No, I’m talking about another time, a few years later. At the Terror’s peak.
I can see me perched on my usual chair, front row in the Place de la Concorde, savouring the star of the show, Madame Razor, creaking and gleaming on the platform above. The tocsin rings, the blade drops; ‘Number 22,’ I bellow. The mob cheers. The queue of condemned nobles is so long I tuck my skirt beneath me, cross my ankles comfortably and knit, my needles clacking endlessly in time with the chopper. I’m determined not to lose rhythm, not even when a count’s severed head hits the edge of the catching basket then topples onto the cobblestones at my feet. The eyes are dull but wide, the mouth an o, as if the old guy is mildly surprised by his fate. The executioner yells ‘Come back here you mongrel!’ and I kick the head back to him. We all laugh.
‘Madame Defarge’s a natural at football,’ someone shouts.
‘A noble’s head bounces better than a pig’s bladder,’ I shout back.
Beside me my comrade The Vengeance chuckles, then declares (yet again) that I’m the bravest of revolutionaries. I’m tired of her sycophancy, but don’t silence her: naturally I won’t quell her patriotism.
As the tumbrils empty I stew over the plan for that afternoon: I’ll queue for bread and haggle over potatoes and turnips at the market, collect mushrooms from our wineshop’s basement, and boil a broth for supper. Then I’ll slink from the slums of St Antoine and fulfil my life’s ambition: I’ll kill the last of the Evrémondes.
A woman and her child.
With a pistol and a knife hidden in my girdle it won’t be difficult, especially as the woman is English, weak.
It’s necessary. The Evrémondes killed my family. They and their ancestors have treated me and mine like maggots. I should be willing to see the very last one of them, Darnay’s little daughter, dead.
But lately my knitting needles have been reluctant. My stitching falters.
The sun hides its chagrined face, the air is dense and judgmental.
I will kill them all! I silently rail at the sky.
But…a woman and her baby?
Why is my heart no longer committed to the end of the Evrémondes? Why is my lust, my urge for revenge – the urge that’s kept me alive and unyielding for decades – why is it waning?
Is it age or weariness? Or is it my true heart rebirthing?
All believe – my husband, The Vengeance, the Jacques, all our comrades – they all believe I’m driven only by hatred. That my whole being, my flesh, my soul, my red liberty bonnet, comprise nothing but venom.
They’re wrong.
I’m driven only by love.
But I’ve never told them that. For a time we sorely needed hate, not love, to bolster the Revolution’s whip. But recently, late at night, when I picture the Princess de Lamballe’s bloodied head paraded in the streets, or the innocent stonemason stabbed by pitchforks as he was dragged behind a horse, I tremble.
Seeing the Marquis de Evrémonde – Darnay as he calls himself in London – in the tumbril a few days ago didn’t help. I was taken aback; for a second I almost believed he couldn’t be as evil as his father or uncle – his eyes were so brimming with compassion he seemed a charitable type.
But then so were my sister’s eyes. Before Darnay’s uncle raped her. And my brother’s eyes. Before Darnay’s father killed him.
And that’s what I must remember.
So I keep telling myself as I knit, and knit. Around my gnarled fingers the wool is coarse, cutting, but taut. Always taut.
‘So many flies! It stinks,’ says citizeness Appolline as she dumps herself beside me. She pinches her nose just as The Vengeance lifts a tiny wedge of crumbly cheese from her basket.
‘You fool – this is a perfume of the gods!’ The Vengeance caws. She nudges me hard with her elbow, and winks. ‘A marquis gave it to me, said I could have more if I helped him escape. Ha! That marquis won’t be needing it now.’
‘I meant the pong from Madame Barber,’ Appolline mutters, staring longingly at the cheese.
‘Thought you’d be used to the smell by now,’ says The Vengeance. ‘Thérèse is, aren’t you, chérie?’
‘It’s the smell of justice,’ I say.
‘I didn’t think it’d be reeking like this in winter.’
We all gaze up at the dark structure shadowed against the sky. Marbled clouds hang over it like halos. The stench in the air does seem rifer today – a slaughterhouse mingling, ironically, with the horse-chestnuts roasting at the corner market. Despite it being autumn the flies are frenzied.
‘What are you saying, Appolline?’ says The Vengeance, her eyes skirting at me. ‘That’s not how a true patriot talks.’
Appolline stutters something about freedom, squawks ‘long live liberty’, then runs out of words. She fiddles with her cockade as if terrified that it – and her head – will be ripped from her. There’s a silence, then The Vengeance chortles, the scars on her face wrinkling like time.
Appolline pokes The Vengeance with her knitting needle. ‘I see you’ve made a toy for your boy.’ The child squatting on the cruddy cobbles grins and waves a tiny guillotine in the air. ‘Death to the nobs!’ he shouts. ‘Chop off the Dauphin’s head!’
The Vengeance rattles on about her son as she knits. ‘Yesterday he ran in squealing as if the world was ending.’ Beaming, she pats the child’s shoulder. ‘He told us he’d heard the baker whispering treason.’ She points her needle at the guillotine. ‘That traitor’ll be up there soon, kissing Madame. We got him good, thanks to my boy.’
The boy picks at the patch over his missing eye, kicked from his head in some protest or other.
Using a complicated purl I stitch a lengthy name into my throw. It hangs over my knees, nearly catching on my boot buckle – as I draw the loop tight a head hits the basket, the mob salivates. The executioner, as round as a barrel, drags the blade back up.
Appolline is gone, hunting for food; she doesn’t want to be beaten again for failing to fill her husband’s dinner bowl. Another tricoteuse wrinkled beyond her years flops beside me, a grubby baby sucking at her teat. I pluck a wedge of bread from under my skirt. ‘Eat, sister.’
She gobbles it with her few black teeth, licks the crumbs from her fingers. The baby’s sucking is loud, but suddenly lost in the crowd’s caterwauls. Two sans-culottes beside us yell and ram each other and jostle the tricoteuse. Their breath stinks of piss and ale.
‘Get up, bitch,’ one growls. ‘Gimme your seat.’
I rise, my hands on my hips; he hoists his walking stick high and waves it threateningly.
The other quickly nudges him. ‘It’s Madame Defarge,’ he whispers. The sans-culotte drops his stick, blanches.
‘Forgive me, madame. I mean citizeness. I didn’t realise I was in the presence of a … a true sister of the revolution.’ He waddles backwards, bowing low, then scuttles through the throng like a cockroach. Knitting fiercely, I resume my seat. Perhaps I should put all these women-haters on my list. Where is the revolution those Jacobins promised for women? I’d like to believe a vote for all is on the cards, but the man nearby pissing while strangling his wife leaves me unoptimistic.
‘What a long quilt that is!’ the suckling tricoteuse says. ‘What’s on it? Those patterns look like words.’
‘It’s a list.’
‘Of what?’
‘The dead.’
‘Already dead?’
‘Some. But some to come.’
‘What’s that long one – a name?’
‘Yes – Evrémonde. A man, his wife and his daughter – the last in a long line of scoundrels. Their ancestors are eating worms.’
‘Evil aristocrats,’ she tutts. ‘An unusual quilt. For your bed?’
I jerk my chin at the guillotine. ‘For their beds,’ I say.
For a moment she looks confused, then laughs. ‘You’re knitting a shroud! Those yellow-bellied cunts’ll love that.’
I swill a mouthful of wine and am unsettled again by this afternoon’s plan. The sun is starting to sink, time sprints towards me. After I learned last week that Darnay was in Paris we had him arrested, then attended his hurried trial. I cheered when the death sentence rang out. God knows why he returned – he was aware, I’m told, of my festering need for revenge – but no matter. He’s been condemned since birth and if – when! – I visit his wife and daughter, they too will be.
But something gnaws at me.
Last night my husband muttered, ‘What’s the matter, my love? Your desire to even the score has arrived, yet you seem…not yourself. Are you feeling poorly? Has the ague got you again?’
But I can’t tell him of my dismay that the Revolution has transmuted into a monster, a nightmarish serpent, consuming itself and all in its path, leaving nothing but blood and tattered guts and misery.
In short, vengeance is not the satisfying fine wine expected.
As we finish the black bread and cheese the wind shifts without warning; it’s so feisty it blows a head along the platform, and a raven drops dead from the clouds and hits the guillotine. A murmur sweeps across the crowd, a few cross themselves, and the rabble is no longer its boisterous self; it could be the portentous wind, it could be that, like every day, what’s a thrill in the morning is quite banal by late afternoon. I wipe wine from my chin and pass the flagon to The Vengeance.
Another countess or duchess or lady-in-waiting – number 38 she’ll be – stands before the mob. Her dress is so ragged she clutches its bodice with both hands, her fouled feet are naked, her cheeks and arms and hair mud-filled and gaunt. She stares at the ground, as if contemplating a poem or what to order the servants to prepare for supper. Only the twitching of her brow reveals her terror. For an instant she gapes at the crowd, bewildered; my heart beats – she reminds me of – who? Her eyes twist towards me and suddenly I know her.
I remember that ruby birthmark on her cheek.
It’s the little girl, a guest of the Evrémondes one faraway summer, who saved my sister and I from death. Our bellies were hollow, untouchable fruit withered on the surrounding vines, and she furtively thrust two apples in my pocket, pressed a finger against her lips, then scurried back to the chateau on doll-like legs. I was shocked: it was a gift from god; if the Marquis knew he’d spit rage at the child. I’d never seen such bravery until then.
Amazingly, the little girl – now a woman – recognises me. We gape at each other. Then as the headsman shoves her to her knees her mouth forms a soundless word: Help!
I turn to stone; the shroud sinks from my lap.
All at once I’m overwhelmed by the stench, the closeness, the horse shit, and the blood. I’ve had enough. I don’t want to be here.
She shouldn’t be here.
I stand so abruptly my needles clatter on the stones and my squeezed lungs refuse to breath.
Back at our wineshop my husband is arguing with drunken customers. As I rush towards the bedroom he quickly ends the conversation, jostles the men through the door and bolts it.
‘I can’t do it,’ I say, toppling onto our straw mattress. ‘I can’t deal with this anymore. My heart…it’s stopped.’
‘Did people see you like this?’ he asks, rubbing his hands nervously. ‘You’ll have to tell them you’re sick, or something. You know you can’t be seen running from the guillotine, questioning the Revolution.’
The mattress crunches as I reel. I so wish that I still believed in God – the priests killed that with their sickles of hypocrisy. Ernest sits tentatively on the bed. ‘It’s okay, my love,’ he says. ‘After the last of the Evrémondes is dead you’ll find peace.’
Peace. I want to laugh.
Later I drag myself along the Rue Antoine. The moon scowls at me like a sinner approaching heaven’s gates. At a small, hunched dwelling I pause before hitting the knocker, rest my forehead against the indifferent door. A piano tinkles softly; I peer through the window and see a woman – that woman, the wife of Evrémonde-Darnay – sharing a bench with a girl, their fingers dancing on the keys. The mother’s face is weary, fearful, but she’s hiding it from the child. The child is so small…she has the same hair, sunflower-yellow, as the girl who saved me with an apple.
My fist is frozen; it refuses to tap the knocker. My shoulders slump, and my heart dries up like a dead cabbage. I turn, and plod towards my home, to pack my few belongings, to cower in my husband’s arms.
*
We found a wagon to carry us across the border and, despite the expected perils, were in Geneva within weeks.
Sometimes, late at night, I think of my sister.
Was it a far, far better thing I did? Not killing that child? Not making all the Evrémondes pay?
I’ll let history decide.
