Read Online Illumination by Matthew Plampin - Free Book Online Page A

and certainty with which Clem had identified Jean-Jacques in the Danton. They’d worked it out. They knew everything. She shut the door; so let them know, she thought. Let them form whatever conclusions they please. How can it possibly matter now?
    Jean-Jacques had taken a small notebook from the coat and was attempting to make an entry inside. Writing posed a steep physical challenge for him. The hand within his right glove was a mottled, broken thing, missing both the index and middle fingers, torn to pieces several years ago and clumsily reassembled. He’d told Hannah that this terrible injury had been inflicted at the same time as the slash to his cheek, while he’d been fighting in America against the Southern Confederacy. Assisted by the wooden digits sewn into his glove, he’d managed to develop a scrawl that was just about legible. That morning, however, his distraction proved too much; he’d dropped his pencil before a single word was complete. Kneading the crippled hand, he asked for her assistance.
    Hannah gave it gladly. Jean-Jacques dictated a list of names, dates and directives, rapidly covering three pages. It felt unexpectedly intimate. He was trusting her with the ultras’ secrets, their plans, the lifeblood of their campaign; whereas she hadn’t even been able to reveal the most basic facts of her life before Paris, leaving him to discover them by accident the previous evening. Hannah longed to explain how badly she’d needed to flee from London – to shake off her tired role as the oppressed daughter and begin again – but she knew that this would have to wait. She closed the notebook and handed it back.
    ‘What’s happening?’
    Jean-Jacques put it in his jacket. ‘The army is marching from their camps in the centre of the city. They’re going beyond the wall – to engage Prussian advance forces to the south.’ His attempt at a businesslike bearing failed; he hugged her, another tight, three-second clasp, and then held her out at arm’s length. A thin ribbon of light wound over his face, striping his irises with crimson. ‘It is starting, Hannah, at long last. The fight is finally starting.’
    Hannah swallowed; when she spoke, her voice sounded hoarse and heavy, as if it belonged to someone far older. ‘What – what are we to do?’
    Jean-Jacques let her go. ‘We must gather everyone,’ he said. ‘ Everyone . We must march on the boulevards and show our numbers – our willingness to meet our enemies in battle. We must show that we are ready.’
    He walked to the shed door and pulled it open. Dazed by what he proposed, by what he was already putting into action, Hannah didn’t move; several seconds passed and she heard him ask, ‘ Are you ready, Hannah?’
    She grabbed a cloth from an easel and tried to wipe the paint from her fingers. ‘I am,’ she lied. ‘I was about to leave myself, actually, for the place Saint-Pierre. I only took so long to open the door because I thought you might be my wretched mother, come to deliver the lecture I denied her last night.’ She smiled at her own foolishness. ‘But she’ll be on a train by now, halfway to Calais – a hundred miles from here.’
    Jean-Jacques turned in the doorway; behind him, a bank of sunlit cauliflower leaves dipped in the breeze. ‘What do you mean?’
    Hannah’s headache twitched back to life. ‘If we are engaging the Prussians,’ she said carefully, ‘then Elizabeth will have taken flight. The final trains will have gone.’
    ‘Forgive me, Hannah,’ Jean-Jacques replied, ‘I thought you’d already know. The last railway lines were cut long before dawn. No one made it out this morning.’ He paused. ‘Your mother is caught.’

III
    ‘What sort of a fellow is he, though?’ Clem asked, lighting another cigarette. ‘What exactly are we talking about here?’
    Elizabeth brushed at her slate-grey gown. She had an impatient look to her that morning; in more ordinary circumstances Clem would have stayed out