War Zone

Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Rêve woke, and opening her eyes, lay for some time watching the sunshine percolating in narrow golden streams from behind the heavy curtains screening the windows of her bedroom.

She had slept in this room when she was a child and it was not only sentiment which made her choose it again when she returned to the Château. It was a fer vent desire to recapture the happiness, contentment and peace of those years before the Revolution.

She had felt that the white walls patterned with gold roses, the ceiling painted with plump, smiling cupids and the windows overlooking the lake had a magic that would waft her back through time into the en chanted past.

But a room could not give her what she sought, nor indeed could she find within the walls of her old home anything but a yearning for her lost childhood and an apprehension for the future.

More than that, she was haunted by her memories of the Terror-memories which lay like an unhealed, ach ing scar beneath all she did and thought.

There was never a day, as she passed through the hall and up the exquisitely tapered staircase, when she did not remember the hoarse shouts and the banging on the outer doors which had heralded the approach of the revolutionaries.

She could see again her father coming slowly down the stairs, exquisitely dressed as always, the diamonds at his throat glittering in the light of the chandeliers, his thin fingers holding his gold snuff-box as nonchalantly as if he were about to entertain a number of welcome friends.

When they met on the staircase, he stopped and as Rêve looked up at him, her face white with fear, he put two fingers under her chin and turned her face to his. For a moment his eyes looked into hers before he said quietly:

"There is only one thing of which to be afraid, ma fille, and that is of being afraid." Rêve had hardly heard him. Little though she was, she knew something momentous and terrifying was

threatening her very existence. She put out her arms to cling to her father, unaware that she was trembling, conscious only that the shouts outside and the thumping on the outer doors were be coming noisier and more violent.

The Count bent and kissed her and for a moment his lips lingered against her forehead, then with a faint smile he turned towards her nurse who was standing behind. "Allons, Antoinette!" he said briefly and proceeded

downstairs. After that everything had been a nightmare of in coherence and terror. Antoinette had smuggled Rêve down a secret staircase into an ancient passage, damp and stinking from long disuse, which had been tunnelled beneath the lake.

When they had emerged gasping into the open, twenty minutes later, the air had seemed unexpectedly sweet and fresh after the foul atmosphere of the pas sage. And after they had filled their lungs, they had stood within the shelter of the wood to look back at the Château.

Every window was ablaze with light. In some of them the light came from the tapers normally lit at this hour in the great crystal chandeliers and crested silver sconces, but in others the tar-dipped torches of the rev olutionaries gleamed red as blood.

It was some years before Rêve learned how her fa ther had met and greeted the drunken, murderous rabble with courtesy and dignity which for the moment checked their lust for blood.

His indomitable courage had indeed saved his life for a short while; but after he had been taken to Paris and imprisoned there, the death sentence was pro nounced and he ascended the guillotine with a jest on his lips.

The Château had been sacked of most of its contents. But when Rêve returned and took up residence again in the home of her forefathers, she grew used to hearing that those in the household who rose first in the morning had discovered little piles of furniture, drapery and various other articles outside the front door, deposited there by some conscience-stricken citi zens under the darkness of the night.

Once when she was shopping in the village she had seen through an open door in a shop a gilt-framed mir ror which had hung in her father's bedroom. She had stared at it but said nothing, and the shopkeeper, notic ing her glance, went crimson with embarrassment.

Next morning the mirror lay outside the door of the Château. It was little things like this which touched her and made her feel that she was amongst her own people again.

Yet the agonies she had suffered in those years when, homeless and a fugitive, she roamed the country-side with Antoinette, were not easily forgotten.

At first she had been child enough to live from day to day; but as she grew older she had begun to realise how much she was missing of the life she should have enjoyed, the companions she should have had, and the position she should have held.

It was only after Napoleon Bonaparte had risen to power and France was once again behaving in a decent and civilised fashion that Rêve's life underwent a second transformation.

Antoinette had by this time managed to get in touch with some of Rêve's relatives in Paris. They were dull, poverty-stricken cousins who were not important enough to incite the anger of the revolutionaries and had there fore lived through the years of Terror undisturbed and unnoticed.

They made Rêve as welcome as they could, but it was perfectly obvious both to her and to Antoinette that they had no wish to provide a permanent home for a beautiful girl of sixteen and her old nurse. They talked things over frankly and her cousin, François, a middle-aged man whose only real interest in life was in the collection of ancient coins, consulted

an advocate with whom he was on friendly terms.

The latter informed him that the émigrés had been permitted to return home and that Napoleon was in the process of restoring to some of them the property and houses of which they had been deprived during the Revolution.

Following this information it had been decided what would be the best for Rêve to do to make an applica tion through the civil courts, to approach the great Na poleon in person, or to return and attempt to take up residence in the Château which was known to be empty and unoccupied. It was Rêve who made the final decision.

"I will speak to the Emperor myself," she said. At the Tuileries, where Napoleon had taken up his official residence, she managed by the usual method of bribery and cajolery of the Court officials to gain en trance to the ante-chamber where those desirous of an audience with the Emperor waited their turn, some times fruitlessly for months on end.