Lucinda Elliot's Blog, page 40

They are here at last!

Sophie watches from the landing window of the middle stairs as the carriage draws up, and two young men spring out.

She thinks herself  indeed a fool, for as the long  fair haired one springs down, full of energy, helping his stocky dark haired overdressed valet adn the other to hand down the luggage, she feels her face burn. She really must get over this infatuation…

She has to laugh as she notices that this man, her grand relative, Lord Ynyr’s cousin, is fair, while his vale (who looks very vain) is dark. No doubt Agnes will nod sagely at this, imagining it to be proof that her absurd fortune telling predictions are coming true.

Monsieur Emile is recognisible as the lanky boy she remembers from that weddng where Lord Ynyr, following his instructions in the art of handstands, ruined his breeches, but now he’s broad shouldered and muscular.

Sophie is staying away as it seems forward to impose her presence on this family reunion, rendered tragic by the fact that Monsieur Emile is now the sole surviving member of his family.  Lord Ynyr is at his side already, and Emile turns to wring his cousin’s hands, while Miss Morwenna rushes down the steps, all happiness. The Dowager Countess follows with more dignity, the Sad Tangles in this morning’s crochet work forgotten.

Roughly the sort of clothing that Emile Dubois and Lord Ynyr would have worn in 1795.

Emile Dubois is kissing Miss Morwenna’s hand gallantly, while his rougish looking valet pauses in his handling of the baggage to take a quick, admiring  look at her.

How impertinent! Sophie is shocked, but of course, it may be that the social upheaval in France has done away with much of the old deference between man and master.

Sophie allows the family three quarters of an hour by themselves, and then shyly enters the first drawing room.

The Dowager Countess spots her first, and calls her over. “Sophie, do not be shy. Here is my nephew, Monsieur Emile…”

Monsieur Emile, chatting with the others by the magnificent ornate fireplace, turns.

Sophie imagines that a tiger must have come in behind her, or an assassin with a knife between his teeth, for her grand relative freezes, eyes dilated, jaw dropped…

Sophie, in her bath, sees Agnes flick surreptitiously through those forbidden Tarot cards…

This is a picture  of Lady Hamilton, and I think she has something of the look about her that I imagined in Ceridwen Kenrick, Kenrick’s beautiful, wanton wife…

Sophie – innocent but sensual girl as she is – likes to enjoy a hot bath before a blazing fire on a cold winter’s day, and as she relaxes in it, and Agnes goes through to the dressing room to get out her dinner clothes, she sees the irrepressible girl get out her Tarot pack, turn

Another version of ‘The Lovers’ Tarot trump card…

them face downwards, pull out one and turn it round.

“Agnes, you are incorrigible! You are to those cards again and we can imagine what the Reverend Smythe Jones would say.”

Sophie hears Agnes snort, but not too loudly, so she can afford to ignore it. “Mr Smythe Jones would do well to recognise his own faults, Miss Sophie, like being too fond of the table.” She adds, mischivously, “The Lovers is come up again, Miss..” She puts the cards back in her pocket.

Sophie clicks her tongue, but can’t dispute that the Vicar is fond of his dinner. “What did I say earlier, Agnes? By the time these admirers you predict arrive, we shall -”

“Ah, beg pardon for interrupting, Miss, but by the by, I heard his Lordship saying to his man that his cousin Monsieur Emile has written him that he’s coming to  visit at last, and to expect him inside the sennight.”

Sophie feels her face go hot. Long, lanky, green eyed Monsieur Emile has been her hero since she first met him at a wedding party when she was about eight and he was twelve or so. She still remembers his lazy smile of greeting, and how graciously he accepted a hair encrusted, flattened cake from his youngest sister Marguerite. “Thank you, ma chere, I will enjoy that…”

For years he was lying low in France, in danger of his life every day as the son of a family who’d engaged in coutner revolutionary activity (ironical indeed, for Sophie has heard Lord Ynyr remark that if anything, Emile’s views were too sympathetic to the proponents of the Revolutuion). Finally, she heard last summer that he was saf ein England, but he has been a long time coming to visit his Aunt here, though Lord Ynyr met him briefly in Town in the autumn.

His Lordship had come back from that trip to London and expressed himself to the Dowager Countess about the ‘back biting, mean gossip in the clubs’ with unusual warmth. “The most preoposerous stories are given credence, you would scarcely credit it, Ma’am…”

“And what has he to do with an admirer, Agnes?” Sophie stands up in her bath and Agnes comes to envelope her in one of the towels warming at the fire.

“Oh, nothing in the world, Miss…They do say that Mr Kenrick’s new wife is coming up at last, too.”

“I’ve heard she’s accounted a great beauty.”

Agnes does some more snorting as she pats Sophie dry. “Yes, Miss, and non too virtuous, neither…I’ll lay that that hulking footman comes up with her, Arthur.”

Sophie isn’t quite sure what that has to do with her virtue, or lack of it…

Here’s a sensual painting by a later painter, Renoir, whose subject nevertheless has some of the voluptuous beauty of the wanton Ceridwen Kenrick…

Tarot predictions – with The Lovers, of course…

Agnes’ Tarot set will have been far more like the one above than the one recognisable to modern readers, below…

So, here I sit in the Manor, toasting my toes by the fireside and illicitely reading ‘Clarissa’ when I should be perusing my Bible, it being Sunday.

Still worse, I have been thinking  improper thoughts about wishing for romance and aventure with a man who will make me tingle as Lord Ynyr, though so delightful, handsome, and in every way agreeable ( besides being so much my social superior that my even aspiring to think of him as a prospective marriage partner is an impertinence in itself).

On top of everything else, I have been thinking of Kenrick, quite uncharitable thoughts about how repuslive I find him, and how dreadful it was to find him by my bed.

So, I turn my thoughts to the village children’s Christmas party. Lord Ynyr always holds one for his tenants, and although present giving properly belongs to St Nicholas’ Day I have been making a small present for each of them. I hope I have made enough dolls for the girls…

And here is Agnes, I know her brisk footsteps well, bustling in to poke up the fire and accouncing that ‘They will be here in a fortnight.’

“What, Agnes?” For I am still thinking of the dolls.

“The young men from abroad, of course. The dark one and the fair one. They will be here in a sennight. “

I tease her, “Why, Agnes, I have been quite taken in. You said that we should each of us have an admirer when first I came here six months since, and they are still not here. Such laggardly dispatch is far from encouraging. By the time they arrive, we will all of us have grey hair and the rheumatics.’

But she is not to be drawn; “They will be here in days. ” She gives me a thoughtful look. “It’s only fair to warn you, though, miss, that they are both of them rascals.”

I am shocked. “Why, Agnes, as if I would encourage the advances of a rascal!”

She just smiles. “You won’t be able to help yourself, Miss Sophie, you will fall for him like a ton of coals being delivered.”

After this inelegant simile, the shameless girl keeps a smiling silence.

I wish what she said would come true for sure, for I long, with the weak and erring part of me, for romance and adventure.

Agnes has shown me her Tarot pack. I drew back from it, finding myself uneasy yet fascinated by the evocative images of those sinister cards.  “The Lovers, Miss Sophie. It has been coming up for you and me these past six months.”

“Let us hope it doesn’t continue to do so for the next sixty years.”

‘You’re That Scoundrel Emile Dubois!’

Toll gates and patrols were making a highwayman’s life more difficult by the 1790′s. Monsieur Gilles and Southern Georges might have the wiliness to avoid capture for some time, but the odds were against them escaping the highwayman’s end at Tyburn for long.

“You’re That Scoundrel Emile Dubois! I know you by your eyes!” Lord Dale is so full of moral outrage as the masked men relieve him of his valuables that he forgets his terror.

This, and the general difficulty of evading patrols and toll gates makes Monsieur Gilles and Southern Georges decide to retire from life as Gentleman of the Road, and to leave London.

Later, Lord Dale repeats this in his clubs.  Lord Ynyr, Emile’s cousin and Sophie’ s benefactor, hears him say, ‘That ruffian Emile Dubois and that valet of his are highwaymen, sure as fire…’

Fortunately, another member of the club smooths matters over; Lord Dale has had enough of facing cold steel.

This, and the general problems with patrols and tollgates decide Emile and Georges to leave London and its environs and to take a trip up north to Wales, where they finally arrive on Christmas Eve.

Sophie’s maid Agnes’ Tarot has long predicted the arrival of two young men from abroad…

Monsieurs Gilles and Georges, Gentlemen of the Road, in Brentford

For a while after their fellow highwyaman Tom’s shooting by a patrol of soldiers, Emile (known as Monsieur Gilles) and Georges lie low.  They have been dividing life between Emile’s town house, where Georges is Emile’s valet  and life in Brentford, where they are equals and stay with  the jovial rascal Mr Kit and his overbearings stout  wife,  Dolly.

Monsieur Gilles, shirt sleeves rolled up, skins a rabbit for Mrs Kit in her kitchen.  “I still cannot credit your being the cousin of some Lord, and able to light a fire and skin a coney as well as any of us. I never thought of gentry as having freckles, neither.”

He’s lost in thought and doesn’t answer for a minute; then he snaps back to the present, and smiles at her. “But I ain’t exactly lived as one of the gentry in a while, Dolly. As for the freckles, I always had the ugly things. I remember when my youngest sister was a baby, she asked -” he breaks off abruptly. “If it weren’t for Georges, I’d be tempted to go out on the highway again. I don’t like hiding away after what became of Tom.”

She crosses her arms: “Will it bring him back to get yourself shot, too?”

“I said, if it weren’t for Georges…Here we are, all done…I’m thinking Georges and I might go and stay with Cousin Ynyr in Wales.”

“In Wales! That’s a world away…”

“And yet it isn’t such a big world at that, Dolly. I met one Kenrick who I used to know from staying at Cousin Ynyr’s at a lecture in London when I was being my other self.  I never did like him, and he ain’t improved, bien sur. Still, I should thank him for making me laugh with the wild notions he came out with, all about time travel and wizardry.”

Dolly gawps. “Time travel, you say? Now I have heard everything.”

Georges stands in the doorway. “A lecture, you say, Monsieur Gilles?” He jeers. “No wonder the looby’s brain is turned, if he wastes his time with suchlike stuff. You’ll do yourself a mischief one of these days, overtaxing your mind by reading too many of them fancy books.”

Emile laughs. “It may be the tollgates and patrols pose a still bigger threat to rapscalions such as ourselves, Georges…”

Mrs Kit shakes her head. “You and them fancy words of yours, Gilles. You’ve done a neat job of that rabbit, anyway.”

Monsieur Gilles and Southern Georges – as highwaymen

Swinley Forest – once a notorious danger spot for highway robbery.

So, skipping a bit now, I come to a slight career change on the part of those two assiduous rascals, Emile Dubois and his one-time valet Georges.

They’ve escaped to the UK, and Emile’s sister Charlotte -the only one he succeeded in rescuing on the night of the riot in Provence, when their family chateau was razed – has now succumbed to the decline from which the unfortunate girl had been suffering for years.

This is tragic for Emile, but it breaks off his last tie with the need to return to respectability; he can be a determined rogue now, and indulge his carelessness with his life as much as he wants; he’s got no surviving relative to consider.

He is hardly in a frame of mind himself to let the threat of a public hanging at Tyburn deter him; and high grounded moral scruples and fear are not things Georges understands, though his inherent sense of fairness means that he is happy to join Emile in his suggestion that they help to redistribute wealth in favour of the less wealthy a little – by acting out the part of a couple of late eighteenth century Robin Hoods, robbing wealthy travellers and giving a large part of their booty away to the poor.

On the night of Charlotte’s funeral, Emile, whose unusually taciturn state worried even the less than sensitive Georges, begins to talk again. “My financial affairs are involved, Georges. A good thing my grandfather had the prescience to invest half his money in Britain, eh? I should go and rusticate at Dubois Court in Buckinghamshire, fending off creditors with my tongue. Frankly, the thought does not appeal. Recollect you our fellow ruffian’s mention of one Mr Kit, living in Brentford…”

They soon set up a business concern with Mr Kit, and are joined by a man called Tom, who tries to rival them in gallantry towards the ladies, of the sort ascribed to highwaymen so often in legend, though not unfortunately, so often true in real life.

Of course, they have to watch out for patrols, ever more frequent in the 1790′s, and turnpikes are the bane of their lives, but they manage to escape from serious trouble until one night when they are surprised by a group of soldiers, and Tom is killed being dragged from his bolting horse…

Some thoughts about the Terror…

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Here’s some jolly pictures pertaining to the execution of aristocrats during the French revolution. That is a of the guillotine used circa 1793, I shouldn’t imagine the original was painted red, though I haven’t been able to find out…

I’m just breaking off here to make a few comments about the historical background to this story.

By the way, it does, I promise, become as Gothic and over-the-top as any Gothic addict could wish when Emile soon arrives in Wales, and encounters the would be time-travelling vampire, Kenrick, with his precious spectacles and habit of drooling on pretty girls’ hands; (of course, Sophie has already met this invididual, once in the dining room, and once by her bed).

People’s perception of The French Revolution often seems to be on sensationalist lines -  the looming guillotine, Charles Dickens’ lurid depiction in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ , thousands of heads rolling into buckets  every day, frenzied crowds of sans cullotes cheering, the tumbrils rolling through the streets…

Two reservations are appropriate here: George Orwell’s comment that regarding the Napoleonic Wars, more people were killed in any of Napoleon’s big battles than were killed during  the years of the Terror, and that the guillotine, though peculiarly associated in people’s minds with the French Revolution, was merely a comparatively humane mode of execution (compared to the slow hangings favoured in Britain, for instance) introduced at that time and used until shortly before the death penalty was abolished in France in 1981 (last used in 1977).

For aristocrats, though, and unfortunately often for those among them like Emile who had opposed the outrageously unjust situation of the  peasants in the old order – taxed to support the artistocracy and with no political representation – the threat  of execution was a real nightmare, with the new government inflexible in its definitions of who was an ‘enemy of the state’ and what constituted counter revoluionary activity.

For sure, Emile’s parents have truly engaged in counter revolutionary activity, been arrested, and await trial .  He tries to get them out through bribery and corruption, while lying low disguised as Gilles a journeyman employee in one Marcel ‘Sly Boots” workshop; this workshop serves as a front for the eighteenth century style protection racket to which Marcel and his men subject the better off’hucksters’. They know how to get round the form of conscription just introduced, the Grand Levee…

Emile of course -two of whose younger siblings have been acidentally killed when their family Chateau was set on fire – must always regard the Revolution with horror – yet as a natural democrat, had his family survived, it would be more in line with his general temperment  to support the aims, if not the methods, of the Revolution.

News from Citizen Gilles…

Georges’ piratical lieutenant isn’t able to make any money by letting Gilles Longlegs know where the blonde Englishwoman has gone. She seems to have vanished completely.

A couple of weeks later, Georges is in his room behind the workshop which serves as a necessary cover for his activities, entertaining two women once again (perhaps this time one of them won’t pass out).

People  might call them ‘Women of Easy Virtue’  or ‘Women of the Night’ but women have to make a living as best they can, particularly in times of social upheaval. Anyway, he sits with them perched one on each knee, and as the dark one of is a  strapping girl he is even more proud than usual of his strong legs, heavily muscled like the rest of him. He has a hand on the blonde girl’s knee and is surreptitiously pinching the dark girl’s bottom.

He’s interrupted by a small boy running in, and glances down slightly irritated. “Yes, boy?”

“Citizen Gilles said to give you this.”

“Oh, did he?” Georges huffs. “If he thinks that I am coming to terms so easy over the cooked meat shop…”

The girls are all admiration at the ease with which he scans the note, but can tell from his dilated eyes and quickened breathing that the news isn’t good.

“Is it heavy news?” The dark girl is caressing his chest. “You read?”

The note says, ‘The truffles were gone before I knew of it.”

Georges flashes his white teeth in a wide smile. “Reading ain’t good for you.” Certainly, after only reading one line, his mood has changed completely. He goes on, ” I must disappint you girls – but not as much as myuself.   I hope you will take a little gift from me..”

He tosses a coin too, to the gawping child. “I suppose I must talk with them others over this Take me to Gilles”

One of the girls kisses him. “Do not be naughty and get into a dispute with him…” The other is too busy putting the money in her bosom.

Georges sees the girls out gallantly. So Emile’s parents have gone unexpectedly to the guillotine…

Southern Georges Revels in Excess ..

Meanwhile, Georges, Emile’s companion in roguishness and one time servant, is disporting himself – as usual in his time off from his warlord existence – in female company when he hears the news about Monsieur Gilles’ romantic misadventures from one of his lieutenants.

He’s eating onion soup, and a very voluptuous woman with Titian colouring is feeding him croutans. Another girl was with them, earlier, but having taken too much wine, she has retired to a chair in the corner to doze and giggle.

Georges finds this  bandit’s lifestyle  rather more to his taste than his life as servant in the Dubois family chateau in Provence; true, he worked for Emile – as democratic and easy going a master as he would be likely to find – but he was only a servant, reliant on his devastating profile, flashing dark eyes, curling dark hair and muscles.

He knows that it is rumoured of him that he has bedded half the married and unmarried women in his area; of course, he hasn’t; but he swells with pride when he hears such stories.

Georges’ lieutenant  is sweaty, possibly with enthusiasm for a new project -  but more likely because it’s warm spring weather and he has no access to a bath,  and he likes to tie his head up in a scarf after the manner of a pirate, a style of headress that Georges finds ridiculous in a landsman.

“Southern, fun and games over with Gilles Long Legs’ lot; seems he was much taken with some little blonde bourgoise he took to one of them parties that that Marcel  Sly Boots keeps having, and she’s vanished.”

Georges’ eyebrows go up and he puts down his spoon. Something flickers in the depths of his eyes, perhaps, but his underling doesn’t see it and Georges returns his eyes to the girl sitting across from him, who has undone several fastenings on her dress “If I was him, I’d've kept in with that Lola. She was some woman! That bosom, that rump…”

The girl jerks her chin in annoyance, and Georges says hastily, “Nearly as good as this beauty, here…Don’t tell me you interrupted us to tell me about some minx running off from Gilles?”

“No, but he was looking for her all night, sent others out looking too. I heard all about it from My Source. Maybe he’d pay well lot to find her again.”

Georges has pulled up the woman’s skirts under the table, and is exploring underneath; she reaches across too and his voice comes out constrained. “Do him a favour, then, and see if you can find the wench…”

It Would be Writing a Spoiler to Say How Sophie comes to be in Revolutionary Paris…

It would be a spoiler to say how Sophie comes to turn up in Revolutionary Paris in May 1794 (when by all accounts she should be in her older brother John’s house in Chester, before being despatched to Plas Uchaf, North Wales) , but anyway, Emile as Monsieur Gilles  meets her and is touched.

Very touched; you might say, besotted.

After all, Emile isn’t naturally heartless, though he may be leading a brutal lifestyle; in creating him, I wanted to portray a male protagonist who is, in fact, naturally amiable and jolly, high spirited, playful, and given to laughing at himself.

He’s a nice rogue (though one with a violent streak as regards other men) who gets caught up in a series of impossible situations.

All this is watched by Francoise, the grand-daughter of the alarming woman who runs the lodging house where Emile lives with his fellow scoundrels.  She knows all about falling in love; she’s missing her old sweetheart back in the south, from where she knows Monsieur Gilles comes too (but not, of course, who he really is).

‘Les Monsieurs’ s their terrible landlady calls them, often hold a party of an evening, with Marcel Sly boots playing the violin. Emile brings Sophie to this, where she literally lets her hair down.

Everyone notices Monsieur Gilles distress when the little fair, shy Anglaise suddenly vanishes; he spends the night searching for her; the story even gets back to a member of a rival group, one ‘Southern Georges’, a handsome, dark, vain fellow whose sexual conquests are a by word…