Seven Men of Gascony

by R. F Delderfield

  Lucy Manaton was thinking clearly now and had fought down her sobs. During the struggle her brain had been clouded by hate, but once she had made up her mind that Louis must be whisked from the house her brain began to work over the possibilities that offered themselves. Like every other person living along the Devon coast she was quite familiar with the extent and practice of the smuggling trade. She knew most of the local characters who took an active part in the galley and fishing-smack traffic that plied to and from the Continent. She knew that within a few miles of Knowle men could be found who were ready to convey escaped prisoners across the Channel, providing that they were sufficiently well paid for the risks. A group of French officers had escaped that way from the Plymouth area less than a year ago. But she must have time to work out a plan.

  Louis checked her flow of ideas.

  “You’d better tell my friends,” he said.

  “Friends?”

  “The sergeant and the others at Bicton.”

  As he said this, Louis experienced a sudden longing for the company of Jean, Nicholas, Gabriel and Dominique. Always before, when there had been difficulty and danger, they had acted as a group. Alone he felt peculiarly helpless, like a child lost on a racecourse.

  As her panic subsided, Lucy had the first glimmering of an idea. “I’ll get you away by sea,” she said. “I know people round here who can arrange it.”

  His sense of helplessness made Louis obstinate.

  “I can’t go without my friends,” he said.

  She snapped back at him: “Don’t be such a fool, Louis. The more that go, the more difficult it is to arrange.”

  “I won’t go without my friends,” he repeated. “We’ve always been together, I couldn’t leave without them.”

  His expression confirmed her in the knowledge that it would be futile to reason with him. She would only be wasting precious time.

  She said: “I’ll find your friends and make arrangements. Go up to the knoll and stay out of sight until I come to you. Quickly! Go now!”

  As they slipped down the ladder, Louis first, he touched her hand in the darkness of Hannibal’s empty stall. He reached forward to kiss her, but she was too impatient and propelled him towards the door with both hands.

  “Please hurry, I’ll come to you, I promise!”

  He ran across the yard and climbed the broken palings of the paddock, disappearing rapidly into the belt of woods. She stood for a moment looking after him and then glanced up at the sky. It was almost light and within an hour the prisoners would be trudging along the road from Bicton to their work on the breakwater. She ran into the hall, threw off her robe and took a fur-lined cape from the cloakroom, slipping her bare feet, splashed with the mud of the yard, into a dirty pair of riding-boots. Then she clumped upstairs, with Harris calling after her, and threw herself into some clothes, descending again in less than a minute.

  Harris caught her by the arm.

  “I wish you’d look at him, m’lady. I’ve tried him with brandy but—”

  “I’m riding for Dr. Ellerman now!”

  She flung the remark over her shoulder and hurried out towards Roxy’s stall. The butler looked after her stupidly, startled out of his old wits and still only half awake. A moment later he heard the clatter of hooves in the yard.

  Lucy knew that she would recognize Old Jean and the others, for she and Louis had met the group going to and from the diggings on several occasions during their recent rides, and once she had attended a barn concert to hear Dominique play. She rode to the diggings at full gallop, but it was yet too early and she found them deserted. Turning, she began to pick her way slowly up the lane to the place where Louis had bandaged Roxy’s injured leg. She passed several groups of men, but her presence there at that early hour did not excite much attention. One or two of them greeted her respectfully and she lifted her crop in acknowledgement.

  At the main road she turned right and walked Roxy slowly back towards Bicton. Just before reaching Budley crossroads she encountered the four voltigeurs, shuffling along in couples, hands in the pockets of their tattered greatcoats and heads down to the keen north-west wind. They looked up at her, and Old Jean nodded a greeting. She reined in to the hedge and beckoned. Jean stopped and came over to her.

  “Tell the others to move on,” she told him.

  He knew instinctively that her presence had something to do with Louis. He was accustomed to thinking and acting quickly and he called across to the hesitating trio. “Move on, Nicholas; I’ll catch you up!” Then he turned back to her inquiringly. “Is it Louis?”

  She nodded. “He told me to find you; he’s in hiding.”

  Jean sucked his teeth. It flashed across his mind that here was something he had expected. He looked at Lucy Manaton with impatience. She had no right to have taken Louis away from the file for her own convenience. Didn’t she understand that anything they did was done together as a unit?

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to get him over to France!”

  “France!”

  Jean’s heart began to beat furiously. Was this the answer to all his ponderings on the subject of escape? Gabriel still had money and they had heard that passages could be bought from the smugglers; but one couldn’t go without the others, while the bribe for five would be prohibitive.

  She solved his problem.

  “How easily can you leave your billets tonight?”

  He chuckled. Years seemed to fall from his lined face.

  “As easily as walking out. There are no guards, we’re on parole.”

  “And the others?” She had never spoken to the man before, but she was quite certain that any attempt to split the group would be useless.

  “They’ll all come, I promise you; five of us, counting Louis.”

  “Do you know a clump of trees called Shortwood Knoll? It’s about two miles from here, at the head of the common?”

  He knew it, having made it his business to study the locality during the past fifteen months.

  “Be there at eleven tonight, all four of you!”

  She clapped spurs into Roxy before he had time to reply, and galloped off down the main road towards Bicton. He stared after a moment, his heart throbbing with joy. Then he moved on after the others and caught them up where the lane opened onto the diggings.

  “How’s Louis?” asked Nicholas casually.

  “He’s coming over with pies tomorrow,” Jean said and picked up his spade. He was not going to have them chattering in the open. He had waited fifteen months and he could wait another twelve hours.

  Lucy did call at Dr. Ellerman’s as she passed his bow-windowed house in Budley, but only to leave a message asking him to go as soon as possible to High Knowle. She told the doctor’s housekeeper that someone there had had a fall. It could all be explained later.

  She did not return towards home but hurried along the Coast road for another two hours or more, stopping only when she had reached a tumbledown cottage at the junction with the cart-track leading down to the village of Beer. Here she dismounted and knocked. A short, enormously thickset man wearing a striped shirt and tight breeches, supported by a highly decorative belt, opened the door. As the man recognized her his heavy features rapidly assumed a respectful expression. He bowed, his bulk making the gesture faintly comic.

  “Thank God you’re at home, Jack!” said Lucy, and without waiting for his invitation she entered the low-ceilinged room. It was so crowded with furniture and seafaring knick-knacks that there was barely space enough for the two of them to sit.

  The fat man closed and bolted the door. His expression relaxed and he winked deliberately. When he smiled, his fat face seemed to dissolve, scores of creases gliding across the moist skin like eels stirred in a bucket. He had small but astonishingly bright blue eyes, set wide apart. His nose was short and decisive. His clean-shaven mouth was wide and humorous, and his bare arms, as thick as table legs, were grotesquely tattooed. He sat down on a stool, whi
ch creaked under his weight, and smacked his bulging thighs.

  “What is it, m’lady? Brandy, lace … I’ve a good bit of stuff here straight from Lille, came in on the Wanderer night afore las’! A risky run it were. I wasn’t on it myself, but Dick Crosbie told me they fetched up agin a cutter—”

  She stopped him with a gesture.

  “I want you to take something out, tonight!”

  He whistled and then winked again.

  “And what would a lady like you want with export trade?” he asked bluntly.

  “Prisoners! Five of them!”

  He shut both his eyes, spread his huge palms on the skin-tight nankeen of his breeches and blew out his lips, making a low, hissing sound.

  “Prisoners!” He did not pursue the question. Jack Rattenbury had not built up a business unrivalled between Weymouth and Dartmouth by enquiring too closely into the motives of his high-class customers. He seldom enquired at all. He had expressed his surprise and that was all. His mind was already busy with figures, risks, cutter patrols, blockade sentinels, tides, wind and all the other factors requiring expert consideration.

  “Prisoners is dangerous!” he said finally.

  Lucy did not take her eyes off him.

  “I’m paying a dangerous price,” she said.

  For the best part of a minute Jack rubbed his nose. Suddenly he screwed up his face so fiercely that his bushy eyebrows met in a long, even hedge.

  “Ten guineas a head!” he announced. “Couldn’t do it for less!”

  He waited, ready to bargain. He had run prisoners in the past for eight and would have dropped as low as seven for Lucy Manaton. She was the daughter of the old Squire, one of his best customers in the days when he was young and spry in the trade and the coast blockade had extended only as far as the Hampshire border.

  Lucy disappointed him. She did not bargain. “Fifty guineas the lot, but it must be tonight, fair or foul!”

  He cocked an eye up at the window as though gauging the weather.

  “You’ll be wanting us over your way for sartin!” said the smuggler, by way of an epilogue to the conversation.

  “I’ll have them down at Sherbrook Goyle by one o’clock,” Lucy promised, and, rising, unbolted the door and passed through the trim little garden to the fence where Roxy was tethered. She mounted and rode off without another word.

  The others located Louis easily enough. It was two hours after dark and he was lying concealed in a thicket on the edge of the knoll. He called out when he recognized Jean’s high-pitched voice and the deeper mumble of Nicholas replying. He told them nothing until he had eaten a crust of the bread they had carried with them. He had been ravenously hungry lying up there since first light, scanning the narrow path for signs of pursuit. He had seen no one but an odd ploughman and an old woman gathering faggots in the wood.

  They exchanged stories and Louis accepted Lucy’s decision as realistically as he had taken her first advice earlier in the day. There was no sense in hanging about waiting for more trouble. It did not occur to him that she might be making a great sacrifice. Their relationship had been intimate and affectionate, but he, no less than she, had been fully aware of its impermanence. To Louis, and to all of them, she had always remained a British aristocrat, with her full share of civic rights, whereas they, as alien prisoners, had no rights at all. Jean said that from what he had seen of her he judged Lucy Manaton capable of steering herself clear of trouble. He knew nothing of the harsh inconsistencies in the character of the local squirearchy, where a woman might command the respect of her neighbours under almost any circumstances except that of preferring a foreigner to an Englishman as bedfellow. Nicholas, who knew the English, had a vague suspicion that all would be far from well with Lucy if it once became known that, in addition to taking a Frenchman for a lover, she had engineered their escape, but he kept his thoughts to himself. It would do no good to worry Louis at this stage and make things more complicated for them all.

  Now that they were on the point of escaping, Nicholas raised no objections. As the second spring in England had advanced he had been growing almost as restless as Jean. The season had stirred in him vague memories of Nicholette, which he had thought buried long ago, or perhaps it was merely his old urge to uproot himself and return to living on the edge of danger, the characteristic which made him prefer the life of a private soldier whilst fully aware of its utter futility. Gabriel and Dominique took their lead from Jean. Both of them had grown to look upon the lean old soldier as infallible. Their trust was partly faith, partly habit. They knew that Jean would keep them alive as long as he could. He had done that with all his subordinates ever since they had made him a sergeant in the camp at Boulogne, nearly a dozen years ago. If Jean had any scruples about breaking his parole he said nothing about them. A chance like this was too good to miss. His first duty was to his regiment. So they packed their kit, and nothing was said when he gave orders to march.

  There was far too much to carry away and they jettisoned a good deal, including Gabriel’s English sketchbook. He tore out two of the water-colours and folded them in neat creases between some oiled packing paper salvaged on the diggings. One was a view of the Exe estuary, looking south-west. The other was a portrait of a rosy Devon child who had often come down to the bank during their rest periods and looked curiously over the Frenchman’s shoulder as he sketched. The portrait was called “Nellie, England, 1811.”

  The men stretched themselves in the thicket and tried to sleep. There was no immediate danger of pursuit, for Louis was the only one who would be missed until the working-parties were checked on the following morning. Jean would have liked a pipe, but he resisted the impulse. They would all want to smoke if he did, and five pipe bowls would be dangerous.

  They lay quiet, watching the moor by the usual bivouac sentry spells. It was astonishing how naturally they slipped back into the old campaign routine. It was as though their period as prisoners of war and dyke labourers had been the occupation of a single day, a routine task in a dull campaign, and now they were back in the vanguard, the army’s feelers for an enemy lying out in the boisterous darkness ahead. Before he slept Jean cocked an eye at the sky. There was no moon, only a glimmer of stars. The wind was fresh, but not too gusty for a voyage in an open boat if it had an expert seaman at the helm.

  Just before midnight Gabriel, who was on watch, heard a pebble rattle on the bridle path below the knoll. He held his breath, listening, and strained his eyes into the darkness. A moment later an indistinct mass showed on the extreme edge of the moor. As it approached, Gabriel saw that it was a single individual, riding a small horse. He woke the others and they waited. The rider came straight for the clump in which they were concealed and stopped. They hesitated, wondering if they should take a chance.

  Presently the figure dismounted and Gabriel, who had the keenest sight, noticed a swirl of skirts. He told Louis, and the coachman’s son wriggled into the clearing and stood up. They saw him exchange a few words with the woman before he returned to them.

  “It’s Lucy herself,” he told them. “We have to follow the pony and no one is to speak; there may be dragoons on patrol nearer the coast.”

  They passed, in single file, down the slope to the path, the woman riding ahead. They followed the track along the edge of the hill, turning to one side where it joined a sunken lane, noisy with dead leaves, which cut through a dense plantation of firs and undergrowth. This track was their guide until it left the wood on the right and plunged down into a cleft between two towering red cliffs running downhill to a shallow ford. The pony splashed gently through the water and they followed suit, all but Jean gasping audibly as the running water reached their knees.

  The narrow road became a black tunnel as the cleft narrowed and the tall trees met overhead. Jean, who went first, could not even see the pony’s tail five yards ahead, but followed the light crunch of its hooves on the gravelled surface.

  Presently they emerged into the open again with the
wind in their faces and heard the suck of the waves below. They were on the edge of the cliffs above Sherbrook Goyle, and there the pony halted. The little mare, Patch, had trodden this same track a hundred times, always in virtual darkness. Lucy had purchased her from a partner of Rattenbury’s and she was familiar with the smugglers’ road.

  They waited at the cliff top for five minutes, but no patrol went by. The wind seemed to drop as they began to pick their way down the landslip to the beach. A zigzag path had been cut, probably by an earlier generation of East Devon smugglers, in the treacherous sandstone, but winter gales had made dangerous inroads into the two-foot ledge. In some places it was hardly more than a narrow shelf, and stakes had been driven into the wall of the cliff to assist the passage of heavily laden men on their way up from the cove below. Their guide was now on foot, having left the pony on a rocky platform a short way down the slope. She picked her way unerringly, bunching her skirts in her right hand, steadying herself with her left, and not once looking behind to see if they followed.

  They blundered along at her heels, grasping one another’s greatcoat skirts, moving like a crocodile of blinded sappers groping their way back from the walls of a beleaguered town. Jean marvelled at the woman’s uncanny instinct. He did not know that Lucy’s father, although Chief Magistrate in the district, had been the smugglers’ patron most of his life and that his daughter’s childhood had been spent clambering up and down these very cliffs in search of gulls’ eggs. Lucy recalled all this as she descended; it pushed the thought of the still figure on the bed at High Knowle deeper and deeper into the unaired corridors of her mind.

  They reached the cove at last and found Rattenbury sitting on a rock, a few yards from his moored craft. Lucy Manaton went over to him, leaving the Frenchmen in a knot at the foot of the cliff. Gabriel saw something pass from the woman’s hand to the portly smuggler, and saw the latter casually stuff whatever it was into his belt and then beckon.