by Tom Sharpe
‘But Frisson is over there,’ said Peregrine, pointing to the south.
‘I know it is but we’ll make out we’ve lost the way.’
‘Bit odd, considering we’ve got maps and compasses,’ said Peregrine. ‘Still, if you say so.’
‘I do,’ said Glodstone grimly, and heaved himself to his feet. For the next hour they trudged across the stony plateau and Glodstone became increasingly irritable. It was extremely hot and his feet were beginning to hurt. All the same, he forced himself to keep going and it was only when they came to a dry gully with steep sides that he decided to revise his tactics.
‘No good trying to reach the Château tonight,’ he said, ‘and in any case this looks like a suitable site for a cache of foodstuffs. We’ll leave half the tins here. We can always comes back for them later on if we need them.’ And unhitching his rucksack he slumped it to the ground and began to undo his bootlaces.
‘I shouldn’t do that,’ said Peregrine.
‘Why not?’
‘Major Fetherington says you only make your feet swell if you take your boots off on a route march.’
‘Does he?’ said Glodstone, who was beginning to resent Major Fetherington’s constant intrusion even by proxy. ‘Well, it so happens all I’m doing is pulling my socks up. They’re wrinkled inside the boots and the last thing I want is to get blisters.’ For all that, he didn’t take his boots off. Instead he unstrapped the sleeping-bag, undid his rucksack and took out six tins. ‘Right, now we’ll dig a hole and bury the emergency supplies here.’
While Peregrine quarried a cache in the side of the gully, Glodstone lit his pipe and checked the map again. By his reckoning they had covered only six miles and had another nine to go. And nine more miles across this confoundedly stony ground in one day would leave him a cripple.
‘We’ll go on for another hour or two,’ he said when Peregrine had finished stowing the tins in the hole and covered them with soil. ‘Tomorrow morning we’ll make an early start and be in a good position to spy out the land round the Château before anyone’s up and about.’
For two hours they tramped on across the causse, encountering nothing more threatening than a few scrawny sheep, one of which Peregrine offered to shoot.
‘It would save using any of the tins and I don’t suppose anyone would miss just one sheep,’ he said. ‘The Major’s always telling us to live off the land.’
‘He wouldn’t tell you to go around blasting away at sheep if he were with us now,’ said Glodstone. ‘The shot would be heard miles away.
‘I could always slit its throat,’ said Peregrine, ‘nobody would hear anything then.’
‘Except a screaming bloody sheep,’ said Glodstone, ‘and anyway it’s out of the question. We’d still have to cook it and the smoke would be spotted.’
But Peregrine wasn’t convinced. ‘We could roast bits of it over the Calor-gas stoves and that way—’
‘Listen,’ said Glodstone, ‘we’ve come here to rescue the Countess, not to butcher sheep. So let’s not waste time arguing about it.’
Finally they found a hollow with several thorn trees and bushes in it and Glodstone called a halt. ‘We can’t be more than three miles from the river and from there we’ll be able to view the Château,’ he said, as they unrolled their sleeping-bags and put a billycan of water on a stove. Above them, the evening sky was darkening and a few stars were visible. They ate some sardines and baked beans and made coffee, and Glodstone, having added some brandy to his, began to feel better.
‘Nothing like the open-air life,’ he said, as he climbed into his sleeping-bag and put his dentures in the empty coffee mug.
‘Hadn’t one of us better stay on guard?’ asked Peregrine. ‘I mean, we don’t want to be taken unawares.’
Glodstone groped for his false teeth. ‘In the first place, no one knows we’re here,’ he said when he’d managed to find them and get them back in his mouth, ‘and in the second, we’ve come the devil of a long way today and we’re going to need all our strength when we reach the Château.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. We’ve only come about twelve miles and that’s not all that far. I don’t mind taking the first watch and I can wake you at midnight.’
‘I shouldn’t if I were you,’ said Glodstone, and put his teeth back into the mug. He lay down and tried to make himself comfortable. It wasn’t easy. The ground in the hollow was uneven and he had to sit up again to dislodge several stones that had wedged themselves under his sleeping-bag. Even then he was unable to get to sleep but lay there conscious that his hip seemed to be resting on a small mound. He shifted sideways and finally got it settled but only at the expense of his right shoulder. He turned over and found his left shoulder on a stone. Once more he sat up and pushed the thing away, upsetting the coffee mug in the process.
‘Damn,’ he mumbled, and felt around for his teeth. As he did so, Peregrine, who had been peering suspiciously over the edge of the hollow, slid down towards him.
‘Don’t move another inch,’ said Glodstone indistinctly.
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’ve mislaid my bloody dentures,’ Glodstone mumbled, aware that his authority was being eroded by this latest admission of a physical defect, and terrified that Peregrine would step on the damned things. In the end, he found the top plate resting against something that felt suspiciously like sheep droppings. Glodstone shoved it hurriedly back into the mug and made a mental note to wash it carefully in the morning before having breakfast. But the bottom plate was still missing. He reached across for his torch and was about to use it when Peregrine once more demonstrated his superior fieldcraft and his night vision by whispering to him not to turn it on.
‘Why the devil not?’ asked Glodstone.
‘Because there’s something moving around out there.’
‘Probably a blasted sheep.’
‘Shall I slip out and see? I mean, if it’s one of the swine and we captured him, we could make him tell us how to get into the Château and what’s going on there.’
Glodstone sighed. It was a long, deep sigh, the sigh of a man whose bottom plate was still missing while the other was in all probability impregnated with sheep dung, and who was faced with the need to explain that it was extremely unlikely that one of the ‘swine’ (a term he regretted having used so freely in the past) was wandering about on a barren plateau at dead of night.
‘Listen,’ he hissed through bare gums, ‘even if it is one of them, what do you think they’re going to think when the … er … blighter doesn’t turn up in the morning?’
‘I suppose they might think—’
‘That we’re in the neighbourhood and have got him and he’s told us he knows. So they’ll be doubly on the qui-vive and—’
‘On the what?’
‘On the lookout, for God’s sake. And the whole point of the exercise is that we take them by surprise.’
‘I don’t see how we’re going to do that,’ said Peregrine. ‘After all, they know we’re coming. That oil trap in the forest—’
‘Told them we’re coming by road, not across country. Now shut up and get some sleep.’
But Peregrine had slid quietly back up the bank and was peering intently into the night. Glodstone resumed the search for his teeth and finally found them covered in sand. He dropped them into the mug and transferred this to a safer spot inside his rucksack. Then he wormed down into his sleeping-bag again and prayed that Peregrine would let him get some rest. But it still took him some time to fall asleep. A lurking feeling that he had made a mistake in bringing Peregrine with him nagged at his mind. He was no longer a young man and there was something about Peregrine’s fitness and his blasted fieldcraft that irritated him. In the morning, he’d have to make it quite clear who was in charge.
In fact it was only an hour or so later when he was woken. The weather had changed and it had begun to drizzle. Glodstone stared bleakly from his one eye into a grey mist and shivered. He was stiff and cold and doubly
aggravated to see that Peregrine had covered his own sleeping-bag with his groundsheet and pools of water had gathered in the folds. In Glodstone’s case it had soaked through the bag itself and the bottom half felt decidedly damp.
‘Stay in here any longer and I’ll go down with pneumonia,’ he muttered to himself, and, crawling out, put on a jersey, wrapped the groundsheet round his shoulders and lit the stove. A cup of coffee with a bit of brandy in it would take off the chill. Blearily, he filled the billycan with water and had put his top dentures in his mouth before being reminded by their earthy taste and something else where they had been. Glodstone spat the things out and rinsed them as best he could. Presently, huddled under the groundsheet, he was sipping coffee and trying to take his mind off his discomfort by planning their strategy when they reached the Château. It was rather more difficult than he had foreseen. It had been all very well to drive across France, eluding pursuit, but now that they were so close to their goal he began to see snags. They couldn’t very well march up to the front door and ask for the Countess. In some way or other they would have to let her know they were in the vicinity and were waiting for her instructions. And this would have to be done without giving the game away to anyone else. The phrase brought him up short. ‘The game away’? In the past he had always thought of the great adventure as a game but now in the cold, wet dawn, squatting in a hollow in a remote part of France, it had a new and rather disturbing reality about it, one involving the genuine possibility of death or torture and something else almost as alarming. For one brief moment, Glodstone sensed intuitively the unlikelihood that he should have been asked to rescue a Countess he had never met from villains occupying her own Château. But a raindrop dribbling down his nose into his coffee mug put an end to this insight. He was there in the hollow. He had received her letters and two attempts had been made, at Dover and again in the forest of Dreux, to stop his coming. Those were undeniable facts and put paid to any doubts about the improbability of the mission. ‘Can’t have this,’ he muttered, and stood up. Over the edge of the hollow drifts of light rain shifted across the plateau, obscuring the horizon and giving the broken terrain the look of no man’s land as he had seen it in photographs taken in the Great War. He turned and prodded Peregrine. ‘Time to be moving,’ he said, and was horrified to find the barrel of a revolver pointing at him.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ said Peregrine, who was all too evidently a light sleeper and one who woke instantly, ‘I thought—’
‘Never mind what you bloody thought,’ snapped Glodstone, ‘do you have to sleep with the damned gun? I could have been shot.’
Peregrine scrambled out. ‘I didn’t have it cocked,’ he said without any attempt at apology, ‘it was just in case anyone attacked us in the night.’
‘Well, they didn’t,’ said Glodstone. ‘It would have been a dashed sight more helpful if you’d let me know it was raining. As it was, I got soaked.’
‘But you told me I wasn’t to wake you. You said—’
‘I know I what I said but there’s a difference between blathering on about sheep being people and letting me get pneumonia.’
‘Actually it was a pig,’ said Peregrine. ‘When you started snoring it started moving this way and I thought I’d better go out and head it off.’
‘All right, let’s get some breakfast,’ said Glodstone. ‘The one good thing about this drizzle is that we’ll be able to approach the Château without being seen, especially if we move off as soon as possible.’
But getting anywhere near the Château proved easier said than done. They had covered a couple of miles when the plateau ended on the edge of a deep ravine whose sides were thick with thorny undergrowth. Glodstone looked over and hesitated. There was no question of fighting their way down it. ‘I think we’d better head round to the north,’ he said, but Peregrine was consulting his map.
‘If I’m right,’ he said, adopting an expression Glodstone considered his own and consequently resented, ‘we’re too far to the north already, the Château lies three miles south-south-west from here.’
‘What makes you so sure?’ said Glodstone, once more feeling that Peregrine was getting the upper hand.
‘I counted the paces.’
‘The paces?’
‘We’ve come about three thousand yards and if we’d been going in the right direction we should have come to these woods by now.’
‘What woods?’ said Glodstone, looking round wearily.
‘The ones on the map,’ said Peregrine, ‘they’re marked green and the river is just beyond them.’
Glodstone peered at the map and was forced to agree that there were woods opposite the Château. ‘Must be something wrong with my compass,’ he said. ‘All right, you lead the way but for God’s sake go carefully and don’t hurry. We can’t afford to take any chance of being spotted now.’ And having tried to ensure that Peregrine wouldn’t march off at some godawful speed he plodded along behind him. This time there was no mistake and an hour later they had entered the woods marked on the map. They sloped away from the plateau and then rose to a ridge.
‘The river must be on the other side,’ said Peregrine, ‘We have only to get to the top and the Château should be opposite us.’
‘Only,’ muttered Glodstone, disentangling his sodden trousers from a bramble bush. But Peregrine was already pushing ahead, weaving his way through the undergrowth with a cat-like stealth and litheness that Glodstone couldn’t emulate. Before they had reached the ridge, he had twice had to retrieve his monocle from bushes and once, when Peregrine suddenly froze and signalled to him to do the same, had stood awkwardly with one foot poised over a pile of twigs.
‘What the devil are we waiting for?’ he asked in a hoarse whisper. ‘I can’t stand here like a damned heron on one leg.’
‘I could have sworn I heard something,’ said Peregrine.
‘Another bloody sheep, I daresay,’ muttered Glodstone but Peregrine was immune to sarcasm.
‘You don’t get sheep in woods. They’re ruminants. They eat grass and—’
‘Have two blasted stomachs. I know all that. I didn’t come all this way to listen to a lecture on animal physiology. Get a move on.’
‘But you said—’
Glodstone put his foot down to end the discussion and, shoving past Peregrine, blundered on up the hill. As he crested the rise, he stopped for a moment to get his breath back only to have it taken away again by the view ahead. Like some holy shrine to which he had at last come, the Château Carmagnac stood on a pinnacle of rock half a mile away across the Gorge du Boose. Even to Glodstone the Château exceeded a lifetime’s devotion to the unreal. Towers and turrets topped by spire-like roofs were clustered around an open courtyard which seemed to overhang the river. An ornate stone balustrade topped the cliff and to the south, beneath the largest tower, was an archway closed by a massive pair of gates.
Then, realizing that he might be seen from its windows, he dropped to the turf, and, reaching for his binoculars, scanned the place in an ecstasy mixed with anxiety, as if the Château was some mirage which might at any moment disappear. But the glasses only magnified his joy. Everything about the Château was perfect. Window-boxes of geraniums hung from the first floor as did a stone balcony; a tiny belvedere perched on a slim promontory above the cliff; orange trees in tubs stood on either side of the steps leading down from doors set in a tower whose walls were pierced at intervals to indicate the passage of a staircase that circled up it. In short, all was as Glodstone would have had it. And as he looked, the sun broke through the clouds and the spires and the flagstones of the courtyard gleamed silver in its light.
Glodstone put down the binoculars and studied the surrounding landscape. It was rather unpleasantly at odds with the Château itself and while the latter had a festive air about it, the same couldn’t be said for its environs. To put it bluntly, the country was as bleak and barren as the Château was ornamental. A few rather desiccated walnut trees had been planted, and presumab
ly irrigated ever since, to provide an avenue for the portion of the drive closest to the main gates but for the rest the Château was surrounded by open ground which afforded no cover. And the drive itself was formidable. Cut into the rock to the south of the Château, it writhed its way up the cliff in a series of extraordinary bends which suggested a truly maniacal desire for the spectacular on the part of its designer. Finally, to make the approach by road still more secure, a wooden bridge without a guard rail spanned the river.
‘Dashed cunning,’ Glodstone muttered. ‘There’s no way of crossing that bridge without signalling your coming.’ As if to prove the truth of this observation, a van turned off the road below them and rattled slowly across the planks before grinding its way in bottom gear up the guarded drive. Glodstone watched it reach the walnut trees and disappear round the rear of the Château. Then he turned hopefully to the north in search of an easier way up. True, the slope was less perpendicular than the cliff but the few stunted thorn trees managing to grow among the rocks afforded little cover. And the rocks themselves seemed untrustworthy, to judge by the number that had rolled down and now formed a barrier along the riverbank. Last but by no means least in the list of natural hazards the river itself. It swirled round the base of the cliff with a dark and malevolent turbulence that suggested it was both deep and subject to dangerous currents.
‘Well, we’ve had a preliminary look at the place,’ he told Peregrine. ‘What we need now is to establish a base camp out of sight and get something warm inside us while we consider the next move.’
They crawled back off the ridge and found a suitable space among the bracken. There, while Peregrine heated up some baked beans on the stove, Glodstone sat on his rucksack sucking his pipe and pondered what to do.
13
For the rest of the day Glodstone lay in the sun drying himself out and keeping a close watch on the Château.