Honour and the Sword

by A L Berridge

  The Capitán pours himself a glass of wine, and another for me. We’d planned on a little celebration, Señor, not that we feel much like it now.

  ‘God rot him,’ says my Capitán, throwing his drink back in one gulp. ‘God rot that stinking bastard to hell.’ He smashes his glass on the floor, sits down heavily at his desk, and buries his head in his hands.

  Jacques Gilbert

  We heard the keys rattling in the lock, then the sound of them marching away. We looked at each other in miserable silence.

  I started to say ‘André …’ but he just said ‘Please don’t,’ and sounded like he meant it, so I stopped, and there we were looking at each other again, and not a word to say between us.

  He gave me his handkerchief, and I wiped the blood that had oozed under the dressing on my cheek. I went to give it back, but it was bloody and disgusting and I didn’t like to, I just showed him and shrugged and said ‘Sorry.’

  He made an odd little noise of distress. Then he took a step forward and opened his arms sort of shyly, like he thought I might ignore him, he stood with his arms out, and I met him, I grabbed and hugged him as tight as I could, and we just stood there holding each other, and in the end we didn’t say anything at all.

  Twenty-Three

  Père Gérard Benoît

  A great crowd was by this time gathered, waiting in silence for the release of Jacques or the restoration of our Seigneur. One woman stood apart from the others, and beneath the hood I discerned the anguished face of Hélène Gilbert herself. I wondered that her husband should leave her alone at such a time, but Jean-Baptiste informed me he was to be found in the Quatre Corbeaux, at which I understood him to be seeking solace in his own way.

  At last the gate opened, but there issued forth only a soldier with a sheaf of papers under his arm and a leather pouch slung over his shoulder. He smiled at sight of me, and asked if I would save him a journey by fastening one of his sheets to the wall at St Sebastian’s. His tone informed me this was by way of an unpleasant jest, so I read the document immediately as he seemed to wish.

  It was in the manner of a handbill, and advertised the execution by hanging of André de Roland for eight in the morning of the coming 21 June. A second paper had been pasted over the bottom of the first, announcing that one Jacques Gilbert was to be hanged beside him.

  Murmurs of dismay arose as this paper passed from hand to hand, at which the soldier appeared mightily amused. He announced that all in the Saillie were invited to attend, and that furthermore his Colonel thought they might like a little souvenir by which to remember the occasion. He cast the contents of his satchel on to the ground, and we saw with horror a quantity of fine black hair strewn over the stones.

  The soldier laughed at our stricken expressions. ‘There’s your precious Seigneur,’ said he. ‘You’ll get what’s left on Tuesday.’

  He turned jauntily away, but at that moment the words ‘Il y avait un petit oiseau …’ rose softly but distinctly from the crowd behind me. Another voice joined the first, then yet another. In seconds the murmur of the song was everywhere.

  The guards at the courtyard gate started forward at once, for the singing of this air was a punishable offence, yet there beside me stood Michel Poulain, singing now both openly and lustily, and as a soldier swung his musket at him, Jean-Baptiste Moreau immediately took up the strain.

  ‘Les soldats le chassaient,

  Il avait l’aile cassée …’

  There were now scores of voices singing. Henri and Colin Lefebvre were among them, Marc Pollet, Daniel Merien, and our largest tenant farmer, Mathieu Pagnié himself.

  ‘ …“Rentre au nid!” un soldat fit …’

  The sergeant at the gate called loudly for silence, threatening to fire unless we desisted, but still the singing continued.

  ‘ “Je ne suis pas aussi bête,”

  Et il chia sur leurs têtes …’

  The words of this ditty were not edifying, but I ask my readers to forgive their inclusion, for on this one night they seemed as uplifting as an anthem. There were women singing too, fearless of the consequences. I remarked among them Mme Laroque, our own Beatrice Hébert, and the indefatigable Mlle Tissot, who was reputed to be eighty years of age. Hélène Gilbert joined them, the tears trickling down her face.

  ‘Et l’oiseau s’envola,

  Dessus le mur il passa!’

  The sergeant called more men from the courtyard, who fired a great volley over our heads. The song continued, but as the sergeant issued another command and the guns now aimed within the body of the crowd itself, at last and with great reluctance the people began to disperse. As the crowd thinned, I looked again at the ground, and perceived with a start that not a strand of the hair remained. As I looked up at those departing, I noted that many were concealing hands beneath their coats or in their pockets, while faint in the distance a last brave voice could be heard to sing ‘Il passa, il passa, il passa, il passa, Dessus le mur il passa!’

  Where there was so much courage and defiance I believed there was also still hope. If I could channel this resolve into prayer as well as song, it seemed to me we had but to keep our faith in Almighty God, and trust to the indomitable spirit of our two young heroes to bring themselves safe home.

  Jacques Gilbert

  I was all right actually, in a way I was almost happy. If I’d been let go, I’d got nothing to go back to, I’d have no family and no friends, I’d always be the man who got André de Roland killed. This way we were together, I could look after and comfort him right to the end.

  Of course he saw things differently. They’d cut his hair and humiliated him but he was still André. He pulled away from me at last, rubbed his sleeve over his eyes, and said ‘I think we’d better get out of here, don’t you?’

  He just couldn’t accept reality at all. It made me sad to watch him prowling round that tiny room looking for ways of escape when there weren’t any, it’s like he couldn’t understand that hope hurts. I begged him to stop and sit down, but he said ‘You’re just tired and hungry, we’ll soon get you right.’ He banged on the door, and when a guard peered through the hole he said we wanted everything d’Estrada had promised, food and water and wine and more blankets, and if he thought of anything else he’d call again.

  The guard looked at him sourly and said ‘You enjoy it while you can, little prince, you’ll be singing a different tune in the morning.’

  André said ‘Ah, but we’ll have a much better night than you will, cabrón,’ and his voice didn’t sound like he’d ever said ‘please’ to anyone, least of all Don Francisco.

  I drank the wine when it came, but it only made me want to curl up and go to sleep, and I couldn’t face the food at all. André said it didn’t matter, we’d got a jug and a bottle, and they were good weapons if we wanted to hit. He said he’d got something else too, and proudly produced this little sleeve-knife he’d hidden in his boot. The blade was about an inch and a half long and covered in earth like he’d been gardening with it, but he said ‘It’s still something we’ve got they don’t know about,’ like that was a kind of triumph all its own.

  He just didn’t know how to give up. He discovered the wonky bar in the window much quicker than I had, and got very excited till I pointed out we were on the top floor and the only way out was by breaking our necks. Then he said we could make a rope from the blankets to let ourselves down, but I made him look at what we’d be lowering ourselves into, and he went very quiet. The courtyard was still part of the barracks, it had soldiers everywhere, guards by the stables and all the doors, and a dozen to protect the gate. They weren’t bothered with us at the moment, none of them ever looked up, but if we came clambering down the wall they were sort of bound to notice, and I didn’t see a feeble little sleeve-knife and a broken bottle being enough to fight our way past them all.

  He kept trying, he looked at the cracked plaster and suggested breaking through into the next cell, but I pointed out there were guards in the corrido
r who weren’t going to let us just walk past them, even if they didn’t hear us crashing our way through the wall, which they would. At last I just said ‘Please stop it, André, you’re making it worse,’ and he said ‘I’m sorry,’ and came and sat beside me on the bed. Even then he didn’t sit heavily, he just perched on the edge, like he wasn’t going to do anything that even smelt of defeat. He said ‘We can’t afford to give up, Jacques. It’s not just us, we’ve got to think of everyone else.’

  I said fiercely ‘We won’t talk.’

  He looked at me sadly and said ‘But I might.’

  All at once I understood. I tried to tell myself I’d be strong enough, but knew I wouldn’t. There’s this thing called garrucha, when they tie your hands behind your back then hoist you up by your wrists. Colin and Robert and me had a go at it once when we were playing at the Inquisition, and I remember after a second I was begging them to stop. I tried to imagine going through five whole minutes of it, and I couldn’t, I’d be screaming and crying in no time, then the boy would talk, he couldn’t help it. Left to himself he wouldn’t, he’d never, but he couldn’t bear me to be hurt, it was me who’d make him do it. Just by being here and alive I was destroying him and everyone in the whole army. I should have died before I let this happen, I should have bloody died.

  Then I remembered the knife. The boy was still playing with it, flipping it round, tossing and catching it. It was only a small blade, but looked suddenly very white. There wasn’t any light in the room to be reflecting off it, it’s like it was making it all by itself.

  I heard my voice say ‘André, there’s another way.’

  He turned and saw my face.

  At first I said just me, but he wouldn’t have it, he said ‘And leave me on my own to face Don Francisco?’ and I understood. So then I said ‘Why not both of us?’ I told him it would be a wonderful way of stuffing Don Francisco. I said we wouldn’t go to hell because we’d be doing it for other people, we’d be doing something heroic like the people in his books, it would be the most honourable thing ever.

  The thought of it was starting to make me light-headed. I remember hearing distant singing, and a bit of my brain thinking it was like a heavenly choir of angels, but it wasn’t, of course, it was real, and not all the singers had good voices, some sounded more like frogs. We went to the window and heard it floating over the wall towards us, and it was ‘Le Petit Oiseau’ again, the courtyard soldiers were looking very fed up about it. There was a distant volley of gunfire, but the singing went on, it just gradually sort of faded away, with a faint sound of laughter as it went. I felt like the laughter was inside me too.

  I said ‘That’s what we’d be doing, we’d be escaping. We’d be flying away.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’ He looked at me with an excitement in his face that made my heart beat faster. ‘We’re going to fly all right. We’re not going through that wall, we’re going over it.’

  I looked at him blankly, but he was concentrating on the window again, holding the bar in his fist and twisting his head upward.

  ‘What? André, what?’

  He turned back to look at me, his eyes shining in the gloom. ‘Not down into the bloody courtyard. We’re going up on the roof.’

  Colin Lefebvre

  Shocking state of things at the Hermitage. No one talking to poor Mercier, and not much better with Dubois, seeing it’s him authorized it. Ravel shouting and cursing, calling the pair of them murderers and God knows what else. Dubois tried to explain he did it for the best, said it was Seigneur’s right, said he really believed they’d let Jacques go, but Ravel just turned on him and said ‘Don’t give me that shit. You know exactly what you’ve done, and I know exactly why you did it.’

  However you looked at it, fact was we’d lost both of them. There was a fair few panicking, since d’Estrada’s promise was over and for all we knew our men being interrogated right now. Some said Seigneur wouldn’t talk whatever was done to him, Dom said Jacques wouldn’t either, but Leroux said ‘Face it, boys, the dons have got double the chance now,’ and no one could argue with that.

  Looked like time to get out. Not me, of course, we’re loyal, the Lefebvres, and I had the Forge to think about. Spaniards knew me well enough, I’d a name as a good, reliable man, seemed to me I could bluff out anything said under torture. But others feeling different, men with maybe not so much to lose or not the guts to risk it, and the bulk of the Dax men were for getting out right then.

  Dubois quite frantic. Said there was no need for that, they could stay at the Hermitage till we knew the worst, but Bruno Baudet said that may be too late. ‘What if André tells about the gabelle road?’ he said. ‘We could find ourselves trapped.’ People were all for packing up their families right this minute so they could get out soon as it was light.

  Dubois started shouting, saying there’s a chance the Sieur won’t talk, saying if they run now that’s the end of the army. Marin Aubert yelled back ‘What army? Without André there is no army,’ and others saying the same thing. Edouard Poulain said Dubois had forfeited the right to lead us anyway, said this was André’s army and no one else’s.

  Then poor old Mercier tried to speak. He said ‘If this is André’s army then we can’t run away now, we have to be here for him to come back to.’

  Fair bit of jeering at that. Georges shouted it was Mercier’s own fault Seigneur was gone in the first place, and Baudet gave him a real hard shove and told him to sit down. Mood started to turn ugly, but that Margot stuck her elbows in and shoved people back. ‘Let the man speak!’ she was bawling. ‘André’s friend, isn’t he? Best marksman we’ve got, saved the lives of most of you one time or another. Let the man bloody speak!’ She was something, that Margot, voice like a heron, tits like cannonballs, you didn’t want to come up against her in a crush, straight up you didn’t. Leroux backed her up and all, said ‘Calm down, lads, lady’s right.’ Turned to Mercier, said ‘You go right ahead, soldier, say what’s on your mind. You’ll get a hearing, or I’ll know why.’

  So Mercier tried, right, he said ‘André’ll come back, he’ll have some kind of plan. Even when you locked him in the stables he dug himself a tunnel. If there’s a way out he’ll find it, and we’ve got to be here to help him, we can’t let him down now.’

  Bit of murmuring at that, but no one that convinced. Mercier turned in desperation to Ravel, who was sitting hunched in a corner turning a bit of the Seigneur’s hair over in his hands. Mercier said ‘You know I’m right, Stefan, why don’t you say something? You care about him, don’t you?’

  Ravel lifted his head and said ‘I care enough not to see him hanged. And he won’t be, Mercier, not as long as you and I can hold a musket. That’s all we can do.’

  Dubois said urgently ‘But the army, Stefan, the army, we have to keep it going.’

  ‘Do we?’ said Ravel. Stood up, shoved the hair in his coat, and started pinching out the candles at the platform end. ‘You do what you like with the pieces, Marcel, you’ve broken everything that mattered.’

  Jacques Gilbert

  We started with that bar.

  It wobbled so much you’d have thought it would just take a couple of bangs and a tweak, but it seemed like it was only loose where the top hadn’t been set properly, and after an inch it just went clang against solid mortar and wouldn’t budge. In the end we scraped out the mortar round it, and it felt like we did it grain by grain. At least we’d got the knife, but we still couldn’t really saw properly because of the noise. It must have been close on two o’clock when we finally prised it out.

  Then there was the rope. We’d got that extra blanket, but it was too thick to tie properly, it just made this kind of bulgy knot that slid apart the second you put any weight on it. It worked better when we cut it into thin strips and soaked them in the water jug, but it still felt like more knot than rope, and we had to cut up our cloaks as well. Even then I wasn’t sure it was long enough for three whole floors, but the boy said if we had to j
ump and break an ankle that was still better than staying here, and I’ve got to say I agreed.

  I’d have agreed to anything. The thing about despair is you’ve nothing to lose, whereas now we had, we’d got hope. My hands were shaking, and every time I heard the guards near our door I jumped in panic in case they looked in. We didn’t even know how long we’d got, whether they’d really leave us till morning or take us by surprise. I had this awful picture in my mind of us being just about to go, then the door opening and Don Francisco being there laughing and us being taken down to the cellar to be tortured after all. I think maybe André had the same picture, because he suddenly stopped testing the rope round the bed and said ‘I think it’s time to go.’

  There were still soldiers in the courtyard, but no one was looking up, and we thought we’d be safe as long as we were quiet. We fastened one end of the rope round the bed and the other round André’s waist, then he sat backwards on the ledge and leant out. He gave me a little nod, pressed his hands into the wall above the window then slowly started to stand up.

  I took the strain. It relaxed after a moment and I knew he’d got a handhold. Then one of his legs started to lift off the ledge, and a moment later the other followed. There was a faint scrabbling sound above me, then one of his feet came flying back in, flailing about for something to rest on, so I twisted quickly and shoved my shoulder under it. After a second he steadied, then dug in hard and sprung up again. I stared out at that black hole of window and waited.