by Nita Abrams
“Do they know your real name?”
“Doucet does.”
“We are leaving, I take it.” Rodrigo closed up the crate.
“Yes, but we must not appear to be leaving,” Meyer said. “Take the birds and whatever else you must have with you, but make sure there is still a crate here in the gig and clothing on your bed. Order a carriage and two horses for tomorrow morning, to travel south. Then find some other stable, one as far from here as you can, hire two mules and four horses, and meet me half a mile north of the edge of town in one hour. I will get Anthony and the ladies; we will go for a morning walk.”
“Can Master Anthony walk half a mile?” the servant asked, worried.
“I devoutly hope so. Otherwise, we will have to leave him behind.”
Abigail was a very light sleeper, especially when she was worried about something. When the door to her room opened, therefore, she woke almost instantly, and sat straight up. It was Meyer, and he had one finger on his lips in an imperative gesture for quiet.
She slid out of bed and went over to the door, which he closed behind him very, very carefully. She was going to say something clever—“Wrong room again, Mr. Meyer?”—but the expression on his face stopped her.
“Speak as quietly as you can,” he told her, in a voice which provided an admirable model. She could barely hear him, and she was standing right next to him. “Remember, sound from this room goes to at least one other bedchamber.”
“Why are you here?” she whispered.
“Napoleon’s advance guard arrived ten minutes ago. They are here, in this hotel. You must be prepared to leave in twenty minutes. You must dress for a long, difficult day outdoors, riding and walking, possibly in snow. We will be pretending to go for a constitutional; therefore, you may bring only what a lady would carry on a morning stroll. Any spare clothing must either be worn or carried in some inconspicuous manner. You must behave as though you plan to return—order luncheon, send laundry out. I will come to fetch you. Once you leave this room, you must appear unconcerned, as though you know nothing about the troops.” This was all delivered in a calm, barely audible monotone without any pause to allow questions or objections, and the next moment he turned, apparently intending to leave.
Abigail grabbed his arm and turned him around again. “Do you make a habit of bursting in on ladies at sunrise and giving them inexplicable commands to abandon all their possessions?” she hissed angrily.
There was a strange glint in his dark eyes. “Only when I believe them intelligent enough to understand that I would not do so without a very good reason.” He glanced at the chair next to Diana’s side of the bed, buried under a confused heap of stockings, shawls, gloves, and underthings. “I will of course replace the items you cannot bring with you at my own expense.”
“Mr. Meyer, I am not complaining about the cost of a few frocks! We already lost the majority of our luggage when we joined you in Barrême. This is not about money.” She was finding it very difficult to be angry and whisper at the same time, and anger was winning.
He sighed. “No. But money is what I can offer you.”
“I want more than that. I want to be treated like a reasonable adult, someone who is entitled to be informed about risks and choices. I want to know what made you walk in here and order me and my daughter to behave like fleeing assassins.”
“I was going to consult you,” he said, leaning wearily against the closed door. “My nephew is very ill. When I spotted the troops I was on my way to your room, in fact. I intended to ask you whether you would be willing to stay in Gap today, in spite of the likelihood that Napoleon’s army would be here by midnight tonight. Anthony should not be traveling at all, even in the most luxurious carriage, let alone riding over an ice-covered mountain on the back of a mule.”
“But you changed your mind.” She folded her arms. “You were prepared to remain here, in the face of Napoleon and his entire army, but at the sight of a few soldiers from the advance party you panicked?”
“Two particular soldiers. Officers. They recognized me from . . . an earlier encounter.” He pushed his hair back from his forehead. “I would go on alone, but it would not do any good at this point. You have all been traveling with me; our party was registered here at the hotel under my name. None of you will be safe.”
She opened her mouth to tell him that officers would not threaten a sick man, or two innocent women. Then she remembered the roadblock. The man with the helmet had been some sort of officer.
“What sort of officers? How do they know you?”
“Twenty minutes,” he said, opening the door. “I must see to Anthony.”
Before they had been on the road two hours, Abigail knew that something must have frightened Nathan Meyer very badly indeed to have convinced him that it was safer for Roth to go than to stay. “Very ill” had been no exaggeration, and today’s journey might well change very ill into deathly ill.
After washing his face with cold water and gulping some extremely strong coffee, Roth had managed to walk out of the hotel on his own two feet. The minute they were out of sight of the soldiers, however, his legs had started to buckle, and Meyer had been forced to support him on one side. Sweat had glistened on Roth’s face as he staggered determinedly on, and Meyer had ended by half-carrying him the last quarter mile. Once mounted, Roth had barely managed to keep his seat, even on the placid white mule. Every few minutes he had been slumping forward, then jerking himself back upright, and just now, at the first halt, he had collapsed into Meyer’s arms upon being lifted out of the saddle.
“I’m not much better on a mule than I am on a horse, am I?” he said, with a faint smile. Meyer had propped him up against the massive remains of a fallen tree. “Sorry to be such a nuisance.”
“Don’t be an idiot.” Meyer handed him a flask. Abigail suspected it was brandy, which was not an ideal drink for someone in Roth’s condition, but they could hardly brew him tea halfway up a mountain. He did look a bit better after taking a few sips.
“It will be very steep for the next mile or so,” Meyer told him. “If you faint, or even sway over to one side, it could be disastrous.”
“Tie me on, then.”
The other two men cut some branches to make a small frame and lashed it to the saddle of the mule. It took them nearly fifteen minutes, and Abigail could not help glancing back down the road, as though soldiers might be galloping after them.
“Mother?” Diana had come over to her. “Do you think I should offer them my pelisse, to use for padding?” she asked, keeping her voice low. “It is ruined in any case, and I am quite warm.”
Diana had had the clever notion of augmenting Abigail’s postflight wardrobe by wearing one of her mother’s gowns over her own riding habit. Once her tightly cut pelisse was added to the ensemble, she looked a bit like a fabric sausage, and had not been able to get into the saddle until Abigail had cut open the side seam of the coat.
It was chilly and overcast, but the snow Meyer had predicted had not arrived . . . at least, not yet. Abigail nodded in agreement. When they set off again, with Roth braced against his makeshift backrest, Diana rode alongside him, chatting determinedly. Abigail could not help remembering that first day in the carriage, when Roth had been the one bravely trying to make conversation, and Diana had been the one who had barely spoken. Roth had a much better excuse, of course. And he was trying. Every once in a while he would give Diana a shaky grin, or even a monosyllabic response.
Meyer dropped back from his position at the head of the cavalcade to ride next to Abigail. “Do you know,” he said thoughtfully, “when I first saw your daughter, I thought she was nothing but an empty-headed flirt. She was holding court at your hotel in Digne, and she had every mannerism polished to a high gloss: the simper, the lowered eyelashes, the brittle laugh, the toss of the head. I would never have suspected she could outface five armed bullies, or would understand that my nephew will do better if someone stays by him and talks to keep him awa
ke.” He shook his head, bemused. “Last night we had to change the hour of our seating for dinner twice because of—what was it?”
“Her hair.” Abigail gave a wry smile. “It would not curl properly. I make a very poor lady’s maid, as she has told me repeatedly since our own ran off.”
“Well then, last night she refuses to eat until her hair is arranged just so, and today she watches you slice open a fur-lined pelisse without even blinking, and then stuffs it onto the back of a mule to make my nephew more comfortable. I must retract what I said yesterday.”
“What was that?” She twisted in the saddle to look at him.
“I believe I said that you were too sensible to have produced such a daughter.”
“And I said she had many excellent qualities.”
He gave a little half bow. “As seems to be the case whenever we disagree lately, you were right and I was wrong.”
“We disagreed this morning,” she reminded him. “About whether to leave.”
“We did not disagree. I stormed in and behaved like an arrogant fool, insisting that we leave at once without explaining myself, and you were sensible enough to overlook my rudeness.”
“Eventually.”
He smiled. “Eventually, yes.”
The track narrowed, and they were forced to ride single file again for some distance. It was very steep, as Meyer had predicted, and the horses were struggling in places. He jumped off, and began leading both his mount and hers; Rodrigo was doing the same for Diana. The mules were in their element now, and would have passed Abigail’s horse easily if there had been any room to go by. After twenty minutes of this slow, uphill work, the ground suddenly leveled off. The road widened. It could easily hold six abreast, Abigail thought. And ahead of them, under high, sullen clouds, an enormous valley appeared. It was surrounded on every side by mountains—not the tree-covered peaks Abigail had seen in Italy, or even the sculpted rock gorges farther south here in France. These mountains were so tall that they disappeared right into the clouds. To the west, where the clouds were thinner, an occasional spire was visible, impossibly high, sparkling with snow even in the gray light.
She drew in her breath. Her horse had stopped, as though it, too, was stunned.
“You have never seen the Alps before? The true Alps, as they say in Grenoble?”
She shook her head.
“This is nothing,” he said. “You must go to Switzerland one day.”
“How tall are they?” she asked, gesturing towards the wall of rock ahead of them.
“These? Twelve, thirteen thousand feet. To the east of here, some of the higher peaks are more than fifteen thousand.”
Almost three miles high. It was incredible.
“I am glad I saw this,” she said, more to herself than to him. “I will always remember it.”
“They are very beautiful,” he agreed. “They are also very dangerous.” She looked at his face, outlined against the snow-covered rocks, at the fierce exhilaration she saw there, and an unwelcome but inescapable conclusion presented itself.
“You find it attractive,” she said slowly. “The danger, that is. Perhaps even more attractive than the beauty.”
“Yes.” He looked at her. “I am afraid that is true.”
“You must be having a wonderful time at the moment, then,” she said bitterly.
“I would be,” he admitted. “If I were by myself.” He began to lead her horse forward again. “It narrows again ahead; I will stay on foot and keep hold of your bridle until we have descended a bit.”
Abigail was not as competent on horseback as Diana was, but she still found it unsettling to have someone else leading an animal she was riding. It occurred to her, as they started down the mountain, that she had been experiencing that same unsettled feeling remarkably frequently of late. Since she had met Nathan Meyer, in fact.
13
Just before noon, in the middle of a meeting with the mayor and deputies of Gap, General Pierre Cambronne was interrupted by an aide. Monsieur Doucet wished to speak with him urgently. Cambronne excused himself, and stepped out into the hall. He did not like Doucet. The man was calculating and ruthless, and he did not behave like a soldier. But he was useful. He noticed things: Officials who were too nervous, or not nervous enough. Documents that looked real but were not. Apparently he had just noticed something important.
Doucet was pacing impatiently. “General! There you are. I have a question for you. Do you remember the man we saw at the hotel this morning, just after we came in—tall, dark-haired, aquiline features?” When Cambronne looked blank, he prompted him: “He came in from the opposite side of the room, from some back entrance. He nodded to you.”
“Ah, that man. Yes, he looked vaguely familiar. Why?”
“He looked familiar to me also. I have an uneasy feeling about him.”
Cambronne searched his memory for a minute, then gave up. “My dear Doucet, I am afraid there is nothing save the notion that I knew the face. My own associations were quite the opposite of yours, very positive ones; if I had to guess I would say he must be some local man loyal to the emperor, someone who came to Paris perhaps on government business and saw us there.”
“Perhaps,” muttered Doucet. “But then why not greet us?” He began pacing again.
“Monsieur Doucet, the deputies of Gap?” Cambronne indicated the half-open door to the council chamber.
“I beg your pardon. By all means, continue. But if you should remember anything further, please inform me at once.”
An hour later, Cambronne was just sitting down to an excellent lunch with the deputies when he was interrupted again. With a sigh, he pushed back his chair and went out into an anteroom.
“He is British,” said Doucet, not bothering with a greeting. “I somehow have remembered that much.”
“Who?”
“The man at the hotel.”
“Really, monsieur, I cannot think why you are so concerned about one man whose face we barely glimpsed,” snapped Cambronne. “One would think the fellow had an entire battalion of royalists concealed in the cellars of the hotel.” He returned to his lunch.
Fifteen minutes later, Cambronne remembered where he had seen that face. He put down his fork, stared blindly at his plate, and then left the table without a word to his fellow diners. “Where is Doucet?” he asked his astonished escort.
“He has returned to the hotel, my general,” stammered one of the junior lieutenants.
“I will go there and find him. Make my excuses to the deputies.”
He nearly ran down the hill to the Auberge du Marchand.
Doucet was in the reception room, slumped in a chair, staring at the doorway the mystery man had emerged from as if he could will the stranger to reappear.
“Doucet? I remembered. Not his name, but enough to concern me.”
The younger man jumped to his feet.
“You were right,” Cambronne said, breathing hard. “He is British. A Jew. Loosely connected to their intelligence service. He was the one who warned me last April, at Orgon.”
The younger man closed his eyes. “Meyer,” he whispered. He swore profusely. Then he jumped up and rang the bell at the desk, tapping his hand on the wood impatiently until the innkeeper’s wife appeared. “Madame,” he said, “is there by any chance an English gentleman staying here? A Monsieur Meyer?”
She beamed. “Why, yes. With another gentleman, and a very lovely young lady, and the young lady’s mother, who—”
“Have they left?” Cambronne interrupted.
She looked puzzled. “I do not believe so. Just one moment.” She returned a few minutes later. Doucet was gripping the edge of the desk so tightly his knuckles were white. “They are still here, monsieur. The chambermaid has just returned from changing the beds.”
Doucet looked at Cambronne. “We will have to detain him. He is very dangerous.”
“I am under a considerable obligation to him,” Cambronne objected. “As is His Imperial Majesty
.”
“I am under a personal obligation to him as well. We can both shower him with gratitude. After we lock him up.” He turned to Madame Marchand. “This man is an enemy of France, madame. I must request permission to take some soldiers up to his room and arrest him.”
She looked horrified. “Arrest him? In our hotel? Could you not wait outside, in the street, and detain him as he returns?”
“Returns?” asked Cambronne sharply. “Returns from what?”
“Merely a walk, General,” she assured him hastily. “The ladies went as well. Right after breakfast.”
“He’s gone,” said Doucet slowly.
“Oh, no, monsieur. There are bags and clothing in both rooms. Jeanette has just brought down two dresses to be pressed before dinner.”
“He saw us. He’s gone.” Doucet slammed his fist down on the desk. “Sacré con!”
Even Cambronne flinched at hearing that particular oath in the presence of a respectable woman.
“I’ll find him,” Doucet said through his teeth. “He cannot travel very quickly, not with two women. Give me ten men, mon général, and two dispatch riders.”
“I need those men here,” Cambronne objected. “What harm can Meyer do us now? If he sends reports to London, what of it? We will be in Grenoble in two days, three at the most.”
“Not if he blows up the bridge at Pont-Haut,” said Doucet grimly. “Nathan Meyer single-handedly destroyed more bridges in Spain than the entire British engineering corps. It is one of his specialties.” He waited for this to sink in. “Now, may I have my ten men?”
Cambronne nodded.
By the time the party was approaching Corps, the first town of any size in the valley beyond the pass, they had been traveling for over nine hours. It had been drizzling off and on for the last three of those hours; they were damp and cold and exhausted. Meyer wanted desperately to get Anthony into a bed somewhere, but he was fairly certain Doucet would be coming after him. Better, he decided, to get his nephew to a safe bed, one he could hope to stay in for the night. There was still some daylight left; he should be thankful for the chance that gave him. He therefore called a halt before beginning the ascent to Corps, and led the party away from the road until trees and thickets concealed them from anyone who might ride by.