by Nita Abrams
He would face that problem when it arose, he told himself firmly. His more immediate concern was the task ahead.
He stopped half a mile short of the hill that ran up to the cliffs and led the animals into the woods until he found a clearing where he could tie them up. There was some kind of path running up the slope, a goat track, perhaps. It was certainly safer than the road. He made his way up to the edge of the ravine and began moving cautiously west. The moon was right overhead, giving plenty of light through the thin clouds. He could see the top level of the bridge, the modern, three-arch structure, and after a moment the older Roman bridge below came into view as well. As expected, there were guards at both ends. He would have to bring the mule up here, then rope the barrel, and himself, down into the ravine. If he wanted to be done before dawn, he had better hurry. He went back down the hill much faster than he had come up and was panting by the time he reached the clearing.
Only at the very last minute did he see that there were three animals tied up, not two.
“Do you need any assistance?” asked Rodrigo in a cold voice, stepping out from behind a tree. “Or should I rejoin the other dupes back at the farmhouse ?” He was still wearing Meyer’s coat. In the moonlit shadows it was eerily like seeing his own reflection come to life.
“What are you doing here?” demanded Meyer, horrified. “How could you leave Anthony and the women alone, with Doucet likely searching for us at this very moment?”
“I am your servant, remember? You chose the bridge over your nephew, over Señora Hart and her daughter. I concluded that the bridge was more important. So here I am.”
“I trusted you,” said Meyer, breathing hard. “I trusted you to be there while I was absent.”
“You did not trust me. You never told me anything. I guessed, of course. But since you were never willing to explain what you were doing, you could never quite bring yourself to ask. To say, out loud, ‘Rodrigo, please stay behind and stand guard while I go off and stop Napoleon single-handedly. And then I will come back—or not come back. And in either case all hell will break loose.’”
“I am asking you now. You can lecture me about my morals some other time. Just get back to that farmhouse.”
Rodrigo gestured towards the cliff. “That is not a one-man job. You will need help.”
“Get back to the farmhouse,” Meyer said again.
“You want both,” said the servant, hoisting himself back into the saddle. “You want the bridge . . . and the woman.”
Meyer did not ask what Rodrigo meant by that. He knew perfectly well which woman.
“But sometimes, señor, you have to make choices. You cannot have both.” He looked down at his master. “At this rate, you will have neither.”
Abigail heard the explosion very clearly. She would have heard it even if she had still been in the farmhouse, but she was actually pacing back and forth outside the barn, rehearsing the fourth version of an impassioned speech she planned to deliver as soon as the perfidious, lying, arrogant, ruthless Nathan Meyer returned from whatever criminal mission had taken him away this time. She did not know who was more despicable: Meyer, for using her and deceiving her, or herself, for being so gullible. She had known there was something odd going on right from the start, from that first meeting at the inn in Barrême, when he had pretended to defer to her preferences and had pushed her—she could see that now clearly—into choosing this northern route. But she had ignored her own intuition.
Every day had witnessed some new act of folly on her part. Why had she let him keep her papers? How could she have failed to see that he was staggering with fatigue nearly every morning, that he had been out all night? He had even stumbled into her room and she had still failed to comprehend the obvious. And then he had let her make a complete fool of herself, with her dramatic little story of the smuggled gold. She remembered his face, during that sudden, fraught silence in the alcove. He had been about to kiss her, and she had been about to let him do it—her own daughter’s suitor! His feelings had seemed so genuine—the mixture of confusion, desire, and tenderness in his dark eyes so plausible to someone who was feeling all those things herself. But it was a sham, a fraud, like the mask of the Spanish partisan he had put on at the blockade.
The explosion was the last straw. It had come from the woods below the farmhouse, and she would wager her entire fortune that Meyer was involved. She would not go to her bedchamber like a dutiful female and wait for the next lie. She wanted answers, right now.
The brush was very thick once she left the farmyard, and after untangling her skirts twice she conceded reluctantly that even in the moonlight she would need a lantern. She returned to the barn and took one that was hanging inside the door already lit. With a sense of deep resentment, she saw that not only was Meyer’s horse gone, but the servant’s as well. She had thought Rodrigo was her friend.
Even with the lantern, it was slow going. She could hear a stream below. She wondered what she would do if she reached the stream and had not found him. Would she wade across? Give up? She stopped, and almost turned back, but then caught—faint but unmistakable—a thread of scent. Sulphur. She closed her eyes and breathed. It was coming from the bottom of the hill.
Two minutes later she found unmistakable signs of the recent presence of at least two horses. And one minute after that, she found the flattened brush, the oilcloth, and the blackened stump of clay pipe. It was still smoking gently in the ground. Setting the lantern down, she tried to make sense of what she saw. A pile of salt. An empty burlap sack with traces of charcoal. An empty jar. The paddle from a butter churn. It was like a riddle in a nightmare.
There were more hoofprints here, first a jumbled trampling around the oilcloth and then a clear trail along the side of the stream below the waterfall. Pulling her skirts closer, she followed. After a quarter mile or so, the trail widened and angled up steeply. She found herself standing on the road. It was completely deserted. To her left, barely visible, a few distant lights shone from the windows of wakeful citizens in the town of Corps. To her right the road was climbing another hill. Common sense told her to stop right now, to go back, before she became irretrievably lost. But the tracks led up the hill, away from Corps. Perhaps she would be able to see something from the crest. She promised herself that she would go only that far. No farther.
By the time she had climbed the hill, the distinctive tracks were gone, merged on this drier section of the road with the wear and tear of hundreds of other travelers. And at the top she saw nothing, save a few lights on a ridge some miles away. She turned slowly in a circle, holding the lantern close to the ground. No hints, no clues emerged from the pebbles and crushed fragments of straw at her feet.
Then, faintly, she heard the hoofbeats. They were coming from the direction of the farmhouse. Could she have been mistaken, followed the wrong tracks? The sound was getting closer. She stepped out into the middle of the road and raised the lantern.
There were six horses. Too many. The lead rider, clearly visible in the moonlight, was a complete stranger.
“Halt!” he called in French. Then, to the men behind him, “Lower your weapons! Await my orders.”
It did not even occur to her to drop the lantern and run away.
He cantered slowly up to her and studied her for a moment, noting her damp cloak, her mud-spattered skirts and boots. A slender young man, in very rumpled, once-elegant clothing. Then he dismounted in one easy movement and bowed gracefully. “Raoul Doucet, madame, at your service.” He spoke in English. “I presume you are Mrs. Meyer? I am seeking your husband.”
“I am not Mrs. Meyer,” she informed him coldly. “And I, too, am seeking Mr. Meyer.” Presumably this was one of Meyer’s criminal associates.
“But how unfortunate that I have missed him,” he said. He raised his voice. “Marcel! À moi!” Another man came riding up, then halted in puzzled dismay at the unexpected sight of a genteel female on foot, alone, in the middle of the road.
“W
here is the rest of your party?” the slender man asked Abigail.
For the first time it occurred to her that perhaps this man was not a friend of Meyer’s. He was handsome, in a delicate, languid way. He spoke English. He knew of their party. But Marcel, the new arrival, was in uniform. It looked like a more complete version of one of the uniforms she had seen at the roadblock. Hadn’t Meyer told her that some of the officers in Napoleon’s border police spoke English?
“I don’t know,” she said. Her voice was shaking. “I am lost.”
He seemed to accept that. Presumably her voice would also shake if she were lost, instead of lying. He turned to the trooper, speaking in French. “You will conduct this lady—” He paused and looked inquiringly at Abigail. “It is mademoiselle? Madame?”
“Madame. Mrs. Hart.”
“Ah. Yes, how stupid of me. I believe I knew that.” Then he resumed his instructions to the soldier. “You will conduct Madame Hart to the guard’s station in Pont-Haut.”
“Yes, monsieur.”
“She is to be treated with every courtesy.” He switched back to English. “I regret the necessity of confining you temporarily, madame, but as you see . . .” He gave a classic and very elegant French shrug.
“You will release me?”
“Naturally.” He bowed. “As soon as I find Mr. Meyer. And I have a very good idea of where he is. Please consider this a momentary inconvenience. It would be unthinkable in any case to allow a lady to risk herself at night on this road with so many soldiers about.” He took away the lantern. “Allow me.”
It was all so absurd. The polite phrases, the courtly gestures, on a deserted hillside at midnight.
He escorted her, with that same terrifying courtesy, to a horse, assisting her to mount behind the trooper. He arranged her cloak. He asked politely whether she had further need of the lantern. But when he turned to go, the polished surface disappeared for a moment, and he said gently, “Do not worry. Your lover will come to no harm so long as he is prepared to be reasonable. We are civilized men.”
He thought she was Meyer’s mistress. For a moment, she was simply incredulous. Then she said, enunciating each word very clearly, “Mr. Meyer is not my lover.”
Doucet’s smile was absolutely enchanting. He swept her the most magnificent bow yet. “I would say, then, madame, that he is either blind or foolish.” The smile faded. “How did you come to be traveling with him, in that case? If I may be so bold?”
Of course he could be so bold. She was his prisoner. “He is a friend of the family.”
“Then he does care for you? He will be concerned for your safety?”
“If so,” she said bitterly, “it will be the first time, to my knowledge, that he has cared about anything or anyone except himself and his schemes.”
He looked grave. “Let us hope that you are mistaken. For both your sake and his.”
15
Everything always took longer than you thought it would; that was one of the first rules of engineering, and it was true whether you were building something or knocking it down. The uncooperative moon had set by the time Meyer had managed to maneuver both himself and the barrel onto the Roman level of the bridge. Without a dark lantern, he had worked by feel, testing cracks with thin slivers of wood to check for dampness. It had taken quite a while to find a reasonably dry fissure that ran near the base of one of the upper piers. At that point he had been forced to light his candle briefly to make sure that the crack was not too large for his small supply of powder. But the guards on the bank above him had not seemed aware of the momentary flicker by the water. They were watching the road.
He was scooping the powder in—an agonizingly slow operation—when he became aware of a light moving in the darkness behind him. He turned, squinting up at the cliff. Someone was waving a lantern. It was not Rodrigo; his servant would have used their prearranged code. The lantern stopped waving. It was moving towards the southern end of the bridge. For a few moments it disappeared, but then it emerged again directly overhead, dangling over the water. Now, bizarrely, it was descending. The mysterious signaler was lowering it over the side from above. He watched, fascinated, as the lantern came down to his level in a series of jerky movements.
He wasn’t fool enough to stay anywhere where the light would reveal him to a sharpshooter; he ducked deep into the arch. Something else was coming down now. No, someone. A man. He could see boots gleaming. He took out his pistol. What kind of fool would expose himself like that, suspended and helpless, lit from below?
“Meyer, it’s Doucet,” shouted the owner of the boots in English. His voice was barely audible over the noise of the water. “I’m coming down. Don’t shoot.”
Not a fool, then. Someone who knew Meyer well enough to be sure that he would hesitate before killing. He put away the pistol and got out his tinderbox.
A minute later, Raoul Doucet bumped down the side of the bridge next to the lantern and swung himself onto the platform. “Meyer?” he called again. “We know you are here; we found your ropes on the cliff. We saw your light.”
Without answering, Meyer lit the tinderbox, and then his candle.
Doucet came forward, very slowly, hands held out to show he held no weapon. When he was close enough to speak without shouting, he stopped, and peered uncertainly at the shadows beneath the candle Meyer was holding over the fissure. “I take it there is powder in that hole at your feet?”
“Yes. Not as much as I would like, but quite a bit.”
“You don’t strike me as the martyr type,” the Frenchman observed.
“I thought perhaps I could use a little leverage in this situation. If one of your troopers shoots me, I would at least like to take the bridge with me as I go.”
“No one is going to shoot you,” said Doucet irritably. “I left very strict orders. Taking potshots at a man who is standing on half a barrel of gunpowder in the middle of the only bridge over the Bonne River strikes me as remarkably counterproductive.”
“Well. We seem to be at an impasse. Although I believe I am holding the trumps at the moment.” They were very warm trumps; the hand shielding the candle was uncomfortably close to the flame.
“That depends,” said Doucet. His tone was oddly apologetic. “I met someone on the road on my way here. A Mrs. Hart. She claims she was searching for you and lost her way. She is presently enjoying my hospitality nearby.”
Abigail. His hand shook slightly, and the candle dipped suddenly towards the lip of the fissure. Alarmed, he jerked it up again. That would be the crowning jest, to blow up the bridge by accident because he panicked at the mere thought of her in captivity. Where was Rodrigo? he wondered. Surely he should be here, to witness his predictions coming true. The pawn had been captured, and the king was in check.
Behind Doucet the lantern sputtered and went out. The younger man’s voice came out of the darkness, remarkably calm for someone who had just been an inch from being blown to pieces. “Perhaps it would be more prudent to continue our discussion with the candle on the ground. You can always knock it in if I make any sudden movements.”
He found another large crack and wedged the candle in, crouching behind it to block the wind. “What are we discussing?”
Doucet lowered himself to a sitting position on the other side of the flame. “Facts. Three simple facts. Item one: Mrs. Hart is in a house we have commandeered in the village, with several of my guards. She is being treated with great consideration. It is my hope that you will soon be taking her back to join the rest of your party. You, at least, presumably know where they are.”
Another threat. Doucet would have no trouble finding the farmhouse once he questioned Abigail more closely. Anthony was there, perhaps feverish again. Rodrigo. Diana Hart. The gruff farmer and his family. It didn’t matter. Abigail was more than enough leverage, to use his own term.
“Item two: This bridge is important but not essential. If it is destroyed, it will delay us by at most two days. Is it really worth the price
we would all have to pay, to buy forty-eight hours?”
“There is a royalist regiment chasing you up this road,” Meyer said. “The delay would allow them to catch you. You would be pinned against the ravine. So far you have had everything your own way. The loss of morale might well be the tipping point between a successful and unsuccessful attempt to retake France.”
“That is true,” acknowledged the other man. “But there is also a royalist regiment waiting for us on the other side of the bridge, halfway between here and Grenoble. Why not let us go and meet it?”
“What is your third fact?”
“You saved my career last year, perhaps even my life, when you warned me that my mistress was framing me for treason. Cambronne is grateful to you as well, for protecting the emperor on his way to Elba. We are not yet the official government of France. There is nothing that compels me to shoot you as a spy. We are therefore prepared to be very generous. If you will agree to certain conditions, we will release Mrs. Hart. We will escort your party towards Grenoble as our honored guests and will guarantee your safety. Once we reach the city, you will all be at liberty.”
“And what are those conditions?”
“The first is the bridge, of course. You will make no further attempt to destroy it, and will disarm any devices you may have set to hinder our progress.”
That condition was an obvious one. “And the second?”
“You will return immediately to England. During the voyage home you will do nothing that might endanger our campaign. No pigeons, no messengers, not even a verbal report afterwards to your superiors in London. If you wish to be a private gentleman, escorting your countrywomen away from a war zone, then you must conduct yourself as one, from this moment on.”