“Never developed a liking for it, thankee,” Lewrie said. “You say we’re t’become other people?”
“Your trail goes cold at the Gantelet Rouge in Pontoise. Now, it will go even colder at Méru,” Sir Pulteney confidently told him as they went back to the coach. “My trail, and Lady Imogene’s, as well. We will openly sup in Méru after obtaining a much humbler conveyance, then travel through the night to put as much distance between us and Paris, and any pursuit, before tomorrow’s dawn. That will require new aliases, and some, ah . . . costume changes, to transform us into a most unremarkable party of travellers . . . French travellers, Begad!”
“I’m t’play a Frenchman?” Lewrie gawped in dis-belief. “Me, sir? That’s asking rather a lot!”
“I took that into consideration, Captain Lewrie,” Plumb replied, “just as I noted that your wife’s French, though not fluent, is much better than yours, which suggested to me the very personas which must be assumed, haw haw! Imogene and I shall do most of the talking.”
“Wouldn’t we need new documents or something?” Lewrie wondered.
“For foreign visitors, of a certainty, but for innocent and up-standing Frenchmen? Hardly! Aha!” Sir Pulteney exclaimed, hurrying them to the boot of the coach, “my lady has already begun the alteration of your wife’s appearance!”
The leather covering of the boot had been rolled up, revealing several large trunks, one of which was open, whilst a second served as a seat for Caroline as Lady Imogene fussed over her, now and then having a good dig down through the open trunk’s contents. There were some gowns, many scarves and shawls, a heap of various-coloured wigs, and a smaller box of paints and makeup.
Caroline had changed into a sobre and modest, drab brownish wool gown, with a cream-coloured shawl over her shoulders and a dingy white apron. White silk stockings had been replaced by black cotton, and her feet now sported clunky old buckled shoes instead of light slippers.
“Good God!” Lewrie gawped again, noticing that Carolone’s fair hair was now covered by a mousy brown wig, and atop that, there now sat a nigh-shapeless old straw farmwoman’s hat. Lady Imogene had done something with her paints and powders, too, for Caroline looked at least ten years older, of a sudden.
“Lud, but that’s subtle, m’dear!” Sir Pulteney congratulated.
“Merci, dearest,” Lady Imogene sweetly replied, beaming. “What is necessary for theatregoers twenty rows back would be much too much for those we will deal with face-to-face. Artifice, as you say, must be subtle. Oh, I apologise for making you seem so careworn, Mistress Lewrie, but your natural beauty must not be remembered,” Lady Imogene said, finishing up the additions, or slight enhancements, of furrows or crow’s-feet, darkening the merry folds below Caroline’s eyes as if she possessed weary, sleepless bags. Et, voilà! Done,” she cried.
“Now, should any pursuers ask if anyone has seen a fair-haired Englishwoman, they can honestly say non, d’ye see, Captain Lewrie?” Sir Pulteney said with an inane titter. “Your turn, now, sir.” He removed his own clothing and began to dig into another trunk. “I will now become Major, ah . . . Pierre Fleury, a retired officer of foot, now too lame to serve. I will be a very disappointed man, haw haw! Lady Imogene is to be, oh hang it, Imogene Fleury . . . a disappointed woman in her own right, because . . . because . . . aha, I have it!” he said as he paced in a small circle.
“You, Mistress Lewrie, are the widow of my eldest son, Bertrand, who found you in the Piedmont during Bonaparte’s Italian Campaign, an Italian, of all things, and not the sort of match we had arranged for him. Being foreign, of course, your less-than-fluent French is plausible. M’dear?” he asked Lady Imogene.
“I simply adore it, mon cher!” Lady Imogene cried, clapping her hands in delight.
“I see . . . I think,” Caroline said, sounding a bit dubious.
“You, Captain Lewrie,” Sir Pulteney said, whirling to face him and already feigning the stiff fierceness of a retired officer and a disappointed father, with a strict martinet’s snap to his voice. “You are my youngest son, our last hope of grandchildren and the continuation of our family’s name, but you . . . Armand, yes, that’ll do . . . you, Armand, tried to be a soldier. You can remember your name? Très bien. You enlisted as a private soldier in the cavalry, but proved so clumsy that you ended by getting kicked in the head by your horse, before you had a chance to go on campaign, and have recently been invalided out. We shall have papers to that effect. . . . Well, we will shortly. You will have to play a dummy.”
It didn’t help Lewrie’s nerves, or his dignity, that Caroline let forth a cynical chuckle-snort, then a full-out hoot of laughter.
“You’re addled as a scrambled egg, Armand,” Sir Pulteney went on. “You must walk stiffly, as if afraid your whole head will tumble off. Slowly and stiffly. Be clumsy with anything you handle, forks and spoons and such. Be slow in speech, grasping for the proper names for things—”
“Je suis un crayon,” Lewrie interrupted, feeling sarcastic, too.
“With your poor command of French, I expect you’ll grasp for a great number of nouns, yayss,” Sir Pulteney snapped, still in character. “Do you rise from a chair, you might swoon a bit . . .”
“And wince, as if there’s a sudden pain in your poor head, as well,” Lady Imogene prompted. “We will cut your meat for you! Dribble a little wine so that I may wipe your chin.”
“Should I drool?” Lewrie rejoined, growing tetchy.
“That might be a bit too much,” Sir Pulteney said with a frown.
“Let me wrap this bandage round your head,” Lady Imogene said, “then turn your complexion pale and wan.”
By the time Lewrie had been “touched up” and his good suitings replaced with ill-fitting and older cast-offs, Sir Pulteney had altered himself into a stiff and stern-looking fellow in his late fifties or early sixties, with a shock of reddish hair and a large, gingery mustachio, a man who wore a sobre black ditto suit and limped on a stout cane.
“When I address you, Armand, it may be well for you to cringe into your collar,” Sir Pulteney instructed. “Who, after all, would wed you now? What hopes of family martial glory for la patrie can come from one such as you? Will you give us grandchildren, or a life of caring for a lack-wit? Pah!” he stamped.
Lewrie ducked his head as if avoiding a proctor’s rod, gulping a bit as he recalled that what he must play-act now was him to the life in his student days—when caught lacking at his studies, skylarking, or wakened from a nap in class. Huzzah for an English public school education! he told himself.
“Thank God for Napoleon Bonaparte,” Lady Imogene said as she packed up her paints and closed the trunks, “the meddler! He imagines he will re-order so much of France . . . the civil law codes, the roads and canals, standardising the currency. . . . He has even given instructions to the Comédie Française about costumes, makeup, and how roles must be played! All these cast-offs were available for a song!”
“Let’s hoist these trunks back into the boot and be on our way, Capt . . . Armand,” Sir Pulteney snapped.
Not all that many kilometres, or miles, away at that very moment, Matthieu Fourchette was gazing across the fields to the river Oise, at a small crossroads place called L’Isle Adam on the main road to Amiens, and cursing under his breath as they watered their tired horses and eased sore fundaments. He had been forced to split his already small pursuit party after the incident with that English lord and his wife; some went on up the road to see if a second coach containing their quarry had gotten that far along beyond the first they’d stopped. There was a slim chance of that, but Fourchette had to make sure that that trailing coach had not been a decoy to put them off the chase and turn their attention elsewhere.
He wished he could sit down and rest, wished he could reach back and massage his buttocks and inner thighs, but he would not admit that he was not as good a horseman as that damned Chasseur Major Clary or the girl. On most of his missions for Fouché, walking round Paris or coaching
round France was sufficient, and when required to go by horse, the distances were usually much shorter, and at much slower paces.
Police agent Fourchette also wished he could get on with it, but he could not do that, either. Fouché had promised him a cavalry troop, and he had to wait for their arrival. He had to wait for his agents to return with a report from the other road. “Damn!” he spat.
“The coaches that left through the Argenteuil gate, and the gate at Saint-Germaine en Laye,” Major Clary thought to contribute as he stood nearby, idly flicking his horse’s reins on his boots while his mount sipped water from the poor tavern’s trough. “The Englishman is most likely in one of those, M’sieur Fourchette.”
“From the west gate? Pah!” Fourchette snapped. “Where would they run to, going west? Brest, Nantes, or Saint Malo? L’Orient or Saint-Nazaire? That would take them days to make their escape. That coach will prove to be a decoy. Fouché writes that he has requested a troop of cavalry to pursue that one, though it will prove fruitless. No . . . I think our quarry flees north for Dieppe, Boulogne-sur-Mer, or Calais. Those ports are much closer, and make their journey shorter.”
“Then why do we tarry, m’sieur?” Charité asked him.
Fourchette began to round on her, but Major Clary spoke up as he pulled the horseback from the trough and began to lead him to the shade under the trees beside the tavern. “Beauvais, is it? Departing the Argenteuil gate, the direst route north leads to Pontoise, then to Beauvais. All the roads join there. We could go on, leaving word with the tavernier for your men, and the cavalry. We could cross the Oise and ride for Beauvais and be there by nightfall, n’est-ce pas? With your authority from M’sieur Fouché and my rank in the Chasseurs, we could order fresh mounts from the regiment garrisoned there. And request more men than a single troop.”
“With these blown nags?” Fourchette gravelled, loath to take advice from a soldier. “We would be lucky to get to . . . what the Devil is the place?”—he snarled, unfolding a poor map—“to this little Méru. Oui, we’ll go to Beauvais, when my men have checked the road all the way to Creil, when the cavalry arrive, and when our horses are rested . . . else we get stuck in the woods until someone comes and rescues us! We will have to wait a bit longer, Major.”
Major Clary thought to tell Fourchette that cavalry sent from Paris in haste would arrive with blown horses, too, but was beginning to take a great dislike to the lank-haired, weaselly fellow. He would have said that, in his military experience, and with General Bonaparte and his many victories as a shining example, forces so widely separated had to act on their own initiative, and quickly. Bonaparte had trusted his generals and col onels to think, to play their disparate parts in the overall scheme before converging before the final objective, to the utter confusion of the enemy. In this case, Beauvais was the objective, the junction of almost every road their quarry might take to flee.
But Major Clary didn’t think that Fourchette would be in a mood to listen to sound advice. Besides, he didn’t much care for how this insouciant, leering salaud ogled Charité, either.
Major Clary came back from the hitching rails, letting his fond gaze assess his amour with a new lover’s delight as she sat on a bench, impatiently jiggling a booted leg crossed over the other, idly pinning back up her wind-tossed coif. She rode astride, like a man, a pair of men’s breeches underneath her gown. Charite rode as good as a man, he further marvelled. Yet . . . what was this chase all about, and what was so important to her about being a part of it—beyond the fact that she could recognise the Englishman and his wife—that that billiard-ball-headed Fouché had allowed her to come along? So this Anglais had insulted the First Consul, had he? Clary had heard their conversation, and Bonaparte had done most of the insulting to the smiling and bobbing “Bloodies.” They were to arrest this gars for that? Horse-whip him, perhaps, or throw him into prison?
Asking Charité in the few fleeting quiet moments of this chase had resulted in vague answers, waved off with an impatient hand, and a change of topic. All Paris knew Mlle. de Guilleri’s heroic history to raise a rebellion against the Spanish and reclaim Louisiana and New Orleans for France, the loss of her kin, and her banishment before the Dons garrotted her. Others said the Englishman was a spy, sent to kill Bonaparte, but that hadn’t happened, so why the urgency?
Thinking back on what he’d seen at the levee, Major Denis Clary suddenly recalled being introduced to this Lewrie . . . and how Charité had spoken to him with such well-concealed anger. Had she known him before, in Spanish Louisiana? Impossible, Clary decided. Yet . . .
“Oh, beurk!” Charité exclaimed, standing quickly. She made a gagging sound. A light two-horse open carriage was trotting up the road to the tavern, with a saddled horse tied to its rear by the reins. “Can we not be rid of that obscenity? That disgusting . . . !”
Capitaine Guillaume Choundas had caught up with them, bleating in bile to run into them, demanding why Lewrie was not yet in their hands, and what did they think they were doing, standing about with their fingers up their idle arses!
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Police Agent Fourchette didn’t think much of Méru, when they got there at last just before sunset; a wide spot in the road, most likely awash in pig-shit, inhabited by numbskulls in wooden clogs, he concluded, sharing the views of most Parisians with regard to their rural countrymen. They did call a halt for wine, bread, and cheese, water and feed bags for their horses, and a few questions.
The local policeman, the only policeman, was a corpulent, lazy jumped-up hay-scyther, stuffed into a uniform and a lax set of duties.
Yes, there were some travellers at the two foul inns, but none of them were Anglais, and no one even close to Lewrie’s description had passed through. Of course he’d carefully looked at the registries (or he would once this intense Parisian and his entourage had departed!) and no foreigners of any kind had paused in sleepy little Méru.
A coach? A big, shiny black coach-and-four with a matched team of sorrels? Mais oui, a coach like that had passed through, but that had been three hours before.
That forced Fourchette, Major Clary, Charité, the police agents, and the befuddled troop of light cavalry into their saddles, some still chewing or pulling at spare canteens hurriedly filled with a raw local vin ordinaire a vague step away from vinegar.
“On to Beauvais, allez vite!” Fourchette demanded. “They’re in a coach, three hours ahead, but we can still catch them!”
“If they did not change teams somewhere along the way, m’sieur Fourchette,” Major Clary said as they began to clatter north, “we will be much faster, even on tired mounts.”
“Fresh team? Oui, the livery,” Fourchette snapped, spurring his horse for the stables. “If they obtained fresh horses here . . . !”
The old stableman was as much a slow-witted bumpkin as the policeman, interrupted from shovelling dung with a pitchfork from one of the barn stalls. “M’sieur wishes?” he asked slowly.
“A coach came through here a few hours ago,” Fourchette began impatiently. “Did you provide them a change of horses? They are criminals, wanted in Paris.”
“A coach came here, oui m’sieur,” the older fellow said, taking his own sweet time to puff on his pipe, take it from his lips, and look into the bowl to see if it was drawing properly, then spit to one side. “But, I did not change horses with them.”
“So they will be slow, aha!” Fourchette started to cheer up.
“You wish to see the coach, m’sieur? The horses?” the old man asked. “They left it all with me and gave me three hundred francs to see it back to a livery in Paris. Is it stolen, perhaps? Will you be taking it? I was looking forward to going to Paris. Quel dommage.”
“Still here? Where?” Fourchette yelped.
“In the barn, certainement, m’sieur,” the old fellow said with his pipe stem for a pointer to the barn’s interior. “The old fellow is a criminal, then? One would never have guessed.”
“What old man?” Fourchet
te snapped as he dismounted and ordered some troopers to help him search the barn and the coach.
“The man who left the coach here, m’sieur,” the stableman said in his slow, laconic way. “A m’sieur Fleury.”
“How old? With a fair-haired woman?”
“An old soldier, I took him to be,” the stableman answered—maddeningly slowly. “Red hair and mustachios? In his fifties, I should think. Carried himself as an officer would. A colonel or general of brigade, I thought him. He travelled with his wife, but she had dark hair, mixed with grey, and quite stout. He had a limp and leaned on a cane.”
“Lewrie could not disguise himself that much,” Charité said in rising impatience, too. “Nor could his wife. Just the two of them?”
“No, mademoiselle” was the grunted reply, ’tween smoke puff s. “M’sieur Fleury had his widowed daughter-in-law and his son with him. Poor fellow.” Puff puff, look at the pipe once more, and spit.
“What about him?” Fourchette demanded, coming back from inspecting the coach and coming away without a clue.
“Why, he’d been kicked in the head by a horse, and let go from the army,” the stableman related. “All his wits knocked from him.”
“Fair, mid-brown hair, slightly curled . . . with a faint scar on his cheek?” Charité pressed, sketching a finger down her own face.
“No, mam’selle. Dark-haired. Didn’t see a scar.”
“Did they say where they were going?” Fourchette asked.
“Did they rent horses from you?” said Charité at the same time.
“Did they just walk on up the road?” came a croaking snarl from the open carriage from Guillaume Choundas.
“Hé, merde, what a sight!” The old stableman gawped at Choundas and made a gesture guaranteed in local lore to ward off evil. “One question at a time, pray you!” he pleaded with his hands before him.
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