King, Ship, and Sword

by Dewey Lambdin

  “Ah, the cooing little lovebirds!” Fourchette exclaimed in glee as he breezed back into their inn, coming to the table to pour himself a glass of wine, not waiting for permission. “And where is that ugly old cow-hide Choundas? Dying in les chiottes again, hein? It’s no matter . . . I’ve lit a fire hot enough under our local soldiers and police for the night, so we will split our party, each of us to go with five or six troopers to cover the city gates and the roads to Boulogne, Dunkerque, and Saint Omer. If we can reach the coast by now, then so can our quarry. I have a feeling about tonight. Eat a hearty meal, and then we’ll be about it!”

  Fourchette sat himself down a bit away from their table, taking another sip of wine and savouring the late-afternoon sea winds; hiding a grin as he shrewdly took note of the stiff and uncomfortable postures and the silence between the girl and her soldier. Not as fond of each other as they’d been when I left? Bon! More hope for me, Fourchette thought.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Sir Pulteney left them at a foetid inn a mile or so short of the sea, so old and begrimed that they were afraid even to speculate what simmered in the large iron pot over the fire in the hearth, settling instead for bread, cheese, and sour wine, over which they could linger ’til his return from his reconnaissance. The two bent-backed old prune-faced hags and the one white-whiskered old man who supposedly ran the place must have a “fiddle” on the side, Lewrie thought, for in the hour or longer that they sat there coughing in silence over their food in low-hanging haze of smoke from the fire, they were the only three customers. Lady Imogene whispered that they had used the inn as a way-station long ago, and . . . it appeared that the owners had not scrubbed the bare wood of the table top in all that time!

  At last the door, leaning at an angle on loose leather hasps, creaked open, the bottom screeching on the wood floor as Sir Pulteney, in his one-eyed piratical sailor’s disguise, slouched in to join them. He up-turned a somewhat clean glass to pour himself some wine, used a sailor’s sheath knife to cut himself some bread and cheese, and dropped a silver coin on the table for his fee.

  “That untrustworthy Anglais smuggler is not coming,” Plumb, or as he preferred, “Henri,” growled, well in character, talking through his food in raspy-throated French. “We might as well go on into Calais. . . . There are others who might be interested in our goods, hein?”

  The old, whiskered man came to collect the coin and bend an ear to the conversation for a moment.

  “We are full? Bon. We go.”

  They had left the two-wheeled cart and the weary horse in the side yard. Still grumbling about the perfidy of any Anglais, “Goddamn,” or sanglant in business, or anything else, Sir Pulteney climbed up to take the reins, leaving Lady Imogene to clamber aboard on her own, still in character. The Lewries took their place at the tail-board as he clucked the horse to a slow plod once more, and the cart creaked off into the night.

  For a late summer night, it was cool, with a soft wind wafting off the Channel, cool enough to make Lewrie shiver as his shoes dangled a foot or so above the road. Caroline was huddled into her shawl, her arms crossed—for warmth, Lewrie hoped. Since he had blabbed the name of Charité de Guilleri that afternoon, and had then had to explain how she and her kin had gone pirating in the West Indies, and how he’d ended them—how the girl had shot him!—leaving out the bawdy parts, of course, Caroline had acted very coolly towards him, rightly suspecting that there was a lot more to the tale.

  He put an arm round her shoulders to warm her up and adjust her shawl, but she shrugged him off with a much-put-upon bitter sigh.

  They came to a turning, another of those faint tracks, within sight of the lights of Calais, before the crossroads of the east-west Boulogne-Dunkerque road and their former St. Omer–Calais road. This jolting, grass-and gorse-strewn track led west, parallel to the main road, and Lewrie wondered how Sir Pulteney could even see it in the dark.

  A mile or so more, and the track bent northwards, after a time spent in low, wind-sculpted trees and bushes. “We’ll rejoin the road to Boulogne, soon,” Sir Pulteney told them in a harsh whisper. “Missing any crossroads, where patrols might be, what? A mile and a bit more, and we’ll be just above the cove, and stap me if it still ain’t occupied!”

  They had to get off the cart and almost drag it, and the horse, through a shallow ditch that ran alongside the Boulogne road, calming the skitterish old horse ’til it was back on solid ground, then boarded their cart for the last leg.

  “Here!” Sir Pulteney cried at last, drawing reins. “Fetch out your things, and we’re off, Begad!” They alit, and Plumb looped reins loose and slapped the old horse on the rump to send it plodding down the road on its own. “This way, smartly, now!”

  They stumbled over uneven clumps of grass, small bushes, and a field of half-buried rocks, at first on the level, then gradually on a down-slope, northwards. Cape Gris Nez, “Old Grey Nose,” stood high to their right, barely made out in starlight and the hint of a moonrise.

  Yes! Ahead of them loomed a black, sway-backed mass, that hut that Sir Pulteney had mentioned; crumbling slowly into ruin, its roof half-collapsed, and its low front and back doors seemingly no higher than Lewrie’s breast-bone, and the jambs leaning at crazed angles. A bit beyond, the coast was a darker mass, erose and bumpy-looking to either hand, but for a notch a little to their right, back-lit by some lighter something that seemed to stir and glitter in the starlight . . .

  “The Channel!” Lewrie exclaimed as loud as he dared. “The sea!” And for the first time since their harum-scarum odyssey had started, he felt a surge of confidence; he was within reach of his proper milieu!

  Matthieu Fourchette and five Chasseur troopers sat their horses at the crossroad, where the east-west highway met the St. Omer road, about a mile before the porte of Calais, with Fourchette showing a lot more impatience than the bemused, softly chatting cavalrymen. He could hear a horse approaching from the south, taking a damnably slow pace, one that almost made him spur out to meet it. At last, a rider emerged from the dark, a gendarme. “See anyone on the Saint Omer road?” Fourchette demanded.

  “No one, m’sieur,” the fellow said, making a sketchy salute to him. “It is very quiet, nothing moving this time of night. Even the Jolly Hound tavern had only a few patrons tonight. God help them if they ate there, though, hawn hawn!” he added with a laugh.

  “What sort of patrons? Did you enquire?” Fourchette pressed.

  “Only two sailors and their whores, the innkeeper reported to me,” the local gendarme easily related, smiling. “Most likely, they were smugglers, looking for a ship, m’sieur. The Jolly Hound is one of the regular rendezvous points for smuggling dealings. . . . We keep a wary eye on it, I assure you, m’sieur. The innkeeper said that the older one, a gars with an eye-patch, told the others that some Anglais smuggler didn’t come, as agreed, so they would go into Calais and try someone else. They had a two-wheeled horse cart. . . . They should have passed here, m’sieur, so surely you have—”

  “Four people . . . two couples in a cart?” Fourchette said with a frown, shifting his sore bottom on his damp saddle. “Two sailors and two women? One with an eye-patch, you say?”

  “Oui, m’sieur,” the gendarme told him. “One woman with coppery-red hair, one fellow with black hair, much younger, with a scar down his cheek . . .”

  “We passed them on the road south of here this afternoon,” the frustrated police agent muttered, half to himself. “Drunk as aristos and . . . a scar?” Mademoiselle de Guilleri said that Lewrie had a scar, a faint one, but . . . “You’re sure the innkeeper heard them say they would go to Calais?”

  “Certainement, m’sieur,” the gendarme said, mystified.

  “Yet they didn’t!” Fourchette spat, thinking hard.

  Two couples, four Anglais, had dined together at Pontoise, then coached together, disappearing from the face of the earth, it seemed. Two couples had supped at Méru: Major Fleury, his wife and widowed daughter-in-law and . . . a bandaged
son! The watchers on the Somme bridge had noted four well-dressed people, though oddly travelling in a hay waggon, going to Arras and . . . morbleu!

  “Disguises!” Fourchette yelped, realising how gulled he’d been. “A whole set of disguises! The two sailors and their women, they are the ones we seek! If they didn’t come through this crossroads, then they must be either east or west of us this very instant!”

  “The criminals we seek are disguised, m’sieur?” the gendarme gawped. “If they change again, how can we ever—”

  “Trooper!” Fourchette snapped at the nearest cavalryman. “Ride to Major Clary and his party and bring them here at once!” His burst of sudden energy made his horse fractious, beginning to circle. “You! Ride the other direction where we left mademoiselle and bring her here! And you . . . ,” he ordered in a rush, “fetch that ugly thing Choundas and his party. We have need of all our men! They’re looking for a smuggler to take them cross the Narrow Sea, but not in Calais itself. Someplace along the coast. . . . Gendarme, you know this coast well? What of side roads, farm lanes, that lead round Calais?”

  “There are some, m’sieur,” the local gendarme replied, his own horse beginning to rear and arch. “We . . . my unit and I . . . know almost all of them. I should ride to fetch my officer and more men, to be your guides?” he asked, eager to please this fellow from the splendours of Paris, and surely a man of great importance.

  “Go, go, go, vite, vite! I will wait for you here! Make haste, for the love of God, though!” Fourchette demanded, in a lather. Poor as this lead was, and as slim a hope, there was still a chance that the enigmatic foursome would be in his hands before daylight!

  They paused briefly at the tumbledown fisherman’s hut to take a breath, kneeling by its back side. It was a rough log structure, re-enforced with scrap lumber and driftwood from the beaches. It looked, and smelled, as if it had been a decade since anyone had even attempted to make use of it, or maintain it. Sir Pulteney dug into his sea-bag and pulled out a battered old brass hooded lanthorn and a flintlock tinder-box. “Remain here and rest, ladies, whilst Captain Lewrie and I head down to the cliffs for a little look-see,” Sir Pulteney said in a harsh whisper, though cackling to himself in his old manner.

  They scampered bent over at the waist, as if dashing through a volley of fire ’til they reached the edge of the cliffs, to the left of a deep, axed-out notch that led down to the Channel, a deep, hidden inlet, and a rock-guarded sand beach. Lewrie looked back and realised that the abandoned fisherman’s hut was below the long slope from their highway above, and was invisible to any but the most intent searchers following the Boulogne road.

  Whoever fished from here, he most-like broke his damnfool neck! Lewrie thought, espying a zig-zag path down from the notch, through a maze of boulders, to the beach. Had the last tenant kept a cockleshell boat drawn up above high tide, down there, he wondered? Or was he a simple caster of nets?

  “You’ve keen eyes, Captain Lewrie?” Sir Pulteney asked. “Fear mine own are of an age, but . . . might there be a schooner out yonder? I think there’s a vessel of some kind, but it’s hard for me to make out. If you’d be so kind . . .”

  Lewrie lifted his eyes to the vague horizon. The moon was rising at last, that orb waxed half full, spreading faint blue light on the Channel waters, illuminating the white chalk cliffs of Dover, far to the north, twelve or so odd miles away! Only! So close, yet . . .

  Lewrie cupped his hands round his eyes and strained to scan the sea, quartering near, then closer. “Wait!” he hissed. “Aye, there is something out yonder! I think . . .”

  There was an eerie, spectral blotch of pale grey, about three or four miles offshore, a ship of some kind. Two trapezoids, like twin fore-and-aft gaff-hung sails? There was a smaller, thinner shape that might be a single jib, to the right of the trapezoid shapes, so she was making a long, slow board East’rd, up-Channel.

  “Aye, there’s something much like a schooner,” he said at last. “But it could be a smuggler’s boat, puttin’ in to Calais, a Frenchie, or even one of their navy’s chasse-marées, lookin’ for smugglers. No,” he said on second thought.

  Chasse-marées had a short mizen, right aft, he recalled. Was it an innocent fishing boat making a long night trawl, to be first to the market come daybreak?

  “We must have faith, Captain Lewrie,” Sir Pulteney said with rising enthusiasm as he fluffed the lint in the tinder-box, cocked the firelock, and pulled the trigger. On his third try, sparks took light in the lint, which he carefully coaxed with his breath into a fire that caught in the oily rag, which began to glow with dark amber, which yet another breath turned to a flame! He opened the lanthorn and applied the rag to an oily wick . . . which, at last, flared up!

  “Zounds!” Sir Pulteney crowed, standing erect, holding up his lanthorn and waving it to and fro for a bit, then he turned it round so the closed back side faced the sea. Rapidly rotating it back and forth, he sent some signal known only to him and one of his old conspirators, then lifted it high once more, the glass-paned side facing outwards.

  “Begad, sir! Odd’s Life, will you look at that!” Sir Pulteney yelped, almost leaping in joy as a tiny glim aboard that vessel leapt to life and began to flash a slow reply in a series of rotations much like Sir Pulteney’s. “It’s our schooner, Captain Lewrie. He has seen us, and, if God is just, we shall be away before the dawn! Let us go gather our ladies and make our way down to the beach, haw haw!”

  Major Clary, Charité de Guilleri, and Guillaume Choundas had responded to Fourchette’s urgent summons to join him at the crossroads, Choundas in such bilious haste that he’d demanded a Chasseur to carry him behind his saddle, no matter how painful it was. Now he was incredulous, and raging. “Costumes? Disguises? Pah!” he bleated. “Are we chasing phantoms, chimeras? The Comédie Française?” he snarled as Fourchette’s suspicions were laid out.

  “This Lewrie salaud was bandaged at Méru, most likely dismissed at the Somme bridge, and groping a red-headed whore in the back of the cart this afternoon, and we never thought to ask to see his face. But he showed his face at a smugglers’ inn, and he had a faint scar. They tried to find a smuggler to take them over to England, but they didn’t . . . they didn’t enter Calais or pass this crossroad,” Fourchette told them all. “You did not see two sailors and two whores in a cart on the Dunkerque road, Major Clary? Then we must admit that the older man of their party has an intimate knowledge of farm lanes and back roads from here to Paris . . . and that they are very near us, this moment, and desperate for passage. We almost—”

  He was interrupted by a lone rider coming from the west, up the road from Boulogne, “Qui va là?” the rider called out nervously as he caught a glimpse of their large party.

  “Police!” a Capitaine Vignon, commander of the local gendarmes, barked back. “Who are you, damn you?”

  “Oh, there you are, Capitaine. It is I, Gendarme Bossuett,” the rider said, spurring up to them and re-slinging his short musketoon. Evidently, the threat of dangerous, fleeing felons, aristo conspirators, or cut-throat smugglers had made him edgy.

  “Report, immediately,” Capitaine Vignon snapped.

  “Pardon, Capitaine, but one cannot be too careful tonight, with so many . . . ,” the gendarme began with a relieved chuckle.

  “Have you seen anyone on the Boulogne road? Two sailors and two women, in a one-horse cart?” Fourchette pressed him.

  “I’ve seen no one, m’sieur . . . citoyen,” the gendarme said in confusion as to the proper form of address to use. “But there is a two-wheeled cart, abandoned, about a league back, just grazing along, with the reins . . . I thought it rather . . .”

  “Zut alors! Putain! We have them!” Fourchette cursed, crowing with glee. “They did find a smuggler to carry them away . . . from some beach along the road! Allez, allez vite, at the gallop! Where they left the cart, they cannot be far from it on foot!”

  Despite the faint moon and starlight, Fourchette spurred into a reckless gallop, l
eading the party of soldiers and police at a furious pace. Choundas whimpered and howled with pain, clinging desperately to his trooper’s back; music to Fourchette’s ears, as it was to Clary and Charité, as well!

  Once they were over the edge of the cliff, the path down to the beach was not quite as steep as Lewrie feared, though it wound like a snake round large coach-sized boulders, in some places so snug between that he had to turn sideways and puff out his breath to squeeze through. At other points the flinty earth, gravel, and loose soil crunched and tumbled as soon as he set foot upon it. In the steepest stretches, someone had long ago used pick and shovel to carve out rough steps down to flatter ledges, before another uncertain descent.

  Now below the line of the cliffs, and unable to be seen by any watchers along the road, Sir Pulteney kept the lanthorn lit and open to hasten their progress and to light the ladies’ way.

  “Thank God our last disguises called for stout old shoes, not slippers,” Lady Imogene whispered, between deep breaths.

  Halfway down, Lewrie told himself, helping Caroline down a set of steps, then looking out to sea again. That schooner was the one Sir Pulteney had arranged, by God! After that mysterious signal, it had hauled its wind and come about to approach the coast, and their notch-like inlet and cove. She was not more than two miles off now, and cautiously slanting shoreward, with a large rowing boat in tow, astern, and dare he imagine that it was already being led round to the schooner’s larboard entry-port?

  “Not much further, not much longer, all!” Sir Pulteney crowed as they reached the last of the boulders, and a faint solid path down through a dangerous scree slope where the going was all gravel, flat shards, and fist-sized rock where ankles could be turned, bones broken, and skulls smashed in an eyeblink if the way slid in an avalanche.