The Old Vengeful

by Anthony Price

  “No coincidence,” said Aske. “Just an historical progression, really.”

  “Historical, Mr Aske?”

  “Or Napoleonic, Miss Loftus. Napoleon was luckier than the British: he had all his PoW camps ready-built for him—all the old frontier fortresses that he didn’t need any more, having advanced the frontier far beyond them, and beaten everyone in sight. But, of course, when he was beaten in his turn, the frontier went back to where it had started—and all the PoW camps became fortresses again … Arras, Cambrai, Verdun … Do you recognise the names, Miss Loftus?”

  To a historian those were names to conjure with from older wars, but Elizabeth knew what he meant: they were the great names of Paul’s war, the sepulchres of three great European armies. And because Lautenbourg itself had been just such another fortress along that long-disputed frontier, it too had its 1914-18 battlefield.

  And yet Lautenbourg didn’t fit, nevertheless: of all Napoleon’s British captives, only the handful of Vengefuls had been sent there, she remembered.

  “Why were they sent to Lautenbourg, Paul? Did Tom Chard know that?”

  Paul shook his head. “He never even asked himself the question— and why should he? But what he does say is that they were marched towards Verdun at first, by easy stages. And then one morning a new escort took over, under a full colonel of the Gendarmerie—a hard man by the name of ‘Soo-Shay’—and they went off in a different direction, and under close arrest, as though they were criminals.”

  “To Lautenbourg?”

  “Yes. And Lieutenant Chipperfield protested about it, because he’d given his parole in the usual way, and he expected to be treated according to the rules of war—like a gentleman.”

  Aske gave a snort. “Nothing unusual about that. Napoleon Bonaparte was a great man, but he wasn’t a gentleman—he was always breaking the old gentlemanly rules, Professor Wilder says. Like encouraging his officers to break their comfortable paroles, and then complaining if a British officer he’d locked up broke out of prison … where they shouldn’t have been put in the first place, once they’d given their word-of-honour… Because, the way the British worked it out, an officer could only escape after they’d shut him up in jail. If they didn’t, then he couldn’t escape. It’s funny really: if Napoleon had played the game there wouldn’t have been any escapes at all, not of officers and gentlemen. But he did—so there were lots of them.”

  Elizabeth frowned, trying to remember Father’s original brief paragraph on the fate of the prisoners. “But it was unusual—the way they were treated—surely?”

  “It was, yes,” Paul agreed. “What Tom Chard says is that they asked him a lot of silly questions … What it amounts to is that ‘Colonel Soo-shay’ interrogated them, and didn’t get the right answers. And then Chipperfield decided that, since they weren’t being treated properly, and sent to the main depot at Verdun, they had a legal right to escape.”

  “So they did!” said Aske triumphantly. “It’s exactly as I said. Or what Wilder said … he said … there’s this famous quote, by some officer—PoW, about his word-of-honour being stronger than any French locks-and-bolts. Meaning, that if they broke the rules he was honour-bound to teach them a lesson. But you’re right about Lautenbourg, all the same—‘fishy’, was how Wilder described that. But… so shouldn’t we be digging there first—at Lautenbourg, where they started—rather than here?”

  Aske’s voice was gentle now, and his question was innocently put, to conceal the suggestion in it that he still doubted the sense of Paul’s actions. Yet there was also more to it than that, thought Elizabeth: having been repulsed once in his attempt to obtain a straight answer to the central question, he was manoeuvring to repeat it indirectly and obliquely.

  “Here will do well enough.” Paul found it harder to maintain his politeness, but he managed it.

  Was it simply because Aske was homosexual, and a stranger associated with someone Paul distrusted? Perhaps all that was good enough for him, the irrational confirming the rational, and yet there was surely an edge of something else which she couldn’t place … If she’d been beautiful and desirable, and Aske had been heterosexual … then it might have been sheer masculine irritation—three was a crowd, and she hadn’t concealed her sympathy for Humphrey Aske, in spite of everything … But she wasn’t, and he wasn’t, so it couldn’t be that, whatever it was.

  “There—up ahead,” said Paul. “I’ve brought you this way so you can get a proper view of it. The first time I came here I could hardly see my hand in front of my face. This is a great country for mist and fog, summer and winter. Both sides found that out in 1918.”

  Elizabeth craned her neck to see.

  “Coucy,” said Paul. “Once upon a time it was better to be the Lord of Coucy than a Prince of the Blood, they used to say.”

  A great castle … walls, with their massive interval towers, stretching for half a mile—or more, disappearing into the trees—crowning a high ridge above the plain.

  “I’d much rather take you on to see the Paris Gun site, of course—that’s why I came here first, back in ‘73 … castles don’t mean a bloody thing to me. Battlefields are the places to see, they’re where it’s all at.”

  “Battlefields—“ Aske caught his tongue again, before it could betray him “—it’s an impressive ruin, I must say … Where do we go?”

  “Follow the road up, through the gateway. Then I’ll direct you,” said Paul, in his Aske-clipped voice.

  The road meandered up the ridge, twisting with its own logic until it turned finally under the walls and towers to skirt their circuit. Elizabeth felt herself pressed into silence by the very weight of history, with Lieutenant Chipperfield of the Vengeful sandwiched between medieval Enguerrand III and twentieth-century General Ludendorff.

  “Park here,” commanded Paul. “From here we walk.”

  Elizabeth looked round, to get her bearings. They had passed through Paul’s great gateway, but into a little town, not a castle—a walled town, which must be what she had glimpsed from below. And now they were in one corner of the town, approaching another gateway, which must belong to the castle itself.

  No … the whole thing was on a bigger scale than that: this second entrance was only an outer gate, opening on to an immense grassy space dotted with trees—an outer ward much bigger than at her own Portchester, near home.

  But Paul seemed to know what he was doing, turning away into the custodian’s office with a curt “Stay here”, leaving them to kick their heels on an empty square of gravel.

  “I’ve never heard of this place.” Aske blinked, and stared around as Elizabeth had done. “But then, judging by the lack of enthusiastic sightseers, I’m not alone in that… or maybe this is aperitif time …” He kicked his way across the gravel like a bored schoolboy, to a curious collection of rusty iron. “This is never medieval—more like industrial revolution … that iron trolley … and those look like I don’t know what—railway lines? Except they’re curved—?”

  The gravel crunched behind them. “Slightly curved, for a circle with a ninety-foot diameter. But your dating is about right, Aske. Say, mid-1860s. Vintage Napoleon III.”

  Another period, and from the wrong Napoleon. They both looked questioningly at Paul Mitchell.

  “And also significant. Cardinal Mazarin tried to blow up the great tower in the seventeenth century, only he hadn’t got anything powerful enough to do the job. But there was an earthquake in these parts in 1692 that cracked it from top to bottom … didn’t bring it down, but cracked it—which is one of our main clues, as it happens … so when Viollet-le-Duc came to do his rescue job on the cheap for Napoleon III he fixed a couple of iron hoops round it, to hold it together. And these are bits of hoop—you can see more of them among the wreckage inside … Ludendorff ‘s explosive was powerful enough … Although it took twenty-eight tons of even what he’d got. Something like ammonal, I suppose.”

  “What d’you mean ‘one of our clues’, Paul?” She stared a
t the bits of old railway line.

  “Not the hoops. The great crack—that’s what fixed our chaps on Coucy here: ‘A wondrous great tower, the like of which I never saw for its breadth and height, but very ancient; which yet stood, though split sadly by a fierce tremor of the earth in the days of the Great King, so it is said.’ Tom Chard wasn’t a great one for French names, but he was interested in everything he saw on his travels, and he had a good memory, thank God! So he left us enough clues—an earthquake in the reign of Louis XIV, because no one ever called Louis XV or Louis XVI ‘great’ … and a ‘wondrous’ tower split by an earthquake can only be Enguerrand’s—wondrous is exactly what it was, which was why Ludendorff blew it up, the bastard.”

  Aske caught Elizabeth’s eye a little despairingly, as if to share his conviction that they were even further from any sort of useful answer.

  “And … that’s why we’re here?” he prodded Paul cautiously.

  “Partly, yes …” Paul scanned the landscape ahead, as though he was looking for something in it. “We’re here to re-write a chapter in Elizabeth’s father’s book, as a result of Miss Irene Cookridge’s recent revelations, actually … Ah! There he is!” He pointed up the pathway.

  Elizabeth frowned along the line of his finger. “Who? Where?”

  Why?

  “On the seat there. My old friend Bernard Bourienne. He made it!” Paul sounded childishly delighted. “Come on—“

  “Who’s … Bernard Bourienne?” panted Elizabeth.

  “He’s a veterinary surgeon from Château-Thierry—“

  “A what?” exclaimed Aske.

  “He’s also an enthusiastic amateur historian. In fact, there aren’t many professionals who know more than he does about American operations in France in 1918—all the best American bits in my Hindenburg Line book are thanks to him … and he’s pretty good on the Chemin des Dames too.”

  “Dear God!” whispered Aske. “Into the trenches again—with a vet!”

  Mercifully, Paul didn’t hear him, he was already striding towards the man on the seat. “I didn’t think he’d make it—Bernard! Well met, mon vieux!”

  “Paul!” Bernard Bourienne unwound himself—all six-foot … six-foot-two—six-foot-four—and, with the shock of dark hair on the top of it, matching the bushy eye-brows, finally more like six-foot-six. “Well met, also, old friend!”

  They embraced, in the continental manner which left Elizabeth slightly embarrassed. And then the Frenchman’s dark eyes zeroed in on her, stripping her down and reassembling her in a fraction of a second, and yet somehow achieving this without the offence she would have felt in England.

  “Bertrand—M’sieur Bourienne—allow me to introduce Mamselle Elizabeth Loftus, daughter of the late Commander Hugh Loftus, VC—“

  The shock of hair came down to Elizabeth’s level.

  “—and my… my colleague and fellow historian, Humphrey Aske, of London University.”

  “M’sieur.” Bertrand Bourienne gave Humphrey Aske a very brief glance, and then a second and more searching one, as though the first had quivered some sensitive antenna hidden in the tangle of hair.

  “Now, Bertrand—“ Paul pre-empted any return civilities “—I hope you’ve got something good for me, because we’re pushed for time, as I told you on the phone last night.” He looked around. “In fact, it must be almost closing time here, to start with … and I’d like my friends to see what’s left of Enguerrand’s tower before we get chivvied out.”

  “Chivvied out?” Bourienne waved the threat away. “My dear Paul, they do not chivvy me.” He drew himself up to his full height, adding the elongated length of one arm to it in a signal directed towards the gate-house. “So!”

  Elizabeth followed the signal, but could see no sign of movement. Then she looked at the Frenchman and he smiled at her, lifting a finger to silence her as he did so. “Listen, Miss Loftus.”

  For a moment there was total silence, no voices, no sounds, not even any bird-song, which she might have expected in England. Then, out of nowhere—out of the air around her—there was music … not music she could place in any origin of time instantly—not the Musak of the twentieth century … but the sweeter sounds of a distant past, made by unfamiliar instruments and clear in the stillness of the evening.

  “Oh—clever stuff, Bertrand,” murmured Paul irreverently. “One day you’ll have to do a Son et Lumière here—ending with a bloody great 28-ton bang, maybe?”

  “Fourteenth century,” said Aske. “Lute and hautboy—Enguerrand’s background music, perhaps?”

  Influence, thought Elizabeth, putting it all together just as suddenly as the haunting music had filled the open space between the trees and the towers all around her. Paul had said contacts, but that had been what he meant—and that had been Father’s complaint in the latter days: I haven’t any influence any more—I can’t make people do things for me—I don’t know the right people … This was what Paul had, which he had boasted of—

  “Enguerrand’s music, c’est vrai,” Bourienne acknowledged Aske’s guess. “Although I should have had them play La Marseillaise for you this time, Paul… if not the rataplan of the drummers of the Guard.” They were moving now, as though by concensus, still lapped by Enguerrand’s music, towards an inner gateway, much more ruined and overgrown, but also greater.

  Paul turned towards his friend. “So you have got something?”

  “That … I don’t know …” Bertrand Bourienne mused on the question. “I know that I have worked very hard for you, these last hours … and in a period unfamiliar to me—and also with material and people unfamiliar to me—yes!”

  “Ha … hmmm!” Paul grunted unintelligibly, and Elizabeth sensed that he was trying to control his impatience.

  “We’re very grateful to you for taking such trouble to help us, M’sieur Bourienne,” she said carefully. “And at such short notice.”

  “No trouble, Miss Loftus. Assisting fellow-labourers in the vineyard is always a pleasure. And I understand the importance of checking new material when it arrives so inconveniently, with a book almost finished …” Bourienne nodded sympathetically “… though that is the mark of a true scholar, but naturally—and nothing less than what I would expect of my friend, Dr Mitchell … No, my only reservation—my only regret, even—is that this concerns an era of history with which I am not conversant in sufficient depth to be of real help, so that … with so little time at my disposal … I have been dependent on the charity of others. And to no great effect I fear.”

  “You mean that Dr Mitchell has sent you on a wild goose chase?” said Aske.

  “No … that I do not mean.” Bourienne pursed his lips, and looked sidelong at Paul. “I know him of old, and he has the historian’s gift—the instinct for the one fact out of the many … the one fact which cannot safely be left behind—the nose for the deep dug-out in the captured trench which is not empty, but full of Germans waiting to issue forth to take you in the rear as you move on.”

  They were passing through the gateway now, with a labyrinth of ruined guardhouses, and steps descending into darkness, on one side, and a jumble of stones on a hillside on the other.

  “And this is one of those dug-outs—those facts, I think,” said Bourienne. “Even though I do not know this period, my nose tells me so.” He looked at Elizabeth suddenly, nodding again, but this time thoughtfully. “I think … you are wise not to leave this chapter behind you, Miss Loftus.”

  “Why, M’sicur Bourienne?” She had come to the question at last.

  He pointed to the stone-covered hillside. “Do you not wish to see Enguerrand’s tower?”

  “I want to know why, first, if you please.” Once out, the why took precedence over everything else.

  “Very well. If I have understood Paul correctly, you are concerned with the fate of a party of escaped British sailors who concealed themselves here, in one of the towers of this castle? Deserters—yes?”

  “Yes.” If that was what Paul had
said, then yes. “Prisoners-of-war, though, not deserters.”

  “No.” It was Aske who spoke. “ ‘Deserter’ was the official name for all escaped PoWs, on both sides of the Channel. Once they broke out they were regarded in law as criminals, the officers as well as the men. over here, if they were recaptured they went straight to the dungeons in the punishment fortresses.”

  “And in England they went to the hulks—the old wooden battleships rotting on the mud-flats, m’sieur. Which was worse, I have been told—is that not so?”

  Aske shook his head slowly. “Not worse than the hell-hole at Bitche—‘the house of tears’. And they reckoned Sarrelibre was worse than Bitche. Or so I have been told, m’sieur.”

  The tall Frenchman looked down at the little Englishman for a moment, then turned back to Elizabeth. “Let us say … it was a cruel age, Miss Loftus. Any man who escaped in those days risked more than mere recapture. But then any man who wore his country’s uniform … that was also a cruel fate. And especially here in France, After twenty years of war, and the Law of Conscription, which was hated so much.”

  “Like the Press Gang?”

  “That I cannot say. But here… by 1812 the countryside was full of refractaires—the evaders of conscription who were on the run … as well as deserters from the army. And, for the most part, the peasants and the poor people pitied them, and helped them. Or at least did not inform on them—“ he swung towards Paul “—and that, Paul, is how these men of yours survived here for so long without discovery: they passed themselves off as conscripts—as fishermen from the west coast trying to return to their homes … Would that be right?”

  “Exactly right, Bertrand, by God!” Paul nodded first to the Frenchman, then to Elizabeth. “Tom Chard said that Chipperfield and the midshipman both spoke enough French to get by, but they passed off their accents as Breton—like pretending to be Scotsmen in Kent. By God! Bertrand—you’ve found them! That’s brilliant of you!”