by A L Berridge
There was a moment’s silence, then she glided across the room and said ‘M. de Chouy, perhaps you would have the kindness to allow an old woman to embrace you.’
He did, and his whole face went pink. But at least it made him more coherent, he sat down and told us the boy had arrived a couple of hours ago, dressed like a common artisan and with some kind of working man in tow.
‘Oh, not like you, Jacquot,’ he said hastily, ‘this man was really rough. But he helped the Chevalier out of Saint-Germain, so naturally we’ve taken him in too. They’re quite safe.’
The Comtesse inclined her head. ‘Not, I fear, for much longer. Once the authorities draw the covert of Saint-Germain they will realize the Chevalier has escaped and turn their attention to his friends. I’m afraid we must get him out.’
De Chouy looked anxious again. ‘I’m not sure we can. The gates were all shut at noon, the Chevalier must have been one of the last in.’
We were all silent. Paris wasn’t like Dax, the city walls were thirty feet high with little sentry boxes all round.
‘The Seine?’ said Charlot. ‘Perhaps a boat.’
De Chouy shook his head apologetically. ‘There are guard boats all along the boom.’
We went quiet again, and I became aware of clattering and voices outside, something happening down in the courtyard. I went to the window and saw a load of armed guards coming through the gate surrounding a grand sedan chair. Our own guards actually bowed.
‘Naturally,’ said the Comtesse, peering out to examine the livery. ‘That is the Secretary of War, M. de Noyers himself.’
‘Odd,’ said de Chouy. ‘I heard he was indisposed. He wasn’t at the party, was he?’
The Comtesse glanced sharply at him, then turned casually back to the window. ‘Perhaps, M. de Chouy, you would retire with M. Gilbert while I receive this visitor?’
I understood then and practically dragged him under the tapestry into the Comtesse’s apartment next door. I listened at the gallery and heard servants down in the hall and the heavy-footed arrival of the men with the chair. I heard the servants ordered away, and guessed the visitor wanted privacy in order to get out. I heard the stairs creak as he came up alone, slow and painful till he reached the top. I heard Charlot saying deferentially ‘Monseigneur,’ then the salon door closing and Charlot leaning against it with a deep sigh.
‘I say,’ said de Chouy, ‘do you think …?’
I said ‘Shh, yes.’
We crept back to the door under the tapestry and squashed our heads right up against it, but could only hear the low rumble that was him and the light up-and-down trill that was her. The gallery door opened again, a mumble of voices, then footsteps coming towards us, and there was Charlot standing in the doorway.
He didn’t show any surprise at finding us listening, I bet he’d been doing the same at the other door. He said ‘He would like to see you, Monsieur.’
My throat clenched in panic, but Charlot was already turning and I’d got to follow him. He practically shoved me into the salon, said ‘M. Gilbert,’ and closed the door.
He was a blaze of scarlet in a high-backed chair like a throne. There was the red skull-cap, the white collar, the short, flat silver hair, the pointed face with stumpy moustache and little grey imperial, the long nose and cold eyes half-hooded with heavy lids. Everything was just as I’d seen it in the paintings, and I didn’t need anyone to tell me I was looking at Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu.
He was hunched slightly forward, grasping the chair arms with long, thin hands, and for a moment he looked me up and down in silence. Then he said ‘So you are the young man who spoiled my little fireworks party?’
I said ‘Yes, Monseigneur.’
He smiled. It was an odd smile, sort of watery, like sunshine on a wet day. ‘Then unless you wish to pay for the ruined display, perhaps you would like to explain what happened.’
He shifted in his chair, and I realized he wasn’t leaning forward to be intimidating, he was actually in pain. It showed in his eyes too, a wariness that was almost like fear. Somehow that made me less frightened, it helped me get through my story right to the end.
He said ‘You realize you’re accusing Lieutenant Dubosc of the Musketeers of an attempted murder?’
I swallowed. ‘If that’s his name.’
He nodded, and there it was again, that watery glint in his eyes. ‘Good.’
I said ‘Then you’ll support him. The Chevalier de Roland, I mean.’
He brought his hands together like somebody praying and touched the tips of his fingers to his lips. ‘No.’
‘But you know he’s innocent …’
He gave me a tiny smile over his fingers. ‘I know a great many things.’
I felt he knew what I’d done in the privy that morning. ‘You’ve got the power to do it.’
He kept his hands together but brought them down to point at me like an arrow. ‘You forget yourself, Monsieur. I am but a humble servant of His Majesty. His will is mine – in most things.’ His hands opened slowly, and I almost saw the world sitting in them like a globe. ‘But I am powerless in this. The Musketeers are the apple of His Majesty’s eye, and he already believes me hostile to them.’
I remembered the glint in his eye and thought the King was probably right.
I said ‘But if one of them speaks out. There’s a young one, he saw it …’
‘So I understand,’ he said. ‘I would guess his name was Darnier.’
‘Then you can get him to speak for us.’
‘Not even I,’ said the Cardinal. ‘That is the name of a young Musketeer whose body was taken from the Seine this morning. They say he bore the marks of twenty-seven cuts.’
I saw his face flashing up in front of me, young and keen and truthful. Twenty-seven cuts then the filthy water of the Seine, and all for knowing even less than we did.
I said ‘Then there’s no hope.’
‘There is if we prove motive,’ he said. ‘But for that we need to prove what the Chevalier suspects is true.’ He heaved forward again, and I realized he was actually going to stand. He waved away my assistance, paced to the window and looked out over his world.
He said ‘Some does not need proving. His Majesty and I have been interested in the Sedan for some time, and have little doubt some form of rebellion is planned.’
He touched his finger to the glass and began to trace little circles on its surface. ‘But the Chevalier has discovered the conspiracy reaches even to Paris. That Fontrailles is involved. That the figurehead here is someone on whom His Majesty and I are not of one mind.’
There was only one man he could mean. My grandmother’s eyes warned me to silence, but we were all thinking ‘Cinq-Mars’ so loudly we might as well have shouted.
‘But to convince His Majesty I will need documents, treaties, signatures,’ said the Cardinal. ‘Without those I cannot act.’
I tasted disappointment in my mouth like flat wine.
He turned round slowly, a featureless black shape against the light of the window. ‘Unless nobody knows that I know. Unless nobody knows you do either, as that would amount to the same thing. Unless they continue to believe you know only the names of Fontrailles and Bouchard with no idea of their significance, and they are in no danger at all.’
I thought that was stupid. ‘But there’ll be an investigation, we’ll have to explain to defend the Chevalier.’
‘You must not defend the Chevalier,’ he said. ‘You may speak of what happened in the gardens, but of nothing else.’
Not speak in the boy’s defence. Stand by and say nothing. I said ‘I can’t not –’
His hand flicked up instantly. ‘A man can do anything in service of the state. But this will serve your Chevalier too.’ He prowled away from the window, his robes sliding over the floor in great swirls of cloth. I wondered how much they weighed on him, and how thin he was underneath.
‘Consider,’ he said. ‘We speak now and gain nothing
. Anything the Chevalier says will appear only a wild story to cover his crime. Anything you say will be seen as a lie to protect him. If I speak without evidence, I forfeit the trust of His Majesty and alert his enemies to my knowledge. They go to ground, I learn nothing further, and we lose everything.’
It was like being back in that maze, banging into hedges everywhere I turned. I looked miserably at my grandmother, but she kept her eyes on Richelieu and seemed calm.
‘Now suppose we stay silent,’ he said. ‘Consider that. These people continue to act, I watch and learn, and when I have evidence I go to His Majesty. The conspiracy is destroyed, these people exposed, and your Chevalier cleared. Does not that seem a better outcome?’
I said ‘If he’s not executed first.’
His eyelids fluttered in mild reproach. ‘I shall of course ensure his escape.’
‘Escape, Monseigneur?’ said the Comtesse. ‘But surely he is already out of Paris?’
The smile he gave her was almost flirtatious. ‘Oh, my dear Madame. He is in the city, and you know it as well as I. He was in Saint-Germain last night with one of my green men, and today he is in the city and we must get him out.’
You can’t pretend with someone who knows everything. I said ‘How?’
He gave me a nod of approval. ‘There are circumstances in which a gate might be left open. If a regiment needed to leave, for example, the Chevalier might depart in the train.’
I said ‘Is there one?’
‘There will be if I order it,’ he said. ‘Say the Porte Saint-Martin. Wait in the cooper’s yard near the Lapin Gris at nine tonight and an officer will bring you into the corps. There is a woman too, is there not?’
I nodded.
‘She can travel with the wives and followers. Keep her safe, Monsieur. She and my engineer are witnesses as much as your Chevalier.’
I hesitated. ‘But if it doesn’t happen? I mean if we’re all in the cooper’s yard …’
He straightened his robes and nodded my dismissal. ‘Really, Monsieur,’ he said. ‘Who can you trust if you can’t trust me?’
Eight
Albert Grimauld
Ah, that’s how it goes when you know the right people, see? André cheered up like wine to hear we’d the Old Devil on our side, he was certain sure of our escape now. He’d been lying in bed moping, saying no, he didn’t want no soup, no, he didn’t want no nothing, and suddenly he was sitting up saying ‘Where’s my soup, Grimauld, you’ve bloody eaten it, haven’t you?’ Course I had, and very good it was too.
So he chucked his pillow at me and a pretty girl went to get him more, then he scrounged paper and a quill off young de Chouy, scribbled away with ink flying, then asked if I’d deliver a letter to a house on the Place Dauphine.
I said ‘Got no choice, have I? Still waiting for payday.’
He said ‘One day it’ll come for both of us.’
Ah, I know, thinking of it now makes me want to spew. But not at the time, see, I went off thinking nothing but good. I found the house, banged at the kitchen door and told the stunted little maid I’d a letter to go into her mistress’s own hand.
The maid looked at me with lower lip flopping and said ‘The mistress is sick of a brain fever, the master says she’s not to be disturbed.’
‘Ah, but my letter will cure all that,’ says I, oozing charm like a monk with a collecting box. ‘You fetch her for me, my poppet, you’ll see.’
‘I’ll get her companion,’ says she, not being up to anything harder, nor likely to meet it with a face like that. ‘Jeanette will know.’
Ah, now Jeanette was more like it, wide smile, plump where you like it, altogether nice-looking piece. There was no messing with her either. She says ‘Is it M. de Roland?’ I says ‘Yes,’ and she says ‘Right,’ then she’s off again and back in a moment with a poor wilting creature it takes me a second to identify as the woman I last saw hacking at a hedge like a Lyons executioner. She rips open the letter and reads it, and oh my word, the difference. When she looks at me again, she’s a lovely thing, ripe and blushing, I wouldn’t have said no to it myself, always providing there weren’t no axe in the vicinity.
‘Is there an answer?’ says I.
‘Yes,’ says she. ‘That’s the answer. Yes.’
It was all over her, that ‘yes’, like blossom on a tree. I found myself thinking of it all the walk back, and for a little time the world looked shiny and bright-coloured to me too, just the way the laddie saw it and it never ever was.
André de Roland
Letter to Anne du Pré, dated 14 October 1640
My very dearest,
You know what has happened. I dare to hope also that you know me innocent, for so I am, my darling, I give you my word before God.
I must, however, leave Paris until the truth can be established. I do not ask you to come with me, for I can offer you nothing but the life of a fugitive and a husband your family may not care to own. I do not ask, but if you were to be in the back room at the Lapin Gris by the Porte Saint-Martin at half after eight tonight I have a way out of the gate with a departing regiment and we could leave together and marry the next day.
I do not ask, my darling, because I have no right. If I did, I would beg.
Forever yours, whatever you decide,
A
Jacques Gilbert
My grandmother would have made the most brilliant general. She looked at the whole picture then went bang and bang at the weak points till there was nothing left to resist.
She knew we were bound to be followed, so she got a pass from the Cardinal for the Porte Saint-Antoine and appointed herself to be the distraction. While she was having the carriage prepared with as much fuss as possible, me and Charlot and Bernadette simply nipped over the back wall.
We needed horses on the other side, of course, but she’d fixed that too. She’d been out visiting the most irreproachable people she knew, and not one of the guards noticed she’d gone out in a coach-and-six and came back in a coach-and-four. Tonnerre and Héros were left in the stables of the Comte de Vallon, where we found them saddled and ready, complete with pistols and our baggage. I took Bernadette on Héros because Charlot would have just flattened him, then the three of us galloped straight for the Porte Saint-Martin.
It was gone eight when we found the cooper’s yard. The gate was ajar, we were obviously expected, but there were no lanterns or torches inside, just great high walls and rows of barrels stacked in towering pyramids. I left Charlot and Bernadette with the horses, and stepped cautiously into the dark.
A bony hand smacked round my mouth, an arm jerked tight round my neck, I was bent back so violently I nearly lost my footing. I kicked out behind, but there weren’t any legs there, the bastard was an expert, and my wounded knee just collapsed under me. I was being dragged helplessly back towards the barrels when a voice said urgently ‘Leave him, Grimauld, it’s Jacques.’
The pressure relaxed and I turned to see the green man from yesterday. De Chouy was there too, beaming with relief, and standing beside him was André. He was dressed as a cavalry officer but otherwise he was just the same, the boy like I’d last seen him. He was standing all right too, he didn’t look hurt on the outside, but when I looked at his face I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach.
He said ‘Hullo,’ in a tight sort of voice, then stepped forward and grabbed me. His clothes were cold but nothing else was, he hugged me like he used to when he was a little boy and me not much more. It was good to remember that afterwards.
He stepped back at last and introduced me to Grimauld, who grinned cheerfully and said ‘You want to watch your back more careful, I could have had you for dinner.’
‘I doubt it, fellow,’ said a voice, and there was the great shape of Charlot looming up in the dark. ‘M. Gilbert did not walk into danger without reserves.’
Grimauld gawped at him. ‘Sod me to the Sedan, where’d you grow that?’
‘Never mind,’ said André quickly. ‘Is th
e street clear, Charlot?’
Charlot wrenched his eyes off Grimauld. ‘Yes, Chevalier. I’ll fetch Mademoiselle and the horses.’
‘Good,’ said André, and turned to me. ‘Can you look after them while Crespin checks the gate’s clear? I just need to nip off to the Lapin Gris.’
I stared. ‘You’re a bloody fugitive, you can’t nip off anywhere.’
‘It’s only a hundred yards away,’ he said, sticking out his chin in that way he’d had since he was ten. ‘But Anne might be there, and I can’t send anyone else.’
I was so shocked I could hardly think. ‘You’ve told her we’re leaving tonight?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ve told her everything. Why not?’
Anne du Pré
Extract from her diary, dated 14 October 1640
My chance came at dusk. Marie reported the way through the kitchen was clear, so Jeanette and I crept down the back stairs as cautiously as if this were a prison of the enemy. And so indeed it was, for at the bottom stood Florian, and behind him Bouchard.
I gave them good evening and made to pass, but Florian did not move and Bouchard stuck his leg across the passage as if we might try to run. I said ‘Florian, I will be late for Compline,’ but my voice faltered, for I saw by his face he guessed the truth.
‘Compline?’ he said, and dragged my hand from my side so that the bundle slipped beneath my cloak and slithered out on to the floor. ‘With your luggage?’
I said ‘You’re hurting my wrist.’
‘Come down then,’ he said, and jerked me off the step to the floor. Behind him Bouchard retrieved my bundle, laid it on the chest and began to rummage inside.
I said ‘Florian, you cannot allow –’
‘Here it is,’ said Bouchard. He was holding out André’s letter.
Shock and hopelessness hit me both together. ‘So now I am spied on by my own maid?’
Florian did not even flush. ‘Marie acted as a loyal servant should,’ he said, unfolding my letter as if it had been his own. ‘I’m disappointed Jeanette has not done the same.’