by Sara Fraser
He and his party had left the cavalry camp at Ludlow in the early hours of the morning when Major Hickey was asleep. Without bothering to obtain the consent of his superior officer, Seymour had ordered the release of the convict into his own custody. Now the man had gone, only God knew where, and the responsibility for his escape lay squarely upon the shoulders of the captain.
‘When I catch him, I’ll flay the little gaol-rat alive,’ Seymour promised himself, then thought bitterly, ‘That’s if I ever do catch him.’
It was because of the convict’s disappearance that the party had ridden to Clun, to make inquiries and alert the constable there. Seymour started to retrace his footsteps and the cheerful glow of sunlight did nothing to dispel the gloom he felt at what was now certain to follow.
‘They’ll definitely court martial me after this,’ he told himself. ‘That damned old woman Hickey, and the blasted colonel will never allow me to send in my papers quietly. They’ll insist on court martialling me as an example to others.’ He tried to force the forebodings from his mind. ‘But all’s not lost yet . . . I can still get my hands on Turpin Wright’s hoard. He’s got to be around this district somewhere, and must eventually show himself. When he does, I’ll be waiting . . . No, I’m not beaten yet!’
Thomas Marston was also a worried man. Bishops Castle was a borough, and in his joint positions as town crier and constable, he was answerable to the bailiff, the recorder, and the council of aldermen for his actions. He had failed in his duties by not proclaiming a hue and cry when he was first told that escaped convicts were believed to be in the parish; and to make matters worse, he had found out only that morning that a French officer had broken parole the previous week and had not been seen since.
‘Oh God, life has become a burden,’ Marston groaned miserably on his milestone.
It was part of his duties as constable to check every day that the Frenchmen were still in their billets. He was responsible through the council to the Government Transport Board and paid by them to carry out this supervision. It was a chore he had neglected frequently, preferring to spend his time drinking ale, and spirits when he could afford them, in the bar parlours of the Three Tuns or the Boar’s Head, or with the rich farmers in the Castle Hotel. Marston’s future looked bleak. At the very least the bailiff and council would strip him of his prestigious and lucrative offices when they discovered his neglect of duty and what amounted to acceptance of bribes from Seymour. At worst he might be sent to prison himself.
Marston was thankful when the corporal returned with the freshly shod horse and he could find release from his fears in the effort of remounting. In sullen silence the party continued their journey.
‘Now! Now! Now! Ohhh God, now!!’ The woman’s naked hips arched in ecstasy and her fingernails dug deep into the lithe muscled back of the man thrusting into her body. They reached a climax together, moaning in exquisite pleasure, and then were suddenly still. Their only movements the rise and fall of ribs under which the lungs strained to draw air.
After long moments, Henri levered himself back and knelt between Sarah’s sprawled thighs. He spent minutes gazing at the beauty of her body, collapsed in satiation beneath him, then bent his head and with his mouth covered each erect nipple in turn, biting delicately at their brown hardness. Afterwards with his lips he nuzzled the firm roundness of belly and thighs, tasting the salt sheen of perspiration and breathing in the rich, powerful scents of a woman who had enjoyed total fulfilment. He smiled and kissed her sun-tinted throat and cheeks and the red moistness of her mouth.
‘Je t’adore,’ he murmured. ‘I adore you.’
She lay passively accepting his homage to her body, then in one swift movement she had slipped from under him and was standing upright, cupping her jutting breasts in her hands and squeezing them to ease their sweet ache. Henri stood and tried to take her in his arms again, but she pushed him away.
‘No! It’s finished now,’ she told him.
‘Very well, ma petite,’ he smiled fondly. ‘We will rest for a while and talk of our future.’
‘Our future?’ she echoed his words, her face mirroring her surprise.
Henri became solemn. ‘Mais bien sûr, our future. I want us to marry.’
Sarah’s lips opened, showing the gleam of white teeth behind their love-swollen redness.
‘Did you say marry?’ she asked incredulously.
He threw back his head and laughed in delight, then came to her and took both her hands in his.
‘That shocks you, does it, ma petite fleur?’ he asked tenderly. ‘Did you not ever hope that some day I should ask you to marry with me?’
She stared at him and her face wore an ambiguous expression. Slowly shaking her head, her voice devoid of inflection, she answered. ‘In all truth, Henry, no. I never did hope that one day you’d ask me to marry you and be your wife.’
He lifted her hands to his lips and rained kisses upon her fingers.
‘Then-you-may-cease-to-worry-about-it,’ he told her, spacing each word with a kiss. ‘We shall marry as quickly as possible. My mind is made up.’
‘Oh no!’ she said emphatically. ‘We shall not wed as soon as possible . . . In fact, we shall not wed at all.’
It was his turn to be shocked.
‘Mais que dis-tu?’ he burst out. ‘What are you saying? Why not marry?’
Sarah tugged her hands free and began to dress rapidly. Unlike most women, she did not use stays and in a very short time she was fully clothed except for her long pink cotton stockings which, with her frilled garters, she rolled up and put in her round reticule. All the while she was dressing, Henri, still naked, stood before her hurling questions at her. She pulled on her leather pumps with the wooden pattens and crammed her hat on her loosened hair. While tying the broad ribbon under her chin, she started to answer him.
‘I’ll tell you why I don’t want to marry you, Henry. To begin with, I don’t love you. Oh you’re good looking enough, with your blond whiskers and brown eyes to turn any girl’s head . . . But I’m not in love with you.’
His jaw dropped and he held out his hands, palms facing her.
‘But you let me make love to you!’ he ejaculated. ‘And what is more, you enjoy it very much when I do so.’
She smiled ironically. ‘Well, Henry, you’re a fine lover. I’m bound to enjoy it, am I not?’
He sighed heavily and his lips curved petulantly. ‘I do not understand you.’
There was a touch of asperity in her voice. ‘No, Henry, I know well you do not . . . But I don’t wish to marry anyone yet, even though he may be the world’s most potent lover. Least of all do I wish to wed a foreigner,’ she added.
‘A foreigner?’ His voice rose in exasperation. ‘I am not a foreigner. I am a Frenchman. An officer of the Empereur Napoleon’s army, the finest army in the world . . . It is an honour for any woman to become the wife of one of the Empereur’s soldiers.’
Sarah sniffed indignantly. ‘Any foreign woman, maybe . . .’ she retorted. ‘But I am English. Goodbye, Henry.’
He moved to block her leaving. ‘Please, Sarah, don’t leave me. Don’t go,’ he begged quietly; and what to Sarah had been almost farcical became suddenly very sad. His soft brown eyes had lost their initial hurt pride and were now beseeching.
She reached out and touched his cheek. ‘I must go, Henry,’ she said softly. ‘If only to avoid trouble with my father.’
‘But I love you,’ he persisted quietly. ‘Marry me and I will protect you from your father.’
She shook her head. ‘No. I mean what I say. I’ve no wish to wed you, or anyone else.’
‘Then when will you come to meet me again?’ he asked.
‘It is better that we do not meet again. Feeling as you do, it would only bring you a greater pain,’ she said. ‘I’m very fond of you, my dear, and I will always stand as your friend. But if we ever kiss again, it must be as a brother and a sister would kiss . . . no more.’
‘Why are you s
aying these things?’ he questioned excitably. ‘Why have you suddenly decided to leave me? Is it something I have done to anger you?’
With an effort she controlled her growing impatience.
‘You haven’t angered me . . . Listen, Henry. When I made love with you, I was not a starry-eyed young maid. You’re not the first lover I have taken. And you will not be the last . . .’ She realized that she was making him jealously angry and that with his emotions in such a turmoil she could not hope to make him understand why she was rejecting him.
Seizing the moment while he was still distracted by her words, she sprang to his side, pushing him hard enough to unbalance him. Gathering her skirts above her knees, she ran for the road. Naked as he was, he ran shouting after her.
The horsemen were in sight of the barn when the young woman ran from its tumbledown walls with the naked man in pursuit. Macarthy, the Irish trooper, sighted the pair first.
‘Jasus and all His saints!’ he exclaimed, and spurred his horse to draw level with his officer. ‘If you plase, sor. Can I spake wit you?’
‘What is it?’ Seymour growled.
‘It’s that, sor, over there.’ The trooper pointed at the fleeing girl and her nude pursuer.
Seymour laughed brutally. ‘Blood and wounds! I always knew that the rustics bedded down with the haste of rabbits, but this is beyond belief.’
At that moment the Frenchman stubbed his toe and came to a standstill. Turning, he limped back to the barn.
Seymour spoke to Thomas Marston. ‘This is hardly a military matter, Marston,’ he sneered. ‘I would think that it behoves you to take some action, does it not, since you are the constable?’
The fat man’s resentment at the other’s tone spilled out. ‘I do not need anyone to tell me where my duty lies, Captain,’ he replied huffily.
Seymour’s cold eyes held enjoyment. ‘Then I suggest, sir, that you arrest that fellow running around without his britches, and hold the woman for questioning so as to ascertain what has occurred.’
‘I intend to do just that, sir,’ the constable puffed pompously, and then flushed with mortification as he realized the trap he had fallen into. If he went after the woman the man would be able to make his escape, and vice-versa. Even as he pondered his course of action the woman was lost to his view behind a coppice.
‘Damn the female!’ he cursed aloud. ‘I’ll take the man.’
‘You are valiant, sir,’ Seymour sneered. ‘Have you considered that he may have a weapon inside that barn?’
From the capacious pocket of his greatcoat the fat man produced a small brass-bound pistol.
‘Indeed he may, sir,’ he spluttered angrily. ‘But if he attempts violence against my person he’ll bitterly regret it, that I swear.’
Without further words, Marston left the dragoons on the road and drove his mount across the fields to the barn. Inside the building, Henri finished dressing and, downcast and despondent, went slowly from it.
‘Stand fast in the King’s name, or I’ll shoot!’
The young Frenchman looked up in surprise at the noisily breathing fat man on his spavined horse. The pistol in the podgy hand was aimed at his chest.
‘Merde alors! What is happening here?’ he exclaimed.
Marston’s sombre forebodings of earlier lifted from his mind and he felt like shouting out in joy.
‘What luck!’ he thought. ‘What wonderful luck!’ Aloud he said, ‘I’m the Constable of this borough and the King’s law. Did you really think you would escape me, Frenchie?’
Henri immediately understood the import of the other’s words. He shook his head.
‘I am not the man who broke parole. My name is Henri Chanteur. I only left my billet at ten o’clock this morning. I can prove that I slept there last night.’
Marston stared hard at the man in front of him and was reluctantly forced to accept that he looked completely different from the description of the prisoner who had escaped.
‘That don’t matter,’ the fat man blustered, determined to do something that would overlay his earlier inefficiency. ‘You’ve still broke your parole by trying to attack that young woman . . . That’s a hanging matter, that is.’
‘Nonsense!’ Chanteur was scathing. ‘That young lady is my fiancée, we are going to be married. All that happened was a lovers’ quarrel, nothing more. If necessary I will give you her name and you may ask her yourself. Non, m’sieur, there has been no crime committed by me. If you try to bring these charges of attack, then you will be laughed from the courtroom.’
For a moment Marston felt baffled, but then the sneering tones of Seymour sounded from behind him and acted as a goad to his thoughts.
‘Goddam me, if this gentleman is not speaking the truth, Marston. I have the young lady here with me, and she has told me the very same as he has told you.’
The captain of dragoons had come up unnoticed by the two men, with Sarah Jenkins riding pillion behind him.
She stared defiantly at the constable. ‘It’s the truth. We had a quarrel, that is why he was chasing me.’
Marston glared at her. ‘Do I know you, young woman?’
‘My name is Sarah Jenkins,’ she retorted, unafraid. ‘I’m daughter to the blacksmith.’
The constable nodded. ‘Oh yes. I heard tell that his wench had come back to keep house for him . . . How will he, a preacher, enjoy hearing that you’ve been playing the trollop wi’ bloody Frog prisoners, d’you think?’
‘Ferme ta gueule . . . shut your mouth!’ Henri growled and started forward.
The fat man’s eyes fixed on him. ‘Just one step more, Frenchie, and I’ll put a ball in your heart,’ he warned.
‘Keep calm, Henry.’ The woman’s tone was hard. ‘Don’t you see that the fat bugger would like to shoot you. It’ll save him being the booby of the townsfolk when they hear how he’s been running around arresting people for meeting in barns.’
Her words gave Marston his way out. It was so simple he had completely overlooked it before. He grinned in relief.
‘Yes, that’s right, young woman. That’s just what I’m going to arrest him for, and more than that. I’m going to get him sent to the hulks for this day’s work.’
‘Don’t talk silly, you fat . . .’ Sarah began, then bit her tongue and looked back over her shoulder at the road.
The constable laughed in satisfaction. ‘Yes,’ he panted. ‘This barn lies a fair bit beyond the Frenchman’s Mile, don’t it . . . nigh on two hundred yards, I should judge.’
Sarah realized the futility of further argument. The laws governing parolees were strictly adhered to. They were allowed freedom of movement within the Frenchman’s Mile, that was up to the white posts set on the main roads a mile from the town’s centre. One yard past those posts and a parolee could immediately be arrested, and sent without right to further appeal back to the hulks.
Henri had the sense to keep silent. He knew that his only hope now was the possibility of perhaps being able to bribe the fat man; and if he antagonized him any further, then even the largest bribe would not suffice.
‘May I have some words with the lady?’ he humbly requested.
The constable was about to refuse when Seymour intervened.
‘Do you think that is wise, Mister Marston?’ he queried. The supercilious expression of the tall officer inflamed Marston.
‘It is my decision to make, Captain,’ he snapped, then said, ‘Come girl, you may speak with the prisoner for a few moments, but only that.’
Sarah slid from the horse’s back and went to Henri. Her green eyes were troubled. ‘Oh, Henry, I’m truly sorry,’ she told him. ‘It is my fault that this has happened.’
‘Non cherie, non. Do not think that,’ he said tenderly. ‘But listen, there is still a chance that you may be able to help me.’ Whispering rapidly, he instructed her to go to his fellow parolees and tell them of his plight. If between them they could raise sufficient money, it might be possible to buy his way out of his predicament.
She nodded. ‘I will do all that I can, Henry. Trust me.’ She let him kiss her mouth and then walked rapidly away, unhindered by Seymour or the constable.
‘Move along,’ Marston ordered. ‘And remember there’s a ball here itching to find your heart, Frenchie.’
Chanteur made no reply, and submissively walked in front of the horsemen back to the road and through Bishops Castle, uncaring and unheeding of the excited stares and comments of people in the streets.
*
Sarah went first to the Porch House but the other parolees billeted there were all absent. She left a message explaining what had happened with the old woman who cleaned the house and then hurried to her home.
When she reached it, she found Jethro and Turpin sitting by the charcoal stove in the living shed. They had slept on a pile of straw in one of the outhouses, so this was the first opportunity she had had of studying her father’s guests by the light of day. In spite of her preoccupation and concern over Henri Chanteur, Sarah again felt a strong reaction to Jethro . . . She was charmed when, upon her entering the room, he rose and bowed slightly in reply to her greeting. Turpin Wright was not so gallant, he merely nodded, then leaned forward and spat in the glowing charcoal.
‘Your father is out, he has gone to Ludlow, Mistress Jenkins,’ Jethro told her, and pointed to the bubbling iron pot suspended above the fire. ‘I hope that you will not be offended by our making free with your pot, but my friend and I were so hungry we began to cook a mess of oatmeal for ourselves.’
She appraised him openly, admiring the sun-darkened features and the clean black hair that fell gently across his forehead.
‘No, sir, indeed I feel ashamed that you should have been forced to prepare your own food in this manner. You’ll think me a poor housekeeper, I’ll be bound.’
He returned her smile, and for the first time in many days felt a surge of desire. ‘I think only that you make a very beautiful housekeeper,’ he said.