by Dudley Pope
“For how many?” he asked.
“For five,” Ramage said and a moment later Louis joined them, settling back in the chair facing Ramage, who saw that he had shaved and combed his hair since they last met. The Frenchman noticed the glance and grinned. “I thought I had better tidy myself up, so that I look like a carpenter too! Tell me,” he asked quietly, “is it an emergency.”
Ramage shook his head. “Not an emergency, but a change of plan—” He broke off as the owner arrived with plates, spoons and a large jug of soup, all of which he dumped in the middle of the table. He fished around in the large pocket in front of his apron and produced a loaf of black bread, which he put down beside Ramage and lurched back to the bar at the far end of the room.
Rossi poured soup into the plates and passed them round while Jackson produced a large knife and sliced up the bread. As soon as they were all bent over their plates Ramage described, between spoonfuls of soup, the Corporal’s description of the lovelorn Lieutenant and his weekly ride to Paris with the Admiral’s despatches. At the end of the story Louis was silent for several moments and then, picking up the jug to see if any more soup remained, he gave a prodigious belch. He sat back in his chair looking to his right, away from the group of workmen at the other table, and apparently bored or daydreaming. But Ramage noticed that no lip-reader could watch his mouth.
“So you wish to sample the food at the Hotel de la Poste at Amiens …” It was a statement, not a question, and Ramage waited as Louis mulled over the problems involved. “… Carpenters won’t do—Amiens is the centre for velvet, and that sort of thing. And priests, too,” he added maliciously, “with the largest cathedral in Europe. Priests are great travellers now, since the First Consul and the Pope signed the Concordat—always going to see the bishop. Not so long ago they were being hunted down by the enfants de terreur and their churches and cathedrals robbed and pillaged. Fashions change,” he commented. “Passports will be needed, and different clothes. I shall want some money to pay for all this.”
“Of course,” Ramage said. “And I need to be in Amiens by Friday night, so that I can spend Saturday arranging things at the hotel. The others could arrive on Saturday, if that would make it any easier.”
“It might be better to split into two parties of two,” Louis said, obviously thinking aloud. “Two priests, two weavers, two masons … people travel in pairs. Four creates suspicion. Let me think about it. I’ll see you in your room at ten o’clock tonight.” He called to the patron for wine and asked quietly: “You had an interesting walk round the port?”
“Very interesting,” Ramage said, “and a little frightening. Even the vessels completed so far could carry an army across the Channel …”
“They could,” the Frenchman said evenly, “though whether they will is another matter. Would you bet on a week or more of easterly winds?”
“Not if I was a Bonaparte, but the odds seem shorter when you look at it from the British point of view.”
Louis shrugged his shoulders. “Appear to shorten my friend, but an east wind is still an east wind, and this flotilla of sheep needs moonlight also or they’ll all get lost. You have seen those prames? They need a gale of wind under them to make any progress …”
“If only half of them arrive on the Kentish beaches,” Ramage said, “they might not take the country, but the devastation …”
Louis reached up and took the carafe of wine from the patron and reminded him they needed glasses.
“Yes, there would be much devastation. Indeed,” he grinned broadly, “it would upset the contraband trade for a long time, too, which is one of the reasons why we are helping you. To tell you the truth, I’m beginning to enjoy it; running contraband three or four nights a week becomes boring.”
Ramage raised his eyebrows. “I should have thought boredom was the last thing that troubled you.”
“Don’t misunderstand me; a boring voyage means a safe one, and I have no wish to return home with wild stories of narrow escapes. We make a profit because we sail as regularly as the packetboat did before the war. But it is still boring!”
The patron arrived with the glasses, which Ramage saw were even dirtier than the windows at the Corporal’s inn. He reached for the bottle and poured wine for them all and lifted his glass to Louis. “War sees some strange alliances—here is to this one.”
The Frenchman drank to it and then put his glass down carefully. “Not so strange, when you think about it carefully. I don’t want to rule the world; I just want to be left in peace to follow my trade. You don’t want to rule the world either, nor do these men; you just want to be left in peace, knowing your family and friends are safe from invaders. That is why we are allies against this Corsican …” He stood up. “I’ll see you in your room after supper,” he said.
That night while Ramage and his three men were sitting on the two beds in their room, talking in whispers as they waited with the flickering candle flame glittering occasionally on the shiny blades of the carpenters’ tools stacked on the floor beneath the window, there was a faint double tap at the door, and before anyone could move Louis slipped into the room, closing the door silently behind him.
Stafford looked at him and said admiringly, “Cor—didn’t hear the coming of you! If you want a job when the war’s over, just look me up in London: we could make a good living, s’long as you don’t mind working at night.”
The Frenchman grinned and said to Ramage in his hesitant English: “I think the heavy feet might alarm you, no?”
“It most certainly would,” Ramage said in French. “We were woken this morning by a gendarme banging on the door. He wanted to inspect our papers—mistook us for conscripts.”
“I warned you: they check all inns and lodging houses for deserters two or three times a week. A matter of routine, but alarming if you have a guilty conscience!”
He sat down on the bed beside Ramage and took some papers from his pocket. After putting them down, he brought out a bottle of ink, and then carefully removed a quill pen which he had slid down inside his boot. He held it up to the candle flame to make sure the point had not split.
“We have to write in the details on the documents,” he explained. “Who you are, why you are travelling … But first I must tell you some differences you will find on the road to Amiens—on any road, in fact. If you use a postchaise (the wagon is too slow), the posts are still the same: 34 between here and Paris, and usually ten kilometres (about six English miles) apart. They are well supplied with horses, although the postmasters no longer follow the old rule of one horse per person; you’re lucky to get three horses for four people these days. The postillions, can legally charge only fifteen sous per post, but if you do not pay them double they can make the journey unpleasant in many little ways.
“Now, listen carefully; there is now a new system by which the traveller has to pay a toll. The money is supposed to be for the upkeep of the roads, but no one has spent a sou on a road in France since the Revolution, let alone a livre: there are deep potholes every few yards. You pay the tolls at barrieres which have been set up along the main roads. But watch out, they are not at regular intervals, and the toll varies between three and eighteen sous.
“All of this makes travelling expensive: before the Revolution you could take a postchaise to Paris for 213 livres; now you have to pay double. Still, there is a brighter side: before the Revolution you would be lucky to arrive in Paris without meeting a highwayman or a footpad. Now they are a rarity.
“They are a rarity,” he said, tapping Ramage’s shoulder for emphasis, “because—from your point of view—there is another pest on the roads: mounted gendarmes. They halt all carts and carriages and demand to see every traveller’s papers. Anyone arousing suspicion is taken to the nearest jail. Oh yes, their favourite trick is to make you sign your name which they compare with the signature in your passport, so remember that and practise it!”
After making Ramage repeat the details, Louis said: “Now, the j
ourney to Amiens. The route from here is through Montreuil (four posts, or about 23 miles), Nampont, and Nouvion to Abbéville—”
Ramage noticed the Frenchman tensed slightly as he paused and then continued.
“It is a wretched town now; half the people have left and the Revolution has ruined the damask industry. Reichord’s Hotel is comfortable—by today’s standards, anyway. Then you go on to Ailly-le-Haut-Clocher. There’s a Red Cap of Liberty on top of the church steeple. It is stuck on the weathercock, so it swivels round with every change of wind.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps others have noted the irony—to comment aloud in public would be to risk your neck. At the next village, Flixecourt, you will get your first sight of a Tree of Liberty; they are proud of the one set up in the square. You will change horses for the last time at Picquigny, and Amiens is only a league and a half beyond.”
“Abbéville,” Ramage said quietly, “has some unpleasant associations for you.”
Louis looked down and was silent for a full minute, seeming almost to shrink, leaving his body behind while he went to some private place full of dreadful memories. Embarrassed at this unexpected reaction to his curiosity and regretting the question, Ramage was trying to think of a way of changing the subject when the Frenchman looked up.
“I will tell you about it—no, don’t worry,” he said as Ramage went to speak, “I want to tell you so you can understand better why I help you. At the moment I must seem to be a smuggler with no allegiances; a man whose loyalty can be bought—no, do not bother to protest, M. Ramage, you have all the doubts about me that I would expect in an honest man. In a minute or two you will understand and we shall be better friends.
“The name Joseph Le Bon means nothing to you. To me he is a former priest from Arras who almost made me believe in God. ‘Ah’ you might say, ‘a saintly man, and wise, as befits someone who once taught rhetoric at the College of Beaune, in Burgundy, and a man of great ability if he nearly succeeded in making an atheist like Louis believe in God and an after-life.’
“You would be partly right: Le Bon made me hope there is an after-life because I want the comfort of knowing there is a Hell in whose flames Joseph Le Bon burns in agony for all eternity, for he is now dead. My only regret is that the Committee of Public Safety finally ordered his execution and cheated me of my revenge. But those who watched him on the scaffold—they saw him screaming with fear, groaning, wailing and begging for mercy before the blade dropped. I had planned that he would be begging me for mercy, but—” he shrugged his shoulders “—the Committee that set him on a path of mass murder eventually executed its own servant.
“I can see you are wondering why this man Louis should be hunting another man, a former priest and teacher of rhetoric, with a knife, with the intention of murdering him. Don’t protest, m’sieur” Louis said grimly, “it is a reasonable question for a man whose country is not torn by revolution, who has never seen pork butchers set down their knives and become ministers of state overnight and use the guillotine to butcher their fellow men, and bakers and grocers made judges who listen only to the charges against the man, never the evidence for his defence, before sending him to death.
“You will learn what happens when I tell you of Le Bon. After the Revolution this man left the Church and entered politics, becoming the Mayor of Arras. He showed judgment; he was even moderate. Then, since he had also been given responsibility for the whole Department of the Pas de Calais, he was told to destroy any anti-Revolutionary movement in Calais and the neighbouring towns.
“Again, he was moderate, even indulgent—so much so that one of his enemies denounced him to the Committee of Public Safety as a protector of aristocrats and a persecutor of patriots. He was recalled to Paris, escaped being put on trial for his life only because Citizen Robespierre liked him and accepted his promise to redeem himself.
“Redeem himself! He was sent back to Calais—a badly frightened man—with unlimited powers to crush the anti-Revolutionaries. The problem was that Le Bon could not find any, so in fear of his own life he simply accused scores and scores of innocent people and sent them to the guillotine. Within weeks hundreds met their death in Calais alone. He then went to other towns—Abbéville, Amiens, Arras, Boulogne …
“Two young ladies in Abbéville who taught the pianoforte, for example, were playing ‘Ca Ira’ on the day a defeat by the Austrians was announced. Le Bon heard them and accused them of having an evil disposition towards the Revolution. They said quite truthfully they had heard nothing of the defeat, and in any case ‘Ca Ira’ was a patriotic tune. Le Bon disagreed—playing ‘Ca Ira’ in those circumstances, he said, meant that they wished the Austrians to advance and capture other French fortresses. If they were true patriots, he told them at the tribunal, they should have played ‘Le Revel du Peuple’ …
“So he condemned them to death, and at the scaffold next morning, while the young ladies were in the tumbril at the scaffold, he delayed the public execution for a quarter of an hour, until some women of the town, in all their finery, had arranged themselves comfortably on a balcony overlooking the guillotine. You find the story hard to believe, I see …”
Ramage nodded and was about to add that that did not mean he thought it was untrue when Louis turned to look him straight in the eye, the strained look back on his face. “Those two young ladies were sisters, m’sieur. The elder was my wife, who was staying in her mother’s house while I was away at sea. Some might say it was punishment on me for being a smuggler,” he said bitterly. “Anyway, when you get to Abbéville, ask about Joseph Le Bon, and they will tell you that story.”
“But you said he was executed—”
“I came back a few days after Le Bon had finished his bloody business and gone on to Paris. I followed him and was arrested almost immediately, because my passport was for travelling only from Boulogne to Abbéville and back. They knew who I was but the gendarmes at Breteuil, where I was imprisoned, were sympathetic because of my loss. They never guessed I was following Le Bon; they assumed I was going to Paris to protest to the authorities. So they kept me in prison for a year, and during that time the mayors of several towns had protested to the Ministry of Police at Le Bon’s wholesale murders. He was accused of public assassination and oppressing citizens of the Republic, found guilty of ‘an unlimited abuse of the guillotine’ and sentenced to death. Yet he was a craven man; I think he was always frightened for his life, and when they sent him back to Calais the second time he became so obsessed that he saw enemies of the Republic all round him. People told me that when the time came to dress him in the red garment which is reserved for murderers as they make their last journey in the tumbril to the scaffold, Le Bon said, ‘It is not I who should wear this garment, but those whose orders I obeyed.’ Ironic,” he added, “that Fouche, the present Minister of Police, is also a former priest: a sea captain’s son who was an abbe and a professor at Nantes University …
“I had a long time to think about the past while I was in prison. I despaired and grew fat—can you imagine that? I, who did not want to live, became ugly and gross; my teeth fell out, I began to grow bald … But in that time I came to understand what Le Bon meant. I would agree with him if he had said, ‘It is not I alone …’”
Louis stood up and walked over to the window, glanced out into the darkness, and then sat down beside Ramage, who knew the movement was not curiosity about what was outside but rather closing a door on his past which he rarely dared to open.
“I have been thinking about your journey to Amiens. It will be dangerous. In Boulogne people accept you as foreign carpenters because there are many of them working in the shipyards. The road to Amiens from Boulogne is different. Four Frenchmen might be suspected of being deserters. Four foreigners—well, I can only guess at what protection the possession of passports and travel documents would give you against suspicion.”
“Is the danger because there are four of us, or the fact we are young and not in the Army?” Ramage asked.
Louis was only echoing the doubts that had beset Ramage since he first heard the Corporal’s proud boasts: he had too many men. He needed Stafford in Amiens, but he dare not leave Rossi and Jackson behind here at the Chapeau Rouge in Boulogne: if they were questioned they would give themselves away. Unless they hid on board the Marie, ready to sail to England with his reports! He was angry with himself for not—
“You need the man who is the picklock,” Louis said. “If you could leave the other two behind, Dyson can hide them on board the Marie: they can be his crew if he has to go to the rendezvous. If you need a third man in case of trouble, I know the road well enough …”
Ramage stared at the Frenchman. “But the risk for you would be enormous! I can’t—”
“No greater than the risk you are taking,” Louis interrupted. “One can be guillotined only once. I—”
“Once is enough,” Ramage said sharply.
Louis shook his head. “I am content to share the risks that you take. We agree that our interests are similar—the smugglers’ and the British Admiralty’s—and I’ve just told you of ‘Ca Ira.’ So listen to an idea which I’m sure will work and which is based on just you, the man Stafford and myself going to Amiens. You are an Italian who owns a large shipyard in Genoa. At the request of the French authorities there you came to Boulogne with your foreman to make arrangements to bring up all your carpenters and shipwrights—a score of them—and their tools.