Secrets of the Fearless

by Elizabeth Laird

  When he came to himself at last, and opened his eyes, he was so weak that even the effort of turning his head was considerable, but his mind was clearing rapidly.

  Where am I? he thought. What’s happened?

  He tried to piece together the last things he remembered. There had been the overheard conversation in the fisherman’s hut. He’d been shot in the side. There had been a terrible ride through a dark forest. Some vague impression of a horribly jolting journey in a dirty wagon.

  Kit! he thought. No, not Kit. Catherine. Where is she? Did she bring me here?

  The effort of trying to work it out was too much. He let his gaze wander round the room. A good deal of light penetrated through the slatted shutters. Though this was the grandest room he had ever been in, it seemed half ruined. On the far side was a huge fireplace, with a stone mantelpiece on which was carved what seemed to be a coat of arms. Above it, a vast mirror in an elaborate gold frame stretched all the way up to the ceiling. The glass, though, was broken, cracks and splinters radiating from a hole that had been smashed right through it.

  There seemed to be very little furniture, apart from the bed – no, it was not a bed, but only a mattress – that he was lying on. A chair with a broken back was beside it, and in front of the nearest window was a table covered with a white cloth, and another chair.

  Parts of the walls were covered with carved and gilded panelling, but most of it seemed to have been ripped out, exposing the bare brick underneath. But the ceiling! The ceiling was magnificent! It was painted all over to look like the sky, and in the middle was a woman who might be a queen or a goddess sitting on a cloud, with naked baby cherubs all around her. As John looked at it, the painting seemed to swim towards and away from him, the cherubs swooping and diving like fat little birds.

  Why was it so quiet here? Was he all alone in this vast place? The only sound was the twitter of starlings somewhere outside, and further away the raucous cawing of a crow. He was in the countryside, then, not in a town. There was no mewing of gulls. He must be far from the sea.

  And I’m in France! he remembered, with a jab of alarm. The Fearless! I must get down to the coast and find a way to get back to her!

  He tried to sit up, pushing off the sheet that covered him, but a dull pain began to throb in his side and his head reeled with the effort. He gave up.

  He was trying to pull the sheet back over him when he heard the door squeak open.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he said weakly.

  He heard a gasp, and made out the shape of a woman, young and slim, in a pale dress. She ran over to him and stood beside his mattress with her back to the light.

  ‘John! You spoke! Oh, I can’t believe it!’

  ‘Is that you, Kit?’

  He stared at her, puzzled, trying to make her out. He still wasn’t used to seeing her in girls’ clothes. She was no longer in her bloodstained white dress, but in another one – he could see now that it was blue – with a high waist and some kind of pattern round the neck. Her dark hair, which he was used to seeing tied severely back in a sailor’s pigtail, was piled up on the crown of her head. A couple of stray locks fell down to her shoulders.

  She went across to the table to pick up a cup and he saw her face. It looked oddly familiar, yet completely different. He stared at her, as if seeing the small pointed chin, long nose and dark pools of her eyes for the first time.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ he mumbled.

  He felt annoyed. Kit had vanished, and this new Catherine seemed strange and remote. Then the horrible thought struck him that he’d spoken out loud, and he shut his eyes, embarrassed.

  ‘Don’t go to sleep again!’ Her fingers touched his forehead. ‘Has the fever really gone?’

  ‘I don’t know. Did I have a fever?’

  She laughed.

  ‘Did you have a fever? You have been half dead with it for days and days. At least ten. I’ve lost count. We were sure you were going to die.’

  He was afraid, for a bad moment, that she was about to cry.

  ‘Who’s “we”?’ he asked.

  ‘Betsy and me, and Jean-Baptiste.’

  ‘Betsy?’ he said, trying to remember.

  ‘My nurse. I told you about her. She’s been looking after you all this time. She took the bullet out of your side. She’s as good as any surgeon. She knows about herbs and nursing too. You would have died so many times without her. She sat here beside you, night after night. She’s downstairs now, with Jean-Baptiste, making you some broth.’

  ‘With who?’

  ‘Jean-Baptiste. The old groom. He’s been the guardian here since the family left. He’s quite old, and a little – well, he totters – but he’s completely loyal. When the gendarmes came he was magnificent. I would never have believed it.’

  He had hardly taken in what she was saying, but the word ‘gendarmes’ alarmed him.

  ‘What gendarmes?’

  ‘Don’t you remember? No, I suppose not. You don’t remember anything, do you? Well, it was so frightening. When we arrived here that first morning after you’d been shot, and I was trying to open the gates, a cavalry officer saw us. I told him you were my brother, and tried to make him think that you were drunk. I thought I’d fooled him, but I think he saw the blood on my dress. Anyway, he must have been suspicious, because he went to tell the gendarmes in Bordeaux. They were already looking for a wounded boy and a girl, because the comte de St Voir – he’s the Frenchman who was with Mr Higgins and the others that night in the fisherman’s hut – he had reported that his horse had been stolen by English spies. The whole countryside was hunting for us! As soon as they heard from the cavalry officer, they came straight here.’

  John was following only with difficulty.

  ‘But they didn’t find us.’

  ‘No, they didn’t find us. Jean-Baptiste was wonderful. “A boy and a girl?” he said, sounding very old and vague. “Where? Who?” And then Betsy came hurrying out. “There’s only one girl here,” she said, “and that’s Mlle de Jalignac, who is the owner of this chateau.” “Mlle de Jalignac?” said the gendarme. “Everyone in Bordeaux knows that she’s dead.” “Dead? How dare you?” says Betsy. “Those ruffianly revolutionaries killed her poor papa, but they never laid their dirty hands on my poor little Miss Catherine. It was a wicked lie put about by her enemies.”’

  As she spoke, the characters she was acting came alive for him, and he relaxed. This was the old Kit he knew so well, full of mischievous mimicry. If he shut his eyes he could pretend that the strangely beautiful Catherine didn’t exist at all.

  Kit was in full flow now.

  ‘“And where are you from, then?” says the gendarme, sounding quite annoyed. “You sound English to me. An English spy, I don’t doubt. I’ll see your papers, if you please.” “English? Of course I’m English, and I’m proud of it,” says Betsy. “I’ve lived in this country quiet as you please since I was a girl, and say what you like, my papers are all in order. Now if you’ll wait here I’ll go and fetch mademoiselle and you can see her for yourself.”’

  He laughed at the Betsy she had conjured up before his eyes, then winced at the pain in his side.

  ‘So she ran up here and made me quickly change my dress and pin up my hair, all in five minutes. And I went downstairs and pretended to be very formal, like my grandmother. I was very scared! Since the revolution you never know how the authorities will treat the aristocrats. “Are you really Mlle de Jalignac?” the sergeant of the gendarmes asks, staring at me till I feel really uncomfortable. “Yes, of course I am,” say I, trying to look haughty, like Grandmama.

  ‘And then he really surprised me. “Your father,” he said, “is greatly missed, mademoiselle. Most of the aristos, they were thieving rascals, and I don’t regret what happened in the revolution, though I’m not a bloodthirsty man myself, but your father, he was a good one. It’s only in respect of his memory that I’ll refrain from arresting this Englishwoman, which I’ve a perfect right to do.”’

/>   She had dropped her joking tone, and her voice thickened. Then she cleared her throat and rattled on.

  ‘So I thanked him, and then he said that anyway he still had his duty to do and his men would have to search the chateau. And Betsy, she was ready for that. “Of course you do,” she said, all calm and smiling now. She saw that losing her temper had been dangerous. “But it’s a hot day and I was just going to fetch up some of my home-brewed ale from the cellar, where it keeps so cool, and if you’d like to refresh yourselves first in the kitchen . . .”

  ‘So they all went into the kitchen, and Jean-Baptiste came up with me and we carried you into a cupboard under the grand staircase. You were so sick you never even moved, or knew anything about it. The gendarmes had no idea how strong Betsy’s beer was, and by the time they came to look over the chateau they wouldn’t have seen a coach and horses if it was standing right in the middle of the dining room.’

  John had stopped following what she was saying. Words had become slippery things that kept sliding out of reach.

  ‘But we’re safe now, aren’t we?’ he murmured.

  ‘Oh, John, I’m sorry. You’re not strong enough to talk yet. I’ll go and fetch Betsy. No – here she comes now, with the broth, and Jean-Baptiste too.’

  She ran across to the door and took the tray from Betsy, who wiped her hands on her apron, crossed the big empty room and bent over John, feeling his forehead as Kit had done.

  ‘The fever’s gone,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘You’ll do now.’

  Beside her stood an old man. He nodded down at John, gave a wheezy chuckle and said something in French to Kit.

  ‘This is Jean-Baptiste,’ said Kit. ‘He says he’s glad to see you looking better.’

  John, looking at the old man through half-closed, weary eyes, thought he was seeing a relic of a former age. Jean-Baptiste wore a patched pea-green coat with a standing collar, a dirty white wig, askew, with rows of curls over his ears, torn breeches, grubby white stockings with holes in them and black buckled shoes from which his toes peeped through the cracks. John shut his eyes, wondering if he really had returned to reality, or if he was still in some feverish dream.

  He felt Betsy’s firm arm under his shoulders, lifting him up.

  ‘You drink this broth now, young man,’ she said, with a firmness that demanded obedience. ‘All of it. It’ll do you more good than anything. And then we’ll leave you to have a nice long healing sleep.’

  PART FOUR

  AUGUST 1808

  JALIGNAC

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Now began for John a dreaming, unreal time of summer and healing, warmth and light. At first, he was only able to leave his mattress for a few minutes each day, but the minutes turned into hours, and his faltering steps became longer and firmer. Progress was slow, though. Weeks later his limbs were still horribly feeble, and his head felt confused and muzzy. He was incapable of thinking clearly about his situation, but he was strangely happy.

  The chateau of Jalignac, on its small rise within the park walls, seemed to float above the surrounding forest. It was an enclosed, private world, untouched by anything outside. John felt safe, almost superstitiously sure that nothing could break into the chateau’s enchanted isolation and harm anyone there.

  He was living with women for almost the first time in his life. He and his father had been alone at Luckstone ever since his mother had died. Life on the Fearless, of course, had been rigorously and exclusively masculine.

  Betsy’s tongue could be rough at times, but she treated him as if he was her son, telling him sharply not to spill the pan of peas he was shelling at her command, or to get out from under her feet and take the bowl of corn out to the chickens in the stable yard. But she was affectionate too, touching his shoulder with a fond caress when she passed his chair.

  The roof of Betsy’s cottage had been so badly damaged in the previous winter’s storms that she had been forced to take up residence in the chateau with Jean-Baptiste. They lived mainly in the kitchens, a vast, rambling domain half underground. Betsy had made the old housekeeper’s room her sleeping quarters, and Jean-Baptiste kept to his old room above the stables.

  The mob which had invaded the chateau after Kit’s father had been executed had looted everything they could lay their hands on. They had scoured the mansion from the attics to the cellars, removing every last stick of furniture, ripping the panelling from the walls, the locks from the doors, the curtains from the windows and the carpets from the floors. The great copper pans had gone from the kitchen, the candelabra from the ballroom, the lanterns from the hall. What they had not been able to remove they had smashed, in an orgy of destruction.

  Of all the vast numbers of servants who had once lived on this great estate, the maids and footmen, cooks and gardeners, grooms, stable boys, valets and gamekeepers, only Betsy and Jean-Baptiste had remained.

  ‘Why did you stay?’ John asked Betsy curiously one golden evening, as they sat on the sun-baked terrace behind the great house, topping and tailing the beans they had picked from Betsy’s vegetable patch that afternoon. ‘Why didn’t you go home to England?’

  ‘Where’s home? What’s home? This is my home,’ she had responded tartly. ‘I’ve lived here more than half my life. I’m used to it. Who’d remember me in England? Any road, I never really believed them when they said Miss Catherine was dead. I knew she’d come back one day.’

  ‘But it’s dangerous for you, isn’t it, Betsy? You’re an Englishwoman here in France. We’re at war.’

  She took the basket of beans out of his hands.

  ‘You’re taking too much off each one,’ she said severely. ‘Waste not, want not, Master John.’

  ‘No, but be serious,’ he insisted. ‘Are you safe here?’

  ‘There’s English people a-plenty in Bordeaux,’ she said, not meeting his eye. ‘People who’ve lived here for years, like me. In the wine trade most of them. They stay quiet, like I do, and mind their own business. Everyone knows me round here. Even that uppity gendarme sergeant, he knew I was no spy. I’m safe here as a bug in an apple.’

  John settled back in his old sagging chair, raised his arms cautiously and leaned his head back into his hands. The wound in his side was almost completely healed now. He could stretch with no more than a twinge of pain.

  She’s right, he thought lazily, wanting to believe her. We are safe here. No one ever comes. No one ever will.

  But later, when he followed her into the chateau kitchen, kept cool even on days of fiercest heat by the thick stone walls, and watched her set an old iron pan to boil on the fire for the beans, a feeling of unease crept over him.

  No one would take Betsy for a spy, he thought, but I really am one, I suppose. It’s why I came ashore, after all. There’s information I should be passing back to England. I shouldn’t be idling my time away here. I shouldn’t be in France at all.

  He pushed the thought away.

  It was August now. The sun shone from morning till night, ripening the peaches that grew against the soft yellow stone wall of the vast overgrown kitchen garden. Betsy had been at work here, reclaiming a corner from the jungle of weeds and brambles to grow her own stock of vegetables. Kit, watching and helping, would bite her lip in shame. Her grandmother, she knew, had long since ceased to pay Betsy her wages. Betsy’s clothes were wearing out and her shoes were holed.

  ‘It won’t be long now, Betsy,’ John often heard her say. ‘I’ll be fourteen soon and have money of my own. You’ll never have to darn your stockings again, I promise you.’

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ Betsy would reply. ‘No point in building castles in the air. Now you go out and pick the mint, Miss Catherine, so I can hang it up to dry. It’ll be winter soon enough, and we’ll need everything we can set in store now.’ But the winter seemed impossibly far away. John couldn’t believe that these blue, calm mornings and hot, sleepy afternoons would ever give way to the blasts and chills of December.

  As he grew str
onger, he joined Kit in endless explorations of the chateau and its vast grounds. It was almost as new to Kit as it was to him. Though Jalignac was her own domain, she had scarcely ever been there before, and only in the repressive company of her grandmother.

  In the golden summer days, alone together, Catherine became the old Kit again, to John’s infinite relief. Together they penetrated the overgrown gardens and climbed the once beautiful stone terraces. They raided the trees in the orchard and the raspberry canes by Betsy’s abandoned cottage. They scrambled into the hayloft above the stables, and slid down the bank to the stream that fed the ornamental lake. Here, in a ruined boathouse, they found an old dinghy, and with cries of delight they launched it on the water.

  ‘Cast off, Mr Smith!’ John shouted. ‘Climb aboard at once, or I’ll damn you for a landlubber!’

  ‘Aye aye, sir!’ cried Kit, jumping nimbly after him. ‘Hard to starboard! Take in a reef there, or you’ll send us down to Davy Jones’s locker!’

  They took an oar each and rowed with the efficient short strokes of seamen to the middle of the lake, where Kit suddenly let out a purely feminine scream.

  ‘John, watch out! We’re sinking!’

  She was right. The boards of the little boat, quite dried out with lack of use, had shrunk, and water was gurgling up through them. Hardly able to row for laughing, they made it back to the bank and stepped out, soaked, leaving the dinghy half submerged at the water’s edge.

  There was one part of the estate that they always avoided. The front of the chateau faced the road, and though the avenue which led down to it was long and overgrown, the frontage of the house was still clearly visible through the wrought-iron gates. Looking out from inside, through the slatted shutters, John had seen an increasing volume of traffic passing up and down. Fresh troops, their muskets polished and shining, the blue of their coats still bright from the tailors’ hands, were marching south to join Napoleon’s armies who were fighting against the British army in Spain. Passing them, travelling north away from the war, came carts and tumbrils carrying the wounded, and, sadder still, chained gangs of British and Spanish prisoners.