Miss Jacobson's Journey (9 page)

Even as she described how Uncle Amos had saved all five Lévi children from the evil consequences of the measles, Miriam wondered at Isaac’s odd reaction to her comment. Was it connected with his abandonment of so many of the observances of Halakah? Her own mixed feelings about the lack of religion in her upbringing made her long to discuss the matter with him, but he was clearly reluctant.

At least she had learned the source of his antipathy for Felix. Now she must discover Felix’s side of the story, and then she’d be able to attempt a reconciliation.

Dusk was falling when they reached Tours. Miriam watched through the window as Felix negotiated the city streets. He remembered her directions perfectly. Nonetheless she was relieved, and pleased with herself, when she recognized the house he stopped at, for it was over a year since their last visit. The signboard over the small shop on the ground floor read “
Lévi, tailleur, soierie.”

“You wait here, Miss Miriam,” Hannah commanded. “I’ll go see what’s what.”

Her rat-a-tat on the door of the tall, narrow, slightly shabby town house was answered by a youthful maid in a white cap and apron. Miriam was glad she had stayed in the carriage when Hannah was left standing on the step while the girl ran upstairs to make enquiries.

Returning, she invited Hannah to step in. Not two minutes later the door burst open and out rushed the entire Lévi family. Madame’s round, beaming face appeared at the carriage window, her tailor-cum-silk-merchant husband grinning over her shoulder, all five excited children clustered about them.

“Miriam, ma chère, come in, come in. And bring these gentlemen with you. How could we let your friends stay at an inn? We shall make room somehow, never fear.”

It was impossible to tell them that one of the gentlemen they welcomed despised Jews. Fortunately, Felix found it equally impossible to be so ungentlemanly as to rudely reject their hospitality. His face reflected his quandary as he allowed Monsieur Lévi to usher him into that den of iniquity, a Jewish home.

Miriam exchanged a mirthful glance with Isaac and bit her lip to suppress a giggle.

  Chapter 8

 “I believe you captured little Leah’s heart,” Miriam teased Felix as Isaac drove the berline out of Tours the next morning. “I am sadly jealous. She has been a favourite of mine since I nursed her through the croup after all the children had the measles.”

“She reminded me of my youngest sister,” he said defensively. “Vickie is just such a playful chatterbox.”

“Like Leah, never waiting for you to answer?”

“Most fortunate that she did not, for I understood no more than one word in five. What was she saying when...”

“How old is your sister?” Miriam interrupted. She had no intention of allowing so promising an opening to degenerate into another French lesson.

“Victoria? She must be Leah’s age, or thereabouts.”

“Six or seven? And your other sisters, how many have you?”

“Three more. Augusta is married, with two infants, Constantia is eighteen, and Lucy twelve. Connie ought to be in London right now, dancing through her first Season, instead of languishing at Westwood.” His bitterness was unmistakable.

“She is not ill, I hope?”

“No, unless with disappointment. Thanks to Isaac Cohen’s father, my father is deep in debt and cannot afford to present his daughter to Society.”

“But Isaac’s father is dead.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I trust his demise will save some other unfortunate family from impoverishment. Yes, that is excellent news.”

Hannah was shocked out of her usual deference. “It’s not right to talk like that of the dead,” she rebuked him, “may they rest in peace. God forbid we should any of us claim to be perfect.”

Felix looked a trifle shamefaced.

“The earl borrowed money from Mr. Cohen, I collect,” Miriam probed, “and failed to repay it?”

“On the contrary,” he said coldly, “he paid every penny. In order to do so, he sold two small estates and mortgaged Westwood to the hilt. Instead of purchasing a commission in the army, I was forced to go to work at the Treasury.”

In essence, his story was not so very different from Isaac’s. To hold each other responsible for their respective difficulties was just plain mutton-headed. Miriam was sure now that she could effect a reconciliation, but she needed time to consider how to go about it.

In the meantime, what she really wanted to know was what the earl had done with the borrowed money. In all likelihood, given the predilections of the upper classes, he had gambled it away and had no one to blame but himself for his family’s relative impoverishment.

It seemed less than tactful to enquire of his dutiful son and heir. Miriam restrained her curiosity. “You wanted to be a soldier?” she said instead.

“I wanted to fight Boney. England was expecting an invasion at any moment. Lord, the tales that flew about! The Corsican Ogre was digging a tunnel under the Channel, or building a fleet of hot air balloons to float above it. He ate babies for breakfast and dined on the heads of his enemies.”

“May God preserve us!” Hannah moaned.

“Ugh!” said Miriam. “But none of those tales was true.”

“Somewhat exaggerated,” he acknowledged, smiling. “Nonetheless, I wish I were fighting Napoleon now, or at least Marshal Massena, in the Peninsula with Viscount Wellington. To my mind he is the greatest British general since the Duke of Marlborough.”

“Tell me about him,” Miriam invited. “For all I have agreed to deliver his gold, I know nothing of him beyond the fact that he needs the gold to pay his army.”

“That alone tells you a great deal. Wellesley--Lord Wellington--expects his soldiers to pay the peasants for the food and horses they requisition, whereas the French simply loot what they need.” Felix continued his fervent paean to the hero of Talavera and Bussaco.

Miriam was thinking how absurdly boyish his enthusiasm made him seem, when the carriage jolted to a sudden halt. At once his arrogant mask descended.

“What the deuce is that nodcock doing now?” He beat Miriam to the window and leaned out. “Oh, there’s some sort of accident ahead.”

Swinging the door open, he jumped down. Miriam followed. A few yards beyond the berline’s reined-in team, she saw to her dismay a cluster of uniforms, dark green with white facings. In their midst the gleaming steel barrel of an artillery gun pointed futilely at the grey sky.

She hurried after Felix.

The group parted as they reached it. One wheel of the gun carriage had slid into the ditch alongside the muddy road. Five of the six huge Percherons pulling it had kept their footing. They stood stolidly, heads hanging, but the left wheeler was struggling in scummy, hock-deep water. The harness tangled about its head and shoulders pulled it sideways, preventing it from rising.

Producing a pocket-knife, Felix pushed in grim silence through the arguing, gesticulating soldiers and began to cut the horse loose. Two of the Frenchmen joined him, one to help, one to berate them both.

Her attention elsewhere, Miriam left him to deal with them. On the grassy bank beyond the ditch, a soldier slumped with his bloody head clasped in his hands. An officer stood over him, his black boots crushing a clump of primroses.

“
Sot! Buvard!
See what you have done,
fils de putaine!“
he shouted.

Miriam eyed the ditch with distaste. It was too wide to jump, but then she spotted a plank bridge over it, back near the berline, where a gate led into a field. As she sped towards it, Isaac sprang down from the box, holding the reins.

“There’s a man hurt,” she called in Yiddish. “Tell Hannah to bring linen.”

He nodded and was turning towards the carriage when an unearthly shriek made them both swing round. Miriam’s gaze flew to the injured soldier. He and the officer were both staring at something farther along the road but after a moment they returned to their respective poses of sullen submission and acrimonious reproof. Where were those dreadful screams coming from?

In the field on the other side of the gate, a peasant was ploughing, neither he nor his horse taking the least notice of the commotion out on the highroad.

 Miriam crossed the crude bridge and picked her way as quickly as she could along the bank. The ghastly noise was coming from the Percheron, she realized. Felix turned away from it, and called to her.

“The horse has a broken leg.” He waved at the officer. “Tell him it will have to be shot.”

Miriam translated. The officer looked curiously at Felix and shrugged.

“Go and take that horse,” he ordered the soldiers who had followed Felix. He pointed at the plough horse in the field and watched the men obey, ignoring Felix.

White with anger, Felix jumped the ditch, pulled a pistol from the officer’s holster, and strode back to the doomed Percheron. Frozen in disbelief, the Frenchman gaped after him. The crack of a single shot split the air. The screaming cut off abruptly as the horse sank onto its side against the bank.

Red with anger, the officer jumped the ditch. Miriam made no attempt to intervene. Half sickened, half relieved, she turned to the injured soldier.

Hannah arrived with clean linen torn in strips and one of the other soldiers passed them a canteen of water. The women concentrated on cleaning and binding the broken head of the gun-carriage driver, who had also hurt his ankle. He explained how he had come by his injuries, but since he spoke a near incomprehensible patois, Miriam was not much the wiser.

Pulling up his eyelid to inspect his pupil, Miriam decided he was not concussed despite the purpling bruise and horrid gash in his forehead. The smell of his stockingless foot, when they managed to remove his boot, nearly made her faint. Her inspection of his swelling ankle to make sure it was sprained, not broken, was cursory. Hannah, in this instance made of stronger stuff, produced from the depths of her reticule a small vial of witch hazel, soaked a strip of linen, and wrapped it around the ankle.

She was engaged in this operation when the soldiers sent after the plough horse returned, leading the shaggy beast. The peasant, a wizened old man, scurried beside them, pulling on the sleeve of the nearest.

“At least pay me,” he pleaded. “My only horse! How am I to feed my family if I cannot plough the field?”

“
Va-t-en, mon vieux,”
said the soldier, not unkindly. “It is for the Emperor. You should be honoured.”

The peasant fell back, wringing his hands. Miriam had no leisure to consider his plight for the officer was striding towards her, his face now hard with suspicion.

“Your companion spoke to you in English,” he accused, gesturing with his discharged pistol at Felix, who followed him. “Now he won’t speak at all.”

“In English?
Mais non, monsieur.
We are Swiss. I speak French but my cousin speaks only SvitzerDütsch--Swiss-German.”

“That’s right,” the injured soldier confirmed. “I had a Swiss
copain
once, a good friend, talked just like that.”

“
Ferme-toi la bouche, imbécile!”
the officer snarled.

Miriam took advantage of the momentary distraction to call to Isaac in Yiddish, “Come here, quick. He thinks we are English.”

Isaac dropped the reins and started forward, reaching into his pocket for their papers. As she had hoped, Felix promptly rushed to hold the horses. With him out of the way, she explained the situation to Isaac, still in Yiddish. The language sounded sufficiently like German, and unlike English, to make the officer wonder whether he had misheard Felix in the heat of the moment--unless he was fluent in English.

He looked at them doubtfully. Surely he had sufficient problems on his hands with the ditched gun not to arrest them if he was uncertain, even though Felix had enraged him.

“
Nos papiers, monsieur,”
Isaac said calmly, holding out the papers to him. “We have a pass from the Minister of Police.”

For a moment he hesitated. “Pah!” he spat out, “I am no policeman.” He turned on his heel and marched off, yelling at his men.

Miriam’s patient winked at her. She smiled at him, took Hannah’s arm, and urged the maid back to the bridge, where the old peasant stood hunched, gazing hopelessly after his conscripted plough horse.

“They stole his only horse,” Miriam told Isaac. “Felix was just telling me that the French army seizes what it wants without compensation, but I thought he meant in foreign countries, not from their own people.”

“What do you think the creature is worth? This is not exactly the sort of emergency Jakob had in mind, but how can one pass by with a full purse?”

“Give him a couple of napoléons d’or,” she said with a look of approval. “They will at least ease the pain of being robbed in the name of Napoleon.”

The peasant called down blessings on their heads and scurried off across the field, clutching the coins. Approaching the berline, Miriam saw that Felix was watching them with a strange expression on his face. The act of charity he had witnessed, she realized with satisfaction, fitted his concept of the miserly Jew no better than had last night’s hospitality. He was confused.

“I’ll drive until we are past the obstruction,” he offered gruffly.

“I am perfectly capable of passing a stationary obstacle,” Isaac flared up. “I only stopped to see if they needed help.”

Sighing, Miriam left them to battle it out and reentered the berline. She was too drained to try to make peace. Hannah sat down beside her.

“I’m getting quite used to them French soldiers, Miss Miriam,” she said proudly, smoothing her skirts. “Didn’t turn a hair, I didn’t.”

“Well, I did. Felix’s concern for that poor horse was admirable, but how could he speak English before a French officer like that!”

She said no more, for he joined them. They sat in tense silence as the berline began to move. When Isaac pulled out to pass the stranded gun, Miriam saw the officer standing with his back resolutely turned, determined to ignore them. On the other hand, several soldiers, including her patient, waved. She couldn’t resist waving back.

A hundred yards farther on they drove past three more guns, drawn in to the side of the road. The teams stood patiently; the crews chatted or smoked their clay pipes, uninterested in the passing carriage.