The Last Banquet (13 page)

He has greater faith in words than me. And greater faith his words will be taken the way he wants them to be taken.

He thinks he’s given them a reason to fear us. I suspect he’s given them a reason to kill us all.

‘Fall back,’ I say. Seeing Jerome’s scowl, I add, ‘We have Virginie to protect.’

‘We should lead them away from her,’ Jerome growls. I’m about to agree when Charlot shakes his head. ‘And leave her for Emile to protect? No, I need a surgeon and we must get her home.’ Jerome dips for Charlot, and since he stands to Charlot’s right, and holds his spear in his own right hand, this is easy enough. I change my spear to my left and steady Charlot’s other side.

When Charlot says we can’t leave the muskets, I point out, briefly, that I cannot carry two muskets and a boar spear and protect anyone usefully.

‘Cover me,’ Jerome orders. He lets go of Charlot, stabs his boar spear hilt-first into the dirt, grabs the older musket, puts his heel to the barrel and strains. Wood splinters and the barrel comes free. It’s an impressive show of strength. Two young charbonnieres kneel by the one Jerome stabbed in the throat, who must be dying by now. Their uncle, perhaps their father. The others watch Jerome with flat eyes as he smashes the second musket. ‘Follow us,’ he snarls at them, ‘and we’ll kill you all.’ Reclaiming his spear, he twists it in his hand and pretends to launch it at the nearest, who stumbles back as the others scatter. ‘Now we fall back,’ he says. Virginie comes running the moment we’re clear. ‘You must take your brother back to the chateau,’ Jerome tells her.

‘That nag won’t carry both of us,’ Charlot says. ‘Emile should go,’ I say. ‘You know the way?’

He nods, white-faced.

‘Then ride back and raise the alarm. Tell the duke to have his huntsmen meet us. And he should call out the militia . . .’

Emile looks at me.

‘This is a
jacquerie
– or will be. You think this ends here?’ ‘I want to stay,’ he insists.

‘You can help us best by going.’

He scowls and I think will refuse; pride or fear of being alone in this forest. But Virginie touches his arm and looks pleading, and that decides it. Emile mounts the horse and trots away without a glance. All I can do is hope he keeps his head down. Most of the branches on our way here were low.

We knew we’d hit disaster when we found our mounts gone. Sabots had churned the loam so badly that the clearing where we’d left our horses could have been freshly dug. ‘Bastards,’ Jerome said.

‘Downriver,’ Charlot muttered. ‘We must follow the bank.’ ‘Why?’ Jerome demanded.

Virginie folded her fingers into mine and gripped so hard her knuckles turned white. She took my hand without asking, without saying anything, for all I knew without knowing she’d done it. ‘Charlot’s right,’ I said. ‘We need to find a boat. It’s too far to walk back through the forest and we’d have to pass those encampments.’

‘You think it’s a full jacquerie?’ Virginie whispered. I shrugged. ‘The last harvest was bad, the next will be worse. The taxes are high. Their children are starving. What have they got to lose?’

Jerome obviously disliked my choice of words but he put his arm round Charlot to support him, then hesitated. ‘Can you ride on my back? It’ll be faster.’

Charlot lifted bloodied fingers away from his shoulder and considered the wound. ‘Bind this first,’ he said, ‘then carry me.’

Having eased off Charlot’s jacket, we tore the arm from his shirt and used it to pad his wound. Then we put him back into the jacket, buttoned it tight to keep the padding in place and Jerome knelt so he could climb aboard. We did all of this in less time than it takes me to write. Charlot bore the pain in silence. ‘Will we make it?’ Virginie asked.

‘Jerome will help Charlot and I’ll keep you safe.’ ‘You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep.’ ‘Who says I can’t keep it?’

She laughed and Charlot glanced back. Something passed between them because Virginie blushed and put her head down and walked in silence for several minutes, keeping her thoughts to herself. A mile ahead, we found three small boats on a sand spit where the river turned. Trees overwhelmed the far bank but our side was clear and the boats there for the taking. I cut two free and drove my spear through other’s bottom to ruin it. Virginie and I dragged the first boat to the water.

‘Get him in,’ I told Jerome, who lowered Charlot to the ground, picked him up as if he was a child and did as I said. ‘Now go.’

Jerome looked at Virginie and hesitated.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Get him to safety.’ It was enough. Jerome nodded and all together we pushed Charlot towards fast water and Jerome clambered in as the flow caught the boat and whisked it away. ‘Hurry,’ Virginie said.

Shouts came from the trees as we reached our boat and began hurrying it down the sand. Virginie scrambled in with a flash of bare leg and I pushed her into the stream and dragged myself after, the boat rocking violently. The flow caught us and hurtled us after our friends as charbonnieres reached the sand spit, screaming in anger. We’d left the boar spears and they hurled both after us.

The spears fell short and were lost.

The river narrowed and the banks rose, matted with wild scrub, dog rose and Corsican mint, and dotted with an occasional pine that peered at us from above. We came out on the far side of the ridge and chased Charlot’s boat towards a stone bridge that carried the road through the forest across the river. Charbonnieres lined its side, pointing and shouting. I saw Jerome raise his pistol and watched those nearest shrink back. He and Charlot passed under the bridge and I saw Jerome jerk forward as a stone caught the side of his head.

‘Tip the boat,’ Virginie said.

She was right. We flipped the boat, cold water closing over us, and I grabbed her and held fast, holding to the bench inside the boat with my other hand. When we surfaced it was under our upturned hull. Stones clattered on the wood above our heads as we approached the bridge and again after we passed under. A musket was fired and another, the first ball missing and the second smashing a plank as it bounced away. The river widened and the current slowed and through the split the musket ball made we could see ragged men lining the bank. Some had ancient muskets, others spears, most carried wood-axes or farm implements. There were dozens of them, then hundreds, for all we knew thousands. Misery on the move. They shuffled and stared at each other blank-eyed as if trying to find a purpose. When we saw a church in flames we knew they’d found one.

The Upturned Boat

o
ur shell bobbed and swirled and once bumped into the body of a gamekeeper floating face-down in the river – and we bobbed and swirled and bumped along beneath it, sometimes bruising our legs on rocks in the shallows and sometimes hanging on to stop ourselves sinking beneath its surface with exhaustion, but always hidden from watching eyes. Virginie had not then learnt to swim, and the shallowest bits of the river always seemed to have banks dotted with peasants. The gap between water level and inside keel was small but it was all the safety we had.

‘I’m cold,’ Virginie muttered. ‘My hands . . .’ ‘Mine too.’ I was terrified my muscles would cramp and I’d lose my grip and Virginie and the boat would be swept away. ‘We should land.’

‘Soon,’ she agreed. ‘We should land soon.’

Trees ran down to the river on both banks and we were back in the forest, which followed the river in a curve along one side of the duke’s domains. He had more lands than a man could ride in a day and Virginie, although certain her father owned the trees we passed through, had no real idea where we were. What worried me, although I was careful not to say so, was not where we were, but how long we’d have to stay hidden. Alone, I might have risked trying to reach the chateau. Virginie’s presence made that idea impossible.

Charlot’s sister was torn between terror her brother had drowned, been killed or died from his wound, and certainty that he was Charlot, so of course he and Jerome would reach safety. They would reach safety and raise a rescue party. And if they didn’t – not because they were dead, but because they were hiding – then Emile would undoubtedly get through. I could sense she was less convinced by that idea but she repeated it as if it was obviously true.

‘Over there,’ she said.

The very beginnings of a gravel bank showed where the river bent around the edge of a slight hill. It was as good a place to put ashore as any and better than most of the sites we’d seen. I put my feet down, felt nothing and pushed myself under, my heels digging deep enough into the riverbed’s gravel to bring the boat to a brief stop. Pushing towards the shore I found my feet could reach the bottom. Even then the current was strong enough to throw us into the bank a hundred yards further along.

‘Too fierce,’ I said, after we’d tried to push our shell upstream.

‘We should let it go . . .’ Virginie was right. Dragging it up would tell the charbonnieres this was where we landed. That is, if they were looking for us still.

‘Ready?’ We came out from under our boat and the flow carried it away as we trudged back to the gravel bank. It shifted noisily underfoot and I looked round. A hundred peasants could be watching without us knowing. But no one shouted or shot at us as we scrabbled ashore and reached the safety of the undergrowth at the river’s edge.

‘Now what?’ Virginie asked.

I took her face in my hand, my fingers so cold they could barely sense the flesh of her cheek, and kissed the corner of her mouth. Only once and gently. ‘I’ve missed you,’ I said. ‘All summer and the two years before. I missed you.’

Huge eyes considered me, brown as cut agate and twice as bright. Then she nodded and looked around her, my words held somewhere for later. ‘We should find safety,’ she said softly. I agreed with her; I simply wasn’t sure what safety was in the middle of a jacquerie. A stone house if we could find one? A church? Although we’d seen one of those on fire. A cave in the hills, if there were hills nearby? ‘This is safe,’ I told her. ‘The trees will hide us.’

‘And when night comes?’ The day was barely afternoon but night would come as it always did.

‘We sleep in the trees.’

‘Separate trees?’

‘If you want. Although we’d be safer together.’

Again that nod, as if she was saving the words. Maybe she was, because she looked around her as she’d looked around her before and finally nodded. ‘We stay here,’ she said. ‘And we sleep like animals in the trees.’

Unbuckling my belt, I put down the hunting dirk I’d been issued that morning. Then I unbuttoned my jacket, which was so heavy with water I would have discarded it had I been able to while clinging to the upturned boat. After that I struggled out of my wet shirt. I’d long since kicked off my boots in the river, as they’d filled with water, but I kept my breeches, although I undid the knees and dragged off my stockings. It was only as I stood in the clearing in the afternoon sun in my wet breeches that I realised Virginie was staring at me. ‘I’m frozen,’ I said.

Pushing a stick through the arms of my shirt I hung it from a jutting branch and began looking for a stick thick enough to support my jacket, which had been heavy enough when it was simply dry leather. Finding one, I hung the garment from a thicker branch and draped the stockings next to it. ‘Where did you learn to do that?’ Virginie demanded.

‘At the academy.’

‘Why would they teach you something so strange?’

‘So we can dry our clothes in situations like this.’ I meant we the students, me, Jerome, Emile, her brother . . .

But she simply said, ‘Turn away.’ And a few moments later, her voice resigned, she said, ‘I need your help.’ She still wore her sodden dress and still shivered from the cold despite standing in the sun. ‘My fingers.’

Her fingers were those of the dead, blue and shrunken where water had leached oil from her skin and bleached her nails. She could barely hold still as I examined them. ‘Let me do it,’ I said. My fingers trembled both from cold and nervousness as I struggled with the first of her buttons. Where I had huge buttons, her dress had dozens of tiny ones, arranged in twos, which fed through cotton loops that seemed to have shrunk. It took me minutes to undo the bodice of her wet dress and she dragged herself out of it rather than face the embarrassment of having me undo more. Her chemise was also sodden but she was naked beneath. It clung to her hips as she turned away from me.

I hung her dress in direct sunlight and told her I would find food.

‘What?’ she said. ‘Where?’

When I returned it was with three small trout, a handful of mushrooms and, unexpectedly glorious, a summer truffle with pale flesh and the most elegant scent. I used the hunting dirk to gut and fillet the trout, slicing carefully along each fragile spine. I stripped skin from the first fillet, broke off a piece of flesh and offered it to Virginie. She shook her head so I ate it and offered her the second piece. She swallowed the raw fish so quickly she could barely have tasted. ‘Slowly,’ I said. ‘Eat it slowly.’

‘I can’t,’ she said, looking sick. ‘I can’t eat it at all.’

We found a beech tree just beyond the clearing twisted with age and split by lightning. In the top of the cavity inside was dry wood so rotten it crumbled in my fingers. I had my flint and steel, because what boy didn’t travel with such in those days. Putting the rotted wood on a flat stone out of the wind, I cracked the flints together. The kindling caught and I blew it ablaze, adding a handful of rotted wood ripped from the tree’s innards.

‘I suppose they taught you that at the academy too?’ Virginie demanded. She was smiling as she said it. Finding the driest twigs I could, to keep smoke to the minimum, I left her holding a stick-skewered trout over the first flames and returned to the river. By the time I came back with a larger trout that I’d tickled from the water, she’d eaten the first and was looking at the second hungrily.

‘Have it,’ I said. ‘I’ll catch others.’

She took a bite and grinned at me; the relief of eating, the warmth of the sun, the fact we were now on dry land putting light in her eyes.

‘No,’ I said, before she could ask. ‘I taught myself how to fish.’