The Old Vengeful (20 page)

He led them back to the car in silence, and she couldn’t take her eyes off him.

“Turn round and get back to the cross-roads, and then turn left, along the crest.” It was hardly an order, more an instruction, and almost a courteous one.

“And then where to?” Vendresse had also taken the sting out of Humphrey Aske.

“To a place called Coucy-le-Château. About twenty miles, mostly on side-roads. I’ll direct you.”

“What is there to see at Coucy-le-Château?” asked Elizabeth.

“There’s a village … and a ruined castle.”

“A medieval castle, you mean?”

“Yes. But the ruins are more modern—ancient and modern, like the hymns in the hymn-book.”

“What d’you mean, Paul?”

“I mean, there was once the greatest medieval tower in Europe there—there still was in 1812, anyway … the great tower of Enguerrand III of Coucy, who was a contemporary of our King John—he was also excommunicated by the Pope, like King John, I believe … But General Ludendorff blew up Enguerrand’s tower in 1918, before he retreated, to remind the French he’d been there.”

They had turned on to the crest road, the fabled Chemin des Dames itself. Elizabeth’s eye was drawn to a huge French war cemetery, with a sign to a German one nearby.

“Not that he hadn’t been reminding them already,” continued Paul. “He’d had the Paris Gun—the one that’s always wrongly called ‘Big Bertha’—stashed in a wood just below the castle. Paris is only about seventy miles down the road, as the shell flies … I could take you to see the gun position in the wood, it’s still there. But it’s rather overgrown and depressing, so I won’t.”

“So it’s another of your 1914-18 places, where they’ve got to remember us—just in case?” If it hadn’t been for Vendresse she would have spoken more sharply.

“It can be.” He nodded thoughtfully, then stopped nodding. “But as a matter of fact it isn’t.”

Elizabeth couldn’t add up this reply to make a sensible answer of it, and Paul appeared to be in no mood to elaborate on it, but withdrew into himself. It was as though their passage across one of his old battlefields, on which every fold and feature had its significance for him, was inhibiting him.

Finally Humphrey Aske roused himself behind the wheel. “You said … the tower—the Frenchman’s tower—was still there in 1812. Was that meant to mean something, or could it have been 1912, or 1712?”

“No.” Paul shook his head. “No.”

“No … what?”

“You’ll be coming to the Laon Soissons road in a moment. You turn left, towards Soissons, and then almost immediately right, down a side-road.” Paul stirred. “I meant 1812.”

Aske peered ahead. “What have medieval towers got to do with 1812?”

Mitchell twisted in his seat, pulling his safety-belt away from his shoulder, and stared past Elizabeth out of the rear window, as though to get a last look at his old battlefield on the ridge.

Then he caught Elizabeth’s eye. “Your father came this way, our people think, from his rough notes.”

“My father?” She frowned at him.

“Or, if he didn’t, Tom Chard certainly did—‘along the high road above the river to the greatest tower I ever saw’—he must have seen a few great towers along the road from the Lautenbourg, but this was the greatest… size and time and distance, that’s how they worked it out … with a few other clues beside, from Miss Irene Cookridge’s book, Elizabeth.”

“To—?” But she had forgotten the name of the place.

“Coucy-le-Château.” He nodded. “Because Coucy-le-Château is where Lieutenant Chipperfield died, they reckon.”

“
YOU
SEE, ELIZABETH
, this is a research project with a difference— or a whole lot of differences … like
time
, for a start, obviously.”

“You mean, we don’t have much of it?”

“Maybe we don’t have any of it. I don’t know. I only know that I’ve taken years to reconstruct days … and your father, Elizabeth—he bumbled along after the
Vengeful
escapers for months and months, enjoying himself in the best hotels and the Michelin restaurants, picking up the odd fact here and there, but mostly useless information. But he wasn’t worried about time, anyway.”

That was Father to the life in his later days, thought Elizabeth: in spite of the doctor’s advice he had been convinced that the whisper of his heart in his ear was only a false rumour.

“But we have other things that he didn’t have.” Paul half-smilfcd at her. “Because, when you think about it, an intelligence department is well-equipped for this sort of enterprise: we have the manpower— trained researchers, who know how to ask questions, and how to interpret the answers—and we have the resources—“

“Huh!” Aske snuffled to himself. “If the tax-payers could see us now! Or are we going to publish this time? A
Festschrift
for Dr David Audley—
1812: Defeat into Victory
? Will that balance the books?”

“And the contacts—manpower, and resources,
and
contacts—“

“Professor
Emeritus
Basil Wilson Wilder, no less!”

“Aske—“

“Sorry, old boy! A moment’s weakness … But Wilder
is
a contact—at least, if this is what your Dr Audley wants to know, he is … And that’s still
ultra-secret
, is it?”

Looking from one to the other, Elizabeth almost smiled; because they were Lucan and Cardigan at Balaclava, re-enacting history, with the one hating the other so much that he’d never let himself be stung into admitting that he too didn’t know why he was doing what he was doing. But since she was in this particular Light Brigade charge it was no real smiling matter.

“So you’re not interested in the
Vengeful
any more, Paul? It’s only the escapers now?”

He nodded. “That’s what your father was concerned with, Elizabeth. You were right.”

“After Miss … Miss Cookridge’s letter?” Here, coming down off the Chemin des Dames ridge,
Miss Irene Cookridge
was no more incongruous
than Julian Oakenshaw
and
Danny Kahn
in the roll-call of names.

“Not just her letter, but the
Conversations
book as well. David had people working on it half the night, and me working on what they came up with this morning.”

“Doing what, Paul?”

“Plotting the route they took after they broke out of the Lautenbourg Fortress.”

Aske half-turned, then his mouth closed on his unasked question and his eyes returned to the road ahead. But Elizabeth knew what was still plaguing him, because it plagued her equally; the only difference being that she knew that Paul himself didn’t know the answer to it, and Aske thought he was being frozen out from the truth.

Why?

“And that was a minor epic in itself—a classic Colditz-style job,” continued Paul. “Because they were shut up tight in an old barracks between the town and the citadel, and there was no way they could get through the barracks’ perimeter into the town.”

Why?

“So what did they do?”

He smiled. “They climbed up
into
the citadel. They made ropes out of their bedding, and grapnels somehow—they were sailors, of course, and sailors are ingenious … And then they climbed down the other side, where the sentries weren’t expecting anything. But it still must have been pretty hairy, because their ropes weren’t long enough, and they had to make the descent in stages—that’s the steep side of the Lautenbourg, which is alleged to be unclimbable. But they had these two ropes, which were just strong enough to bear one man’s weight, and a thin one to pull the ropes back up for the next man. And the last man down fixed the knot so it would bear his weight, but then two of them could pull it free—risky, but ingenious, as I said.” He shook his head admiringly. “Tom Chard—he made it sound easy. But that’s one hell of a cliff, with the wall on top of it.”

“You know the Lautenbourg Fortress, Paul?”

“Uh-huh. I was down that way a few years back, when the French started restoring the battlefield of Le Linge, above Colmar.” He smiled at her again. “It’s a 1915 battlefield, you see, Elizabeth, Le Linge is … I just visited the Lautenbourg in passing, as it were. But then, oddly enough, I’ve visited most of the Napoleonic prison fortresses they used for our chaps in 1812—a happy coincidence, you may think.”

“No coincidence,” said Aske. “Just an historical progression, really.”

“Historical, Mr Aske?”

“Or Napoleonic, Miss Loftus. Napoleon was luckier than the British: he had all his PoW camps ready-built for him—all the old frontier fortresses that he didn’t need any more, having advanced the frontier far beyond them, and beaten everyone in sight. But, of course, when
he
was beaten in his turn, the frontier went back to where it had started—and all the PoW camps became fortresses again … Arras, Cambrai, Verdun … Do you recognise the names, Miss Loftus?”

To a historian those were names to conjure with from older wars, but Elizabeth knew what he meant: they were the great names of Paul’s war, the sepulchres of three great European armies. And because Lautenbourg itself had been just such another fortress along that long-disputed frontier, it too had its 1914-18 battlefield.

And yet Lautenbourg didn’t fit, nevertheless: of all Napoleon’s British captives, only the handful of Vengefuls had been sent there, she remembered.

“Why were they sent to Lautenbourg, Paul? Did Tom Chard know that?”

Paul shook his head. “He never even asked himself the question— and why should he? But what he does say is that they were marched towards Verdun at first, by easy stages. And then one morning a new escort took over, under a full colonel of the Gendarmerie—a hard man by the name of ‘Soo-Shay’—and they went off in a different direction, and under close arrest, as though they were criminals.”

“To Lautenbourg?”

“Yes. And Lieutenant Chipperfield protested about it, because he’d given his parole in the usual way, and he expected to be treated according to the rules of war—like a gentleman.”

Aske gave a snort. “Nothing unusual about that. Napoleon Bonaparte was a great man, but he
wasn
’
t
a gentleman—he was always breaking the old gentlemanly rules, Professor Wilder says. Like encouraging his officers to break their comfortable paroles, and then complaining if a British officer he’d locked up broke out of prison … where they shouldn’t have been put in the first place, once they’d given their word-of-honour… Because, the way the British worked it out, an officer could only escape after they’d shut him up in jail. If they didn’t, then he couldn’t escape. It’s funny really: if Napoleon had played the game there wouldn’t have been any escapes at all, not of officers and gentlemen. But he did—so there were lots of them.”

Elizabeth frowned, trying to remember Father’s original brief paragraph on the fate of the prisoners. “But it was unusual—the way they were treated—surely?”

“It was, yes,” Paul agreed. “What Tom Chard says is that they asked him a lot of silly questions … What it amounts to is that ‘Colonel Soo-shay’ interrogated them, and didn’t get the right answers. And then Chipperfield decided that, since they weren’t being treated properly, and sent to the main depot at Verdun, they had a legal right to escape.”

“So they did!” said Aske triumphantly. “It’s exactly as I said. Or what Wilder said …
he
said … there’s this famous quote, by some officer—PoW, about his word-of-honour being stronger than any French locks-and-bolts. Meaning, that if they broke the rules he was honour-bound to teach them a lesson. But you’re right about Lautenbourg, all the same—‘fishy’, was how Wilder described that. But… so shouldn’t we be digging there first—at Lautenbourg, where they started—rather than here?”

Aske’s voice was gentle now, and his question was innocently put, to conceal the suggestion in it that he still doubted the sense of Paul’s actions. Yet there was also more to it than that, thought Elizabeth: having been repulsed once in his attempt to obtain a straight answer to the central question, he was manoeuvring to repeat it indirectly and obliquely.

“Here will do well enough.” Paul found it harder to maintain his politeness, but he managed it.

Was it simply because Aske was homosexual, and a stranger associated with someone Paul distrusted? Perhaps all that was good enough for him, the irrational confirming the rational, and yet there was surely an edge of something else which she couldn’t place … If she’d been beautiful and desirable, and Aske had been heterosexual …
then
it might have been sheer masculine irritation—three was a crowd, and she hadn’t concealed her sympathy for Humphrey Aske, in spite of everything … But she wasn’t, and he wasn’t, so it couldn’t be that, whatever it was.

“There—up ahead,” said Paul. “I’ve brought you this way so you can get a proper view of it. The first time I came here I could hardly see my hand in front of my face. This is a great country for mist and fog, summer and winter. Both sides found that out in 1918.”

Elizabeth craned her neck to see.

“Coucy,” said Paul. “Once upon a time it was better to be the Lord of Coucy than a Prince of the Blood, they used to say.”

A great castle … walls, with their massive interval towers, stretching for half a mile—or more, disappearing into the trees—crowning a high ridge above the plain.

“I’d much rather take you on to see the Paris Gun site, of course—that’s why I came here first, back in ‘73 … castles don’t mean a bloody thing to me. Battlefields are the places to see, they’re where it’s all at.”

“Battlefields—“ Aske caught his tongue again, before it could betray him “—it’s an impressive ruin, I must say … Where do we go?”

“Follow the road up, through the gateway. Then I’ll direct you,” said Paul, in his Aske-clipped voice.

The road meandered up the ridge, twisting with its own logic until it turned finally under the walls and towers to skirt their circuit. Elizabeth felt herself pressed into silence by the very weight of history, with Lieutenant Chipperfield of the
Vengeful
sandwiched between medieval Enguerrand III and twentieth-century General Ludendorff.