Soldier No More

'Drive to the chateau—' Roche swallowed nervously, then dummy5

took hold of himself '—and drop me off in the parking area in front of the main gate ... do you know it?'

'Yes, m'sieur. The new parking area which M'sieur d'Auberon has had prepared for the tourists—there is building work in progress still or the gate-house—'

'That's right.' Galles' information tallied with Genghis Khan's. 'You wait for me there. That's all you have to do, mon vieux.'

'It is . . . a pick-up?'

That was a perfect question, better even than he could have imagined 'Yes. And we are picking up dynamite, I can tell you.'

Galles touched the sacking with his toe. 'Then we will make your pick-up, m'sieur—never fear!'

Roche used up the last three kilometres inside Chases et Gens.

Most obligingly (though no doubt by design, now that he intended to convert Le Chateau du Cingle d'Enfer into a tourist-trap, milking foreigners where his hobereaux ancestors had once composed the peasants out of their money), Etienne d'Auberon had included a plan of the chateau.

'... the outer courtyard, reached by way of a ruined gatehouse of formidable proportions, leads the visitor to a second and more attractive gateway, built in the dummy5

Renaissance style, bearing the family motto 'Soln in perfectum me attrahit' intertwined among delicate devices...'

So he had two gateways to pass—

'. . . the interior of the chateau, soon to be opened to the public for the first time, comprises a succession of noble rooms, furnished with the everyday objects of life in the XVI, XVII and XVIII centuries, including priceless tapestries, furniture and family portraits...'

Either the chateau had somehow escaped the excesses of the French Revolution, or the present owner was lying through his teeth! But here, once again, was illustrated that unrivalled ability of the French to triunph over adversity . . .

and he could only hope that his own diluted French blood would do the same for him.

'We are close, m'sieur.'

Roche craned his neck to take in the view. They had left the last houses of Laussel-Beynac behind among the trees, and had twisted and turned in a series of hairpin bends to rise above a great cingle of the river, to bring into view the towers of the chateau ahead.

The last turn opened up the new parking area, bulldozed out from the hillside on the peasants' side of a great dry moat which had been cut across the limestone headland on which the castle itself had been built to command the river valley.

The medieval defences of the castle lay directly ahead, dummy5

wreathed in scaffolding, with a lorry in the foreground from which men were even now unloading bags of cement, and with the delicate conical towers of the Renaissance chateau he had glimpsed earlier rising in the background.

He was oddly reminded of The Old House, which was so absolutely different and so English, but which was the same for all that: possession of these things—Le Chateau du Cingle d'Enfer and The Old House at Steeple Horley—could twist some men out of true self-interest, just as any abstract ideas could delude others, like himself and Genghis Khan, who had no such things of their own, into other follies.

The distant sound of a motor-cycle, somewhere behind him in the trees on the twists and turns, recalled him to reality.

He picked up Choses et Gens and his own bastide nonsense, and walked round the Citroen to the driver's window.

'Just you keep your eye on that gateway. When I come out of there I don't want to hang about admiring the view—you understand?'

He didn't wait for Galles to acknowledge the instruction, but launched himself straightway towards the first gate.

' The visitor will observe the gun-ports, pierced low in the gateway by Jean d'Auberon, who died with 'obert de Montal at-the battle of Pavia in 1525 . . .'

He observed the gun-ports.

And he also observed the cement-bag carriers, who took no more note of him than the peach-box carriers outside dummy5

Neuville.

Under the shadow of the archway ahead—' rebuilt by Etienne III d'Auberon, who led the best shots in France in the hunt for the last wolf of the Dordogne, in 1774' —there was a pile of cement bags, laid away safe from any August rain, as Genghis Khan's man had said they would be.

He paused halfway down, out of sight of everyone, as though to adjust the tightness of one shoelace, and picked up the brief-case planted between the bags.

It was dusty with a fine powder of cement, and the key was in the lock. He turned the key and put it into his trouser pocket, dusted down the case with his hand, as he straightened up, and stepped out briskly into the light of