Soldier No More

the inner courtyard beyond.

It was only a matter of ten seconds, but he had it now— King, Cawdor, Glamis, all—he could turn round and run now!

He continued on towards the 'Solum perfectum me attrahit'

doorway, tucking the d'Auberon book and the bastide material more comfortably under his arm. A thing done right was a thing done well, Mrs Clarke had said.

There was a heavy bronze dolphin knocker on the great door.

He looked back across the courtyard and saw that the cement carriers were back on their job.

A small grill clicked open in the door, startling him.

'Captain David Roche—for M'sieur d'Auberon.' He projected the password into the grill, slightly off-put by the pink scalp dummy5

which was all he could see through it. 'M'sieur Audley has telephoned, I think?'

Heavy bolts echoed on the inside. Getting into the chateau, with all its ancient treasures and its more lethal post-Suez objets d'art, was not just for casual callers.

There were three steps forward, and then two steps down, over white Carennac marble into the hall, while the great door crashed shut behind him.

'. . . and its greatest architectural beauty is the splendid Renaissance staircase, which comprises a superb transition between the spiral and the stair in flights, as at Montal. . .'

'If M'sieur le Capitaine will come this way?' The little bald man who had peered up at him through the grill, grey-coated and black-trousered, indicated a door to his left.

Roche regretted desperately that he had come so far, but he was trapped now beyond all thought of retreat.

'. . . a succession of noble rooms. . .'

Here he was in one of them, complete with tapestries on one side, and a breath-taking view beyond the river on the other!

'M'sieur d'Auberon will attend you here shortly, M'sieur le Capitaine.'

dummy5

The second door closed behind him.

Door—enormous windows, with five-mile views across the river—vast carved fireplace . . . and an immense faded tapestry picturing heavily-armed Renaissance Romans martyring naked Christians in ingenious ways. . .

But he hadn't come to admire d'Auberon's treasures. There was a huge oak table in the centre of the room, on heavily carved legs. He walked towards it quickly, first dumping the bastide notes and Choses et Gens on top, then tucking the brief-case down out of the way behind one of the legs, feeling for all the world like Stauffenberg planting his bomb under the table in the Fuehrer's bunker.

Only, unlike Stauffenberg, the moment he'd abandoned the brief-case he wanted to pick it up again. The thought of letting it out of his grasp even for a second left him desolate, clenching the empty hand which had relinquished it into a tight fist in a reflex against temptation.

He felt the temptation grow. It wasn't really necessary at all, this charade—he was still obeying Genghis Khan when the man's orders no longer mattered—when nothing mattered except the possession of that brief-case—

A sound outside the room straightened him up just as his hand started to unclench.

'Captain Roche?'

Roche turned slowly towards the sound.

'Captain Roche—what a pleasure! You are David Audley's dummy5

friend? Or, more accurately, Miss Baker's friend?'

He hadn't consciously tried to imagine what Etienne d'Auberon would be like, beyond vague instinctive images founded on what Lexy and Madame Peyrony had let slip, crossed with his own experience of superior Quai d'Orsay types.

'M'sieur d'Auberon.' He mouthed some sort of reply, letting the Frenchman come towards him while moving only slightly himself so as to mask the brief-case more effectively.

'And staying with him, in the Tower? While on leave from Paris, he said?' D'Auberon's handshake was firm and dry, and neither too strong nor too weak, like the man himself.

Roche found himself recalling another of Bill Ballance's obiter dicta, on the Anglo- French love-hate complex: ' the best Frenchman is the one you can admire as an enemy if you can't have him as a friend' .

But meanwhile he had replied again, one half of his brain working automatically to make the necessary conversation along lines already planned while the other half tried to betray him.

'Ah, yes—our bastides. And there is nothing recent written on them in English? You are lucky David Audley hasn't thought of that. He is a most able historian . . . but then his interests are strictly Merovingian, aren't they?'

Far beneath the surface of the words Roche sensed the truth of what he already knew, that d'Auberon and Audley admired dummy5

each other in enmity, not as friends.

He replied once more, and saw d'Auberon smile, and the smile hurt him. For d'Auberon was another name in the list of his betrayals, as surely as if there had been a