The Old Vengeful

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 dummy3

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 dummy3

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.

'Park here,' commanded Paul. 'From here we walk.'

Elizabeth looked round, to get her bearings. They had passed through Paul's great gateway, but into a little town, not a castle—a walled town, which must be what she had glimpsed from below. And now they were in one corner of the town, approaching another gateway, which must belong to the castle itself.

No . . . the whole thing was on a bigger scale than that: this second entrance was only an outer gate, opening on to an immense grassy space dotted with trees—an outer ward much bigger than at her own Portchester, near home.

But Paul seemed to know what he was doing, turning away into the custodian's office with a curt 'Stay here', leaving them to kick their heels on an empty square of gravel.

'I've never heard of this place.' Aske blinked, and stared around as Elizabeth had done. 'But then, judging by the lack of enthusiastic sightseers, I'm not alone in that... or maybe this is aperitif time . . .' He kicked his way across the gravel like a bored schoolboy, to a curious collection of rusty iron.

'This is never medieval—more like industrial revolution . . .

that iron trolley . . . and those look like I don't know what—

railway lines? Except they're curved—?'

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The gravel crunched behind them. 'Slightly curved, for a circle with a ninety-foot diameter. But your dating is about right, Aske. Say, mid-1860s. Vintage Napoleon III.'

Another period, and from the wrong Napoleon. They both looked questioningly at Paul Mitchell.

'And also significant. Cardinal Mazarin tried to blow up the great tower in the seventeenth century, only he hadn't got anything powerful enough to do the job. But there was an earthquake in these parts in 1692 that cracked it from top to bottom . . . didn't bring it down, but cracked it—which is one of our main clues, as it happens ... so when Viollet-le-Duc came to do his rescue job on the cheap for Napoleon III he fixed a couple of iron hoops round it, to hold it together. And these are bits of hoop—you can see more of them among the wreckage inside . . . Ludendorff 's explosive was powerful enough . . . Although it took twenty-eight tons of even what he'd got. Something like ammonal, I suppose.'

'What d'you mean 'one of our clues', Paul?' She stared at the bits of old railway line.

'Not the hoops. The great crack—that's what fixed our chaps on Coucy here: ' A wondrous great tower, the like of which I never saw for its breadth and height, but very ancient; which yet stood, though split sadly by a fierce tremor of the earth in the days of the Great King, so it is said.' Tom Chard wasn't a great one for French names, but he was interested in everything he saw on his travels, and he had a good memory, thank God! So he left us enough clues—an earthquake in the dummy3