'Fair, mid-brown hair, slightly curled… with a faint scar on his cheek?' Charitй pressed, sketching a finger down her own face.
'No, mam'selle. Dark-haired. Didn't see a scar.'
'Did they say where they were going?' Fourchette asked.
'Did they rent horses from you?' said Charitй at the same time.
'Did they just walk on up the road?' came a croaking snarl from the open carriage from Guillaume Choundas.
'Hй, merde, what a sight!' The old stableman gawped at Choundas and made a gesture guaranteed in local lore to ward off evil. 'One question at a time, pray you!' he pleaded with his hands before him.
'Did… they… say… where… they… were… going, you old fool?' Fourchette. 'And how!'
'No reason to be insulting, m'sieur,' the old fellow said in a sudden sulk. 'M'sieur Fleury said they were going home to Rouen. He had taken his son to a physician in Paris, to see if they could do anything for him. As for how they went on, they rented an old two-horse farm waggon from me. They went up that way, the road to Beauvais.'
'What is all this nonsense about these people, Fourchette?' Choundas demanded from his carriage, slamming his cane on the floor. 'Lewrie did not come this way, he's on another road right now, laughing his head off at how feeble we are!'
'Who the Devil are we after and why, Major?' Capitaine Joseph Aulard, leader of the troop of cavalry, asked the only military man in the party. 'Two Anglais or four French people? My colonel told me nothing but to catch up with this police fellow and follow his orders.'
'Two Anglais… a capitaine in their navy and his wife. As to why, you might have to ask M'sieur Fourchette, for I see no sense in it, mon vieux,' Major Clary replied in a mutter, with a shrug. 'I am here simply because I met the Anglais and can recognise him.'
Incroyable!' the cavalry officer spat. 'There is a plot!' Fourchette growled as he fumbled to put his foot into The stirrup. 'Three coaches, three couples, two to throw us off the scent! There's more to this than we thought. Organised by a cabal of Anglais secret operatives, paid for with British gold. This coach came from Paris a match to the first one we came across. They are still ahead of us. Lewrie and his wife, and another pair that aid them! Going to Beauvais We ride on!'
'All night?' Capitaine Aulard bemoaned. 'Merde. We'll all be reeling in our saddles by the time we get to Beauvais… without a proper supper too.'
The farm waggon had no suspension straps to support its jolting solid axles. Its four wheels were badly greased, if greased at all, so the intermittent keening shriek could carry for miles at night. It had been used to haul hay, bricks, lumber, dung, everything. Now the bed was liberally covered with fresh-smelling straw, under which all those trunks and valises were hidden. Still, it remained a nasty conveyance, and a slow one, to boot, for the two large horses which pulled it were old, and Sir Pulteney, at the reins again, did not press them too hard.
The sun was down, the stars were out, and the moon hinted that it might rise above the trees and low hills several hours hence. The birds had gone to their nests and were silent. Innocent farm people were slurping their soups, dipping their breads, carving off slices of cheese and onions, and sipping their vin ordinaire, perhaps no more than an hour from retiring. The locals' own waggons and carts were in the barns, so the fugitives had the road pretty much to themselves. In the distance, only here and there, were there glims to be seen through opened shutters.
'Odd's Blood, there it is! Just as I recall it!' Sir Pulteney announced as he turned the waggon into a much narrower farm track off the Beauvais road, the entrance almost lost in overgrowth, and so bad a lane, evidently so little-used, that in the darkness anyone chasing them would have to know of its existence and peer hard to spot it.
Sir Pulteney shook the reins and clucked the team to a faster pace for a mile or so before slowing again. 'It appears there's been a dry summer, so we should find one of the old fords and cross over the Thйrain river. After that, there are a thousand farm tracks just like this, which will take us near Amiens, round it in point of fact, and, is our luck in, we'll be in Calais in a trice, haw haw!'
'How long a trice did ye have in mind?' Lewrie asked, clawing at a maddening itch beneath his dark wig and bandage, hoping that the last Frog actor who'd worn it hadn't had crabs, lice, or fleas. The paints that Lady Imogene had daubed on him were greasy, too, and the cool night air made him conjure that his face was covered in bear fat like a Muskogee Indian's would be, to keep the mosquitoes at bay.
'Three days in this waggon,' Sir Pulteney estimated as they shared the un-sprung bench seat of the un-sprung waggon behind their plodding team. 'Slower than cold treacle tonight, of course. Farmer folk hereabouts would remark upon anything on the roads at night, especially one making good time. And we can't have that, Begad! Haw!'
If we can't make noise, then stop that brayin'! Lewrie griped.
'Horse, pray God, at some point?' Lewrie hoped aloud. 'So we can make better speed?'
'Once we've altered our appearances and assumed new aliases, somewhere up ahead,' Sir Pulteney pooh- poohed. 'You and your wife… pardons, Armand and Dorothea… should try to get some rest. Hello?' he said of a sudden, drawing the creaking waggon to a full stop. 'Do you hear something back there?'
Oh, Christ, they've found us! Lewrie thought in dread.
He stood, facing to the rear. They had come more than an English mile, Lewrie reckoned, so he had no fear of being spotted right off; there was a lot of forest behind them. As he did at sea, Lewrie opened his mouth and breathed softly, cocking his head to either side. Even above the groan of timbers, masts, and yards, and the hiss of the hull through the sea, sound carried quite far, even something as faint as the dinging of a watch bell.
'Horses!' Lewrie said in a harsh whisper. 'A lot of 'em. Jinglin'.'
'Sword scabbards and musketoons… bit chains, and such, or so I recall from my days in the Yeoman Cavalry,' Sir Pulteney opined. 'Cavalry… at least a troop… and a coach, too? At a fast canter or trot, it sounds like. Lud, they fell for it! Old Simenon at the stables pointed them to Beauvais, possibly Rouen, as well, where Major Fleury claimed he lived! A party being pursued could take a boat at Rouen down the Seine to the sea and board a packet at Le Havre. Let us pray they take that as a better-than-fair proposition!'
'Once we get to Calais, though,' Lewrie had to ask, losing his dread as the sound of their pursuers-if pursuers they truly were-seemed to continue on north, and coming no closer or louder along their miserably narrow and rough farm track. 'How do we get aboard a packet ourselves we have no false papers? If word gets out for the police and all to be on the lookout for us?'
'Recall, I mentioned that I'd arranged for a schooner to meet us?' Sir Pulteney breezily boasted. 'The former head of our league, the greatest of us all, has a schooner yacht of his very own, and had the eager cooperation of several other merchant masters. She will be off one of our old rendezvous coves near Cap Gris Nez, to loiter near the shore 'til we turn up, then take us off the beach, and away!'
'Uhm, Sir Pulteney… that was ten years ago, in the midst of the Terror, when the Frogs weren't anywhere near as organised, with so many police and guardsmen,' Lewrie pointed out, a new nagging dread in his head. What also nagged him was that Sir Pulteney Plumb looked on their escape from France as a chance to re-live the antics of his youth, like alumni during Old Boys' Week, men of middling age who should know better, but would over-indulge in the old taverns and haunts, and dive into vigourous sports as if they were still not come to their majority.
One last chance t'be heroic, Lewrie sarcastically deemed this; one last grand adventure… with us dead in a ditch if he fails!
'They didn't have nigh a million men under arms back then, sir,' Lewrie continued, 'in their army, the Garde Nationale, and the police. There wasn't a gendarme on every street corner, and if there
