more dignity, 'You forget I have given my parole.'
The gleam of extraordinary ferocity faded from Duhamel's face, being replaced by a sceptical and disillusioned look. 'You shall blow it during halts,' he said. 'Not in the coach. These gentlemen may wish to reflect.'
They had little else to do, other than sleep. Jack was gifted that way: not only had he a great deal to make up, but the enormous meals he ate in obscure competition with the unconscious Frenchman weighed down his eyelids. They weighed down his liver too, and upset his internal economy: even before they left Brittany most of the sauces were based on cream by the pint; in Normandy it was worse, and their halts became even more frequent. Although they travelled with two chamber-pots under the seat Jack's modesty could not do with less than a hedge, or at least a capacious bush, and the disgusted postillions had to draw the coach into the side every few miles or so.
Then at Alencjon Duhamel's judgment failed him. As he walked into the kitchen of the inn his keen eye perceived a tub of freshwater crayfish, and although they had not fasted long enough to purge themselves of the filth upon which they had been regaling he ordered them to be boiled at once. 'Very lightly boiled - just seized, you understand - it would be a crime to spoil their flavour, such fine fat beasts.'
Stephen's reflections had left him with little appetite; but Jagiello, who did not feel the need to reflect, ate several score, and Jack, muttering 'that no Frenchman should outdo him' kept pace. In his already weakened, upset condition he became so quickly ill, so obviously and transparently disordered in the middle of an empty road that at last Duhamel suggested that Dr Maturin should do something for him, should prescribe physic, or take some appropriate measures. Stephen had been waiting for this with mounting impatience: 'Very well,' he said, writing on his knee. 'If you will have the goodness to tell one of the soldiers to take this to an apothecary, I believe we may travel on in something more nearly resembling comfort.'
Duhamel looked at the cabalistic scrawl, considered, and agreed. A trooper galloped off and galloped back again with a horse-sized enema and a number of bottles, some large, some very small. The journey continued; there were no more sudden urgent halts, no cries of 'there is a bush ahead'; Jack dozed most of the way under the influence of his physician's favourite tincture of laudanum, a powerful opiate whose abuse in time of great emotional stress had very nearly put an end to Stephen's career, but which he still considered the most valuable substance in the pharmacopoeia.
Stephen was happy to see the laudanum bottle, for although he no longer indulged he liked to have his tincture by; and when, a little short of Verneuil, first Jagiello's and then Duhamel's iron bowels succumbed to the crayfish he gave them each a dose. He could at the same time have put an end to Duhamel, for he had also renewed his store of sudden death and in one minute phial he had enough to deal with fifty Duhamels and plenty to spare; but with such an escort it would have served no good purpose and in any case he had never, as a physician, intentionally injured any man: he doubted that he could bring himself to it, whatever the extremity.
They rolled on through the He de France, three of them somnolent and fasting, and he returned to his reflections. One great disadvantage was the fact that he had been out of touch with Europe for some time and he had little acquaintance with recent developments in French affairs, particularly in those to do with the various branches of intelligence. He did know of course that the French services outdid even the English in their multiplicity, their jealous rivalries, and their struggle for power and control of the secret funds. The army and the navy had each their own, so did the Great Council, the foreign ministry, the ministries of the interior, of justice, and of the police, none wholeheartedly trusting any of the others, to say nothing of those virtually autonomous bodies, the descendants of the secret du roi, charged with the surveillance of the rest and of one another, watchdogs guarding watchdogs so that at times half the nation seemed made up of informers. He did know that Talleyrand and Fouche and Bertrand were nominally out of office, but he did not know how much influence they still in fact retained nor what agents still worked for them, though he believed their name was Legion. Where the real power lay at present he could not tell: nor did he know whose prisoner he was.
But he was tolerably certain that if he were in the army's hands they would torture him. That was also possible in the case of Fouche's successor, if only from revenge - the people in that ministry had suffered much from his activities - but with the soldiers it was probable. The supreme military argument was superior force, physical force, and in many services, not only the French, this led to the use of torture: Stephen had undergone the process once, though not to the extremity, and he dreaded a repetition. He had held out at Port Mahon, but he had been younger then, less battered, and he had the strongest immediate motive for doing so - the direct preservation of the Catalan resistance organizations, no less. Now he was not certain how he would behave: courage was far from constant in any man and extreme agony could reduce him to a shrieking, spiritually dominated animal, willing in some cases to make any concession whatever for a moment's relief. He hoped he would bear it; he thought it likely, particularly with the saving grace of anger and contempt; but he was glad, heartily glad, that in the dark-green phial he had a sure way out.
He was by no means as strongly attached to life as he had been in the days of Port Mahon, when apart from his political activities his whole heart was taken up with Diana; but even so he was unwilling to leave it in the infinite squalor of a torture-room, among the vile excitement of the operators and the flood of hatred - for torturers were obliged in self-justification to hate their victim and obviously the hatred was returned. Diana Villiers ... at the time of Port Mahon they had not been on terms, she having bolted with Richard Canning; but it was extraordinary what a stay she had been to him - the pole that held his needle to the north and gave its pointing a significance that it had lacked since her reign came to a sudden end.
He thought of her much as they approached Paris. She would surely be there, at the Hotel de La Mothe, rather than in the country. It would take a great deal to move Diana from the most fashionable shops in the world after her long abstinence, and although he was certain that she would never, never part with her great diamond, a fortune in itself, her other jewels would allow her to run riot for years on end. Her connection with him, as far as Paris was concerned, was tenuous in the extreme - that of a travelling companion, physician and patient, no more - and even if it were known to the police, which he doubted, her living under the protection of La Mothe would preserve her from anything but formal enquiries which she knew how to deal with. In his opinion the reputation of the French police, except in criminal affairs, was exaggerated; he had found them rather slow and inefficient, timid where the rich were concerned, hide-bound by form, hampered by their rivals, and often corrupt.
The traffic increased on either hand. His thoughts returned to the possible reasons for their present position, the possible lines of defence. His own arrest was only too comprehensible, but this treatment of Jack and young Jagiello seemed to have little meaning. Unless ...his mind ran along a series of hypotheses, none really convincing.
After Versailles, where the traffic became thicker still, Duhamel locked the coach doors from within. 'Oh Lord,' said Jack, starting from his doze, 'I shall have to get out.' 'So shall I,' said Jagiello.
Duhamel hesitated, fingering the key and looking out of the window, for the same imperious urge was upon him too: no, no, it was impossible. The late sun gilded an avenue crowded with carriages, passers-by on either side, and never a bush, never the least shelter to be seen. He called to the postillions to go faster, to the escort to clear the way well ahead. 'It will not be long now,' he said anxiously - his first entirely human utterance in this journey - and sank back into his corner, his hand pressed to his labouring belly, his pale lips tightly closed.
Why arrest Jack? Stephen could not see it. He remembered the universal howl of execration that had greeted the imprisonment and the almost certain murder of Captain Wright in 1805; and poor Wright was only a
