Powerscourt didn’t think Jean was going to wake up very soon. He wondered if they would realize what had happened to their fellow warder, that they would have to open the doors of every single cell until they found him. It seemed possible to Powerscourt that they would assume Jean had gone home early, or had been taken ill and gone to lie down somewhere. Maybe they wouldn’t realize he was locked in one of the cells, unable to speak, and in that case they wouldn’t come looking for him. A prisoner escaping was just impossible. It had never happened before.
The events of the next ten minutes confirmed to Powerscourt that they had no idea that one of their charges was at large. They shouted messages for Jean, some of them rather rude, and they returned to their own quarters. Powerscourt crept into the room where the doctor had talked to him, close to the front door. Even in here the windows were barred. He padded round the room, removing a doctor’s white coat from a hook on the door and some bandages from a drawer in the desk. To the side of the window was an enormous closet, large enough to hold a man. There was a bathroom to the side and from a little window in there Powerscourt had a view of the path leading up to the main gate. His plan now depended on somebody coming up to the front door and being able to open it. He put on his doctor’s coat and felt safer inside it. He put a couple of large pens in the top pocket. He put a stethoscope round his neck just in case. Everything in here depends on the colour of your clothes, he said to himself. Dress or be dressed in pale green and they’ll pour medicine down your throat two or three times a day. Pale blue and you’re a warder with vast powers over the patients. But a white coat? You’re virtually God.
He checked the time on the clock on the wall. The bastards had taken his watch and he didn’t think now was an ideal time to ask for it back. It had probably been sold already somewhere in the back streets of Beaune. Eight minutes to eight. He thought any more staff clocking on would come on the hour or the half-hour. Maybe a few minutes earlier to be on the safe side. Peering out of the bathroom window, Powerscourt saw that nothing moved for now. There was nobody in sight. He wondered if he should explore other parts of the hospital in search of windows with no bars or doors with no keys. He decided against because he might open a door on to a room full of warders and be sent straight back to the cells with extra dosage for having knocked out Jean. He checked that he could breathe if he was concealed inside the cupboard for a while.
Eight fifteen came. Eight thirty. Powerscourt was back on duty at the bathroom window, rubbing at the glass from time to time. He wondered about Lady Lucy and hoped she was bearing up. He hoped she had remembered to send a message to William Burke. If anybody could organize reinforcements it was Burke. Powerscourt thought his brother-in-law would have made a most efficient adjutant in the Army. He wondered about the theory that had brought them to France. It didn’t seem that important now, he told himself, until he remembered the forthcoming trial of Cosmo Colville on a capital charge.
At twenty to nine he heard footsteps. But they were on the inside, the footsteps, not outside, and there were voices too. Two people were heading for the front door. Powerscourt had a split second to make his decision. He waited until he saw the door opening. He patted the stethoscope round his neck and fastened his coat buttons all the way to the top and strode out into the corridor.
‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ he said cheerfully, ‘time to go home at last, I see. Even we doctors must rest.’ He was halfway out the door now, one of the men busy with keys in the locks.
‘Good evening, doctor,’ the men said in unison, peeling off to the side of the building to pick up their bicycles.
Powerscourt didn’t risk any more conversation. He was out. He was free. It had been brief, his stay in the Maison des Alienes, but it had been one of the more disagreeable experiences of his life. That and the monstrous pressoir where you felt your limbs could be crushed at any moment. A few stars were visible in the night sky. The two cyclists must have gone in the other direction, away from Beaune, south towards Chalon sur Saone. In the distance the low hills of Burgundy were dark against the night. Powerscourt felt glad to be breathing proper air again after the stale fug back in the hospital. Looking behind him he could just make out its great bulk, dark except for a couple of lighted windows on the ground floor. Ahead, over to his left, was Beaune and Lady Lucy and a welcome in a French hotel. He was just enjoying a mental glass of beer when the world behind him went mad. All the lights in the hospital had been turned on. Darkness was banished from every floor. A powerful bell was ringing continuously as if the Maison d’Alienes was an ocean liner in distress. ‘Man the lifeboats! We’ve struck an iceberg!’
Powerscourt wondered if they would send out a search party of warders. Either Jean had made his escape, or the two on the bicycles had returned to the asylum to reveal that they had met a strange man pretending to be a doctor at the front door. He could just see three figures emerging from the door and come trotting after him. Powerscourt wrapped his white coat round his waist and ran as fast as he could towards Beaune, checking behind him as he went. The gap appeared to be closing. He was in the street that led out of the town now. He plunged into the side streets, aiming for where he thought the centre of Beaune should be. He felt in his pocket for his money. It was still there. He saw a sign for the station and hurried towards it. Surely stations would have taxis in them, even this late. He put his white coat back on. Now he was in the station square, great puffs of smoke rising into the night sky from the Paris express. As he made his way towards it he crossed the path of a group of six gendarmes, commanded by a sergeant.
‘Forgive me, doctor,’ said the sergeant, ‘there is an escaped lunatic at large. He made his way out of the Maison de Fous back there. Forty years of age or thereabouts. Brown hair. Have you seen such a man, doctor?’
‘I do believe I might have seen him just now, sergeant. Running away from Beaune on the Chalon road. If you’re quick, you’ll catch him. Good luck!’
The sergeant and his men marched off at the double. Dr Powerscourt hurried off to the station and hailed the first cab he saw. ‘Hotel des Ducs de Bourgogne, if you please,’ he said, sinking into the red upholstery. As the cab rattled its way north into the town, Powerscourt saw yet more Beaune policemen marching towards the asylum. Even here you could still hear the bell.
He gave the cabbie a generous tip. ‘Would you like to earn some easy money, monsieur?’ he said, riffling through a bundle of French banknotes.
‘Of course,’ said the cabbie, ‘but not if I have to break the law and go to prison.’
‘You need have no fear on that score. All you have to do is to forget that you brought me here. If anybody should ask, say nothing. Deny it. Here.’
Powerscourt handed over the equivalent of a week’s earnings if not more.
‘Thank you, sir,’ said the cabbie. He held his finger to his lips. ‘Mum’s the word.’
19
The man at the front desk told Powerscourt that Lady Lucy was in room twenty, at the end of the corridor on the first floor. He was just about to ask his dishevelled visitor a question, but the man had gone, bounding up the stairs two at a time.
When he knocked on the door of the room Lady Lucy thought it must be one of the porters bringing another message. ‘Come in’ she said, rather sadly, standing at the window, looking out over the square. When she turned round she saw that she was looking at a scarecrow. The white coat had long since lost its freshness. There were great stains across the front. The pale green trousers beneath looked as though they might belong to an attendant in a Turkish bath. The hair was tousled and uneven with patches that were almost bare sitting next to the natural curls. The scar on the face, left by Jean Jacques’s scissors, was still there. But if it was a scarecrow it was her scarecrow. She had, after all, married the scarecrow. She had lived with the scarecrow and loved the scarecrow for longer than she cared to remember.