"No one, m'sieur" the fellow said, making a sketchy salute to him. "It is very quiet, nothing moving this time of night. Even the Jolly Hound tavern had only a few patrons tonight. God help them if they ate there, though, hawn hawn!" he added with a laugh.
"What sort of patrons? Did you enquire?" Fourchette pressed.
"Only two sailors and their whores, the innkeeper reported to me," the local gendarme easily related, smiling. "Most likely, they were smugglers, looking for a ship, m'sieur. The Jolly Hound is one of the regular rendezvous points for smuggling dealings… We keep a wary eye on it, I assure you, m'sieur. The innkeeper said that the older one, a gars with an eye-patch, told the others that some Anglais smuggler didn't come, as agreed, so they Would go into Calais and try someone else. They had a two-wheeled horse cart… They should have passed here, m'sieur, so surely you have-"
"Four people… two couples in a cart?" Fourchette said with a frown, shifting his sore bottom on his damp saddle. "Two sailors and two women? One with an eye-patch, you say?"
"Oui, m'sieur," the gendarme told him. "One woman with coppery-red hair, one fellow with black hair, much younger, with a scar down his cheek… "
"We passed them on the road south of here this afternoon," the frustrated police agent muttered, half to himself. "Drunk as aristos and… a scar?" Mademoiselle de Guilleri said that Lewrie had a scar, a faint one, but… "You're sure the innkeeper heard them say they would go to Calais?"
"Certainement, m'sieur" the gendarme said, mystified.
"Yet they didn't!" Fourchette spat, thinking hard.
Two couples, four Anglais, had dined together at Pontoise, then coached together, disappearing from the face of the earth, it seemed. Two couples had supped at Mйru: Major Fleury, his wife and widowed daughter-in-law and… a bandaged son! The watchers on the Somme bridge had noted four well-dressed people, though oddly travelling in a hay waggon, going to Arras and… morbleu!
"Disguises!" Fourchette yelped, realising how gulled he'd been. "A whole set of disguises! The two sailors and their women, they are the ones we seek! If they didn't come through this crossroads, then they must be either east or west of us this very instant!"
"The criminals we seek are disguised, m'sieur?" the gendarme gawped. "If they change again, how can we ever-"
"Trooper!" Fourchette snapped at the nearest cavalryman. "Ride to Major Clary and his party and bring them here at once!" His burst of sudden energy made his horse fractious, beginning to circle. "You! Ride the other direction where we left mademoiselle and bring her here! And you…," he ordered in a rush, "fetch that ugly thing Choundas and his party. We have need of all our men! They're looking for a smuggler to take them cross the Narrow Sea, but not in Calais itself. Someplace along the coast… Gendarme, you know this coast well? What of side roads, farm lanes, that lead round Calais?"
"There are some, m'sieur" the local gendarme replied, his own horse beginning to rear and arch. "We… my unit and I… know almost all of them. I should ride to fetch my officer and more men, to be your guides?" he asked, eager to please this fellow from the splendours of Paris, and surely a man of great importance.
"Go, go, go, vite, vite! I will wait for you here! Make haste, for the love of God, though!" Fourchette demanded, in a lather. Poor as this lead was, and as slim a hope, there was still a chance that the enigmatic foursome would be in his hands before daylight!
They paused briefly at the tumbledown fisherman's hut to take a breath, kneeling by its back side. It was a rough log structure, re-enforced with scrap lumber and driftwood from the beaches. It looked, and smelled, as if it had been a decade since anyone had even attempted to make use of it, or maintain it. Sir Pulteney dug into his sea-bag and pulled out a battered old brass hooded lanthorn and a flintlock tinder-box. "Remain here and rest, ladies, whilst Captain Lewrie and I head down to the cliffs for a little look-see," Sir Pulteney said in a harsh whisper, though cackling to himself in his old manner.
They scampered bent over at the waist, as if dashing through a volley of fire 'til they reached the edge of the cliffs, to the left of a deep, axed-out notch that led down to the Channel, a deep, hidden inlet, and a rock-guarded sand beach. Lewrie looked back and realised that the abandoned fisherman's hut was below the long slope from their highway above, and was invisible to any but the most intent searchers following the Boulogne road.
Whoever fished from here, he most-like broke his damnfool neck! Lewrie thought, espying a zig-zag path down from the notch, through a maze of boulders, to the beach. Had the last tenant kept a cockleshell boat drawn up above high tide, down there, he wondered? Or was he a simple caster of nets?
"You've keen eyes, Captain Lewrie?" Sir Pulteney asked. "Fear mine own are of an age, but… might there be a schooner out yonder? I think there's a vessel of some kind, but it's hard for me to make out. If you'd be so kind… "
Lewrie lifted his eyes to the vague horizon. The moon was rising at last, that orb waxed half full, spreading faint blue light on the Channel waters, illuminating the white chalk cliffs of Dover, far to the north, twelve or so odd miles away! Only! So close, yet…
Lewrie cupped his hands round his eyes and strained to scan the sea quartering near, then closer. "Wait!" he hissed. "Aye, there is something out yonder! I think… "
There was an eerie, spectral blotch of pale grey, about three or four miles offshore, a ship of some kind. Two trapezoids, like twin fore-and-aft gaff-hung sails? There was a smaller, thinner shape that might be a single jib, to the right of the trapezoid shapes, so she was making a long, slow board East'rd, up-Channel.
"Aye, there's something much like a schooner," he said at last. "But it could be a smuggler's boat, puttin' in to Calais, a Frenchie, or even one of their navy's chasse-marйes, lookin' for smugglers. No," he said on second thought.
Chasse-marйes had a short mizen, right aft, he recalled. Was it an innocent fishing boat making a long night trawl, to be first to the market come daybreak?
"We must have faith, Captain Lewrie," Sir Pulteney said with rising enthusiasm as he fluffed the lint in the tinder-box, cocked the firelock, and pulled the trigger. On his third try, sparks took light in the lint, which he carefully coaxed with his breath into a fire that caught in the oily rag, which began to glow with dark amber, which yet another breath turned to a flame! He opened the lanthorn and applied the rag to an oily wick… which, at last, flared up!
"Zounds!" Sir Pulteney crowed, standing erect, holding up his lanthorn and waving it to and fro for a bit, then he turned it round so the closed back side faced the sea. Rapidly rotating it back and forth, he sent some signal known only to him and one of his old conspirators, then lifted it high once more, the glass-paned side facing outwards.