“Anyway-Bob took the King’s shilling and I did not. From Dunkirk, he and I rode together through the no-man’s-land-which, not to repeat myself, you’ll soon be seeing plenty of-by Ypres, Oudenaarde, Brussels, and as far as Waterloo, where we parted ways. I went down to Paris, he went back to Brussels, and probably spent a lot of his time, thereafter, scurrying to and fro carrying messages, as when he was a boy.”
During this recital, Jack had been unwinding his crutch: a curved stick with a padded crossbar at the top to go under his armpit, all lashed together with a mile of crude twine. When he’d undone the windings, he was left with two pieces of wood and some rags he’d used for padding. But protruding from the top of the long crutch-pole was the pommel of a Janissary-sword.
He had searched half of the Harz Mountains to find a stick whose curve matched that of the sword. Having found it, he’d split it in half, and hollowed out a space in the middle big enough to contain the scabbard. The pommel and guard still stuck out the top, but when he added the crutch’s cross-bar, then swaddled it in rags, and bound all in twine, he had a crutch that seemed innocuous enough-and if a border-guard threatened to unmake it, Jack could always cup a hand under his armpit and complain about the painful black swellings that had recently flared up there.
The crutch was a convenience in settled places where only Gentlemen had the right to bear arms-but between here and northern France, he hoped to see as little of that sort of country as possible. He belted on the sword and strapped the crutch-pole alongside Turk’s saddle, and then Jack the crippled vagrant was suddenly Jack the armed rider, galloping down the sea-coast on the back of a Turkish war-horse.
DOWN PAST THEHAGUE,around the Hook of Holland, Jack paid a visit on certain boat-owning fellows of his acquaintance, and learned, from them, that the French had banned the inexpensive cloth coming out of Calicoe in India. Naturally the Dutch were now smuggling it down the coast, and there was a steady traffic of the small cargo-vessels called flutes. Jack’s friends ferried him, Turk, and a ton of Calicoe across Zeeland, which was the name the Dutch gave to the huge sandy morass where such rivers as the Maas and the Schelde emptied into the North Sea. But an autumn storm was blowing up in the Channel, and they had to take shelter in a little privateers’ cove in Flanders. From there, Jack took advantage of a fortuitous low tide to make a night gallop down the coast to Dunkirk, and the hospitality of the dear old Bomb amp; Grapnel.
But from Mr. Foot, the proprietor of the Bomb, Jack got an earful about how, ever since King Looie had bought Dunkirk from King Chuck, things weren’t the same: the French had enlarged the harbor so that it could harbor the big warships of that arch-privateer Jean Bart, and these changes had driven away the small Channel pirates and smugglers who had once made Dunkirk such a prosperous and merry town.
Disgusted and dismayed, Jack left immediately, striking inland into Artois, where he could still go armed. It was hard up against the frontier of the Spanish Netherlands, and the soldiers who’d been sent up to prosecute King Looie’s wars there had not been slow to grasp that there was more to be made by robbing travelers on the London-Paris route-who were still so grateful to’ve survived the Channel crossing that they practically gave it away-than from dutiful soldiering.
Jack made himself look like one of these highwaymen-no great feat, since he had been one for a year or two-and that brought him swift and more or less safe passage down into Picardy: the home of a famous Regiment, which, since they were not there when Jack arrived, he reckoned that they must be up laying waste to the Spanish Netherlands. A few changes in attire (his old floppy musketeer-hat, e.g.) gave him the look of a deserter, or scout, from same.
In one of those Picard villages the church-bell was clanging without letup. Sensing some kind of disorder, Jack rode toward it, across fields crowded with peasants bringing in the harvest. They rotated their crops so that one-third of the fields had wheat, one-third oats, and the remaining third were fallow, and Jack tended to ride across the ones that were fallow. These wretches looked at him with fear that was abject even by the standard of French peasants. Most of them scanned the northern sky, perhaps looking for clouds of smoke or dust, and some dropped to the ground and put their ears against it, listening for hoofbeats, and Jack concluded that it wasn’t him personally they feared, so much as what might be behind him.
He assessed this village as one where he could get away with being armed, and rode into it, because he needed to buy oats for Turk. The only person he saw was a barefoot boy in coarse dirty linen, visible from the waist down through a low doorway in the base of the bell-tower, his raggedy ass thrusting out rudely with each jerk on the bell-rope.
But then Jack encountered a rider in good but plain clothing who had apparently come up from the direction of Paris. They drew up, a safe distance apart, in the town’s deserted market-square, circled round each other once or twice, and then began shouting at each other over the din of the bell, and settled on a mixture of English and French.
Jack: “Why are they ringing the bell?”
“These Catholics think it wards off thunderstorms,” said the Frenchman. “Why are they so-?” he then asked and, not trusting his English or Jack’s French, pantomimed a furtive cringing peasant.
“They’re afraid that I’m a forerunner of the Picardy Regiment, coming home from the wars,” Jack guessed. He intended this as a wry jest about the tendency of regiments to “live off the land,” as the euphemism went. But it was quite significant to this Huguenot.
“Is it true? Is the regiment coming?”
“How much would it be worth to you?” Jack asked.
Everything about this Huguenot reminded him of the Independent traders of England, who’d ride out to remote districts in harvest-time to buy up goods at better than market price. And both Jack and this trader-who introduced himself as Monsieur Arlanc-understood that the price would drop still further if the sellers believed, rightly or wrongly, that the Picardy Regiment was coming to eat it out from under them.
So there was, inadvertently, a sort of business proposition on the table. Vagabond and Huguenot rode around each other a few more times. All around them, the peasants labored at the harvest. But they were keeping an eye on the two strangers, and soon a village elder came hustling in from the fields on a donkey.
But in the end, Monsieur Arlanc could not bring himself to do it. “We are already hated enough,” he said, apparently meaning the Huguenots, “without spreading false panics. These peasants have enough to be afraid of already-that is why my sons and I ride out to such dangerous marches.”
“Fine. But incidentally, I don’t intend to rob you,” Jack said irritably, “you needn’t make up phant’sies about your supposed pack of heavily armed sons, just over the rise.”
“Tales don’t offer sufficient protection in these times, I’m afraid,” said Monsieur Arlanc, tucking his cloak back to divulge no fewer than four separate firearms: two conventional pistols, and two more cleverly worked into the handle of a tomahawk and the barrel of a walking-stick respectively.
“Well played, Monsieur-Protestant practicality and French savoir-faire united.”
“I say, are you sure you’ll be all right riding to the Inn at Amiens armed with nothing but a sword? The highways-”
“I do not stay at Inns of the French sort, nor do I generally ride on highways,” Jack said. “But if that is your habit, and if you are going that way…”
So they rode to Amiens together, after purchasing oats from the head man of the village. Jack bought enough to fill Turk’s belly, and Monsieur Arlanc bought the rest of the year’s harvest (he would send wagons later to take delivery). Jack told no lies-just lounged on the rim of the town well, looking like a Volunteer, as the local deserters and highwaymen were called. After that it was a good stiff ride to Amiens, where there was a large establishment throttling a crossroads: livery stables nearly buried in hay, and paddocks crowded with oxen; queues of empty wagons lining the road (some soon to be hired by M. Arlanc); several smithys, some geared for shoeing horses, others for putting rims on wagon-wheels. As well, harness-shops, and various carpenters specializing in wheels, ox-yokes, cart-frames, and barrel-making. Trains of harvest-laden carts filling the roadway, waiting to be inspected, and to pay tolls. Somewhere, a lodging for traders and travelers that accounted for its being called an Inn. From a distance, it was a great dark smoking knot, clearly recognizable as not Jack’s sort of place-he unbelted his sword, slid it back into its concealment in the crutch-pole, and began winding it up again.