stables where the sun shines all the afternoon. And that is where he lies now, Captain—under the roses in the sunshine, whoever he is—whoever he was—under my beautiful roses.
Which is a good place for a brave man, do you not think—
even an enemy?"
Roche's backbone was made of ice. The Château Peyrony, with its garden planted so, was no place for double agents.
"You are shocked?" Madame Peyrony shook her head slowly.
"I should not have told you, do you see?"
He licked his lips. "Only—" the word came out as a croak "—
only because I remind you of him, Madame. I wouldn't like you to think that I'm brave enough to qualify for your rose garden—I'm much too frightened for that honour."
For an instant he was afraid that his nervousness had made him too flippant, but then she smiled—not a ghost-smile, but a genuine old-witch-smile of pleasure edged with a touch of malice.
"He was frightened also, Captain—courage without fear is a counterfeit louis d'or made of lead, with heads on both sides.
That is how you are both alike: you are both hunters who are also hunted, I think. That is what I see in you."
God! thought Roche—after what Jilly had said that was more than disquieting, it was positively macabre! If she could see his fear in his face—if both of them could see it, or smell it, or somehow sense it with some sixth sense—then what had Genghis Khan and Clinton seen?
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The malice became triumphant, and then abruptly vanished, leaving only a pure smile. "But do not despair, Captain—you are the true hunter, the honourable hunter, not like my late husband and his friends with their shotguns in the forest—
you are the original hunter."
The original hunter? For once her strange but impeccable English must have deserted her, decided Roche.
She observed his confusion. "You are going to the Tower tonight, to the orgy?"
The original hunter's confusion only became greater. "To stay with David Audley?" The original hunter managed to nod to that.
"Good. So there you will meet another Jew—Professor Stein of Cambridge University—"
The nuance of contempt in her voice snapped the hunter's confusion. "Colonel Stein, you mean, Madame?"
Colonel Stein?"
"Late of the Israeli Air Force." Roche heard his own voice sharpen with outrage. "And late of the Royal Air Force, DFC—
Distinguished Flying Cross, Madame. Professor Colonel Stein
—yes?" He wasn't going to put up with that any longer, and she wouldn't help him if she despised him.
Her lips compressed into a thin line, puckering the wrinkled skin round her mouth with lines of displeasure. "He is a friend of yours?"
He gave her the wry-boyish-English-gentleman's smile, as dummy5
near as he could resurrect it, instinct encouraging him to stake all he had left on it. "I shalln't know that until I've met him. Maybe he is—maybe he isn't." He shrugged. "Does he know about original hunters, this . . . Colonel Professor Stein?"
The frown disappeared, and the displeasure too. She gazed at him sardonically. "As a matter of fact, he does. He is an authority on them."
The penny dropped inside Roche's memory. Stein was an expert on paleolithic art and this region was famous for its prehistoric remains. "Ah— the cave painters."
She shook her head. "The cave painters were not hunters, they were priests—their pictures were hunting-magic, to help the hunters."
"Indeed?" Roche was mightily relieved to be out of recent history and safely in prehistory.
"So I am told." The old-witch malice flashed. "Obviously you are not an expert in such matters, but only in bastides!”
"Among other things." He bowed. "But you see me as an ancient hunter, nevertheless?"
"Ancient—of course! How foolish of me, Captain!"
"Original will do. It's the 'true and honourable' I don't quite understand, Madame."
"It is simple. The hunters of today in these parts kill small game with big guns—my late husband's gun room is still full of them. But ten thousand, twenty thousand years ago in dummy5
these same parts . . . along this ridge and in the valleys below . . . they hunted big game with spears tipped with flint
— and the lions and tigers hunted them at the same time."
Yes, thought Roche grimly, and being human, or nearly, they probably hunted each other too! Though, being poor savages, they only killed each other for the pot, not to keep the red flag flying or the world safe for democracy . . .
"I see." But she was still playing with him, and she had been doing that for long enough. "So I am the hunter and the hunted. And you have concluded that simply by looking at me?"
"And listening to you, Captain. It seems to me that so far we have both been agreeably open with each other, up to a point.
From which we may further conclude that we each want something from the other, would you not say?"
The old—witch! But what could she possibly want?
"Fair enough, Madame." And what had he to offer? "I won't. . . how shall we say? . . . trifle with Lady Alexandra's affections?"
" 'Trifle'?" She savoured the word. "You think you could?"
"I don't see why not. They'd be worth trifling with."
"You would do better with Gillian."
"She wouldn't have me."
She nodded. "Yes—she's a clever child. But you are not here for that."
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"How do you know that?"
"Because I have been expecting you. Or someone like you."
What? Someone . . . like me?"
"Of course. This is my territory, Captain—my ridge, my valleys, my villages. Since a child—my territory . . . child, young girl, young woman, wife, mother, old woman—old witch, as Alexandra would say. So the spells here are my spells, not yours—not David Audley's, not the Jewess's, not any stranger's, but mine. You are a hunter, Captain, but now you are hunting in my territory. You are not the first of your kind, remember?" Roche remembered the rose garden, and the young German. "But I do not know everything any more—
there was a time when I did, but times change—"
And on whose side was Madame Peyrony, for God's sake?
"—yet I still feel the pulse—I know when there is something there in the dark which should not be there, that something is loose out there." She pointed towards the window.
The light in the room turned the late evening outside into inky blackness. But that 'something loose' was nothing so innocent as any sabre-toothed tiger or cave bear out of the original hunter's deepest memory: it was the modern horror of man stalking man, the unknown enemy which Wimpy would have identified as negotium perambulans in tenebris—
something wicked, to make the thumbs prick . . . something hunting out of human conviction, not out of honest hunger . . .
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Christ! If he continued along this road he would reduce himself to a quivering jelly of fear, out of pure imagination!
There were only men and women out there, like himself; and Madame Peyrony was only a frightened old woman, by herself in a frightening old house in the dark; and she was only on her side, and he was only on his side; and all each of them wanted to do was to survive, and not go into the dark.
He wanted to ask her how she knew all this, but there wasn't time, and probably she wouldn't tell him, and it didn't matter because he believed her anyway, because what she had said fitted in with what he already knew.