It was hardly surprising, therefore, that Eloise was up, washed, dressed and had descended to the inn parlour for breakfast before I was even out of bed. As it was, I cut myself shaving, scrambled into the first clothes that came to hand (blue hose, green jerkin, a dirty shirt and my old patched boots), failed to comb my hair or brush my teeth and, judging by Eloise’s glare of disapproval, arrived at table looking the wreck I felt. But it was with relief that I saw Raoul d’Harcourt was not yet present. Perhaps he, too, had suffered a disturbed night.
As I sipped my beaker of small beer and swallowed a basinful of gruel — at least, I think that’s what it was meant to be — I remarked smugly on his absence. ‘He heard me say sun-up,’ I said.
The innkeeper entering the parlour at that moment, Eloise turned and addressed him in rapid French. There was a good deal of Gallic shrugging of shoulders and spreading of hands — the usual waste of time — before mine host trundled off to look into the matter. He returned, after a wait of some minutes, to say that the gentleman had gone. He was not in his bedchamber or anywhere else in the inn. Even I could understand that much.
There was yet another rapid exchange between Eloise and the landlord — it sounded like an explosion of hailstones on a tiled roof — before she told me, looking nonplussed, ‘It seems that although Monsieur d’Harcourt is nowhere to be found, his baggage is still in his room.’
‘Gone for a walk?’ I suggested. The French were so excitable!
Eloise regarded me scornfully. ‘Hardly! With his boots and his cloak still in his room? It’s raining like the Great Flood out there, or are you still so drugged with sleep you haven’t noticed?’
As a matter of fact, I hadn’t, but now she mentioned it, I was suddenly aware of the sound of heavy rain spattering on the roof and the street cobbles.
‘Maybe he likes walking in the rain,’ I argued. ‘Maybe he has a spare pair of boots and another cloak. He looks rich enough to have two of everything. What about his horse?’ I added with a flash of inspiration. ‘Is it still in the stables?’
Investigation proved that it was.
‘There you are, then! He’s gone for a stroll. Some people enjoy walking in the wet. But I think it’s the end of his riding with us. John won’t wait on his fits and starts. He wants us on the road now, if not sooner. He’s determined we’ll be in Paris by Thursday.’
And so it proved. John Bradshaw was indifferent as to what had become of the Frenchman. Perhaps relieved, really, that it would be just the four of us without any need for play-acting.
‘It’s his own fault if he’s not ready to go with us,’ he said flatly. ‘I’ll tell Philip to bring round the horses.’ He noticed Eloise’s troubled expression and frowned. ‘Don’t worry about him, mistress,’ he said curtly. ‘I doubt he’s come to any harm. And now we’re nearly at our journey’s end, we’ve worries enough of our own.’
Sixteen
Thanks to one of the horses throwing a shoe (or whatever it is that horses do with shoes) and also to John Bradshaw being laid up for the best part of a day with stomach cramps — owing, he reckoned, to a bad piece of fish he had eaten — it was late on Friday afternoon before our somewhat bedraggled party of four entered Paris by the Porte Saint-Denis.
November had come in with its usual melancholy weather, and a thin rain had settled, mist-like, over our cloaks and assorted headgear, lowering our spirits even further. Conversation had been minimal for the past two days, decreasing until it was little more than absolute necessity dictated. John, naturally enough, was still suffering from the after-effects of his colic, but he had been sour before that. Something had irritated him and seriously ruffled his temper, but he did not confide in me and I could only guess at the cause. We were at last nearing our destination, and there were so many things that might go wrong. He seemed intent on shouldering the entire responsibility for the success or failure of the mission, in spite of my pointing out to him that he could hardly be blamed, at least in my particular case, for something he knew nothing about.
‘Timothy won’t see it like that,’ he grunted.
‘Don’t pretend you’re afraid of Timothy Plummer!’ I scoffed, but he merely shrugged and terminated the exchange by turning to upbraid Philip for some imagined misdemeanour.
I hadn’t failed to notice his growing exasperation with Philip, demonstrated almost hourly by an angry shout or even, at times, a blow, all of which Philip took with a kind of surly acceptance far more irritating than an angry response would have been. I think there were moments when John would have welcomed a bout of fisticuffs just to relieve the tension between them. I know that I often longed to take my old friend by the scruff of the neck and shake some life into him. My earlier sympathy, indeed my own grief for Jeanne, had been eroded by his behaviour.
As for Eloise, her continuing concern over the missing Raoul d’Harcourt was beginning to stretch my tolerance in another direction. For the first day after our leaving the inn, she had talked of nothing else, wondering, speculating as to his present whereabouts and whether or not some harm had befallen him. A particularly sharp exchange of views the following bedtime had resulted in my dragging pillows and one of the covers off the bed and spending the night on the floor. Since then, we had adhered rigidly to the most commonplace remarks and, on occasion, had even resorted to addressing one another through the medium of a third party. This childish behaviour had naturally enough added to John Bradshaw’s worries and contributed to his increasing bad temper.
By the time the walls of Paris came in view through the murky November twilight, we were all exhibiting the strains and tensions of an ill-assorted party thrown together for days on end and unable to escape one another.
Paris, like London, could be heard and smelled from several miles away, the noise and stench increasing the nearer one got. By the time we passed through the Porte Saint-Denis and proceeded down the Rue Saint-Denis, my senses were reeling, and it was all I could do to remain upright in the saddle.
Eloise, on the other hand, seemed suddenly to revive like someone given a refreshing draught of wine. Her hitherto drooping form straightened up, and her head began to turn this way and that as she looked eagerly about her. This part of the city, she informed me, was known as La Ville. The Town. We were riding south, she went on, towards the Île de la Cité and beyond that, on the far bank of the Seine, was the suburb of the Université, so called for the simple and obvious reason that it was where the various colleges were situated, amidst the surrounding sprawl of houses, fields and churches. As far as she was concerned, she had come home.
I, in contrast, was feeling more and more like a stranger in a strange land — which, of course, I was. But up until then, in the towns and countryside we had passed through, I had not felt too alienated. There had been many similarities to England. Paris, however, was altogether different. The Rue Saint-Denis was packed with people and traffic — ten or eleven carts, I’d swear, to every furlong of road — and everyone jabbering away, nineteen to the dozen, in an incomprehensible language. And not only talking, but also gesticulating wildly. (Why, oh, why do our French neighbours find it so necessary to discourse with their arms as well as their tongues?) And the smell was almost overwhelming.