"What d'you mean 'one of our clues', Paul?" She stared at the bits of old railway line.
"Not the hoops. The great crack—that's what fixed our chaps on Coucy here: ' A wondrous great tower, the like of which I never saw for its breadth and height, but very ancient; which yet stood, though split sadly by a fierce tremor of the earth in the days of the Great King, so it is said.' Tom Chard wasn't a great one for French names, but he was interested in everything he saw on his travels, and he had a good memory, thank God! So he left us enough clues—an earthquake in the dummy3
reign of Louis XIV, because no one ever called Louis XV or Louis XVI 'great' . . . and a 'wondrous' tower split by an earthquake can only be Enguerrand's— wondrous is exactly what it was, which was why Ludendorff blew it up, the bastard."
Aske caught Elizabeth's eye a little despairingly, as if to share his conviction that they were even further from any sort of useful answer.
"And . . . that's why we're here?" he prodded Paul cautiously.
"Partly, yes . . ." Paul scanned the landscape ahead, as though he was looking for something in it. "We're here to re-write a chapter in Elizabeth's father's book, as a result of Miss Irene Cookridge's recent revelations, actually . . . Ah! There he is!"
He pointed up the pathway.
Elizabeth frowned along the line of his finger. "Who?
Where?"
Why?
"On the seat there. My old friend Bernard Bourienne. He made it!" Paul sounded childishly delighted. "Come on—"
"Who's . . . Bernard Bourienne?" panted Elizabeth.
"He's a veterinary surgeon from Château-Thierry—"
"A what?" exclaimed Aske.
"He's also an enthusiastic amateur historian. In fact, there aren't many professionals who know more than he does about American operations in France in 1918—all the best American bits in my Hindenburg Line book are thanks to dummy3
him . . . and he's pretty good on the Chemin des Dames too."
"Dear God!" whispered Aske. "Into the trenches again—with a vet!"
Mercifully, Paul didn't hear him, he was already striding towards the man on the seat. "I didn't think he'd make it—
Bernard! Well met, mon vieux!"
"Paul!" Bernard Bourienne unwound himself—all six-foot . . .
six-foot-two—six-foot-four—and, with the shock of dark hair on the top of it, matching the bushy eye-brows, finally more like six-foot-six. "Well met, also, old friend!"
They embraced, in the continental manner which left Elizabeth slightly embarrassed. And then the Frenchman's dark eyes zeroed in on her, stripping her down and reassembling her in a fraction of a second, and yet somehow achieving this without the offence she would have felt in England.
"Bertrand— M'sieur Bourienne—allow me to introduce Mamselle Elizabeth Loftus, daughter of the late Commander Hugh Loftus, VC—"
The shock of hair came down to Elizabeth's level.
"—and my. . . my colleague and fellow historian, Humphrey Aske, of London University."
"M'sieur." Bertrand Bourienne gave Humphrey Aske a very brief glance, and then a second and more searching one, as though the first had quivered some sensitive antenna hidden in the tangle of hair.
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"Now, Bertrand—" Paul pre-empted any return civilities "—I hope you've got something good for me, because we're pushed for time, as I told you on the phone last night." He looked around. "In fact, it must be almost closing time here, to start with . . . and I'd like my friends to see what's left of Enguerrand's tower before we get chivvied out."
"Chivvied out?" Bourienne waved the threat away. "My dear Paul, they do not chivvy me." He drew himself up to his full height, adding the elongated length of one arm to it in a signal directed towards the gate-house. " So!"
Elizabeth followed the signal, but could see no sign of movement. Then she looked at the Frenchman and he smiled at her, lifting a finger to silence her as he did so. "Listen, Miss Loftus."
For a moment there was total silence, no voices, no sounds, not even any bird-song, which she might have expected in England. Then, out of nowhere—out of the air around her—
there was music . . . not music she could place in any origin of time instantly—not the Musak of the twentieth century . . .
but the sweeter sounds of a distant past, made by unfamiliar instruments and clear in the stillness of the evening.
"Oh—clever stuff, Bertrand," murmured Paul irreverently.
"One day you'll have to do a Son et Lumière here—ending with a bloody great 28-ton bang, maybe?"
"Fourteenth century," said Aske. "Lute and hautboy—
Enguerrand's background music, perhaps?"
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Influence, thought Elizabeth, putting it all together just as suddenly as the haunting music had filled the open space between the trees and the towers all around her. Paul had said contacts, but that had been what he meant—and that had been Father's complaint in the latter days: I haven't any influence any more— I can't make people do things for me— I don't know the right people . . . This was what Paul had, which he had boasted of—
"Enguerrand's music, c'est vrai," Bourienne acknowledged Aske's guess. "Although I should have had them play La Marseillaise for you this time, Paul. . . if not the rataplan of the drummers of the Guard." They were moving now, as though by concensus, still lapped by Enguerrand's music, towards an inner gateway, much more ruined and overgrown, but also greater.
Paul turned towards his friend. "So you have got something?"
"That ... I don't know . . ." Bertrand Bourienne mused on the question. "I know that I have worked very hard for you, these last hours . . . and in a period unfamiliar to me—and also with material and people unfamiliar to me—yes!"
"Ha . . . hmmm!" Paul grunted unintelligibly, and Elizabeth sensed that he was trying to control his impatience.
"We're very grateful to you for taking such trouble to help us, M'sieur Bourienne," she said carefully. "And at such short notice."
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"No trouble, Miss Loftus. Assisting fellow-labourers in the vineyard is always a pleasure. And I understand the importance of checking new material when it arrives so inconveniently, with a book almost finished . . ." Bourienne nodded sympathetically ". . . though that is the mark of a true scholar, but naturally—and nothing less than what I would expect of my friend, Dr Mitchell . . . No, my only reservation—
my only regret, even—is that this concerns an era of history with which I am not conversant in sufficient depth to be of real help, so that . . . with so little time at my disposal ... I have been dependent on the charity of others. And to no great effect I fear."
"You mean that Dr Mitchell has sent you on a wild goose chase?" said Aske.
"No . . . that I do not mean." Bourienne pursed his lips, and looked sidelong at Paul. "I know him of old, and he has the historian's gift—the instinct for the one fact out of the many ... the one fact which cannot safely be left behind—the nose for the deep dug-out in the captured trench which is not empty, but full of Germans waiting to issue forth to take you in the rear as you move on."
They were passing through the gateway now, with a labyrinth of ruined guardhouses, and steps descending into darkness, on one side, and a jumble of stones on a hillside on the other.
"And this is one of those dug-outs—those facts, I think," said Bourienne. "Even though I do not know this period, my nose tells me so." He looked at Elizabeth suddenly, nodding again, dummy3