but this time thoughtfully. "I think . . . you are wise not to leave this chapter behind you, Miss Loftus."
"Why, M'sicur Bourienne?" She had come to the question at last.
He pointed to the stone-covered hillside. "Do you not wish to see Enguerrand's tower?"
"I want to know why, first, if you please." Once out, the why took precedence over everything else.
"Very well. If I have understood Paul correctly, you are concerned with the fate of a party of escaped British sailors who concealed themselves here, in one of the towers of this castle? Deserters—yes?"
"Yes." If that was what Paul had said, then yes. "Prisoners-of-war, though, not deserters."
"No." It was Aske who spoke. " 'Deserter' was the official name for all escaped PoWs, on both sides of the Channel.
Once they broke out they were regarded in law as criminals, the officers as well as the men. over here, if they were recaptured they went straight to the dungeons in the punishment fortresses."
"And in England they went to the hulks—the old wooden battleships rotting on the mud-flats, m'sieur. Which was worse, I have been told—is that not so?"
Aske shook his head slowly. "Not worse than the hell-hole at Bitche—'the house of tears'. And they reckoned Sarrelibre was worse than Bitche. Or so I have been told, m'sieur."
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The tall Frenchman looked down at the little Englishman for a moment, then turned back to Elizabeth. "Let us say . . . it was a cruel age, Miss Loftus. Any man who escaped in those days risked more than mere recapture. But then any man who wore his country's uniform . . . that was also a cruel fate.
And especially here in France, After twenty years of war, and the Law of Conscription, which was hated so much."
"Like the Press Gang?"
"That I cannot say. But here. . . by 1812 the countryside was full of refractaires—the evaders of conscription who were on the run ... as well as deserters from the army. And, for the most part, the peasants and the poor people pitied them, and helped them. Or at least did not inform on them—" he swung towards Paul "—and that, Paul, is how these men of yours survived here for so long without discovery: they passed themselves off as conscripts—as fishermen from the west coast trying to return to their homes . . . Would that be right?"
"Exactly right, Bertrand, by God!" Paul nodded first to the Frenchman, then to Elizabeth. "Tom Chard said that Chipperfield and the midshipman both spoke enough French to get by, but they passed off their accents as Breton—like pretending to be Scotsmen in Kent. By God! Bertrand—
you've found them! That's brilliant of you!"
" Moment, Paul." Bourienne cautioned Paul with a hand. "It may be that I have not got them. None of the peasants who were interrogated admitted that these were Englishmen—"
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"But the place and the time is right, Bertrand—"
"But not the numbers, my friend. You said four men, and these were not four men—they were three men and a girl."
"And a girl?" Elizabeth's heart sank.
"A young girl. The sister of one of them, who was travelling with her brother, Miss Loftus."
Elizabeth turned to Paul. "Paul—?"
"Bloody marvellous!" Paul beamed at her, and then at Bouriennt. "You're a magician, Bertrand. I never thought you'd find them, not in the time. But you have!"
"But. . . the girl, Paul?"
"Tom Chard mentioned a girl—obviously," said Aske.
"Everything comes back to Tom Chard."
"Not quite everything." Paul cut back to the Frenchman, dismissing Aske. "What happened, Bertrand?"
"Ah . . . now I am going to disappoint you! What happened is not at all clear... I have this friend in our society—a local history society, you understand, Miss Loftus—and he has a colleague who is an authority on the times hereabouts of the First Empire ... on the local administration under the Emperor Napoleon, and so on ... a man who knows his way round the records and documents of the period—"
"Bertrand—"
"All right. You are in a hurry, I know . . . The fact is, for security purposes the country was divided into small dummy3
districts, each with a police commandant, and the presence of this party was eventually reported to the officer at Chauny
—I say 'eventually', for it seems that they had lodged in one of the smaller towers here for ten days or more . . . the château as a whole had been derelict since the revolution, you understand . . . Yes, well... it was assumed that they were refractaires, and a party of police was sent to arrest them.
But when they searched the château they found that the birds had flown. Possibly they had been warned by the peasants ...
or perhaps they had a look-out. All that the gendarmes found was—a grave. A fresh grave."
Elizabeth looked to Paul. "Lieutenant Chipperfield, Paul?"
"Shh! Go on, Bertrand."
Bourienne frowned at Paul. "This was all routine so far, you must understand. Hunting deserters was one of their main tasks— French deserters . . . All through that previous winter, and into the spring, there had been a special drive to bring the conscripts to the colours as never before—every man or boy they could lay their hands on, the class of 1813 even. The whole of France was on the move, they said—the whole of Western Europe even. This was 1812, remember—"
"Russia," said Aske. "The great invasion! The dress rehearsal for 1941." He nodded to Elizabeth. "You remember what I said? This was the big year—1812!"
"The year of Salamanca," said Paul. "One of David Audley's maternal ancestors was killed at Salamanca, charging with Le Marchant's cavalry in Wellington's greatest victory, as he dummy3
never tires of telling us."
"Greatest victory—phooey!" Aske sniffed derisively.
"Napoleon withdrew forty of his best battalions from Spain for Russia. Spain was a side-show, compared with Russia—
like Greece and North Africa were side-shows in 1941
compared with Russia. Once they'd dealt with Russia—
Napoleon and Hitler both—the rest was chicken-feed . . .
they'd have taken England next after that. In fact. . . in fact, the only difference between the year 1812 and the year 1941
is that at the very end of 1941 the Americans came in on our side . . . Whereas, in 1812 the Americans declared war on us, old boy!"
"This is Professor Wilder talking, presumably?" Outside his 1914 -18 War Paul wasn't so sure of himself.
"Professor Wilder and the facts." Aske picked up Paul's uncertainty like a £5 note in the gutter. "Wilder says the trouble with us is that we've been brought up on Arthur Bryant and Nelson—we reckon we're winning the war from Trafalgar in 1805 onwards. But the fact is that by the summer of 1812 we were losing it. Bad harvests . . . riots in the cities—the Luddites breaking up the factories and burning the corn-ricks . . . the pound falling against the franc. . . and war with the United States . . . and then Napoleon leading the greatest army of the age against the Russians." He shook his head. "In 1812, when poor old Chipperfield was being planted here, we were losing, believe me, Mitchell."
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"Hmmm. . ." Paul cut his losses at a stroke. "So they found a grave, Bertrand. And did they dig it up?"
"They dug it up, yes." Bourienne didn't quite know what to make of the Mitchell-Aske byplay. "And that is when it started to cease to become routine, my friend."
"How so? He died of natural causes, surely? Blood-poisoning or gangrene, or whatever?"
Bourienne waved a hand. "What he died of, I do not know.