but she was at Gibraltar for re-fitting and stores before that. . . and then she called at Lisbon on the way home . . . ?"
"Come on," Elizabeth!" Paul encouraged her.
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"Well ... I suppose the French could have received news of her sailing from Lisbon, if they had spies there ... if she didn't sail immediately—but meeting the Fortuné. . . that was still accidental, Paul."
"You're just guessing—clutching at straws," murmured Aske.
"Of course I'm bloody guessing!" snapped Paul. "But our people say the time factor just about fits—allowing for the length of time it took to transfer information to Paris from Spain."
"But that would take weeks—" Aske stopped suddenly, and his expression changed. "Ah!"
Elizabeth stared at Aske.
"That's what he means, Miss Loftus," Aske nodded. "The Fortuné doesn't come into the reckoning at all. But once the Vengeful survivors came ashore the news would have gone to Paris in a matter of hours, by semaphore. They always celebrated whenever one of our ships came to grief—the Moniteur would publish it, we can check that even ... But . . .
they didn't do anything about it. They just started the prisoners off towards Verdun, like always . . . and that also took weeks—don't you see?"
Belatedly, Elizabeth saw—saw the two additions of time, and what they might mean: on the one hand the days the Vengeful had been in Gibraltar, or Lisbon, and at sea, plus the time from the sea-fight with the Fortuné, through the shipwreck and the survivors' landfall, and the long trek dummy3
thereafter across France towards the prison depot. . . and on the other, the odyssey of the information about the Vengeful from Lisbon to Paris, first from behind the British lines, from some French spy, and even through French-occupied Spain . . . which, with guerrilla bands watching every road, would have been hardly less slow and dangerous. And together those two additions of time and distance turned into snails creeping across the map, but converging on each other just short of Verdun and safety, when Colonel Suchet finally caught up with Lieutenant Chipperfield.
"So Suchet's our man now—'Colonel Soo-shay' who asked the silly questions— goodbye Tom Chard, hullo Mon Colonel,"
said Aske to Paul. "Because whatever it was the old Vengeful had on board, Mon Colonel wanted it, that's for certain—"
Colonel Jean-Baptiste Suchet—
The night-bells of Laon had stopped long since, but sleep still eluded Elizabeth as the roll-call of the living and the dead—
the newly dead and the long dead—continued to echo inside her brain—
Colonel Jean-Baptiste Suchet and Lieutenant Horace Chipperfield . . . and Danny Kahn and Julian Oakenshaw—
and Harry Lippman and Ray Tuck . . . and Harry Lippman and Father . . . and Father and Lieutenant Chipperfield—and Tom Chard and Abraham Timms and the little midshipman . . . and Colonel Suchet and Bertrand Bourienne . . . and Paul—and Paul ...
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And Humphrey Aske, and Chief Inspector Del Andrew—and Danny Kahn . . . and David Audley, and Faith Audley, and Cathy Audley—and David Audley and Josef Ivanovitch Novikov, and Paul—Dr Paul Mitchell of the King's College, Oxford— Paul. . .
And all the dead Tommies, lying so neatly, row on row, on their hillside in Champagne, below the road on which the king's sisters had chattered their way so long ago . . . and yet not so long ago as Enguerrand had built his tower . . .
Friends and enemies, heroes and villains . . . heroes and villains at the same time, according to whose side they were on—Suchet and Novikov and Audley and Paul . . . and whose side had Tom Chard been on, who had somehow beaten all the impossible odds to break free, and to live to tell the tale?
Whose side? And why?
The questions crowded behind the ghosts closing round her bed in the silence—whatever it was the old Vengeful had on board—what had Father been doing—what had he done—
Then, dissolving the ghosts and the questions both, and startling Elizabeth out of her mind as they vanished, there wasn't quite silence any more: there was the sound of a discreet tap-tap on her door— discreet, but insistent.
X
"ELIZABETH—"
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But whatever Dr Paul Mitchell, of the King's College, Oxford, whispered after that was lost to her as she scuttled back into bed, conscious more of Madame Hortense's taste in night-attire than of Dr Mitchell's post-midnight opening gambit.
The door closed out the light from the passage, and darkness sprang back into the bedroom.
"Christ, Elizabeth—I can't see a bloody thing!" Dr Mitchell blundered unromantically against the table by the door. "Put the light on, for heaven's sake!"
Elizabeth drew the sheet up to her neck. "What d'you want, Paul?" The silly question asked itself before she could stifle it.
"For God's sake—I want to talk to you!" hissed Paul. "What did you think I wanted?"
Dust and ashes filled Elizabeth, turning to shame and then anger in quick succession. She let go of the sheet—what did it matter what he saw or didn't see?—and leaned across to switch on the bedside lamp.
"What d'you want?" She glared at him in the knowledge that it hadn't been a silly question at all. "I was trying to get some sleep."
"I'm sorry." He blinked at her in the light.
"So am I." Disgust with herself hardened her voice. "Well, what is it?"
His face set to match her tone. "First... as of now, when someone knocks on your door in the night, you don't just dummy3
open up, like Juliet for Romeo. You ask who the hell it is—
okay?"
"Juliet for Romeo" was too close for comfort—too humiliatingly and pathetically close, thought Elizabeth miserably.
"Second ... I am sorry to disturb you, Elizabeth. But I have some news for you."
"News?" It was on the tip of her tongue to reject the offer until morning, but that would be merely petty, and she was awake now anyway. And there was also something in that voice which didn't match the set expression. "What news?"
"I've been on the phone to England. I've spoken to David Audley . . . and to Del Andrew, Elizabeth."
It was sympathy—the news must be bad news. But what bad news could either Dr Audley or Chief Inspector Andrew have for her, who had no next-of-kin, no hostages to fortune?
"Yes?" She couldn't help him, he had to bite on his own bullet.
He stared at her. "They think they know where—how—how your father got all that money."
She had been wrong about not having hostages to fortune: she had a hundred thousand of them, and they were going to take them all away from her. She had been briefly rich, but now she was poor again.
"In, fact, they're pretty damn certain. That Del Andrew—he's a fast worker. . ." He continued to stare at her, rolling the dummy3
bullet around, unwilling to clench his teeth on it.
So it was worse than that: they were going to send her to prison . . . or was it Father, who was beyond their reach, who had committed some disgraceful act—even some treasonable act—?
No—not some treasonable act . . . not Father— never Father!
But . . . disgraceful? Dishonest?
"It wasn't his money?" Was that what the Vengeful had been carrying? The thought of some great treasure had been in the back of her mind all along, even though she had scorned the possibility of it—even though she knew that the Vengeful was a long-lost wreck, and that the survivors could hardly have got away with anything of value—