Ramage's Devil Page 6

  Gilbert tapped the paper which had the anchor symbol and the heading “Ministry of the Marine and Colonies” and, like the others, was a printed form with the blanks filled in. “You are of military age, so you will have to show this everywhere.”

  “And you? Have you the correct documents?” Ramage asked. “You aren’t taking any extra risks by coming with us?”

  Gilbert shook his head. “No, because I have all the necessary papers to go shopping in Brest. I am well known at the barrières. You have told madame about the difference between foreigners, and French people passing the barrières?”

  “No. We’ve been busy making these clothes fit and I would prefer you to explain. My experience in Republican France is now several years old: I’m sure much has changed.”

  Gilbert sighed. “To leave the ancien régime and go to England … then to return to Republican France. Now it is the guillotine, the tree of liberty, gendarmes every few miles, documents signed and countersigned … no man can walk or ride to the next town to have a glass of wine with his brother without a passeport … few men dare quarrel with a neighbour for fear of being denounced out of spite, for here the courts listen to the charge, not the defence—”

  “The barrières,” Ramage reminded him.

  “Ah yes, sir. Well, first there is the curfew from sunset to sunrise: everyone must be in his own home during the hours of darkness. To travel—well, one has the documents you have seen. You need plenty of change—at every barrière there’s a toll. The amount varies, depending on the distance from the last barrière, because they are not at regular intervals.”

  “A large toll?” Ramage asked.

  “No, usually between two and twenty sous. It wouldn’t matter if the money was spent on the repair of the roads—which is what it is supposed to be for—but no one empties even a bucket of earth into a pothole. But luckily we have our own gig because travelling by postchaise is very expensive. Before the Revolution a postchaise from here to Paris was about two hundred and fifty livres; now it is five hundred. No highwaymen, though; that’s one triumph of the Revolution!”

  “Highwaymen!” Sarah exclaimed. “You mean that France now has none?”

  “Very few, ma’am, and the reason is not particularly to our advantage. We now have many more mounted gendarmes stopping honest travellers, and instead of money and jewellery they demand documents. Truly ‘money or your life’ has now become ‘documents or your life.’ So as well as the gendarmes at the regular barrières, there are ones who appear unexpectedly on horseback, so no one dares move without papers. But,” he added, tapping the side of his nose, “there are so many different documents and so many signatures that forgery is not difficult and false papers unlikely to be discovered.”

  “How many barrières are there between here and Brest?” Ramage asked.

  “Three on the road, and then one at the Porte de Landerneau, the city gate on the Paris road. We could avoid it by going in along the side roads, but it is risky: if we were caught we would be arrested at once.”

  “Whereas our documents are good enough to pass the Porte without trouble?”

  “Exactly, sir. Now, if I may be allowed to remind you of a few things. As you know, the common form of address is ‘Citizen,’ or ‘Citizeness.’ Everyone is equal—at least in their lack of manners. ‘Please’ and ‘thank you’ are now relics of the ancien régime. Rudeness is usually a man’s (or woman’s) way of showing he or she is your equal—although they really mean your superior. Many gendarmes cannot read—they know certain signatures and have them written on pieces of paper for comparison. But don’t be impatient if a gendarme holds a paper upside-down and “reads” it for five minutes—as if it has enormous importance. They are gendarmes because they have influence with someone in authority. Neither the Committees of Public Safety nor the préfets want illiterates, but often giving a job to such a man is repaying a political debt from the time of the Revolution.”

  Gilbert paused and then apologized. “I am afraid I am talking too much …”

  “No, no,” Ramage said quickly. “And you must get into the habit of giving orders to ‘Charles’ and ‘Janine.’ Lose your temper with me occasionally—I am a slow-thinking fellow. Poor Charles Ribère, he can read slowly and write after a fashion, but … even his wife loses her patience with him!”

  A smiling Gilbert nodded. He found it impossible to toss aside the natural politeness by which he had led his life. Since he had been back in France, some Frenchmen had called it servility: why are you so servile, they had sneered: man is born free and equal. Yes, all that was true, but man also had to eat, which meant he had to work (or be a thief, or go into politics). Working for the Count was very equable: he lived in comfortable quarters, ate the same food as the Count and his guests, but in his own quarters without the need (as the Count often had) to let the food get cold as he listened to vapid gossip. But for these revolutionary fools he could have expected a comfortable old age with a good pension from the Count, and probably a cottage on the estate, here or in England.

  “Servility”—yes, that was what these Republican fools called it. Elsewhere, particularly in England, it was called good manners. Please, thank you, good morning, good evening—according to the Republicans these were “servile phrases.” A true Republican never said please or thank you. But he had never listened to the Count, either: the Count always said please and thank you and the suitable greeting every time he spoke to one of his staff. In fact, a blind man would only know who was servant and who was master because the Count had an educated voice: his grammar, too, betrayed his background of Latin and Greek, and English and Italian. Gilbert had once heard him joking in Latin with a bishop who laughed so much he became nearly hysterical. No Committee of Public Safety would ever understand that normal good manners were like grease on axles—they helped things move more smoothly.

  “I think Edouard will have the gig ready for us by now,” Gilbert said, making a conscious effort to avoid any “sir” or “milord.” “We are going to buy fruit—our apples have been stolen—and vegetables: the potatoes have rotted in the barn. And indeed they have. We need a bag of flour, a bag of rice if we can buy some, and any vegetables that catch your fancy. I am tired of cabbage and parsnip, which is all we seem to grow here. A lot of salt in the air from the sea makes the land barren, so Louis says, but I think it is laziness in the air from the Count’s good nature.”

  Gilbert gestured towards two wicker baskets as they reached the back door. “We take these to carry our purchases—you put them on your laps. I have all the documents here and will drive the gig, because your hands are occupied.” He winked and then looked startled at his temerity in winking at a milord and a milady. Ramage winked back and Sarah grinned: the grin, Ramage thought in a sudden surge of affection, of a lively and flirtatious serving wench being impertinent. Impudent. Adorable. And what a honeymoon—here they were setting off (in a gig!) at the beginning of an adventure which could end up with them all being strapped down on the guillotine. So far, the Committee of Public Safety (though perhaps the Ministry of Marine would step in, but more likely Bonaparte’s secret police under that man Fouché would take over) could accuse Captain Ramage of disobeying the order to report to the local préfet as an otage, because to call them detainees and not hostages was polite nonsense. Then of course he was carrying false papers and dressed as a gardener—proof that he was a spy. And he was lurking around France’s greatest naval base on the Atlantic coast … Yes, a tribunal would have only to hear the charges to return a verdict. And Sarah? A spy too—did she not carry false papers? Was she not assisting her husband? Was she not also an aristo by birth, as well as marriage? Alors, she can travel in the same tumbril, and that valet, too, who was a traitor as well as a spy.

  As he helped Sarah up into the gig and heard a disapproving grunt from Gilbert (husbands might give wives a perfunctory push up, but they did not help them), he thought bitterly that their luck had been unbelievably bad. First, that
the war had begun again while they were on their honeymoon—after all, the peace had held for a year and a half. Then that they should be staying with Jean-Jacques. Admittedly they would have been arrested if they had been staying at an inn, but the point was that they were now involved with L’Espoir and trying to think of a way of rescuing the Count of Rennes. Noblesse oblige. He was becoming tired of that phrase—his first love, the Marchesa di Volterra, was back in Italy because of it, and possibly already one of Bonaparte’s otages, too. An otage if she had not yet been assassinated.

  So, heavily involved with keeping himself and Sarah out of the hands of the local Committee of Public Safety, trying to rescue Jean-Jacques, and getting all of them (including the faithful and enterprising Gilbert) back to England, it was not just bad luck, it was damnable luck which brought the Murex through the Chenal du Four and into Brest with a mutinous crew on board.

  Or, he allowed himself the thought and at once felt almost dizzy with guilt, why did the mutineers not put the officers and loyal seamen in a boat and let them sail back to England? Why keep them on board and bring them into Brest, where the French had anchored the ship, landed the mutineers and left the officers and loyal men on board the brig with an apparently small French guard? Now every gendarme in the port would be on the alert in case one of the loyal men escaped from the Murex; every fishing-boat would be guarded—perhaps by soldiers—so that the chance of stealing one and getting back to England would probably be nil. Damn and blast the mutineers—and her captain, for not preventing the mutiny! He was not being fair and he found he had no wish to be fair: he wanted only to find someone to blame for this mess.

  Lord St Vincent! The name slid into his thoughts as Gilbert flipped the reins so that they slapped across the horse’s flanks and started it moving. Yes, if Lord St Vincent had not given him, as his first peacetime orders, the task of finding a tiny island off the Brazilian coast and surveying it, he would never have met Sarah. If they had never met they would never have fallen in love and from that it followed they would never have married or be here on a prolonged honeymoon through France. Which, he admitted, was as disgraceful a thought as any man should have so near breakfast.

  The country round the château was bleak. Or, rather, it was wild: it had the harsh wildness of parts of Cornwall, the thin layer of soil sprinkled on rock, rugged boulders jutting up as though scattered by an untidy giant. The small houses built of tightly-locked grey stone, some long ago whitewashed, roofed by slates, a small shelter for a horse or donkey, a low wall containing the midden. Life here was a struggle against nature: crops grew not with the wild profusion and vigour of the Tropics—to which he had become accustomed over the past few years—but because men and women hoed and dug and ploughed and weeded from dawn to dusk.

  Gilbert became impatient with the horse, a chestnut which looked as though it was not exercised enough and heartily resented being between shafts. Perhaps, Ramage thought sourly, it was a Republican and resented having to work (if jogging along this lane rated the description “work”) for Monarchists.

  “Pretend to be asleep—or sleepy, anyway,” Gilbert said as they approached the first village. Ramage inspected it through half-closed eyes, and for a moment was startled how different it was from all the villages he had seen up to now. A few moments later he realized that the village was the same but his attitude had just changed. He had been a free visitor when he had seen all the other villages on the roads from Calais to Paris, south across Orléans and the Bourbonnais, among the hills of Auvergne, and to the north-west up towards Finisterre through Poitou and Anjou … Towns and villages, Limoges with its superb porcelain and enamels, the fourth-century baptistry of the church near Poitiers which is France’s earliest Christian building … Clermont-Ferrand, where Pope Urban (the second?) sent off the first Crusade in 1095 (why did he remember that date?), the châteaux and palaces along the Loire Valley … Angers with the château of seventeen towers belonging formerly to the Dukes of Anjou, and no one now willing to discuss the whereabouts of the tapestries, particularly the fourteenth-century one which was more than four hundred and thirty feet long. And Chinon, on the banks of the Vienne, where Joan of Arc prodded the Dauphin into war. No, all these towns had been impressive and the villages on the long roads between them for the most part interesting (or different, anyway), but they had been at peace—with England, at least.

  With England: that, he suddenly realized, was significant, and he wished he could discuss it with Sarah but it had to be talked about in English, not French, and it was too risky talking in English when they could be overheard by a hidden hedger and ditcher.

  The French had been at peace with England but not yet with themselves. He had been surprised to see that the enemy for the people of all the villages, towns and cities of France was now their own people: the members of the Committees of Public Safety at the top of a pyramid which spread out to gendarmes enforcing the curfew and standing at the barrières demanding passeports, the old enemies denouncing each other in secret, the banging on doors in the darkness, when no neighbour dared to look to see who the gendarmes were bundling away.

  Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité—fine words. They had stretched France’s frontiers many miles to the north, east and south, but what had they done for the French people? Now every able-bodied young man would have to serve again in the army or navy, and there was no harm in that if they were needed to defend France. But France would be attacking other countries: earlier France was everywhere the aggressor, even across the sands of Egypt.

  That was looking at the phrase in its broadest sense, yet the picture those three words summoned up for him was simple and one that fitted every place in every city, town and large village in France.

  The picture was stark and simple: two weathered baulks of timber arranged as a vertical and parallel frame, and a heavy and angled metal blade, sharpened on the underside, sliding down two grooves. A bench on which the victim was placed so that his or her neck was squarely under the blade, a wicker basket beyond to catch the severed head. Weeping relatives and wildly cheering onlookers—that dreadful melange of blood and hysteria. Of the three words, the guillotine must stand for fratenité and égalité because liberté was represented by the other part of the picture. This was the rusted metal representation of the Tree of Liberty. Usually it was little more than an example of the work of a hasty blacksmith and always it was rusty. And sometimes on the top was placed a red cap of liberty, faded and rotting, rarely recognizable as a copy of the old Phrygian cap.

  And the gig had stopped and Gilbert was getting out and saying something in a surly voice, using a tone Ramage had never heard before. Yes, they had arrived at the barrière. It was in fact simply three chairs and a table in the shade of a plane tree on one side of the road. Three gendarmes sat in the chairs and one had called to Gilbert to bring over the documents. Gilbert was carrying not just the canvas wallet but a bottle of wine.

  Pretending to be asleep, hat tilted over his face, Ramage watched. Gilbert took out the papers—leaving the bottle on his side of the table, as though putting it there to leave his hands free—and handed them to the gendarme, who still sat back in his chair and gestured crossly when Gilbert first placed the papers on the table. To pick them up the gendarme would have to lean forward, and this he was reluctant to do. Gilbert put the documents in the man’s hand, and the gendarme glanced through them, obviously counting. He then looked across at the gig and handed the papers back, holding his hand out for the bottle.

  Gilbert walked back to the gig, resumed his seat, slapped the reins across the horse’s rump and the gig continued its slow journey towards Brest. The other two gendarmes, Ramage noticed, had never opened their eyes.

  Beyond the village, Gilbert turned. “You saw all that—obviously they are not looking for any escapers. That is the routine, though: two sleep while the other reaches out a hand.”

  “So our papers are not—”

  The thud of horses’ hooves behind the
m brought the sudden command from Gilbert: “Don’t look round—mounted gendarmes. Pretend to be asleep!”

  A moment later two horsemen cut in from the left side, then two more passed on the right and reined their horses to a stop, blocking the narrow road.

  “Papers!” one of the men demanded, holding out his hand.

  “Papers, papers, papers,” Gilbert grumbled. “We have only just showed them back there, now the four horsemen of the Apocalypse want to look at them again …”

  One of the gendarmes grinned and winked at Sarah. “We like to check up on pretty girls on a sunny morning—where are you going, mademoiselle?”

  “Madame,” Sarah said sleepily. “To Brest with my husband.”

  Her accent and tone of voice was perfect, Ramage realized. The gendarme was flirting; she was the virtuous wife.

  The gendarme looked through the papers. “Ah, Citizeness Ribère, born 22 years ago in Falaise. You look younger—marriage must suit you.” He looked at Ramage. “Citizen Ribère? Off to Brest to buy your wife some pretty ribbons, eh?”

  “Potatoes and cabbages, and rice if there is any,” Ramage said with glum seriousness. “No ribbons.”

  The gendarme laughed, looked at Gilbert’s passeport and handed the papers back to him. “You buy her a ribbon, then,” he said, and spurred his horse forward, the other three following him.

  “Was that normal?” Ramage asked.

  “Yes—but for, er Janine, I doubt if they would have bothered to stop us.”

  They passed the next couple of barrières without incident, although at the second two of the gendarmes were more concerned with their colleague who was already incoherently drunk but unwilling to sleep it off out of sight under the hedge. He had spotted the bottle that an unsuspecting Gilbert had been clutching as he alighted from the gig and probably saw a dozen. Finally, while Gilbert waited patiently at the table, the other two dragged the man away, returning five minutes later without apology or explanation to inspect the papers.