French Leave (2 page)

Beside her at the rail stood Tibble. There was precious little space to do anything but stand; the packet boat was carrying at least twice as many passengers as the permitted load. Barbary eyed her manservant, who was looking nervous as a cat. “I had thought you a great deal more stouthearted than this!” she chided. “I promise you there are no Bow Street Runners on board.”

Tibble started, glanced around. He’d been on pins and needles ever since he’d popped Lord Grafton’s watch. Not that Tibble was unacquainted with pawnshops, but he was not accustomed to trafficking in stolen goods. He did not imagine that the penalties for such sins were light.

“I do not mean to carp upon the subject,” Barbary said sternly, “but you are hardly the most congenial of traveling companions, and if you do not come out of the dismals soon, I am like to catch them myself. To have left so much behind! Not that I mean to scold, because you were perfectly correct, and we could hardly have made an unobtrusive exit laden down with household furnishings. I hope you aren’t going to cast up your accounts. I vow you look quite green.”

Tibble was perfectly cognizant of how he looked. The wind had turned unfavorable, creating considerable distress on the crowded packet boat. “Umf,” he moaned.

Umf? This was not an encouraging sign. Barbary rummaged through her reticule and retrieved her vinaigrette—unearthed at last from beneath the settee—which she then thrust under Tibble’s nose. When he had stopped coughing, she insisted that he keep the thing.

“I am not the least bit queasy,” Barbary pointed out. “Indeed, I feel as if I had just waked up from a horrid dream. Think of it, Tibble, we are about to embark on a new life.”

So they were, willy-nilly. Ever since Tibble could remember, it seemed mankind had been plagued by the warlike French, whom he had come to regard as a race of bloody-minded, thieving monkeys. Now they were to live among those same brigands. Tibble again had recourse to the vinaigrette.

“I am a selfish wretch,” said Barbary. “Here I have dragged you away from home and hearth without so much as a by-your-leave.”

Tibble forbore to point out that home and hearth were no doubt now occupied by the bailiffs, and perhaps as well—if Lord Grafton had noticed his missing pocket watch—by the men from Bow Street. “It don’t signify,” he muttered with patent insincerity.

“Pish tush!” retorted Barbary. “I swear I’ll make it up to you. Although I’m sure I can’t say precisely how. Never mind! I have done some absurd things—I admit it—but you will see how different things will be now that we have the opportunity to start anew with a clean slate.”

Tibble made no comment. Whatever his private thoughts, they did not show on his impassive countenance, which indeed did have a distinctly greenish hue. Certain conclusions could be reached, however, by the frequency with which he applied to the vinaigrette.

Barbary sighed. She thought it very hard that the cat had got Tibble’s tongue just now, when she herself was experiencing relief at having escaped her creditors. Naturally, she meant to see that they were someday paid. As she meant to reimburse Lord Grafton for the loss of his watch, although he well deserved to lose it, after offering her false coin. How Barbary would manage to accomplish this she was as yet uncertain, but she had no doubt she would contrive to repair her fortunes somehow. Meanwhile she would enjoy her journey, for which she was dressed quite elegantly in a traveling costume
à la militaire
and a small-brimmed hat with a stiff helmetlike crown. It was a journey undertaken by many travelers this summer. Twenty-one years had passed since the war with France had been announced in the House of Commons by Mr. Pitt, very nearly on the occasion of Barbary’s birth.

Now the war was ended. The Monster from the Abyss, the Corsican, the Ogre, had gone down finally to ignominious defeat. The Brigand Chief was safely imprisoned on the isle of Elba, and Barbary was in flight to France. She wished she had brought a picnic meal to sustain her during the eight-hour voyage, which ended at last when the wind and tide conspired to land the packet boat some miles along the coast from Calais.

This was not an auspicious omen. By judicious application of shoe and elbow, Barbary managed to procure seats for Tibble and herself in a farmer’s cart. The farmer was thin and ragged, his horse harnessed with a rope.
“Merci!”
Barbary said prettily as she climbed aboard, ignoring the incensed mutterings of fellow packet-boat passengers who had not managed to obtain space in the cart.

The cart lurched forward. Barbary grasped at her portmanteau with one hand and at Tibble with the other. The manservant’s sickly hue had not abated with their arrival on dry land.

The landscape was very dreary. Fields were left unplanted, and the few animals that grazed there looked half-starved.  Barbary saw dead horses and shattered homes. She shuddered at her first glimpse of the reality of war.

The cart brought them at last to Calais, a singularly dreary little town. The buildings looked dilapidated, and there were many ragged people in the street. There were also a great many visitors, and packs of beggars and whining children who followed their carriages, throwing somersaults and screeching anti-Buonapartist sentiments in hope of a coin.

Barbary climbed down awkwardly from the cart and looked around for an inn. Her luggage was very heavy, and Tibble was green again. The celebrated Dessein’s was out of the question for a person suffering from deranged finances, and the same was true of the Silver Lion. The first hôtel at which she inquired had no vacancies, the proprietor informed her, adding that she’d have the devil of a time finding a room because the town was filled to bursting with travelers waiting to depart on the few public diligences. But if Ma’mselle wasn’t too particular— Ma’mselle assured him that she wasn’t at all particular at this point—she might proceed to a certain establishment in an adjoining street.

Barbary trudged along the rue Royale, which ran from the Place d’Armes to the rue Francaise. At another time she might have been more curious about her surroundings—the bookshop, for example, which had once been the Hôtel d’Angleterre, where portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte had been displayed on the panels above the entrance until the mob tore them down during the Revolution. But Barbary’s whole attention was focused grimly on arriving at her destination before her aching feet refused to go one more step. “Bear up!” she said bracingly to Tibble. “Soon you shall have some nice broth.”

Tibble suspected a bucket might be more appropriate. This was no good time to discover he was a poor traveler, but he had never before set foot out of London in all his life. He wished he had not done so now. It was fortunate that Miss Barbary spoke French because Tibble had no intention of trying to twist his tongue around that barbarian gibberish. Had it been his choice to make, Tibble would have preferred debtors’ prison to exile.

Along the rue Royal they proceeded until they came to a bridge. A hôtel stood there, as promised. Barbary eyed the ramshackle building doubtfully. Evening’s shadows were lengthening, and the hôtel did not appear to be crowded to the rafters with guests, at any rate. Resolutely ignoring the pile of horse dung near the entrance, Barbary stepped inside.

The proprietor came out of the taproom to greet her, wiping his hands on a voluminous apron that was none too clean. Here was no jovial innkeeper, but a skeletal, sour-faced creature whose pale eyes had an avaricious gleam. The price he quoted seemed fair enough for a night’s lodging. “He’ll have to sleep in the stables,” the man said, and gestured toward Tibble as if the manservant were not an animate being but a block of wood.

Barbary picked up her heavy portmanteau. “Then it won’t serve. I may have dragged you away from hearth and home, Tibble, but sleep in the stable I will not ask you to do!”

Had he been asked, Tibble would naturally have protested; sleeping in stables was far from what so superior a manservant might like. However, his own feet hurt, as well as his belly, and sleeping in the stable was infinitely preferable to forever trudging through the streets. “It don’t signify, Miss Barbary. I’m sure I don’t mind.”

“Then that’s settled!” sighed Barbary, relieved. “Perhaps someone might show me to my room.”

The proprietor allowed as someone might. He directed Tibble toward the stables, then left Barbary standing in the hallway and disappeared again into the taproom. It appeared that the French fondness for things and people English, so apparent to the first waves of travelers who had flocked to the Continent after the Emperor Napoleon’s defeat, had not long endured.

Was she to be left standing forever in this hallway? Barbary sat down on her portmanteau. At last a maidservant shuffled into the hallway and indicated with a jerk of her head that Barbary was to follow her up the stairs. In the upper hallway she flung open a door.

Barbary stepped cautiously into the room, of which the best that could be said was that it was no worse than she had feared it might be. The floor was greasy, the furnishings sparse, the hearth unswept.

Behind her, the door banged shut. Barbary took off her bonnet and her pelisse, then flung herself down upon the narrow bed to indulge in a storm of tears. The dust that arose made her cough instead. Barbary wished that she might have a bath, but the room’s amenities ran only to a miserable hot-water bottle, a single earthen jug and basin, and a strip of towel. “How could Grafton have behaved so shabbily?” she said aloud to the ceiling, which, of course, did not reply. “I’m sure I wish him joy of his bran-faced bride.” But perhaps the chit was a beauty, as Barbary had once been herself, before adversity had made her grow quite hagged.

Was
she hagged? Barbary sat up, searched hastily for a mirror, and subjected herself to an inspection in its depths. She was not an antidote. Yet.

She flung away the mirror. This, too, was Conor’s fault. Barbary should have contracted a marriage
à
la mode
as so many of her friends had done, instead of marrying for love. What had that great romance gotten her but a spouse who alternately ignored her and accused her of acting like a little zany when she tried to remind him of her existence by some outrageous act? And then she had thought she loved Grafton, who in his own turn had played her false.

Never never ever would she love again. This vow cast a further blight upon her spirits, and Barbary squelched an impulse to fall into hysterics. One must look on the bright side of things. Horrid as it was to be reduced to such straits, had she not brought both Tibble and herself to safe harbor, of a sort? Yes, and she was neglecting her responsibilities, for hadn’t she promised Tibble a nice bowl of broth?

Barbary rose from the bed, brushed dust from her costume, and left her room in search of sustenance. She rather fancied a venison pasty, or perhaps a pigeon pie. And perhaps a hot drink to soothe her nerves. Through a labyrinth of uncarpeted passages she picked her way, until she came at last to the taproom, a low-ceilinged chamber with sawdust hiding what other mysteries might lie upon the floor. Several men were sprawled in the battered old chairs.

Barbary hesitated. She had never been in an establishment such as this. How Conor would laugh, and Grafton shudder, to see her brought so low. But Conor had his opera dancer, and Grafton his bran-faced bride, and Tibble must be prodigious hungry, and so was Barbary. She stepped into the taproom.

At her entrance, conversation ceased. Barbary felt her cheeks burn. Nonetheless, she engaged the proprietor in conversation with a tolerable nonchalance. No venison pasty or pigeon pie was available. Barbary settled for a bowl of bouillon for Tibble and a bit of cheese and bread for herself. “Perhaps,” the proprietor said meaningfully, “Ma’mselle would like to take her repast in her room?”

Ma’mselle would indeed like to do so. She was uncomfortable to be the cynosure of all eyes. As she turned to leave. One of the men sitting at the small table nearest the fire pushed back his chair.
“Anglaise?”
he asked.

Barbary nodded. One didn’t wish to be rude. Besides, the man stood firmly between her and the door. He was tall and swarthy-complexioned, villainous-looking, dressed in shabby clothes.

What did he want with her? To quote poetry, it seemed. In very harsh accents he said:

“ ‘Tis done—but yesterday a King!

And arm’d with Kings to strive—

And now thou art a nameless thing:

    So abject—yet alive!’ ”

Astonishing, to discover a fondness for poetry beneath so gruff an exterior. The man was looking at her expectantly. Barbary was also familiar with Lord Byron’s
Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte.
She murmured:

“ ‘Is this the man of thousand thrones,

Who strew’d our earth with hostile bones,

And can he thus survive?

Since he, miscall’d the Morning Star,

Nor man nor fiend hath fallen so far.’ ”

The man nodded, as if well pleased, and thrust out his hand. “Me, I am Jacques.”

Jacques seemed to have taken a fancy to Barbary’s company. Gentlemen frequently took such fancies, a point of great contention during her tempestuous marriage, but had not Barbary sworn off all further dealings with the opposite sex? And Jacques was not the sort of individual with whom she might wish to have dealings even had she not made a vow. Gracious, but his teeth were white and strong. Easy enough to imagine them gripping a knife, or tearing animal flesh from its bones.

“Alors!”
he said, and took an impatient step toward her. Barbary drew back her little foot and kicked him smartly in the shin. Jacques cursed and grasped his wounded leg. Barbary ducked around his bulk and beat a hasty retreat.

Chapter Three

Barbary kept to her small room during the remainder of her stay in Calais, which was mercifully brief, although not brief enough to prevent the discovery that she shared her chamber with assorted species of insect life, as a result of which she abandoned her bed to sleep upright in a battered chair. It was hardly the most pleasant of experiences, but still preferable to risking a further encounter with the villainous-looking, poetry-quoting Jacques. Had the man not been so threatening, he would have been absurd.