Honour and the Sword (58 page)

I said ‘They were going to hang me. They were going to have me tortured.’

‘Don’t get yourself in a state, lad, you’ll do someone an injury.’

He was reaching for the sword again, so I pulled back and whipped at his face with it, and the blade slipped down and scratched his chest.

He looked at the thin line of blood trickling down onto his shirt. ‘Now look what you’ve done.’

‘You sold me,’ I said. ‘You betrayed me to the soldiers.’

‘True.’

‘You lied to me. You pretended you wanted me back, you made me trust you just so you could do this. They were going to kill me and you didn’t care, I know you didn’t, I saw your face.’

‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a handkerchief,’ he said.

‘You can bleed to death for all I care.’

‘Not me, lad, you,’ he said patiently.

He took out his big red handkerchief and offered it to me. I took it without thinking. He was right, there were tears running all down my face, I could taste them on my mouth. I wiped them, and clenched the handkerchief in my hand. He’d had that same handkerchief for as long as I could remember. He wiped his brow with it when he sweated, or cleaned his hands on it when we were mucking out. Once when I cut myself on a broken harness he bound my arm with it. He was very gentle.

‘You’ve got to tell me why,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to.’

He reached out for the handkerchief and I gave it to him.

‘It won’t help,’ he said. ‘It never does. Don’t you know that by now?’

‘Was it the money?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘I’d have got you money, I could have got it from André.’

For the first time his face changed. It darkened down the sides of his nose and round his mouth. His eyes seemed deeper.

‘I wouldn’t have touched his money.’

‘But you took it from the soldiers?’

‘A thousand’s a lot of money. Thirteen hundred if they counted you in, but I wasn’t bothered about that. After all, we were supposed to be getting you back.’

‘Is that what they told you?’

‘Of course. You didn’t think I’d want you hurt, did you, boy?’

That was too much. ‘You didn’t want me
hurt
?’

‘Oh, come on, what’s that, a little scratch on your face? You look all right to me.’

‘I’m not talking about that.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Feelings. Is that what you want to talk about?’

I didn’t say anything. I don’t think I could.

‘You don’t know anything about feelings,’ he said. His whole face was darker now, and his voice deeper. ‘There isn’t any pain at your age. Who are you fucking these days, I wonder? I hear you dropped Lefebvre’s girl.’

‘I can still have feelings, can’t I?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Can you?’

‘How can you say that?’ I said, and I could hear my own voice trembling, because this was it, really, this was what I needed to know. ‘You’re the one with no feelings, you don’t love me, you never have.’

‘True,’ he said again. ‘True.’

I reached blindly for the handkerchief again. ‘You can’t just sit there and say that like it doesn’t matter. You’re supposed to love me, you have to love me, I’m your son.’

‘No,’ he said tiredly. ‘You’re not.’

Stefan Ravel

It had to be just the four of us. No one else knew it wasn’t exactly a good idea for Jacques to go home, and it wasn’t something we thought he’d want spread around

We found his horse where it was last time, and left ours beside it. We checked the bushes, then André crept to the front of the cottage, peered through the window, then drew his sword and motioned me to open the door. I kicked it open, actually, I wasn’t in the mood for pissing about. This whole house and everything in it made me sick.

There was just Gilbert’s wife there with a little girl. She looked terrified when I burst in but then saw André and rushed up calling his name. He checked her politely, and I saw he wasn’t in the mood for any flannel either.

‘It’s all right, Nelly,’ he said. ‘Just tell me where he is.’

She dug her hands in his shirt. ‘I think, I’m afraid, oh, I think he’s going to kill his father.’

So he knew after all, poor bugger. No wonder he’d looked so bloody awful.

‘Where did they go?’ asked André.

‘He didn’t say. André, please, you must stop him. There are things Jacques doesn’t know, things I ought to have told him, if he kills his father it will all be my fault.’

Typical woman. Every second counted, so she had to talk about blame instead of giving us what we needed to know.

André tried again. ‘How long ago did they leave?’

She made an effort at last. ‘Only a few minutes. They’re not in the barn, I looked. Jacques wanted to talk privately but I don’t know where.’

‘All right,’ said André. ‘I can guess.’

He turned to leave, but from the doorway Mercier said ‘Horses on the Ancre road.’

André jerked his head towards the back room, and we all piled in to find a door out to a little yard with a well in it. There was a track running behind the barn back to the paddock, and Marcel and Mercier started down it right away. André hesitated, then said to the woman ‘Nelly, you are going to tell the soldiers your husband has gone to the village and you have never seen Jacques at all. Do you understand?’

She was useless as soft string. ‘Oh, André, I can’t.’

Me, I’d have smacked her one, but André merely pressed her hands together and leant down to speak directly into her face. ‘You can. You’ll be quite safe. They won’t hurt you, your husband is too important. You can do this, and it will buy me the time I need to save your son.’

She seemed quite fascinated by him. She nodded like someone in a trance.

He said ‘Good girl,’ kissed her quickly, then turned and ran to join us on the track. Behind him I heard horses pounding up the Ancre drive.

Jacques Gilbert

I know it was obvious, I’ve been seeing it all the time I’ve been telling you, but it’s different for you, you’re only getting the important bits, then it’s easy to see where it’s all going. It’s not so easy when it’s your own life, and you don’t know beforehand what the important bits are, and you’ve got a habit of believing the things you’ve believed since you were too tiny ever to question them.

As soon as he said it I knew it explained everything. I didn’t even need to ask who my real father was. There’d been too many signs for me to have missed them all. The way my Father hated him, the way he hated André who looked so like him, the way he talked like Mother loved him.

‘The Seigneur,’ I said.

He nodded, pleased, a grown-up approving a child’s intelligence. ‘Of course the Seigneur.’

I think there was a part of him actually glad to tell me. He’d almost told the truth lots of times, it’s like he’d been finding it harder and harder to keep it in. He’d called me a bastard to my face.

He started to reach in his pocket, then stopped and raised his eyebrows in a kind of exaggerated way of asking permission. I felt embarrassed, it was all wrong him asking me, I just nodded, yes, yes. He took out his pipe and box, and lit up.

He said ‘I fell in love with your Mother when she was thirteen years old. Everyone did, she was the most beautiful thing you ever saw.’ He looked oddly young when he said that, he had a look in his face that reminded me of Little Pierre. ‘I’d nothing then. I was stable boy, same as you, but my dad worked the Pagnié farm, he was nothing. Not that Nell was much more, she worked as maid up at the Manor, but I courted her like a lady all the same. Never laid a finger on her, never so much as kissed her, I did it properly and by the Church, because that’s what she deserved.’

He took his pipe out of his mouth and spat.

‘Then he took her. Your father. He came across her one day in one of the bedrooms, fancied a bit of it, and took her just like that. That’s how you were made, boy.
Droit de seigneur.
’

I said ‘I don’t believe it. She liked him, she’d never have felt like that if it was how you said. I think he loved her.’

‘Oh call it what you like, boy,’ said Father, waving it away with his pipe. ‘Your Mother deluded herself long enough, why shouldn’t you? What does it matter anyway? There she was at fifteen with a baby on the way. Your father couldn’t help even if he’d wanted to. He was sixteen back then, old enough to marry, but old Michel got himself killed, Hugo was off to Paris as Comte de Vallon, so Antoine was our new Seigneur, and his mother betrothed him to a rich woman in Paris.

‘And there was the snag. In the normal run of things a bastard or two wouldn’t bother the Rolands, Hugo had plenty in Paris, but the Delacroix girl came from different stock. Nothing noble about them, only rich and religious, and if they’d found out about Nell there might have been no wedding, and no money to pay Hugo’s debts.

‘The old Comtesse came down herself to make me a proposal. I married Nell and brought up the child as my own, and in return I got the job of stable-master for the whole Ancre estate. The fools. They were offering me everything I’d ever dreamed of, and the only price I had to pay was your Mother coming to me second hand with another man’s child in her belly. So I married her, God help me, the Seigneur married his rich girl, the Comtesse went back to Paris with no one the wiser, and there we all were.

‘Then you came. You had that dark hair right from the start, like an animal, a devil, nothing to do with us. When Nell suckled you it was like seeing another man at her breast. I used to dream of smothering you. I’d watch you sleeping and think about pressing your face into the crib until you died.’

‘Why didn’t you?’ I couldn’t look at him, I didn’t want him seeing my face.

‘I don’t know,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘It’s hard to kill a baby. But there was never any doubt whose son you were, not from the start. You liked the horses, but you didn’t want to groom them, you wanted to use them. You wanted to play with swords, you wanted to go for a soldier. You used to sneak off and watch the Seigneur fencing, I saw you, more than once. You started carving little animals, and God knows how you picked that up, it was something he did too. Maybe you watched him. Maybe you and your mother spent time with him I never even knew about. I used to wonder.

‘Then we had my Pierre, and things could have been so perfect, but she went as nurse to the Seigneur’s brat instead. I met you once, the four of you. Her carrying that mewling brat in her arms, the Seigneur walking beside her like her husband, and you running along behind, with him sometimes reaching out to ruffle your hair. He was always touching your hair, because it was his. You looked like a family.

‘I stopped her going, but that wasn’t the end of it. You were always there, you were going to inherit everything. I thought if you went for a soldier you might be killed, then everything would be the way it should be. The Seigneur didn’t need you, he had a boy of his own. Nobody wanted you. You should have died.’

His voice was all conversational, like this was just a story he was telling me. I suppose that was natural, I mean it wasn’t new to him. Just to me.

He said ‘When the Spaniards came, I thought you really had, and for the first time I was free. I’d picked up a few bits and pieces at the Manor, I was going to take my wife and children, walk out of the Gate, and find somewhere we could start again. Then suddenly there you were. All those good men who died that day, but you came out of it without a scratch. If you’d been alone, I don’t know, I might have killed you myself, but you brought that boy with you, and the whole nightmare began again.’

‘It was your idea,’ I said. ‘You can’t blame me for that, you wanted him.’

‘Oh, I did, I really did. And not just the money. That man’s son reduced to living in my barn and dressing in your old clothes, depending on me for the very food he ate. I liked that. I wanted to watch him going under, I wanted him degraded, just as I’d degraded you. I used to take a lot of pleasure with you in the old days, I’d let your father see you spitting and swearing and filthy, with the marks of my fist on your face, because you were my lad now. I thought I’d do it with André too. But you didn’t degrade him, you looked up to him, and the brat didn’t spit on you, he started to lift you up.

‘And you got more like him every day. You started to talk like him, act like him, think like him. The bastard was dead, but I had two of his sons right in my house, looking down on me, treating my own son like a servant. I’d come home and there you’d be, the two of you with Nell like you were the family, and I was the outsider.

‘It was better when you left. Then that day at the church. You walked in wearing clothes like your father’s, your hair dressed like his, I saw the expression on Nell’s face. Then in came the other one, same clothes, same walk, same arrogance, and he went and sat in the Seigneur’s place. Her face then. When she looked at you, she saw Antoine’s son. When she looked at him, she saw Antoine. I should have killed him years ago. He was dangerous, he always was, I needed to put a stop to it right away.’

I remembered that day. I remembered him being nice to me in the churchyard after the service, and how happy I’d been.

‘You were planning this even then?’

‘Of course,’ he said, looking at me in surprise. ‘That’s when I decided. I knew I’d got to make it up with you, and persuade you to come and visit, I was prepared to say and do anything, but I didn’t need to, you fell for it right away.’

‘And that’s why you wanted me at Christmas? And those other times? All those things you said, they were all lies?’

‘That’s right,’ he said patiently. ‘I did hesitate at times, don’t think it’s been easy, but it had been so good that last year, just the four of us, I had to protect that. I still do.’

I looked up then, because his voice had changed, and I saw he’d picked up the pistol from my side. I never even saw him do it.

Jean-Marie Mercier

There were six soldiers, and they all went into the cottage, we watched them from the paddock. They didn’t draw their swords or make any attempt to cover the back entrance, they simply walked in, and Stefan called them a disgrace to a fine army. André was less sure. He said it looked as if the Spaniards couldn’t believe we were really here yet, and were planning to sit and wait for us to arrive. When five minutes passed and they still hadn’t come out, we thought he must be right.