Vintage Stuff (14 page)

'Damn,' he mumbled and felt around for his teeth. As he did so, Peregrine, who had been
peering suspiciously over the edge of the hollow, slid down towards him.

'Don't move another inch,' said Glodstone indistinctly.

'Why not?'

'Because I've mislaid my bloody dentures,' Glodstone mumbled, aware that his authority was
being eroded by this latest admission of a physical defect and terrified that Peregrine would
step on the damned things. In the end, he found the top plate resting against something that felt
suspiciously like sheep droppings. Glodstone shoved it hurriedly back into the mug and made a
mental note to wash it carefully in the morning before having breakfast. But the bottom plate was
still missing. He reached across for his torch and was about to use it when Peregrine once more
demonstrated his superior fieldcraft and his night vision by whispering to him not to turn it
on.

'Why the devil not?' asked Glodstone.

'Because there's something moving around out there.'

'Probably a blasted sheep.'

'Shall I slip out and see? I mean if it's one of the swine and we captured him, we could make
him tell us how to get into the Château and what's going on mere.'

Glodstone sighed. It was a long, deep sigh, the sigh of a man whose bottom plate was still
missing while the other was in all probability impregnated with sheep dung and who was faced with
the need to explain that it was extremely unlikely that one of the 'swine' (a term he regretted
having used so freely in the past) was wandering about on a barren plateau at dead of night.

'Listen,' he hissed through bare gums, 'even if it is one of them, what do you think they're
going to think when the...er...blighter doesn't turn up in the morning?'

'I suppose they might think '

'That we're in the neighbourhood and have got him and he's told us he knows. So they'll be
doubly on the qui-vive and '

'On the what?'

'On the lookout, for God's sake. And the whole point of the exercise is that we take them by
surprise.'

'I don't see how we're going to do that,' said Peregrine. 'After all they know we're coming.
That oil trap in the forest '

'Told them we're coming by road, not across country. Now shut up and get some sleep.'

But Peregrine had slid quietly back up the bank and was peering intently into the night.
Glodstone resumed the search for his teeth and finally found them covered in sand. He dropped
them into the mug and transferred this to a safer spot inside his rucksack. Then he wormed down
into his sleeping bag again and prayed that Peregrine would let him get some rest. But it still
took him some time to fall asleep. A lurking feeling that he had made a mistake in bringing
Peregrine with him nagged at his mind. He was no longer a young man and there was something about
Peregrine's fitness and his blasted fieldcraft that irritated him. In the morning, he'd have to
make it quite clear who was in charge.

In fact it was only an hour or so later when he was woken. The weather had changed and it had
began to drizzle. Glodstone stared bleakly from his one eye into a grey mist and shivered. He was
stiff and cold and doubly aggravated to see that Peregrine had covered his own sleeping-bag with
his ground-sheet and pools of water had gathered in the folds. In Glodstone's case it had soaked
through the bag itself and the bottom half felt decidedly damp.

'Stay in here any longer and I'll go down with pneumonia,' he muttered to himself and,
crawling out, put on a jersey, wrapped the groundsheet round his shoulders and lit the stove. A
cup of coffee with a bit of brandy in it would take off the chill. Blearily, he filled the
billycan with water and had put his top dentures in his mouth before being reminded by their
earthy taste and something else where they had been. Glodstone spat the things out and rinsed
them as best he could. Presently, huddled under the groundsheet, he was sipping coffee and trying
to take his mind off his discomfort by planning their strategy when they reached the Château. It
was rather more difficult than he had foreseen. It had been all very well to drive across France,
eluding pursuit, but now that they were so close to their goal he began to see snags. They
couldn't very well march up to the front door and ask for the Countess. In some way or other they
would have to let her know they were in the vicinity and were waiting for her instructions. And
this would have to be done without giving the game away to anyone else. The phrase brought him up
short. 'The game away'? In the past he had always thought of the great adventure as a game but
now in the cold, wet dawn, squatting in a hollow in a remote part of France, it had a new and
rather disturbing reality about it, one involving the genuine possibility of death or torture and
something else almost as alarming. For one brief moment, Glodstone sensed intuitively the
unlikelihood that he should have been asked to rescue a Countess he had never met from villains
occupying her own Château. But a raindrop dribbling down his nose into his coffee-cup put an end
to this insight. He was there in the hollow. He had received her letters and two attempts had
been made, at Dover and again in the forest of Dreux, to stop his coming. Those were undeniable
facts and put paid to any doubts about the improbability of the mission. 'Can't have this,' he
muttered, and stood up. Over the edge of the hollow drifts of light rain shifted across the
plateau obscuring the horizon and giving the broken terrain the look of No-Man's-Land as he had
seen it in photographs taken in the Great War. He turned and prodded Peregrine. 'Time to be
moving,' he said and was horrified to find the barrel of a revolver pointing at him.

'Oh, it's you,' said Peregrine, who was all too evidently a light sleeper and one who woke
instantly, 'I thought '

'Never mind what you bloody thought,' snapped Glodstone, 'Do you have to sleep with the damned
gun? I could have been shot.'

Peregrine scrambled out. 'I didn't have it cocked,' he said without any attempt at apology,
'it was just in case anyone attacked us in the night.'

'Well, they didn't,' said Glodstone. 'It would have been a dashed sight more helpful if you'd
let me know it was raining. As it was, I got soaked.'

'But you told me I wasn't to wake you. You said '

'I know what I said but there's a difference between blathering on about sheep being people
and letting me get pneumonia.'

'Actually it was a pig,' said Peregrine. 'When you started snoring it started moving this way
and I thought I'd better go out and head it off.'

'All right, let's get some breakfast,' said Glodstone. 'The one good thing about this drizzle
is that we'll be able to approach the Château without being seen, especially if we move off as
soon as possible.'

But getting anywhere near the Château proved easier said than done. They had covered a couple
of miles when the plateau ended on the edge of a deep ravine whose sides were thick with thorny
undergrowth. Glodstone looked over and hesitated. There was no question of fighting their way
down it. 'I think we'd better head round to the north,' he said but Peregrine was consulting his
map.

'If I'm right,' he said, adopting an expression Glodstone considered his own and consequently
resented, 'we're too far to the north already, the Château lies three miles south-south-west from
here.'

'What makes you so sure?' said Glodstone, once more feeling that Peregrine was getting the
upper hand.

'I counted the paces.'

'The paces?'

'We've come about three thousand yards and if we'd been going in the right direction we should
have come to these woods by now.'

'What woods?' said Glodstone looking round wearily.

'The ones on the map,' said Peregrine, 'they're marked green and the river is just beyond
them.'

Glodstone peered at the map and was forced to agree that they were woods opposite the Château.
'Must be something wrong with my compass,' he said. 'All right, you lead the way but for God's
sake go carefully and don't hurry. We can't afford to take any chance of being spotted now.' And
having tried to ensure that Peregrine wouldn't march off at some godawful speed he plodded along
behind him. This time there was no mistake and an hour later they had entered the woods marked on
the map. They sloped away from the plateau and then rose to a ridge.

'The river must be on the other side,' said Peregrine, 'We have only to get to the top and the
Château should be opposite us.'

'Only,' muttered Glodstone, disentangling his sodden trousers from a bramble bush. But
Peregrine was already pushing ahead, weaving his way through the undergrowth with a cat-like
stealth and litheness that Glodstone couldn't emulate. Before they had reached the ridge, he had
twice had to retrieve his monocle from bushes and once, when Peregrine suddenly froze and
signalled to him to do the same, had stood awkwardly with one foot poised over a pile of
twigs.

'What the devil are we waiting for?' he asked in a hoarse whisper. 'I can't stand here like a
damned heron on one leg.'

'I could have sworn I heard something,' said Peregrine.

'Another bloody sheep, I daresay,' muttered Glodstone but Peregrine was immune to sarcasm.

'You don't get sheep in woods. They're ruminants. They eat grass and '

'Have two blasted stomachs. I know all that. I didn't come all this way to listen to a lecture
on animal physiology. Get a move on.'

'But you said '

Glodstone put his foot down to end the discussion and, shoving past Peregrine, blundered on up
the hill. As he crested the rise, he stopped for a moment to get his breath back only to have it
taken away again by the view ahead. Like some holy shrine to which he had at last come, the
Château Carmagnac stood on a pinnacle of rock half a mile away across the Gorge du Boose. Even to
Glodstone the Château exceeded a life-time's devotion to the unreal. Towers and turrets topped by
spire-like roofs were clustered around an open courtyard which seemed to overhang the river. An
ornate stone balustrade topped the cliff and to the south, beneath the largest tower, was an
archway closed by a massive pair of gates.

Then, realizing that he might be seen from its windows, he dropped to the turf, and, reaching
for his binoculars, scanned the place in an ecstasy mixed with anxiety, as if the Château was
some mirage which might at any moment disappear. But the glasses only magnified his joy.
Everything about the Château was perfect. Window-boxes of geraniums hung from the first floor as
did a stone balcony; a tiny belvedere perched on a slim promontory above the cliff; orange trees
in tubs stood on either side of the steps leading down from doors set in a round tower whose
walls were pierced at intervals to indicate the passage of a staircase that circled up it. In
short, all was as Glodstone would have had it. And as he looked, the sun broke through the clouds
and the spires and the flagstones of the courtyard gleamed silver in its light.

Glodstone put down the binoculars and studied the surrounding landscape. It was rather
unpleasantly at odds with the Château itself and while the latter had a festive air about it, the
same couldn't be said for its environs. To put it bluntly, the country was as bleak and barren as
the Château was ornamental. A few rather desiccated walnut trees had been planted, and presumably
irrigated ever since, to provide an avenue for the portion of the drive closest to the main gates
but for the rest the Château was surrounded by open ground which afforded no cover. And the drive
itself was formidable. Cut into the rock to the south of the Château, it writhed its way up the
cliff in a series of extraordinary bends which suggested a truly maniacal desire for the
spectacular on the part of its designer. Finally, to make the approach by road still more secure,
a wooden bridge without a guard rail spanned the river.

'Dashed cunning,' Glodstone muttered. 'There's no way of crossing that bridge without
signalling your coming.' As if to prove the truth of this observation, a van turned off the road
below them and rattled slowly across the planks before grinding its way in bottom gear up the
quarried drive. Glodstone watched it reach the walnut trees and disappear round the rear of the
Château. Then he turned hopefully to the north in search of an easier way up. True, the slope was
less perpendicular than the cliff but the few stunted thorn trees managing to grow among the
rocks afforded little cover. And the rocks themselves seemed untrustworthy, to judge by the
number that had rolled down and now formed a barrier along the river bank. Last but by no means
least in the list of natural hazards was the river itself. It swirled round the base of the cliff
with a dark and malevolent turbulence that suggested it was both deep and subject to dangerous
currents.

'Well, we've had a preliminary look at the place,' he told Peregrine. 'What we need now is to
establish a base camp out of sight and get something warm inside us while we consider the next
move.'

They crawled back off the ridge and found a suitable space among the bracken. There, while
Peregrine heated up some baked beans on the stove, Glodstone sat on his rucksack sucking his pipe
and pondered what to do.

For the rest of the day Glodstone lay in the sun drying himself out and keeping a close watch
on the Château.

'They're bound to have some system for watching the roads,' he told Peregrine, 'and for
signalling when someone suspicious puts in an appearance and once we find out what that is we can
bypass it.'

'Yes, but we're not on the road,' said Peregrine. 'I should have thought the simplest thing
would be to swim the river and shin up the cliff...What's the matter?'

'Nothing,' said Glodstone when he could bring himself to speak, 'And when do you propose we do
this? In broad bloody daylight?'

'Well, no, we'd have to do it after dark.'

Glodstone gnawed on the stem of his pipe and tried to control himself. 'Listen,' he said
finally, 'if you're seriously suggesting that we try to climb what amounts to the north face of
the Eiger, on a miniature scale, in pitch darkness, you must have less between the ears than I
thought you had. We've come here to save the Countess, not to commit bloody suicide. Why do you
think the Château is walled on three sides but there's only a balustrade above the river?'