Nine Coaches Waiting (27 page)

“Yes," I said, and then, desperately: "
No
."

"But why-?"

"Don't Philippe, please. I can't-" I looked away from him and said tightly: "Don't you see, we can't take risks of any kind. However sure we are we've got to be-we've got to be sure." I finished a bit raggedly. "Don't you

see?”

If he saw anything odd in this remarkably silly speech he didn't show it. With a shy but a curiously unchildlike gesture he put out a hand and touched mine. "Mademoiselle-"

"I'm not crying, Philippe. Not really. Don't worry. It's only that I'm tired and I didn't get much sleep last night and it's long past time for food." Somehow I smiled at him and dabbed at my face while he watched me with troubled eyes. "Sorry
, mon p'tit.
You're standing this trek of ours like a Trojan, and I'm behaving like a fool of a woman. I'm all right now."

"We'll have lunch," said Philippe, taking a firm hold of the situation.

"Okay, Napoleon," I said, putting away my handkerchief, "but we'd better stay where we are for a little while longer, just to make sure."

"That he's really gone?"

"Yes," I said, "that he's really gone."

Philippe relaxed obediently into the shelter of the whins, and lay chin on hand, watching the road below him through a gap in the thick green. I turned on my back so that the sun was on my face, and closed my eyes. Even then I didn't want to face it. I wanted to go on, blind, cowardly, instinct-driven… but as I lay there listening for the engine of his car the thing that I had been trying to keep back, dammed out of mind, broke over me. And before I had thought further than simply his name I knew how very far I was-still was-from jettisoning him along with the others. Instinct might make me shrink from Léon de Valmy, and keep me a chilly mile away from Héloïse, but-it seemed-whatever evidence, whatever "proof' I was offered, I still sprang without thought straight to his defence.

Because you want it that way. Haven't you been enough of a fool, Cinderella?
I stirred on the warm grass with sharp discomfort, but still somewhere inside me hammered the insistent advocate for the defence…

Everything that had happened since Raoul had entered the affair, everything he had said and done, could bear an innocent interpretation as well as a guilty one… or so I told myself, groping wearily, confusedly, back through the fogs of memory. A word here, a look there-never did frailer witnesses plead more desperately. He had not known of the attempts to get a non-French-speaking governess; he hadn't been worried, only amused, at the thought that I might have eavesdropped on his father's conversation; he had seemed as shocked as I was over the shooting in the wood; his sharp questions about William Blake, and that curiously touchy temper he had shown, might have been due to jealousy or some other preoccupation, and not to the realisation that the "friendless" orphan was in touch with a tough-looking Englishman in the neighbourhood; and that blast of the horn that brought Philippe out onto the balcony-that might have been fortuitous. Bernard hadn't spoken of it. As for Bernard's flat statement to Berthe that it had been Raoul who had shot at Philippe in the wood, I didn't regard that as evidence at all. Even in his drunken mood, and however sure he had made himself of Berthe, Bernard might well hesitate to admit that kind of guilt to her. Then at the dance…

But here the pleading memories whirled up into a ragged and flying confusion, a blizzard so blinding that, like Alice among the cards, I came to myself trying to beat them off. And I was asked to believe that these, too, were dead and painted like a pack of cards? Something to put away now in a drawer, and take out again, years hence, dusty, to thumb over in a dreary game of solitaire? Yes, there it was. For Philippe's sake I had to assume Raoul's guilt. I couldn't afford to do anything else. The child had only one life to lose, and I couldn't stake it. Raoul was guilty till he could be proved innocent. In that, if in no other part of my crazy fear-driven plans, I had been right. He was here but we couldn't run to him.

Close to my ear Philippe whispered: "Mademoiselle."

I opened my eyes. His face was close to mine. It was scared. He breathed: "There's someone on the hilltop behind. He's just come through the wood. I think it's Bernard. D'you suppose he's in it too?"

I nodded and put a swift finger to my lips, then lifted my head cautiously and peered through the screening whins towards the hill behind us. At first I saw nothing but the trees and the tangling banks of scrub, but presently I picked him out. It was Bernard. He was above us, about two hundred yards away, standing beside a big spruce. There was no need to tell Philippe to keep close; we both lay as still as rabbits in our thicket of green. Bernard was standing motionless, scanning the slope below him. The moments dragged. He was looking our way. His gaze seemed to catch on us, to linger, to pass on, to return…

He was coming quickly down the hill in our direction.

I suppose a rabbit stays still while death stalks it just because it is hoping against hope that this is not death. We stayed still.

He had covered half the distance, not hurrying, when I heard the Cadillac coming back.

My hand pressed hard over Philippe's on the short turf. I turned my head and craned to stare up the road. My muscles tensed themselves as if they would carry me without my willing it straight down into his path.

I don't know to this day whether I really would have run to him then or not, but before I could move I heard the brakes go on. The tyres bit at the soft gravel of the road and the car pulled up short some fifty yards away from us. I could see him through my screen of whins. He was looking uphill towards Bernard. The horn blared twice. Bernard had stopped. I saw Raoul lift his hand. Bernard changed course and walked quickly down the hill towards the car. He jumped the ditch and hurried up to the door. Raoul said something to him, and I saw Bernard shake his head, then turn with a wide gesture that included all the hill from where we lay back to Dieudonné. Then Raoul gave a sideways jerk of the head and Bernard went round the bonnet and got in beside him.

The Cadillic went slowly by below us. Raoul was lighting a cigarette and his head was bent. Bernard was talking earnestly to him.

I turned to meet Philippe's eyes.

After a while I got up slowly and reached a hand down to him. "Come along," I said, "let's get back from the road and find somewhere to have lunch."

After we had eaten we took to the woods again without seeing another soul, and some time in the middle of the afternoon our path led us out of a wild tangle of hornbeam and honeysuckle onto a little green plateau; and there, not so very far to the north of us we saw at last, through the tops of the still-bare trees, the blue levels of Lac Léman.

"This," I said, "is where we stop for a while."

Philippe was surveying the little dell. It was sheltered and sun-drenched, a green shelf in the middle of the wood. Behind us the trees and bushes of the wild forest crowded up the hill, dark holly and the bone-pale boughs of ash gleaming sharp through a mist of birch as purple as bloom on a grape. Below the open shelf the tangle of boughs fell steeply towards Thonon. Those bright roofs and coloured walls were, I judged, little more than a mile away. I saw the gleam of a spire, and the smooth sweep of some open square with brilliant flowerbeds and a white coping above the lake. Even in the town there were trees; willows in precise Chinese shapes, cypresses spearing up Italian-fashion against the blue water, and here and there against some painted wall a burst of pale blossom like a cloud.

At my feet a small stream ran, and a little way off, under the flank of a fallen birch, there were primroses.

Philippe slipped a hand into mine. "I know this place."

"Do you? How?"

"I've been here for a picnic. There were foxgloves and we had
pâtisseries belges."

"Do you remember the way down into Thonon? Where does it land us?”

He pointed to the left. "The path goes down there, like steps. There's a fence at the bottom and a sort of lane. It takes you to a road and you come out by a garage and a shop where they keep a ginger cat with no tail.”

"Is it a main street?"

He wrinkled his forehead at me. "We-ell-"

"Is it full of shops and people and traffic?"

"Oh, no. It has trees and high walls. People live there." A residential area. So much the better. I said: "Could you find your way from there to the Villa Mireille?"

"Of
course.
There's a path between two garden walls that takes you to the road above the lake and then you go down and down and
down
till you get to the bottom road where the gate is. We always went by the funicular."

"I'm afraid we can't. Well, that's wonderful, Philippe. We're practically there! And with you as guide"-I smiled at him-"we can't go far wrong, can we? Later we'll see how much I can remember of what you told me about the Villa Mireille, but just for the moment I think we'll stop and rest."

"Here?"

"Right here."

He sat thankfully down on the fallen birch. "My legs are
aching.

"I'm not surprised."

"Are yours?"

“Well, no. But I did miss my sleep last night and if I don't have a rest this minute I shall go to sleep on my feet."

"Like a horse," said Philippe, and giggled, albeit a little thinly.

I flicked his check. "Exactly like a horse. Now, you get tea ready while I make the bed."

"English tea?"

"Of course."

The grass was quite dry, and the sun stood hot overhead in the calm air. I knelt down beside the birch-log and carefully removed two dead boughs, a thistle, and some sharp stones from our "bed", then spread out my coat. Philippe, solemn-eyed, was dividing the last of William's biscuits into equal parts. He banded me mine, together with half a stick of chocolate. We ate slowly and in silence.

Presently I said: "Philippe."

"Yes, mademoiselle?"

"We'll be down in Thonon pretty soon now. We really ought to go straight to the police."

The big eyes stared. He said nothing.

I said: "I don't know where the nearest British Consul is, or we'd go to him. I don't suppose there's one in Évian, and we can't get to Geneva because you've no passport. So it should be the police."

Still he said nothing. I waited. I think he knew as well as I did that the first thing the police would do would be to face us both with Léon de Valmy. After a while he asked: "What time will my Uncle Hippolyte get home?"

"I've no idea. He may be here already, but I think we may have to wait till late… after dark."

A pause. "Where is this Monsieur Blake?"

"I don't know. He may be out somewhere in Dieudonné, or he may have gone back up to the hut. But we-we couldn't very well wait for him there." He gave me a quick look and I added hastily: "We might telephone the Coq Hardi from Thonon. They might be able to give him a message. Yes, that's a good idea. We can try that."

Still he said nothing. I looked at him a little desperately. "You want to go and look for your uncle first? Is that

it?"

A nod.

"Philippe, you'd be quite safe if we went to the police, you know. We-we should do that. They'd be frightfully nice to you, and they'd look after you till your Uncle Hippolyte came- better than I can. We really should."

"No. Please. Please, Miss Martin."

I knew I ought to insist. It wasn't only the eloquence of Philippe's silences, and the clutch of the small cold hand that decided me. Nor was it only that I was afraid of facing Léon de Valmy… though, with the anger spilt out of me and dissolved in weariness, my very bones turned coward at the thought of confronting him in the presence of the police.

There was another reason. I admitted it out of a cold grey self-contempt. I might have braved Léon de Valmy and the police, but I didn't want to face Raoul. I was a fool; moreover, if I allowed any more risk to the child I was a criminal fool… but I would not go to the police while there was any chance that Raoul might be involved. I wasn't ready, yet, to test the theories of that advocate for the defence who pleaded still so desperately through today's tears. I couldn't bring the police in… not yet. If they had to be told, I didn't even want to be there. I was going to wait for Monsieur Hippolyte and, like a craven, hand the whole thing to him. Let the
deus ex machina
fly in out of the clouds and do the dirty work. I was only a woman, and a coward, and not ready, even, to face my own thoughts.

I gave a little sigh. "All right. We'll go to the Villa Mireille first. In any case they've already searched it."

"How d'you know?"

"Eh? Oh, well, I imagine they have, don't you? But your uncle won't be there yet,
petit,
of that I'm sure. We'll stay here a little while and rest. I don't feel fit for very much more just yet. Here, you may as well finish the last of the chocolate."

"Thank you." He gave me a watery smile. "I'm sleepy."

"Well, curl up there and sleep. I'm going to."

"I'm thirsty, too."

"I imagine the stream's all right. It comes straight down the hillside. Let's risk it anyway."

We drank, and then lay down in the sun, curled close together on my coat, and soon we slept.

I needn't have been afraid that any restless ecstasy of the mind would keep me awake. Sleep fell from nowhere like a black cloud and blotted me out. I never stirred or blinked until the sun had his chin on the hilltop beyond Dieudonné valley, and the shadows of the naked trees stretched long-fingered across the glade to touch us with the first tiny chill of evening.

Philippe was awake already, sitting with knees drawn up and chin on them, gazing a little sombrely at the distant housetops, purpling in the fading light. The lake was pale now as an opal, swimming under the faint beginnings of mist. In the distance on the further shore we could see, touched in with rose and apricot, the snows of Switzerland.

Brightness falls from the air…
I gave a little shiver, then cot to my feet and pulled the silent Philippe to his. "Now," I said briskly, "you show me that path of yours
, petit,
and we'll be on our way."

His memory proved accurate enough. The path was there, and the narrow country road, and the corner with the garage and the shop, past which we hurried in case anyone should recognise him from his previous visits. He never spoke, and his hand in mine had become perceptibly more of a drag. I watched him worriedly. His frail energy was running out visibly now, sand from the brittle glass. I thought of the long wait that probably still lay ahead of us, and bit my lip in a prolonged pain of indecision.

The dusk had fairly dropped now over the town. We walked along a high-walled street where the pavements were bordered with lopped willows. The lamps had come on, and festoons of gleaming telegraph wires pinned back the blue dusk. Few people were about. A lorry started up from the garage and drove off with a clatter, its yellow lights like lion's eyes in the half-light. A big car purred by on its own hasty business. Two workmen on bicycles pedalled purposefully home. From a side street came the raucous voice of a radio and the smell of frying.

Philippe stopped. His face, lifted to mine, looked small and pale. He said: "That's the way, mademoiselle."

I looked to my right where a vennel led off the street between two high ivy-covered walls. It was narrow and unlighted, vanishing into shadow within twenty yards. A loose spray of ivy tapped the wall; its leaves were sharp and black and clicked like metal.

From the opposite side of the road came a burst of laughter, and a woman's voice called something shrill and good-natured. The cafe door clashed, and with the gush of light came once again the heavenly hot smell of food.

The child's hand clutched mine. He said nothing.

Well, what was luck for if it was never to be tempted?

I turned my back on the black little alley. Two minutes later we were sitting at a red-topped table near the stove while a long thin man with a soiled apron and a face like a sad heron waited to be told what we would have to eat.

To this day I vividly remember the smell and taste of everything we had. Soup first, the first delicious hot mouthful for almost twenty-four hours… It was
cr
ȇ
me d'asperge
,
and it came smoking-hot in brown earthenware bowls with handles like gnomes' ears, and asparagus-tips bobbed and steamed on the creamy surface. With the soup came butter with the dew on it, and crusty rolls so new that where they lay on the plastic table-top there was a tiny dull patch of steam.

Philippe revived to that soup as a fern revives to water. When his omelette arrived, a fluffy roll, crisped at the edges, from which mushrooms burst and spilled in their own rich gravy, he tackled it with an almost normal, small-boy's appetite. My own brand of weariness demanded something more solid and I had a steak. It came in a lordly dish with the butter still sizzling on its surface and the juices oozing pinky-brown through the mushrooms and tomatoes and tiny kidneys and the small mountain of crisply- fried onions
filet mignon
can be translated as
darling steak
this was the very sweetheart of its kind. By the time that adorable steak and I had become one flesh I could have taken on the whole Valmy clan single-handed. I complimented the waiter when he came to clear, and his lugubrious face lightened a little.

"And what to follow, mademoiselle? Cheese? A little fruit?"

I glanced at Philippe, who shook his head sleepily. I laughed, "My little brother's nearly asleep. No, no cheese for me, thank you, monsieur. A
café-filtre,
if you please, and a
café-au-lait.”
I fingered the purse in my pocket. "And a benedictine, please."

“Un filtre, un café-au-lait, une bénédictine."
He swept the last crumb from the table, gave the shiny red top a final polish with his cloth, and turned away. I said: "Could monsieur perhaps get me some
jetons?”

"Assuredly." He took the money I held out and in a short time the cups were on the table and I had a little pile of
jetons
in front of me.

Philippe roused himself to blink at them. "What are those?"

I gaped at him. Then it came to me that Monsieur le Comte de Valmy had, course, never had to use a public telephone. I explained softly that one had to buy these little metal plaques to put in the slot of the telephone.

“I should like to do it," said Monsieur le Comte decidedly, showing a spark of animation.

"So you shall
, mon gars
, but not tonight. Better leave it to me." And I rose.

"Where are you going?" He didn't move, but his voice clutched at me.

"Only to the corner behind the bar. See? There's the telephone. I'll be back before my coffee's filtered. You stay here and drink your own-and Philippe, don't look quite so interested in those men over there. Pretend you've been in this sort of place dozens of times, will you?"

"They're not taking any notice."

Neither they were. The only other occupants of the little café besides ourselves were a gang of burly workmen absorbed in some card-game, and a slim youth with hair cut
en brosse
whispering sweet somethings into the ear of a pretty little gipsy in a tight black sweater and skirt. Nobody after the first casual glance had paid the slightest attention to us. The stout patronne who sat over some parrot-coloured knitting behind the bar merely smiled at me and nodded as I picked my way between the tables towards her and asked if I might telephone. Nobody here, at any rate, was on the lookout for a young woman with brown hair and grey eyes, on the run with the kidnapped Comte de Valmy.

It wasn't only luck that protected us, I thought, as I fumbled with the half-forgotten intricacies of the telephone; it was commonsense to suppose that the chances of our being seen and recognised now, here, were very small. One had read dozens of "pursuit" books, from the classic
Thirty-nine Steps
onwards, and in all of them the chief and terrible miracle had been the unceasing and intelligent vigilance of every member of the population. In sober fact, nobody was much interested…

Here one of the card-players raised his eyes from the game to look at me; then he nudged his neighbour and said something. The latter looked up too, and his stare raked me. My heart, in spite of the soothing logic of my thoughts, gave a painful jerk, as with an effort I forced my gaze to slide indifferently past them. I turned a shoulder and leaned against the wall, waiting, bored, for my connection. From the corner of an eye I saw the second man say something and grin. I realised with a rush of amused relief that any pursuit that those two might offer would have other and quite natural motives that had nothing whatever to do with the errant Comte de Valmy.