The Autumn was so fine that Louis continued his visits to Marly until mid-October. Afterwards we had to see to all the injured animals he left behind – the French noblesse ride horses into the ground – so I didn’t get to Paris until well into November.
Vardes thought I had a girl in Paris because, always before I went, I sent word that I was on my way to a Marie-Denise in the rue de Vieux Epiciers by one of the garçons bleus.
I fetched Rosinante from the pasture where grooms kept mounts for their own use. He was the horse I’d spotted between the shafts of the Parisian coal cart. He’d cost every franc in my pocket, plus the pocket – the coalman demanded my jacket as well. The stable lads jeered when I brought him back, still covered with black dust, and gave him the name of Don Quixote’s nag: ‘Voilà, c’est Rosinante.’
He didn’t look much, I admit, with his long neck and forehead and his colouring of monotonous brown, but he had the strongest and easiest action I’ve ever come across.
We crossed the Seine by the Pont de Neuilly. It was a cold, clear day. They say that when Louis came to the throne Paris was a medieval slum. Now it’s a great, tree-lined, boulevarded city that is a pleasure to ride through, cleaner than London and, with 5,000 street lamps and La Reynie’s ruthless police force, a damned sight safer.
But give me London any day. Parisiens might breathe purer air than Londoners, but London has more freedom – as long as you’ve enough money to enjoy it. The French have never put a check on their monarchs like we’ve put on ours. No king or queen of England can reign with the absolute power of a Louis, thank God. There’s no habeas corpus to protect France’s political prisoners; one of Louis’s lettres de cachet could put a man in prison without trial and keep him there until he died, and often did.
He truly believed kings were sacred, answerable to God, not their people. That was why he made his biggest mistake and insisted on maintaining the Pretender as rightful ruler of England, instead of coming to terms with William of Orange like one sensible man with another. It brought France down in the end.
Still, he looked after his soldiers, I’ll say that for him. As I crossed the river again at the Pont des Invalides I went past the dignified buildings and thirty acres where Louis housed 7,000 wounded soldiers who otherwise would have eked out a living as beggars. Chelsea Hospital can’t compare with it.
Personally I liked the old bugger, but if Bratchet thought he was the Sun King she should have looked in the shade now and then. I could have shown it to her, the underbelly; the village on the far side of the hill from Marly where the peasants lived like rats. I could have told her about the tax he’d imposed on marriages and baptisms – baptisms for Christ’s sake, in a country that called itself Christian – to pay for his wars.
What about the Edict of Nantes, I could have asked her. What about him going back on that agreement to allow freedom of worship? In a stroke, he despoiled his country of an entire class, the Protestant bourgeoisie – your own people, Bratchet – well-to-do shopkeepers, skilled workers, silk-makers, glass-blowers, valuable men and women who didn’t want to be forced into Roman Catholicism.
That was his other mistake. When they went they left France an unskilled country. And they took with them tales of children being taken away to be turned into little Papists, of torture, rape and men sent to the galleys, so that Louis XIV’s name became synonymous with brutality throughout Europe and banded its countries against him.
I don’t think he even knew what was being done in his name. I’d had to attend mass at Marly, my father spinning in his grave I expect, and listen to old Louis honestly thank God he was instrumental in gently persuading heretics back to the true faith. That’s the trouble with tyrants: they believe their own advertisements.
And the Bratchet believed it. The Scotch bastard’s fault. Teaching her bloody Latin. Jacobite bloody mumbo-jumbo. But I couldn’t get out of my head the look on her face. I kept hearing her: You left me. Jesus, I should have taken her away when she’d asked. Though as I told her, I’d had troubles of my own then. After all the years I’d spent searching for my mother, I had finally found her. It was just before I was sent to Flanders with the company. ‘Sarah Millet? End bed. Dying from the pox.’
It wasn’t any different from every other poorhouse ward I’d enquired at. Row of beds where women vomited or cried out or writhed or lay still. Same smells of lye and dirt. The notice at the end of her bed said ‘Millet’, but even then I wasn’t sure. I’d kept the image of her face in my mind so long, I thought I’d recognize it. But I couldn’t. I stood there a long time while her head turned to and fro on the wooden pillow. Then I fetched Mrs Defoe. When she saw her, she knelt down and wept. ‘So altered, oh Sary, Sary. Kneel, Martin. Tell her you forgive her.’
She wouldn’t have heard me. What would I have forgiven her for in any case? Marrying a bigoted bully? Trying to save herself and me from his beatings by running away?
‘Jezebel, Martin, she was Jezebel. May her flesh be the portion of dogs.’
It looked as if it had been. London isn’t kind to vulnerable women, no city is. You had to grant Aunt Effie that much; she’d won out – until somebody killed her. My mother hadn’t. I sat for three days by her bed until she died, stroking her hand and talking to her, but I don’t think she heard me. The look on Bratchet’s face before she turned on her heel and left me in the stable was my mother’s as the breath went out of her.
And the devil of it was that, like it or not, I was responsible for the woman because I’d been too late to save my mother. More than responsible. I was beginning to feel a great deal for the Bratchet.
After I’d finished in Le Brun’s workshops, Rosinante and I ambled into the Bois de Boulogne, where the haut monde of Paris promenades itself up and down on sand paths between the trees. By the Lac des Patineurs there’s a horse trough. I let Rosinante drink and sat down on a tree trunk where spectators sit in winter to watch the skating. Apart from some children floating twig boats on the far side of the lake there was no one around.
Except the man on the other end of the tree trunk.
‘Afternoon, Marie-Denise,’ I said.
‘Miss Marie-Denise to you, cheeky,’ said John Laws.
I swear his own mother would have passed him by. He was in plain brown cloth – not rich, not cheap – and wore an old-fashioned perruque wig, a typical Parisien bourgeois taking an afternoon off. He got up as if to admire Rosinante – ‘What a repulsive animal’ – and, while seeming to examine him, slipped a purse into my saddlebag. We sat down together on the tree, admiring the view.
‘The Pretender’s planning to invade Scotland,’ I said.
‘We know that, ducky.’ He kept his eyes on the lake. ‘The question is when?’
‘Probably the spring.’
‘Don’t happen to know how big his force will be, do you?’
‘Not sure. Talk at Marly says Louis is prepared to send five thousand troops. They’ll go from Dunkirk.’
‘Mmm. Wish we had a date, though.’
‘Have you got anything for me?’
‘As a matter of fact, ducky, we have. We’ve intercepted a letter from St-Germain among a batch on its way to naughty, naughty William Greg. Addressed to an Anne Boleyn, would you believe. Confirming an instruction to “dispose of the goods”.’
Bratchet. ‘When was this?’
‘The letter? Ages ago. Beginning of the year. We’ve only just got round to decoding it. We’re very busy, you know. Now don’t go rushing off in a manly sweat.’ I’d begun tightening Rosinante’s girth. ‘My spy at St-Germain reported Mlle La Fée as still chirruping happily around the place only yesterday.’
‘Why in hell don’t you get William Greg to talk?’
‘My dear, they’ve been tickling his feet with feather dusters for months. Not a cheep from him.’
I tried to think. The letter had been sent at the beginning of the year, but nobody had yet made any attempt on Bratchet’s life, and she’d been there since February. Perhaps they weren’t going to. Or perhaps somebody was still waiting for an opportunity. Or perhaps they hadn’t been in a position to use an opportunity when it came. I said, ‘Who was at St-Germain in January and has been absent ever since?’
‘My dear boy… ah, I see what you mean.’ He was quick, Laws, I give him that. ‘Well now, the Pretender has. He’s been fighting for dear Louis against Marlborough – such a compelling way to inspire the English to love him. But unless she’s spilled a lot of his mother’s rouge, I don’t think he’d kill a serving girl, do you? Then there’s Mme Francesca, she’s been in retreat or something, but I believe the…’
‘The grandmother. It’s her.’
Laws blinked. ‘Really? Stab of her crochet needle in the dark? Fatal blow from a pincushion? You may be right, of course. My spy tells me she’s only now returned for the winter.’
‘When? When did she get back?’
‘Two or three weeks ago. Do you really think it’s her? Tut, tut, what are grandmothers coming to these days?’
I cantered off while he was still musing on it. I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t thank him even.
With the return of Francesca Bard, life at St-Germain lost some of its sunniness for Bratchet. Winter returned at the same time and the exiles sat in front of fires too small for the château’s enormous fireplaces and complained of the cold.
Bratchet waited for two days for a summons from Anne Bard’s grandmother which did not come. At last she took the initiative and approached Francesca’s maid in the household staff kitchen. ‘Good morning, Mlle Beate,’ she said quietly in French, ‘I wondered when Mme Bard would want to see me.’
‘She don’t,’ said Mlle Beate, and walked off.
Bratchet caught her up in a passageway. ‘She sent for me.’
‘You?’ Bratchet received a look of such malevolence that she took a step back. ‘You leave alone.’ The woman hurried off, muttering. Bratchet heard exclamations like ‘Sale poule!’ and ‘Souillon!’ echoing back along the passage.
‘She seemed to hate me,’ she told Mme Putti.
‘Magyar,’ explained Mme Putti. ‘She hate everybody.’
Beate, it appeared, was not popular. When she wasn’t accompanying Francesca on her cures and retreats, she lived in her mistress’s room and was seen seldom around the château, which was a relief to everybody. Squat, with a hairline that started low down on her forehead, and speaking, when she spoke at all, with an accent from darkest Middle Europe, she was known to the exiles as the ‘Bête Noire’.
‘Woman ugly like that ought to be polite,’ Mme Putti said.
Not only was Beate rude, she possessed a temper that kept her fellow servants at a respectful distance. She had once, in a quarrel over some sausages, stabbed Mrs Collins, the laundress, in the hand so badly that Mrs Collins had been off duty for a month. Mary of Modena would have sent her away immediately if Francesca hadn’t pleaded for her and stood surety for her good behaviour.
Dr MacLaverty spoke more kindly of her than did others, but he spoke kindly of everybody. ‘She’s frightened for the future, like the rest of us,’ he told the Bratchet. ‘She’s devoted to Francesca, not the cause, so she’ll have no place here when Francesca dies.’
But everybody else felt that the only compensation to be gained from the death of Francesca Bard – and they were fond of her – was that Mlle Beate could then flap off to whatever vampire-infested fastness she’d come from.
Bratchet was slow to resentment. For all her new-found self-regard, Effie Sly had accustomed her to being bullied. But the situation began to rankle. ‘Bugger the Magyar. Francesca’s the reason I’m here. She wants to see me. I want to see her.’
Francesca’s room was at the top of a circular stair in one of St- Germain’s turrets. Bratchet found herself facing a small, arched door decorated by a snarling gargoyle of a knocker. She rapped on it. And rapped again. There was no answer, no sound from inside, but the knocker had the same virulence with which Beate had looked at her in the kitchens. As if the woman were peering out at her through its eyes.
Bratchet lost her nerve and retired down the dark and winding steps. She didn’t go back until Kilsyth returned to St-Germain in the train of young men that accompanied the Pretender, the war having stopped for the winter.
She was on duty on the day they trooped in to pay their duty to Mary of Modena. It was the first time Bratchet had seen James Francis, the young man who, she’d been told, was really England’s king. She was disappointed. All the queen’s women who’d had a hand in raising him told tales of his cleverness, beauty, piety, his fitness to be King of England – and here they’d drop their voices – a wiser one than his father. Bratchet expected a glorious young Caesar.
The prince was good-looking enough, like all the Stuarts, with the dark eyes of his mother, and, no doubt, possessed the virtues attributed to him. But something was missing, something his sister had and he did not; charm perhaps, the ability to thrill.
He’s very neat, she thought. James’s velvet coat had remained unspattered by his journey from the front, the buckles on his boots still shone. An inherited bitterness was thinning his mouth. Because he couldn’t afford the equipment considered necessary to his rank he had to fight under the incognito of ‘Chevalier de Saint-Georges’.
As far as Bratchet was concerned, it was Kilsyth who dominated the chamber, almost literally, spattering its carpet with mud from his boots, telling Mary of Modena of her son’s prowess in the field. ‘He was grand, Majesty, ye should have seen him. And the Sasunnoch soldiers refusing to charge when they recognized him. I tell ye, the Union’s hated.’ But for Bratchet, it was Kilsyth who was grand in his tartan. Quel homme. Ardent but manly. Sensitive, brave, wholehearted in everything he did.
Left to herself, the Bratchet of Puddle Court would have allowed her self-loathing after the rape to drive her into a grotesque fulfilment of sin. She’d felt tempted to join Floss and the ladies who plied their trade next door, not because rape had roused her sexuality – it had done the opposite – but in an attempt at distorted expiation: I am soiled therefore let me be more soiled.
Oddly, it had been Effie who’d saved her. She’d told Bratchet, ‘You’re a lady’s maid and don’t you forget it. Just because one gentleman ploughed his furrow it don’t mean we let ’em all in the field.’
To that extent, Bratchet had been saved from the death that awaited so many maids who suffered fates worse than. But her sexuality was shrivelled before it could be said to have budded. While her contemporaries fluttered their eyelashes and their hearts, Bratchet wondered why they bothered. Love-making? Hate-making more like.
Now, late in the day, here was Livingstone of Kilsyth, who treated her with respect, who demanded nothing of her, and because he demanded nothing of her, Bratchet was experiencing a deliciously painful passion which stored up the beloved’s every expression, every word referring to herself, to be recollected later in his absence, an experience she found as pleasurable as, possibly more than, his presence.
For the first time she felt the dewy irrigation of love.
She was glad she had an excuse to seek him out on the terrace later that evening to tell him that though Francesca had returned to St-Germain, her maid refused permission for a visit.
‘Refused permission? What’s the woman up to? We’ll see to it this minute.’
Grabbing Bratchet’s hand, he hurried her through the corridors and up the stairs to the turret. She thought how he was like an awakening prince; the flap of his boots on the stair, his knock, the cry, ‘Wake there, my lady. Here’s Livingstone of Kilsyth to see ye,’ took menace and mystery from the door that had baffled Bratchet. After shuffling and mutterings behind it, it was opened by Beate.
Unusually for St-Germain on a winter night, the room they entered was warm, almost hot. It should have been a lantern, the windows on its eight sides allowing views on to gardens and roofs and letting in light, but the windows were shuttered and the walls covered by arras in front of which screens advanced to a few yards around a canopied, curtained bed facing the door, its resemblance to a catafalque increased by the corpse that occupied it. The corpse of Anne Bonny.
Bratchet’s indrawn breath caused the corpse to open its eyes and Kilsyth to ask her what was the matter. The bones of the face, the set of the mouth, neck and shoulders were so like Anne’s that Bratchet was shocked into the superstition of folk tales; the Little People had taken Anne to some kingdom where she’d aged ten years for everybody else’s one.
‘Anne,’ wailed the Bratchet, completely unnerved, ‘What did they do to you?’ They’d shrivelled her, but even the wavy white hair grew as Anne’s wavy black hair had grown.
‘Anne? You know my granddaughter?’ The voice was Anne’s given the quaver of old age.
‘Indeed we do, ma’am,’ shouted Kilsyth, ‘And are here to enquire after her, if you will be so good. And yourself, ma’am, do ye prosper?’
‘Beate, Beate, I’m not deaf,’ moaned Anne’s grandmother, ‘I do not prosper.’
‘You make noise, I kill you,’ Beate told him, ‘She very ill.’
That was evident. The old lady’s skin was an almost transparent layer like thin beeswax over her skeleton and showed yellow against the linen of her pillows. She was so insubstantial that she seemed to have been sloughed by an emergent, newer self which had wriggled away somewhere else. Her breathing made irregular scratches on the silence of the room.
Nevertheless, the resemblance to her granddaughter gave Bratchet an illogical déjà vu sense that Francesca must recognize her. She went to the bed and picked up one of the frail hands in hers and kissed it. ‘You are so like Anne,’ she said. ‘She was my friend.’
‘You know Anne?’ Small, gapped yellow teeth showed eagerly.
‘I’ve been searching for her. Can you tell me where she is?’
‘She was here. When was it?’ The old lady’s eyes were concentrated on the end of the bed where Kilsyth stood, suddenly still, without seeing him. ‘She was here. Beate, was it last month?’
Beate had sat herself on the other side of the bed and was working at a lacemaker’s cushion which rested on a small table. Her thick hands whipped the bobbins in and out, under and over, creating what seemed to be a growing snowflake. She didn’t answer.
‘Or it may have been last year,’ nodded Francesca. ‘I become confused. Why do I think she was in the army?’
Bratchet looked helplessly at Kilsyth, who shrugged with equal helplessness, then boomed, ‘Where has she gone, ma’am? Where did Anne go?’
Francesca became distressed again. ‘Beate, he is too loud. Where did Anne go? Why do I think of the West Indies? Was it the West Indies, Beate?’
The maid was putting away the lace cushion. ‘Now you go,’ she said, and disappeared behind a screen lacquered with dragon patterns. They heard the clink of tin and into the room’s smell of heavy cloth, perfume and aged skin, came a new odour.
Kilsyth demanded of Francesca, ‘Can ye no tell us, lady, where Anne is that we can send for her?’
Watching Francesca’s face for the answer, they both saw it slacken and her eyebrows rise as if somebody unexpected and unwelcome had appeared behind them.
Involuntarily, they looked back. When they turned again, Francesca’s hands were plucking at her sheets and she was moaning.
Beate looked round from behind a screen. ‘Out,’ she said, ’out, out, out.’
‘Balm,’ begged Francesca, ‘balm.’
‘Comink, my darlink,’ the Bête’s voice was soothing even as she made pushing gestures with her hands at Kilsyth and Bratchet. ‘It cooks now. Comink.’
‘Quick,’ Francesca was saying, ‘quick, quick.’
Beate appeared again; she had a dish warmer in her hands and the smell was stronger and headier. She screamed at them, ‘Out. Out or I kill you.’
They retreated and closed the door behind them. Bratchet sagged with disappointment. ‘Do you think Anne was ever here?’
‘Who knows? Nobody else saw her.’ It was the first time she’d seen him hopeless. By the time they’d reached the bottom of the stairs, he’d recovered. ‘Tomorrow maybe the lady will have her wits back. Si je puis, the motto of the Kilsyths. If it can be done, it will be done. We’ll spend every moment possible at the poor woman’s bedside.’ He paused. ‘What hell’s broth was that the dwarf was feeding her?’
Bratchet hadn’t spent her time round the docks of London for nothing. ‘Opium,’ she said.
It was Kilsyth who asked, and gained, permission from Mary of Modena for Bratchet to have a short leave of absence from duty so that they could attend the sickbed of Francesca Bard. ‘The dame’s my kinswoman, ma’am and in a poor way.’
‘God have mercy on her,’ said Queen Mary. ‘If you and my little La Fée can distract her thoughts, then it is charity to do so.’
But it was Bratchet who did the attending and distracting; the Highlander found it necessary to accompany James Francis when he went hunting, which he did nearly every day.
It was a period lasting three weeks but Bratchet remembered it as longer. Every morning she dreaded the climb up the turret stairs to a room as cluttered with keepsakes as Effie’s rooms had been, though richer – silk fans, enamelled pill boxes, a pillared clock with a deadening tick, satin screens – and, everywhere, in crucifixes and paintings, horribly realistic depictions of Christ on the Cross to match the recurring bouts of agony suffered by the woman in the bed.
And, all the time, emanating across it was Beate’s malevolence. When she wasn’t looking after her mistress, the maid returned to her lacework so that, from that day on, the click of bobbins and the tick of a clock induced a feeling of discomfort in Bratchet that bordered on nausea. Why Beate hated her she couldn’t think, but she felt there was more here than the general animosity of a disordered mind; this was personal.
Apart from the ‘I kill you’s every time the Bratchet did something to displease her, Beate didn’t address her. Except once, when she suddenly spat out a question: ‘You say your prayers?’
‘Yes,’ Bratchet told her, ‘every night.’
Beate nodded.
The woman’s devotion to Francesca, however, was absolute. The old lady was kept clean, given food with a spoon and drink from a beaker like a beloved child, while Beate crooned lullabies in her native tongue, whatever it was. The bed frothed with Beate’s lace, every pillow was decorated with it, it hemmed the lovely caps that adorned Francesca’s hair afresh every morning. A little tray of sweetmeats was kept within reach of the patient’s hand, each one nestling in a tiny cup of lace.
With the onset of the pain, Bratchet was bundled out of the room to wait on the landing and smell the scent of opium coming from under the door. When she returned, the pupils of Francesca’s eyes were tiny black dots and her expression peaceful.
In between the pain and the opium doses there was a point where she wanted to talk, but she did it in the form of a loop in which Bratchet’s questions about Anne were met with the same answers: ‘She was here, wasn’t she? When was it, Beate? Was it last month? I become confused. Why do I think she was in the army? That is very ridiculous.’
The ghost of Anne Bard hovered in the room but Bratchet’s attempts to grasp it were like trying to capture smoke.
‘I think Anne did come here, but a long time ago,’ she reported to Kilsyth, ‘I think it must have been her who was in the Dragoons and that she came on here from Ghent when the French captured it. She must have taken Mary’s name to throw her enemies off the scent.’
Kilsyth shook his head. ‘That bold harpy in the Dragoons was never Bonny Anne,’ he said. ‘Ye don’t realize… I saw Anne once. Her mother brought her to Cairnvreckan to present her in the hall of my chief. The delicate wee hands of her, the holy innocence…’
‘How old was she?’ asked Bratchet.
‘Six, mebbe seven. I was no much older myself.’ He sighed. ‘My heart and sword were hers then, and hers they’ve been ay since.’
‘Yes, well,’ said Bratchet, tartly, ‘Things happen. People change.’
It was evening and they were walking through the gardens where other returned Jacobite soldiers were entertaining their ladies in the privacy of the chilly moonlight, the only privacy there was. Murmuring voices came from under the trees, and from behind the occasional bush, panting.
Kilsyth spoke low, but not really to her. ‘I’m thinking how it would answer for Anne to marry James. Would the English not accept a Catholic Stuart if he were wed to a Protestant Stuart, and one so lovely? Aye, it would be the solution. She’d win their hearts as she won mine. It’d be the grand thing all ways round.’
It appeared that the Pretender had managed to fire at least Kilsyth’s loyalty into wishing him back on to his father’s throne. Bratchet stood her remembered Anne alongside the unimpassioned figure of James and doubted it. He hadn’t fired anything in her; it wasn’t likely he would fire Anne either.
She was irked by Kilsyth’s idealized passion for a girl of six or seven. ‘Don’t want to marry her yourself, then?’
He was shocked. ‘These are high matters. Personal feelings do not come into it. For the good of Scotland I’d sacrifice all I have. What an alliance would be there. And a grand advantage for my clan.’
He’s fallen in love with the Pretender just as he had with Anne, thought Bratchet. He wants to reconcile their two causes together. Alliances. Sacrifices. She didn’t understand the politics, but she recognized nonsense when she heard it.
‘All I can say is, you don’t know Anne like I do.’
It struck her that very few people did. ‘How well do you think Francesca knows her?’ In all Anne’s tales of her childhood travels, she had not mentioned her grandmother.
Kilsyth pondered and said with surprise: ‘Mebbe not at all. Her daughter-in-law had little love for her, being Protestant and Francesca a strong Catholic. And with the war gone on so long, she’d no have had access to France for years.’
Then Francesca’s conviction that she had met her granddaughter might well be the wishful thinking of a mind grown too old. Already depressed by the knowledge that Kilsyth worshipped a figure which lived only in his imagination and couldn’t therefore be rivalled, Bratchet experienced a sense of desolation. ‘We’ll never find Anne.’
Kilsyth gave her a comradely slap on the back that made her cough. ‘We must and we will. The flaming cross will burn brighter for James if he has a Highland lass for his queen. There’d be a true Union for ye. We’ll find her, lassie.’
He took her back to the door of her room, kissed her hand and said goodnight. She could hear him singing in a loud baritone as he marched down L‘Escalier du Pape:
‘His heart was all on honour bent,
He could not stoop to love,
No lady in the land had power
His frozen heart to move.’
So could everybody else hear him. Complaints in all the languages of Catholic Europe issued from doors along the passage where people were trying to sleep.
Glorious. The man created his own fiction and lived in it; kings, queens, the battle for thrones, questing knights and ladies, hopeless passion, sacrifice. And if he loved Anne, whom she loved, it gave a fitting bitter-sweet tristesse to the romance. She must be grateful he had whirled her into it. Whatever the ending might be, it would be better than Puddle Court.
There was little romance, however, to the days she spent in the turret room. Bratchet grew sorrier and sorrier for Francesca and her suffering as she gained glimpses into the old lady’s past and her attempts to retrieve her dignity after Prince Rupert had put her away.
Certain stimuli, a word, would set up a remembrance. If the locket at her throat shifted when she moved, she would insist on Bratchet opening it to see the miniatures of Rupert and herself when young inside it. Then Francesca would whisper as if it were a secret, ‘I was younger and prettier. He was mad for me, always. The actress was a counterfeit, to protect our son from plotters.’
Bratchet gathered that after Francesca’s father’s death – which had unaccountably taken place in Persia – Prince Rupert felt himself responsible for the stricken, beautiful girl, orphan of one of his officers. ‘But if it was his duty, it was his desire too. Mad for me, he was. And it was a marriage as legal as any and wouldn’t Father Waleska attest to it if he were here, poor man, and hadn’t died bird-nesting in ’82.’
When, once or twice, Turnspit trotted into the room with Bratchet, Francesca refused to let Beate turn him out and told Bratchet to feed him ‘a jujube’ from the little, lacy casings of sweetmeats which Beate made for her. ‘Rupert had a poodle just like that who loved my jujubes.’ It was a sign of how her eyes were failing her that she could equate Turnspit with the legendary black poodle which had galloped into battle by his master’s stirrup – the only similarity was both dogs’ liking for sweetmeats.
Bratchet gently mentioned the name of her granddaughter a few more times then ceased to do so. Yes, Anne had been here. When was it? Had she been in the army? Had she gone to the West Indies? Why did she think so?
Whether Anne had in fact visited her grandmother after she’d been abducted from England – mention of her being in the army indicated that it was after — or whether it had been Mary Read who had come and, in talking about Anne, had confused Francesca, it was impossible to find out and to keep pressing the question was unkind.
Bratchet continued her visits because Francesca, in her pain-free moments, seemed to enjoy them, though such moments were becoming fewer. There were dreadful scenes as the moaning began and Francesca’s eyes became huge and fixed on the door, giving to the helpless, watching Bratchet the impression that an invisible wild beast had entered the room to rend the body on the bed. Greater quantities of ‘balm’ were now necessary to bring it relief.
Then came the morning when Bratchet climbed the turret stair to find the door at the top open. Francesca lay on her bed, her arms crossed on her chest with a jewelled crucifix between her hands in her usual pose when asleep.
Looking round for Beate, Bratchet noticed that Francesca’s more valuable possessions were missing, the enamelled boxes, some of the rings on Francesca’s fingers. The room was silent. There was no tick from the dreadful clock, no scratching, laboured breathing.
Bratchet found herself crying. Before she went for Dr MacLaverty, she stood for a moment by the bed to say goodbye. Beate had dressed her mistress more beautifully than ever; the dead face, Anne’s face, nestled in an exquisite lace shawl like a child’s at its christening.
It was decided, after much discussion, that there was little point in trying to apprehend Beate. She had decamped at night with the connivance of a groom, who was also missing. Francesca hadn’t left a will and, since no relatives were likely to come forward to claim them, her rings and pill-boxes would probably have gone to Beate anyway, for her years of service.
Francesca was buried in the St-Germain cemetery, with Prince James and the whole Jacobite court in attendance, Mary of Modena in tears. Her grave wasn’t the only one that had to be hacked out of the frozen earth. The winter was carrying off St-Germain’s elderly; the wife of Sir William Waldegrave, the queen’s doctor, the Abbé Rizzini, and Mrs Hunt, one of the maids.
To replace the runaway groom, Livingstone of Kilsyth applied to Marly for the return of his ‘servant’ Millet since the man had turned up at St-Germain anyway and showed no sign of being willing to go back. Permission was given; the horses at Marly were fit and well and Marly itself going into its winter hibernation until spring and the Sun King woke it up again.
To be honest, I felt a bit of a fool for insisting on coming back to discover that the grandmother was dead and had in any case been incapable of attempting Bratchet’s life. Nobody else had either, a fact that she pointed out without warmth on the few occasions she had to bring a message from the queen to the stables. Even so, I reckoned it was time she and I escaped from France and there wasn’t going to be a better time to do it.
Before the winter began, the allies had capitalized on their victory at Oudenarde by advancing into France and were besieging Lille, the strongest fortress in Europe. They were therefore nearer Paris than at any time since our arrival in the damned country.
I considered the matter carefully. The nearness of the allies wouldn’t help us. Louis’s forces were being kept in the field to prevent the besiegers’ further advance and would cut off our escape in that direction. The route to Le Havre, though, might be open. And Le Havre was the port of call for a boat which, according to John Laws, would take us back to England when it became necessary.
Whether it could make the trip in winter seas was another question. On the other hand our escape would be easier in a winter like this one. The ground was becoming too hard even for hunting and allowing a relaxation in stable work in which my absence wasn’t likely to be noticed for a day or two.
It would mean a difficult journey of one hundred or so miles. Fugitives would be more noticeable on empty roads, but there was the advantage that anybody likely to be curious – sentries, toll-keepers, etc. – would be staying indoors close to their fires.
I began making preparations for our departure, doing a lot of sewing – not my forte – using horsehair, and making a considerable outlay of John Laws’s money on warm clothing.
The most difficult bit of the escape, I reckoned, would be in persuading the Bratchet to come with me.
Though Bratchet had put the queen’s evening posset to warm on the mantelpiece above the fire that had been kept blazing all day, lumps of ice fell into the glass as she poured it from the decanter.
Mary of Modena looked up from her writing table. ‘The ink, La Fée, I want the ink, not the wine.’ For her, the rebuke was sharp; the cold made people irritable.
Bratchet curtseyed and took the silver inkwell from the trivet at the edge of the fire. Through her thick mittens she could feel the heat distorting the metal. Unless ink was almost at boiling point, it froze on the pen and wrote white.
The queen said, ‘We’re all tired.’
It was a form of apology. Bratchet nodded, too exhausted to curtsey again. She had been on duty for sixteen hours because Mme Putti had complained of a headache and gone to bed. As she’d pointed out, she’d stood in for Bratchet while Bratchet sat in Francesca’s room, now Bratchet could stand in for her.
Mme di Fiorenza was nodding in a chair by the royal bedchamber’s fire so that all the fetching, carrying, trips to the kitchens and taking of messages fell on Bratchet. To move three feet out of range of the fire was to be in zero temperature. The high, unlit marble corridors beyond the bedchamber were, quite literally, icy.
The letters Mary of Modena was writing were of sympathy to Louis XIV and Mme de Maintenon on the loss of their confessor, old Père de la Chaise. He’d just died from the cold at Versailles. So had the Princesse de Soubise, one of Louis’s former mistresses.
At last Mary of Modena finished her letters and Bratchet, dismissed for the night, took them to the hall table to await the postboy. She wondered if there would be a postboy to collect them; the last had arrived at the château frozen to his horse and had died shortly afterwards. She stopped wondering; she couldn’t summon up enough concern; the cold was congealing compassion in her veins.
She went to the kitchen and fetched a brick heating in the ashes of the fire – one had to take precautions to warm one’s bed to ensure one wasn’t found dead in it – wrapped it in her skirt, lit a taper and climbed the stairs to her corridor.
The sounds coming from her room made her drop the brick and run. There was an obstruction against the other side of the door and she had to push hard to open it. She stumbled over something but managed to save the taper from going out.
The sounds were coming from Mme Putti on the bed. For a moment it seemed as if the old woman was fighting someone in it with her; the counterpane was billowing up and down. But there was no one else. The commotion was Mme Putti’s legs, kicking.
‘What is it? What is it?’
Mme Putti lurched on to her side. Bratchet saw her face and ran for Dr MacLaverty.
It wasn’t until people brought candles that she found the obstruction against the door was the corpse of Turnspit. There was vomit trickling from his mouth which had drawn back in a rictus.
Mme Putti was still alive the next morning but her face and nails were livid and her breathing difficult. Every so often she went into a convulsion. A frightened Mary of Modena ordered every doctor in the château to examine her – Putti had been with her since her marriage.
Dr MacLaverty had said ‘Poison’ the moment he saw her. So did the others. So did an authoritative little man with black teeth and a stalk of rue stuck up each nostril named de Picard, who, despite the weather, was sent by King Louis and who’d gained his experience, it appeared, during the outbreak of poisoning in the 1680s, a scandal that had touched Versailles itself and discredited the then royal mistress, Mme de Montespan.
‘Does she give herself enemas?’ he asked.
The queen stared at him helplessly across her servant’s bed and looked around for the Bratchet. ‘Does she?’
Bratchet shook her head.
Dr MacLaverty reminded his royal colleague that a dog was included in the case which was not likely to have poisoned itself in a badly applied enema. De Picard examined Turnspit, still lying near the bed under a petticoat of Bratchet’s. He forced the jaws open, stirred his fingers around the tongue and sniffed. ‘Antimony.’
The other doctors nodded. ‘Had she reason to commit felo de se?’ asked de Picard.
Mary of Modena drew herself up. ‘Monsieur, Mme Putti is as devout a Catholic as myself.’
‘She has a rival for her lover’s affection, perhaps?’
Had Mme Putti been conscious, she would have treasured the compliment. As Dr MacLaverty whispered to Bratchet, ‘The good doctor has lived too long at Versailles.’
De Picard shrugged. ‘Well, someone has poisoned her. In a tisane, perhaps, or a sweetmeat.’
Mary of Modena shook her head, unable to credit the idea. ‘I shall have her moved to my room.’
‘Certainly, Your Majesty, if you wish to kill her. The move would subject her to draughts.’ He himself was wearing two fur caps and several blankets. ‘Nor attempt to change her sheets. Did not the Prince d‘Espinoy die from having his sheets changed, against my advice, before he was fully convalescent?’
They forced emetics down Putti’s throat, purged and bled her until Bratchet thought there could be nothing left in the poor body.
It was useless. The patient went into a coma, then died.
They took the corpse to lie in the chapel, leaving Bratchet alone in the entresol to clear up.
She sat in the room’s only chair staring at the bed lit by a solitary candle. She was in shock from the scenes she’d witnessed and grieving bitterly for her bedfellow. Putti had had her faults; she’d been bad-tempered, especially when hungry, and had frequently stolen Bratchet’s food as by prior right, but she’d possessed an Italian sophistication that had revolutionized Bratchet’s sense of style. Above all, she’d been one of the wittiest people in the château. She hadn’t deserved to die like that. Bratchet was going to miss her badly; Putti had made her laugh.
But the desolation which descended on Bratchet was not due to the demise of Mme Putti but for Turnspit. She had never felt loneliness like this and, God knew, she had known loneliness. Always, during the bad times, there had been the hairy, smelly, bony cushion of her dog to lay her head on. Effie had acquired him soon after Bratchet’s arrival at Puddle Court, to use in the turnspit wheel and to put down rats. Effie found him characterless and treated him as badly as she had Bratchet, resenting it when the two of them formed a dumb alliance against her.
To Bratchet he’d had dignity; it had distressed her to desperation to see him pedalling and scrabbling in the wall wheel to keep his paws away from the hot coal Effie tossed in it to make him turn faster. The picture came to her mind’s eye now, and racked her.
When I flung open the entresol door, she was still sitting there. She looked up at me. ‘Turnspit and Putti are dead.’
‘I’m sorry.’ If it sounded casual, it was because I still hadn’t got over the relief. ‘I thought it was you.’ I’d returned from the blacksmith’s to hear that one of the bedchamber women was poisoned.
She shook her head miserably. ‘Turnspit. And Putti.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Come on. Put on something warm. We’re going.’ I began picking up pieces of clothing to feel their thickness. ‘You’ll need good boots.’
‘Going?’
‘Before they try again.’
‘Who tries again?’ Her face hardened. ‘Oh, you’re not still… I won’t have you make a drama from it. This wasn’t murder. It was… a bad piece of meat or something.’
‘Doctors got it wrong, did they?’
‘Yes.’ St-Germain was goodness and happiness for her, perhaps the best she’d known. ‘It was something else,’ she said wearily, ‘Putti was already ill… I did her duty for her because she wasn’t well.’
‘What about the dog, was that ill too?’
‘No,’ she admitted.
‘Died out of sympathy did he? Sorry, vomit, dead. MacLaverty told me. For Christ’s sake, Bratchet, think.’
She was too bereft and tired to think; too cold. ‘Leave me alone,’ she said, ‘I’m not going with you. You’re mad. I’ve got things to do here. The queen needs me.’ Irritation was rousing her from lassitude. ‘Go away and leave me alone. I’ve got to change the sheets.’
She got up and began tearing the fouled covers from the bed. I took the pillows off for her and their cases. If necessary I’d carry the silly bitch to where Rosinante was waiting.
The flurry she was making as she folded the blankets suddenly stopped so that I turned to look at her. She was standing by the bed, her eyes fixed on something in it. Her hands were raised as if the cold had infiltrated her body and frozen it in mid-action.
I took up the candle and carried it nearer the bed. Lying on the sheet where the pillows had covered them were a cluster of lace casings such as women made to contain sweetmeats.
I buried Turnspit in a lawn within sight of the Le Vau fountain on which, I gathered, he had sprinkled admiration in the past. It was hard work to dig even that small grave. The moon shone like a great pale sun without rendering colour. Apart from the hit-hit of the pickaxe the gardens of St-Germain were silent. Like the dog in Bratchet’s arms. Like her.
When I told her to put the dog’s body in the grave, she put it in. I shovelled earth over it and tamped it down with my foot. When I led her away, she followed. Something had gone out of her with the realization that Beate had tried to murder her. It was easy to persuade her that we must leave; she no longer wanted to stay.
I’d tethered Rosinante and the pack donkey in the stableyard. They were still there. So was Livingstone of Kilsyth. He’d been to a neighbouring château for some jollification or another and was still in his regalia.
‘Where are you taking the lassie?’
‘Away.’
‘Ye’re not.’
I said, ‘Francesca’s maid left her poisoned chocolates. She put them in Bratchet’s cupboard. Putti ate them instead and gave one to the dog.’
‘Havers,’ he said, ‘why would any soul do such a thing?’
‘Because she was paid to. Now get out of my way.’
He didn’t move. ‘How do ye know the chocolate was for the lassie? I’ll not say the maid wasna mad. It may be she was trying to kill Mme Putti.’
I shook my head. ‘We found them in Bratchet’s cupboard. There was her initials embroidered on the casings.’
He frowned. ‘But the woman’s fled and gone. There’s no danger to the lassie now.’
‘She’s been in danger ever since I’ve known her. Anyway, there’s no point in her staying. Anne Bonny was never here, never will be. She’s as dead as her grandmother. So haver off, I want to be well away before dawn.’
He appealed to Bratchet. ‘Do ye go, Mlle La Fée? Do ye not stay with the cause?’
Her eyes were wide and pale and not looking at him, or anything. Shock had put her into a sort of trance, but it was still a healthier state than the trance the Scot had put her into, him and his bloody cause.
‘We’re going,’ I said.
He still didn’t move. He was thinking. It always took him time. At last he said: ‘Aye, well, you may have the right of it about Bonny Anne. She’s no dead, that I know, but she’s not here either. And I’ve a wee errand or two of my own to take me back home. Wait till the morrow when I can explain myself and we’ll all go. Ye’ll need me to get through the French lines.’
I brought the gun out from my cloak and pointed it at him. It was an old one that the Duc d‘Orléans had left in his saddle-holster and forgotten about. Like the noblesse, it was more ornamental than useful, but at this range it wouldn’t miss. ‘No explanation. You can write a note and leave it in the stables.’ I didn’t trust the bastard. ‘You’re coming now.’
‘Like this?’ He was in full Scottish rig – kilt, bare knees, sporran, the plaid scarf they wear over one shoulder of their jackets. How he wasn’t freezing to death beat me; they breed them hardy in the Highlands. In that dress, they have to.
I covered him with the pistol while he went into the stables to gather every horse-blanket he could find, then into the stall where he kept his horse. I told him to put two of the blankets on the beast, then saddle up, then dress Bratchet in the padded cape I’d made for her. While he was doing it, I put on the other cape and got up on Rosinante. The Scotsman swung Bratchet up behind me. I told him to mount, take the pack mule’s reins and lead the way.
Then we set off into the coldest winter there’s ever been.
You had to have been in France to know just how bad the winter of 1708/9 was; it was terrible throughout Europe, but it gripped France especially, as if it was on the side of the allies. I think it was.
We heard later that the Paris thermometer fell to below what it could register. The Seine froze and ice snapped the mooring ropes of the barges. Water froze in wells, peasants in cottages, cattle in stalls, rabbits in their burrows. The air cut through feathers like invisible metal so that birds fell dead from the trees.
I’d reckoned it was about a hundred miles from St-Germain to Le Havre as the crow flew and hoped we’d cover about twenty a day, but the crow didn’t have to cope with roads like rutted cast iron, or make detours to spare its horses’ hooves, or persuade the beasts down hills when they balked at the slipperiness of the descent, or lead them up steep gradients. It was a good day if we did twelve miles.
We daren’t rest until we found shelter. To stay still turned your blood sluggish in your veins and prevented you moving. On one detour we passed a man who’d stopped to rest in a field. He was still sitting there, dead as mutton, like a petrified scarecrow. Kilsyth wanted to bury him but I said no; it would take too much of our strength.
The only blessing was that it was too cold to snow. That would have finished us. We moved through a white world because the frost was so deep that every twig, every weed, had grown crystals which made it twice its size. Frost formed on the reins, on our cloaks; we looked like a trio of sparkling ghosts.
For the first two days, the Scotsman reasoned with me. ‘There’s no need for this flight. They don’t think you an enemy. Let us go back, let me but to explain I must return to Scotland and we can make this journey in the spring in all pleasantness.’
He was probably right, but I didn’t trust him. Even less I trusted whoever was marking the Bratchet – they’d proved to have a long reach. They’d managed to track us wherever we went.
Once he’d done his protesting, Kilsyth held his peace. Being less warmly clad than Bratchet and me, he couldn’t spare the breath. To talk involved pulling down the scarves covering the lower part of our faces, inviting air into our mouths that lanced the teeth.
By early afternoon we had to start looking for somewhere to pass the night. Even under cover it would be death without a fire, so when we found a charcoal-burner’s hut or a barn, there remained the labour of gathering fuel. The donkey had to be unloaded, the horses unsaddled and unrugged, hooves had to be picked free of balled ice and pebbles, and icicles to be chipped from eaves to melt for water – it takes a lot of ice to produce a kettleful of water. By the time we’d settled and boiled the salted horsemeat I’d brought, we were too tired for conversation.
The roads were virtually empty except for the military. Kilsyth had to do the talking when we were questioned and I kept the pistol cocked under my cloak while he did it. But mostly the soldiers we encountered were returning from the front and were wearier than we were, many of them wounded, all of them sullen. For the first time, they were being beaten on their own soil.
There weren’t even whistles at the Bratchet with which soldiers on the march usually compliment young women. Mind you, enveloped in the clumsy horsehair quilt and hood I’d made, she didn’t exactly look an object of ardour. She didn’t talk at all. Finding the Beate snake in her Garden of Eden had returned her to the miserable wretch she’d been at Aunt Effie’s.
I did my best to raise her spirits, and Kilsyth did more, but she didn’t respond. I wondered if she was beginning to suspect that her loyalty to the person she’d seen coming out of Aunt Effie’s after the murder was misplaced.
I tried capitalizing on it. ‘Do you want to tell me who killed Effie Sly?’
She looked at me as if I was the true enemy. I was the one who’d changed things, the man who’d taken her into winter away from the happy ignorance of her golden summer.
She shouted, ‘Who got rid of Anne and Mary? The nobs did, din’t they? And you’re working for them.’ She was all Puddle Court now. ‘You’re a lurker, you are, and I wouldn’t tell you shitten-cum-shite if you was to piss gold in a bucket.’
Well, at least I’d roused her.
When I told Kilsyth we were headed for Le Havre where, I said, I might be able to bribe a fisherman to land me in England by night, he was better pleased than he had been. There he’d find some merchantman that traded with the Highlands to take him home. He gave me his parole that he wouldn’t decamp until then, nor do anything to prevent us getting away.
I was glad of him. There might have been awkwardness if it had been only Bratchet and me to share the same bedding for sleeping – which it was vital to do for the warmth. The first night I clambered under the blankets beside her, she went stiff as if I was one of Effie’s lodgers. ‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ I told her.
But when the Scotsman came in from putting away the horses and knelt down and said his prayers and joined us, she relaxed. He was her chevalier sans reproche as the French call it. She could trust him, apparently, if she couldn’t trust me. To be honest, both of us were too cold to be capable. With her blue, pinched face and red nose, she wasn’t any houri either.
The next day, it was the sixth if I remember, or the seventh, Kilsyth began to wander in his wits. He was singing some Scottish song uncomplimentary to the English and, towards the end of the afternoon, I saw he’d thrown off his blanket and we had to go back for it.
We made for the next shelter we saw, a broken-down deserted farmstead. Bratchet and I got a fire going and left Kilsyth sitting by it – he was still singing and not noticing the cold – while we went out into the byre. The farmstead hadn’t been deserted; the peasant and wife who rented it from their seigneur were hanging from a rafter above their frozen cow. I righted the sawing-horse they’d stood up on to adjust the noose of their ropes, and cut the bodies down: ‘One cow,’ I shouted at Bratchet, ‘One bony bloody cow the difference whether they lived or died. Where’s your Sun King now?’
It wasn’t the time. It wasn’t her fault anyway. She was as horrified as I was, though not so angry.
That night I slaughtered the donkey. I’d brought him along to feed us when the fodder he carried ran out. And Kilsyth needed nourishment. Bratchet knew that and approved it, but it didn’t make her more kindly towards me. She’d allied with the donkey because, with Kilsyth and I having to care for our horses, it had fallen to her to lead the beast, pack and unpack him, feed him. He’d become Turnspit, her dumb comfort. I was taking everything away from her.
When we got back to the dwelling, Kilsyth was coming out of the door. ‘Fareweel to a’ our Scottish fame,’ he was singing, ‘Fareweel our ancient glory, Fareweel e’en to the Scottish name, Sae famed in martial story.’
We had trouble getting him back inside. ‘I’ll no enter under an English roof for your hireling wages.’
‘It’s Scottish,’ Bratchet told him, quickly. She was sobbing.
‘Verra well then.’
We took him up the hut’s cupboard staircase to the room above containing one large wooden bed on which was a straw palliasse, but no bedclothes, and laid him on it. Bratchet wanted to cover him with everything we had. ‘There’s a warming pan down there. I’ll put some fire in it.’
I stopped her. Kilsyth had become so cold over the last few days that he’d reached the point I’d seen in horses where, if you heat them up too quickly, they die. I wouldn’t even let her feed him hot stew. ‘Tepid’s warm enough.’
It was a hard night. We rubbed his feet and hands to get the blood back in them and gradually increased the heat of the bed, giving him warmer and warmer drinks every hour.
The Bratchet wouldn’t rest, she was frantic he was going to die. ‘It’s your fault,’ she kept saying, ‘You didn’t have to bring him along. I’m going to take him back. So soon as he’s better, we’re going back to court. I should never have left anyway. The queen needs me.’
I was tired. ‘Court,’ I said, ‘Queen. James Francis’ll be King of England when I’m Pope. They’re dolls pretending to be real. Curtseying to a lot of playing cards you’ve been. And near got yourself poisoned doing it.’
‘It was still better than Puddle Court,’ she said.
We couldn’t go on like this. ‘Bratchie, be reasonable. You had to come away. This is deep. It’s deep business. Somebody near got you in England and they near got you in France. Somebody’s got a long arm. Who is it? Why? Tell me.’
‘It wasn’t Somebody,’ she insisted. ‘There isn’t a Somebody except in your mind. It was the Bête. She was always talking about killing people and she did. She’s mad. She just hated me for no reason. She was…’ she had to lapse into French to get over her meaning ‘…un phénomène.’
‘Mme Putti’ll find that a comfort. Wherever she is.’
She winced and I realized how Putti’s death hurt her. I didn’t want to hurt her any more. And I never seemed to do anything else.
We saved Kilsyth between us, but we had to stay in that farmstead for another week until he was fit enough to travel and to give time enough for Bratchet and me to sew two blankets together and stuff them with the mule’s hair to keep the cold off him when we went.
By the time we set out the air that had been so clear had gained a furriness which cut down the view; a drop from one of the icicles in the eaves fell on my head as I inspected the horses’ feet. ‘Thaw’s coming.’
It came slowly. Roads became slush by midday but turned back to ice at nights. Traffic increased – and so did questions. Kilsyth got us through. He was in fine form and, I think, grateful to us for being alive. We were good Jacobites, friends of the king, he told people. The usual French hostility thawed in the warmth of his bonhomie. Thanks to him we were able to stay at the cheaper inns with impunity. At nights he’d sit with our hosts and roar out his Scotland for ever songs at the top of his voice and make them laugh and join in.
Bratchet withdrew into her silence. A large part of the Scotsman’s cheeriness was because he was going home. ‘I’ll be in the Highlands for the spring,’ he said, ‘and ye both in your London, poor souls.’
‘Ye both.’ No request that Bratchet go with him.
Even he fell silent as we followed the Seine into what should have been the richest earth in France, the apple-growing, cream-making Normandy, and saw withered orchards and fields where peasants were digging down to find their winter corn seed shrivelled.
As we approached Rouen we passed a haras. Through elaborate gates we could see up the sweep of a drive to the château-like stables around a cour d’honneur where liveried grooms led stallions for inspection past the officers. The fact that it was the only energy and prosperity we’d seen during the whole journey, and that it existed in a place devoted to breeding horses for Louis XIV’s cavalry, pointed up the misery of the people whose taxes paid for it.
I suppose we neglected Bratchet those last days towards Le Havre. She was quiet and, anyway, spent most of her time asleep riding pillion, her head nodding against the back of one of us. We swopped her over when whichever horse she happened to be on had endured her weight long enough, and she nodded even during the changeover.
‘The weaker sex,’ said Kilsyth, winking at me, ‘Lord bless their sauncy hearts.’ I winked back.
She slept, I realize now, because there was nothing else for her to do. Directions were taken, inns entered, stayed in, paid for, more directions taken, without reference to her. The journey was turning we two men into friends; our talk was horses and war. Being a woman, she had no contribution to it and, because she was a woman, we didn’t expect any.
By the last but one day, we’d become so used to her silence we started comparing our past women. It was only when Kilsyth, in full flight on brothels he had known, was dismounting that we recalled her presence behind him. ‘Wheesht now, Martin. Remember the lassie.’
We rode into Le Havre in late evening and found an inn. There Bratchet made a stand. ‘I’m not going. Go and find your bloody boats and sail off. I’m not coming. I’m not going back to Puddle Court.’
‘It won’t be Puddle Court,’ I said, ‘It’ll be… somewhere else.’
‘Where?’
She’d floored me. I hadn’t thought. ‘I don’t know, yet.’
‘What as?’ she demanded, ‘What’ll I be? A maid again? You can stick that, you mimpin. I’ve served a queen, I’m not serving nobody else now.’
‘What do you want to do, lassie?’ Kilsyth asked.
‘I’m going to enlist. I’m going to do what Mary did and Kit Ross did and become a soldier.’ She was standing up and facing us both like a rabbit making a last stand against two dogs.
‘Which army are you thinking of strengthening?’ I asked.
‘It don’t matter. French or English. Just as long as I’m quit of you two.’
I saw Kilsyth’s mouth twitch. ‘Ye’re maybe a wee bit on the short side for a soldier. I doubt they’d take you.’
‘Besides,’ I said, ‘you’ll need money while you wait for the ’listing officer. Livingstone here ain’t got any and I’m lending him what I’ve got for his passage.’
‘Ye’d best press on to England now, lassie. There’s no going back.’
‘Don’t call me lassie.’
‘Come on now, Bratchie, join us in a drink and something to eat. You’ll feel better.’
‘Don’t call me Bratchie.’
We left her in her room and went off to make a night of it. When we came back we looked in on her and saw she was asleep again.
We arranged that Kilsyth should go to the harbour and, while trying to find a boat for himself, make enquiries about L‘Hirondelle on our behalf. He’d not taken back his parole and I was pretty sure I could trust him. It was a case of having to; my French wasn’t good enough to avoid suspicion, while the Bratchet had gone into a torpor which made her useless.
He returned in high spirits that evening. ‘The luck of the Kilsyths is back with me. There’s a fine big boat in harbour this minute that’s to set out to the Firth of Moray on the morn’s tide. The master’s a leal Jacobite and trades with the clans, he tells me.’
‘What about L‘Hirondelle?’
‘I asked him. Casual, as ye told me. He knows her. She’s late this month which he puts down to the weather, but for certain will be here within the week.’
‘So you sail before we do.’
‘I go aboard this night. With your permission, of course.’
I couldn’t see any reason not to give it, but I was uneasy. Oddly enough, so was he. ‘Och, Martin, but what will you and the lassie do without me?’
All we had to do was stay in the inn until our boat came. Bratchet could do our talking. But I was still uneasy. And I’d miss him. I told him so.
‘Ye’ll come and see me off? It’d be as well you accustom yourself with the harbour. The quays are a puzzle.’
We took the Bratchet with us, in case somebody stopped me on the way back with questions I couldn’t answer. Unmelted blocks of ice had been swept into dirty piles along wharves where swing-bridges and cranes glistened with wet. Flotsam knocked against the sides of water-basins. A fight broke out in a tavern, spilling men out of its doors into the light thrown through its open door on to the slimy setts of the quay. Ports are the same all over the world.
I thought of the two women whose fate had sent the three of us chasing across Europe in the first place. Docks like these were the last thing they’d seen before they were overpowered and bundled aboard some scow bound for… where? Was it really Mary who’d escaped and become a soldier? Or Anne? And which of them had returned to England and murdered Aunt Effie?
I looked down at the Bratchet. She knew.
She was looking around her with aversion and I thought she was probably remembering her friends, like I was. One of them’s trying to kill you, Bratchet. Or she’s got high-placed friends who need to kill you on her behalf. Believe it.
She wouldn’t, of course. She would, literally, rather die than believe it. So she might, unless I could stop it. It all came back to the same question. ‘Tell me who killed Effie Sly, Bratchet,’ I said.
In the murk her eyes looked pale as she shrank away from me and nearer to the Scotsman. He put his hand under her elbow and hurried her along.
I don’t know much about boats, or I didn’t then, but the Holy Innocent seemed overlarge for an illegal merchantman needing to avoid attention from the English navy on her trips to Jacobite Scotland. There was only a flambeau on the dockside and her own riding lights to see her by, but I got the impression of bulk looming above us in the dark. She had gun ports along one deck.
Her welcome was hearty enough. An officer standing by the gangplank with a dark lantern said, ‘Captain Porritt’s compliments to you, Mr Kilsyth, and welcome aboard. He asks if you and your friends would be pleased to come to his cabin and down a nightcap with him before we set sail.’
‘Ye might as well, Martin,’ Kilsyth muttered, ‘Ye’re paying for it.’
Only Kilsyth could have persuaded passage money out of a lender which would enable him to join a plot against that lender’s government. More ironically, it was that same government’s money – part of the purse of louis d’ors that John Laws had given me in Paris. But he’d pointed out that I hadn’t given him time enough that night when we left St-Germain to go and borrow from somebody else.
So we all went aboard the Holy Innocent to have a drink with Captain Porritt.
Four sailors grabbed Kilsyth and me as we went through the entry port. Another one grabbed Bratchet. We heard her shouting and kicking as he carried her off. Kilsyth put up a better fight than I did, I got a sea-boot in my stomach which put me out early but he did a lot of damage before he went down. They bound our hands and feet and bumped us down companionways to somewhere black in the ship’s innards. My head took punishment and the last thing I remember thinking was that Anne Bonny and Mary Read had done better than us in the same situation. At least one of them had managed to escape.
We’d been unlucky, as I found out much later. If we’d arrived in Le Havre the following week instead of when we did, the Holy Innocent wouldn’t have been able to set out because the winter came back with a vengeance, refreezing the seas.
Behind us, wolves began prowling the forests of France and fed not just on domestic stock but human flesh; people were dropping dead from starvation. In Paris the shortage of bread produced riots and a mob of women setting out to protest to Versailles had to be stopped by the army. The noblesse stayed indoors rather than confront the accusing faces in the streets, black with hunger. French currency lost a third of its value; public institutions and great private financiers went bankrupt.
There was no policy like the English Poor Laws system to deal with the situation; charity in France relies more on individual generosity; in past food shortages Louis had always been rich enough to help with distributions of ‘The King’s Bread’, but the scale of this emergency was beyond his scope; anyway the war had begun to impoverish even him.
He did what he could, imposing a tax for the hungry from which no one was exempt, making an immediate contribution himself of £1,400. He lifted all tax on transport, ordered wholemeal bread to be baked for everyone, rich and poor, and banned hoarding and speculation. As an example to his nobles, he had his own gold plate melted down to pay for food for the starving. But the food wasn’t there. Crops had withered. Bracken and roots were being used to make flour. Children were seen cropping the grass in the fields like sheep.
As God’s representative on earth, the Sun King was responsible for his country’s suffering. He did the only thing he could; he began suing for peace.