At Dijon, Robert was negotiating with a fishmonger. It was heavy going, partly because they were down in the man’s cellars, where it was almost totally dark and the air practically swam into your nostrils with the smells of fins, scales and guts, and partly because his French was less fluent than his Italian. The fishmonger, a small, dark man, was holding his shielded lamp over a pit in the corner of the cellar to illustrate how little of the commodity he had for his own use. He was explaining, Robert thought, how far it had to be brought to him and at what expense.
‘But I’ll pay you well. You can send for more.’
The man shook his head doubtfully and looked at the hessian sack Robert had brought with him. ‘Not so much. Not half so much, without robbing myself. It’s the worst time, July.’
That was one thing that had been easier when he crossed the Alps. At every coach halt there’d been some boy who could be paid to run up with the sack and an axe to the glacier fringe, but now he was well west of the glaciers and with less than half an hour before the coach left for Paris.
‘Half full, then, and name your price. Only, please hurry.’
The man named his price – a high one – took the sack and clambered slowly with the lamp down some steps into the pit. Robert stood, trying not to fidget with impatience, while he hacked at a block that gleamed golden in the lamplight, and loaded shards of it into the sack. One of the worst things about this nightmare was the urgency that was drilled into him, combined with the times when there was nothing he could do but wait. Back in Turin, he’d learned every knot in the woodwork of that awful café, waiting for news from Marco. Then, on the second night, Marco had arrived, sweating from the weight of a wooden box about eighteen inches high and two feet long. He’d put it down on the floor with what seemed like exaggerated care and almost jumped out of the door when Robert lifted the lid.
‘Be careful. A knock’s enough to set it off.’
Marco had kept his distance while Robert looked inside. There were two bottles like squat wine bottles but with thicker glass, packed in straw, each containing about a pint of pale yellow, oily liquid. Robert had been surprised, both at the fact that the stuff was a liquid and not a powder and at the small quantity of it. Marco had flashed a humourless grin.
‘Just one bottle’s enough to destroy this place and probably half the street besides. The professor says it’s the deadliest thing ever made. He didn’t want to make it at all, only it came out by accident from something else he was doing. He’s been trying to keep it secret but people talk.’
‘What does he call it?’
‘Pyroglycerine.’
He’d impressed on Robert that the dangerous instability of the stuff was lessened if he could keep ice packed round the bottles. The box was tin-lined to stop melting water seeping out, and a friend of his could supply a bag of ice, for a consideration. Robert would have to do the best he could to renew it on the journey. Robert had slept that night with the box under his bed and taken the first coach out from Turin in the morning. Every jolt of the journey over the Alps thundered inside his skull, and he remembered what Marco had said. He hoped Marco had been exaggerating. He supposed it should have concerned him that he was risking the lives of the other passengers, but the whole thing was happening in such a fog of unreality that only the box, its need of ice and the letter from Liberty in his pocket really existed for him. Now, striding up the street in Dijon, his thoughts were on the journey to the Channel and the hessian sack already sweating moisture in the hot sun.