Instead of lurching into the dark forest, I rolled under the carriage, dodging the grinding wheels as the coach rocked back and forth. Lying in its shadow, I feverishly began to load my rifle while prone, a trick I’d learnt from the Canadians. I bit, poured, and rammed.
‘He’s getting away!’ Three of the bandits ran around the rear of the coach and plunged into the trees on the side I’d leapt, assuming I was escaping that way. The passengers looked ready to bolt as well, but two of the thieves commanded them to stand where they were. The fake customs inspector, cursing, struggled to reload his pistol. I finished my own ramming, poked my rifle barrel out, and shot him.
The flash was blinding in the darkness. As the bastard buckled I got a startling glimpse of something that had been hanging inside his own shirt, now dangling free. It was a Masonic emblem, no doubt expropriated by Silano’s Egyptian Rite, of crossed compass and square. There was a familiar letter in the middle. So that explained it!
I rolled, stood, and swung my weapon by the barrel as hard as I could, clubbing another thief with my gun butt. There was a satisfying crack as eleven pounds of maple and iron trumped bone. I scooped up my tomahawk. Where was the third rascal? Then another gun went off and someone howled. I started running toward the trees in the opposite direction from where the first three had gone. The other passengers, including Talma, scattered as well.
‘The bag! Get his bag!’ the one I’d shot was shouting through his pain.
I grinned. The medallion was safe in the sole of my boot.
The woods were dark and getting darker as night fully descended. I trotted as best I could, alone, my rifle a makeshift prod to keep me from running into trees. Now what? Were the robbers in league with some arm of the French government, or entirely imposters? Their leader had the correct uniform and knowledge of my prize and position, suggesting that someone with official connections – an ally of Silano, and a member of the Egyptian Rite – was tracking me.
It wasn’t just the thief’s readiness to cock a pistol in my face that disturbed me. Inside his Masonic symbol, I’d been reminded, was the standard letter said to represent God, or gnosis, knowledge, or perhaps geometry.
The letter G.
My initial, and the same letter which poor Minette had scrawled in her own blood.
Was such an emblem her last sight on earth?
The more anxious others were for my trinket, the more determined I was to keep it. There must be some reason for its popularity.
I stopped in the woods to reload, ramming down the ball and listening after I did so. A branch snapped. Was someone following? I’d kill them if they got close. But what if it was poor Talma, trying to find me in the gloom? I hoped he’d simply stay with the coach, but I dared not shoot, shout, or tarry either, so I went deeper into the forest.
The spring air was cool, the nervous energy of escape evaporating and leaving me chill and hungry. I was debating circling back to the road in hopes of finding a farmhouse when I saw the steady glow of a lantern, then another lamp and another, amid the evening trees. I crouched and heard the murmur of voices in a language distinctive from French. Now here was a way to hide myself! I’d stumbled upon an encampment of the Rom. Gypsies – or, as many pronounced the word, Gyptians, reputed to be wanderers from Egypt. Gypsies did nothing to discourage this belief, claiming they were descended from the priests of the pharaohs, even though others considered them a plague of nomadic rascals. Their assertion of ancient authority encouraged lovers and schemers to pay money for their augury.
Again, a sound behind me. Here my experience in the forests of America came into play. I melted into the foliage, using a shadow cast by the lantern light to cloak myself. My pursuer, if that’s what he was, came on oblivious to my position. He stopped after spying the glow of the wagons, considered as I had, and then came ahead, no doubt guessing I’d sought refuge there. When his face came into the light I didn’t recognise him as either an assailant or a passenger, and now was more confused than ever.
No matter, his intentions were plain enough. He, too, had a pistol.
As the stranger crept toward the nearest wagon, I slid noiselessly behind him. He was looking at the multicoloured marvel that was the nearest gypsy vardo when my muzzle eased over his shoulder and came to rest on his skull.
‘I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,’ I said quietly.
There was a long silence. Then, in English, ‘I’m the man who just helped save your life.’
I was startled, uncertain whether to reply in my native tongue. ‘Qui etes-vous?’ I finally demanded.
‘Sir Sidney Smith, a British agent fluent enough in the tongue of France to recognise that your accent is worse than mine,’ he replied again in English. ‘Get the gun barrel off my ear and I’ll explain everything, friend.’
I was stunned. Sidney Smith? Had I encountered the most famous prison fugitive in France – or a mad imposter? ‘Drop your pistol first,’ I said in English. Then I felt something poke my own back, pointed and sharp.
‘As you will drop your rifle, monsieur, when you are at my home.’ In French again, but this time with a distinctive Eastern accent: A gypsy. A half-dozen more emerged from the trees around us, their heads covered in scarves or broad-brimmed hats, sashes on their waists, and boots to their knees, looking raffish and tough. All had knives, swords, or clubs. We stalkers had become the stalked.
‘Be careful,’ I said. ‘There may be other men chasing me.’ I laid my rifle on the ground as Smith surrendered his pistol.
A handsome, swarthy man came around to my face, sword in hand, and gave a grim smile. ‘Not anymore.’ He drew a finger across his throat as he collected the rifle and pistol. ‘Welcome to the Rom.’
When I stepped into the light of the gypsy campfires, I stepped into another world. Their barrel-roofed wagons with paint-box colours created an elfin village amid the trees. I smelt smoke, incense, and cooking spicy enough to be exotic, heavy with garlic and herbs. Women in colourful dresses, with black lustrous hair and golden hoops in their ears, glanced up from steaming pots to evaluate us with eyes as deep and unfathomable as ancient pools. Children crouched by the coloured wheels like watching imps. Shaggy gypsy wagon ponies stamped and snorted from the shadows. All was cast in amber by the glow from their lamps. In Paris all was reason and revolution. Here was something older, more primitive, and free.
‘I am Stefan,’ said the man who’d disarmed us. He had dark, wary eyes, a grand moustache, and a nose so shattered in some past fight that it was as rumpled as a mountain range. ‘We do not care for guns, which are expensive to buy, costly to maintain, noisy to use, tedious to reload, and easy to steal. So explain yourselves, bringing them to our home.’
‘I was en route to Toulon when our coach was accosted,’ I said. ‘I’m fleeing from bandits. When I saw your wagons I stopped and heard him’ – I pointed to Smith – ‘coming up behind me.’
‘And I,’ said Smith, ‘was trying to speak to this gentleman after helping save his life. I shot a thief who was about to shoot him. Then our friend ran like a rabbit.’
So that had been the other shot I’d heard. ‘But how?’ I objected. ‘I mean, where did you come from? I don’t know you. And how could you be Smith? Everyone assumes you escaped to England.’ In February, the flamboyant British naval captain, scourge of the French coastline, had with female help escaped from Paris’s Temple Prison, built from a former castle of the Knights Templar. He’d been missing ever since. Smith had originally been captured while trying to steal a French frigate from the mouth of the Seine, and was so bold and notorious a raider that the authorities had refused to ransom or exchange him. Engravings of his handsome likeness were sold not just in London, but in Paris as well. Now, here he claimed to be.