“They’d never …” Then O’Gilroy paused to think, perhaps about Devil’s Island. “Mebbe, mebbe … It’s a mite more difficult than saying ‘Range one thousand, fire,’ I fancy.”
“It is,” Ranklin said shortly.
“And I suppose ye wasn’t lying when ye said ye didn’t have yer little gun with ye?”
“Unfortunately not. If it comes to it, and they don’t suddenly up and cut our throats – and I don’t think they wilclass="underline" they’d be better off making it seem an accident, and that might take time – try and play for more time. Spin it out.”
“I’ve no argument agin living another minute, Captain. Or for ever, anyone gives me the chance.”
Soon afterwards, the General came back, punting his way with the walking stick across to his unfinished drink. They watched him cautiously as he sipped and put the glass down with a shivery hand.
“Mon Capitaine, you spoke of these dark times. And you are correct. The government of France is a rabble. The Army – my Army – is led by opportunists. Anarchists are on the streets of Paris, bandits on the highways – where is the discipline?” He grunted angrily. “You are too young to recall General Boulanger.”
“The ‘Man on Horseback’?” Ranklin said. “He was elected a deputy for Paris, I believe.”
“That same man. And that night – it is more than twenty years – he could have rallied other deputies. The generals were with him. And they could have restored the King – the father of the Duke. It needed only for Boulanger to take the lead – and where was he that night, Captain?”
Ranklin suddenly remembered the story, but let the General tell it.
“On top of his mistress!” the General hissed.
They waited in polite silence. “His mistress,” the General repeated, staring fiercely into the might-have-been. “One night, one woman – and the destiny of France. That is how weak our government has become. Enfin, there will come another night, and no woman.”
There didn’t seem anything to say. The wind rattled tentatively at a window. Then Gaston coughed discreetly from the doorway and announced: “Le Comte est servi.”
Hanging back as the General led the way out, O’Gilroy whispered: “Was that the truth, then?”
“About Boulanger and his mistress? Oh yes. I think he was in love with her – you might say he’d better have been. Anyhow, he shot himself on her grave a few years later.”
“Yer fooling me.”
“No, all of that’s true. Mind, I’m not saying the coup would have worked, the King would have come back. But it gives you an idea of how fragile French politics can be. And still are.”
13
They sat around the end of a long walnut table, waited on by Gaston and the manservant: vegetable soup, trout, and lamb cutlets – the first Ranklin had seen that year – in aspic. The aspic was probably new to O’Gilroy, but he would have eaten the cutlets with the wool still on. The General merely picked at his food; like most men of his age, he lived in short bursts of energy and talkativeness, and being gallant to Corinna and angry about Boulanger had exhausted him. Ranklin made one attempt to ask about Corinna’s husband and was told one did not talk about ladies at table. He went back to twiddling his wine glass.
Although it was still light outside, and they were eating absurdly early, the heavy curtains had been drawn and the room lit by silver candelabra. The colours enriched by the half-dark, the glints of light on china and glass, the shadows wavering in the slight draught – all gave a stagy effect. Perhaps doubly so, because Ranklin guessed that in daylight the room would seem as tawdry as stage scenery. And weren’t they in a play – acting parts and speaking meaningless lines until – until what?
It came when Gaston leant down to whisper a discreet something in the General’s ear and the old man gazed sombrely first at Ranklin, then O’Gilroy. Somebody, Ranklin thought grimly, has searched our room and not found what he was looking for. The General sighed. “Gentlemen, you are both royalists also.”
Since O’Gilroy probably hadn’t believed in any king since Brian Boru, Ranklin said quickly: “I am an officer in His Britannic Majesty’s Army.”
The General grunted. “In the past our countries have fought many times, honourably. Now, soon, we will fight together. But victory is only possible if France is led by a true king, His Majesty Philippe. I comprehend, Captain, that you carry to Paris a code for our Army. On behalf of His Majesty I will accept the code and you may report that it has been correctly delivered.”
That simple statement would have silenced a Welsh politician; it struck Ranklin dumb as a statue. The implications of it swam blurred and dreamily round his mind; the only hard-and-fast thought he could cling to was that the General was monumentally loony.
And the only thing he could think of to do was to play – indeed, overplay – his own part in this farce. “General, you must understand that I have my orders, and as I hold the King’s Commission, these orders come, in effect, from my King. I am ordered to deliver the code to Paris.”
“Paris is full of traitors.”
Perhaps so, Ranklin reflected, since the General shouldn’t have heard of the code at all.
“The code will be safe,” the General went on, “only in the hands of a loyal servant of His Majesty.” And he held out one such quavering hand.
Trying not to break down into wild and disastrous laughter, Ranklin stiffened in his chair. He knew his chubby figure didn’t play dignity well, but he did his best. “General, I am an officer entrusted with a mission. You have warned me that my mission is endangered, and I am deeply grateful. Now, if you would kindly permit me to contact my superiors in London and inform them of the situation, I shall obey their new orders.”
The General sipped his wine, wiped his mouth on his napkin, and nodded to Gaston, who nodded towards the door. Ranklin saw O’Gilroy tense.
Gunther Arnold came into the room with Sergeant Clement close behind.
“You have met M’sieu van der Brock,” the General said.
“Yes,” Ranklin agreed. “But perhaps I misheard the name.”
Gunther, wearing a dark suit straining at its buttons and a floppy bow tie, just smiled and slid into a chair opposite Ranklin. Gaston brought a glass and poured him wine. Clement stayed back in the shadows.
Realising they were waiting for him to speak, Ranklin ignored Gunther and said to the Generaclass="underline" “Do you believe my superiors in London are also traitors? If so, they could have given the code to an enemy directly. They still can. Instead, they entrusted it to me to deliver to Paris.”
“To the traitors in Paris,” Gunther said smoothly, and Ranklin saw his argument crumble like Jericho’s walls.
“This,” O’Gilroy observed, “is getting a mite more tangled than who owns M’Ginty’s cow.”
Ranklin glared angrily at him and, now desperate, tried again with the Generaclass="underline" “But if we have traitors in London who know the code, then it becomes valueless – worse, a liability – to your King. ”
But Gunther was wearing a small, satisfied smile and, looking at the General, Ranklin suddenly guessed why: the old relic simply didn’t know the first thing about codes. In his campaigns, which in the last forty years could only have been against tribesmen in the French colonies, he wouldn’t have needed codes. He might just know what they were, but saw them as things that kept an intrinsic value no matter who owned them, like a sword or a barrel of gunpowder.
And he also saw that, loony or not, the General was completely sincere. He simply wanted the code for his “King”, and presumably believed it was going to get there. How? By hand of Gunther, probably, on his travels as a cigar merchant. Which in turn meant that Gunther was manipulating the General, using his royalist connections in Paris – in the Ministere de la Guerre especially – and …