Clement pulled a huge revolver free as the wave of people broke around Gunther. O’Gilroy threw his rifle, the General slashed with his stick, and Clement dropped the gun – which surprisingly didn’t go off. Ranklin pulled O’Gilroy clear and shouted in his furious face: “In the car!”
O’Gilroy stared at him for a blank instant, then ran. Ranklin paused to take the starting-handle from the General’s car, but it wasn’t in place, so he threw the rifle through the windscreen instead. Corinna was already in the driving seat and O’Gilroy pushing the car back one-handed. They got it turned, then rolling forward onto the gravel of the drive and its weight took over as they tipped downhill. O’Gilroy scrambled into the second seat and Ranklin found himself on the running-board on Corinna’s side.
She let in the clutch, the back wheels skidded, then the engine caught with a bang and the car surged forward.
“We left our bags. And me overcoat,” O’Gilroy said suddenly.
“You’ve got your lives,” Corinna pointed out. “Though for how much longer, driving without lamps …”
“Just guess,” Ranklin said impatiently.
She slowed right down where the drive met the road by the unlit gatehouse, but even then Ranklin’s weight nearly toppled them into the ditch.
She stopped. “There’s a rumble seat back there, you know.”
Ranklin was baffled, then realised she must mean a dickey seat under lids where the luggage had been strapped. He had only ridden in one a couple of times before: usually it was for children and servants. He lifted the lids with more haste than enthusiasm, but it would be better than clinging on the running board.
“And light the lamps while you’re out there,” Corinna said.
“No. Find a side road, then if we’re being chased they’ll go right past.”
He sat down and they rattled off again; Renaults were known for their reliability but not, obviously, for their silence, and Ranklin’s view forwards was just the back of the canvas hood.
Inside the hood, Corinna asked O’Gilroy: “You didn’t kill Cort, did you?”
“Never at all. But that doctor’s got his chance yet. Just cut him along his ribs. With what I’d left of me bayonet ye couldn’t slice bread.”
“Yes, what happened there?”
“That bastard the Sergeant – begging your pardon, ma’am …”
“That’s okay. It sounds quite accurate.”
“He must’ve filed me bayonet across, or more like put on one he’d got filed already. When ye was helping to fix me arm – and that was a real kindness of ye, ma’am.”
“Any time. And Cort knew this?”
“And him hammering away at me bayonet like ye saw? And me wondering what he was doing? Ah, he knew. An affair of honour. Jayzus and Mary.”
“Do you think the General knew?”
O’Gilroy thought about it. “No, not him. Not with him getting angry with the Sergeant taking out his pistol. No, he was being honourable enough. And bloody barmy besides, begging your pardon.”
“Stop apologising. It was more than bloody barmy: Prospero’s isle with the duel scene from Hamlet thrown in.”
But she couldn’t show off any more because O’Gilroy didn’t ask what she meant.
They were almost in sight of the local village, showing as a faint glow on the low clouds and flickers of light through the windswept trees, before she found a track to turn into.
Ranklin clambered down stiffly to put a match to the acetylene lamps.
“What’s it like back there?” Corinna asked cheerfully.
“Cold, thank you.”
“I guess it’s lucky you’re – not too tall. You’ve lost your hat.”
It had come off in the scuffle of their escape, and Ranklin felt horribly naked without it. One simply did not go out without some sort of headgear, and his natural instinct combined with his new trade to make him shrink from being conspicuous.
Of course, O’Gilroy was in a worse state, being without a collar, tie and overcoat as well. Any gendarme with a proper sense of values would probably arrest them on sight. But they wouldn’t have to worry about that until they reached Rouen.
Corinna promptly cancelled that: “I should tell you we’ll run out of gas at any time. I figured on getting filled up at the Chateau.”
“Out of what?”
“Petroleum, benzine, the stuff automobiles drink. Any idea where we can get some at this time of night?”
The French countryside didn’t go in for garages, except on a few main roads. A go-ahead blacksmith or ironmonger might stock a few tins at an inflated price, but Ranklin didn’t fancy the delay of routing out one of them, not in the village of which the General was the squire. By themselves, he and O’Gilroy might have chanced it, but not with Corinna … She had provided the wheels, but also a brake.
“Keep going,” he decided. “But head for the railway line. We’ve got to reach Paris tonight.”
“To hand over the code? I must give it you back. But don’t you want the local gendarme first?”
“Not in the General’s own village. Nor anywhere in the countryside, not now. I’ll explain it to people who’ll understand in Paris. But why didn’t you get the car filled up in Rouen?”
“Because,” she said crisply, “I was so damned mad at a certain party for using me as a messenger girl that I turned right around and headed back. Does that answer your question?”
“I said you should go to the gendarmerie there.”
“Hey, that’s great. A total stranger tells me I should go to the cops and tell them to raid a chateau – a place I know, I’ve been staying in – for no reason at all.”
“Well, I couldn’t say much on the back of a card. And it would have solved all our problems.”
“And if you’d been strangled at birth we wouldn’t have any problems. Now, d’you want to stand here debating it until the motor runs dry?”
Ranklin climbed back into the dickey seat. “Stay warm,” Corinna called. “I can go fast now.”
“If Englishwomen do what they’re told just like that,” she said to O’Gilroy amidst an angry clashing of gear-wheels, “then … then they deserve Englishmen.”
16
The car didn’t die until they were through the village and coming down into the valley of the Scie, with the lights of little villages strung along the railway to Rouen. Corinna let it roll as far as it would – about half a mile from the nearest village.
“End of the line,” she announced. “Change here for Rouen, Paris and the British Empire. All ashore that’s going ashore. A good brisk walk will soon warm you up.” Watching Ranklin climb, cramped and cold, out of the servants’ seat had put her in a good humour.
O’Gilroy turned off the lamps, Corinna lent him a silk scarf to replace his collar, and they began walking.
After a while she said suddenly: “But if Cort and Clement were really going to kill you – us – it would have looked awful suspicious, wouldn’t it?”
“Not necessarily,” Ranklin said grumpily.
O’Gilroy said: “Ye could make an accident, with our necks broke in a car crash. Or drowned driving into a river. Or burned up.”
“Or hit by a train on a crossing,” Ranklin said in the tone of somebody who’d just had it happen.
“Ah, now that’d be a grand sight to see. Better’n being poisoned from smoking French cigarettes. Begging your pardon, ma’am, but ye don’t happen to smoke yeself?”
“Sorry, no.”
“And even if we’d been shot,” Ranklin wound up, “and they had to explain away bullet-holes, they could have blamed it on French motor bandits.”
“I suppose in your job you carry lists of such thoughts. And I get the general idea – but you think that’s all over?”
Ranklin instinctively looked behind, but there was only darkness. “I hope so. They probably want to get Gunther to hospital. But we did mark the road for them by leaving the car back there.” There hadn’t been anywhere to push it off the road. “I’d rather keep worrying a little longer.”