I got out of Paris and wandered, living from hand to mouth. For a while I was a waiter in Antwerp, and then I worked for a bookseller in England, compiling a French Grammar and Phrase-Book for Young Ladies. Then I went to Belgium, as courier and what-you-will to an Anglo-Indian gentleman. But, not long after Napoleon returned from Elba and the Infantry hailed him, again, as Emperor, my nabob paid me off and made for Flushing and the sea in a light carriage, leaving me with a trunkful of soiled linen, and one of his horses – a dapple-grey mare named Cocotte.
She had cast a shoe on that appalling stretch of road between Marchienne and Fontaine l’Evêque, by the River Sambre: a most desolate and dreadful place, a brooding brown plain under a sky such as must have hung over Sodom before the fire fell from Heaven. Only, in this case, the heavens were full of water, but none the less black for that. It was a wet spring, that spring of 1815, and nowhere wetter or more sombre than at Marchienne, where the Sambre runs from above Landres to join the Meuse at Namur.
We had put up at a questionable kind of inn. Originally, it had been named ‘L’Aiglon’, the Imperial Eagle. As soon as Napoleon was deposed, the landlord had painted out his sign, leaving it blank. Later, he had daubed on a Fleur-de-Lys. When we arrived, he was trying to smear back the Eagle: the news of the Emperor’s return from Elba had already broken.
‘If we scraped off a few strata of paint,’ I said to him, ‘no doubt we should come to the Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.’
He said: ‘I am only a poor inn-keeper, I am a neutral – I move with the times.’
This inn-keeper’s name was Morkens, and he was a boor. He had some arrangement with the local blacksmith: if a traveller lost a tyre, a horseshoe, or the merest lynch-pin, the blacksmith would detain him, so that he was compelled to stay with Morkens. Morkens charged the traveller treble, and the blacksmith charged him quintuple; each paid the other commission.
We paused at this inn (call it what you will), intending to stop for two hours. Two days later, the mare was still unshod. ‘Is it my fault?’ whines this execrable Morkens. ‘If milord is in a hurry, I can sell him a horse——’
‘Do so,’ says my master; and Morkens sells him an abominable screw for the price of a thoroughbred, swearing that he is taking the bread out of his children’s mouths.
‘I’ll pay!’ cries my nabob, dashing down golden guineas. Then, to me: ‘Here’s your money, my good man. Can’t take you with me. Travelling light – can’t spare weight. Here’s another ten guineas for you.’
‘Your trunk, milord? The mare?’ I asked.
‘Oh, damn the trunk and confound the damned mare! Keep ’em! I’m away!’ cries he.
And off he went, bumping over the most dismal and treacherous road in the world, leaving me standing under an equivocal sign that creaked outside the world’s worst inn, rubbing elbows with the meanest rogue in muddy Flanders: Morkens.
The chaise was not out of sight when this Morkens turned to me, and said: ‘The linen he left behind in that trunk is of the finest cambric——’
‘– How do you know?’ I asked.
‘Oh,’ said Morkens, ‘I gathered as much from the quality of the stuff your master had on his back. Why do you ask? Would I look in his trunks?’
‘Of course not,’ I answered.
You understand; my instinct warned me to continue to play the perfect courier-cum-valet de chambre with this Morkens. I spoke primly, but at the same time gave him a sidelong glance, smiling with the right-hand corner of my mouth, while I winked with the left eye, falling impassive, again, upon the instant.
‘Now, look here,’ said he, ‘then we’ll go halves.’
‘Halves? Of what?’ I asked.
‘Oh, linen and what-not,’ said Morkens. ‘The linen, the horse …’
‘But milord gave the horse and the linen to me, my friend,’ I said. ‘You heard him.’
He shouted: ‘Hey, Marie!’ and his wife came out. She was good-looking in the Flemish style – a skin like cream, and hair like copper. The cream soon goes cheesy, and the copper tarnishes; still, while their looks last, Flemish women, as you know, are very pretty, if you like something to get hold of (if you understand what I mean). Marie Morkens must have been a good twenty years younger than her hogshead of a husband, and she had the sleek look and something of the colouring of a fine, healthy, tortoise-shell cat. I remember that she had golden eyelashes; never trust a woman with fair eyelashes.
‘My darling,’ said Morkens, ‘did we hear milord giving his horse and his linen to this gentleman?’
She answered: ‘Of course not, my dear…. Hey, Cornelys, come here!’ Her voice was husky, yet penetrating, not unlike a cowbell in a mist.
Cornelys, the blacksmith, whose smithy was only twenty yards away, came running, hammer in hand, and stood open-mouthed, a veritable Vulcan with his leather apron and his blackened face. He stood, grinning like an idiot, rolling his inflamed eyes at the inn-keeper’s wife, with whom he was obviously head over heels in love.
‘Cornelys,’ said she, ‘you did not hear the English milord giving his horse and his linen to this gentleman here, did you?’
‘No.’
‘You heard him giving them to my husband, didn’t you?’
‘Did I? Oh yes, I remember now. That’s right; to your husband, certainly,’ said this idiot.
Morkens said: ‘So there you are!’
You know, my friend, that I am nicknamed ‘The Fox’. I am supposed to be incredibly clever. In point of fact, I am not; I pass as clever only because, in an emergency, I keep a cool head, hold my tongue, keep my temper, and wait to see which way the cat jumps. I hold by the old apophthegm To the ignorant much is told, moreover. I give away as little as possible, and prefer to profess, above all, an abysmal ignorance of foreign languages when in out-of-the-way places. In Flanders, for example, I pretended not to understand Flemish, although I understand it perfectly; thus I overheard many interesting things, as will soon be evident.
Now the woman turned to her husband and in the barbarous dialect of the locality – it always reminds me of a dog with a bone in his throat – said: ‘Joris, give him the horse. One side or the other will be advancing or retreating, any day now, and horses will be commandeered anyway.’
‘Give him the horse? Are you out of your mind, wife?’
She purred in her throat: ‘Give him the horse, I say, husband; and sell him a saddle.’
‘You are right, my heart.’
‘I am not your heart, you fat lump; I am your brain, you fool. Let me handle this,’ said she. Then to me, in French: ‘Nevertheless, monsieur, it is not in my character to see a traveller stranded in this God-forsaken mud. My husband is willing to lend you milord’s horse. A light rider like yourself can easily overtake milord’s coach, which will be going heavily, the roads being as they are. You can join milord at Flushing, and all’s well that ends well. No?’
I said, with simulated reluctance: ‘Very well. I see that I am outnumbered here. Shoe me the mare, and let me go.’
The blacksmith said: ‘Oh, as for that – ten minutes! The shoe is made.’
So I led the dapple-grey mare out of the stable, and to the forge. Madame Morkens accompanied me. She stood, hugging herself as if in secret delight at some incommunicable titillating thought, as such women will, while Cornelys went to work with rasp and hammer. That lovesick clown’s mind was not on his work. Every other second he paused to make sheep’s eyes at Madame Morkens. Once, indeed, while he was driving home the first nail, the mare Cocotte almost kicked him into his own fire.