And, most likely, he was not exactly a fisherman. He walked confidently in this market of Dover. She had heard much of the English press gangs from her smuggler friends. The English navy would take any such man from the port towns, so tall and strong, with his hands marked with pine pitch and tar, and drag him off to their naval ships to be poor and uncomfortable. Unless he had powerful protection. The smugglers had great influence along this south coast of England.
Almost certainly he was an English smuggler like her friend Josiah. Smugglers were cunning and capable men and it was not altogether surprising she should owe her life to one. How interesting life in England was turning out to be.
He was so tall it was easy to follow his progress amid the booths of the market. He picked a stall, and the woman dropped her other customer like a three-day-old mackerel to hurry to serve him. She was old enough, that woman, that she should not have been so foolish for a pair of broad shoulders. Or perhaps she was not so foolish. When he left, he flipped her a silver coin, not asking for change.
He brought back whelks, held in a cone of broadsheet paper. They looked exactly like the ones she had eaten in the fisherman’s hut in St. Grue two days before, though these were English whelks. He carried also two mugs of tea, hooking the two handles with one finger very deftly. The tea contained milk in abundance and great heapings of sugar, neither of which she wanted, but he had saved her life for her and she would have happily eaten a bouquet of meadow grasses if that had been what he offered.
He sat and drank tea and watched her winkle the whelks out with a peeled wood stick. Two housewives sauntered by, with their shopping baskets and white aprons and pretty bonnets. They shot her smuggler glances. The harlots came to the tavern window and whispered with one another, letting their dresses slip low on their shoulders. And well they might. He was a large and excellently made man. She would indulge herself in smugness for this few minutes while he sat beside her.
“I am Annique. I have not told you that yet.” No, the tea did not improve upon acquaintance. “Annique Villiers. It is my life you have given me. That was not some slight quarrel you interrupted, monsieur, je vous assure.” She chewed. “Peste. I will speak only English now. I am determined.” She was very hungry, and the whelks were fresh and admirably clean of sand. “I would most certainly be dead if you had not happened by. Leblanc must kill me, you see, to shut my mouth, as I know certain discreditable facts about him. Leblanc is the one I put my knife into. Henri, who would also be happy to kill me, is the one you were kind enough to throw among the garbages.”
“You should keep out of alleys.”
“Bien sûr. I shall most certainly do so in the future.” She ate the last of the whelks. “But I will be safe in a few days. Leblanc will not find me again, once I leave Dover. There is much of England to hide in.”
All this time she had been tossing whelk shells onto the pavement, the way everyone else did. She hated to throw the paper there, so she crumpled it up and put it in her empty tea mug.
She was delightfully filled. She wanted nothing more than to curl up like a cat and sleep. But cats do not have agents of many governments chasing them. “I thank you for whelks and for the tea, which is very English. I shall have to drink a great deal of it to properly appreciate it, I believe. Will you tell me your name? It is hard to say thank you with such great sincerity to someone whose name I do not know.”
“My name is Robert Fordham.” How solemn he was with it, as if he were trusting her with a secret. Perhaps he was. It could be that this town was posted with numerous handbills from the Office of the Customs, seeking his capture. He did not know that she had kept many secrets and could be trusted with his. “I’m pleased to meet you, Annique.”
His expression was somewhat grim, all this time. He was captain, she was almost sure, and in the habit of worrying often and deeply about the safety of his small smuggling ship. This was someone who would lead men as naturally as he breathed or hurl himself into an alley to save the life of a stranger. In the army of Napoleon he would already have risen to high rank, though not in an English army, naturally, which was enslaved to the old order of things.
A seagull flapped down beside her feet and began upending the shells she had discarded, checking inside. There were multitudes of seagulls pillaging the market. The women who sold fish fought them continually.
It was time, she knew, to get up and be upon her travels.
“Monsieur…No. I will break myself of the habit of speaking French in a day or two. Mr. Fordham, I am grateful until I have no words, and I am a person who has many words. You have my good wishes, for whatever they are worth.” She had no map of Dover in her head. She carried no exact maps of English cities at all, really. She shaded her eyes and looked up at the sun. London was north, so she would walk north. It always surprised her how often the obvious works. “I hope, if you are ever in danger, someone comes to your rescue.”
“So do I.” The man rose when she did, and walked with her. “Where are you going?”
She gave him the truth, since he had saved her life. “To London. I have an errand.”
“The London stage leaves from the Bear and Bells, at the center of town. The easiest way is back through the market—”
She laughed. “I have only three pounds, Monsieur…Mr. Fordham.”
“Robert.”
“Robert.” She liked that name. She said it in her own way, the French way, so that it sounded correct to her. “I have three pounds and sixpence. It would be silly to squander it. I shall walk.”
He frowned. “You can’t walk from Dover to London.”
“But yes. I have walked the whole way here from the south of France, except for some distances when I went in a coach, and I shall tell you, the times walking were the more agreeable. It is a nothing, this walking to London.”
He was so tall he was able to take slow, deliberate steps and still keep pace beside her. “You’ll take the Canterbury Road then. I’ll show you.”
He said little as he unwound the town for her, street to street, and finally pointed the way onward. The Canterbury Road led straight uphill and did not look easy, which made it typical of the roads she had encountered in her life. When she turned to thank him, he had already turned away. He had not waited to say good-bye.
She saw him striding purposefully in the direction of the docks, his black cap and shoulders showing above the other people on the street. He was good to look upon, strong and brown and muscular from carrying illegal cargoes around. It is a healthy life, to be a smuggler, if one does not get hanged for it.
“It is unfair, this,” she remarked softly, to nobody. The people she would most like to avoid—Leblanc, for instance—she encountered everywhere. Someone like Robert Fordham walked away an hour after he saved her life.
Doubtless he was married to a woman in one of those stone houses and had three small children with slate-colored eyes. He would be hurrying home to them at this minute. She amused herself on the long climb out of Dover, wondering which house might be his and what that good woman, his wife, had fixed him for his supper.
These white cliffs about her were oddly light colored, as if they were made of old snow. At every height birds flew. The ocean behind her was blue this afternoon, like the warm waters of the south. She walked away from Dover, remembering the cliffs of Italy and France, thinking of the Roman historian Tacitus, who had written about England, and wondering where she would go after she had seen Soulier and then completed her business in London. She must find safety, of course, but also earn a living, since she was no longer to support herself by stealing secrets. Perhaps she would become a cook.
She was still in sight of the sea when she realized she was being followed.