The old man helpfully pantomimed putting the harness on. “In case I didn’t get the idea, eh?” said Crawford in English as he picked the thing up. He slowly put it on, feeling the stiffness in his joints and wishing he hadn’t spent the night curled up in a cold wooden bin. “Well, I’ll tell you this—you’d better be able to get me a passport.”
Very clearly, des Loges asked him if, for the walk, he would prefer stone-soled shoes.
Crawford declined the offer.
“Ah, le fils prodigue!” remarked des Loges in his barbarous French, shaking his head.
Crawford leaned forward against the rope and the wagon creaked forward, but then he realized that he was still carrying the bag. He stopped and walked back and, over protests, made des Loges hold it. Then, with that small victory won, he walked back until the rope was tight again and began pulling. Within the first few minutes he had figured out the most comfortable way to wear the harness, and the easiest-to-maintain pace.
As he plodded away from the sea, leaving the village behind as the ground slowly rose, the only smells were of sun-heated stone and the spice of heather, and the only violations of the sky’s quiet were Crawford’s heavy breathing and the creaking of the wheels and the monotonous skirling of the bees.
After what might have been an hour he crested a hill, and found himself facing a broad, shallow inland valley … and he stopped abruptly, letting the wagon roll forward and bump him in the calves, for an army of giants stood in ranks across the distant gray-green slopes.
Then he heard the old man laughing at him and he realized that the figures in the valley weren’t men but were upright stones—the landscape reminded him vaguely of Stonehenge.
A little embarrassed at having been startled by the sight, he began walking down the north slope of the hill; but after the wagon had twice more bumped him from behind, he decided that it would be easier to let the wagon roll down the hill ahead of him backward while he trudged along after it, hauling back on the rope and acting as a brake.
In this ludicrous posture they were passed by a party of six unamused monks on donkeys, and des Loges added to Crawford’s humiliation by choosing that time to recite, in a loud and sarcastic voice, a local legend that held the stones to be a pagan army that had been chasing one St. Cornely toward the sea until the saint turned, and, by the exertion of his virtue, petrified them all in place.
A narrow arm of the sea extended far inland, narrowing to a river eventually, and the buildings of the little town of Auray clustered around the mouth of the river and mounted in steep lanes and terraces up the flanks of the hills on either side.
From the old man Crawford had learned that the history of the whole area was peppered with miracles and apparitions—only a mile away to the east was the Chappelle Ste. Anne, where the Virgin had appeared to a peasant named Yves Nicolazic and told him to build a church there, and down the road a little way stood a cross marking a fourteenth-century battlefield, the unshriven casualties of which were condemned, according to popular belief, to wander the hills until the Last Day—but the citizens weren’t prepared for the procession that came plodding and creaking and barking into town at a ceremonious pace just at sunset on that Friday.
All day Crawford had alternately sweated in the sun and shivered in the sea breezes as he dragged the wagon along the rutted road, and at lunch he and his passenger had each drunk an entire bottle of claret with the bread and cheese and cabbage des Loges had packed; just before they resumed their journey the old man had bitten eye-holes into the cloth bag and pulled it over his head like the hood of a bucolic executioner, and Crawford had followed his example by donning as a hat the hollowed-out shell of the cabbage head.
Having finally reached Auray, these many hours later, the cabbage was wilted but still clinging to his head, and he was noctambulistically intoning the refrain to a song des Loges had begun singing hours ago; and the melody, or perhaps the wing-flapping motions with which the wagon-bound old man had chosen to accompany it, had attracted a following procession of barking dogs. Children ran into houses and several old women blessed themselves fearfully.
Des Loges broke off his singing long enough to tell Crawford where to turn and which one of the fifteenth-century buildings to stop in front of; and when the wagon rolled to a halt and he was finally able to take off the harness, Crawford blinked around at the steep streets and old houses and wondered what he was doing here, weary, fevered and cabbage-decked.
They’d stopped at a two-story stone building with half a dozen windows upstairs but only a single narrow one at street level. The eaves projected a good yard out beyond the wall, and the building was just perceptibly wider at the bottom than at the top, and Crawford thought the place had a forbiddingly oriental look. A thin, middle-aged man in an outmoded powdered wig was staring down at them in consternation from one of the upstairs windows.
“This had better be it, François,” the man called.
“I’ll see that the widow is delivered to you in a lace dress and a veil,” answered des Loges in his archaic French, “and that Mont St. Michel stands in for her father! But Brizeux!—until my cousin here resumes his travels I can’t spare the hospitality.”
The man in the window nodded tiredly. “Everybody needs help in passing on. One moment.” He disappeared, and a few moments later the street door was pulled open. “Come in, come in,” Brizeux said, “God knows you’ve drawn enough attention already.”
The sunset glow overwhelmed the lamplight inside, and it wasn’t until the door was closed again that the ranked shelves of ledgers and journals regained their air of significance.
Brizeux led them into a private office and waved toward a couple of velvet-upholstered chairs; dimly on the faded cloth backs Crawford could see the outline of the embroidered Napoleonic B that had been cut off recently and, more faintly, the shadow of the fleur-de-lis that had preceded it. Brizeux was as erratic in his politics as the chair, addressing his guests as “citoyens” one moment and as “monsieurs” the next. His French, at least, was pure Parisian.
Crawford looked at the man curiously. He was nearly a caricature of a law clerk, fussy and shabby and ink-stained and smelling of book-bindings and sealing wax, but he seemed to hold a position of authority here—and, to Crawford’s surprise, he seemed to be willing to give Crawford a passport.
He opened a drawer in his desk and dug out a double handful of passports and then shuffled through them, squinting up at Crawford from time to time as if to judge the fit. Finally, “Would you be more at ease as a veterinarian or as an upholsterer?” he asked.
Crawford smiled. “A veterinarian.”
“Very well. Henceforth you are Michael Aickman, forty-two years old, late of Ipswich, who arrived in France on the twelfth of May. Your family is doubtless worried about you.” He handed Crawford the passport.
“What happened to the original Michael Aickman?” he asked.
Brizeux shrugged. “Waylaid by criminals, I imagine. Perhaps he was carrying a lot of money … or perhaps his assailants simply killed him for his passport, which could be sold to,” he permitted himself a sour smile, “certain unscrupulous public officials.”