But Peregrine wasn't convinced. 'We could roast bits of it over the Calor-gas stoves and that way '
'Listen,' said Glodstone, 'we've come here to rescue the Countess, not to butcher sheep. So let's not waste time arguing about it.'
Finally they found a hollow with several thorn trees and bushes in it and Glodstone called a halt. 'We can't be more than three miles from the river and from there we'll be able to view the Château,' he said as they unrolled their sleeping-bags and put a billycan of water on a stove. Above them, the evening sky was darkening and a few stars were visible. They ate some sardines and baked beans and made coffee, and Glodstone, having added some brandy to his, began to feel better.
'Nothing like the open-air life,' he said, as he climbed into his sleeping bag and put his dentures in the empty coffee-cup.
'Hadn't one of us better stay on guard?' asked Peregrine, 'I mean we don't want to be taken unawares.'
Glodstone groped for his false teeth. 'In the first place, no one knows we're here,' he said when he'd managed to find them and get them back in his mouth, 'and in the second, we've come the devil of a long way today and we're going to need all our strength when we reach the Château.'
'Oh, I don't know. We've only come about twelve miles and that's not all that far. I don't mind taking the first watch and I can wake you at midnight.'
'I shouldn't if I were you,' said Glodstone, and put his teeth back into the mug. He lay down and tried to make himself comfortable. It wasn't easy. The ground in the hollow was uneven and he had to sit up again to dislodge several stones that had wedged themselves under his sleeping-bag. Even then he was unable to get to sleep but lay there conscious that his hip seemed to be resting on a small mound. He shifted sideways and finally got it settled but only at the expense of his right shoulder. He turned over and found his left shoulder on a stone. Once more he sat up and pushed the thing away, upsetting the coffee mug in the process.
'Damn,' he mumbled and felt around for his teeth. As he did so, Peregrine, who had been peering suspiciously over the edge of the hollow, slid down towards him.
'Don't move another inch,' said Glodstone indistinctly.
'Why not?'
'Because I've mislaid my bloody dentures,' Glodstone mumbled, aware that his authority was being eroded by this latest admission of a physical defect and terrified that Peregrine would step on the damned things. In the end, he found the top plate resting against something that felt suspiciously like sheep droppings. Glodstone shoved it hurriedly back into the mug and made a mental note to wash it carefully in the morning before having breakfast. But the bottom plate was still missing. He reached across for his torch and was about to use it when Peregrine once more demonstrated his superior fieldcraft and his night vision by whispering to him not to turn it on.
'Why the devil not?' asked Glodstone.
'Because there's something moving around out there.'
'Probably a blasted sheep.'
'Shall I slip out and see? I mean if it's one of the swine and we captured him, we could make him tell us how to get into the Château and what's going on mere.'
Glodstone sighed. It was a long, deep sigh, the sigh of a man whose bottom plate was still missing while the other was in all probability impregnated with sheep dung and who was faced with the need to explain that it was extremely unlikely that one of the 'swine' (a term he regretted having used so freely in the past) was wandering about on a barren plateau at dead of night.
'Listen,' he hissed through bare gums, 'even if it is one of them, what do you think they're going to think when the...er...blighter doesn't turn up in the morning?'
'I suppose they might think '
'That we're in the neighbourhood and have got him and he's told us he knows. So they'll be doubly on the qui-vive and '
'On the what?'
'On the lookout, for God's sake. And the whole point of the exercise is that we take them by surprise.'
'I don't see how we're going to do that,' said Peregrine. 'After all they know we're coming. That oil trap in the forest '
'Told them we're coming by road, not across country. Now shut up and get some sleep.'
But Peregrine had slid quietly back up the bank and was peering intently into the night. Glodstone resumed the search for his teeth and finally found them covered in sand. He dropped them into the mug and transferred this to a safer spot inside his rucksack. Then he wormed down into his sleeping bag again and prayed that Peregrine would let him get some rest. But it still took him some time to fall asleep. A lurking feeling that he had made a mistake in bringing Peregrine with him nagged at his mind. He was no longer a young man and there was something about Peregrine's fitness and his blasted fieldcraft that irritated him. In the morning, he'd have to make it quite clear who was in charge.
In fact it was only an hour or so later when he was woken. The weather had changed and it had began to drizzle. Glodstone stared bleakly from his one eye into a grey mist and shivered. He was stiff and cold and doubly aggravated to see that Peregrine had covered his own sleeping-bag with his ground-sheet and pools of water had gathered in the folds. In Glodstone's case it had soaked through the bag itself and the bottom half felt decidedly damp.
'Stay in here any longer and I'll go down with pneumonia,' he muttered to himself and, crawling out, put on a jersey, wrapped the groundsheet round his shoulders and lit the stove. A cup of coffee with a bit of brandy in it would take off the chill. Blearily, he filled the billycan with water and had put his top dentures in his mouth before being reminded by their earthy taste and something else where they had been. Glodstone spat the things out and rinsed them as best he could. Presently, huddled under the groundsheet, he was sipping coffee and trying to take his mind off his discomfort by planning their strategy when they reached the Château. It was rather more difficult than he had foreseen. It had been all very well to drive across France, eluding pursuit, but now that they were so close to their goal he began to see snags. They couldn't very well march up to the front door and ask for the Countess. In some way or other they would have to let her know they were in the vicinity and were waiting for her instructions. And this would have to be done without giving the game away to anyone else. The phrase brought him up short. 'The game away'? In the past he had always thought of the great adventure as a game but now in the cold, wet dawn, squatting in a hollow in a remote part of France, it had a new and rather disturbing reality about it, one involving the genuine possibility of death or torture and something else almost as alarming. For one brief moment, Glodstone sensed intuitively the unlikelihood that he should have been asked to rescue a Countess he had never met from villains occupying her own Château. But a raindrop dribbling down his nose into his coffee-cup put an end to this insight. He was there in the hollow. He had received her letters and two attempts had been made, at Dover and again in the forest of Dreux, to stop his coming. Those were undeniable facts and put paid to any doubts about the improbability of the mission. 'Can't have this,' he muttered, and stood up. Over the edge of the hollow drifts of light rain shifted across the plateau obscuring the horizon and giving the broken terrain the look of No-Man's-Land as he had seen it in photographs taken in the Great War. He turned and prodded Peregrine. 'Time to be moving,' he said and was horrified to find the barrel of a revolver pointing at him.
'Oh, it's you,' said Peregrine, who was all too evidently a light sleeper and one who woke instantly, 'I thought '
'Never mind what you bloody thought,' snapped Glodstone, 'Do you have to sleep with the damned gun? I could have been shot.'