The old man simply stared at her. ‘Danged if I ever hear the like,’ he repeated blankly.
‘Parbleu, you are deaf perhaps? It is seen that you are very old, certainly.’
Colour suffused the man’s face. ‘Deaf? Deaf? I’ll have you know, miss—’
‘Do not have me know anything,’ interrupted Melusine crossly, and digging into her habit, produced the fateful dagger that had cut Gerald’s hand. ‘To the contrary, I will have you to know something. You will do as I say, or—’
‘Hoy!’ called Trodger from down the hall. ‘You put that thing away now, missie. We don’t want no trouble, do we?’
At sight of him, everything went out of Melusine’s head but the thought of Jack Kimble. She started forward.
‘Jacques? You have done it? He is alive?’
‘Oh, he’s alive, all right,’ confirmed the sergeant, putting the petrified Pottiswick—stockstill and staring in horror at the dagger—firmly out of his way and taking his place before Melusine. ‘Sleeping like a baby, he is. He’ll do.’
Melusine sank against the wall of the corridor, closing her eyes. ‘Merci, dieu.’
‘Now then, missie,’ began the sergeant severely, ‘just you hand over that dagger. Nice goings on. Ladies with weapon’s on ’em.’ He took the thing from Melusine’s listless grasp and went on, ‘Now then, what’s all this here argy-bargy with Pottiswick?’
Melusine opened her eyes and straightened up. She had hardly noticed the loss of her dagger, so strong had been the waves of relief that attacked her on hearing that Jack had returned from death’s door. But this was important.
‘Bon. You will make him get his daughter, if you please. She is called Madame Ibstock, you understand.’
‘Is she now? And what would you be wanting of her, may I ask?’
‘Because she knows something that may make this fool understand that I am the mistress of—’ She broke off. There was no sense in creating further difficulties for herself by arguing with the sergeant over her identity. An admirable alternative presented itself and she sighed, spreading her hands. ‘You see, it is that I am a female, and you all are men. It is not at all comme il faut.’
Trodger frowned, and chewed his lip. ‘Something in that, missie. But I’m thinking as how I’d best report to the major over this here shooting.’
‘Yes, do so,’ rejoined Melusine enthusiastically. ‘En effet, it is for this that I was enquiring of this man if he has pen and paper. I will write to your major, and you will send the letter very quickly. Also, you must send someone to fetch my horse—at least, it is not mine but I have borrowed it to come here—because it will be dark very soon and—’
‘Woof! Hold it, hold it,’ begged the sergeant. ‘One thing at a time, missie.’ He turned to the lodgekeeper behind him, whose shocked fear had given place to a direful frown. ‘Here you, Pottiswick. Get pen and paper for the missie. Then go and fetch this daughter of yourn. Don’t stand gawping, man. And you’d better have her fetch in some food for the missie, an’ all. Get on, do.’
He gave the gaping Pottiswick a shove, passing him on to his junior, who was waiting patiently by the kitchen door. The militiaman at once thrust the old man between the shoulder blades, pushing him into the kitchen.
Melusine soon found herself seated at a table, with a dirty piece of paper in front of her, and a badly mended pen between her fingers. The ink, contained in a grimy bottle unearthed in the outhouse, was old, and made blotches as soon as it touched the paper. But it would serve.
Mon cher major, Melusine began. And then scratched it out and wrote instead, “Gérard”. She sat in deep thought for a moment or two, and then nodding briskly, dipped the pen in the ink again and began to write.
“Jacques is wounded and we are arrested by this imbecile of a sergeant. The soi-disant Valade escapes and takes my proof, which I have broken on his head. Hurry to me, I entreat you. Never did I need a rescue so much. It is at the lodge that we stay. I pray you, Gérard, do not fail me. Á bientot—Melusine.”
To her relief, Trodger sent one of his men posthaste to London with this missive, while the other went to fetch the horse, having been given precise directions on how to negotiate the passage so that he might find it at the other end. The old man Pottiswick, still grumbling, much to Melusine’s disgust, had gone on his errand to his daughter’s house some two miles distant. And the sergeant, having carried out all Melusine’s instructions as if they had come out of his own head, went up to check on his patient, apparently at last convinced that his prisoner would not attempt to run away.
Nothing could have been farther from Melusine’s mind. She had come to the end of her resources. It had been a trying day. She was tired, hungry—and thus somewhat impatient for the food Mrs Ibstock might bring—and downcast.
She sat in a chair in the parlour and regarded the darkening sky through the small casement window. It seemed to her at this moment that there was nothing left for her to do. Gosse, if he had any sense, would immediately seek out the Remenham lawyers. Once he had managed to stake his claim, she would have all to do to prove her identity and win it back. If only monsieur le baron had said nothing, or perhaps instead accepted the couple as the Valades and agreed to help them. Not that there had ever been any hope of that. She had told Emile. She had warned him.
Her mind wandered back to that fateful day. Was it a week ago? No, perhaps more. Time was moving so fast, she could no longer count the days since Gosse had come to her with his preposterous suggestion at the Coq d’Or, where they were staying and where he had robbed her and left her and Martha to their fate.
‘Mademoiselle,’ he had greeted her, entering the little private parlour where, Martha being at prayer in their room, she sat alone, reading over and over the letter Mother Abbess had given her and revolving plans in her head.
She had looked up from her seat at the small round table in the centre of the parlour which, together with the wooden armchairs beside the small fireplace, and a sideboard next the single casement, was all the furniture the place afforded. Melusine, used to the stark surroundings of the convent at Blaye, had no complaint to make. Her desires were not for riches. Only identity, and a chance to be someone other than a nun.
Not so Gosse. But at this point he was still subservient, still outwardly humble, in spite of the blackhearted villainy that was even then burgeoning in his breast.
‘Mademoiselle, there is a way to win to freedom and prosperity.’
To be sure there was a way. For freedom at least. Why did he imagine she was making this journey to England? She feigned interest.
‘But what way, Emile?’
‘Your family, mademoiselle, the family of your father.’
‘You mean monsieur le baron, the General Charvill, my grandfather?’
Melusine laid aside on the table the letter she had been studying and turned so that the frame of her nun’s wimple no longer obscured her view.
‘Pardon, mademoiselle, but perhaps your father went to England, after all, and—’
‘My father went to Italy,’ interrupted Melusine, her heart tightening with the familiar sensation of loss. ‘Never would he have gone to England. And if you mean that he may have reconciled himself with his own father, you waste your breath.’
‘That was not what I had in mind.’
‘Eh bien, what then?’
Emile sidled closer. ‘To what do you go, mademoiselle? The life of a nun in a convent, in a country where nuns are unwelcome. Where even to be a Catholic, they say, is to be looked upon with scorn and disgust.’
Melusine shrugged. She had no intention whatsoever of spending her life in a convent, but that was not his affair.
