Flashman's Escape (25 page)

When I got close, I saw that the organ itself was high on a platform but the seat was empty. Glancing around to check that no one was about, I climbed up the steps to the platform to look at the instrument. It was well looked after and there was no dust on any of the keys. There was even a pile of music scores on a little table beside the bench that the organist must sit on. The organ was obviously still in use and so I would just have to wait until an organist appeared. I turned and started to climb down the little ladder back to the ground.

“What are you doing,
monsieur
?” called a voice sharply. “You are not allowed up there. The organ is a very valuable instrument and must not be damaged.”

I turned and there was a pinch-faced priest glaring at me. “I was seeking the organist,” I explained.

“We have several; which one do you want?” challenged the cleric.

I had no idea who I wanted but knew enough that when lying it was always best to stay as close to the truth as possible. So I opened my arms in a sign of submission and tried to appeal to the priest’s goodwill.

“I am sorry, sir, I do not know. As you can see I am a soldier, and three years ago I saved the life of a brother officer at the battle at Talavera, in Spain. He had been wounded and when the battlefield caught fire I managed to drag him out of the path of the flames.”

The priest looked slightly mollified but asked, “What has that to do with our organists?”

“I cannot remember the man’s name but he told me that his father was an organist here. In fact he said that his father would be pleased to play for me should I ever be in Paris. I am not here for a concert, but as I was in the city I thought I would enquire to see if the man I saved had survived.”

“I see,” mused the priest. “Monsieur Lacodre had a son who was wounded in Spain.”

“That could be him,” I replied. “Was it at Talavera?”

“I have no idea but I can send a boy to get him. He does not live far away. Why don’t you wait here?”

With that the priest bustled off and I sat down on one of the benches. I tried to think back to my brief meeting with the wounded officer; was his name Lacodre? It was strange: I could remember his face well and even that we had joked about him not having a sister he could introduce me to, but his name was a complete blank. Even if it was Lacodre then there was no guarantee the organist would help us. I would have to make sure we were somewhere private when I explained what we wanted. That way we would have some chance to escape before he could raise any alarm.

I sat there in the light from a nearby stained window rehearsing in my mind how I would remind the man of the service I had done his son and subtly pressure him to help us. I had been sitting there for some ten minutes when I noticed a slight disturbance at the entrance of the cathedral. A tall soldier had walked in, followed by an elderly couple who were nearly running to keep up. The man quickly scanned the congregation, and spotted Grant sitting there in his red coat facing the altar. The soldier grinned and started walking directly towards Grant. Even if the officer had not been limping heavily, I would have recognised him for the man I had saved. I got up quickly and strode to intercept him; but he reached Grant first and stared down at him in confusion.

“You are not the man I was told about. What is this?”

Grant looked up in surprise at being challenged by the Frenchman and noticed various other members of the congregation turning to stare at him.

“I think I am the man you are looking for,” I called from a few yards away as I rushed up.

“Yes… yes, you are,” agreed Captain Lacodre hesitantly, taking in the man he knew to be a British soldier now wearing a French lieutenant’s uniform. He looked from me to Grant in his red coat and then back to me again, obviously trying to work out what on earth we were doing in the capital city of our nation’s fiercest enemy. His gaze encompassed the curious faces watching this encounter and he gave me a rueful grin. “I think perhaps we should talk in private. Would you like to come back to my parents’ apartment?”

We walked back the few hundred yards to
chez
Lacodre with Madame Lacodre hugging and kissing me once she understood that it was me that had saved her son from the flames and not Grant. The old organist barely uttered a word. He just strolled along beside us, slightly bemused and puffing on his pipe. Inside the apartment the woman fussed around finding wine and getting us bread and cheese. Then, once we were settled around the table, Lacodre looked at us expectantly. “Perhaps you had better tell us what this is all about,” he suggested.

We gave them the edited highlights: how Grant had been captured and had given his parole. That his guards had freed him in Bayonne when they learned he was to be tortured and that I had been sent by the British to get him back.

“But why did you come all the way to Paris once your guards had released you in Bayonne?” asked Lacodre, confused. When Grant explained about his precious honour Lacodre shook his head in dismay while the father muttered to his wife something about Grant’s sanity.

“The point is that we are here now and we need help to get home,” I declared. “Is there anything you can do to help us?”

“It is impossible!” exclaimed the old man. “There are patrols all over the country searching for men who are avoiding conscription or trying to get out of the invasion of Russia. You would need papers to prove you are not deserters just to get out of the city.” He looked imploringly at his wife. “The government will be looking for these men. If Jean helps them, he will be arrested – we could all be arrested.
Mon dieu
, people have already seen them with us in the cathedral. We are already in danger…”

“Calm down,” snapped his wife as the old boy worked himself into a state. “Do you think this man,” she cried, gesturing at me, “worried about the danger when he charged into the flames to rescue our son?” As it happened I had been on the verge of abandoning their son when I spotted a gap to safety through the smoke and flames, but now did not seem a good time to mention that. “If he had not shown courage,” she continued, “ Jean would have been burned alive. We owe him the life of our son; we are not going to abandon them.”

“From the sound of things the ministry will not know you are missing yet,” suggested Lacodre to Grant. “They might not realise you are missing until Marshal Marmont sends another message to find out what information has been gathered from the interrogation.”

“Exactly,” I agreed to help calm the old man. “And even when they do find out, they will assume Grant slipped back over the border into Spain. They will never think he was idiotic enough to continue on to Paris.”

“They might,” protested Grant. “They know I am a man of hon… ouch.” Grant glared at me, rightly guessing who had kicked him under the table.

“We are trying to reassure the organist,” I murmured at him in English, “that there is little risk in him helping us. If you cannot say anything helpful then keep your damn mouth shut.”

The old man glared at me suspiciously as he had not understood what I had muttered to Grant. “It does not matter,” he announced at last, “because you still cannot get out of the city without the right papers and you cannot hide here. We can give you some food and some money and then you must go.”

“Wait,” replied Lacodre. “They might be checking the roads but they do not search all of the river barges that leave the city. I have a cousin Marcel who owns a barge. It runs down the Seine from Paris to the canals that join with the Loire. Then sometimes he goes all the way to Nantes on the Britany coast.”

My heart soared. Here was help indeed, and it sounded so simple. Instead of travelling by night and hiding by day in hedgerows, risking capture at every step, we would float downriver gently to our destination, with plenty of time to hide among the cargo if anyone tried to board the vessel. Of course life is never that simple, as we were to learn.

“What could we do to escape when we reach Nantes?” I asked.

“There will be ships there who will be trying to run the British blockade of the port,” explained Lacodre. “My cousin will know some of the captains. If you go in one of those, they will take you to safety. If the ship
is
captured by the British navy, well, you will be saved then too.”

“That is an excellent plan,” I cried, feeling a great weight lift from my shoulders. Rarely had I known my fortunes change so fast. Just a few minutes ago we were trapped in an enemy capital, with no means to escape, and now we had what sounded like a comfortable and well-thought-out plan. “When can we meet your cousin?”

Lacodre’s face dropped. “Not for a while. I saw him a few weeks ago and he was heading south; I am not sure how far. But sooner or later he will be taking a shipment of wine back to the river quay here in Paris.”

“But that means we could be trapped in Paris for weeks waiting for him to return,” I exclaimed, dismayed.

“And you are not staying here while you wait,” insisted the old man firmly.

“Can we get a message to Marcel, asking him to come quickly?” I asked.

“Barge men carry messages for each other and pass them over on the river but they are not secure. Anyway Marcel makes his living from the boat; he must deliver his cargo or he will not be paid.” Lacodre looked at me. “The barges are not fast. Even if he is heading to Paris now it will take at least a week or two for him to get here.”

“So we have to find somewhere to hide for a few weeks?” I asked, feeling the hope start to subside.

“What about the old chapel in Madame Trebuchet’s garden?” mused the old woman. “People have hidden there before.”

“Are you mad?” shouted the old man. “Think of who she is, what she is. We cannot afford to get involved with her, especially with men that the government will soon be hunting down.”

“Who is Madame Trebuchet?” I asked with a growing sense of unease.

“It is best you do not know in case the worst happens,” stated Lacodre quietly. “What you do not know you cannot tell. Another cousin, Anna, is a maid in her house. It is a big rambling building, part of a former convent, with a huge garden. At the bottom of the garden is a half-ruined chapel which has been used to harbour fugitives before.”

“And what happened to the last fugitive?” enquired the old man before answering his own question. “He was arrested, and how Madame Trebuchet escaped arrest and imprisonment is beyond me.”

“You think she betrayed the fugitive?” asked Grant, alarmed.

“No, no,” replied Lacodre, raising his arms to calm the growing tension. “The man was her lover, a former French general who had been implicated in a plot against the emperor. She was distraught when he was arrested; there is no question that she betrayed him. She still visits him in prison.”

“Why wasn’t she arrested then?” demanded his father.

“I don’t know, but Anna is convinced that Madame Trebuchet did not betray anyone.” Lacodre turned to me. “It does not matter, for you should not see Madame Trebuchet and with luck she will never know that you are hiding at the bottom of her garden. The chapel cannot be seen from the house. Apart from Anna, who can bring you food, no one should see you at all.”

A short while late Lacodre was leading us south through the streets of Paris. With half a million of the French empire’s soldiers marching on Russia, there still seemed a lot of uniformed men about. Lacodre explained that soldiers had been brought in from other parts of the empire to give a show of strength and normality in the French capital. I imagined that this was the reason that the soldiers who had escorted us from Salamanca had been summoned. There were dragoons, hussars, infantrymen and gunners all strolling the streets. But on closer inspection, most looked past their prime or sporting wounds.

Grant still walked along wearing his British uniform and while he got the odd sideways glance as there were two French officers with him no one intervened. The idea that an escaped British officer would stroll brazenly around Paris was so preposterous that no sane person would consider it a possibility. With a myriad of uniforms worn across the empire, perhaps most who saw him assumed that he was from one of the Swiss or Hanoverian regiments. Only one person showed any hostility: a suspicious old matron with a ribbon stall. Grant simply raised his hat to her and called, “Greetings from America,” and her expression lifted at once.

“Long live George Washington,” she cried in reply.

The old convent had been called the Feuillantines and it was off the Rue Saint Jacques in the southern half of the city, just a few hundred yards from a large park called the Luxembourg Garden. Lacodre left us by a locked gate in an alleyway at the back of the house while he went around the front to speak to his cousin. It was by now a pleasant and warm afternoon. Grant and I sat down against the wall in the shade of a tree that was growing over the stonework.