Ramage & the Guillotine (20 page)

He sat down on the bed beside Ramage and took some papers from his pocket. After putting them down, he brought out a bottle of ink, and then carefully removed a quill pen which he had slid down inside his boot. He held it up to the candle flame to make sure the point had not split.

“We have to write in the details on the documents,” he explained. “Who you are, why you are travelling … But first I must tell you some differences you will find on the road to Amiens—on any road, in fact. If you use a postchaise (the wagon is too slow), the posts are still the same: 34 between here and Paris, and usually ten kilometres (about six English miles) apart. They are well supplied with horses, although the postmasters no longer follow the old rule of one horse per person; you're lucky to get three horses for four people these days. The postillions, can legally charge only fifteen
sous
per post, but if you do not pay them double they can make the journey unpleasant in many little ways.

“Now, listen carefully; there is now a new system by which the traveller has to pay a toll. The money is supposed to be for the upkeep of the roads, but no one has spent a
sou
on a road in France since the Revolution, let alone a
livre:
there are deep potholes every few yards. You pay the tolls at
barrieres
which have been set up along the main roads. But watch out, they are not at regular intervals, and the toll varies between three and eighteen
sous.

“All of this makes travelling expensive: before the Revolution you could take a postchaise to Paris for 213
livres;
now you have to pay double. Still, there is a brighter side: before the Revolution you would be lucky to arrive in Paris without meeting a highwayman or a footpad. Now they are a rarity.

“They are a rarity,” he said, tapping Ramage's shoulder for emphasis, “because—from your point of view—there is another pest on the roads: mounted gendarmes. They halt all carts and carriages and demand to see every traveller's papers. Anyone arousing suspicion is taken to the nearest jail. Oh yes, their favourite trick is to make you sign your name which they compare with the signature in your passport, so remember that and practise it!”

After making Ramage repeat the details, Louis said: “Now, the journey to Amiens. The route from here is through Montreuil (four posts, or about 23 miles), Nampont, and Nouvion to Abbéville—”

Ramage noticed the Frenchman tensed slightly as he paused and then continued.

“It is a wretched town now; half the people have left and the Revolution has ruined the damask industry. Reichord's Hotel is comfortable—by today's standards, anyway. Then you go on to Ailly-le-Haut-Clocher. There's a Red Cap of Liberty on top of the church steeple. It is stuck on the weathercock, so it swivels round with every change of wind.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps others have noted the irony—to comment aloud in public would be to risk your neck. At the next village, Flixecourt, you will get your first sight of a Tree of Liberty; they are proud of the one set up in the square. You will change horses for the last time at Picquigny, and Amiens is only a league and a half beyond.”

“Abbéville,” Ramage said quietly, “has some unpleasant associations for you.”

Louis looked down and was silent for a full minute, seeming almost to shrink, leaving his body behind while he went to some private place full of dreadful memories. Embarrassed at this unexpected reaction to his curiosity and regretting the question, Ramage was trying to think of a way of changing the subject when the Frenchman looked up.

“I will tell you about it—no, don't worry,” he said as Ramage went to speak, “I want to tell you so you can understand better why I help you. At the moment I must seem to be a smuggler with no allegiances; a man whose loyalty can be bought—no, do not bother to protest, M. Ramage, you have all the doubts about me that I would expect in an honest man. In a minute or two you will understand and we shall be better friends.

“The name Joseph Le Bon means nothing to you. To me he is a former priest from Arras who almost made me believe in God. ‘Ah' you might say, ‘a saintly man, and wise, as befits someone who once taught rhetoric at the College of Beaune, in Burgundy, and a man of great ability if he nearly succeeded in making an atheist like Louis believe in God and an after-life.'

“You would be partly right: Le Bon made me
hope
there is an after-life because I want the comfort of knowing there is a Hell in whose flames Joseph Le Bon burns in agony for all eternity, for he is now dead. My only regret is that the Committee of Public Safety finally ordered his execution and cheated me of my revenge. But those who watched him on the scaffold—they saw him screaming with fear, groaning, wailing and begging for mercy before the blade dropped. I had planned that he would be begging
me
for mercy, but—” he shrugged his shoulders “—the Committee that set him on a path of mass murder eventually executed its own servant.

“I can see you are wondering why this man Louis should be hunting another man, a former priest and teacher of rhetoric, with a knife, with the intention of murdering him. Don't protest,
m'sieur”
Louis said grimly, “it is a reasonable question for a man whose country is not torn by revolution, who has never seen pork butchers set down their knives and become ministers of state overnight and use the guillotine to butcher their fellow men, and bakers and grocers made judges who listen only to the charges against the man, never the evidence for his defence, before sending him to death.

“You will learn what happens when I tell you of Le Bon. After the Revolution this man left the Church and entered politics, becoming the Mayor of Arras. He showed judgment; he was even moderate. Then, since he had also been given responsibility for the whole Department of the Pas de Calais, he was told to destroy any anti-Revolutionary movement in Calais and the neighbouring towns.

“Again, he was moderate, even indulgent—so much so that one of his enemies denounced him to the Committee of Public Safety as a protector of aristocrats and a persecutor of patriots. He was recalled to Paris, escaped being put on trial for his life only because Citizen Robespierre liked him and accepted his promise to redeem himself.

“Redeem himself! He was sent back to Calais—a badly frightened man—with unlimited powers to crush the anti-Revolutionaries. The problem was that Le Bon could not find any, so in fear of his own life he simply accused scores and scores of innocent people and sent them to the guillotine. Within weeks hundreds met their death in Calais alone. He then went to other towns—Abbéville, Amiens, Arras, Boulogne …

“Two young ladies in Abbéville who taught the pianoforte, for example, were playing ‘Ca Ira' on the day a defeat by the Austrians was announced. Le Bon heard them and accused them of having an evil disposition towards the Revolution. They said quite truthfully they had heard nothing of the defeat, and in any case ‘Ca Ira' was a patriotic tune. Le Bon disagreed—playing ‘Ca Ira' in those circumstances, he said, meant that they wished the Austrians to advance and capture other French fortresses. If they were true patriots, he told them at the tribunal, they should have played ‘Le Revel du Peuple'
…

“So he condemned them to death, and at the scaffold next morning, while the young ladies were in the tumbril at the scaffold, he delayed the public execution for a quarter of an hour, until some women of the town, in all their finery, had arranged themselves comfortably on a balcony overlooking the guillotine. You find the story hard to believe, I see …”

Ramage nodded and was about to add that that did not mean he thought it was untrue when Louis turned to look him straight in the eye, the strained look back on his face. “Those two young ladies were sisters,
m'sieur.
The elder was my wife, who was staying in her mother's house while I was away at sea. Some might say it was punishment on me for being a smuggler,” he said bitterly. “Anyway, when you get to Abbéville, ask about Joseph Le Bon, and they will tell you that story.”

“But you said he was executed—”

“I came back a few days after Le Bon had finished his bloody business and gone on to Paris. I followed him and was arrested almost immediately, because my passport was for travelling only from Boulogne to Abbéville and back. They knew who I was but the gendarmes at Breteuil, where I was imprisoned, were sympathetic because of my loss. They never guessed I was following Le Bon; they assumed I was going to Paris to protest to the authorities. So they kept me in prison for a year, and during that time the mayors of several towns had protested to the Ministry of Police at Le Bon's wholesale murders. He was accused of public assassination and oppressing citizens of the Republic, found guilty of ‘an unlimited abuse of the guillotine' and sentenced to death. Yet he was a craven man; I think he was always frightened for his life, and when they sent him back to Calais the second time he became so obsessed that he saw enemies of the Republic all round him. People told me that when the time came to dress him in the red garment which is reserved for murderers as they make their last journey in the tumbril to the scaffold, Le Bon said, ‘It is not I who should wear this garment, but those whose orders I obeyed.' Ironic,” he added, “that Fouche, the present Minister of Police, is also a former priest: a sea captain's son who was an abbe and a professor at Nantes University …

“I had a long time to think about the past while I was in prison. I despaired and grew fat—can you imagine that? I, who did not want to live, became ugly and gross; my teeth fell out, I began to grow bald … But in that time I came to understand what Le Bon meant. I would agree with him if he had said, ‘It is not I
alone …
'”

Louis stood up and walked over to the window, glanced out into the darkness, and then sat down beside Ramage, who knew the movement was not curiosity about what was outside but rather closing a door on his past which he rarely dared to open.

“I have been thinking about your journey to Amiens. It will be dangerous. In Boulogne people accept you as foreign carpenters because there are many of them working in the shipyards. The road to Amiens from Boulogne is different. Four Frenchmen might be suspected of being deserters. Four foreigners—well, I can only guess at what protection the possession of passports and travel documents would give you against suspicion.”

“Is the danger because there are four of us, or the fact we are young and not in the Army?” Ramage asked.

“The number. If you travelled in pairs it would be safer, but there is the language problem if you split up. You and the American, for instance; that would be all right because you can do the talking and if you met with difficulties would understand what was happening. But the Italian—his French is not sufficient, and if they found a translator to question him in Italian, I doubt if he could tell a convincing enough story of travelling up from Genoa.”

Louis was only echoing the doubts that had beset Ramage since he first heard the Corporal's proud boasts: he had too many men. He needed Stafford in Amiens, but he dare not leave Rossi and Jackson behind here at the Chapeau Rouge in Boulogne: if they were questioned they would give themselves away. Unless they hid on board the
Marie,
ready to sail to England with his reports! He was angry with himself for not—

“You need the man who is the picklock,” Louis said. “If you could leave the other two behind, Dyson can hide them on board the
Marie:
they can be his crew if he has to go to the rendezvous. If you need a third man in case of trouble, I know the road well enough …”

Ramage stared at the Frenchman. “But the risk for you would be enormous! I can't—”

“No greater than the risk you are taking,” Louis interrupted. “One can be guillotined only once. I—”

“Once is enough,” Ramage said sharply.

Louis shook his head. “I am content to share the risks that you take. We agree that our interests are similar—the smugglers' and the British Admiralty's—and I've just told you of ‘Ca Ira.' So listen to an idea which I'm sure will work and which is based on just you, the man Stafford and myself going to Amiens. You are an Italian who owns a large shipyard in Genoa. At the request of the French authorities there you came to Boulogne with your foreman to make arrangements to bring up all your carpenters and shipwrights—a score of them—and their tools.

“Very well, you arrived in Boulogne, made your inspection, and decided you and your men can help build the barges and gunboats—even improve and speed up the methods being used. But you are not satisfied with the wages or conditions you have been offered, so you want to return to Paris—you came by that route—to visit the Ministry of Marine and negotiate better terms.

“Now, we have to account for my presence. I am—” Louis's mouth curved down in a wry smile, “I am a representative of the Committee for Public Safety, making sure you do not get up to mischief! Of course you do not know I am your guardian; you think I am a representative of the Ministry of Marine. Yes, that story would go down well with the gendarmes; I wink at them confidentially and show my papers and whisper a few words about Italians so they think they are helping the Committee. Well, how do you like my little plot?”

“Well enough,” Ramage said slowly, “except that it will not stand up to a moment's investigation in Boulogne or Paris. If the gendarmes checked with the shipyard—”

“No
arrangement we can make will stand such checking,” Louis said emphatically. “The best we can do is to have such a good story that they accept it the moment we tell it, and accept our papers. There is no problem about papers, and our whole purpose is to have a story that is slightly unusual yet completely probable: something only just outside the limits of their experience, yet well within their comprehension. There is not a man between here and Paris who wouldn't understand and believe the story I am suggesting.”