The Bastard: The Kent Family Chronicles (7 page)

The boy tossed the spontoon aside. He reached down for Auguste’s collar, then glanced at Phillipe with a touch of irritation.

“Look, will you help me?”

Phillipe wiped snow from his eyelids. “Yes. Yes, I will. But—how old are you?”

“Thirteen, if that matters.”

“You handle weapons like a soldier.”

“Well, I’ve been up to Paris for two years now. I only came back for Christmas, to visit my aunts and my grandmother. In the city, I’ve been schooled in the use of swords and pistols by an old officer who’s one of the best. De Margelay’s his name. When spring comes, I’ll be a cadet in the Black Musketeers.”

Again that stare of annoyance when Phillipe didn’t respond. “Surely you’ve heard of the regiment that guards King Louis!”

Phillipe shook his head. “I don’t know about such things. My mother keeps an inn near here. The Three Goats.”

“Ah! I’ve ridden by it.”

“Why did those two attack you? Hope of ransom?”

“Undoubtedly. It’s no secret that I returned home for the holy days: I was searching so hard for rabbit tracks, they took me by complete surprise. But you won’t be punished for killing this one. I can assure you of it. In fact, what happened makes us blood comrades. In the military, there’s no stronger tie. Now come on, let’s move him.”

Phillipe’s shock and fear were lessening moment by moment. He and the boy hid the body in a drift some distance from the clearing. The young soldier kicked snow over Auguste’s ghastly face. Then he resettled his tricorn on his head and asked:

“Were you headed home?”

“No, to the village.”

“Then mount Sirocco with me. Two can ride as easily as one. No objections, please—I insist!”

It struck Phillipe that the youth wasn’t accustomed to having anyone go against his wishes. Remarkable. Especially for a thirteen-year-old. Without a word, he followed the red-haired boy back toward the stamping sorrel.

“The crime was theirs, not yours,” the boy shouted over the roar of the wind, while the sorrel pounded through the snow toward the village. “Any soldier has the right to kill his enemy in battle.”

“I’ll try to remember that,” Phillipe yelled, hanging onto the boy’s waist with one hand and gripping the spontoon across his shoulder with the other. But his mind still swam with ugly visions of Auguste bleeding.

Snow stung his face. Ahead, he discerned the first of the cottages at the end of Chavaniac’s single winding street.

“I must get off soon,” Phillipe cried. “I walked to town to buy cheeses for—wait! Slow down!”

But the boy nicked the sorrel’s flank with a spur, and the horse bore them up the short cobbled street, soon leaving it behind. The boy turned the sorrel’s head westward.

“Where are we going?” Phillipe demanded.

“To my home. It’s just ahead. There’ll be a warm fire, and some wine, and I can show you a trick or two with the lance. You’ve had no training in arms, have you?”

“None. My father was a soldier, though.”

The remark came out unbidden as the sorrel plowed through drifts beneath the limbs of bare, creaking trees. All at once Phillipe knew where he was. But he didn’t believe it.

“So was mine,” the boy shouted in reply. “He fell at Minden in fifty-nine. Hit by a fragment of a ball from a British cannon. What was your father’s regiment?”

“I can’t remember.” The sorrel bore them past the facade of an immense, blockhouse-like chateau at whose corners two towers rose. “He’s no longer with our family, you see.”

“Can you remember your own name?” the boy asked, amused.

“Phillipe Charboneau.”

“You must call me Gil. The whole of my name is too tedious to pronounce.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier. And since my father’s death, Marquis de Lafayette. See, I warned you! Make it just Gil and Phillipe. Fellow soldiers,” he finished, turning the sorrel into a spacious stable behind the chateau—

Which belonged to the Motier family. Richest in the neighborhood. Each hour, it seemed, the winds of fortune were blowing him in new and astonishing directions.

The relatively calm air inside the dark, dung-smelling stable came as a relief. Gil nosed the sorrel into a stall and leaped from the saddle. Then the young marquis took the spontoon from Phillipe’s hand, knelt and began rubbing at some dried blood still visible on the head.

“As to the story we must tell,” he said, never glancing up from the work, “you discovered me at the roadside. Floundering in the snow and hunting for Sirocco, who stumbled, fell, unhorsed me, then ran off. After some delay, and with your assistance, I finally located the animal.”

Gil looked up. “Agreed?”

Held by the steadiness of those young-old hazel eyes, Phillipe murmured, “Agreed.”

Light flared from the far end of the stable. An old groom with a lantern hobbled toward them. He spoke with a clicking of wood false teeth:

“So late home, my lord! How was the hunting?”

“Poor,” Gil replied. “Except that I found a new comrade. Give Sirocco an extra ration of oats, please.” He took Phillipe’s elbow with perfect authority and steered him out of the stable. They crossed the yard through the whipping snow, then entered the chateau, where new wonders awaited.

“I don’t believe the tale for a minute,” said Girard, much later that night. He was warming his stockinged feet at the fire in the common room. “You stole the cheeses, Phillipe.”

“I tell you I didn’t! His aunts gave them to me. Saint-Nectaire. The most expensive kind!”

With a flourish, he slapped coins down on the table. “Go on, count. You’ll find every last sou I took with me.”

Girard fingered the coins. “We thought you’d fallen victim to brigands. But it turns out that it was only a marquis.”

Despite the teasing, Girard’s blue eyes couldn’t conceal a certain admiration. As for Marie, she was jubilant, using a cheese knife to slash through the wrapping cloth with almost sensual joy. She slipped a piece into her mouth, chewed, exclaimed:

“Saint-Nectaire it is! I had some only once before in my life. Phillipe, how did you get on with the marquis? Easily?”

“Yes, very. And I don’t think he was being kind just because I helped save—save his horse. We’re friends now. I’m to visit him again tomorrow. And as many times as I wish before he returns to Paris after the holidays. His mother died last spring, you know,” Phillipe added with the slightly condescending tone of one privileged to reveal a bit of gossip. “In Paris, he’s to be a cadet of the Black Musketeers.”

They said nothing. With outright loftiness, he informed them, “The regiment which guards the king himself!”

Flash
went the blade, deep into the cheese. Marie wielded the knife almost as if she were striking an old enemy.

“You see, Girard? They got along famously because my son was born to that sort of life. Blood tells! In the end, a man finds his rightful place.”

Sampling a morsel of the cheese, Girard glanced at Phillipe. The latter was too excited by memories of the splendid chateau, the incredible gilt-decorated rooms, the kindly aunts, to notice the dismay in the eyes of the lank scholar.

Long after the fire had gone out and they’d locked the inn for the night, Phillipe lay shivering, trying to sleep. He was kept from it by recurring memories of Auguste’s blood staining the snow bright red.

Again and again, he recalled Gil’s reassurances. Gradually, the worry about discovery—punishment— diminished. But he was still disturbed by one aspect of the personality of his new friend the Marquis de Lafayette: the casual way Gil took a life—and hid the deed.

Did the nobility consider another human life worthless when their own lives were threatened? Did they dispose of their victims secure in the knowledge that their position would shield them from reprisals? Did his father, James Amberly, behave the same way? If so, Phillipe could well understand Girard’s approval of rebellion against such high-handed actions.

Troubled, he drifted into chilly drowsiness. His mind turned to the things he might learn from Gil before the young marquis returned to Paris. On balance, perhaps the day had been more good than bad.

I must forget the dead boy the way Gil forgot him,
he thought, close to sleep.
I must remember what is the greatest crime of all. That is the only crime I must never commit.

In the days that followed, Phillipe—with his mother’s blessing and encouragement—became almost a daily visitor at Chateau Chavaniac.

Gil’s aunts and his feeble, elderly grandmother treated him with polite kindness. And there were so many exciting things to do, and see, and learn, that Phillipe never noticed how the aunts now and again glanced at one another; how they smiled in wordless amusement when Phillipe upset a wine glass or tramped across a luxurious carpet in snow-covered boots.

Gil proudly showed off his military uniform. It was scarlet and gold, with a blue mantle that bore a cross encircled by a ring of fire, the devices sewn in silver thread.

In the stable yard, where the snowbanks glared white in the winter sunlight, Gil demonstrated the rudiments of self-defense with a sword. Of course they didn’t use real swords, only stout sticks. But Gil didn’t seem to mind demonstrating thrusts and parries with the beginner’s implements from which he’d graduated long ago.

Then, two days before the holiday commemorating the birth of Christ, Gil took Phillipe down to the frozen lagoon near the chateau. From oiled cloth, he unwrapped his most prized possession.

“My military tutor bought it in Paris, for my birthday,” he explained. “They’re damned hard to come by, you know.”

He thrust the shimmering walnut-stocked musket into Phillipe’s hands.

“It’s the finest military weapon in the world. Brown Bess. See, even the barrel’s brown. They treat the metal with a secret preservative.”

The incredible gun was more than five feet long. Phillipe held it gingerly, awed, as Gil produced a cartridge box from his pocket and initiated his friend into the step-by-step ritual that preceded a shot.

“Most of King George’s redcoats can load and fire in fifteen seconds,” he commented. “That’s why, militarily, the French hate Georgie
and
his muskets.”

In less than an hour of teaching, Phillipe learned how to pour powder into the muzzle, drop in the ball and ramrod the crumpled paper which held the powder.

Next—lift the firing-pan frizzen. Bat the barrel with the heel of a hand, to send a little powder through the touchhole—

With the Brown Bess at his shoulder for the first shot, he nearly blundered. Gil cried out, “Don’t keep your eyes open! In a bad wind you could go blind from a flareback from the touchhole. Just hold it tight, aim in the general direction you want to fire, shut your eyes and pull the trigger.”

Phillipe followed instructions. The thunderous impact knocked him flat. A pine branch across the lagoon cracked and fell.

“Not bad at all,” Gil nodded, smiling.

Phillipe stood up, dusting off snow and shaking his head. “Gil, I don’t understand how a soldier can win a battle with his eyes closed.”

“When a thousand British infantrymen close their eyes and fire together, they can destroy anything standing in front of them. If we had such muskets, we could rule the world. Lacking them, we’ve nearly lost it. Try another shot.” He smiled across the sun-gleaming brown barrel. “You hold her as though born to it. Must be the blood of that soldier father of yours.”

Phillipe smiled back, friendship and his secret both serving to warm the bitter day.

But as quickly as it had begun, the friendship ended with Gil’s return to Paris.

The return was signalled on the eve of the New Year, 1771, by the
clop-clop
of a horse climbing to the inn door. Marie peeked out, clasped her hands excitedly.

“God save us, Phillipe, it’s your friend the marquis! And this place isn’t even swept properly—
Girard!”

Her cry brought the gangling man from the back of the inn, just as Gil entered, afternoon sunlight making his red hair shine beneath the tricorn hat.

Flustered, Marie curtseyed. Girard sighed and began to swish the broom over the floor. Phillipe rushed forward to welcome his friend.

“I expected to see you later this afternoon at the chateau!”

“But my grandfather wants me back in Paris two days hence. The coach is departing in an hour. Here, I’ve brought you a gift. I’ve been saving it for the last day we spent together.”

“My lord,” said Marie, “may I offer you a little wine?” Phillipe winced. Her expression was almost fawning.

Gil waved the offer aside courteously. “Thank you, no. I must ride back almost immediately. There’s only time enough to present this to Phillipe.”

He held out a long, slender package wrapped in oiled cloth.

“In token of our friendship. Perhaps you’ll find it more enjoyable to practice with than a stick.”

Touched, Phillipe laid the parcel on one of the scarred tables, carefully undid the wrapping. A bar of winter light falling between the shutters lit the slightly curved steel of the blade, the warm brass of the cast hilt.

“Dear Lord, what a beautiful sword!” Marie breathed.

Phillipe could only agree. The hilt had a bird’s-head pommel and a single knuckle-bow and quillon. The grip was ribbed. Picking up the amazing gift, Phillipe discovered a second, separately wrapped parcel beneath it. Even Girard expressed admiration for its contents: a scabbard of rich leather, tipped and throated in brass.

“There’s a staple and strap for carrying it,” Gil pointed out, obviously enjoying his role of benefactor. “Now you have a briquet like any good French grenadier.”

“I don’t deserve such a splendid present, Gil.”

“But you do! I think you have the natural abilities of a fighting man, should you choose to develop them.”

“But—I have nothing to give you in return.”

The hazel eyes seemed to brighten a moment. Gil’s reply, though seemingly casual, communicated clearly.

“You have given me a great deal, Phillipe. Companionship during what would otherwise have been a typically dull visit with my dear aunts and grandmother. And the pleasure of teaching some fundamentals to an apt pupil. Now I must go back to being the pupil.”