The Bastard: The Kent Family Chronicles Page 5

  “Well,” said Phillipe, a little smugly, “my mother—and father—chose the side I’m to be on, I guess.”

  Now it was Girard’s turn to squint into the sunlight, unhappily. “For the sake of your future—and your mother’s ambitions—I trust it is not the wrong one.”

  “Do you seriously think it could be?”

  Girard stared at him. “Shall I answer as your paid tutor? The fellow hired only to instruct you from non-controversial texts?”

  “No,” Phillipe answered, oddly chilled. “As yourself.”

  “Very well. Although this may be envy talking, I don’t believe I’d be comfortable belonging to a titled family just now. As I suggested, the British have always loved their liberties a little more fiercely than most Europeans. And done relatively more to secure those liberties—at the expense of their kings and their nobility. When intellectuals such as our mad Master Jean Jacques thunder that contracts between governors and the governed may be broken by the will of the people, should the governors grow too autocratic—and when British statesmen stand up, question the propriety of laws written by a king’s own ministers, and take the part of a king’s defiant subjects—well, I shall only observe again that there are strong winds blowing. Who knows what they may sweep away? Or whom?”

  Phillipe asked, “In a contest like that, Girard, which side would you be on?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? The side to which I was born. My father was a farmer in Brittany. He was stabbed to death by the saber of a French hussar when the hussar ‘requisitioned’ our only milk cow for his troops. In the name, and by the authority, of King Louis. My father refused, so he was killed. If it were in my power, I would forever shatter the contract with a king who would permit that kind of murder.”

  Girard’s expression had grown melancholy. What he had just revealed was the first—and last—bit of autobiography Phillipe Charboneau ever heard from the tutor. Now Girard went on:

  “Yes, gentlemen such as Monsieur Rousseau are subtly nudging common folk to the realization that, together, they can simply say, ‘We are finished with you!’ to any monarch who serves them ill.”

  “But I still can’t imagine a thing like that would really happen.”

  “Why? Because you don’t want to? Because it might spoil your splendid future?”

  Irritated, Phillipe shot back, “Yes! Here, I’ve finished with your books.”

  Girard took the other two volumes, said quietly, “The point is, Phillipe, they haven’t finished with you. Whether it pleases you or not.” He sighed. “Ah, but let’s not quarrel over words. When I started giving you these books months ago, I only meant to shed a little more light into a bright young mind—”

  “And instead, you’ve got me thinking the world’s going to be blown apart.”

  “Well, it’s true. There are whispers of it—no, much more than whispers—from those same British colonies I mentioned. And the Commoner—and others in King George’s own government—applaud! Doesn’t that tell you anything?”

  Phillipe overcame his annoyance, grinned. “It tells me I’m lucky I’m going to be rich. I’ll have money enough to build a big house with safe, thick walls.”

  But Girard did not smile back.

  “Since I am fond of you, Phillipe, let us devoutly hope there are walls wealth can build thick enough to withstand the winds that may rise to a gale before you’re very much older.”

  CHAPTER III

  Blood in the Snow

  i

  AT NOVEMBER’S END, WORD circulated in the neighborhood that old du Pleis the goatherd had died. His son, Auguste, disappeared. The hovel up the track was abandoned. And Phillipe was spared further encounters with his now-vanished enemy.

  Since the beating, he hadn’t gone back to the hillside terrace, walking instead the full three kilometers to Chavaniac to replenish the inn’s supply of cheese. But each time, as he passed the point where the track turned upward from the road, he still felt an echo of the humiliation—and regret that he hadn’t found a means to settle his score with the goatherd’s boy.

  He walked into the village with considerably more confidence now. His mother’s revelations had given him that. He was even able to pass by the tiny Church of Saint-Roch without experiencing more than a touch of the old boyhood fear that the priest would suddenly appear and recognize him as the unredeemed child of the unredeemable actress.

  He set out on one such trip to the village on an afternoon a couple of weeks before Christmas. The first furious snowstorm of winter was howling out of the north, driving white crystals into his eyes above the woolen scarf he’d tied over his nose and mouth. He had wrapped rags around his hands and boots. But even so, he quickly grew numb as he trudged through the already-drifted snow.

  Yet in a curious way, he relished the unremitting fury of the wind. It reminded him of the winds of which Girard had spoken. And of other, more fortuitous gales: the winds of luck, of changing circumstance, that had suddenly plucked him up and were hurling him toward a new kind of future. Fortune’s wind might be savage, he decided. But to be seized and swept along by it was much more exciting than to live forever becalmed.

  Leaning into the blizzard, he fought it like a physical enemy. He was determined to reach the village and return home in record time, just for the sake of doing it. Concentrating on making speed, he was totally unprepared for an unexpected sound.

  He halted on the snowy road, listening. Had the wind played tricks?

  No. He heard voices crying out.

  One was thin; a boy’s, perhaps. The others were lower. Harsh.

  Directly ahead, he saw where the storm had not yet concealed the tracks of a horse. The tracks led off to the right, into the great, black, wind-tormented pines. The thin voice sounded again—

  From back in those trees!

  Phillipe began to run.

  Following the cries and the drifted horse tracks, he quickly passed into the forest. Not much farther on, he spied a boy defending himself from two ragged attackers.

  The boy wore a long-skirted coat and a tricorn hat, the hat somehow staying on his red head as he darted from side to side, fending off the lunges of the other two by means of a sharp-pointed, lancelike weapon that looked all of seven feet long. In the swirling snow beyond the struggle, a small, tethered sorrel horse snorted and whinnied in alarm. Phillipe kept running.

  “You little sod!” shouted one of the attackers. The boy had slashed the lance tip from right to left and caught the stouter of the two brigands across the face.

  The injured man reeled back, cursing. As he stumbled, he turned. Phillipe saw him head on. Even with a mittened hand clasped to his gashed cheek and a shabby fur hat cocked over his forehead, his face seemed to leap out at Phillipe through the slanting snow.

  Auguste.

  “Circle him, circle! Grab that damned thing!” the other attacker screamed. Phillipe recognized the voice of cousin Bertram.

  The boy—twelve or thirteen at the most—darted to his left, manipulating the lance with trained grace. Bertram ran at him, a knife gripped in his right mitten.

  “The hell with holding him for money!” Auguste yelled over the wind. “He’s ripped my face to pieces—do the same to him!”

  And that was just what Bertram intended, it seemed, as Phillipe ran the last yards to the clearing and shouted, “Here! Stop!”

  The cry distracted the boy, whose clubbed red hair was the only patch of color in the gray and white scene. Phillipe saw a face frightened yet determined. But when the boy turned suddenly, he lost his footing.

  While the boy slipped and slid, Bertram seized the lance shaft, wrenched it from the boy’s grasp and threw it away behind him.

  Phillipe ducked as the lance struck pine boughs near his cheek, showering him with snow. Bertram slashed over and down with the dagger. But the boy dove between his legs and the cut missed.

  Then Phillipe looked at the closer of the two attackers. Auguste drew his mitten away from his bloody face, gap
ing. The three-inch wound below one startled eye glistened pink where the skin had been laid open. As he recognized Phillipe, his face grew even more ugly.

  “You’d have been wiser not to answer his cries for help, little lord.”

  Blood spattered on the snow from the point of Auguste’s chin. His red mitten fumbled at his waist, producing a dagger similar to the one Bertram kept stabbing at the intended victim. The boy’s tricorn hat had finally fallen off as he jumped one way, then another like an acrobat, trying to avoid the slashes.

  Hate and hurt in his dark eyes, Auguste charged. The knife was aimed at Phillipe’s belly.

  Phillipe had no time to think. He simply reacted, reaching for the nearest weapon—the lance fallen nearby. He thrust with both hands, hard.

  Auguste screamed, unable to check his forward momentum. His run impaled him on the head of the lance. Phillipe let go, jumping backward as Auguste fell, raising powdery clouds of snow.

  Blood spurted from all around the vibrating lance. The fabric of Auguste’s coat had been driven into his wound. Bertram checked a lunge, goggling at his fallen cousin. Auguste writhed onto his side, staining the immaculate snow a bright scarlet.

  “Christ preserve us,” Bertram quavered. “Cousin?”

  Then he glanced at Phillipe with raging yellow eyes. The red-haired boy ran to the little sorrel, opened a sheath and drew an immense pistol.

  Bertram pointed at the unmoving body. “Murderer. You killed him!”

  With audacity Phillipe could hardly believe, the young boy showed Bertram the muzzle of his pistol.

  “You’ll find yourself in a similar condition if you’re ever seen near Chavaniac again. My aunts told me Auguste du Pleis had taken to thievery after his father died. But I didn’t assume that included-snatching rabbit hunters.”

  Phillipe stared at unblinking hazel eyes in the freckled, young-old face. The boy’s voice sounded assured. Though he was three or four years younger than Phillipe, and slightly built, he handled weapons—the lance and now the pistol—with perfect familiarity.

  The boy took a step toward Bertram.

  “Don’t you understand me? Get away from here or I’ll shoot you. I’m giving you a chance. Take it.”

  All at once Bertram read the lesson of the pistol’s eye. A moment later he was gone, boots thudding away into the wind-bent pines. Then not even that sound remained.

  Phillipe moved shakily toward Auguste. “Is he really—?”

  “I’d say so,” the boy interrupted, planting a boot on Auguste’s neck. “An officer doesn’t carry a spontoon into battle for show. They’re killing instruments.”

  With no trace of emption, the boy twisted the gory head of the lance until it came free of Auguste’s belly. Then he indicated the pistol he’d thrust into his belt.

  “It’s lucky those two knew nothing of firearms. I couldn’t have got a ball off in this damp. The powder would have flashed in the—here! Stop looking so nervous! I’ve scared the other one off. We won’t see him again. And you killed this one in my defense. Let’s drag him deeper in the woods. When he’s found next spring, not a person around here will know how he died—or care.”

  Despite the boy’s words, Phillipe had started to shake with reaction to the struggle. He had slain another human being. And apparently the red-haired boy was not the least upset.

  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.

  ii

  “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.

  iii

  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 discover
ed 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.

  iv

  “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.”