Chapter One

East of Paris — Thursday, 23 to Friday, 24 November 1780

A mile past the barrier the man in the grey coat leaned forward and drew down the blind on Cheston’s side.

He did it neatly, with two fingers, as a man straightens a picture in somebody else’s house. Then he drew down his own, and sat back, and the carriage became a small brown room that smelt of new leather and moved.

“I am sorry,” he said. “It is not personal to you.”

“No,” said Cheston. “I don’t suppose it is.”

That was all. It was more civil than a great many conversations he had had about money, and it took away the only means he had of knowing where he was going.

So he began to count.

He had counted all his life. Hogsheads and casks, days of demurrage, loss in passage, the difference between what a hogshead weighed on the wharf at Chestertown and what it weighed on the quay at Bristol four months later, which was never nothing and was sometimes a great deal. A merchant who cannot hold a column in his head is a merchant who is being robbed in a dozen places at once and has not found out. He could not see. He could still count.

He had the turns. A coach going left throws a sitting man to the right, and the harder the turn the further he goes, and six weeks in a brigantine had given him a body that recorded that sort of motion whether he asked it to or not. So he sat with his hands on his knees and let himself be thrown, and gave each turn a weight as it came: slight, or square, or the long easy bend a road makes when it is going with the ground and not against it.

He had the surface. Paving for a while, loud and shaking, then earth, softer, then paving again through what must have been a village, then soft for a long way.

He had the horses. He knew the sound of horses being worked and the sound of horses being spared, and these were being spared.

And he had the man opposite, who had folded his hands on the head of a cane and closed his eyes, and who was not asleep.

“May I ask your name?”

“You may ask it, monsieur.”

“But you won’t give it.”

The man opened his eyes. They were a pale ordinary grey, like the coat, and there was nothing unfriendly in them.

“If I gave you a name you would carry it about with you and try it on people,” he said, “and it would not be mine, and you would waste a good deal of effort. I would rather you kept your effort. You will want it.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. I am told to bring you. I am not told what happens when you are brought.” He considered Cheston for a moment, with what might have been sympathy. “I will tell you one true fact, because you will ask it anyway. Nobody is going to hurt you.”

“You can’t know that.”

“No,” the man agreed. “But I have done this before, and nobody ever has.”

“Done this before.” Cheston heard it and did not like it. “How often?”

The man closed his eyes again.

He tried it the other way after an hour, because there was nothing to lose.

“This morning you said you were a friend of the Doctor’s.”

“I said that I expected I was.”

“Are you?”

“Everybody in Paris is a friend of the Doctor’s, monsieur. It is the fashion. There are ladies who have his face on their snuff boxes and have never read a line he wrote.” A small movement of the mouth. “I have read several.”

“Then you know what he’ll do when he hears of this.”

“I know what a great many people would do.” The man looked at the blind as if he could see through it. “He is not a great many people.”

Cheston sat with that. He did not want to sit with it and he could not help it, because it was the only remark the man had made all morning that sounded like knowledge rather than manners.

The old man in the fur cap, at four in the morning, with the fire out. Do not search. Searching announces the value.

He had thought it elegant at the time. He had been rather pleased to be trusted with it.

He put it away, very carefully, the way a man puts away a letter he means to read properly later, and went back to counting.

At about the fourth hour they stopped, and the man opposite got out, and said over his shoulder that Cheston might get out too if he wished.

He wished.

It was a yard behind a posting house, with a heap of dung in the middle of it steaming in the cold and four fresh horses being walked out. A boy was sitting on a mounting block eating bread with both hands. A woman stood in a doorway with her sleeves pushed up. There was a cart with a wheel off, and a man in an apron at the head of the near leader with his thumb in the beast’s mouth, making a professional face about its teeth.

Nobody looked at him.

He stood in a French inn yard in a brown coat with a Maryland cut to it, plainly a foreigner, plainly in the company of a man who was keeping him, and not one person there looked at him longer than they would have looked at a sack. The woman in the doorway glanced up and went in. The boy went on eating.

He had expected, without ever putting it into words, that being taken would look like something.

It looked like two gentlemen changing horses.

Then a horse came in at the gate at a trot, and on it was a man in a blue coat faced with red, with a sword and a pair of pistols in his holsters and the bored, entitled look of an officer of the maréchaussée on his round. He swung down by the trough and called for wine, and the woman came back out with it at once.

Cheston’s heart began to go.

He had enough French for this. He had been working at it for eight weeks and he had some forty words he trusted, and six of them were enough. I am an American. I am taken against my will. Send to Passy. He could say that in the middle of this yard in a raised voice, and the officer would have to hear it, and a crowd would gather, because a crowd always gathers at a raised voice, and then it would have happened in a public place, in front of witnesses.

He looked at the man opposite.

The man was looking at him. He had been looking at him, Cheston understood, since the horse came in at the gate.

He did not put a hand on Cheston’s arm or step between him and the officer. He took the folded paper out of his breast pocket, the one with the red seal, and held it lightly in his fingers, and waited.

“You may, if you like,” he said quietly, in English. “I shan’t prevent you.”

“And then?”

“And then he will come over, because he must. And I shall show him this, because I must. And he will read the top of it, and the word for the King, and your name spelt correctly, and he will hand it back to me and touch his hat.” The man turned the paper over once. “And then we shall go on, and he will have written down in his book that he saw an American in this yard on the twenty-third, going east with a person of authority, and that the American made a disturbance.”

He let that settle.

“At present, monsieur, you are in no book at all. I should think about that before you change it.”

The officer drank his wine and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said something to the woman that made her laugh.

Cheston stood in the cold and looked at the cart with the wheel off.

It was the paper that decided it. Not the threat, because there was no threat in it, but the paper itself, because he knew exactly what it would do. He had seen it done. He had stood in a room over the arsenal at L’Orient and watched a French officer read a sheet with a seal on it, and he had gone where he was told, because the seal was in order and a reasonable man does not brawl with a seal. He had been right to. It had been put right in the end, and it had been put right because it had all been written down.

And the man was telling him the truth. He could feel that it was true, as a figure is true when you have added it three ways. At present he was in no book. Once he was in a book, somebody could read it.

He could not yet tell which of those was worse. That was the trouble. He had too little to choose with.

He stood there for twelve minutes by the clock over the stable door and did not say anything, and when the horses were in he got back in when he was invited to, and heard the door shut.

The man opposite put the paper away and folded his hands on his cane.

“Thank you,” he said.

“I didn’t do it for you.”

“No. You did it because you are a careful man.” He closed his eyes. “It is why you were chosen, I should think. Whoever chose you.”

Cheston did not speak again for two hours.

He was not sulking. He was frightened, properly frightened for the first time, and he had learned in the brigantine that fear is only useful to a man who puts it to work, so he put it to work.

Chosen.

Whoever chose you.

The man did not know what he was. That much was plain, and it was the only comfort available. He had been told to bring a man from the rue Dauphine, and he had brought him, and he did not know why. Or he was very good at seeming not to know, which came to the same for the present.

But somebody knew. Somebody had watched the gate at Passy, or watched the rue Dauphine, or watched the banker’s in the rue Vivienne where he had drawn forty louis on the Wednesday morning against a letter of credit with his father’s name on it. Somebody had sent a man in a grey coat to ask Madame Garnier which window was his. And that somebody had not known enough to be certain until Cheston himself stood up in a lodging-house front room and held out a paper with Franklin’s name at the bottom of it and said, in front of witnesses, that the American Minister would answer for him within the day.

He had done their work for them. He had done it in a firm, sensible, honest voice, the voice that had carried him through every difficulty of his life, and it had carried him into this carriage.

The man in the green coat in the doorway on the Wednesday. He had told himself he had not seen him.

He went over it again. He went over it the way he would have gone over a set of books after a partner had absconded, looking for the first false entry, because there is always a first false entry and finding it is the only way to make the rest bearable.

He found four candidates and could not choose between them. And two of them were not errors at all. They were the ordinary acts of an ordinary week: taking a room, drawing on a banker, buying a coach seat, walking out to look at a market. That was the worst of it. Nothing he had done had been unreasonable, and it had made no difference.

The light came in under the edge of the blind and lay across his knees, and moved as the road moved, and at some point in the afternoon it went.

He had the day now. He put it at nine hours of movement from the barrier, and four changes of horses, and horses being spared the whole way. He knew what a stage was worth in England, where he had travelled post a good deal, and he knew French roads were better, and he allowed for both, and he allowed generously on the side of shortness, because he would rather be under in his own estimate than over.

He did the sum three times and got it three times.

Over sixty miles. Call it seventy.

And east. They had gone out of Paris to the east. He had watched the towers of the Bastille go past the window with his own eyes before the blinds came down, and the barrier after it, and the open country, and a road going away towards a low ridge with the late-morning sun in front of him.

Seventy miles east of Paris, then. Champagne, or the edge of it. He knew nothing about Champagne except wine, and not much about that.

He sat in the dark with the figure and did not like it at all.

They stopped for the night at a house he never saw the front of. He was taken in by a side door and up a back stair, with the second man ahead of him carrying a candle and his keeper behind, and shown into a room with a bed and a basin and a chair and a small window, very high, that gave onto nothing.

“Supper will come up,” said the man, from the doorway. “If you want anything else, knock. Somebody will be outside.”

“All night?”

“All night.”

“And tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow is shorter.” The man paused with his hand on the door. He seemed to be making up his mind. “Monsieur Cheston. May I give you a piece of advice that is not in my instructions?”

“If you like.”

“Sleep. You will want to sit up and think. Everybody does. It does you no good at all, because you have nothing to think with, and a man who thinks with nothing only frightens himself, and then he is no use to anybody, least of all himself.” He inclined his head. “I say it because I have seen the other. Good night.”

The door shut. A moment later a bolt went across on the outside, quietly, and whoever did it went away down the stair at once, as though embarrassed.

Supper came up an hour later, soup and a piece of mutton and bread and half a bottle of thin red wine, and he ate all of it, which surprised him.

Then he sat on the edge of the bed with his hands on his knees and did exactly what he had been advised not to do.

He took his position the way he would have taken it for a partner, plainly, the worst entries first.

He was seventy miles east of Paris in the keeping of people who would not say who they were.

His passport was in another man’s pocket.

He had thirty-eight louis in his purse, and three English guineas, the last of Anne’s. He had his father’s watch, a penknife, the clothes he stood in and a bag with two shirts and a razor case, and in his waistcoat a small pink shell with a hole worn in it that belonged, properly speaking, to his father.

Nobody knew where he was.

He stopped on that one, because it was the one that mattered, and he made himself go through it properly.

Madame Garnier knew he had gone out with two gentlemen. She would strike him through in her book and write parti beside it, because the room was free, and she would be right. The coach office would resell his seat on Monday and think nothing of it. The banker in the rue Vivienne had no reason to expect him again. His father in Bristol was expecting him for Christmas and would go on expecting him for some time after that, because a man crossing from France in a war crosses when he can.

And Passy.

He had told nobody at Passy where he was lodging. He had been told not to. There was to be no correspondence, no enquiry, no visit and no arrangement to meet, because a correspondence is a channel and a channel can be read. The old man had explained it on the Saturday with his foot on a stool, and Cheston had agreed with every word of it, because every word of it was right.

He sat on the bed and held that up to the candle and turned it round, and saw the other side of it for the first time.

A man nobody writes to cannot be missed.

He did not take it any further that night. He was not ready to. He put out the candle and lay down in his clothes on top of the blanket, and listened to somebody shift on a chair outside the door, and to a dog somewhere a long way off, and to his own heart.

He slept six hours. It surprised him very much in the morning, and he never afterwards found out whether there had been anything in the wine.

The second day was shorter, as the man had said, and the blinds were down from the start.

He counted it anyway, from discipline rather than hope. Five hours and three changes. The same horses being spared. More turns than the day before, and a long stretch in the middle where the road climbed steadily and he felt the slope in the small of his back for the best part of an hour and wrote it down in his head as a ridge. Another village, paved. A river, because the wheels changed their note on a bridge and he heard water under it.

He added it to the first day and sat with the total.

A hundred miles, perhaps more. Say a hundred and ten. East.

He was a careful man and he did not trust a round figure, so he took ten off for the roads he could not see and ten more for the horses being spared, and then he put five back for the hours at the start that he could not properly account for, and arrived at a figure between ninety and a hundred and twenty miles from the rue Dauphine.

It was a very good piece of reckoning. He was pleased with it, in a small bleak way, as a man is pleased with a column that adds up even when the total is ruinous.

“You have been counting,” said the man opposite, without opening his eyes.

“Yes.”

“May I ask your figure?”

Cheston considered refusing, and then could not see the use.

“About a hundred miles.”

The man said nothing for a while.

“You are a very exact man,” he said at last. There was no irony in it that Cheston could hear. There was something else, which he could not name then and was able to name, with great precision, three months later.

It was pity.

In the middle of the afternoon the carriage slowed, and turned, and went a short way over something that was not a road, and stopped.

He heard a gate.

It was not the opening of a gate. He had been listening to gates all his life, at landings and warehouses and the yards of men who owed him money. It was the sound a gate makes when it is already open and is being pushed the rest of the way back against a wall. Then the carriage went through, and there was the other sound, which is shorter.

Then a man’s voice, and a woman’s, the two of them talking about the weather.

The man opposite put up the blind.

Cheston looked out at a good square house of two storeys and an attic, with a slate roof and eight windows across the front, standing in a walled ground of an acre or two, most of it under vines cut back for the winter, so that it looked in November like a field of sticks. There was a stable range on the left. There was a well, and a pear tree trained against the south wall, and a windmill on a rise beyond the wall with its sails turning slowly against a sky the colour of pewter. An old dog came out, inspected the wheels, and went back in.

The gravel had been raked.

It was the gravel that went into him. He had walked down raked gravel at dawn on the Sunday, past a man with a rake, through a gate that stood open, and nobody had asked his name.

This gate had been shut behind him.

“Here we are,” he said, and got out, and held the door, and waited, with perfect courtesy, for him to follow.

A woman came out of the house as he got down. She was a square, upright woman of about fifty, in a dark stuff gown and a white cap, and she was wiping her hands on her apron as she came. Then she seemed to think better of it and took the apron off altogether and put it over her arm.

“Monsieur,” she said, to the man in the grey coat.

“Madame Bosquet.”

“You’re later than you said.”

“We are.”

“Well.” She looked at Cheston for the first time, briefly and entirely, the way a woman looks at a leg of mutton she has not ordered but will have to cook. “He’ll want his supper, then.”

“I should think so.”

“Is he any trouble?”

“None at all,” said her visitor. “He is a very exact man.”

Madame Bosquet gave a small grunt that might have meant anything, and turned, and went back in, and the two men followed her.

The hall was stone-flagged and cold and very clean, with a staircase going up on the right and a door on either side and a smell of beeswax and onions. On the left, just inside, stood a table, and on the table a candlestick, a pair of spectacles in a case, and a book.

He knew what it was before he had his hat off. Every house in France kept one. He had signed three of them in eight weeks, and the last had been Madame Garnier’s in the rue Dauphine, five days ago, with a better pen than the one at Passy.

Madame Bosquet did not ask him to sign this one.

She put on her spectacles and opened it, standing, and dipped the pen, and wrote in it herself, in a clear round hand that took its time. He stood and watched her do it, and did not understand until a long while afterwards that he was watching the most important event of his year.

She wrote the date. She wrote his name, and spelt it correctly, and he felt the small cold weight of that go into him, because nobody had told her how to spell it in his hearing. She wrote américain. She paused, and then wrote négociant, which was right, and which nobody had told her either. Then she wrote a word or two in an abbreviation he could not read, and after it, in a second abbreviation, a name he would have given a great deal to be able to read.

She wrote it without any change in her face at all.

The man who had brought him watched her finish, and nodded, and put on his hat.

“Madame,” he said. “Monsieur Cheston.” He paused at the door, with the cold coming in round him, and for a moment Cheston thought he would say more. He did not. He went out, and the door shut, and a minute later Cheston heard the carriage turn on the gravel and go away down the lane, and the gate, and the short sound after it.

Madame Bosquet blotted the page and took off her spectacles and put them back in their case. Then she turned round and looked at him properly for the second time.

“Now,” she said. “What have you got on you?”