Voyage of the Sparrowhawk Page 15

  Their turn had come.

  *

  ‘It will be difficult, at the hospital,’ Sister Angèle had told them before they left the mission house. ‘You will see things, what war does to people.’

  Lotti had replied, ‘But we have seen that already, all the time, everywhere. The servicemen at home who came back from the war with bits missing, Captain de Beauchesne who lost his eye. And we have seen the villages which were destroyed, and the farmhouse, and the cemetery with thousands of graves.’

  ‘The hospital will be worse,’ said Sister Angèle.

  The door to the ward opposite the record-keeper’s office had been wedged open to create a draught. And in the end, the record-keeper had to repeat himself twice before either Ben or Lotti heard what he said.

  Afterwards, they walked out of the hospital into the hot still afternoon, gripping each other’s hands. Sam was not at the hospital, and the register held no record of him, but this was not the reason they held on so tight.

  Sister Angèle had been right.

  What they saw on that ward was much, much worse than anything they had seen before.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Albert Skinner was in Calais, interviewing customs officer Jean Lepage.

  Had Jean Lepage seen the Sparrowhawk come through? He had! Albert Skinner was relieved. Where had the Sparrowhawk gone? It was very important. The children on board had run away, the girl’s uncle was looking for her and the boy was an orphan with no family.

  Jean Lepage found himself in a dilemma.

  On the one hand, he knew the stories circulating in Calais about Ben and Lotti. If there was the slightest chance of the boy finding his brother alive, he had no intention of getting in their way. His own nephew had disappeared at the Battle of Verdun, his sister had spent months scouring hospitals for him. Also, there was the memory of the girl’s face when she told him about the puppies, that look of wonder, which Jean had not forgotten.

  On the other hand, one did not lie to policemen.

  Jean Lepage compromised.

  ‘Try asking at La Belle Ecluse,’ he said. ‘The landlady there may be able to help.’

  Madame Royère had none of Jean Lepage’s scruples about lying. Henri de Beauchesne had given precise instructions before he left about what to say to anyone who came looking for the Sparrowhawk, and promised to reward her for saying it.

  ‘They have gone to Paris,’ the landlady said firmly, and gave Albert the captain’s address.

  Albert had one final question, about something that had been troubling him since he left England.

  ‘Tell me,’ he asked. ‘With the children, were there dogs?’

  Madame Royère rolled her eyes. This was a subject dear to her heart.

  ‘So many dogs!’ she sighed. ‘Puppies!’

  ‘Puppies?’

  ‘Five!’ she told him. ‘Four black like the mother, the fifth a toffee-coloured runt, with the ears of her terrible father, who cries all night.’

  So Malachy Campbell’s chihuahua had made it to France, thought Albert.

  ‘Thank you, madame,’ he said.

  He left for the station, to catch a train to Paris. As soon as he was gone, Madame Royère telephoned Captain de Beauchesne, to warn him of the policeman’s arrival.

  Henri sent a second telegram to the convent, this time addressed to Clara, hoping that she was there, that it would be helpful and, most of all, that she would be pleased with him.

  *

  Sister Monique brought Henri’s telegram to the Sparrowhawk, noting with interest that Clara blushed as she read it.

  POLICEMAN ARRIVED BELLE ECLUSE … STOP … ALBERT SKINNER … STOP … ROYERE TOLD HIM YOU ARE IN PARIS, FOLLOWING MY INSTRUCTIONS … STOP … WILL DEFLECT AND INFORM YOU OF FUTURE POLICEMAN ACTIVITY … STOP … PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF I CAN ASSIST FURTHER … STOP

  ‘What should I do?’ asked Clara.

  ‘About what?’ asked Sister Monique drily.

  ‘About the policeman, of course.’

  ‘The captain tells you that he will deflect him. Is it so bad, if the policeman finds you?’

  Yes, thought Clara bleakly, it is so bad. And yet, at some point, wasn’t it inevitable that the law would catch up with them? What would happen now? In the unlikely event that Ben found Sam alive and well, he would live with his brother, but if he didn’t? For the first time, Clara realised that in haring after the Sparrowhawk with no plan other than to keep Ben and Lotti safe, she had actually made things worse for them. Would anyone allow her to become Ben’s guardian, now that she had helped him run away? And would she herself be in trouble with the law? She wasn’t sure where it stood with respect to Ben, but she was fairly sure it would take a dim view of the fact she hadn’t returned Lotti to her uncle.

  She should have insisted on bringing Lotti home before the Netherburys returned from Scotland, taken her to St Winifred’s, begged them to say nothing of the late arrival to her uncle … Hubert Netherbury would be furious. Clara had met him only once, when he interviewed her to tutor Lotti, but she had a fair idea of the sort of man he was. Suddenly, she felt very afraid for Lotti.

  Oh, she should have done everything differently! And yet Clara also knew that nothing she said could have stopped Ben and Lotti, and that had she given them away, they would never have forgiven her.

  Sister Monique was asking her a question.

  ‘Do you trust this captain?’

  Clara thought about the efficiency with which Henri had helped them at La Belle Ecluse, his bashfulness towards her at the end. Unconsciously, she stroked the telegram with her thumb. She knew that Henri would keep Albert Skinner away for as long as he could.

  After that, who knew?

  ‘I do trust him,’ she said.

  ‘Then save your worry for the children,’ advised Sister Monique. ‘Or, better, pray for them.’

  Her eyes fell on the puppies nestled with Elsie in their crate.

  ‘The little toffee one is too thin,’ she observed.

  ‘I know,’ said Clara. ‘I keep trying to help her feed, but Elsie is so unsettled since Ben went away, she doesn’t seem interested.’

  ‘Bring her to the kitchen,’ suggested Sister Monique. ‘I’ve some fresh goat’s milk, we’ll try her with that.’

  As they walked up to the convent, a gardener came towards them pushing a wheelbarrow. He stopped and straightened to let them pass, and Clara felt a small shock. She had seen him several times from a distance and had assumed from the way he carried himself that he was an old man. Close up she saw that he was quite young, though his ragged clothes and thick beard and the livid scar that ran down his left cheek from his temple made it hard to guess his age.

  ‘A poor lost soul,’ sighed Sister Monique when they were out of earshot.

  ‘Who is he, and how did he get that scar?’

  ‘Nobody knows, because he does not speak. He appeared earlier in the spring, and the Reverend Mother took pity on him and gave him work. He lives in a cabin in the woods. We call him Moses, because he loves to watch the river.’

  ‘Poor man,’ said Clara, but she shivered as she followed Sister Monique through the orchard, feeling the gardener’s eyes still on her, and remembering her feeling last night on the Sparrowhawk, that she was being watched then too.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  ‘We’ll go to every house between the hospital site and Buisseau,’ said Ben at breakfast on Wednesday. ‘We’ll show them Sam’s picture and ask if they saw him.’

  ‘Every house?’ Lotti paled.

  ‘Every single one,’ said Ben. ‘Also in Buisseau itself. People don’t just disappear. Someone must have seen him.’

  Since the hospital, Lotti knew that it was hopeless and that they would never find Sam this way. It had been a brave, defiant plan, but all the adults had been right, it was impossible. Ben refused to see it. Well, Lotti could understand that, and she still felt the responsibility of having suggested the plan in the first place, so she would continu
e to support him, but she felt profoundly weary. After what they had seen yesterday at the hospital, Lotti almost hoped Sam hadn’t survived. To be alive, and look like that …

  She tried to shake the image out of her head. It was no good thinking like this, no good at all.

  Leaving Federico once again with Sister Monique, Lotti and Ben cycled all day through the countryside between Buisseau and the river, on tiny roads to knock on the door of remote cottages and farmhouses, on tracks down to where labourers worked in the fields, down paths to visit gamekeepers and woodcutters …

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, mademoiselle, have you seen this man?’

  ‘Monsieur, I am looking for an English soldier …’

  People cried, people sighed. People closed doors in their faces, people invited them into their homes. Over cake and grenadine, they showed Lotti and Ben their own photographs and told their own stories, but no one remembered Sam.

  They returned to Buisseau in the late afternoon. Ben wanted to continue the search in town, but Lotti couldn’t go on.

  ‘I’m so tired,’ she said.

  Ben was angry with her, and Lotti truly was sorry, but all through the day, as the terrible sad stories of the war piled up, her mind had kept returning to the café in the south-west corner of the main square, which she had glimpsed on Monday when they came off the train.

  She wanted, very much, to sit there quietly and remember, and discover if she had the courage to do what she had come to France to do.

  *

  Lotti left Ben and cycled towards the town centre. When she reached the main square, she dismounted and wheeled her bicycle to the café.

  The late-afternoon sun was still warm, and the terrace outside was beginning to fill up. Lotti loitered, suddenly shy, still holding her bicycle.

  ‘What do you want?’ An elderly waiter came out of the café and barked at her.

  ‘I’m just looking,’ she stammered.

  He gazed at her suspiciously. In the glass of the café window, Lotti caught sight of her reflection and understood. The old shorts and jersey pulled from the Barton jumble pile, already stiff with salt from the Channel crossing and stained with oil from the Sparrowhawk, were thick with dust from the day’s cycling. After a week living on the water, her face was tanned as a sailor’s and she hadn’t had a proper wash since La Belle Ecluse. She looked like an urchin. Uncle Hubert and Aunt Vera would be appalled.

  The thought gave Lotti a deep satisfaction.

  ‘Do you have any pineapple juice?’ she asked the waiter.

  ‘Not had that since the war,’ he said firmly.

  ‘Grenadine, then. I’ve got money, I can pay.’

  ‘We don’t have grenadine either.’

  Every café had grenadine, it was one of the most basic things you could ask for, but Lotti didn’t argue. The waiter didn’t want her here, and Lotti wasn’t even sure this was the café she had come to with her parents anyway. It looked similar, but that could just be her memory playing tricks on her. It certainly didn’t feel the same.

  Later, though, when she was asleep, she saw that day again clearly in a dream – Mama sitting in the sun in her white dress, Papa in his straw hat, even the glass of pineapple juice. But then the glass exploded and turned into the burnt carcass of an aeroplane. Lotti woke weeping in the small hours and did not go back to sleep.

  *

  ‘Monsieur, I’m sorry to disturb you, this is a picture of my friend’s brother …’

  ‘What’s that, girl? Give it here, I can’t see, my eyes aren’t what they used to be …’

  Lotti and Ben spent all of Thursday knocking on doors through the streets of Buisseau, on foot this time, dragging Federico on the lead, with Ben obstinately optimistic and Lotti privately despairing. By the end of the afternoon, the photograph was in a sorry state, worn thin with handling, the gloss of its surface dulled by strangers’ fingers. Clumsily handled by an old man with poor eyesight, it fell apart. Back at the mission house, Ben tried to repair it, but glue only made it worse. Sam’s face was ripped in two, and completely unrecognisable.

  ‘You can still tell it’s him,’ Ben insisted. ‘I can still tell it’s him. We can describe him.’

  But now Lotti and Sister Angèle and Sister Marianne all said, ‘Enough.’

  Ben folded his arms on the table, and laid down his head, and closed his eyes, and didn’t move. He knew that it was hopeless, and that Clara and Captain de Beauchesne and the Reverend Mother had all been right.

  Early on Friday, they said goodbye to the mission house sisters and took the train back to the convent, sitting side by side in an empty compartment with Ben’s misery hanging over them like a rain cloud waiting to explode, and Lotti wondered hopelessly, Oh, what are we going to do?

  Sister Marianne had telegrammed ahead, and Clara and Sister Monique came to meet them at the St Matthieu station in the convent pony cart. Ben shrank away when Clara tried to hug him. She looked at Lotti, who just shook her head.

  ‘I am very afraid,’ Lotti whispered, ‘that he is going to break.’

  At the convent, Ben made straight for the Sparrowhawk, where he crept into Nathan’s workshop and knelt on the floor by Elsie’s crate.

  ‘We didn’t find him, Elsie. I’m sorry. We didn’t find him.’

  Gently, Elsie shook away her puppies and climbed out of the crate into his lap. Ben put his arms round her and at last, very quietly, began to cry.

  Clara and Lotti sat on the roof with Federico, understanding his need for privacy but wanting to stay close.

  ‘Albert Skinner is in Paris,’ Clara murmured. ‘Captain de Beauchesne sent a telegram.’

  ‘Skinner!’ Lotti’s heart skipped a beat, then she frowned, confused. ‘What’s he doing in Paris?’

  ‘I don’t really understand either,’ admitted Clara. ‘I think Henri – I mean Captain de Beauchesne – arranged it with Madame Royère. In his telegram he says he’s trying to deflect him but Lotti, I do think we should go back to England, and the sooner the better really – in the morning. We’ll leave the puppies here and take the Sparrowhawk to a boatyard to fix that awful rattling, and then we’ll get the train home and I will explain to your uncle …’

  ‘Oh, don’t talk about my uncle!’ Lotti covered her ears with her hands. ‘It makes me feel sick.’

  ‘Darling, I know you don’t want to go, and I understand, but I promise, when we get back to England, I will do everything I can to help you …’

  ‘You want to adopt Ben,’ said Lotti, accusingly. ‘Not just help him. You said, when you found us in Calais.’

  ‘I … Lotti, have you been angry with me all this time?’

  ‘Yes!’ said Lotti. ‘Mostly I’ve been thinking about Ben, and about … other things. But yes, it did hurt, Clara.’

  ‘But how can I adopt you, darling, when you have a family already? I promise you this though, I will look after Federico, and I’ll visit you at school as often as I’m allowed. I don’t want you to feel alone again, ever.’

  Lotti kissed her, because she could see Clara was upset, but then she pulled away and said, ‘It’s not enough though, not for me. I want so much more from life than that.’

  ‘Lotti …’

  ‘Let’s just sit quietly for now, Clara. Let’s not talk about tomorrow. Let’s just think about Ben.’

  It very much seemed, in that moment, as if all was lost.

  But once again, they had underestimated the dogs.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The convent hens were happy.

  At night, they slept safely in a snug coop with sand on the floor and plenty of shelves for roosting. During the day they roamed freely and laid their eggs wherever they chose. A little bantam called Poulette liked the herb garden. Pauline, her mother, had once laid an egg on the chapel altar. Palinka, an intrepid young russet, flew as high as she could to lay hers in apple trees.

  The gardener, Moses, had grown used to finding eggs as he worked, and he liked to look out for th
em. As he looked, he noticed other things, like caterpillars and butterflies, the discarded nuts of squirrels, tiny red flowers growing in moss, and he forgot all about gardening and eggs but lost himself in these treasures instead. Often on these occasions he smiled, and a dimple appeared in his left cheek.

  Moses had been dimly aware of the sound of the cart returning, but he was far away raking a path at the top of the orchard, and had discovered an adder basking in a dip of the wall. He laid down his rake to watch it. The adder was brown and green, looped in elegant coils, beautiful. Moses slowed his breath to match the rise and fall of the adder. Somewhere in the distance, he heard a dog bark, but he ignored it.

  His mind wandered.

  Around him in the grass, hens scratched at the ground.

  *

  Federico was bored. He had hated Buisseau. Shut away with nuns, dragged along pavements on the lead. Back at the Sparrowhawk he longed to run and explore the woods with Lotti as they used to at Barton, but she was sitting all quiet and subdued with Clara, and had ordered him to sit too.

  He obeyed, but it was no life for a dog. And then into the open door in the wall to the orchard there stepped the hen Palinka …

  … who just stood there, foolhardy creature, her head cocked coyly to one side, practically inviting Federico to chase her …

  It was too much for any chihuahua, let alone one who had suffered.

  Federico did not hesitate. The Sparrowhawk’s roof was high, but this jump was nothing compared to the one at Emlyn Lock. The little dog tucked his legs beneath him and launched himself from the roof of the Sparrowhawk on to the jetty, where he bounced, gathered himself and with frenzied barking gave chase.

  Palinka, with loud squawks, fled back into the orchard and up the nearest tree. Federico circled the trunk, yipping excitedly. Lotti ran after him, shouting for him to come back. She had almost caught up with him … her hand was about to close around his collar, when another hen appeared, and then another … a whole flock of hens at the far end of the orchard! Federico rolled, twisted and streaked away, a toffee-coloured blur, bat ears streaming.