The Bastard: The Kent Family Chronicles (6 page)

Phillipe whistled. “No wonder he’s notorious.”

With a shrug, Girard closed the book. “I repeat, much of the man’s work strikes me as idiotic. His novels especially. Silly romantic fancies! But on politics—ah, on politics—!” He kissed the tips of his fingers.

“I’m still surprised he hasn’t been arrested,” Phillipe said.

“Well, for one thing, the time’s right for his ideas. More and more people are coming to realize that we are all born in a natural state of freedom—and that power is therefore
not
something which descends in selective rays of light from heaven, to touch only a few of the especially appointed. Such as our good King Louis XV up in Paris—” Girard grimaced. “Or the Hanoverian farmer who holds the throne of England.
They
don’t care for the notion that power and authority are the results of contracts between the people and the rulers—or that the people may break those contracts at any time.”

Mock-serious, he tucked the Rousseau work into his capacious side pocket. “Oh, it’s dangerous stuff.”

“I wonder.”

“What?”

“Maybe it’s just a lot of words. Soap bubbles—”

Girard started to sputter. Phillipe continued quickly:

“I mean—one of the things I really wanted to ask you was—has any of this actually changed anything?”

“Changed
anything!” Girard rolled his eyes. “My dear pupil! It’s stirring new winds all over the world. Have you ever heard travelers at the inn mention the former British Prime Minister? Monsieur Pitt?”

“Yes. With curses, mostly.”

“Of course! The Great Commoner, as his people affectionately called him, directed England’s effort in the late, unlamented Seven Years’ War—and stole most of France’s territory in the New World in the bargain. A few years ago, the ministers of King George attempted to levy various niggling taxes—in such forms as an official stamp on all legal documents, for example. These taxes were to be levied only in Britain’s colonies in America. And Pitt himself—already an earl—actually stood up in Parliament and challenged the king’s right to enact such a tax! He proclaimed injustice being done to England’s sons across the water. And he helped get the stamp tax repealed! How’s that for being a steward of the people? At the same time, there was an Irishman in Parliament—a Colonel Barre, if I recall. He likewise praised the colonists for refusing to pay the taxes because they had no representation in London. He termed the contentious Americans ‘sons of liberty.’ Don’t tell your mother, but I like that touch. Phillipe, do you realize that a hundred years ago, both of those spokesmen for ordinary people might well have had their heads on the block?”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

Smiling briefly, the tutor went on. “It amounts to this.
Because
of books like the ones you’ve been struggling to understand, there’s a test of wills coming in the world. The people against the rulers. It’s reached England already. It will reach France one day.”

“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.”

A
T 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, gaping. 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.