The Lightstep (18 page)

And why should she not talk more with him about Alba and
their adventures together? They had been close companions for
four years – four years that had been lost to her when Alba had
been away from home and which she could now never recover.
All the things they had done, like the tale of the dancing bear –
had there been anything more like that? What else could he have
told her?

Why had he not been there? Did he never attend levees or
balls at all? If he did not, their meetings would be few indeed.

She felt her heart sink at the thought.

But then, all the more reason to make the most of what meetings
there might be. And never mind what Mother said of it
afterwards! She remembered his eyes on her, in that shabby
barracks room where the light had fallen sideways upon his face
and left half of it in darkness. She thought how he had glared
when Anna had offered her bribe. He had dismissed it without
hesitation. He had not even stopped to calculate what kind of
bribe the meagre purses of Adelsheim could have afforded him.
As an émigré and a revolutionary, probably he had no money at
all.

Handsome? No, he was not handsome, but who cared for that?
So much the better for him. Good looks always seemed to make
men idiots, just as money only made them feckless. Nor did he
have 'quality' as mother reckoned it – four quarterings or more.
But he had a quality of his own, strange and angry, like a black
vulture that had alighted on a branch as she passed, and through
some wild magic had spoken to her. She saw that very clearly.

With a new firmness in her step now, she went in search of
Anna.

Wéry was twenty leagues from Erzberg, in a land still
devastated from the war. He sat on his horse in the ruins
of a great half-timbered farmhouse. Barn and byre and house had
all been one building, as imposing as a moderate church, rising
for four storeys within the great pitched roof. But the roof had
fallen in fire, leaving blackened stumps of rafters naked to the air.
The byre had collapsed altogether, and most of the end-wall with
it. Weeds and brambles grew among the wreckage.

From this hiding-place Wéry looked out to a far hill-top,
crowned with a wood. In the fields below the wood a group of
peasants, tiny with the distance, 'were hand-pulling a plough
through the soil. They would be hand-pulling it because there
were no oxen left here, no mules or donkeys and certainly no
horses. Anything so useful had been lost a year or more ago. Now,
months after the peace, there was still not the money to replace
them. So the peasants harnessed their wives and children to the
plough, and scratched as best they could in the sparse greens of
the fallow.

Twice in the last few years French armies had advanced this
way from the Rhine, and twice retreated. And as they had passed
they had taken the beasts from the field, food and possessions
from the villagers, even the timbers from the barns. Waters still ran
here, birds sang and trees grew, but in all other senses it was
desert, dotted with the skeletons of buildings and hamlets where
half the huts were empty.

Wéry was watching for news that they would come for a third
time.

There was a new regime in Paris. Directors had been expelled,
royalist sympathizers purged. Was there a change of French plans
for Erzberg? No one knew.

And Hoche was dead, suddenly, of some sickness. There was to
be another commander in Germany now. Again, what did it
mean? Erzberg seethed with war rumours. Canons argued with
the Prince in the cathedral chapter. Bergesrode fumed and
demanded answers that Wéry could not give him. And away
beyond that hill-top where the human plough-team laboured
was the road to Wetzlar, headquarters of a French army tens of
thousands strong.

Wéry waited. He was not expecting to see the heads of enemy
columns yet. Not yet, even though the French when they moved
could move faster than many an opposing general thought
possible. There would be some sign first – some news or rumour
or fact that would warn him they were about to march. That was
what he was waiting for.

On the far side of the valley, a brightly-coloured cart was
trundling slowly down the line of a track that dropped from the
wood to the valley floor.

It was a curious sight, on this grieving landscape. The sidepanels
were painted a light blue, outlined in yellow, and covered
(Wéry knew, although he could not see them from this distance)
with lively figures of flowers and trumpeters and gypsy girls. It
had a brash, unforced cheerfulness, which seemed to shout that
from now on everything was going to get better and better, and
soon there would be prosperity again.

Curious, but Wéry had been expecting it. He knew that a
certain pedlar, Tomas Kranz, worked along these roads, into and
out of Giessen, into and out of Wetzlar. Kranz painted his cart in
bright colours so that he could be seen from far off by anyone
who had a little money, and who might drop what they were
doing to come and pick over the goods that he carried. Wéry saw
him now and waited for him. There was a purse at his waist for
Tomas Kranz, and also a bottle of brandy in his saddlebags. Kranz
liked brandy. And he should be carrying more than pans and
leather straps today.

He should be carrying news: facts, gossip, maybe columns of
figures, written on scraps of paper and disguised as some random
act of book-keeping. He should be carrying all the bits and pieces
that he and others had managed to gather from their perilous
associations with the French occupiers. It might be a mass of
contradictory information, meaningless without other clues that
Kranz and his fellows had been unable to hit upon. It might all
point in one direction. Or, buried among it, in some drunken
officer's tittle-tattle, there might be some gem that would make
sense of all the hints and rumours that had reached Erzberg so far.

Soon he would know.

But as his eye followed the slow progress of the cart down the
hill, Wéry felt a sense of detachment. Soon he would speak with
Kranz, but not yet. In the meantime the French, Bergesrode and
his demands, Kranz and his answers – there was nothing to be
done about any of them. They were like a great, thick coat of
thoughts, which he had worn for a long time and which, at the
moment of seeing the cart, he had understood at last were not
part of his skin. He could peel them off, if he chose, and lay them
aside. He could put on other thoughts that lay waiting in the
cupboards of his mind. Watching that blue-and-yellow cart as it
lumped and rocked its way to the ford, he could actually wish
that it were not after all a cart, carrying a brave, cross-grained,
self-pleased, snuffling little man, but that instead it would be the
carriage of a lady. And that it would draw up on the roadside by
the barn where he waited and Maria von Adelsheim would lean
from the window and call to him.

And they could walk together by the stream down there, with
the chaperon a good distance back, and talk together. They could
talk for hours. (Heavens, what would he say? What could he say
of himself that might interest her? But surely he would think of
something.)

It was a bittersweet thought, because he knew it was impossible.
There was no chance that he might be permitted to
meet her, except in some great ballroom where all officers were
commanded to attend, and where a thousand eyes would be
watching who met with whom, and for how long. And yet he
preferred to play with it, as if it were a candle-flame – even to
burn himself with it a little, rather than to consign it to nothingness.
He wondered, if the idea about the packages worked,
whether he might pass his own letters to her along with those
that went and came from the Rhine. But the woman Poppenstahl
would surely be alert for that (she might be simple, but she could
not be
that
simple). And even if letters could reach the hand he
intended them for, what could they say? And what would she
think?

Hopeless, of course. Quite hopeless. And if he did not shake
off these thoughts soon they would simply torture him.

Still, he was not sorry to be thinking them.

The cart was moving slowly. It had come perhaps a third of
the way down the slope. The plough-team was moving even
more slowly. The increase of the patch of tilled earth, the
diminishing of the fallow, was all but imperceptible.

There was plenty of time to dream.

Then another movement caught Wéry's eye.

A party of horsemen had appeared where the road emerged
from the far wood. He could not see how many there were. Nor
could he see their uniforms, because in this cold, wet autumn all
soldiers wore coats or cloaks, and all coats or cloaks swiftly
became a muddy grey or brown.

But he did not have to see their uniforms – not here, within
a few leagues of Wetzlar. He leaned forward in his saddle,
feeling a cold prickling at his wrists and throat. He swore softly.

Enemy!

The horsemen came on down the road. They seemed in no
hurry but they made up ground easily on the slow-moving cart.
The cart did not change its pace. Kranz might not know they
were behind him. Or maybe he did know, but knew also that the
very worst thing he could do would be to attempt flight. He
could not out-distance them. He would be carrying papers,
letters from French unit commanders, permitting him to do his
trade in their lines. He would have to rely on those, and hope that
the patrol had some other reason to be out here.

Wéry watched, helpless. The horsemen closed up on the cart.
From this distance, he could hear nothing. But all at once, and
without fuss, the cart had stopped, a couple of hundred yards
short of the stream. The horsemen surrounded it. There would be
questions now. Kranz would be producing papers. He might even
be starting his salesman's patter –
belts and buckles, Captain. Belts
and buckles and handkerchiefs, and there's no soldier alive who has too
many of those. See for yourself. I only carry the best. Silks, Citizens?
Presents for the girls? Take them to the house of Madame Herder in
Giessen and say I sent you . . .
Kranz was good. He'd delight in
earning a coin or two from the French, under the very nose of
his spymaster. He . . .

A small puff of smoke sprouted among the men and horses.
Wéry did not hear the shot.

Nothing seemed to happen for a few moments.

Then, lazily, the cart turned in its tracks. It began to make its
way uphill, even more slowly than it had descended. The horsemen
gathered behind it and followed. Maybe they were laughing
to one another. Wéry thought there was now a man standing in
the back of the cart, picking over Kranz's bales and stores as the
little caravan went bump, bump, bump back up towards the ridge
from which they had all emerged.

In the field, the people at the plough had halted. Two of them
stood, gazing down at the road. Two others sat in the furrows, glad
of any chance for a rest. But the ploughman himself was running
downhill, across the fallow, to the roadside where the cart had
been halted. Screwing up his eyes, Wéry thought he could see
something lying there. At this distance, it only looked like a small
pile of rags.

And that was all Kranz would be now.

Wéry swore savagely.

He swore because he had lost a man, a good and lucky man,
who suddenly had not been good or lucky enough.

He swore because he had lost the information – all that information!
All the answers he had been hoping for! And he had
had to watch it happen! (Damn it – he had been sitting here daydreaming
while they came and stole his man's life from under his
nose! If he had been alert, perhaps . . .)

He swore because he did not
know.
He did not know whether
what he had seen was a casual murder, for the sake of the purse
and a cartload of goods, a score settled by men who thought they
had been cheated, or an assassination of a man known by the
French to be a spy.

And if they had known he was a spy, what else did they know?
What about the other agents – were they safe? Who had betrayed
Kranz? What else had been betrayed?

And what was he to do?

You must not go into French-held territory,
Bergesrode had said.
Up here in Nassau, "French-held territory" was wherever the
French went. And the French went where they liked. The danger
grew the nearer he came to Wetzlar. And it would double if the
French were breaking his ring as he sat here.

The best thing to do – the wise thing to do – would be to lie
low, wait nearby, and see who got out.

But he could not sit still! However sensible it might be, it was
not the way he was made. There were men over there who might
be warned. They had information – possibly vital information –
that he needed. Kranz might have been carrying something on
his body. Had the soldiers searched it? Had they found something,
and recognized it for what it was?

There must be no dreaming now. No distractions. He had
been dreaming a moment ago and the enemy had punished him
for it. Now he must catch up.

He watched the soldiers disappear into the distant trees. Then
he urged his mount towards the doors of the barn that concealed
him. Just before he emerged from hiding, he held the horse back
for a moment. That cold pricking was running up and down his
wrists again. He could feel his own pulse beginning to drum the
beats of action.

The soldiers could not have known he was here. If they had
known, they would simply have delayed their pounce, to catch
him as well.

But they might suspect that Kranz had been due to meet
someone. Eyes might well be watching now, from the cover of
the far wood, to see if anyone else came to the body.

He swallowed. He studied the line of trees carefully. Nothing
showed. But of course, if they suspected something, nothing
would be allowed to show.

After a little thought, he turned his horse again, and made his
way out to the back of the barn.

He was still going to cross over. He was going to find his
agents, if they were alive. And first, he would go to the body. But
he would come at it the long way round, so that he might see any
watchers before they saw him.

He was going to circle.